Christopher Watkin on Derrida
Review of Christopher Watkin, Jacques Derrida, Great Thinkers (P&R, 2017). 184 pages.
Christopher Watkin has achieved something rare and delightful - an insightful and accessible introduction to, and engagement with, Derrida's thought from a reformed Christian perspective.
This book is a well written missile of brevity and clarity. In the first part of the book, Watkin explains what Derrida is all about with the effortless grace and good humour of a seasoned teacher. Many such introductions to secular theorists make me cringe at either their lazy enthusiasm for half digested ideas, or their unsympathetic alarmism that hasn't felt the weight of the argument before dogmatically dismissing it. This book avoids both errors. As a teacher and researcher in French studies, Watkin is able to offer a sympathetic and nuanced reading of Derrida's work based on the original French texts.
In the second part of his book, Watkin moves from careful description to a compelling and creative engagement with Derrida's ideas from a reformed Christian perspective. For me, the secret to the success of this section is his decision to engage with Derrida, not as if speaking on behalf of some generic Christian inquisitor, but by putting him in conversation with one particular worthy interlocutor, Cornelius Van Til. This shifts the mode of the discussion closer towards an exercise in comparative philosophy than a theological assessment.
Framed in this way, the discussion reveals a Christian worldview which is not reactive or defensive, but exhilarating in its life-giving coherence; as Watkin memorably concludes, "Deconstruction does not see biblical Christianity coming." Watkin describes the recurring structure of this surprise as "diagonalization", meaning that Christianity disrupts the categories assumed by deconstruction and by its opponents, cutting across the established battle lines in interesting (diagonal) ways. The central resource for this disruption is John's prologue, which tells of the ultimate diagonal disruption: the Word made flesh. Believing that we can reach for and capture the ineffable in language may be idolatrous, but so (it turns out) is Derrida's iconoclastic refusal out of hand to let God speak for himself.
As a graduate student in literary theory I'm often asked to recommend a book for non specialists who want to engage with postmodern ideas from the perspective of faith, and until now all I have been able to come up with is a sheepish shrug. But no longer! Now, finally, here is the book I can wholeheartedly recommend.