A Pantheology of the (Im)Possible: Reading Deconstruction in Ecstatic Naturalism and Ecstatic Naturalism in Deconstruction

naturalist philosopher robert corrington begins his chapter in Frontiers in American Philosophy, volume 1, by asserting that “the current obsession with language and with written texts has blunted the generic drive of hermeneutics and its more legitimate quest for a categorical structure that is truly responsive to the various dimensions of meaning manifest in the ongoing human process. . . . The deeper emancipatory forces of nature and history remain bereft of a proper location for their appearance in nondestructive social orders.”1 This critique is presumably directed at poststructuralist theories in which language and text are all there is, the world is made up of a play of signs, and reliance on ontology or any kind of universal “ground” is imperialistic, logocentric, and ultimately misguided. one thinks immediately here of Jacques derrida’s assertion that there is nothing outside the text. corrington’s use of phenomenology as the key foundation for any philosophical and categorical scheme resists such assertions, noting that there are real and observable natural phenomenon at work outside the very construction of language being played with by deconstruction. conversely, as Kevin hart points out, “derrida’s target is this absolute exteriority or interiority which has been repeatedly named and used to ground philosophical systems. one of the most important names it has been given is ‘god’; but as he shows, nature and selfconsciousness have also been pressed into service from time to time.”2 one could easily add being or the ground of being to this list. for in this reading of derrida, it is the very assumption of a kind of ground, a whence, that prevents the kind of emancipatory forces he sees as available within human construction, or more accurately deconstruction and reconstruction.