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Saving face?
Fantasy, ethical alterity and deconstruction
Any attempt to articulate a theology from the position of gendered and sexual marginality must consist of more than simply saving face on behalf of religious orthodoxy. On the contrary, its entire relationship to orthodoxy must be fundamentally different to the established norm. A queer, feminist approach to theology specifically necessitates a resistance to the claims of absolute truth and exclusive access to the divine as logos that generally characterize patriarchal religious systems. It needs, in Marcella Althaus-Reidâs words, âto replace hegemonic divine concepts by deviant (unnatural) styles of thinking, helping people to develop their own identities outside the closure and boundaries of theo/social systemsâ (Althaus-Reid 2000: 175). Despite its common adoption as a tool for religious apologetics, which I outlined in the introduction, fantasy literature carries potential for disrupting representations of reality that religious orthodoxy both depends on and perpetuates with its claims to authority. The secondary worlds presented in fantasy texts can shake the foundations of the âprimaryâ world from which they necessarily draw influence â in other words, ârealityâ as constructed within a fundamentally patriarchal, heterosexual and cisgender framework. This tendency, this chapter argues, is best understood in terms of the deconstructive philosophy put forth by Jacques Derrida. Likewise, many fantasy texts can be seen to dramatize deconstructive philosophyâs attempts to describe a movement which it names âdeconstructionâ, one that consists, as Derrida puts it, in âopening, uncloseting, destabilizing foreclusionary structuresâ (Derrida [1987] 1992: 341).
This chapter examines the ways in which fantasy literature can be read as deconstructive in relation to patriarchal religious structures. I will demonstrate that not only is deconstruction always already at work within fantasy texts and the religious structures they uphold, but also that some fantasy texts, such as those I am examining in this book, are also alert to their own deconstructive power, whether or not the texts themselves or their authors define this power according to such terms. The argument of this chapter is twofold. First, fantasy texts and deconstruction have homologous structures; both situate themselves in terms of impossibility and alterity, and therefore share a radical potential for the disruption not only of normative constructs but also of normativity per se. Second, both of them have relationships to religion specifically that equip them to inhabit a critical space within theology that affirms theologyâs language and concepts at the same time that it dismantles them. As discourses, fantasy and deconstructive philosophy are mutually illuminating; from one perspective, fantasy can give more concrete form to concepts and terms commonly associated with deconstruction, especially those related to religion, that may otherwise come across as esoteric. At the same time, reading fantasyâs relationship to theology as a deconstructive one allows for a more nuanced understanding of the theological work that fantasy texts do and safeguards fantasy against the appeals to sovereign authority that exclude women and queer people from theology.
I will begin this chapter with a brief overview of deconstruction as theorized by Derrida. The theological implications of deconstruction will be crucial to this discussion and therefore particular attention will be given to how Derridaâs discourse on theology relates to his interest in alterity. For this purpose, I trace a genealogy of influence between Emmanuel Levinasâs ethics of the other and Derridaâs work on deconstruction, particularly highlighting Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, âPsyche: Inventions of the Otherâ, The Gift of Death, Rogues and âFaith and Knowledgeâ. In these texts, Derrida foregrounds his projectâs nature as an advent of the other, and in doing so develops and extends Levinasâs interest in the divine command towards ethical responsibility signified by the face of the other, who is utterly heterogeneous to the sovereign subject. While the definitions of âalterityâ and âthe otherâ will become complicated in later chapters of this book as queer and feminist theories and theologies draw from the language of psychoanalysis alongside deconstruction, for the purposes of this chapter these terms are to be understood in the theo/ethical sense that they are used by Levinas unless otherwise stated. In the second part of this chapter, I consider deconstruction alongside theories of fantasy elaborated by Tolkien, Le Guin and Attebery. I then turn to Till We Have Faces, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Passion of New Eve as case studies, conducting close readings that will demonstrate how each text not only uncovers sites of potential disruption by displacing theological structures into secondary worlds but also dramatizes the deconstructive power of fantastic storytelling in the process.
Defining deconstruction, deconstructing definitions
Derridaâs fascination with God as a name for a disruptive ethical âotherâ presents ample opportunity for troubling and transgressing normative religious doctrines and theological systems, particularly those situated within Western philosophical discourses, without disavowing theology altogether. Mentions of God pervade Derridaâs philosophical writing, but these almost never occur in a clear-cut fashion, and they tend to be impossible to pin down to a particular faith commitment or even a rejection thereof. The closest Derrida comes to making an explicit statement about belief in God is in an interview with John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart and Yvonne Sherwood, in which he states that
[i]f belief in God is not also a culture of atheism, if it does not go through a number of atheistic steps, one does not believe in God. There must be a critique of idolatry, of all sorts of images in prayer, especially prayer, there must be a critique of onto-theology â the reappropriation of God in metaphysics [ . . . ] In order to be authentic â this is a word I almost never use â the belief in God must be exposed to absolute doubt.
(Derrida et al. 2005: 46)
The paradoxes and contradictions contained within this brief quotation, chief among them that between faith and atheism, and that of faith as atheism and vice versa, are a summation of the profound ambivalence with which Derrida approaches the question of God in his work. Throughout his writings Derrida is harshly critical of the God of classical theology figured as absolute presence, âthe absolute witness to the dialogue in which what one sets out to write has already been read, and what one sets out to say is already a response, the third party as the transparency of meaning[.] Simultaneously part of creation and the Father of Logosâ (Derrida [1967] 1979: 11). As we shall see, such a God as is described here, who serves as source and determiner of all meaning, is to Derrida both impossible and an oppressive function of Western logic. And yet, for Derrida this is not the final word on the question of God; the question remains, and must remain, open for deconstruction to be possible. Elsewhere, in The Gift of Death (1992), Derrida also offers the name of God as âthe name of the absolute other as other and as uniqueâ (Derrida [1992] 1995: 68). That is, God is utterly heterogeneous to what could be articulated as proper by any speaking subject.
Derridaâs treatment of the name of God follows the premise that God is outside the realm of human understanding, a claim to which few theologians would object, but takes this in a far more radical direction than most theologians would. Derridaâs invocation of the name of God as a name for the other serves at once to point to the absoluteness of the otherâs alterity and to unsettle the name of God. As Derrida elaborates in âEpochĂ© and Faithâ, âGod is not some thing or some being to which I could refer by using the word âGodâ. The word âGodâ has an essential link to the possibility of being deniedâ (Derrida et al. 2005: 37). The very name âGodâ points to the impossibility of what it names, since to invoke God is to invoke what would be alien to articulation within a language, a theology or a faith tradition. To believe in God, for Derrida, is to be an atheist because belief in God requires refusing the finality of any âbeliefâ in âGodâ that could be stated. While acknowledging this is not the same as rejecting theology, it does demand that theology give up its dreams of absolute authority. To quote Althaus-Reid, âtheology has its own deconstructive forces, its own instabilities and imprecisions which always create tensions and open new ways of understandingâ (Althaus-Reid 2000: 148), but these cannot be rearticulations of divine authority as it has been understood. It is for this reason that deconstruction also enables theologians marginalized by hetero-patriarchal and cis-sexist religious structures to radically challenge the underlying assumptions of orthodoxy on the grounds that hegemonic orthodoxy is not a unified whole, and already contains within itself the potential for rupture and transgression from a position of difference.
Althaus-Reid, Caputo, Walton and many others have extensively identified and made ample use of the opportunity for radical rethinking and re-visioning that deconstruction enables, even demands, for theology. Scholars of fantasy, however, have been more reluctant to take on Derridaâs project. It has often been presumed that a deconstructive approach to fantasy would be inimical to theological or otherwise mystical readings of the genre. Insofar as common ground is identified, fantasy is positioned over and against Derridaâs work to correct perceived flaws and shortcomings. Most famously, C. S. Lewis scholar Kath Filmer has dismissed deconstructive writing as a âphilosophical cloud-cuckoo-landâ (Filmer 1989: 55) that consists of âthe disruption and denial of textual meaningâ (Filmer 1989: 56). To Filmer, such a discipline âdepends on the absence of an objective reality; since there is nothing to be perceived, there can be no perceptionâ (Filmer 1989: 57). As an alternative or antidote to such apparent nihilistic madness, Filmer presents mythopoetic fantasy as âa kind of deconstructive activity which is every bit as radical as Derridaâs, with the considerable advantage that the mythopoetic mode makes good senseâ (Filmer 1989: 60). For her, the tangible forms of fantasy are far better equipped to challenge received notions of reality than the horrifying, alienating void that deconstruction apparently signifies.
Though not as strident in his position as Filmer, Marek Oziewicz has similarly grouped deconstruction together with a handful of potential approaches to fantasy he identifies as âreductionistâ (Oziewicz 2008: 4). Oziewicz categorizes âreductionismâ and âholismâ as two opposing approaches to fantasy, claiming that
[w]hereas the former was interested in fantasy as a cultural practice which reveals political, historical, economic, gender and other entanglements that characterize human activities, the latter approached fantasy as a cultural practice whose meaning encompasses yet extends beyond those entanglements and aims to create a platform for imaginative representation of transcultural concepts and values. Whereas the former adopted as its allies relativism, biological determinism, naturalism, behaviourism, Freudianism and secularism and used them to examine fantasy, the latter aligned itself with the school of sophia perennis, antireductionism, essentialism, and Jungian, religious and spiritual perspectives.
(Oziewicz 2008: 4â5)
Oziewiczâs lists of values here are odd, given that they group together wildly divergent and often incompatible strands of thought on opposing poles of a culture war with little effort made to elaborate on them or to justify their alliances. The important point for Oziewiczâs argument is, apparently, that approaches he deems âreductionistâ are inappropriate for fantasy in that
[t]hey are anti-essentialist, relativistic, and politicized, besides asserting that reality is a linguistic construct, that all meanings are provisional, and that the concept of human nature, along with any talk about values or meanings in literature, must be distrusted as Euro- and andro-centric.
(Oziewicz 2008: 29)
By contrast, âholisticâ approaches to fantasy, of which theological readings are one example,
[see] fantasy literature â with its tendency for depicting unquestionably supernatural events and building stories on the protagonistsâ reactions to a reality suddenly flooded with the supernatural â as one of the ways modern humans express their yearning for mystery and continue to reflect on the meaning of life.
(Oziewicz 2008: 5)
Even leaving aside the question of how allegedly âreductionistâ philosophies can be at once too relativistic and too staunchly political, Oziewiczâs binary framing fails to consider how the supernaturally suffused realities presented in fantasy are blatant linguistic constructs; how âthe meaning of lifeâ and any concept of divinity, transcendence and the human subject are always mediated through cultural, philosophical and linguistic presuppositions; and, most crucially, how the worlds presented in fantasy can unsettle such assumptions. In the following section, I map out some key points of Derridaâs deconstruction in relation to questions of God and religion. This discussion will show that far from being reductionist, deconstruction opens onto a richer, more thorough engagement with religious themes, and with religious impulses in fantasy, than is possible within the narrow âholismâ that Filmer and Oziewicz advocate.
Vive la différance
Defining deconstruction is made difficult by the fact that âdeconstructionâ refers both to a philosophical discourse and to what that discourse attempts to describe. This is partially because, especially in English, the word âdeconstructionâ is easily misconstrued when used to describe the movement with which Derridaâs writing concerns itself. As he states, â[the] word, at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourseâ (Derrida [1983] 1988: 3). Furthermore, Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys note that deconstructionâs concern with disrupting and unravelling structures from within means that â[t]here can be no definition of deconstruction as a concept [ . . . ] to do so would be to traduce its movement, which would anyway already be at work within âitselfââ (Dick and Wolfreys 2013: 55). In other words, any possible definition or even utterance of âdeconstructionâ is open to the same disruptive movement which it describes. Deconstruction, as a movement within structures, does not supervene upon them from the outside; it is not a theory or a critical tool that can be applied because, according to Derrida, â[d]econstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernityâ (Derrida [1983] 1988: 4).
One of the principal concerns of deconstruction as a philosophical discourse is the disruption of logocentrism, t...