Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Page 183

Death, Jesus, Derrida
result in nothing less but a romantic reading of the biblical literature. Without
the metaphysical escape or void so integral to Derrida’s method of reading,
Seeley has perverted Derrida into a cultured arm chair disputant (colleague)
at best: A “sober” application of Derrida’s agenda that has been made but an
addendum to the traditional methods of critical New Testament scholarship
(such as form and redaction criticism or narrative criticism). To reduce Derrida
to the level of conventional biblical methodology is not an endorsement of
his importance but trapping everything and nothing—all he stands for—in a
cage. But the movement shall not be strapped to such a chair, Derrida con-
tinues:
But the work of writing and the economy of differance will not be dominated by
this classical conceptuality, this ontology, or this epistemology. On the contrary,
these fumish its hidden premises. Differance does not resist appropriation, it does
not impose an exterior limit upon it. Differance began by broaching alienation
and it ends by leaving reappropriation breached. Until death. Death is the move-
ment of differance to the extent that that movement is necessarily finite. This
means that differance makes the opposition of presence and absence possible....
Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes
impossible.65
Sayings collections like the Synoptic Sayings Source and the Gospel of
Thomas provide an excellent insight into how fragmented is the reality of
speech. Not only is speech deprived of its original context of the speaker as
it lives on but is at the same time made subject to writing for preservation. It
is present only as much as it is absent at the same time. The Gospel ofThomas
opens with these words, “These are the hidden sayings (words) that Jesus
uttered and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded” (Gos. Thom. Incipit). Speaker
and words have been separated and spoken words have become written words.
Add to that the often abrupt nature of these sayings collections: different
genres are put together and the context may be broken at any time with new
clusters of sayings, different strata etc. The voice is absent, yet, present in
the written word and the word is absent, yet, present for the proper under-
standing (Gos. Thom. 1). The elusive anecdotes and aphorisms are subject,
indeed, to the desire to find true meaning but it escapes it as it remains mere
possible for their translucent nature: they are and are not, spoken or written
and yours is the task of getting into them until death. Derrida warns at the
same time about the dangerous side of writing—it must never become
65 Op. cit., 1974, 143.
181