Reading Derrida Thinking Paul

This book explores the interweaving of several of Derrida’s characteristic concerns with themes that Paul explores in Romans. It argues that the central concern of Romans is with the question of justice, a justice that must be thought outside of law on the basis of grace or gift. The many perplexities that arise from thus trying to think justice outside of law are clarified by reading Derrida on such themes as justice and law, gift and exchange, duty and debt, hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and pardon. This interweaving of Paul and Derrida shows that Paul may be read as a thinker who wrestles with real problems that are of concern to anyone who thinks. It also shows that Derrida, far from being the enemy of theological reflection, is himself a necessary companion to the thinking of the biblical theologian. Against the grain of what passes for common wisdom this book argues that both Derrida and Paul are indispensable guides to a new way of thinking about justice.

In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure? The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume.

Offers a constructive new approach to the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction.

This thirteenth volume in the interdisciplinary Study of Time series explores the way in which limits and constraints impact upon our understanding of time.

What is a modern philosopher to make of Paul, the apostle? What do non-Christian philosophers in Europe gain from reading ancient letters from Christianity's first great ideologue, and letters addressed to groups of people lost to time? To ask this question is to acknowledge that despite religious faith being regarded by many as a stage that our modern societies have left behind, contemporary philosophers are confronted with questions such as multiculturalism and religious fundamentalism in the wake of immigration and the increasing presence of religious minorities. The Letters of Paul have gained the interest of several philosophers, and the interpretations of the apostle have taken many forms. Looking closely at Paul's letters which have gained most interest from atheist philosophers, The First Letter to the Corinthians and the Letter to the Romans, this book offers an overview of the various ways they have been understood. It pays close attention also to the readings of Paul in the three thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud – canonized as two of the great pillars of the modern critique of religion – with Spinoza as one of their important predecessors. Confronting these readings with insights not only from the more recent philosophical readings of the apostle but also from historical-critical scholarship on the Bible, this book lifts the veil over a new picture of the apostle as a figure with potential value for non-Christians and atheists. An Apostle for Atheists leaves us with ideas that compel us to reconsider Paul's negative reputation for secular modernity and appreciate him as a figure of a radically new politics as well as a renewed psychoanalysis.

Whilst Christian theology is familiar with questions about the relation of church and state, divine and human law, little attention has been devoted to questions of international law. Esther D. Reed offers a systematic engagement with contemporary issues of international law and its relevance for modern theology. Reed discusses numerous issue driven topics, including: challenges to classic just-war thinking from so-called fourth generation warfare, peoples and nationhood within divine providence, the ethics of territorial borders and the militarization of human intervention. By discussing selected biblical texts Reed helps to move the issues of international law higher up the agenda of Christian theology, ethics and moral reasoning.

This book unfolds a vision for philosophical theology centered on the practices of the care of the self, the city, and creation. Rooted in Paul’s articulation of the wisdom of the cross, and in conversation with ecological, radical, and political theologies; continental philosophy; and political ecology, it addresses the challenge of injustice and ecological catastrophe. Part one reads 1 Corinthians as an exercise in reading and writing that shapes and changes relationships and capabilities. Part two follows this alternative path for theology through Derrida and Kierkegaard, and neglected trajectories in Origen, Augustine, and Luther. Along the way, reading and writing are explored as exercises that transform selves, communities, and even habitats. They are creaturely acts that can scandalize the dominant orders of consumption and competition for the ends of love and justice. This is a philosophical theology engaged with political ecology, exercises that help cultivate new creation.

Paola Marrati considers the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works.