#john caputo

[improvisedliturgy]

Derrida is not undermining all distinctions but showing that distinctions are better thought of differentially, as occupying different points along a continuous line, where elements of one thing blend and bleed into others, and demonstrating that the “black-and-white,” either/or way of thinking in terms of binary oppositions—where one thing is simply the lack of the other—is invidious and loaded with traps. We cannot understand men or women if we do not first understand what is womanly about men and manly about women (reversal); both “man” and “woman” are traps that prevent the invention of new forms of gendered existence that shatter traditional stereotypes (displacement).

John D. Caputo, "A Prayer for the Impossible: A Catechumen's Guide to Deconstruction" in The Essential Caputo

[beguines]

John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event

[luciaofsyracuse]

“When someone says, “God is love,” do they mean that “God” is one of the best names we have for love? Or is it the other way around: is “love” one of the best names we have for God?”

— John D. Caputo, Philosophy and Theology

[blessedrestlessness]

The contemporary sociologist Justin Murphy, a Deleuzian “reactionary leftist”, seems to think Deleuze’s insights must be sought somewhere beyond or behind his language: “His work is obviously difficult; it’s dense; […] because of the nature of the sociology of French intellectual life in the 20th century, things just evolved in such a way that the highest-level thinkers […] got into this ridiculous competitive game of making their language increasingly complex.”

Deleuze himself, on the other hand, says that: “Depth is nothing […] but the reverse side of the surface.” Thus, the depth of Deleuze’s philosophical work is merely the reverse side of the surface, language, of which it is composed. As Richard Eyre writes of Shakespeare in Utopia and Other Places, “The life of the plays is in the language, not alongside it or underneath it. Feelings and thoughts are released at the very moment of speech. An Elizabethan audience would have responded to the pulse, the rhythms, the shapes, sounds, and above all meanings, within the consistent ten-syllable, five-stress lines of blank verse. They were an audience who listened” (Eyre, 176).

Those who want to move beyond or behind language think of themselves as excavators, but isn’t it rather the case that theirs is an additive project? They superimpose upon the “flowery” language of the philosophers they study their own far-less-lovely summaries, applying a thick coat of simple notions to the surface of wonderfully complex texts. This is the reductive tendency against which John Caputo warns when he writes: “One might even say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is,” cheekily adding, “In a nutshell” (Caputo, 32).

The neologisms of writers like Lacan and Derrida do, in fact, point to the realities these thinkers illuminate, and are helpful additions to the philosophical lexicon, just as neologisms like genderqueer have been a contribution to substantive discourse on gender.

___

Caputo, John. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, New York, Fordham University Press, 1996, p. 32.

Eyre, Richard. Utopia and Other Places, London, Bloomsbury, 1993, p. 176.

Murphy, Justin. “Was Gilles Deleuze a Poly Cuck?” Justin Murphy, YouTube, 26 Jun. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfsaEkv7ck.

[remembranceof]

We usually think that we first have to get to know something or someone in order subsequently to get to love them. But one of the great lessons of St. Augustine’s writings is that it is love that drives our search to know. Caught up in the grips of what is loved, love is driven to understand what it loves.

John D. Caputo, from “On Religion”

[improvisedliturgy]

God is an event, not in the order of power or being, but in the order of the good, the order of the order or command or call or appeal for the good, which calls for the good even when, especially when, things are going badly. The rule of God, the kingdom of God, are names for the solicitation by which we are visited and which regularly disturbs the world with a word from afar. The word issues from the lowliest and least likely places, from the nothings and nobodies, and above all, for Paul, from the abject and crucified body on a Roman cross. The more radical conception of the rule of God and the power of God is to say that the power of God is embodied in the helpless body whose flesh is nailed to the cross.

John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event

[improvisedliturgy]

One of the things Derrida means by a text or a tradition is that it keeps “happening” (arriver) without ever quite “arriving” at a final, fixed, and finished destination. We cannot simply “derive” (dériver) direct instruction from it, but we must instead allow it a certain drift or free play (dérive), which allows that tradition to be creative and reinvent itself so that it can be, as Augustine said of God, ever ancient yet ever new.

John D. Caputo, "A Prayer for the Impossible: A Catechumen's Guide to Deconstruction" in The Essential Caputo

[improvisedliturgy]

The highest possibility, the possibility we desire above all else— hence the event in the paradigmatic sense— is the possibility of the impossible. That is the key. Highlight this: the “possibility of the impossible” is central to what we mean both by the event (Lesson Eight) and by God. The latter point is not a quirk of Derrida but the considered opinion of Matthew (19:26) and Luke (1:37): some things are beyond us mortals, but “for God all things are possible.” Whatever is not possible for us is possible for God. So now we can say that the name of God is the name of a call that calls for the coming of the impossible, for the possibility of the impossible, to which we should be the response. The name of God is a placeholder for the open-endedness of the impossible, for a desire that I cannot contract to desiring this or that, for a faith exceeding any belief, for a hope against hope, for a love that is without measure. It stands in for an excess, for a passage to the limits, for an infinitival hope or expectation. The mystery of God springs from the dual mystery of the absolute secret, of the concealed depths, of the unconditional, of the unprethinkable, which outstrips us, which has called upon us before we know what to call it, when we were little more than wombish waterlings, and of an unforeseeable future, when what lies before is, well, God knows what.

John D. Caputo, What to Believe?: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology