SOURCE: "Derrida and the Study of Religion," in Religious Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 19-21.

In the following review of Glas, The Truth in Painting, and The Post Card, Winquist summarizes Derrida's philosophy and considers its relation to theology.

Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the "other" of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the "other" and the "other of language." [Derrida, in an interview with Richard Kearney in Kearney's Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 1984]

Western theology and the study of religion are both deeply implicated in the logocentric framework of the Western philosophical tradition that has become the object of a radical deconstructionist critique. In...