Ethics as Deconstruction, and,
The Ethics of Deconstruction
Published in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 1 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 95-125
There are two parts to this paper, an exegetical part, Ethics as Deconstruction, and a more theoretical part, The Ethics of Deconstruction. What I hope they have in common is to show that literary and philosophical deconstruction has more ethical effect than is commonly supposed.
1. Ethics as Deconstruction
In this part of the paper, I shall look at some biblical texts where an ethical idea or prescription or hint seems to be founded on a deconstruction. Rather than attempt to explain what I mean by that in abstract terms, I shall take up my Þrst example.
a. Deuteronomy 23.15-16
You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him.
In Hebrew society, there was a clear distinction, most will allow, between slave and free. A person could become a slave as a captive in war, through being kidnapped, carried off and sold, through being sold as a child by parents, though selling oneself voluntarily into slavery through hunger of debt, or, involuntarily, through defaulting on a debt. No matter how the individual had become a slave, the same basic rules seem to have applied.
The slave was a chattel of the master, and had no rights of his or her own. A slave was 'a commodity that could be sold, bought, leased, exchanged, or inherited'./1./ In the ancient Near East generally, and presumably also in Israel, any injury done to a slave required compensation to the master. There is only one case in the Bible that illustrates this principle, but there is no reason to doubt that it was at the foundation of the institution of slavery: if a slave is killed by a goring ox, the owner of the ox must compensate the master by a payment of thirty shekels of silver (Exod. 21.32)-just as a father must also be compensated for the death of a son or daughter./2./
Various kinds of manumission were available to a slave. I. Mendelsohn has enumerated them as follows: 1. A Hebrew slave is to be released after six years of service (Exod. 21.2-4; Deut. 15.12); 2. a Hebrew who has made himself a voluntary slave is to be freed in the year of jubilee (Lev. 25.39-43, 47-55); 3. a Hebrew girl sold by her father with a view to marriage is to be released if the master does not wish to marry her when she is of age (Exod. 21.7-11); 4. a slave permanently maimed by his master is to be freed (Exod. 21.26-27)./3./
What is amazing about the law of the fugitive slave in Deuteronomy 23 is that it enables a slave to acquire his or her own freedom-by the relatively simple expedient of running away. A slave can choose not to be a slave.
And that leaves us in a classic deconstructive situation. Classically, a deconstruction takes hold of a pair of binary oppositions that have been passing as valid currency, exposes the faults in the distinctions that are drawn between them, the deÞnitions that claim to separate them, and shows how, to some extent, each is implied in the other. For practical purposes it may well serve to continue employing the concept of an oppositional pair, but the deconstructive enterprise has pointed out the fragility, and perhaps the ultimate futility, of the distinction.
In this case, the opposition slavep;free is deconstructed if it can be shown that 'slave' includes 'free' (it would be a different move to show how the concept 'free' in ancient Israel implied 'slave'-in an economic sense, perhaps). The point here is that if a slave can choose not to be a slave, the concept slavery does not exist as it once was thought to exist, and the simple, commonsensical distinction between slave and free collapses.
This deconstructive collapse has of course not only linguistic and conceptual signiÞcance, but also social and ethical signiÞcance-and that is what makes it so interesting. What kind of a society can it be in which it is possible for slaves to become free by a mere act of will; it is as strange as a society in which poor could become rich-by a mere act of will. That is the measure of the social signiÞcance of the deconstruction. But it is also an ethical issue, for-by our standards at least-there is an ethical issue involved in the institution of slavery. To our mind at least, slavery is a bad thing, and its abolition is to be desired and celebrated./4./ The Hebrew Bible does not report the abolition of slavery as a real social phenomenon, but it does announce a conceptuality according to which traditional slavery is, strictly speaking, inconceivable. If slavery were to be deÞned, as it is in Deuteronomy 23, as no more than a matter of a choice that slaves make, the ethical problem of slavery has well nigh disappeared.
Not surprisingly, the deconstructive force of Deuteronomy 23 has been resisted by interpreters. It has been urged, in a commonsensical way, that the law is unrealistic and not serious. 'If this law literally applied to any slave who had run away from his master, it certainly was unrealistic, for if put to practical use, it would have resulted in the immediate abolition of slavery.'/5./ It is often pointed out that other ancient Near Eastern societies had no such law. The Laws of Eshnunna, for example, explicitly impose a Þne for harbouring a runaway slave (§§12-13), while the Code of Hammurabi makes it a capital offence (§§15-16). In the Alalakh tablets from Syria we have evidence of a reward being paid to a person for apprehending a runaway slave./6./ On these grounds it is urged that the biblical law cannot refer to any slave who escapes from his or her master, but to 'a fugitive slave from a foreign country seeking asylum in Palestine'./7./ Needless to say, there is not the faintest evidence in the text for such an interpretation, and the speculation witnesses only to the embarrassment of the scholar with the text.
I am of course not arguing that the abolition of slavery was the intention of the framers of this law; but simply that the wording itself stealthily undermines (which is to say, deconstructs) the concept of slavery-which is as good a way as any of abolishing it. Even if it does not lead immediately to a change in the social institution-and we have no evidence that it did-it remains on the statute book as an ethical principle whose time is yet to come.
There is another biblical text that points in the same direction, and here there can be no question of the slave being a foreigner. For in Exod. 21.2-6, we Þnd:
When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master's and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, 'I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free', then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for life.
Here there is a concept of voluntary slavery, which is deconstructive in the alternate mode. For if Deuteronomy 23 showed that 'slave' could include 'free', Exodus 21 shows that 'free' can include 'slave'. For in this case the Hebrew slave has served his time, and is a free man. But-unlike the commonality of slaves-he chooses to be a slave. There is indeed a kind of necessity upon him to become (remain) a slave, for he does not want to abandon his master or his family. But it is not the same kind of necessity that we have considered earlier, that makes a debtor voluntarily sell himself into slavery. There is a real choice here (however constrained), and the man who makes the choice to submit himself to slavery is a free man when he makes it./8./ And that action redeÞnes slavery, and therewith also the relation between slave and free. Slavery is in a sense abolished when it ceases to be a state a person is forced into against their will. It still survives as a social institution, indeed, but in that the line of distinction between slave and free has been blurred, it has lost its conceptual force.
You cannot found a social institution on a deconstructable conceptualization. But what I am principally arguing here is that the deconstructive uncertainty opens a space for an ethical decision.
b. Genesis 9.5-6
For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man's brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.
This text is ostensibly a prohibition of murder./9./ It threatens the would-be murderer that his life is in danger: if he sheds the blood of a human being, his blood also will be shed./10./ It is a gnomic text, especially its core: ËpeV;yI /mD: µd:a;B; µd:a;h; µD"""""" pevo 'who sheds human blood shall have his blood shed by a human'. It is a divine sentence, and it gives all the appearance of comprehensive law./11./
The prohibition is expressed as a prediction: if X happens, then Y will happen. Or perhaps it is not a simple prediction, for the Hebrew 'imperfect' can be used in modal senses. It could mean, 'by a human his blood must be shed', or, 'by a human his blood should be shed', or 'by a human his blood may be shed'./12./ That is an unsettling situation of indeterminacy. Perhaps the sentence is not a warning directed toward the would-be murderer, but an authorization to the community that capital punishment for murder is required. Or perhaps it means that capital punishment is not required but desirable? Or not desirable but permissible?
At this point the usual exegetical move is to ask, Which of these various possibilities is the correct one? Which makes best sense of the rationale given in v. 6b, which is best supported by the context, which would best cohere with the realities of legal and social life in ancient Israel, which can we parallel in other Israelite laws? Perhaps there is an answer to these questions, and one exegesis may be demonstrated to be the best, though it will always be a matter of probabilities./13./ But even if there is a best exegesis, that does not make it the correct one. Perhaps there is no correct exegesis, and all the meanings have to be kept open. They may well not be all equally 'good' exegeses. So long as they fall within the bounds of possibility (whatever they are), the text means whatever they all, severally or collectively, mean.
Now, this is a text about ethics. It professes to dissuade people from murder or else to authorize communities to carry out capital punishment of murderers-or something like that. So it claims to give authoritative guidance on an ethical issue./14./ But it deconstructs itself in that-in what it says-it does not do any such thing. For from the text itself we cannot tell if
(a) it is saying to would-be murderers, Don't do that, because
(i) you will certainly be executed if you do, or
(ii) you run a risk of being executed if you do
or
(b) it is saying to a community,
(i) all murderers must be executed, or
(ii) you ought to execute murderers, but you need not, or
(iii) you can execute a murderer if you like.
This does not sound like a text with a determinate meaning. There is no doubt that this text regards murder as a bad thing, but there is plenty of doubt about what it thinks should be done about it. Indeterminacy of course does not itself amount to a deconstruction. What makes the text self-deconstructive is that its claim is undermined by its content.
But this is not the end of the deconstructability of the text. The Þrst case emerged from observing the tension between the form of the saying and its content, the second pair of deconstructions from an interrogation of the concept of killing ('shedding blood' in the terms of the text). The text professes to be against killing, but in fact it authorizes killing. Apparently it says, Do not kill, but in reality its message is, Kill! It even seems to be less interested in the killing that occurs (whenever, by whomever) than in the killing it itself sanctions. Humans no doubt go on killing, it says, but what you need to know is that you are required (or, permitted) to do killing yourself. In shifting the focus from the initial act of murder to the act of punishment or vengeance it becomes not so much a prohibition of killing as an incitement to it. This is a strange deconstructive situation for an ethical text to Þnd itself in, is it not?
The text does not disguise that the execution of a murderer is itself a killing. It uses exactly the same language for the murder and the judicial execution: the murderer sheds blood, his blood is shed. So the executioner is himself a shedder of blood, and there is nothing to distinguish him from the murderer-not in the language at any rate, and if not in the language, then where? This is not a linear sentence, then, this ËpeV;yI /mD: µd:a;B; µd:a;h; µD" pevo; it is a circle, for every time that the sentence is completed it resumes, putting the implied subject of the second verb ('it shall be shed') in the position of the subject of the Þrst ('whoever sheds'). To begin with, the executioner is hidden in the shadow of the passive voice, lurking at the end of the sentence, when he does his deed; but once it is done, the sentence begins to roll again, and this time the executioner is foregrounded; he is now the pevo, the shedder of blood, and the sentence concerns him. He is authorized to kill, but only at the cost of his own life./15./
And there is the ethical hint. If blood revenge is permitted (or even required), but only at the cost of labelling it 'murder'-is it permitted? Somewhere, I mean to say, in among the words of a text that professes to authorize capital punishment is the undoing of that authorization, at the very least its problematization. You can see from this case why I am beginning to wonder whether ethical initiatives might not originate at the points of deconstructability of traditional ethics./16./
c. John 8.3-11
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, 'Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?' This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his Þnger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, 'Let him who is without sin among you be the Þrst to throw a stone at her'. And once more he bent down and wrote with his Þnger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' She said, 'No one, Lord'. And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again'.
My next examples are from narratives about Jesus, whom I regard as an arch-deconstructor. I had better apologize (in the sense of defend myself) for even referring to, let alone beginning with, a text that our editions and translations tell us most severely is not a text, not a text that has anything to do with the Gospel of John, not a text that is a part of the New Testament, not a biblical text at all in fact. In case we have not got the message, many commentators rub it in by reserving their commentary on these verses to the very end of their work,/17./ or omitting to comment on it altogether./18./ Modern English translations express their disapproval by relegating the text to a footnote (so rsv), putting it in square brackets (nab, gnb, Moffatt), setting it off from the rest of the text with a line above and below (niv), or printing it at the end of the Gospel (neb, who head it 'An Incident in the Temple'-so that we should not recognize it?).
'[M]issing from the best early Greek mss'/19./ is held to be a damning criticism. 'Present in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts' is not a phrase one encounters in the commentaries (though it is the truth); nor is it commonly remarked that this text is to be found in almost every copy of the New Testament ever printed./20./ These facts do not count against the current (but historically conditioned) supremacy of the text critics. They of course have their own, perfectly legitimate, programme to carry out (deciding what the earliest text was), but there is no reason why that should include decisions about what is and what is not a biblical text. From the standpoint of the history of the text or of the physical reality of actual Bibles, it would be more correct to say a propos of this pericope, 'The best early Greek manuscripts are defective at this point'-and to force text critics to utter that sentence once a day for their presumption./21./
It would not be seemly to cast doubt on the scholarly tradition of the inauthenticity of this pericope. But I notice that it is a rare scholar who spares a moment to wonder whether there might not be a reason why the pericope is missing from the 'best' (? most authoritative, ? most authorized) manuscripts. A hermeneutic of suspicion is not, as it turns out, a merely modern affectation; Augustine put two and two together for himself when he roundly declared:
Some of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, I suppose from a fear lest their wives should gain impunity in sin, removed from their manuscripts the Lord's act of indulgence to the adulteress./22./
Was the passage missing, or was it excluded? Did it fall, or was it pushed?
No matter. It is enough for my purpose that this narrative, whether or not 'original' or 'authentic' (whatever those terms might mean), 'represents the character and method of Jesus as they are revealed elsewhere', as C.K. Barrett puts it./23./ For I want to argue that the 'method' of Jesus, especially in ethical matters, is a deconstructive one.
The essence of the story, from this point of view, is that express permission is given to execute the woman, but in such a form that it cannot be carried out. Jesus believes the woman is guilty as charged, for he tells her to 'go and sin no more' (v. 11). He believes the Mosaic law is applicable to her, and he upholds that law. Jesus is not against Moses, he is not against stoning. As far as Jesus is concerned, if one faultless man had stood there, he would have been entitled to stone her, and the others could then have joined in the stoning (could they not?), even though they themselves were not without sin. For Jesus says, 'Let him that is blameless (ajnamavrthtoß) among you cast the Þrst stone'-but he does not say who should cast the second and the third.
But equally clearly, Jesus does not intend that the woman should be executed. If he does not condemn (katakrivnw) her himself, even when he is in a position to do so, he cannot really want others to condemn her and carry out a sentence of death. Indeed, it is hard to see why the woman is brought to Jesus in the Þrst place unless her accusers know that Jesus is not going to agree to her execution./24./ They know that, but they also know that Jesus upholds the Mosaic law/25./-enough, that is, to make them eager to discover that in some respect he does not./26./ We readers too cannot imagine the Jesus of the Gospels consenting to the death of a woman for adultery./27./
Jesus' response to the situation is to deconstruct the Mosaic law. Moses' law, like any law, relies on a distinction between wrongdoers and law-enforcers. Law-enforcers punish wrongdoers, criminals are punished by judges. As long as that binary opposition stands, societies can function as they have got into the habit of functioning. But suppose that there is something faulty about the opposition, and that law-enforcers are themselves wrongdoers. Suppose, that is, that the category 'judge', instead of being oppositionally related to the category 'criminal', is included within it. Then you have a classic deconstruction of the categories presupposed by a text. What follows, when the demarcation collapses, is that judges can no longer function as judges, not when they realize that they are-criminals!
Well, at least, that is the dramatic consequence. It is not the 'real life' consequence, for the judicial system in Judaea did not break down the moment Jesus performed his miracle of deconstruction. That real-life (non)-consequence is typical of deconstruction, of course, for the deconstruction of a binary opposition does not 'destroy' or 'abolish' or 'negate' or 'remove' the opposition. It only exposes its fragility, it only problematizes it, it only renders it unsafe and questionable, it only invites þexibility, it only encourages new arrangements, new conceptualizations. In the story world, the judges þee the scene, unable to lift a pebble; though they entered the story as a united block, they leave one by one, in a dissolve./28./ In the real world, on the other hand, all things continue as they have since the creation-except that an ethical doubt has been inserted into the structure of the administration of justice, its Achilles heel has been exposed.
We are not done yet with the deconstructive possibilities of this text, though. It is not just a matter of how the character Jesus within the narrative deconstructs the law that he is confronted by, but also of how the narrative itself deconstructs itself.
A minor respect in which the text offers itself up to deconstruction is over the distinction guilty/righteous. In a word, the story hangs upon the Pharisees being both guilty and righteous-which is to say, upon the deconstructability of the opposition guilty/righteous. If they had not all been guilty, the woman would have died; it needed only one blameless man, and she would have been stoned to death. But on the other hand, if they had not all been righteous-righteous in the sense of acknowledging their sin publicly, of telling the truth about their guiltiness, of not pretending they were blameless, indeed of not disregarding the authority of Jesus (what rights does he have in the matter?, we wonder)-the woman would equally have been put to death. Just one man who would not confess his sin would have been enough to start the hail of stones. So, dramatically speaking at least, the woman's life depends upon the honesty of her accusers, upon their 'conscience' (suneivdhsiß) and their ability to be 'convicted' (ejlevgcw) by it.
This deconstruction rubs against the grain of the text, no doubt. For it is in the interest of the text to show that Jesus is in the right, and that, ergo, his opponents are in the wrong. Indeed, Jesus always wins controversies with Pharisees. But here that clear-cut opposition between Jesus and Pharisees breaks down somewhat, as the text lets it slip that the woman's life, which Jesus is concerned to preserve, hangs less upon any action of his than it does upon the honest shamefaced confessions of the Pharisees. Jesus risks her life on their honesty. The Pharisees are still the villains of the piece, but they are not dyed in the wool villains. If they are not blameless (ajnamavrthtoß), neither are they blackguards. The text does not explicitly acknowledge any goodness in the Pharisees, but it undermines itself secretly by its storyline.
A Þnal deconstructive aspect of the narrative is of more moment. It is the deconstruction of Jesus' own deconstruction, and it goes like this. Jesus, I have argued, does not deny the woman's guilt or the applicability of the Mosaic law, but he saves her from stoning by deconstructing the opposition judge/criminal. But the narrative does not include him within the category of the criminal-judge, the Pharisee-sinner. Ex hypothesi, Jesus is the one ajnamavrthtoß on the scene. If, by his own profession, the one without sin should cast the Þrst stone, then let him cast it! Is he free to rescind the law of Moses-and his own acknowledgment that it is indeed applicable in this case-on humanitarian grounds? Surely not! Or rather, if he is not going to support the law of Moses and carry it out by executing the woman, why did he not say so in the Þrst place? If he resists the commandment of Moses, and does not believe adulterers should be stoned to death, why does he not reject the law rather than problematize it? Deconstructing the law of Moses does not render it invalid; it only gives one furiously to think. If he will not cast a stone, he must regard the law as invalid; and it is a waste of time to deconstruct a text that you have written off.
Which is to say, while the pericope professes to concern itself with the right of humans who are themselves sinful to execute judgment upon other humans, the issue turns out to be a quite different one: namely, the authority of Jesus vis-à-vis that of Moses, the question of whose word goes. Is it Moses, who says, 'Stone her', or is it Jesus, who says, 'Neither do I condemn you'? The course of the narrative deconstructs its punchline, and vice versa.
The last point is not, I think, an ethical one, but purely an issue of the status and authority of Jesus; but the Þrst point, about the judge-criminal, is certainly an ethical matter. What a deconstructive impulse-which I ascribe to the character Jesus-does in the matter of ethics is to call into question conventional ethics, especially those built into the fabric of society, and to hint at an ethic beyond ethics.
d. Matthew 22.16-21 // Mark 12.13-17 // Luke 20.20-26
Then the Pharisees went and took counsel how to entangle him in his talk. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, 'Teacher, we know that you are true, and teach the way of God truthfully, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?' But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, 'Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the money for the tax.' And they brought him a coin. And Jesus said to them, 'Whose likeness and inscription is this?' They said, 'Caesar's'. Then he said to them, 'Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'. When they heard it, they marvelled; and they left him and went away.
And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians, to entrap him in his talk. And they came and said to him, 'Teacher, we know that you are true, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?' But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, 'Why put me to the test? Bring me a coin, and let me look at it.' And they brought one. And he said to them, 'Whose likeness and inscription is this?' They said to him, 'Caesar's'. Jesus said to them, 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'. And they were amazed at him. The scribes and the chief priests tried to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people; for they perceived that he had told this parable against them.
So they watched him, and sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might take hold of what he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor. They asked him, 'Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly, and show no partiality, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?' But he perceived their craftiness, and said to them, 'Show me a coin. Whose likeness and inscription has it?' They said, 'Caesar's'. He said to them, 'Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'. And they were not able in the presence of the people to catch him by what he said; but marvelling at his answer they were silent.
Here is Jesus again in deconstructive mode. He is presented with a binary opposition: God or Caesar. He responds in language that gives lip-service to the opposition, but that calls it into question nevertheless. His audience react with 'amazement' (qaumavzw, Mt. 22.22; ejkqaumavzw, Mk 12.17; qaumavzw, Lk. 20.26)-which is the signal that a deconstruction has been performed upon them. Jesus' own deconstructive reply is, however, itself open to deconstruction, so I shall argue.
The presenting form of the binary pair is the question: Is it lawful or not to pay taxes to Caesar? Are we to give or are we not to give? But these are not themselves the terms of the opposition. The question, Is it lawful? (e[xesti), is not a real question, and it obscures the real question. For e[xesti ought to mean: '[I]s it warranted by anything in the Law or the scribal tradition?'/29./ But the Law and the scribal tradition (as far as I know) have nothing to say about Caesar, or about paying taxes to foreign rulers. At least, I can Þnd no references in the commentaries to Jewish discussions of this theme./30./ Jesus and his opponents must both know that paying tax is not forbidden, and therefore it is not 'unlawful'. There is thus a dishonesty in pretending that that is the issue.
The Gospel narrators, for their part, want to alert readers to the deviousness of the question, and they do so in Þve ways. They tell us that Jesus' interlocutors are out to 'entangle' (pagideuvw, Mt. 22.15) or 'entrap' (ajgreuvw, Mk 12.13) him. They say that his opponents are spies pretending to be honest (ejnkaqevtouß uJpokrinomevnouß eJautou;ß dikaivouß, Lk. 20.20). They have the opponents of Jesus address him insincerely and sycophantically: they call him Teacher, they say that he is 'true' (ajlhvqhß, Mt. 22.16; Mk 12.14) or 'speaks rightly' (ojrqw`ß levgeiß, Lk. 20.21), that he teaches the way of God truthfully, that he shows no partiality. They have Jesus evaluate his opponents' attitude as 'wickedness' (ponhriva, Mt. 22.18; panourgiva, Lk. 20.23) or 'hypocrisy' (uJpovkrisiß, Mk 12.15). They have Jesus address his interlocutors as 'hypocrites' (uJpokritaiv, Mt. 22.18). These are all tokens that the question presented is not the real question-which is to say, the opposition lawful/unlawful is not the issue.
Beneath the surface form of the question, beneath the presenting opposition lawful/unlawful there is a more substantive opposition, and it is that opposition that Jesus will deconstruct. As Lohmeyer puts it, 'The question already hints at the distinction between a human and a divine order, a political and a religious command'./31./ The presupposition of the question, that is to say, is a disjunction between the rule of God and the rule of Caesar, an implication that obedience to the one implies disobedience to the other.
When a binary opposition is set up, and especially when it is a long established distinction that has been inherited from the past, it is very difÞcult to ignore it, to challenge the terms of the debate. Jesus' opponents are looking for a yes/no answer, in the terms they have chosen (perhaps, to be fair, that have been chosen for them). Jesus offers them a bothp;and answer, and in so doing both accepts and negates the terms of the oppositional pair. He accepts the conceptualization God/Caesar, but he denies that the two terms are in opposition. It is right to pay taxes to Caesar and it is right to pay taxes to God. Paying tax to Caesar is not in opposition to the divine rule; giving God the things that are God's robs Caesar of nothing.
I do not know if other people would be happy to call a dislocation of a binary opposition such as this a deconstruction. But if a deconstruction is a 'teasing out of warring forces of signiÞcation within the text'/32./ then that seems a good enough description of what Jesus is doing with the text of his opponents' questions. He is not doing a lot of 'teasing out' in patient philosophical mode, of course, for the Gospel narratives use the language of drama and rhetoric and debate; but the warring forces of signiÞcation are certainly his goal. With his 'bothp;and', he makes the lion to lie down with the lamb, even though, as the quip has it, the lamb will have an uncomfortable night of it.
His deconstruction of the (unspoken) terms of the binary opposition reduces his interlocutors to silence (Lk. 20.26); they walk away and abandon the conversation (Mt. 22.22). That is quintessentially the outcome of a deconstruction, for the rug is pulled from under your feet when the structure of your thought has been sabotaged (or even just problematized!); there is nothing more to say, and you might as well leave the room. There is an amazement too, if your arguments meet, not with a point by point refutation or even a global resistance, but with a riposte that, in a trice, changes the rules of debate. It is very interesting, and not at all surprising, that each of the gospels concludes the pericope on the note of the amazement of his opponents./33./
But, as I said, Jesus' own deconstruction is itself open to deconstruction. Though he has displaced the presenting opposition (lawful/unlawful), and then dislocated the resulting binary pair (God/Caesar) by rearranging their relationship from either/or to bothp;and, he still operates with a binary pair. And that in itself provokes deconstructionist suspicions.
Let us put those suspicions in the terms of the text. If Jesus' audience should render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, then they have divided the world into two spheres. What belongs to Caesar does not belong to God; what is God's is not Caesar's./34./ That seems to make everything clear and straightforward. But what if Caesar himself belongs to God? What indeed? For if one of the elements in a binary opposition can be shown to be in some sense included in the other, the opposition is thereby deconstructed.
Does Caesar belong to God? We could try answering that from Þrst principles, which would make it pretty obvious that Caesar as a human being is as much a creature of God as anyone. Or we could answer it intertextually, by citing a text like Ps. 24.1, 'The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein'-a text that would be familiar to all the characters in the gospel narrative. Or we could try answering it from the narrative itself and its implicatures. If Caesar's image on the coin is the proof of his ownership of it, what is the proof of God's ownership? Is it not the 'image of God' stamped upon humanity?/35./ Then is Caesar made in the image of God, or is he not? If he is, he is God's.
Whichever way we look at it, Caesar owns nothing that God does not also own; perhaps we could even say, to which God does not have better title. And once we observe that Caesar belongs to God, the conceptualization of the two spheres collapses. If Caesar belongs to God, what of Caesar's possessions? Do they not also belong to God? And if Caesar owns nothing that God does not own, does Caesar own anything?/36./ How then can anyone render to Caesar what is 'his'? Nothing is 'his'./37./
The binary opposition, that is to say, is very unstable. So unstable, in fact, that we may well wonder whether the character Jesus, who is a dab hand at deconstructing oppositional pairs, does not set up this opposition precisely in order to watch it falling apart in the hands the moment anyone tries to work with it. S.G.F. Brandon, in fact, thought that in this saying Jesus, who would have regarded everything as God's by right, was absolutely prohibiting the payment of taxes to Caesar./38./ I think it is more subtle than that, as beÞts a truly deconstructive situation. The deconstruction does not settle the matter, as if it could shift us from one state of certainty to another. Deconstruction just exposes fragility, and leaves things more open to question. In this case, the deconstructability of the oppositional pair God/Caesar leaves us, I think, with the following result: if you are looking for a text to authorize the payment of taxes, this is your text; if you are looking for a text to prohibit the payment of taxes, this is your text.
There are yet further deconstructions to which these texts lay themselves open. The Þrst arises from my observation that everyone commenting on this pericope seems to accept its assumption that Caesar 'owns' the coins on which his image appears. 'According to ancient ideas', says Dennis Nineham, 'coins were ultimately the private property of the ruler who issued them.'/39./ I Þnd that very difÞcult to believe, though I can well believe in rulers wanting to put such an idea about. If anyone were to tell me that Caesar 'owned' coins with his picture on, I would Þnd myself wanting to say, Not if they're in my pocket, he doesn't! Social and commercial life in the ancient world took no account whatever of such a theory, and even the business of paying taxes was discharged by most citizens, we may believe, without a nod to a principle of ultimate ownership. The narrative deconstructs itself-which is to say, opens itself up to undermining questions-by conducting its whole discussion without a glance in the direction of the real ownership of real money, and the evident fact that Caesar has only a claim to taxes, not a right of possession of other people's money.
Next there is the language about payment. When Jesus is asked about the tribute, the question is whether it is lawful to 'give' tax to Caesar (divdwmi, in all three Gospels). But when he replies, he speaks of 'rendering', 'repaying', 'restoring' to Caesar what is his (ajpodivdwmi, in all three Gospels). Is Caesar, according to Jesus, not to be 'given' anything but to be paid only what is he is 'owed'? That then raises the question, And what is he owed? Does Palestine beneÞt at all from the taxes it pays? Some commentators feel obliged to think of some beneÞt that accrues from the taxes, so that Caesar can somehow 'earn' his taxes. 'The obligation to pay to Caesar some of his own coinage in return for the amenities his rule provided is afÞrmed', says CranÞeld./40./ What 'amenities' could Jesus have been thinking of?, we ask. Gymnasia? Or perhaps there were no amenities and no beneÞts accruing to the Jewish people from the taxes they paid, and Jesus means that it is simply and intrinsically 'just to demand payment from subject states as a general principle'/41./-as Leaney puts it; that is, emperors are 'owed' taxes because they are emperors. I would be surprised if Jesus held that as a general principle, and even more surprised if he thought it was 'just' that the Jewish people should be subject to the Romans. Now if the text says that Caesar should be paid what he is owed, but gives no hint about whether he is in fact owed anything, the text faces two ways, undermining the conÞdence it projects.
Finally (for now) there is the problem that the text authorizes too much. If the reason why tribute should be paid to Caesar is because the coins have his image on them, why stop at the tribute? If every coin 'belongs' to Caesar, had they not all better be handed back to him forthwith? If I may keep one coin with Caesar's head on it in my pocket, why should I turn another, identical, coin over to him as his right? It begins to seem as if having Caesar's image and inscription on the coin has nothing whatever to do with the question of whether one should pay taxes-except in a suggestive, associative, symbolic, perhaps whimsical, satiric, even bitter, exasperated, hostile kind of way. A text that professes to give a reason for paying taxes but does not deliver on its promise is a deconstructive text. Perhaps texts in general are constitutionally incapable of delivering on their promises, and that is why deconstructability is a feature of textuality in general, and not just of some texts. But all I wanted to argue at the moment was that this particular text is deconstructable in these particular ways, and that there is something specially interesting about ethical texts that deconstruct themselves.
This is of course a text that is 'about' far more than the payment of taxes. It is a rich ethical text, of almost inÞnite range. But it is an amazingly unstable text, which does not offer clear moral guidance. Its deconstructability disenables it for incorporation into an ethical system; it will not serve as an ethical principle, not unless you are willing to entertain principles that face two ways, principles that lie down and roll over at a word, Möbius strips of principles, in which the outside is always already the inside . . .
Where deconstruction touches upon ethics, I am concluding, it serves to render venerable verities shaky, to preclude systems, and to muddy the waters. But at the same time, the problematization of ethical foundations does not imply the abandonment of them; rather, in making ethics more of a problem, it makes it more of a problem for you and me-which is to say, it tends to locate ethics in praxis, to remove it from the realm of ideas to the realm of lived experience, to make it the product of the human subject, to disaggregate it from the commonality, to foreground personal responsibility.
2. The Ethics of Deconstruction
It is so commonly alleged against deconstruction that it is itself unethical, or at least not interested in ethics, that a paper on ethics and deconstruction should perhaps address that question directly. I will review in turn some of the allegations that have been made against deconstruction on this issue, and some of the responses made by deconstructionists, and will conclude with four theses of my own which will (I hope) eventually tie the second half of this paper in with the Þrst.
a. Allegations
I collect here a number of allegations against deconstruction on the ethical front:
1. It is said that deconstruction is nihilistic, in that it
removes all grounds of certainty or authority in literary interpretation . . . assert[ing] that the reader, teacher or critic is free to make the text anything he wants it to mean. . . [T]his is immoral because it annihilates the traditional use of the great texts of our culture from Homer and the Bible on down as the foundation and embodiment, the means of preserving and transmitting, the basic humanistic values of our culture./42./
2. It is dehumanizing, in that it does not treat the text as a human document. It proclaims the death of the author, and it abandons the idea of reading as an engagement of a human reader with a human author in favour of the 'text-as-such'. It 'denies access to the inexhaustible variety of literature as a determinably meaningful text by, for, and about human beings'./43./
3. It fails to acknowledge the difference between right and wrong, between reason and unreason,/44./ being 'hostile to the very principles of Western thought'./45./
4. It is particularly hostile to religious ideas and people:
The radical indeterminacy of deconstructive criticism, which denies to any text a Þxed and stable meaning, is scarcely compatible with the ways religious communities use their scriptures as a norm . . . Whether this style will þourish in biblical interpretation, or help unite and build up a religious community, is doubtful. Christian theology has certain metaphysical commitments which cannot easily be reconciled with these latest intellectual fashions./46./
5. Deconstruction is atheistical, 'virulently anti-Christian, with its assault on the Logos-idea and its insistence that there is a great gulf Þxed between language and reality'./47./ There is 'nihilism and skepticism behind most deconstructionism'./48./
6. It offers no hope. Its vision of life is
critically astute but morally impoverished. Metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics [are] dead topics, and philosophy and literature . . . nothing more than conversations to be carried on within the rotting corpse of Western belief . . . [T]he bad news is that there is no good news, and the good news is, surprisingly, that there has never been any good news. So we are liberated by knowing that we have no right to lament the loss of something we never had./49./
7. The lives of certain prominent deconstructionists have called into question the moral value of deconstruction:
Moral questions have arisen because of widely publicized scandals involving the political affairs of post-modern philosopher Martin Heidegger and deconstructionist Paul de Man, both of whom have been linked to pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish, anti-humanist fascism. Their political involvements before and during the Second World War have raised serious moral questions not only about themselves but also about the political implications of their postmodern philosophies./50./
8. As a philosophical enterprise, its guiding principles leave no room for ethics or at least call ethics very seriously into question:
The relationship between deconstruction and ethics is necessarily uneasy . . . Humanistic values . . . are grounded in what Derrida calls the framework of logocentric metaphysics, which deconstruction insistently calls into question . . . Deconstruction points to the inherent instability in the very idea of 'ethics'./51./
9. Deconstruction is often represented as play, and play is not serious, so deconstruction is not ethical. In his famous 1966 paper, which introduced the United States to his deconstructionism, Derrida opposed to the 'saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic' way of thinking a Nietzschean way that is
the joyous afÞrmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the afÞrmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This afÞrmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security./52./
10. Deconstructive critics are dishonest: they claim that all language is indeterminate, but the moment they speak they expect to be heard as having determinate things to say./53./ 11. There are no references to ethics in the indexes of standard books on deconstruction./54./
b. Responses
To these charges of an unethical orientation of deconstructionism there have of course been several responses.
1. The Þrst is the move of J. Hillis Miller, who wants to claim that deconstruction is 'nothing more or less than good reading as such'./55./ Good reading attends to the ethics of reading. And the ethics of reading is not a matter of discovering the ethical principles embodied in texts; rather, the ethical moment in reading is the ethical conviction one feels compelled to while reading, an ethical conviction that manifests itself in action, whether social or political./56./
With the beginning of this argument I am in agreement. My difÞculty with Hillis Miller's position as a whole is that I am not sure that I know what it is, since he does not write very well. For example,
It is not because stories contain the thematic dramatization of ethical situations, choices, and judgments that they are especially appropriate for my topic [the ethics of reading], but for a reverse reason, that is, because ethics itself has a peculiar relation to that form of language we call narrative. The thematic dramatizations of ethical topics in narratives are the oblique allegorization of this linguistic necessity.
I feel sure it must be possible to make the point more lucidly without losing any of the subtlety; I also feel sure that if I cannot understand something after I have read it Þve times the fault is probably not mine.
2. The second is the move of Gary Phillips./57./ He argues that
deconstructive reading calls for a certain kind of critical accountability on the part of readers to the Bible and enables a critical, destabilizing intervention within dominant critical practices, disciplines, interpretative traditions and institutions./58./
He calls deconstruction's contribution to ethics an 'invigorating' of the ethical question by searching for 'subtler understanding of the ways texts refer, represent and bring about a different opening onto the world', but above all by demanding a 'hands-on, face-to-face encounter with the text' that stands as other to readers and their interests. Deconstructive reading does not allow us to keep a safe distance from the text,/59./ but rather requires us to 'take responsibility for the text' by 'marking' the text with our own interventions, thus confusing the conventional boundary between author and reader. Deconstruction, as an engagement that is both afÞrming and analytic, is a response to 'the Other that lies beyond the Bible'; and the Other, which is the goal of deconstruction, is the name for that which 'escapes human control, grounding or anticipation'. The deconstructive process lays an ethical obligation upon readers to respond to the Other.
By underscoring the radical 'otherness' of the Bible-marked in various ways by alternative meanings, readers, interpretative traditions, communities, practices, and so on-deconstruction works prophetically for a different kind of reading and writing position in the world. It does so by embracing the twin ethical aim characterized as a responsibility to otherness and a responsibility to act./60./
I share Phillips's opinion that deconstruction 'invigorates' ethical questions (though not 'the ethical question'). But the difÞculties I have with his approach are two: I do not care for his hypostatization of the Other, especially when it attains the status of capitalization./61./ No doubt there is plenty that escapes human control, plenty of diversity witnessed to by alternative meanings and interpretative traditions, but I can believe in nothing (= not a Thing) that can be denominated Otherness or the Other. The other difÞculty I Þnd in Phillips is in knowing whether the Bible is supposed to be different from other texts in this regard. Is the 'Other than lies beyond the Bible', the 'radical "otherness" of the Bible' the same sort of other or otherness that lies beyond all texts? And is the 'prophetic' work of deconstruction special to deconstructive reading of biblical texts, or is deconstruction 'prophetic' everywhere it casts its beady eye? I am nervous, in other words, that a religious agenda has slipped in under the covers.
3. A third approach is that made by Peter Kemp, who advocates a 'poetics of commitment' as a Þx for the absence of an ethical dimension in the work of deconstructionists like Derrida. An ethic consistent with deconstruction would adopt a 'nevertheless' position: despite the deconstructive enterprise, we should never give up hope, even in the face of suffering and evil, he says./62./ A commitment to ethical values does not imply a knowledge of any universal truth; it is a way of living with the deconstruction of 'all forms of object cultivation'./63./ Although there seems to be no real space for ethics in philosophical deconstructionism, in that deconstruction, according to Derrida, operates on a pre-ethical plane, one could argue that that very afÞrmation implies an ethical justiÞcation of its own (why should we give priority to thought over action, regarding thought as 'pre-ethical'?). Furthermore, it could be suggested that Derrida himself, in foregrounding death as an issue in philosophy, implicitly invokes ethical questions. For him, the concept of 'presence'-which he categorizes as the hallmark of Western philosophy-rests on a suppression of the reality of death;/64./ and he of course wants to reinscribe death in the philosophical vocabulary, making Freud's death principle the fundamental principle for understanding life. Is he not in so doing making space for ethics within his philosophy of deconstruction?
4. In response to Peter Kemp, Lisa Campolo argues that the absence of ethics he perceives in Derrida's work is just the kind of 'lack' that deconstruction adopts as its target, just the kind of 'alienated longing for full presence' that Derrida would call into question./65./ Rather, deconstruction, at least in the person of Derrida, suspends and problematizes the traditional meanings of the terms 'ethical' and 'nihilistic'. Derrida has no intention to disregard or destroy humanistic values just because he wants to interrogate them. He believes we have a responsibility to the principles of reason and truth, and he afÞrms the hope of a new enlightenment./66./ This is not a positive ethical programme, but it is not hostile to ethics nor indifferent to it. In putting ethical signs sous rature, under the marks of erasure, Derrida both effaces them and leaves them visible/67./-and that is perhaps the best we can do these days with ethical signs.
5. Mark C. Taylor has spoken of an 'ethic of resistance' as the ethical stance of deconstruction./68./ What deconstruction entails is an insistence on the alterity that stands opposed to and resistant to structures. It is
a way of coming to terms with the impossibility of liberation. The kingdom never arrives, there is no salvation; there never was wholeness, there never will be wholeness. The problem becomes, how does one linger with the wound, how does one linger with the negative without negating it? How does one carry on when there's no hope of overcoming in any kind of Þnal way?/69./
That is to say, if I understand him correctly, that the ethical position the deconstructive enterprise engenders is that in ethics, as in theology and philosophy, the traditional Þxed points of reference themselves become the objects of scrutiny rather than the guideposts to further ethical decisions.
c. My reþections
Here are my own responses to: Is there an ethics of deconstruction?
1. If texts are indeed capable of deconstruction, and if, for example, the oppositions on which they rely are open to question, then I want to know about that-and I think that wanting to know is not just idle intellectual curiosity, but a kind of ethical courage, like wanting to know the worst from my doctor. I cannot bear to be kept in the dark about something that is the case, and I think it my duty to let other people in on secrets-especially secrets that important people would like to stay secret.
I do not particularly wish to prejudge whether such and such a text is deconstructable, or deconstructable in such and such a way; but if I have convinced myself that it is, that is the way it is-for me. And I cannot imagine that pretending that that is not the case can be an ethical way of being.
I also observe that once I have seen how a text can be deconstructed, I Þnd it very hard to forget the deconstruction. The deconstruction seems to be less something that one has done to the text than something the text has done to itself. The deconstruction is then an aspect of the text, something that one knows about the text, as one knows about its language and its rhetoric and its context and so on. Once I have noticed, for example, that the care of the shepherd for the sheep in Psalm 23 extends right up to the point where the sheep enters the 'house of the Lord'-and we all know what happens to sheep when they go to the house of the Lord-I have a new outlook on the image of the 'shepherd' which cannot be wished away./70./ If any of that is right, it is ethically wrong to ignore it.
I do not count it an especial intellectual virtue to demonstrate the deconstructability of a certain text, and I should like to believe that there are often more interesting and more important things to say about texts than that they are deconstructable. But if it can be shown successfully to a reasonable number of people that a text deconstructs itself, that is for me a fact (by which I mean a mutually agreed perception), and I think of it as an ethical duty not to ignore facts. (Of course, if it is your fact and not mine, then it is not a fact for me, so I have rather less compunction about resisting and ignoring.)
2. What I Þnd deconstruction does in the realm of ethics is to problematize traditional categories and distinctions. And what such problematization does is to weaken the authority of traditional ethics. And what such weakening does is to turn more ethical issues over to the decision of individuals. And what the taking charge of one's own ethical decisions does is to make one more of an ethical person./71./
I would not want to say that to obey a law because it is a law cannot be an ethical act. But I do know that obeying a law can sometimes be an immoral thing to do, and sometimes it can be a way of avoiding an ethical decision of one's own. Being responsible for my own ethical decisions does not necessarily make me a better person, but it does make me more aware of ethical matters, and it does compel me to invest myself in ethical questions. The less I can rely on traditional decisions about ethical questions the more effort I have to spend on making my own. I argue therefore that deconstruction promotes ethical enquiry and ethical responsibility.
Of course, as I have observed before, to deconstruct a set of categories does not abolish those categories. Just because the distinction between right and wrong, between slave and free, between killing and executing, is hazier than people have thought, it does not mean that there is nothing 'in' those distinctions. Not necessarily. Whether I will go on operating with a set of traditional categories for the most part, or whether I will feel compelled to abandon them forthwith so soon as I have seen how grossly they deconstruct each other, is a matter that I will have decide in each case on its own merits.
3. Deconstruction is the deconstruction of something. Without categories, oppositions, assertions there can be no deconstruction. Deconstruction is parasitic on traditional structures. It is not the same as making things up from scratch, and it is certainly not the same as working things out from Þrst principles.
Deconstruction, in other words, starts from the way things are. It respects the historical formulation of ideas in systems of thought and in texts, and it honours the staying power of ancient and universal sets of ideas. It works with traditions, and even if its results are radical, its starting point is the given./72./
In the realm of ethics, deconstruction pays tribute to the force of traditional ethics, and functions primarily to decentre ethics rather than to abolish it. That is to say, I see deconstruction as re-centring ethics around ourselves as decision-makers (fallible, inconsistent, committed), rather than around a system that is orderly, comprehensive and coherent.
4. Deconstruction invites a style of ethics that is both in change and that leads to change. As we have seen in some of the examples from biblical texts, the openness of texts to deconstruction connotes the vulnerability of ethical systems to their own formulations. Ethical systems must change, must perhaps change into something other than ethical systems, precisely because they must be expressed in deconstructable language. But since, at the same time, ethical systems are the construct of power-holders in society, societies too open themselves to change whenever they devise an ethical system that expresses itself in (necessarily) deconstructable language. We saw that happening in the case of the runaway slave in Deuteronomy 23 and of the shedder of blood in Genesis 9. The moment the ethic is said (written), at that moment it becomes deconstructable, at that moment an agent for ethical and social change has been released into the community.
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