Creatio Ex Libidine: Reading ancient logos différantly

Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 141-156

  Burrus, Virginia ^a  

^a DREW UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84905524274     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203485477     Document Type: Chapter

References (41)

1. Not mentioned below-and thus all the more meriting acknowledgment up front-are my colleagues Catherine Keller and Stephen Moore. To a great extent, their thoughts provide my point of departure in this essay. In particular, my own positing of a theology of creatio ex libidine is much indebted to the creatio ex profundis articulated by Keller in her The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).
2. Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 31.
3. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. and ed. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 109.
4. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 158.
5. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 101.
6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London:The Johns Hopkins Univerisity Press, 1974), p. 56.
7. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 291.
8. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 68.
9. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 67.
10. Cf. Paul de Man's suggestion that Derrida's narration of the logocentric fallacy "as a historical, consecutive process" is a "fiction" that should not be taken literally: "his historical scheme is merely a narrative convention" (Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. revised [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], pp. 137-138).
11. The term "Judaeo-Christian" is, of course, hugely problematic in its supersessionism. For my purposes here, however, what is still more problematic is the tendency to harden the boundaries between "Judaism" and "Christianity" by too rigid an alignment of logocentrism, Platonism, Christianity, on the one hand, and deconstruction and Judaism, on the other. I hasten to add that this alignment is not without its insightful defenders; see, for example, Susan Handelmann, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982). Daniel Boyarin has argued that "Judaeo-Christianity" may be reappropriated for the purposes of deconstructing the very binary that it has frequently served to reinstate, as for example in Norris's seemingly uncritical use of the term. "Instead of two defined entities, Judaism and Christianity, I would suggest that for the second and probably third century, we should still be thinking of a complex religious system, Judaeo-Christianity (not in its modern sense of common heritage and lowest common denominator!) in which there are only borderlands, and no-man's lands, a web-site in which the very borders and rules for admission and citizenship are still underconstruction by heresiologists on one side, Rabbis on the other. 'Jewish Christianity' is a name for the third term, as it were, that deconstructs the binary opposition of two ostensibly mutually exclusive entities, as well as the social continuum that maintains the possibility of constant 'contamination' between them on the ground."
12. Daniel Boyarin, "Justin Martyr Invents Judaism," Church History 70, no. 3 [2001]: pp. 427-461).
13. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 96, n.43, remarks that "with a few precautions, one could say that pharmakon plays a role analogous, in this reading of Plato, to that of supplément in the reading of Rousseau." He augments the list in Margins of Philosophy, p. 12: "différance," "reserve," "archi-writing," "archi-trace," "spacing," "hymen," "margin-mark-march." 13. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 117.
14. Godfrey Vesey (ed.) The Philosophy in Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1-13(4).
15. In Mark Edwards's decisive framing, "There is no such intermediary as the Logos to be met with in the writings of the Gentile Platonists" (Origen Against Plato, Ashgate Studies in Philosophy and Theology in Late Antiquity [Aldershot:Ashgate, 2002], p. 66).
16. Daniel Boyarin, "The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John," Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3 (2001): 243-284.
17. Other recent studies also relevant to the exegetical origins of Logos theory include Mark J. Edwards, "Justin's Logos and the Word of God," Journal of Early Christian Studies 3, no. 3 (1995): 261-280
18. Nicola Frances Denzy, "Genesis Traditions in Conflict? The Use of Some Exegtical Traditions in the Trimorphic Portennoia and the Johannine Prologue," Vigiliae Christianae 55, no. 1 (2001): 20-44.
19. Alasdair Heron, "'Logos, Image, Son': Some Models and Paradigms in Early Christology," in Creation, Christ, and Culture, R. McKinney, ed. (Poole: T&T Clark, 1976), pp. 52-53.
20. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 12.
21. Patricia Cox Miller, The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 115.
22. English translations of the "gnostic" treatises preserved in the codices discovered at Nag Hammadi may be found in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd ed., ed. James M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).
23. Karen King has argued persuasively that gnostic texts should be read through the lens of the contemporary critique of colonialism, on the grounds that the cosmic "alienation" so frequently attributed to the texts is a disguised articulation of political alienation experienced under the Roman Empire (Karen L. King, "Translating History: Reframing Gnosticism in Postmodernity," in Tradition und Translation: Zum Problem der Interkulterellen Übersetzbarkeit Religiöser Phänomene. Estschrift für Carsten Colpe zum 65. Geburtstag, Christoph Essas [Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994], pp. 264-277). I find Homi Bhabha's (Derridean) postcolonial theory particularly relevant to such a reading, not least because it is strikingly resonant with gnostic theory itself. "The colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference," notes Bhabha. "Colonial specularity, doubly inscribed, does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid ... The display of hybridity-its peculiar 'replication'-terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of the hybridity of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power"
24. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London:Routledge, 1994], pp. 107, 114, 115).
25. Cf. Miller, Poetry of Thought, p. 110, in reference to the particular multiplication of feminine figures in gnostic texts: "The feminine dimension of reality not only appears, but is intensified, underscored, by its multiplied form, setting the masculine world of Ialdabaoth atremble." 22.
26. Karen L. King, "The Politics of Syncretism and the Problem of Defining Gnosticism," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 27, no. 3 (2001): 473-77.
27. Also relevant is the earlier work of Elaine Pagels on the "political" implictions of gnostic cosmology; see especially "'The Demiurge and His Archons'-a Gnostic View of the Bishop and Presbyters," Harvard Theological Review 69 (1976): 301-324.
28. Miller, Poetry of Thought, pp. 110-111.
29. Miller, Poetry of Thought, p. 112.
30. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 77.
31. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 157.
32. John Peter Kenney, "The Platonism of the Tripartite Tractate (NH I, 5)," in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, ed. R. T. Wallis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 198.
33. Kenney, "The Platonism of the Tripartite Tractate," p. 189.
34. See also Einar Thomassen, "The Structure of the Transcendent World in the Tripartite Tractate (NHC I, 5)," Vigiliae Christianae 34 (1980): 363, on the contrast between the contemplative generativity of the Father and the demiurgic activity of the logos.
35. Miller, Poetry of Thought, p. 248.
36. Miller, Poetry of Thought, p. 250.
37. Miller, Poetry of Thought, p. 183.
38. Miller, Poetry of Thought, p. 184.
39. These are concerns that are threaded through the essays now collected in Miller, Poetry of Thought. I have tried to record some of my debts to Miller, whose interest in the intersections of desire, creativity, and writing strongly coincides with my own. I must also acknowledge the influence of Rebecca Lyman; see her fine treatment of Origen's cosmology in J. Rebecca Lyman, Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 38-81.
40. See, for example, Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). In close debate with Derrida, Pickstock celebrates the Graeco-Christian and the "logocentric," for which she claims the honor of a linguistic materiality and fecundity that Derrida reserves for "writing," and from which she receives the mantle of authority for a "radically orthodox" theology taking place "after modernity." 38. Boyarin's interest in rabbinic textuality and its comparison with hellenistic textuality threads throughout many of his publications; it is a topic he is revisiting in his Border Lines:Hybrids, Heretics, and the Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations: Reading Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
41. Cf. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 11: "Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name 'origin' no longer suits it."