Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>Some years ago I read an article which in some detail traced the origins
>of deconstruction to a 20th century-tradition of Christian apologetics in
>France. I thought it was in NLR, but I've scanned my copies for it and
>can't
>find it. Does this ring a bell with anyone?
I'm not aware of any such background in the case of deconstruction. As I understand it, deconstruction arose as a reaction to structuralism, on the one hand, and phenomenology, on the other. Perhaps you're thinking of the earlier revival of Thomism, or the development of the Catholic existentialism of Marcel in response to Sartre?
I do know that there is currently in France (or there was a short time ago) a big debate between Derrida and the theologian Jean-Luc Marion about the possibility of an unmediated, absolute givenness (i.e., God). And of course there was the constant give and take between JD and the Jewish religious phenomenologist Levinas for several decades.
However, I think that it is interesting to note that the MacDaddy of deconstruction, Heidegger, was steeped in theology and in fact had originally studied Thomism; he was to be the shining star of Catholic Germany. Damn, they must have been disappointed later on when he called for the abolition of the Church. Anyway, I think it's pretty obvious that _Being and Time_ is to a very large extent a secularized form of Protestant theology. In that sense I guess that one could consider deconstruction to have had an origin in Christian thought/polemic, albeit in a very roundabout way (Luther-->Kierkegaard-->Heidegger-->Derrida [with lots of Nietzsche tossed into the mix as well, of course]).
Chris Doss
>
>Carrol
>
>
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