Life, Existence, and Culture, or What I Have Learned from Deconstruction

Abstract

Taking as a starting point a few key passages in the Gospels about the Last Supper and Crucifixion, the author tries to show how the linguistic machinery of a text reveals its deconstructive aspect – making a call for cultural appropriation on the one hand and resisting this appropriation on the other. This duplicity is also projected onto an existential level, reflecting the tension between life as an idiomatic aspect of every human endeavor and culture understood as subjecting to shared experience. The main conceptual impetus of the essay goes against maintaining the sharp distinction between life rejecting an accurate representation and existence with all the reproduction devices it carries with itself. This analysis, referring to a vast corpus of Derrida’s texts, goes beyond a metacommentary limited to French philosophy or literary studies and can also be read as a contribution to a theological interpretation of the Gospels made with the help of deconstructive logic.