A Deconstructionist Manifesto: Mark C. Taylor's "Erring"Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Mark C. Taylor

Abstract

Mark C. Taylor's Erring, subtitled A Postmodern undertakes to explore the radical implications of the historical-cultural phenomenon that Taylor identifies as the death of God. On the author's view these implications have yet to be fully confronted; in Nietzsche's words, the event still on its way, still wandering.' Only by entering without reservation into this valley of disillusionment can one hope to find what may lie on the other side. Or rather, only by realizing there is no other side can one begin to embrace and affirm the life that is to be lived within the apparently barren valley: the life of wandering, or erring. This reading of our contemporary situation provides the context and rationale for Taylor's appropriation of the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction may be understood as a strategy for tracing the radical interrelatedness of all of reality; is a way of delineating identity-in-difference and difference-in-identity (p. 109). On Taylor's reckoning thus spells the death of every alleged absolute (thus the full extension of the death of God) culminating in a recognition of the relativity of death itself (thus the reaffirmation of life that comes with the acceptance of death). It is in this sense that destruction and creation are inseparable (p. 143). Because deconstruction so assists us in tracing this devious path, it would not be too much to suggest that deconstruction is the 'hermeneutic' of the death of God (p. 6). The reader may be relieved to discover that this celebration of errancy exhibits, in its broad outline, a remarkable clarity of structure, treating the demise of four traditional concepts (God, self, history, and book) in as many chapters. The four chapters of part 2, Deconstructive A/theology, mirror the sequence in part 1, striving in each instance to articulate the new truth that is born with the passing of the old. The argument Taylor deploys within this framework is prodigious in range of reference and resonance and is almost hypnotic in its single-