POSTMODERNISM: I need your help...
Ron Hardin
Rowland Croucher wrote:
>
> I've been asked to talk to some clergy conferences on the differences between
> modernism and postmodernism (from a mainline Christian perspective) and want to make
> it simple. How about helping me complete this imaginary overhead projector
> transparency? (As a pre-postmodernist I like things to be logical/understood :-)!
See what you think if you read some of Derrida, any or all of the following
(I think you will find Derrida a better reader of Christianity than modernism is)
Memoirs of the Blind, U Chicago Press, 1993, say p.30:
Whether it be in writing or in drawing, in the Book of Tobit or in the
representations related to it, the thanksgiving grace of the trait
suggests that at the origin of the graphein there is debt or gift rather
than representational fidelity. More precisely, the fidelity of faith matters
more than the representation, whose movement this fidelity commands and thus
precedes. And faith, in the moment proper to it, is blind. It sacrifices
sight, even if it does so with an eye to seeing at last. The performative
that comes on the scene here is a ``restoring of sight'' rather than the
visible object, rather than a constatative description of what is or what one
notices in front of oneself. Truth belongs to this movement of repayment that
tries in vain to render itself adequate to its cause or thing. Yet this latter
emerges only in the hiatus of disproportion. The just measure of ``restoring''
or ``rendering'' is impossible - or infinite...
Difference in Translation, Cornell U Press, 1985, ed. Joseph F Graham, p.169:
``...
Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower.
Its head: in the heavens.
Let us make ourselves a name,
that we not be scattered over the face of the earth.''
What happens to them? In other words, for what does God punish them in
giving his name, or rather, since he gives it to nothing and to no one,
in proclaiming his name, the proper name of ``confusion'' [Bavel] which
will be his mark and seal? Does he punish them for having wanted to build
as high as the heavens? For wanting to accede to the highest, up to the
Most High? Perhaps for that too, no doubt, but incontestably for having
wanted thus to make a name for themselves, to give themselves the name,
to construct for and by themselves their own name, to gather themselves
there (``that we no longer be scattered''), as in the unity of a place
which is at once a tongue and a tower, the one as well as the other, the
other as the one. He punishes them for having thus wanted to assure
themselves, by themselves, a unique and universal genealogy...
Raising the Tone of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins U Press, 1993, p.155:
``He signifies it by sending it through his messenger
to his servant Yohanan.
He reports the testimony of the word of Elohim
and the testimony of the Yeshoua the messiah,
all he has seen.
Joy of the reader, of the hearer
of the words of the inspiration
of those who keep what is written:
yes, the time approaches, o gar kairos engus, tempus
enim prope est.''
... I draw your attention to the narrative sending [envoi], the
interlacing of voices and envois in the dictated or addressed
writing...
And there is no certainty that man is the central exchange of
these telephone lines or the terminal of this endless computer.
No longer is one very sure who loans its voice and its tone
to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer is one very sure
who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic reversal
here more necessary than ever, one can just as well think
this: as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who
writes, the text becomes apocalyptic. And if the envois
always refer to other envois without decidable destination,
the destination remaining to come, then isn't this completely
angelic structure, that of the Johannine apocalypse, isn't
it also the structure of every scene of writing in general?
This is one of the suggestions I wanted to submit for your
discussion: wouldn't the apocalyptic be a transcendental
condition of all discourse, of all experience even, of
every mark or every trace? And the genre of writing called
``apocalyptic'' in the strict sense, then, would be only
an example, an exemplary revelation of this transcendental
structure. In that case, if the apocalypse reveals, it is
first of all the revelation of the apocalpyse, the
self-presentation of the apocalyptic structure of language,
of writing, of the experience of presence, in other words,
of the text or of the mark in general: that is, of the
divisible envoi for which there is no self-presentation
nor assured destination...
The Gift of Death, U Chicago Press, 1994, p.80:
Our faith is not assured, because faith can never be, it must
never be a certainty. We share with Abraham what cannot be
shared, a secret we know nothing about, neither him nor us.
To share a secret is not to know or reveal the secret, it is
to share we know not what: nothing that can be determined.
What is a secret that is a secret about nothing and a sharing
that doesn't share anything?
Such is the secret truth of faith as absolute responsibility and
as absolute passion, the ``highest passion'' Kierkegaard will way;
it is a passion that, sworn to secrecy, cannot be transmitted from
generation to generation. In this sense it has no history. This
untransmissibility of the highest passion, the normal condition of
a faith which is thus bound to secrecy, nevertheless dictates to us
the following: we must always start over. A secret cannot be
transmitted, but in transmitting a secret as a secret that
remains secret, has one transmitted at all? Does it amount to
history, a story? Yes and no. The epilogue of Fear and Trembling
repeats, in sentence after sentence, that this highest passion that
is faith must be started over by each generation. Each generation
must begin again to involve itself without counting on the generation
before. It thus describes the nonhistory of absolute beginnings
which are repeated, and the very historicity that presupposes a
tradition to be reinvented at each step of the way, in this incessant
repetition of the absolute beginning.
===
You have to read Derrida on things that interest you, to get interested.
--
Ron Hardin
r...@research.att.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Rowland Croucher
I've been asked to talk to some clergy conferences on the differences between
modernism and postmodernism (from a mainline Christian perspective) and want to make
it simple. How about helping me complete this imaginary overhead projector
transparency? (As a pre-postmodernist I like things to be logical/understood :-)!
(P.S. I know a little of the debate about whether 'postmodernism' ought to be regarded
as a misnomer: Lyotard speaks of postmodernism as the 'acceleration of modernism')
***MODERNISM*** ***POSTMODERNISM***
Truth is 'given'/there are absolutes All underlying premises are banished
somewhere (Relativism reigns)
Individualism The Group
Rationality/logic/scientism Search for transcendent / resacralizing
of nature
Media icons: The Brady Bunch (Mike is The Simpsons: no order, no one's in
the God-figure, sorting out good/evil charge. Main idea: what's right, now?
Best book/overview (secular): ??? ???
Best ditto (Christian) ??? ???
etc.
etc.
etc.
Thanks!
--
Shalom! Rowland Croucher
Director, John Mark Ministries - resources for pastors/leaders.
(Bookroom, library, and worldwide F.W.Boreham Trading Post)
Home Page: http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm
CLERGY/LEADERS' LIST: clergy-...@pastornet.net.au
('SUBSCRIBE' on subject-line)
Ron Hardin
> writes, the text becomes apocalyptic. And if the envois
> always refer to other envois without decidable destination,
> the destination remaining to come, then isn't this completely
> angelic structure, that of the Johannine apocalypse, isn't
> it also the structure of every scene of writing in general?
Incidentally Kenneth Burke in _The Rhetoric of Religion_ proposed
seriously the analogy of words about God with words about words,
long ago.
moggin
Rowland Croucher <rowl...@werple.net.au>:
>I've been asked to talk to some clergy conferences on the differences between
>modernism and postmodernism (from a mainline Christian perspective) and want
>to make it simple.
You might look at Mark Taylor.
-- moggin
-Mammel,L.H.
In article <32E816...@werple.net.au>,
Rowland Croucher <rowl...@werple.net.au> wrote:
>
>***MODERNISM*** ***POSTMODERNISM***
[ ... ]
>Media icons: The Brady Bunch (Mike is The Simpsons: no order, no one's in
>the God-figure, sorting out good/evil charge. Main idea: what's right, now?>
I think this is actually backwards.
Lew Mammel, Jr.