James K.A. Smith - Nothing Outside the Text? Taking Derrida to Church

Paul writes – some of you will have had the good fortune to read James KA. Smith’s excellent little book, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (the first in a series of great little books published by Baker addressing questions of the Church and postmodern culture – more on this series, here).

For those who haven’t read the book, here’s a good introduction, a paper by James K. A. Smith, which forms (in large measure) one chapter of the book. You can read the whole paper here, and will find an excerpt below:

“…Derrida's claim that there is nothing outside the text was often misunderstood, and not just by Christian theologians. Later, when presented with the opportunity, Derrida tried to clarify his claim: " The phrase that for some has become a sort of slogan of deconstruction, in general so badly understood ('there is nothing outside the text’), means nothing other than: there is nothing outside context." In a way, Derrida is repeating the axiom of real estate as a central condition of  interpretation: location, location, location! The context of both the phenomenon (whether a book, a cup, or an event) and the interpreter function as conditions or frameworks that determine just how a thing is seen or understood. Just as he claims that there is nothing outside the text, elsewhere Derrida claims that "there are only contexts." Context, then, determines the meaning of a text, the construal of a thing, or the "reading" of an event.

Derrida's claim that there is nothing outside the text means roughly that everything is interpretation; interpretation is governed by context and the role of the interpretive community.

First, if one of the crucial insights of postmodernism is that everyone comes to his or her experience of the world with an interpretive framework and a set of ultimate presuppositions, then Christians should not be afraid to lay their specifically Christian presuppositions on the table and allow their account to be tested in the marketplace of ideas. Second, and more constructively, this should push us to ask ourselves whether the biblical text is what truly governs our seeing of the world. If all the world is a text to be interpreted, then for the church the narrative of the Scriptures is what should govern our very perception of the world.

We should see the world through the Word. In this sense, then, Derrida's claim could be resonant with the Reformers claim of sola scriptura, which simply emphasizes the priority of God's special revelation for our understanding of the world and making our way in it. There is nothing outside the Text, we might say. And to say that there is nothing outside the Text, then, is to emphasize that there is not a single square inch of our experience of the world that should not be governed by the revelation of God in the Scriptures. To say that there is nothing outside the Text is to say that there is no aspect of creation to which God's revelation does not speak. But do we really let the Text govern our seeing of the world? Or have we become more captivated by the stories and texts of a consumerist culture?…”

Comments

[len]

Your last thought here connects me back to the need for renewed imagination. But what need to imagine anything when we have so much comfort in the "eternal now?"

[Paul Fromont]

Exactly Len. I keep thinking that this is the missing link in the mission-shaped church conversation - I think we underestimate the formational power and "hold" of "consumerist" [insert other key descriptors too] culture (for me I read, after Stringfellow, Wink etc, "powers").

Stanley Hauerwas says it well:

“The work of Jesus was not a new set of ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society, but the establishment of a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing and self-sacrificing love in its rituals and discipline. In that sense, the visible church is not to be the bearer of Christ's message, but to be the message."