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“Christian epistemology links mystic knowledge to language. God has spoken,” Michel de Certeau writes (M.F., p. 114) Two extended metaphors for the economy of this speech act are common in the tradition. In the first, God is Speaker, Christ is the Spoken Word, the Verb grafted upon this world (M.F., p. 150) and the Spirit is the breath (pneuma) which makes this communication possible. In the second, the Spirit is explicitly linked to the writing of the Spoken Word. God is Writer and creation is His book. Certeau, as we will see, examines both these metaphors (with the economies of revelation and redemption that they imply). The speech act is fundamental to his understanding of history, creation, subjectivity and the practices of daily living. And yet, as a thinker who draws upon and develops the poststructuralism of Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida (to name only a few), this privileging of the voice is somewhat at odds with poststructural denunciations of the author and critiques of the metaphysics of presence subtly organised around the hierarchy of speech over writing.
1 Church Dogmatics, 1. 1, tr.G.W.Bromiley (Edinburgh: T.&T Clark, 1975). p.296. There is a difference between saying that discourse is haunted by an alterity, exteriority and excess which raises theological questions and saying that discourse is by its nature sacred, an echo of the divine. I take the first to accept seriously the creator-creature divide, the God beyond ‘God’ as Gregory of Nyssa would say. I take the second to intend an onto-theological project, a metaphysical project according to modernity’s understanding of metaphysics. My own project in this essay belongs to the first distinction.
2 See Simon, Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992Google Scholar.
3 See my essay ‘Kenosis and Language: Allegoria Amoris’ in Religion in Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Moms, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
4 Seen as such Demda’s early work is the apotheosis of modernity’s project. I wish to acknowledge here the value of discussions on Denida’s work I have had with Catherine Pickstock of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
5 See Certeau’s essay ‘Believing and Making People Believe’ in P.E.L., pp.177-89. In this essay, having defined belief not in terms of object or content but a modality of assertion (p.178), Certeau goes on to outline the politics of believing-what makes something believable. Again he announces, albeit rather wistfully, the demise of religious believing or belief in “an invisible alterity behind the signs” (p.188). And whilst demonstrating how the Church is implicated in the demise of belief, he emphasizes how secularity has co-opted so many of the strategies and practices of religious believing to create its virtual realities “by making people believe that others believe it, but without providing any believable object” (p.189). Certeau speaks from within the secularism to the secularists. This is a space he has created for himself from which he speaks and which is constituted by what he speaks. But the credibility of religious beliefs does remain. The Church as a series of institutions practising these beliefs remains also. There as an alternative space within the cities of secularity. Certeau often seems to forget this while providing us with analyses of heterological spatiality. What politics of the believable is he engaging in?
6 Explorations in Theology III: (Creator Spiritus, tr.Brian McNeil. C.R.V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). p. 166.
7 For his theology of spacing and desire as they relate to his anthropology and doctrine of creation (all heavily indebted to Gregory of Nyssa), see Balthasar’s Presence and Thought tr. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995.
8 How is Christianity Thinkable Today? Theology Digest vo1.17 (1971). p.345.
