Encountering Religion by Tyler Roberts

Author:Tyler Roberts
Format: epub
Tags: PHI022000, Philosophy/Religious, REL051000, Religion/Philosophy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Deconstructive Vigilance and the Turn to Religion

No philosophical discourse does more to help us think about these issues, and the problems I have been addressing in the book so far, than deconstruction, and no thinker has done more to shape my approach to the connection between deconstruction and religion than de Vries. His groundbreaking work on figures such as Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and especially Derrida turns to religion to explore the incongruities we experience every day in the context of more general incongruities at the heart of human thought and existence. Among these, the most important is the aporia between rules, conventions, and laws, on the one hand, and responsibility and justice, on the other. For de Vries, thinking and bearing this aporia requires a new kind of engagement with the religious traditions that have shaped Western culture; it demands, that is, an “exposure of the philosophical to the religious,” which he identifies as “minimal theology.”8 By this, de Vries means a mode of thinking about decision and action that takes place not in resolving incongruity but in responding to it, that is, by thinking respectfully and responsibly. In decisive contrast to secularist theorists of religion, de Vries, following Derrida, understands such responsibility for and to incongruity and the respect that grounds it as the mark of the “religious”: “The indecisiveness or undecidability with regard to these last and most pernicious of all binary oppositions [the theological and the philosophical, more generally the religious and the secular] may very well be the ultimate gesture of respect … that marks the essence of religion, whatever form it takes.”9

The point of departure for de Vries’s sustained and voluminous engagement with the question of religion is the claim that at this point in time, in our increasingly globalized (but, importantly, still significantly Western) historical context, and despite the powerful secularizing forces of modernity that have led critics and observers of religion since the Enlightenment to predict and call for the end of religion, old and new religions continue to exert powerful intellectual and social influences. Moreover, Western religious traditions brought to bear on questions of existence and ethics—especially questions of responsibility and finitude—continue to shape even the most secular of discourses in complex ways.10 We cannot begin to understand this complexity if we conceive of religion simply as a historical leftover that should be thought or legislated away or, at most, tolerated. Instead, critical thought on ethics, politics, and philosophy depends on a careful working through of, or even what de Vries describes as a “breaking back through” to, the West’s religious heritage.11 This is not necessarily to privilege the Christian (or the Jewish or the Islamic) way of naming and relating to the fundamental incongruities or the aporetics of human life—the deconstructive turn to religion is not, in any simple sense, a turn to a particular religion—but to acknowledge that these traditions have structured Western thought, including Derrida’s and de Vries’s own conceptions of the universal, the ontological, the ethical, and so on.

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