Defamiliarize, Don’t Deconstruct: Reconsidering Contemporary Christian Trends

When I entered graduate school in the late 1990s to study English literature, I was eager to discuss deconstruction, but I was surprised to find that hardly anyone was using the term, and if they did so, they used it apologetically. In a hushed hallway conversation with a friend, I asked why. He blushed, leaned close, and whispered, “Well, remember Paul de Man, the literature professor at Yale, who popularized deconstruction in the US in the 1970s and ‘80s? After his death, he was unmasked as a Nazi sympathizer who had written antisemitic wartime journalism, and so deconstruction rapidly fell out of favor.”

Next I read Vincent Pecora’s essay “What was Deconstruction?” and then put the trend behind me, ironically moving on to the final throes of New Historicism. When European philosophers like Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben came to town to discuss St. Paul and the parousia in 2004, fresh air blew through the stale corridors of theory’s afterlife. The term continued to gasp and sputter its way through popular parlance, and you can still find titles like “Deconstructing College Rankings” and “Deconstructing Cashmere,” where it is used informally to analyze or scrutinize, rather than following philosopher Jacques Derrida’s usage of the term to discuss the interplay of binary oppositions when exploring linguistic fluidity in literary and philosophical texts.

The exposure of Paul de Man’s double life as a bigamist, a convicted criminal, and a Nazi sympathizer called into question the indeterminacy espoused by deconstruction and post-structuralist philosophy, which sought to reveal the unreliability of language and to destabilize the dialectical polarities that structure Western metaphysics. While de Man focused more narrowly on the inextricable interaction of antinomies in literature (grammar/rhetoric; literal/figurative), Derrida’s embrace of the “freeplay of the signifier” to expose textual contradictions and to blur the boundaries between hierarchical oppositions like nature/culture, speech/writing, and presence/absence also challenged logocentric truth claims — while couching all of it in linguistic gymnastics and fun wordplay. Nothing to see here behind the curtain of ethical consequences, nothing at all — until the consequences turned dire, not only for de Man, but for all of us.

After decades of subverting, displacing, and dissolving dichotomies into an undecidable interplay, was it any wonder when we landed in an era of ceaseless propaganda and “alternative facts,” where we are plagued by fundamental disagreements about what constitutes a shared reality? Members of the Frankfurt School, like Jürgen Habermas, who staunchly defend the Enlightenment’s emphasis on communicative rationality, look positively benign in comparison, so I’m unclear why they have recently been a target. As for the current vicious debate surrounding the dismantling of gender binaries, which is indebted to Judith Butler — another disciple of Derrida — I will simply point out our location in the history of ideas to demonstrate how we landed where we are today.

When Slavoj Zizek, a proponent of psychoanalytic deconstruction, claimed to be a “Christian Stalinist,” the latent antisemitism surfaced yet again, and many of us shook our heads in dismay, while others wondered if he was joking — just another ironic wordplay? That was unlikely, as he had been praising Stalin off and on for years. But the stakes were high, and the joke was not funny, and the bell tolled again for the death of deconstruction. (Not long after 9/11, Zizek delivered a talk at UCLA in which he discussed the porousness of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, suggesting that the terrorists who flew their planes into the World Trade Center were in fact the masters because they were willing to sacrifice everything. “Some years he gets up there and says the same thing about Stalin,” sighed one of my advisors.)

Even as its specter continues to cast a long shadow and to reinvent itself in subterranean ways, deconstruction’s dance into the dizzying abyss had largely collapsed in the academy by the conclusion of the twentieth century. The backlash against deconstruction in particular and post-structuralism in general was followed by a new strand of anti-postmodernism, including not only Continental philosophers like Badiou and Agamben, but also Radical Orthodox theologians, who elevated Christian theology as a bulwark against a disenchanted modernity, as well as post-secular scholars, who contested the Enlightenment thesis of inevitable secularization.

And so I was surprised to see deconstruction’s recent resurgence in popularity when various Christians, late to the trend and ostensibly unaware of its contextual complexity, resurrected the term over the past few years in order to question certain aspects of their faith. While I admire their desire to extricate themselves from repressive evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds, they tend to have a superficial understanding of the term as they leap onto the trendy bandwagon, and they appear to be unaware of its associations with de Man and with pernicious strands of relativism. For a predominantly progressive crowd that would like to distance themselves from white Christian nationalism, they would benefit from a more careful consideration of their terminology.

Rooted in the Emerging/Emergent Church movement — another trend that has come and gone — the “Exvangelical” and “Faith Deconstruction” movements expanded in popularity under the writings and internet influence of a wide variety of Christian pastors, scholars, and laity, ranging from philosophers like John Caputo to popular authors like Brian McLaren and Sarah Bessey.

Caputo’s amusingly titled What Would Jesus Deconstruct? — a riff on WWJD — contains the lengthiest end-note I have ever seen, deflecting the problems of Derrida’s early work and explaining why he chooses to concentrate on the later work, which he finds more palatable to Christianity. Rather than rehearse Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett’s helpful critique of Caputo and Faith Deconstruction, I’ll simply note that Caputo never once mentions the controversy surrounding de Man’s duplicity in his book, and Childers and Barnett appear to be unaware of it as well. Even more significantly, if an author’s work is truly separate from the life of the author, scholars should have no issues defending the work — as some are attempting to do for Heidegger’s oeuvre — but this largely hasn’t succeeded for de Man’s scholarship.

“De Man’s stance, the stance that made him famous, was that facts were unreliable, language was slippery,” writes Tom Bartlett, in a review of Evelyn Barish’s biography of de Man. “For a fugitive running from unpleasant facts, and one for whom lying was second nature, such a worldview was both natural and useful. ‘The people that love de Man and continue to support him fundamentally say that there is no necessary connection between what a person does or says in his or her private life and what his or her ideas are,’ said Barish. ‘I’m not of that position.’”

Though she is likely unaware of the sordid history surrounding the rise and fall of deconstruction, Tia Levings appears to be an impressive auto-didact and is using the term correctly as she challenges the rigid hierarchical oppositions of her abusive fundamentalist past. Out of all those using the term, I have the most sympathy for her and for what she has overcome. Yet the end goal of deconstruction is to leave one in a state of aporia — an endless regress of images, a dizzying state of imbalance like being in a hall of mirrors, a mis en abyme, where you cannot discern your direction or where you stand, where meaning is unstable and nearly every word becomes a multivalent, obnoxious pun — endlessly differing, endlessly deferring (Derrida’s différance). Imagine if most of Jesus’s words were undecidable puns with dual meanings, with no single meaning privileged over another, and you get the general idea. I do not think that Levings ultimately wants to land there.

On the other hand, I was delighted to see Jinger Duggar (of 19 Kids and Counting fame) deliberately choosing the term “disentangle” rather than deconstruct, as she separates the egregious aspects of her oppressive fundamentalist upbringing from the great goodness and mercy of God. As my friend Jenny Williams has noted, “disentangle” contains lively feminist connotations, evocative of generations of supportive women, combing, braiding, and weaving strands of hair — in contrast to “deconstruct,” connoting combative boys playing with their philosophical building blocks. (It’s also worth noting that women remain vastly underrepresented in the fields of theology and philosophy, and even where they have made inroads, you will often still find them listed second: Catherine Pickstock after John Milbank; Gayatri Spivak after Jacques Derrida. This is ironic, of course, if one wants to destabilize hierarchies.)

Christians who insist on continuing to deconstruct may claim that they’re just using the term to question, reject, or “systematically dissect” various aspects of their faith and to explore gray areas of ambiguity. While there’s nothing wrong with having doubts and questions, they need to ask themselves if they want to be associated with a word tainted with such heavy baggage, including proponents who have deconstructed the bounds of truth and goodness so far that they have refused to renounce historical events that are unambiguously evil.

Consider, for example, this passage from de Man’s Allegories of Reading, where he discusses Rousseau’s Confessions, and ask yourself if this sounds like someone whose conscience or superego has derailed, and if this is someone you would claim as an ally as you embark on your deconstructive journey of discovery:

Far from seeing language as an instrument in the service of a psychic energy, the possibility now arises that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration or meaning. It is no longer certain that language, as excuse, exists because of a prior guilt but just as possible that since language, as a machine, performs anyway, we have to produce guilt (and all its train of psychic consequences) in order to make the excuse meaningful. Excuses generate the very guilt they exonerate, though always in excess or by default. (299, emphasis mine)

After all, if you accept the lethal idea that language is absolutely random — a freeplay of signifiers — it should not matter greatly if de Man called Jews a pollutant. The random language of an apology or an excuse may correlate to an “aberrant” sense of guilt, but the guilt is likely not an anterior actuality, just a construction of language. (Avoid the apology for one’s heinous political stances, and thereby avoid the guilt.) The tautological circularity of possibilities is often the point, so if you’re on the deconstructive bandwagon, enjoy your journey into an endless oscillation of antinomies. If your stomach is strong enough, try reading the critics, including Derrida, who sought to defend de Man’s wartime journalism, and you will see the hermeneutics of deconstruction at its absolute worst. (Herman Rapaport, for instance, claimed that de Man’s antisemitism is “enormously complex and profoundly ambiguous.”)

In contrast to a deconstructive reading, which seeks to uncover contradictions and indeterminacy within a text in a manner that resists harmonious closure, a structuralist approach would, for example, read the synoptic gospels side by side at the same time — horizontally across all three gospels at once to evaluate the syntagmatic relations as well as vertically to explore the paradigmatic relations. Though biblical scholars and theologians have long engaged in a comparative analysis of the synoptic gospels, the interpretive matrix of structuralism never really gained traction, despite its potential to offer a salient perspective.

Yet I’m not here to restore structuralism, and I’m obviously not here to deconstruct. I’m here to defamiliarize. That’s a fancy word for the way that art can take something that is familiar to us and make it unfamiliar again, replacing our automatic, default perception of the world with a rejuvenated vision, a vision new and strange. This visionary estrangement derives from the aesthetic theories of the Formalists in the 1920s, who claimed that art can provoke this process of defamiliarization by shocking us into a new awareness of the world, thereby cleansing the Blakean “doors of perception,” which have been clouded by habit and daily repetition, so that we can see anew with the freshness of a child’s eyes. In his essay “Art as Technique,” the Formalist Viktor Shklovsky writes that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader 80).

Rather than embracing deconstruction, I’d encourage Christians to try defamiliarizing their faith instead. Take the first chapter of the Gospel of John, for instance, and meditate on it for a while, fumbling for a definition and trying to imagine the pre-incarnate Logos of God’s self-expression — an infinite, incorporeal being beyond any imagination and beyond the bounds of time and space, who then entered history at the cellular level in the womb of a woman — until your mind and heart tremble in awe, and you suddenly appreciate the dazzling darkness spoken of by the contemplative mystics. The language is not absolutely random but rather like a window at the bottom of a glass-bottomed boat, which reveals a deeper and unfathomable vista: the paradoxical unity of inarticulable mystery and absolute truth. In C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, the protagonist Orual enters into this realization: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. It is because you yourself are the answer. Before your face questions die away” (308).

The experimental narrative techniques and revelatory “moments of being” in literary modernism most often evoke the process of estrangement and defamiliarization for me, indebted as they are to James Joyce’s reconfiguration of the word “epiphany” to contain both sacred and secular connotations, and perhaps best exemplified by the exquisitely beautiful (and shocking!) “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Yet the actual Epiphany surrounding the journey of the Magi remains one of my favorite biblical stories, partly due to the vivid imagery and symbolism — the prophecy, the star, the extravagant threefold gifts — and partly because scholars like to argue about its historicity. Perhaps they find it hard to believe in such a staggering miracle: that the gift of revelation, illumination, and salvation is available to all, to every tribe and nation — even to the astrologers and the outsiders, even to the wayward and the lost.

Is defamiliarization just another trendy term that has already seen its heyday? Maybe, but it’s the only critical theory that has lingered with me after all these years, and when I read a book or see a film or view a painting or hear a song that refreshes my vision and perception of creation or deepens the miracle and mystery of the Incarnation, I respond with gratitude for being alive and being loved, and I can think of no greater theory than that, a theory that daily reminds me to drop my default perceptions, to look on others with eyes of compassion, and to see the world anew.

For Part II of this two-part series, go here.

Kathryn Stelmach Artuso (Ph.D. UCLA) is a freelance journalist, a specialist in transatlantic modernism, and the author of Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South.