ABSTRACT
Predominant among those continental philosophers whose work is often described as postmodern is Jacques Derrida, known in American circles as the founder of deconstruction. First introduced to scholars of religion through the 1982 volume, Deconstruction and Theology, which presented deconstruction as “in the final analysis the death of God put into writing”,1 Derrida was initially associated with a rather facile version of postmodernity. It posited as signs that we are “beyond” modernity the death of the subject, of credible metanarratives, of confidence in reason’s ability to access truth. It included Derrida (along with other continental philosophers) in its list of modernity’s pallbearers, if not its murderers. Deconstruction and the threat it posed could be summed up in one sentence: “there is nothing outside the text”. Stepping inside Derrida’s purportedly esoteric and elitist world required relinquishing any claim that language refers successfully to anything outside itself. Thus truth (understood as proper correspondence between words and reality), morality (proper action based on universal principles), and rationality (that by which we pursue truth and morality) are revealed as illusory. Nihilism will get the last word after all.
