ABSTRACT

Catherine Keller: As nothing like a philosopher or a biblical scholar, but something like a theologian, I perch at this table with fear and trembling. But then theology is always trembling. It oscillates between bible and philosophy, between a ghostly apocalypse of conjurations and the discipline of the reasonable doubt. Theologians have been embarrassed by the oscillations, we have (unlike biblical scholars) tended to disavow the apocalypse and the doubt. So no wonder some of us are grateful for the mysterious resonances of deconstruction with our own lost irony, with our haunting uncertainty, and more recently, with our politico-messianic hopes. But beyond this table, among most theologians, such appreciation of Derrida sounds at best like gratitude for crumbs-crumbs from the banquet of high theory for the hungry dogs. (Not that there is any shame in the posture of the Syrophoenician woman, the grief-stricken mother who for that moment healed Jesus of his Abrahamic chauvinism [Mark 7:24-30].)

In the light of Derrida’s coming, it would at any rate be inhospitable not to risk admitting this gratitude. But the risk is double-edged, like the Messiah’s tongue. Gratitude in the present context may be the inhospitable itself. As it has been said: “When a gift is given, first of all, no gratitude can be proportionate to it … As soon as I say ‘thank you’ for a gift, I start canceling the gift, I start destroying the gift, by proposing an equivalence, that is, a circle which encircles the gift in a movement of reappropriation.”1 So without saying thank you, without fantasizing equality or proportionality,

without preaching a Sunday school poststructuralism-shall we risk an appropriation in order to avert a destruction? Shall we risk apocalypse in order to defer it? Doesn’t he? Stephen D. Moore: As it is a Sunday,2 and as “poststructuralism” (however we define the term or be ourselves defined by it) is, let’s face it, the only thing, other than “religion” (no more amenable to definition, no less amenable to deformation), that brings us together around this table, the notion of a Sunday school poststructuralism might not, after all, be such a fanciful conceit. What we preach on Sunday, indeed (those of us who do), we practice throughout the week-or so Jacques Derrida has recently been teaching us.