Sherwood Y. (Ed.) Derrida’s Bible: (Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida)

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. — xvi, 324 p. — (Religion / Culture / Critique). — ISBN 978-1-4039-6663-6, 978-1-137-09037-9.In the last few years, Derrida has gained a great deal of attention from scholars of biblical studies and theology. The contributors to Derrida's Bible explore the relationships between Derrida, theory, and religious studies. Unlike other books on Derrida, this collection is primarily focused on biblical studies, where others are concerned with Derrida and religion in general.
This valuable volume represents a helpful shift of focus of current discussions of ‘Derrida and religion’ to ‘Derrida and the Bible,’ to the way in which this scrupulously close micro-reader of texts reads and helps us read Biblical texts, the assembled conglomerate of which is what is meant by ‘Derrida’s Bible.’ The collection shows superbly how ‘the Bible’ (like ‘Plato’), as a single overarching theological unity or an enabling ecclesiastical authorization, is exploded by a close — even ‘literalist’ — reading which releases an avalanche of metaphors, puns, competing theologies, heterogeneities, multiple layers of cut and paste authorship, good news and bad, awash in problems of interpretation and translation — in short, everything that Derrida predicts a ‘text’ (a ‘scripture’) would be. Yvonne Sherwood has produced an important collection for which everyone, readers of Derrida and readers of the Bible, will be grateful.True PDF