Erasing "economy": Derrida and the construction of divine economies

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Marion Grau

In a pre-emptive verbal strike rejecting calls by foreign leaders for the U.S. to join the international effort to back the Kyoto agreement that aims at curbing global warming through the reduction of [CO.sup.2] emissions, George W. Bush stated: "We will not do anything that harms our economy." (1) Though hardly a surprising revelation, this blunt, unapologetic phrase, perhaps even creed, is strangely intriguing to me. In fact, I have been tempted to cross it out, and emphatically so, ever since I read it in the New York Times. It seems to me that Derrida's practice of erasure as described by Gayatri Spivak could serve as an analytical tool to mark "the economic factor as irreducible" in the formation of a counter-economic theological position in Late capitalism.

In her preface to Of Grammatology, the book's translator, Spivak, writes about her attempts to translate Derrida's practice of crossing out certain concepts:

My predicament is an analogue for a certain philosophical exigency that drives Derrida to writing "sous rature," which I translate as "under erasure." This is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and delection.

A word, so Spivak further explains comes "sous rature," if it is seen as "inaccurate but necessary," if it unveils "unfamiliar conclusions" as we examine "familiar things," if it uncovers that "our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us." (2) Almost twenty years later, in her recent A Critique of Postcolonial

Reason, Spivak calls the reader to cross out the economic:

In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic "under erasure," to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified. (3)

For Spivak, who is indebted to Derrida, deconstruction becomes an analytical tool for political agency, helping to uncover what constitutes and enables certain contemporary constructions of economy. The "explanatory power of economics" (4) in Bush's statement is meant to communicate to the reader "economy's" final determinacy, where the lifting up of "our economy" claims to suffice and render unnecessary any further explanations or comments. Bush's phrase, in a handy nutshell, seems to encompass the policy of neo-classical globalizing economies on the tireless search for growth and expansion. Perhaps it might make sense to deconstruct this nutshell, to crack its properties and to mis/appropriate "economy" for the perhaps yet "misunderestimated" (5) field of constructive theology.

Derrida's texts, I find, hover somewhere between philosophy, close readings of literary texts, even midrash. Indulge me then, for a moment when I wonder whether Derrida also writes a kind of economics and ask how Derrida's "economic" thought might contribute to the task of reconstructing what I have called a theology of Divine Economy. In the following I suggest that Derrida's economy of differance may help to map the space for a constructive theology of Divine Economy that locates itself in the complex network of postmodern local and globalizing economic structures and seeks to find ways to embody an effective witness that refuses to reduce these complications to dichotomic oppositions but provides a more flexible instrument to reread early Christian scriptural traditions as well as to embody possibilities for a modest, but decisive Christian economic ascetic witness in a contemporary context.

"What Is Economy?" Approaches from Derrida's Texts and Beyond

Mapping Derrida's investigations of economy, one would find that, depending on the phase of his oeuvre and on what texts he interacts with, or "inhabits," Derrida's musings on economy take on remarkably different shapes. Economic concepts already grasped his attention early (Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy). The trading capacities of language, the central characteristics shared by money and writing, fascinate Derrida. Thus he writes in Of Grammatology:

Money replaces things by their signs, not only within a society but from one culture to another, or from one economic organization to another. That is why the alphabet is commercial, a trader. It must be understood within the monetary moment of economic rationality. The critical description of money is the faithful reflection of the discourse on writing. In both cases an anonymous supplement is substituted for the thing. (6)

Derrida maps his own economic approach in relation to texts by Hegel and Bataille. Bataille distinguishes between the concepts of restricted and general economy, where a restricted economy is limited to commercial values while a general economy extends to the political realm. Derrida applies this distinction to the theory of language and writing and redefines a restricted economy of language as the attempt or conviction that all meaning can be accounted for, that all signs hit their targets, to speak with Saussure, whereas a general economy refers to the loss, the expenditure, the expropriation of meaning, the production of excess of meaning. This excess, in part signified by the word differance, is an "unheard of," but visible double-entendre, and stands as one of the ways in which Derrida has attempted to map both the loss and excess of meaning.