Postmodern Theology

A Biopic

Raschke

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498203883
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Postmodern Theology consists in a sharp-edged retrospective and reflection on the forty-year history of the most important movement in contemporary religious thought that is only now passing from the scene. The author, Dr. Carl Raschke, is generally credited with having sparked the movement, even if he did not always happen to be its leading spokesperson. Not only has a comprehensive survey of postmodern theology in all its different phases and complexity not been published prior to the appearance of this book, but it is even more remarkable for someone who both "launched" it and had a central role in shepherding it along to offer what may be termed a "movement memoir."Postmodern Theology surveys and summarizes the major figures and trends that have given currency to such familiar expressions as "deconstruction," "deconstructive theology," "radical theology," "a/theology," "God is dead," and of course, "postmodernism" itself. Dr. Raschke also contextualizes the emergence of these catchy phrases from a frothy soup of new intellectual theories and philosophical innovations, which were international in scope but customized for both academic and popular religious writers--mainly in Britain and America--from the late 1960s onward.

1

Postmodernism and Its Theological Offspring

What Is, or Was, Postmodernism?

On September 29, 2008, the stock market plunged 774 points, marking the advent of the so-called Great Recession. Yet in light of recent cultural history it also signaled the end of a different period, what had loosely been termed the “postmodern” era. The postmodern era was never really an “era” in the sense of a time interval that could be precisely dated. The term “postmodern” had come to serve as a master metaphor for what was, in truth, the cultural odyssey of the West throughout the post-Vietnam decades. If the referent of an era is registered only by a hyphen, we must still be postmodern in some decisive way of framing things, because there can technically be no such as thing as the “post-post-modern.” The hyphen leaves it thoroughly open-ended.

At the same time, 2008 marked the onset of a certain disenchantment with the breezy and wide-eyed optimism that had distinguished not only the 1990s but most of the Reagan and first Bush administrations. That optimism had found an outlet in what was essentially an upbeat mood inherited from the cultural revolutions throughout the West during the sixties, namely, that the old, authoritarian and unassailable frameworks of meaning on both the right and left that had persisted throughout the industrial age were cracking and coming apart, and that a brave new and experimental world dominated by what Richard Florida1 would later term the “creative class” with their free play of ideas and the imagination was inexorably taking shape. But the Bush presidency, which ended just as the economic sirens were sounding, marked a turning point, and the optimism slowly began to ebb away. In consequence, something in our culture changed irreversibly after the autumn of 2008.

We are here, however, not to chronicle the rise and fall of postmodernism in the West. As with every cycle of history, what was once “all the rage” has left its indelible impression on the present generation, and will affect generations to come. Even if we can’t put a hyphen after the hyphen, time has already left its profound signature on the times from that hyphen. How do we characterize “postmodernism”? Overall postmodernism, if we can genuinely portray what was always an elusive, shape-shifting entity in both its birth and dotage, was consistently marked by a kind of highbrow inventiveness as well as commitment to intellectual and artistic boundary-breaking that accompanies times of collective confidence and optimism. Its quirkiness was an extended holdover from the cultural craziness and political anarchy of the late sixties and early seventies, corresponding to the life cycle of the Baby Boomers from impetuous youth to modish middle-agedness. When the general mood began to darken immediately after the turn of the millennium, especially after the destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001 followed by the Afghan and Iraq wars, “pomo” (as it was popularly known) had gone mainstream and had even embedded itself within the academic establishment, including that declining discipline loosely denominated as “theology.”

But what did the word “postmodern” actually imply throughout what has been an almost forty-year run by now on the marquees of the cutting-edge culture? Whether “postmodern” over this span of time was utilized in a commendatory sense as progressive and “hip,” or in the calumnious voice of political conservatives during the Reagan interlude to excoriate so-called “alternative” lifestyles and values, the term itself had become irremediably diffuse and incapable of specification. Yet, in reality, it encompassed everything that was good, bad, or indifferent about the sea changes in social life that took place after the upheavals that commenced in the late 1960s and continued into the mid-1970s. In the early phases the ideas swirling around what we now understand as “postmodernism” were intrinsically associated with the intellectual movement known as “post-structuralism,” which in turn was affiliated with the critical approach to reading texts that acquired the name of “deconstruction.” Post-structuralism, as the locution implies, connoted a clutch of savants and thought-leaders from a patchwork of disciplines, primarily in France, who sought to transition from the dominant paradigm of cultural and linguistic analysis known as “structuralism.”

The éminence grise of structuralism in France at the time had been the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, but the same methodology had also played a feature role in the work of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. “Deconstruction” as an interpretative procedure was launched on Gallic turf by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and imported into the United States with the translation into English of some of his most important early works during the seventies. These diverse trends, however, did not receive the “postmodern” stamp until the appearance of a book in the early 1980s by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard entitled The Postmodern Condition.2

The word “post-structuralism” itself was given initial impetus by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of Derrida’s students, in her translation into English from the French of his sprawling, early tome Of Grammatology.3 However, the concept still was intimately ensconced with the somewhat recondite sensibility concerning arts and letters “after structuralism,” that is, the next generation following the great suzerains of structuralist thought themselves—Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes as well as Lacan. The notion of “deconstruction” was part of the legacy of Martin Heidegger. In his “Letter to a Japanese Friend” (1983) Derrida discusses his desire to stay close to Heidegger’s “destruction” (German=Destruktion, or Abbau) of the history of metaphysics. Derrida wrote,

At that time structuralism was dominant. “Deconstruction” seemed to be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an anti-structuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, “logocentric,” “phonocentric”)—structuralism being especially at that time dominated by linguistic models and by a so-called structural linguistics that was also called Saussurian—socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.4

It was actually a little more complicated. Structuralism was by and large a European project. One might even be more selective and call it a French obsession, even if it had its own coterie of American adherents. The latter tended to congregate in the academic specialties of literary criticism and theory, which is why Derrida first secured his American beachhead among “lit-crit” professors at Yale University (the so-called “Yale School”) that included Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Even the majority of these then-fashionable “poststructuralist” luminaries, who acquired notoriety in the late 1970s, did not see themselves as offering primarily what Derrida called “anti-structuralist” gestures. Post-structuralism referred primarily to the ongoing impact of Derrida’s 1966 lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”5 From the very beginning the “post-structuralist” movement, later fuzzed in its range of implications as it was rebaptized “postmodernism,” was closely associated with Derrida. Derrida, as his own correspondence suggests, was doing something rather unique.

The real context for the immigration of post-structuralism into the United States was the mere fact that more and more scholars in the humanities were fed up with the quasi-totalitarian regime of Anglo-American linguistic philosophy. It is hard to imagine from the vantage point of the present how pervasive analytic philosophy was in the academy from the early 1950s until well into the 1970s. Continental philosophy, whether French or German, was considered a weird kind of “cult,” as my own department chair in philosophy when I was an undergraduate referred to it. I can recall from my days as a doctoral student at Harvard a brief conversation I had at a social gathering with Willard Quine, one of the most famous analytic philosophers of all time. I told him I was doing my doctoral dissertation on Kant, and in response he sniffed, “oh, that mystic!” However, just as French post-structuralism was the intellectual by-product of the political turmoil in France during the late 1960s, its adoption by the American academy not quite a decade later can be seen as a kind of methodological revisionism that aped the cultural revolution of the sixties that had largely run its course by 1975.

It should also be noted that in the 1970s and early 1980s there was scant recognition in either philosophy or religious studies of a significant phenomenon known as “Continental philosophy.” That term only garnered acceptance (though it had been around before) in the 1990s. The operative label at the time was “philosophical theology,” as distinguished from “philosophy of religion,” the latter of which usually carried the implication of a series of problems and issues largely addressed through the analytic or empirical approaches. Few use the former phrase nowadays, currently replaced by “Continental philosophy of religion,” or “Continental theology.” The general word for Continental philosophy when Derrida first came on the scene was “existential philosophy” and/or “phenomenology.”

In its early iterations the term “deconstruction” was simply a coy neologism, a syntactical anomaly. Perhaps Derrida wanted to ensure that his venture was not confused with Heidegger’s. The genealogy of “deconstruction” can be linked directly to Derrida’s efforts to strum boldly the anti-Husserlian refrains in Heidegger within a totally new key that was largely informed not just by structural linguistics, but also Lacanian semiotics, the theory of signs. The way in which even prominent scholars of the present era use the term “deconstruction” today has little to do with how Derrida originally configured it. If one considers carefully everything Derrida composed prior to 1978, it becomes quite evident. The word “deconstruction” has been so mongrelized and bastardized by now, and I myself am inclined only to invoke it quite sparingly.6

Philosophy, and what was once known as “philosophical theology,” however, was probably the last redoubt of the academy to take an interest in “post-structuralism,” or to even hear about it for that matter. I myself personally had never heard about it until 1977, and that was because I was at the time part of an interdisciplinary faculty reading group at my university, dominated by literary theorists. What I had been doing ever since I began publishing academic papers around 1974 was to try to find a philosophically sophisticated—and legitimate—alternative to analytic philosophy. I was already steeped in Hegel, Heidegger, and the phenomen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Postmodernism and Its Theological Offspring
• Chapter 2: Radical Theology
• Chapter 3: The Thought of the “Other”
• Chapter 4: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo
• Chapter 5: Un-deconstructing Justice
• Chapter 6: The Rise and Fall of Postmodern Theology
• Bibliography