ix. 10/31

Before talking about this last class meeting I’ve been ruminating over the Derridean term ur, and so I decided to follow a hunch that Ur was the biblical city from which Abraham originated, and essentially where our Judeo-Christian-Muslim concept of abstraction, under the guise/name of God, came from (if you subscribe to the metanarrative). Regardless of Derrida’s beliefs, the point in naming the metatextual as Ur-text coincides beautifully with the overencompassing notion of God as Abraham would have seen It/Him/Her which is not dissimilar to our abstract conceptualizing of differance.

Now, for the Halloween session: Dr. Casey’s comment of having worked the first twenty years of his academic life trying to change the status quo of white men in power only to wake up and see that he now is the white man in power, not only struck me as truth—or as true as anything can be from this postmodern perspective—but also reflected, in my mind, postmodernity’s tendency to resemble the image of a snake self cannibalizing by swallowing its own tail. In other words, how postmodern theorists sometimes construct structures that in and of themselves cause their own deconstruction.

The example that immediately pops into my mind is The Postmodern Bible, which is compiled by writers who “swear by and follow after Althusser, Barthes, Culler, Derrida, Eagleton, Foucault, Genette, Bal, Jameson and Kristeva” (Robert P. Carroll quoted in Cambridge Companion To Biblical Interpretation; ed. Barton. p59.). The make up of this Collective, as Carroll dubs them, is “ten white, privileged academics [who] denounce white academicism! Itself lacking black writers (of either gender) and womanist writers (black feminist women)” (59). So by its own agreed upon delineations The Postmodern Bible “quickly and easily deconstructs itself,” not unlike Dr. Casey ironically did when reflecting in the mirror.