Graven Ideologies

Bruce Ellis Benson’s Graven Ideologies , a study of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion, confirms something I’ve suspected from my sketchy reading of Derrida. Benson says that Derrida emphasizes that all thought is set in a structure of “not yet but still to come.” This is Derrida’s famed notion that final meaning, closure, is forever deferred.

I think this is right in many respects. Consider this simple argument: Meaning is context-dependent, as everyone agrees. But the context in which things or words mean is never stable; it’s always shifting and changing and growing. The context of yesterday’s posts is now larger than when I wrote them, because it was yesterday when I wrote them and not it’s today. So, deferral is a real phenomenon, and should leave us chastened, recognizing that we have not arrived at a final, God’s-eye view of things.

The problem with Derrida’s account here is not that he emphasizes deferral, but that he doesn’t believe in any eschaton. As Benson points out, Derrida’s messiah never comes (which leaves Derrida’s theology profoundly Jewish). But if there is an eschaton, then meaning is deferred, but not forever. There will be a day of accounting, a day that will set a final context in which every word and act may be judged.

Add to this the NT notion that the eschaton has already occured in some fundamental sense, and you have an account of meaning that takes account of deferral without falling into permanent drift.

I think this leads me somewhat in the direction of Pannenberg, but I don’t know Pannenberg well enough to say for sure.