Jacques Derrida
Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Press, 2017 
One of the most important thinkers of our time, Jacques Derrida continues to have a profound influence on postmodern thought and society.
Christopher Watkin explains Derrida’s complex philosophy with clarity and precision, showing not only what Derrida says about metaphysics, ethics, politics, and theology but also what assumptions and commitments underlie his positions. He then brings Derrida into conversation with Reformed theology through the lens of John 1:1-18, examining both similarities and differences between Derrida and the Bible.
Endorsements
“The Reformed community has long sought to stage a dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Karl Barth, but no one before Christopher Watkin has ever considered initiating a dialogue between Derrida and Barth’s Reformed critic Cornelius Van Til. Watkin explains Derrida’s fundamental ideas very clearly; more, he shows Calvinists some things that might be gained if they read Derrida with sympathy. Not least of all, the Bible might disclose more of its meaning.”
—Kevin Hart, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia
“Chris Watkin has done what I thought was impossible. He has explained Derrida’s deconstruction with lucidity, brevity, and charity. Not only that: he has imagined what it would be like for Cornelius Van Til to go toe-to-toe with Derrida in a discussion about language, logic, and the Logos made flesh, all of which figure prominently in John 1:1–18. And if that were not enough, he has done it in just over a hundred pages. Readers who want to know what all the fuss over postmodernity is about would do well to consult this book. It is an excellent beginning to this new Great Thinkers series.”
—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
“Philosopher Stanley Fish once declared, ‘Deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead. . . . It is everywhere.’ Christopher Watkin’s remarkable book explains better than any other the nature of Derrida’s program and the reasons for its persistence. Watkin corrects misunderstandings and caricatures. Derrida is easy to dismiss when one takes a few of his thoughts out of context. But a great deal of importance must be highlighted. The author engages in a biblical and Reformed critique, one that ‘hold[s] fast what is good,’ while identifying its evils (1 Thess. 5:21–22). Complete with helpful diagrams, the book is a tour de force. I wish I had possessed it while in graduate school.”
—William Edgar, Professor of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary
Reviews
Review at “Christian Reflections” blog:
Great Thinkers: Jacques Derrida is an excellent, accessible example of how to listen really carefully to another person’s point of view, and then engage with it fairly. For those wanting to get a grasp on what postmodernism is all about, and a guide through how to think about it from a Christian point of view, this is a great place to start. Christopher Watkin writes with great clarity, and his illustrations, diagrams and section headings all illuminate the ideas he is unpacking. For the tertiary educated reader, it is stretching without being such hard work you need to be fully awake, brow-furrowed and prepared to re-read dishearteningly dense paragraphs.
A must read for anyone interested in the intersection between Christianity and modern philosopher. And a great training tool for upcoming Christian leaders. I look forward to reading Christopher’s contribution on Michel Foucault.
Alan D Strange, Mid-America Journal of Theology (2018), 283-5.
This is a remarkable book. Truly. If one had contended before I read this book that someone could produce a clear and competent outline of the major features of the thought of so complex a figure as French post-modernist Jacques Derrida in such a brief space, I would have greeted such a claim with incredulity. Not only has Watkin admirably done so, but he’s done far more than this: to add to the first part of the book, which contains an amazing precis of Derrida’s philosophy, he has written a second. part that is a Van Tilian analysis of Derrida, a frankly breathtaking task that subjects Derrida to a presuppositional examination that engages his thought in the most fruitful biblical way that l’ve ever encountered.
This reviewer heartily commends this book to all interested in engaging Derrida and his fellows and hopes for more in this series in this vein. If others take a like approach this could demonstrate a utility hitherto untapped in Van Tilian apologetics. This is a model of the apologist as a practitioner sauviter in modo, fortiter in re.
Amazon reviews
January 8, 2018
Watkin explains that some Christians writers embrace Derrida’s thought as heralding the ‘next reformation’ while others such as Alister McGrath (see Christian Theology: An Introduction, p114) are dismissive, believing that Derrida considers the intentions of the author irrelevant to interpreting texts. I was already well aware of McGrath’s reaction (see The Science of God, p38) and this had aroused my curiosity as to why Derrida seemed to elicit such extreme responses. Watkin’s very readable and well-argued monograph presents a middle way for those wishing to understand Derrida’s ideas and to see in what ways they might resonate with Christian thought.
This review will focus mainly on Chapters 1 and 5. The former elucidates Derrida’s thought, particularly regarding the meaning of texts, whereas in the latter we can imagine a conversation between Derrida, a self-confessed atheist, and a van Til, a notable Reformed Theologian of the 20th Century.
Chapter 1, What is Deconstruction?, navigated judiciously by Watkin is a demanding read. Concepts such as logocentrism, phonocentrism, différance, arche-writing, signifier, signified and trace (see Glossary), necessary to understand Derrida’s approach to deconstruction are carefully explained. Différance, the word coined by Derrida to describe the mode of existence of everything that exists, is very important here.
Deconstruction is but one of many terms used by Derrida to describe what happens in written texts and what they mean. While it has been alleged this leads to meaninglessness, he maintains instead that it leads to an openness as to what the text actually says. While the one-liner, “there is nothing outside the text” is the usual translation from the French, it has sometimes been taken to mean there is nothing beyond language. Derrida claimed the exact opposite is the case. To try to overcome any misunderstanding, Watkin has suggested very helpfully, “Rather than saying that Derrida means ‘there is nothing outside language’ it is closer to the mark (but not sufficient) to say ‘there is nothing outside of context’”.
Derrida was on a mission to deconstruct Western Metaphysics. However, one example will have to suffice. Phonocentrism describes the supposed immediacy of meaning in spoken language, in contrast to writing. However Derrida claims neither the written word nor the spoken word has precedence.
Derrida’s approach to ethics may strike some as surprising. He sensed a ‘real other’ who placed demands on him, the impersonal God of the philosophers, in contrast to the personal God of John 1:1-18. There is a fascinating discussion of undecidability (p 35); a decision is undecidable if it is impossible to have sufficient information or context to be sure one’s judgement is just. He argues this is no reason to fail to act! There are also surprising insights into conditional giving and reciprocal hospitality.
Chapter 4 begins the exploration of Derrida’s thought through the eyes of Reformed thinkers using ‘presuppositionalist’ or ‘van Tilian’ thought. The section, Frame’s Reformed Readings and Misreadings of Derrida (pp68-66), is very informative and well worth careful reading. Chapter 4 also emphasises the importance of Epistemological Self-Consciousness, i.e. what we think it is possible to know, and how we can know it. He notes this is very important for both van Tilian thought and Derrida.
In Ch 5 Watkin contrasts the approaches of Derrida and Van Til in the light of John 1:1-18. van Til’s Christian (Reformed) position includes the following basic presuppositions:- (1) The Biblical witness must be taken as a whole. (2) There is a Biblical understanding of reality whereby “the Christian has good reason to affirm the orderliness and regularity of the world, because she understands that regularity and its origin and ground in God’s character”. (3) The Creator-Creature distinction; Creator and Creation do not exist in the same way, implying two modes of being. By way of stark contrast, Derrida’s concept of Différance, “Everything that exists (everything that is) exists in the same way”, involves just one mode of being.
I agree with Watkin when he says, “The Creator-creature distinction does bring Reformed thinking to something like Derrida’s affirmation ‘there is nothing outside the text’”. This must be taken in sense in which Watkin qualified it above. Thus for both Derrida and van Til are, there is no pure unmediated access to knowledge, free of all context.
Returning to John 1, it is The Word (‘He’ and not ‘it’), who is responsible for all things in the universe. This is the God who is both personal and absolute (referred to as absolute personality theism), in contrast to the impersonal and uncaused God of the philosophers.
Derrida baulked at any idea of transcendence, a step too far for him for his God is ‘wholly other, unknowable’. He questions how this absolute (God) could communicate with the finite or creatures? The Christian answer from John 1 is that the Word became flesh, and is none other than Jesus Christ (John 1:17-18). In so doing God has accommodated Himself to our situation and Watkin observes it “facilitates our understanding of ourselves and God, rather than frustrating it”.
Readers will be pleasantly surprised by Derrida’s acknowledgment of the danger of thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. It reads almost like a direct quotation of Rom 12.3!
Matters such as post-modernism, Derrida’s claim that ‘The other is wholly other’, the Sovereignty of God, the Trinity and much more besides, have been left for readers to follow up for themselves.
For those like the reviewer, who are not philosophers, Watkin has provided a very readable and helpful bridge between the ideas of a particularly important late 20th Century philosopher and a recognised theologian from the much the same era. He is to be commended for employing the two very important principles articulated by the writer of the Foreword: “Listen before you speak” and “Understand before you critique”.
There is a fairly full Glossary but a definition for diagonalisation (applied to many of the Figures) is missing! Figures are numbered, but the numbers are not referenced in the text. A more comprehensive index would have helped.
John Pilbrow is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Monash University and a Former President of ISCAST (Christians in Science and Technology).
December 28, 2017
Great Thinkers: Jacques Derrida, by Christopher Watkin
I had heard of Christopher Watkin, professor of French thought at Monash University, a few times through friends who work for AFES at Monash and those who go to his church. But it was only when I did an Open Learning course he was teaching, ‘Postmodernism and the Bible: Derrida and Foucault’ that I became a fan. Christopher and I share the same desire of seeking to listen carefully to the ideas of others, and then interact with those ideas from a Christian point of view. This book covers a lot of the territory from the Open Learning Course, but then the second half of the book, where Christopher brings the ideas of Derrida into conversation with those of Reformed philosopher Cornelius Van Til, was largely new to me.
Great Thinkers: Jacques Derrida is an excellent, accessible example of how to listen really carefully to another person’s point of view, and then engage with it fairly. For those wanting to get a grasp on what postmodernism is all about, and a guide through how to think about it from a Christian point of view, this is a great place to start. Christopher Watkin writes with great clarity, and his illustrations, diagrams and section headings all illuminate the ideas he is unpacking. For the tertiary educated reader, it is stretching without being such hard work you need to be fully awake, brow-furrowed and prepared to re-read dishearteningly dense paragraphs.
In the first half of the book, Christopher seeks to unpack key aspects of Derrida’s thought without critical assessment, looking at Deconstruction, Ethics and Politics and Theology. In this first half he corrects against common misunderstandings of Derrida’s thinking, and draws us closer to his unique contributions, rather than a more generalised and simplistic caricature of ‘postmodernist’ thought. These first 3 chapters would make the book worthwhile on its own. It provides a clear summary of Derrida’s ideas, with a decent number of excerpts from Derrida’s own writings and an annotated bibliography for those who want to explore further.
In the second half of the book, Christopher seeks to find points of agreement, disagreement and fruitful conversation between the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the Christian faith. He uses Cornelius Van Til (and almost as much John Frame) as a theological partner in this conversation and focusses his biblical exposition on John 1:1–18, with extended reflection on Colossians 1 as well.
Chapter 4 was a real highlight for me, where Christopher considers the places John Frame’s critique of postmodernism misses the mark. This is a great example and warning of how careful we need to be in listening well to those with whom we disagree, so that we can be clear on why exactly we do disagree. I love this kind of close, rigorous interaction, that really gets into the weeds, rather than deals in over-simplified generalities. It’s a great fun, dramatic chapter.
In Chapter 5, Christopher, with the help of Van Til, shows how a Christian view of the world provides a framework within which the ideas of Derrida don’t quite work. The sharp distinctions that Derrida sets up in his philosophy (between ontotheology and différance, the one and the many, abstract generality and concrete particularity, radical monstrous openness and pre-programmed predictability and so on) do not quite represent the world as the we find it in Scripture. So Christopher argues that Derrida’s critiques and proposals don’t quite stand up.
At the same time, Derrida’s way of looking at things provides us with a fresh way to think about and re-state biblical ideas. Christopher is careful not to simply adopt his concepts and baptise them. At the same time, there are points of agreement which are more than mere surface similarity. Derrida’s critique of pure human objectivity is something we would agree with, even if we would structure it differently. Likewise, Derrida’s description of a future hope as ‘monstrous messianicity’ is a colourful way to emphasise the shocking ‘new thing’ that God has done in the cross of Christ.
Chapter 5 was so long (at 50 pages, it was twice as long as any other chapter in the book) and rich I am curious to know why it wasn’t broken up into several smaller and more digestible chapters. In its current form, it is easy to get lost in the argumentation and for some of the stronger points to get lost in a single paragraph.
In the end I still came away from the book more annoyed by and dismissive of Jacques Derrida, and especially his infuriatingly antisocially opaque writing style, than Christopher is. He mentions a cutting critique of Derrida by philosopher John Searle, but doesn’t really unpack how this debate unfolded. I would have loved to hear more of this controversy. Searle’s comments gave voice to my annoyance at trying to read Derrida on several occasions over the last 20 years, and I didn’t feel like Christopher’s apologetic fully answered Searle’s critique. But I guess this makes Christopher Watkin the author I need not the author I want! I am better served by a book like this, than a book that tells me more of exactly what I’d like to hear the way I’d like to hear it.
A few other minor notes of a more critical nature:
—The illustration about the French and English words for river and stream (or fleuve and rivière) on page 19 didn’t convince me of the point he was trying to make. I understand that language is somewhat arbitrarily constructed. But only somewhat. Regardless of the precise distinctions between stream/river and fleuve/rivière… these distinctions are still subtle ones describing flowing bodies of water. To be more fully convinced I’d like to see some more substantive examples.
—In rightly distancing Christianity from the ‘God of ontotheology’ (page 46) I wonder if Christopher throws out too much of the baby with the bathwater? So much powerful theological language comes to Christian theology from classical philosophy and has been digested and reframed in the process… I am wary of being too simplistic in us accepting Derrida’s dismissal of it all.
—Contrary to Christopher, I think John Frame’s critique of Derrida’s ethics (relativising moral discourse while requiring everybody to conform to his values, p. 60) largely sticks. Derrida relativises moral discourse by relativising it to the peculiar situation, the unique individual. But in order to make this ‘every other is wholly other’ and this ‘democracy to come’ work as an ethic, he has to beg a whole lot of questions. In the end, Derrida’s ethics isn’t far off assertion, in my assessment.
—In the same way, while Christopher is helpful in tightening up the terms of John Frame’s critique of Derrida on page 64, I still think Frame’s point stands. A lot of his ‘close reading’ of texts strikes me as forced and ‘clever’ and dependent on wordplay, rather than actually careful reading.
—On page 80 Christopher writes ‘Logic is reliant on God, not determinate of him’, which is misleading, in my view. In this sentence ‘logic’ needs to be put in scarequotes — ‘logic-understood-as-a-separate-thing-to-God-himself’. Better to say what he goes on to say “Logic is the product of God’s character and part of its expression in creation. There is nothing before, behind, or underneath Go upon which he relies.”
—I’d be curious to have another pass through Christopher’s responses to Derrida, his ‘diagonlisations’ (as he puts it), to explore how Derrida might reply to Christopher’s replies. When might ‘diagonlisation’ simply be perceived to be a rhetorical or philosophical sleight of hand? How do we bed down the assertion that the biblical framework truly does resist Derrida’s categories?
—On page 92 Christopher rightly describes the unifying interpretative role that Christ playes in all of creation, as described in Colossians 1. I would like to also see more time given to the second order reatlity that ‘in Christ and for Christ’ produces: which is a created order ordered-alongisde itself. Where Christ actually gives meaning and order to each thing as it relates to every other thing. There becomes an internal logic to the world.
—On page 95, it seems that the biblical and theological concept of transcendence is reduced to merely ‘covenant rule’. This doesn’t preserve enough place for the many places where the Bible does assert a distance and unknowability and ‘otherness’ to God.
A must read for anyone interested in the intersection between Christianity and modern philosopher. And a great training tool for upcoming Christian leaders. I look forward to reading Christopher’s contribution on Michel Foucault, which I believe may well be forthcoming?
March 13, 2018
It’s a line of argument taken by Merold Westphal, whose delightful forward invites us in to Watkin’s treatment of Derrida.
The book comes in two parts. The first part is a lucid and incisive exploration of Derrida’s thought. As someone who has struggled to read Derrida and met with only moderate success I found Watkin’s treatment incredibly helpful. He deftly and generously explains key moments in Derrida’s with the attendant terminology in such a way as one felt the force of Derrida’s argument. Watkin’s sympathetic and illuminating treatment provides a model for real intellectual and moral engagement. His generous listening sets up part two, his critique.
In part 2 Watkin seeks to bring Derrida into conversation with Reformed theology, in particular Cornelius Van Til and John Frame. Watkin is not afraid to say where Van Til and Frame misunderstand Derrida. I appreciated his critique of their reading of Derrida. The conversation he lays about is between these Reformed thinkers and Derrida on John 1.1-18. He shows how the God presented in Scripture refuses to be captured by the categories of deconstruction, and indeed finds creative and life giving ways out of the the cul-de-sacs deconstruction can sometimes lead to.
“To assume that human beings can speak adequately of God would be arrogance and hubris; to assume that God cannot speak adequately of himself would be presumption and just as arrogant” (p102). Derrida can however show us ways that we are blind to our own fallenness and to how we can domesticate God and dominate others.
Watkin shows how deconstruction provides another angle from which to see the depth of God’s grace to us in Christ.
This volume will help Christians engage with Derrida and postmodernism in general. I would be very interested to see how the convinced post-modern or simply the reasonably well read non-Christian would find Watkin’s treatment. That would take the conversation off the page and into personal exchange, something I’m sure Watkin would heartily recommend.
November 30, 2017
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.