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This second volume in The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation—the salut!—that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens in the midst of the world. This book clarifies and builds upon not only dis-enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much post-modern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The book rethinks the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. It further endeavors to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, the book engages and deploys the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism. The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive and responsible thinking about “the undeniable experience of the alterity of the other”, this book examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other, e.g. the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida's relation to a recently departed actress caught on video, to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be. For Derrida, the singularity of the other, always written in the lower case, includes not only the formal or logical sense of alterity, the otherness of the human other, but also the otherness of the nonliving, the no longer living, or the not yet alive. The book explores welcoming and hospitality, salutation and greeting, “approaching”, and mourning as constitutive facets of the relation to these others. Addressing Derrida's readings of Husserl, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, and Nancy, among other thinkers, and ranging across a number of disciplines, including art, literature, philosophy, and religion, this book explores the apparitions of the other by attending to the mode of appearing or coming on the scene, the phenomenality and visibility of the other. Analyzing some of Derrida's essays on the visual arts, the book also demonstrates that video and photography display an intimate relation to “spectrality”, as well as a structural relation to the absolute singularity of the other.

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar opposite; both are “beyond being” and the metaphors hitherto thought to disclose the transcendent. They underlie Plato's distinction of a procreative gap between being and becoming. The chiasmus between the Good and chora makes possible their mutual participation in one another. This gap makes possible both phenomenological and cosmological interpretations of Plato. Metaphor is restricted to beings as they appear in this gap through the crossing of metaphor's terms, terms that dwell with, rather than subulate, one another. Hermeneutically, through its“is”we can see something being engendered or determined by that crossing. The book's larger goal is to align the primacy of the Good in Plato and Christian Neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, this book brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers. Ranging from 20th-century European philosophy—the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others—to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and Buddhist metaphysics, this book opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative. Rather than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, the book treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. It probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, it exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negations of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, it shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that drive the debate on the question of what Jewish philosophy is or could be. The idea of Jewish philosophy begs the question of philosophy as such. But “Jewish philosophy” does not just reflect what “philosophy” lacks. Rather, it challenges the project of philosophy itself. Examining the thought of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohen Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and others, the book highlights how the most philosophic moments of their works are those in which specific concerns of their “Jewish questions” inform the rethinking of philosophy's disciplinarity in principal terms. The overdue recognition of the modernity that informs the critical trajectories of Jewish philosophers from Spinoza and Mendelssohn to the present emancipates not just “Jewish philosophy” from an infelicitous pigeonhole these philosophers so pointedly sought to reject but, more important, emancipates philosophy from its false claims to universalism.

Divine Enticement takes as its central claims that the meanings of theological concepts are not so much propositional—whether those propositions are affirmative or negative—as they are seductive; and that in fact our relation to the divine, the sacred, that which we name by "God" is one of an infinite seduction. The use of language in such conceptualization evokes more than it designates. This is not a flaw nor a result of vagueness or imprecision in theological language, but rather marks the correspondence of such language to its subject, understood here not as a being but as that which, outside of or at the limit of our thought, draws us as an enticement to desire, not least to intellectual desire. Several characteristics of signs, such as their sensory character, their incomplete referentiality, and their power to draw in various ways, are relevant. Thus a number of rather traditional notions in Christian theology are conceived here as enticements, modes of drawing the desires of both body and mind. Central to the text is the strange semiotics of divine naming, naming as a call on that for which there cannot be a referent. Likewise central is the value of the possible, which I argue is essential to enticement as the space in which a seduction may draw us always further. Finally, the entanglement of sign and body, not least in interpretations of the Christian incarnation, both grounds and complicates the theological abstractions.

We are exorbitant, and rightly so, when we cut any link we may have to cosmological powers. Levinas invites us to be exorbitant by distancing ourselves from visions of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. We begin to listen well to Levinas when we hear him inviting us to break completely with the pagan world in which the gods are simply the highest beings in the cosmos and learn to practice an adult religion in which God is outside cosmology and ontology. God comes to mind neither in our attempts to think him as the creator of the cosmos nor in moments of ecstasy but in acts of genuine holiness, such as sharing a piece of bread with someone in a time of desperate need. Levinas, in short, enjoins us to be exorbitant in our dealings with one another. This book asks how the “between” of Levinas's thinking facilitates a dialogue between Jews and Christians. In one sense, Levinas stands exactly between Jews and Christians: ethics, as he conceives it, is a space in which religious traditions can meet. At the same time, his position seems profoundly ambivalent. No one can read a page of his writings without hearing a Jewish voice as well a philosophical one. Yet his talk of substitution seems to resonate with Christological themes. On occasion, Levinas himself sharply distinguishes Judaism from Christianity—but to what extent can his thinking become the basis for a dialogue between Christians and Jews? This book explores these questions, thereby providing a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

The future figures prominently in much phenomenological work, but the methodological significance of the future for the discipline of phenomenology is rarely (if ever) the subject of direct inquiry. This book seeks to remedy that by showing the key role that futurity (the subject’s relation to the future) plays in two key elements of the phenomenological method: constitution and intentionality. It begins by examining the role that the future plays in Husserl’s phenomenological account of the meaning- and world-constituting function of consciousness. It then shows thatLevinas’ critique of this account of phenomenology is based on a distinct account of futurity: eschatology. This notion of eschatology is essential to Levinas’s attempt to reimagine phenomenology as an essentially intentional and ethical enterprise. Finally, the book explores Derrida’s reconciliation of the phenomenologies of Husserl and Levinas in a “phenomenology of tension” that is characteristic of deconstruction. Central to this project is the role of the future, especially as it manifests itself in the notions of differance and the messianic. By highlighting the role of the future in the phenomenological method, this book reveals the necessary intertwining of intentionality and constitution at the heart of phenomenology: the subject is always constituted and constituting. This two-fold sense of phenomenology is best understood via the notion of the promise, thereby establishing phenomenology as the essentially promissory discipline.

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, the book reads Dewey's idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). It elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey's notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology.