Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Clayton Crockett
128 Harrin Hall
Department of Philosophy and Religion
University of Central Arkansas
Conway, AR 72035
USA
ClaytonC@uca.edu
Catherine Malabou
2 bis rue de l’Ermitage
75020
Paris
France
cmalabou@club-internet.fr
Abstract
This article develops a theoretical and political critique of the contem-
porary notion of the deconstruction of Christianity, primarily in the later
work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The deconstruction of
Christianity relies upon an understanding of temporality and messianicity
derived from Heidegger and Benjamin, and we challenge this privileg-
ing of messianism in contemporary philosophy and theology. Messianism
is contrasted with plasticity, and plasticity is shown to have resources to
overcome the impasses of contemporary thought in a counter-messianic
way. To oppose messianism is not to oppose theological thinking, but to
open a creative and productive political space for a radical theological and
philosophical reflection.
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
16 Political Theology
We confess, we are hesitant to place this work before your ‘eyes,’ you who already
know what we are going to say, who can see (what is) to come (voir venir). To think
is a work of mourning, a desire for approval as well as an anticipation of disappoint-
ment. To think is to love, a love that is always in transference…
How can we establish the respective roles of the philosopher and the theologian, here
of all places? Or any place? Are they strangers, enemies, partners, or lovers?
For the philosopher, her task is to create thought from within, an internal, intensive
power that is primary. Philosophical thinking inaugurates the arrival of being. But
what if thought has exhausted itself and being has withdrawn? Can postmetaphysi-
cal thinking resign itself to piecing together gadgets with strands of thread and glue
salvaged from the ruins of western metaphysics (Odradek)? Or would a genuine
philosophical vision be possible in the wake of deconstruction?…
For the theologian, his task is completely derivative of the divine presence, the necessary
and impossible task of expressing God’s Word about God, without any intermediary.
The theologian is extrinsic, external to the self-generating truth of divinity, reduced
ideally to the status of a pure vessel of transmission. But what if theology is cut off
from all dogmatic or ecclesiastical bonds, from all positive revelation? Is theological
thinking then at an end, without any purpose? Or could there be a radical theology
freed from the possibility of revelation, a creative theological fashioning of conceptions
of divinity?…
1. See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion,
trans. O. Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 168.
3. See Mohammed Arkoun, Islam: To Reform or to Subvert? (London: Saqi Books,
2006), for careful methodological consideration of issues related to this idea that implicate
both Islamic and western scholarship. Arkoun suggests that a conception of “Mediterra-
nean space” would help deconstruct the “fundamental polarity of a substantialised Islam on
one hand, and on the other (depending on the side of the divide), an ‘enlightened’ or Sata-
nized West” (13).
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” in Religion and Media, ed.
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 113. Also
included in La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, I (Paris: Galilée, 2005).
5. Ibid., 114.
6. Ibid., 118.
7. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 54.
8. See ibid., 60: “Let us never forget that Christian, in fact, Lutheran, memory of
Heideggerian deconstruction (Destruktion was first destructio by Luther, anxious to reactivate
the originary sense of the Gospels by deconstructing theological sediments).”
9. See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch
and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). In
this context, Alain Badiou’s reading of Paul in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,
trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) must be read as struc-
turally similar to deconstruction, even though Badiou insists upon his atheism more
unambiguously. For Badiou, Paul’s discourse is paradigmatic in that it represents “a pure
fidelity to the possibility opened by the event” (45). The Resurrection of Christ is “pure
event, opening of an epoch.” Even though Badiou does not “believe” in the Resurrec-
tion event, he affirms the structure of Paul’s thought as a form of fidelity to an event in a
way that is very close to deconstruction, shorn of Badiou’s set-theoretical mathematical
ontology.
thus very difficult to see in what way there might be a specificity of the
uniquely Christian “opening.” The same argument may be used against
Nancy’s definition of Christianity as a “self-deconstructive” movement.
“Self-destruction” or “self-deconstruction” also characterizes metaphysics
as such, because Nancy completely identifies Christianity with “the West”:
“Christianity is inseparable from the West.”10 How would that identifica-
tion preclude or exclude western metaphysics, above all? Once again, we
are not able to grasp the specificity of the Christian self-deconstruction,
which alone would allow us to think of a possible deconstruction of
Christianity.
If, according to Heidegger, Christianity does not transgress the borders
of metaphysics and does not, for this reason, merit special treatment, it is
precisely because Christianity cannot be defined as an absolute opening. It
is ultimately a consequence of the fundamental opening of Being, which
is not specifically Christian. And this is also what Hegel states so power-
fully: the openness (das Offenbare) understood as revelation (Offenbarung)
is what inscribes Christianity in the development of Spirit. The openness
is the one of presence, or parousia. Even if the concept of presence refers
essentially to the being of the Christian god, it cannot be thought outside
of its originally Greek determination. The last moment of absolute spirit
in the Encyclopedia is not religion, but philosophy. We know that the
Encyclopedia ends with a quote from Aristotle’s Metaphysics concerning the
Prime Mover:
And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of
thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with
and thinking its objects, so that thought and its objects are the same. For
that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e., the essence, is
thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the posses-
sion rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems
to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If,
then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this com-
pels our wonder; and if in a better state this compels it yet more. And God
is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought
is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life
most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal,
most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God;
for this is God.11
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State of New
York University Press, 1996), §65, 333.
13. §81, 386.
14. Cf. §82, where Heidegger analyzes Hegel’s concepts of time and of spirit’s “self-
revelation.”
possible. ‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but exists as the primordial
temporalizing of temporality.”15 As Derrida shows in Specters of Marx, this
primordial time is based upon an originary disjointure, and not upon a
formal succession of “leveled” nows.16 Does this redefinition allow us to
think of an autonomy of messianic time as such? It seems that this central
issue is not genuinely examined in itself by contemporary thinkers of
messianicity. Even Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism” in Spec-
ters of Marx lacks an explicit engagement with Heidegger’s concept of the
“last God” as it appears in Contributions to Philosophy. To think of time as
“disjointed” or as an originary disjointure rather than a joining or accord
is perhaps not enough to help us decide whether the Heideggerian motif
of the last god belongs to any “messianicity.”17
In Derrida’s eyes, the messianic event can only mean the coming of
the “absolute ‘arrivant,’” which remains surprising, escaping all pre-
visions and all horizon. There can only be “traces” of such a coming. For
Derrida, following Levinas, traces, unlike Hegelian “forms” (Gestalten),
are not visible. They are formless and exceed the domain of presence. For
Derrida, the “absolute ‘arrivant’ ” is the most appropriate name for justice
and for democracy. If justice and democracy impose themselves one day
on earth, it won’t be by virtue of any dialectical motor, just by (and as) the
“gift” of the “arrivant.”18
The gift of the messianic event is based upon a notion of infinity in
Levinas and Derrida, which from a Hegelian and Heideggerian perspec-
tive is ultimately based upon a vulgar Aristotelianism. Even if time is not
a simple succession of “nows,” the emptying out of all presence projects
the time of the Messiah outward and restricts it to an invisible horizon,
from which it comes. At the same time, the messianic event can never
arrive, because the condition of it being a messianic event, or an absolute
arrivant, is that it never arrives. The complete suspension of presence
precludes the taking place of the event, even as the event lives off of this
infinite and indefinite deferral.
On the other hand, one attempt to “save” messianicity from this cri-
tique would be to distinguish between a Jewish messianicity that is based
upon the infinity of time as described here, and a Christian messianicity,
which is anchored in the occurrence of a determinate event, the Christ-
event. This is one way to read Badiou’s book on Saint Paul, even though
Badiou claims that his understanding of Paul is not messianic.19 Badiou
argues that his reading of Paul is non-messianic because for Paul the event
has already taken place, but we would suggest that it is messianic in terms
of Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paul. As a specific form of Christian
messianicity, it is precisely because the event has happened, but it is also
still occurring, fulfilling itself, coming to an end, that it is messianic, even
though Badiou would characterize the ongoing character of the event
more extrinsically as fidelity to an event.
In Agamben’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, The Time
That Remains, Paul attests to the ongoing nature of the Christ-event, which
is stretched out towards its end. The Christian lives in the world “as not”
(hos me); for example, weeping as not weeping. Agamben claims that for
Paul, “in pushing each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic
does not simply cancel out this figure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its
end. This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the
figure of the world.”20 The time in which Paul lives is the time between the
event and its completion, the Resurrection and the return of the Messiah,
which is the end of the world. In a more generalized sense, Agamben sees
Paul expressing the paradigmatic form of messianic time: “messianic time
is the time that it takes time to come to an end, or, more precisely, the
19. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). In a later book, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran
(London and New York: Verso, 2006), Badiou argues that: “With Paul, for example, we have
a notion that is not contained in the idea of messianism, since at issue is the process of the
coming of God himself, such as it has taken place”, 207; emphasis original. This is Agam-
ben’s definition of Christian messianism—the event has taken place, but it has not yet been
brought to an end. Badiou theorizes this situation less in terms of time, and more in terms
of fidelity to an event that has taken place, but we argue that the event cannot be contained
within or restricted to the literal moment of the resurrection, which does not take place in
time, but explodes time itself in powerful, productive and destructive ways.
20. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans,
trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 24–5. Agamben reads
Benjamin as a modern-day Paul, which complicates any strict distinction between Chris-
tian and Jewish messianicity. On Paul and Benjamin, see also Jacob Taubes, The Political
Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
three implications: (1) the capacity to receive form in a passive sense; (2)
the ability to give form in a more active manner; and (3) the power to
annihilate form.26 As distinguished from ancient Greek plasticity, which
related more specifically to the arts, modern plasticity concerns more pre-
cisely the form of human subjectivity.
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant struggled to articulate how human
mental capacities could both give and receive form, and he ended up
positing a duality between passive sensory intuitions and an active
transcendental apperception. The latter, however, appeared secondary
to the material form of human representations, so Kant conceptualized
the transcendental imagination as a form-giving power that could re-
present sense intuitions under the form of categories of understanding.
Heidegger’s book on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics demonstrates the
complex but fundamental status of the transcendental imagination in the
First Critique. Heidegger argues that Kant shrinks back from his insight
into the significance of the transcendental imagination in the Critique of
Pure Reason, which is why he has to re-write it and relegate the transcen-
dental imagination to an inferior position in the second edition of the
First Critique.27
It is Hegel, however, who fully and successfully formulates the modern
nature of human subjectivity, and he does this by modeling it on divine
subjectivity. For Hegel, the process of representation (Vorstellung) “seals
into one the divine kenosis and the kenosis of the transcendental subject.”28
What does this mean? Representation for Hegel functions in a way similar
to the transcendental imagination in Kant, and it refers to a schematism,
the providing of a schema, which is not an image in a literal sense. Whereas
the transcendental imagination troubled Kant because it threatened to
mix up the empirical and the transcendental, for Hegel the process of
representation is more straightforwardly and productively a process of
temporalization, a temporal formation.
The key insight is that Hegel helps to fashion an understanding of
modern subjectivity by reading human subjectivity in the same way that
he reads divine subjectivity, as kenotic and self-othering. Hegel reads the
Christian Trinity in an unorthodox way, according to which each persona
consists of a progressive alienation that is not the manifestation of a lack,
26. See Catherine Malabou, La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, décon-
struction (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2005), 25 n. 1.
27. For a consideration of the transcendental imagination in Heidegger and Kant, as
well as a theological reading of the Kantian sublime, see Clayton Crockett, A Theology of the
Sublime (London: Routledge, 2001).
28. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans.
Lisabeth Durling (London: Routledge, 2005), 112.
29. Ibid., 113. See also Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1994).
30. Ibid., 119.
31. Ibid., 128.
32. Derrida, On Touching, 60.
The plasticity of the brain is so radical that we create our brains, and
making a brain is not simply a mechanical or even an organic process,
because our brain is us—contemporary subjectivity is being a brain. We
think that our brain is just a tool for use by the mind, or else that brains
determine us as subjects in a positivist manner, forgetting that we also
make our brains, and never even glimpsing the possibility of becoming-
brain, brain as subject, which is a pure time-image, a “little bit of time in
its pure state,” as Deleuze writes.38 “The plasticity of time is inscribed in
the brain.”39 Plasticity refers to the incredible resilience of form of adult
brain cells, not only infant or fetus stem cells.40 Furthermore, this plastic-
ity of modulation extends beyond our solely physiological account of the
brain, into the initial representation of the self, or “proto-Self,” which is
unconscious, and finally into the conscious self. Plasticity indicates the
productive giving of cellular and mental forms, the reception of form
in and on the body and mind, and ultimately the annihilation of form,
the dying of neurons that is required in order to generate a self, or the
forgetting of experiences that is necessary in order to continue to have an
identity. Brain plasticity is the material example of the originary ontologi-
cal plasticity: there is no Being outside an originary fashioning of Being.
We have to think of the priority of the fashioning of form upon Being.
The challenge is that we can think the absolute or pure form of time in
terms of messianicity (Benjamin, Agamben, Badiou, Derrida) or as plastic-
ity (Deleuze, Derrida, Malabou). Here is the confrontation, the payoff, the
stakes of the confrontation over the deconstruction of Christianity. So long
as time is understood as literally formless, it inevitably takes the form of the
messianic, which is a pure force, even if it is thought as a weak force rather
than a strong force (a messianicity without messianism). Plasticity allows the
necessary form to be thought as giving, taking and destruction of form, in a
branching that is creative rather than simply responsive or passive. Contrary
to what Levinas asserts, all traces are convertible into forms, even though
we cannot think of form in terms of “presence” any longer.41 By “form,” we
understood the form of philosophy after its deconstruction.
38. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 17.
39. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 83.
40. Stem cells exhibit plasticity in a striking and powerful way. Stem cells possess the
capacity to differentiate themselves into additional cells of the same kind of tissue, as well
as the ability to develop into cells of other types of tissue. Plasticity here refers to the ability
of stem cells to shift or modulate between one and the other, between self-differentiation
and trans-differentiation. Ibid., 38–9.
41. The trace, Levinas says, is “inconvertible into forms.” Emmanuel Levinas, Other-
wise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1998), 90.
and Foucault, as well as Deleuze, provide a way “to move along the path
from the deconstruction of Christianity to life; it provides the only way to
move beyond Heidegger.”45 Lawlor reads Foucault and Derrida in detail,
and suggests that Derridean spacing is a gap (écart) that can be read in
conformity with Foucault’s analysis of “man and his doubles.” Foucault
claims that these doubles or doublets are produced by “ ‘un écart infime,
mais invincible,’ ‘a hiatus, miniscule and yet invincible.’ ”46 The minute but
impassible gap is both a limit and a passage, to life, to a new concept of life
that Lawlor calls a neo-vitalism. We would resist this term neo-vitalism,
and insist that what Deleuze calls “a life” in his last essay, “Immanence:
A Life” extends far more broadly than what we usually think of as life in
a biological sense. Life thought as “conflict,” “battleground” and “place
of the dead” at the end of Lawlor’s book refers to a certain powerless-
ness and finitude that is itself in continuity with major themes in western
metaphysics.47
The écart infime must be thought synaptically, plastically, and in terms of
éclosion. In this sense, the gap is a border, a threshold. The gap extends infi-
nitely along the border, but it is not itself uncrossable, just ineliminable.
In terms of vision, the gap or border is between the eye seeing a thought
coming and the eye of the thought that gazes upon the seer: “the impos-
sible face-to-face encounter between the eye on the edge of discourse that
looks and the eye that tries to look to see the thought.”48 What is important
is that the thought is born along a border that constitutes an écart infime
between the seer and the object of thinking, “the eye of language…at the
edge of discourse.”49 At the same time, this écart is not strictly speaking
formless—there cannot be an écart without form.
Conclusion
If Christianity is co-extensive with the conception of the “West,” then there
is no possibility of rigorously separating philosophy and theology. Most
forms of theology would be dedicated to preserving and continuing some
form of Christianity, even if at times in the name of overcoming it. Most
forms of (western) philosophy would be dedicated to preserving western
logic and discourse, if not western culture and hegemony, whether or not
45. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 43.
46. Ibid., 53.
47. Ibid., 146.
48. Catherine Malabou, “An Eye at the Edge of Discourse” (trans. Carolyn Shread)
Communication Theory 17 (2007): 22.
49. Ibid., 16.
they are aware of how deeply Christian this logic and discourse are. Why
would a radical theology and a radical philosophy think or desire to let go
of Christianity, even the deconstruction of Christianity? So long as this is
not a repression, a Verwindung or twisting free of Christianity remains the
only creative alternative for (western) thinking.50
A task in which a radical philosophy and a radical theology can col-
laborate is to create a new brain for our species, based upon a shared
insight into the plasticity of form, both material and immaterial. This is
also an urgent political, or perhaps even a post-political task. Here theol-
ogy would remain, as Bergson claims, “a machine for making gods,” but
these gods would be plastic gods, and the theological machine would be a
brain: “it is there that the possibility of religion persists: the religious bond
(scrupulous, respectful, modest, reticent, inhibited) between the value of
life, its absolute ‘dignity,’ and the theological machine, the ‘machine for
making gods’.”51 Lacan claims that “only theologians can be truly atheistic,
namely those who speak of God,” because God is the locus of speech,
and “as long as things are said, the God hypothesis will persist.”52 At the
same time, so long as theism and atheism remain questions of conscious
belief, they remain superficial in relation to a psychoanalytic understand-
ing of the unconscious, and secondary in terms of human motivations and
desires.53
Can the concept of creation (creation of forms in particular) be thought
outside the realm of theology? This issue constitutes one of the main
questions of Hegelian philosophy, and by extension any significant post-
Hegelian philosophy, because it can only be answered by “No.” But this
“no” has a great future, at least in part because plasticity is “the form of a
possible other world.”54
50. On Verwindung, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), chapter 10, “Nihilism and the Post-
Modern in Philosophy,” 164–81. Vattimo contrasts Verwindung with Überwinding in Heide-
gger, and claims that rather than a straightforward overcoming, Verwindung constitutes
an acceptance that is a convalescence, which Vattimo also translates as “secularization”
(179).
51. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the
Limit of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 51.
52. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge Book XX
Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 45.
53. See Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), for a radical theological discussion of psy-
choanalytic theory from Freud to Lacan and Žižek.
54. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 161. In terms of neuroplasticity, this possible
other world constitutes a biological “altermondialisme.”
Bibliography
Agamben, G. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. D. Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
——The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon. New York: Modern
Library, 2001.
Arkoun, M. Islam: To Reform or to Subvert? London: Saqi Books, 2006.
Atwood, M. Surfacing. New York: Random House, 1998 [1972].
Badiou, A. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
——Polemics, trans. S. Corcoran. London and New York: Verso, 2006.
Boyer, P. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic
Books, 2001.
Crockett, C. A Theology of the Sublime. London: Routledge, 2001.
——Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2007.
Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Derrida, J. Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976.
——Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans.
P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
——“Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limit of Reason Alone.”
In Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
——On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. C. Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005.
Gauchet, M. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. O. Burge.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Hamer, D. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes. New York: Anchor, 2005.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace. New York: Books for Libraries
Press, 1972.
Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany: State of New York University
Press, 1996.
——The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Lacan, J. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge Book XX Encore, ed. J.-A.
Miller, trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Lawlor, L. The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. New York: Fordham
University Press, 1996.
Levinas, E. Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1998.
Malabou, C. Le Change Heidegger. Paris: Léo Scheer, 2004.
——Que faire de notre cerveau? Paris: Bayard, 2004.
——La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, déconstruction. Paris: Éditions Léo
Scheer, 2005.
——The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. L. Durling. London: Rout-
ledge, 2005.
——“An Eye at the Edge of Discourse,” trans. C. Shread, Communication Theory 17 (2007).
McKeon, R., ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Nancy, J.-L. “The Deconstruction of Christianity.” In Religion and Media, ed. H. de Vries
and S. Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
——La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, vol. I. Paris: Galilée, 2005.
O’Regan, C. The Heterodox Hegel. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Taubes, J. The Political Theology of Paul, trans. D. Hollander. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004.
Vattimo, G. The End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988.