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Symposium: Deconstructing Theology

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the nations is now neither inside nor outside. "On this mountain the Lord of Hosts will prepare a rich banquet for all the peoples.. .and swallow up the veil that shrouds all the people, the pall thrown over all the nations; He will swallow up death forever." (Isa. 25:6-7). Death is the boundary that separates interior from exterior, absence from presence. But death too is a veil ("a hedge of lilies") to be penetrated and broken. The overcoming of death in a fully immanent a/theology is Isaianic peace, an end to violence, as well as the nomadic crossing This vision is expressed in a over of nations, identity-in-difference. Texas writer in which East little known fiction an East by relatively Texas becomes a new Jerusalem and a strange phoenix-like bird, the road runner, God's prophet: "A tear ... holds within it, like the eye of a bird, what world made it gather and form and fall. ... So men and women carry countries in them and, falling, the country in their breast falls in them. Surely the world is grass. ... That was his call over the prairies and over the mesa, over sage and chemisa and broomgrass" (William Goyen). A cruciform theology could also cross over to a differently deconstructive Buddhist textuality expressing liminality and differance, to the deconstruction of self in Nagasena, emptiness in Nagarjuna, signification as difference in Dignaga, the unfreezing of time as being in D6gen. ERRING is an entering wedge in the always already ongoing theological enterprise that can never be brought to closure. Edith Wyschogrod of the City University of New York Queens College

V. MASKING:DOMINO EFFECT
... if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it. Jacques Lacan 'You know quite well,' I said slowly, 'that, as far as I'm concerned, there's no longer any difference between a mask and a cassock. There isn't anything you've said to me for a long time that hasn't seemed a sham ... Georges Bataille Four texts-each approaching yet another text from a different angle, each opening the missing text in a different way. The question is how to think and rethink in the midst of this fourfold-or, perhaps, how, with Heidegger and others, to think the midst of this fourfold. To

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glimpse the opening of the fourfold might be what it means to begin erring. I deeply appreciate the careful and thoughtful responses of Professors Altizer, Lingis, Prabhu, and Wyschogrod. As Edith Wyschogrod points out, Erring "invites further elaboration, a further spinning of texts in a library without end." These additional spinnings turn and return the book to me in new and unexpected ways. Such is the estrangement of writing. It is not easy to add another twist to what has (always) already been written. Such is the dilemma of writing. Where to begin, to begin yet again? To try to think (in) the midst of this fourfold, I begin with something that none of the texts contains: a certain textual supplement. Alphonso Lingis's essay arrived with a photograph attached to it. Actually the photo was something like a post card, for its back bore a brief inscription: "here is a small response to your book." Since I have always been impressed by Lingis's excessive insight, I was reluctant to dismiss his playful message as inconsequential, though clearly it was not central to the main line of his argument. How, I wondered, might a photograph of an uncanny mask be a response to Erring? As my puzzlement grew, I picked up another tentacle of our telecommunications network and phoned Lingis to ask him more about the mask. All he could (or would) tell me was that the mask is from Bali. He insisted he could not remember exactly where the mask had come from or when he had acquired it. With this much but no more information, my imagination was left to wander from association to association. After passing through Clifford Geertz's influential analysis of the "masked dance" of Rangda and Barong, I finally arrived at Lingis's account of "The Rangda" in his remarkable book, Excesses: Eros and Culture. For human beings never dance in Balinese dances; they are represented only as a pair of clowns who turn up from time to time to translate into vulgar language the sacred Kawi language the gods speak. The dramaproceeds to metamorphoses, demon into priest into seductress into ape into queen into hog, as though we are in some Nietzschean world where behind every mask there are only more masks . . . What resolution could be possible? Rangda dances her screaming curses; she is not vanquished, in the courtyard of the temple of Death those nights, or anywhere else in Bali or in life. (78-79) Like Geertz, Lingis stresses that the contest between Rangda and Barong is inconclusive; it is a draw. The fascination of the drama lies in neither one nor the other of the binary opposites, but in their ceaseless interplay. The ritual marks and remarks "the eternal return" of a play that promises no final act, no resolution, no conclusion. The masks, in other words, mask a margin, a limen, that can never be

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unmasked, "as though we are in some Nietzschean world where behind every mask there are only more masks." This "masked dance" stands in tension with the drama of the western ontotheological tradition. From Plato to Hegel, philosophy has been preoccupied with unmasking. How, asks the philosopher, can one penetrate masks and see the true behind the false, the real behind the apparent, the raw behind the cooked? When and where, asks the theologian, did, does, or will revelation come? The climax, which is not to say the end, of this drama is Hegel's speculative (and specular) philosophy. More specifically, the closure of (the) western philosophical vision arrives when consciousness becomes transparent to itself in perfect self-consciousness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes this moment as an unmasking in which the "curtain [Vorhang]" separating subjectivity and objectivity falls. Hegelian philosophy poses the question of what and how to think after or beyond the advent of absolute knowledge. Kierkegaardwas the first to recognize the implications of the closure of the System. His pseudonyms can be understood as various masks through which he devises ironic and humorous styles of writing intended to unravel the web of philosophy and the fabric of Hegel's text. Kierkegaard's writerly strategies return in curious ways in the struggle of many contemporary "philosophers" and literary critics to think "beyond absolute knowledge." Derrida, for example, echoes Kierkegaard's questioning of the gaze of the philosopher and the insight of philosophy when, commenting on Nietzsche's interpretation of truth, he contends that in the void remaining after the death of God, veils veil veils and masks mask masks. If unmasking is impossible, revelation is reveilation. Such ceaseless masking has a domino effect on much western philosophy and theology. One after another, central concepts and dominant notions-God, self, history, book . . .-tumble. As entanglement in a very different world once led us to suspect (though this suspicion now seems sadly, perhaps dangerously, faded), this domino effect carries serious consequences for all of western society and culture. The peculiarity of closure, however, is that it harbors a certain opening. Beyond, or even "within," the closure of the western ontotheological traditionthere might lie an opening to and of the East. One way to trace this opening is to ask what else lurks between unsettling masks. In the struggle to think "beyond absolute knowledge," Kierkegaard anticipates and Derrida returns to what Heidegger describes as "the task of thinking" at "the end of philosophy." The thinker, Heidegger maintains, must try to think what philosophy left unthought. According to Heidegger, "What characterizes metaphysical thinking which grounds the ground for being is the fact that

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metaphysical thinking departs from what is present in its presence, and thus represents it in terms of its ground as something grounded." But metaphysics, or the ontotheological tradition, "does not ask about Being as Being, that is, does not raise the question of how there can be presence as such" (56, 70). The task of thinking is to think the unthought of philosophy that answers the question of how there can be presence as such. Heidegger defines this unthought as "the difference between Being and beings," or, more concisely, "difference as difference." This difference should not be confused with the presence of any specific difference. Heideggerian Differenz, which is the condition of the possibility of all presence and every present, is not a presence, and, hence, can never be properly present. Yet neither is it simply absent. What philosophy has not thought (because it cannot think such an "unheard-of' thought without ceasing to be philosophy) is what lies between presence and absence, identity and difference, and being and nonbeing. Neither representable in nor masterable by traditionalphilosophical and theological reflection, this margin inscribes "the Open" that lies in the midst of "the fourfold" comprised of "earth and sky, divinities and mortals." Like the to-and-fro of masked dancers, this difference cannot be thought properly. To think difference as difference, Heidegger insists, is to think "erringly." Heidegger's critique of the culmination of western ontotheology in the modern philosophy of the subject and the extension of this philosophy in modern technology creates a seminal opening for the postmodern imagination. Thinkers after Heidegger think after a different difference in a repeated effort to think otherness otherwise. This Nachdenken has issued in a series of displacements of and supplements to Heidegger's Differenz: Merleau-Ponty's "flesh," Sartre's "gaze of the other," Lacan's "discourse of the Other," Levinas's "infinite," Foucault's "madness," Kristeva's and Irigaray's "woman," Deleuze's and Guattari's "rhizome," Bataille's "excess," Blanchot's "proximate," Beckett's "unnamable," Serres's "parasite," and Derrida's "diff rance, "writing," "pharmakon," "tympan,""supplement," "remainder," etc. In straining to hear these echoes of Kierkegaard'sAbsolute Paradox,the constant temptation is to reduce undecidable differences to complementary pairs or dialectical opposites. Neither a difference nor indifferent, supplements to Differenz inscribe a margin that "is" something like a "hymen" interrupting every proposed copulation. Along this border the unending interplay of differences insinuates an alterity that simultaneously makes possible and subverts the stable couples grounding most western thought, society, and culture. As Lingis observes, this alterity is irreducibly "exterior." This

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"exteriority," or to use Blanchot's rather than Levinas's term "le dehors," is elusive, if not evasive. Alterity is an outside that is "inside" disrupting all inwardness and dislocating every identity. To insist that exteriority hollows all interiority as if from "within" is not to maintain, with Altizer, that "all of the contraries or opposites of our Western tradition pass into each other, and do so by virtue of the presence of the God who is absent, and who IS in His IS NOTNESS." My difference with Altizer on this important point is slight, though radical. The subversion of opposites does not entail the collapse of differences or the reconcilation of identity and difference in an The implicit invocation of Blake is, Hegelian identity-in-difference. therefore, misplaced unless, of course, Blake is reinterpreted against Altizer. If, as Altizer maintains, Erring is an apocalyptic book (and, as one of its readers, I doubt that it is), the apocalypse it implies is forever deferred. This deferral is, in effect, indistinguishable from the total absence of apocalypse. While for Altizer the death of God is the condition of the possibility of the parousia, I would insist that the death of God is the condition of the impossibility of parousia. From an errant perspective, apocalyptic thinking is but another (perhaps final) variation of unmasking thought. By refusing to entertain the impossible or to reflect upon the impossibility of thinking, apolcalyptic thought becomes both unthinkable and impossible. The delay of the parousia-a deferral that might also be described in Merleau-Ponty's terms as "the non-lapsability of the lapsability of time"-rends every whole and tears every totality. As Kierkegaard never tires of stressing, there is no "Archimedean point" from which to view things whole. All visions of the whole and appeals to totality presuppose an implicit or explicit completion that is called into question by the lapse of time. Following Heidegger's interpretation of the relation of Being and time and Alexandre Kojeve's influential rereading of Hegel, thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida insist that the temporality of experience subverts any imagined whole and undercuts every system and all systematic thinking. For people who have suffered the horrors of totalitarianism in the form of fascism and Stalinism, there is an important political dimension to this issue. In this context, however, I want to underscore the philosophical implications of this critique of holistic and totalistic thinking. Prabhu presents his misgivings about deconstruction in terms of a vision of a whole which, though suggested by his numerous references to Hegel, only becomes explicit in the penultimate paragraph of his paper. Here he states that the view he wants to "defend is that of the Real being fully in the Whole, to which we humans have only indirect access and fully in each of the moments of the Whole, to

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which our access is direct." A somewhat superficial, albeit widespread, view of Derrida's perspective plagues Prabhu's argument. The now standardcriticisms of deconstruction for being nihilistic and arbitraryare paraded yet again. Like so many other opponents, Prabhu does not seem to have examined Derrida's texts with enough care to be familiar with the Derridean critique of precisely the position that Prabhu proposes. To illustrate this point, I cite but one example among many. Expressing reservations about the Nietzschean-Derridean view of truth elaborated in Erring, Prabhu writes: "Just because truth 'is never totally present,' does not mean it is not present at all, even if it is never totally present." Quite clearly this claim rests upon a part-whole model. Though we do not know the whole truth, what we do know is partly true. Since part inheres in whole and whole in part, partial knowledge is secure. But part and whole constitute one of the couples overturned in deconstructive analysis. To be persuasive, a critique of deconstruction based upon an appeal to the whole would have to demonstrate how to fill the lapses and plug the holes exposed by deconstruction. Prabhu makes no effort to provide such a response. I suspect this lapse is not accidental. These remarks carry implications that are relevant to two important points that Lingis raises. As I have stated, Lingis recognizes the disruption caused by the irreducible exteriority of alterity. In this paper, however, he does not indicate the consequences of this exteriority for his own view of being-itself and the self-in-itself. While at opposite ends of the ontological spectrum, the notions of being-itself and the self-in-itself presuppose a common interpretation of being that post-Heideggerian thought calls into question. Developing the insights of the early Heidegger, Lingis argues that "the being with which I exist is being-universal and undivided being, that with which all that is is." Elsewhere he goes so far as to maintain that "utter exteriority" is "the utterly indifferentiated nothingness." Over against Lingis, I would argue that while alterity is no thing, it is neither undivided being nor indifferent nothing. The alternation or oscillation implied in the word "alterity" fissures universal and undivided being and disrupts every form of indifference. At the other end of the ontological spectrum, alterity dislocates every thing-/self-in-itself. Within the eternally recurring play of the divine milieu, there is no thing-in-itself. Since exteriority is always already "interior,"the subject is never simply "in itself." The double envelopment of inside and outside displays what Derrida, following Merleau-Ponty and Bataille, labels "invagination."When everything is inside-out and outside-in, subjectivity proper disappears. Merleau-Ponty describes the structure of invagination as the inter-

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twining [l'entrelacs] of a chiasmus that marksthe margin between the visible and the invisible, being and nonbeing, and presence and absence. If this chiasmic structure replaces the more traditional understanding of the opposition between subject and object [Gegen-stand], Lingis's assertion that the selfs "existence 'in itself,' backed up against itself, must be conceived positively" becomes questionable. This point can be made differently by suggesting that the self, as well as everything else, is empty. Each of the respondents emphasizes ways in which deconstructive a/theology opens avenues of communication between and among various religious traditions. As Altizer and Prabhu note, one of the richest points of contact can be found in the intersection of a deconstructed Christianity and Buddhism. More specifically, certain aspects of Derridean deconstruction bear a significant similarity to the form of MadhyamakaBuddhism, or "the Middle Way," developed by Nagarjuna.Nargarjuna'sattack on the entitative theory of existence (bhdva) by means of the notion of emptiness (sunyatd) closely resembles Derrida's criticism of the principle of identity through the notion of differance. Furthermore, if viewed in terms of "co-dependent origination" (pratitya samutpada), sunyatd approaches "the non-original origin" that I have reinterpreted in terms of the divine milieu. Within this milieu, the erasure of the self-in-itself recalls the dissolution of illusory svabhdva. I suspect the intertwining of these two positions is considerably more intricate than I have indicated. For example, it might be possible to establish a productive comparison between the textual strategies of deconstruction and those deployed in some Buddhist texts. Inasmuch as deconstructive critics subscribe to a performative view of language, it might not be unreasonable to expect similarities between the practice of deconstruction and certain Buddhist meditative and ritual practices. If silence is not the simple opposite of speech any more than writing is the mere binary opposite of speaking, the practice of writing could be seen as a form of meditation and the practice of meditation as a form of writing. Further elaboration of a comparison between two such contrasting points of view must await the careful attention of scholars who are trained in the different traditions. It would, in my judgment, be a mistake not to extend such comparative analysis to competing strands in the western religious tradition. As Edith Wyschogrod argues persuasively, deconstruction is related to the Jewish tradition in complex ways. The link between Judaism and deconstruction is more obvious than the interplay between Buddhism and deconstruction. Derrida draws not only on his own Jewish background but also on the works of major twentieth-century Jewish writers like Freud, Husserl, Levinas, and Jabes.

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The most intriguing point of contact between deconstruction and the Jewish tradition seems to be Lurianic Kabbalism. When post-structuralism and Kabbalism are read with and against each other, each is transformed in interesting ways. If deconstruction is placed in this context, new possibilities for dialogue between Judaism and Christianity emerge. Within the bounds of this exchange, The New no longer seems quite so new and The Old no longer seems quite so old. With the recognition of the intersection of the preoccupations of many deconstructive writers and concerns that dominate eastern and western religious traditions, it becomes necessary to reexamine the common charge that deconstruction is apolitical or quietistic, at best, and nihilistic, at worst. There is an undeniably nihilistic side to deconstruction. Students of religion, however, should realize that nihilism is a complex phenomenon. The nihilism of deconstruction more closely resembles Christian selflessness, Jewish exile, and Buddhist emptiness than any simple libertinism or antinomianism. In Erring I have tried to emphasize the socio-ethical dimensions of deconstructive a/theology by exploring the notions of dispossession, impropriety, expropriation, communication, compassion, spending, sacrifice, death, desire, delight, errancy, and carnality. To rethink human experience in these terms requires a reconsideration of most of the principles that guide contemporary social, political, and ethical debates. Though bearing considerable socio-ethical relevance, deconstructive analysis can never provide a firm foundation for thought or action. Deconstruction is steadfastly non-foundational and, hence, is relentlessly critical. Ratherthan legitimating quietism, such criticism leads to a perpetual restlessness that issues in endless transformation. Recalling Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, this constantly transformative process knows neither arche nor telos. The iconoclasm of radical criticism makes erring endless. In the absence of firm foundations, clear origins, and certain ends, the world becomes an undecidable and irresolvable play of masks. Like the ceaseless rhythm of masked Balinese dancers, we err along a margin that can never be known properly. At this threshold, masking, rather than unmasking, might have more to do with religion than we generally realize. Is it an accident that, in addition to being a piece in a game, a domino is a hooded robe worn with an eye mask at a masquerade as well as a hooded cape worn by clergymen? For nearly two decades, I have been alternating between Kierkegaard and Hegel-oscillating from one to the other and back again. Eventually it became clear to me that this errant course repeated the rhythm of much twentieth-century theology. The longer I wavered, the less satisfactory became the opposing extremes. By rereading Kierkegaardand Hegel through Nietzsche and Derrida, the

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mean, the middle, the milieu itself became not only fascinating but actually compelling. Altizer sees this clearly when he writes: "Hence it is Taylor's project to create an A/theology by way of a synthesis of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, even if he thereby employs the contemporary deconstructionist language of Derrida." The time and space of erring are opened by the domino effect of Hegel's acknowledgment of the death of God, Kierkegaard's claim that Christendom is at its end, Nietzsche's announcement of Dionysus (whose other name is the Anti-Christ or Bacchus), and Derrida's recognition of the closure of the book. In erring, I am doing nothing other than struggling to think the domino effect of masking by thinking the unthinkable oscillation of alterity and the impossible alterity of oscillation. Oscillation, after all, derives from the Latin word oscillum, which means a swing and originally referred a mask of Bacchus that hung from a tree in a vineyard to sway in the wind. Five texts-each approaching yet another text from a different each angle, opening the missing text in a different way. Though ending, these words are not final, for there is no last word. 'I must explain things clearly to you,' I said. 'Up to the last moment, I'm going to be tempted to add one word to what has been said. But why would one word be the last? The last word is no longer a word, and yet it is not the beginning of anything else. I ask you to remember this, so you'll understand what you're seeing: the last word cannot be a word, nor the absence of words, nor anything else but a word. (Blanchot, 52-53) Mark C. Taylor Williams College REFERENCES Altizer, Thomas J. J., et. al. 1982 Deconstruction and Theology. New York:Crossroad. Blanchot, Maurice 1985 Vicious Circles. Trans. by P. Auster. Barrytown, New York:Station Hill Press. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Letters and Papers from Prison. London: SCM Press, Ltd. Derrida, Jacques 1981 Positions. Trans. by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Heidegger, Martin 1972 "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." In On Being and Time. Trans. By J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row. Lingis, Alphonso 1983

Excesses: Eros and Culture. Albany: State University of New YorkPress.

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Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Berkeley: University of California Press. Erring, A PostmodernA/theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch. New York:Charles Scribner's Sons.

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