Dr. Wolterstorff Weighs In

For those favored few who have been following the "St. Paul Goes to Berkeley" series, I will reveal this blog's perspective on the current topic under debate--the "death of the author"-- by quoting from Nicholas Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. Which, incidentally, is a wonderful tome for those of you who are interested in contemporary theology and hermeneutics. If a Yale philosopher's defense of interpreting for authorial discourse contra Derrida and Ricoueur is the kind of thing that gets you all hot and bothered, you need to read this. But I digress. Without further ado, here is Dr. Wolterstorff:

"...Derrida does not draw the conclusion that we ought to put authorial-discourse interpretation behind us and conduct our interpretation exclusively in accord with his alternative understanding. As we saw earlier, he doesn't tell us to put it behind us even when interpreting his own writings! Because we can't put it behind us. And we can't put it behind us because we can't put metaphysics behind us. Several times over Julia Kristeva, in her published interview with Derrida, invited him to discuss strategies for "escaping metaphysics" and to describe the workings of language after the escape. Each time Derrida's answer was the same: 'I do not believe, that someday it will be possible simply to escape metaphysics...'

This is one of the most persistent and striking themes in Derrida's writing: escape is not possible. It's not possible to conduct one's writing and one's interpreting, not much of it anyway, outside the language of ontotheology. Not possible for us, that is. One can speculatively imagine a human being escaping; but you and I cannot escape. For metaphysics is not a special language, found in the books of certain philosophers, which one can write and speak for a while and then return to our customary ways of writing and speaking. Our customary ways are all metaphysical ways. Metaphysics is not 'a regrettable and provisional accident of history,' 'a slip,' 'a mistake of thought occurring within history,' Metaphysics 'is the fall of thought into philosophy which gets history underway.'

The case against metaphysics was itself conducted, and could only have been conducted, in the language of metaphysics; we have no other language in which to conduct it....Engagement in the practice of discourse interpretation is indeed fated. Derrida is right about that--though the fate is to be located in the requirements of human community and of respect rather than in the fact that we can't escape the language of metaphysics."