Transgressing religion: The privilege of faith in Jacques Derrida's khora and Paul Ricoeur's mediating imagination

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the projects of Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur as they encounter and transgress the traditional boundaries of religion. It relies primarily on the dialogues generated by the texts of Derrida and Ricoeur, whose philosophical heritage is the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl. Since phenomenology is a distinct methodology at variance with the American analytic tradition, the first chapter introduces the central elements of phenomenology preserved in Derridean deconstruction and Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics. Chapter two investigates Derrida's deconstruction reading strategy and then narrows its focus to his transgression of the constructs of religion. In chapter three attention turns to the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur broadens the hermeneutical circle to include the mediations of the subject as well as a subsequent act of appropriation whereby a subject is transformed by a text. This appropriation requires the involvement of the mediating imagination.; Overall the dissertation engages in three dialogues. The first is a dialogue prompted by the intersections of the work of Derrida and Ricoeur that mediate the course of the project. Together they present a second dialogue bringing phenomenology to philosophy and hermeneutics. Lastly, this conversation between Derrida and Ricoeur reopens the philosophical dialogue about the relationship of faith and reason.; This investigation concludes finding the mediation between Derrida and Ricoeur in the privilege of faith, the logic of superabundance, and in the logic of gift, which for the Christian is the gift of grace. Their projects focus on the hermeneutics of testimony as the language and privilege of faith. Lastly, they witness to the premodern testimonies of the Church fathers, who allowed a dialogue between faith and reason in the search for truth. This dissertation ends witnessing the polysemy of testimonies mediated in the dialogues between faith and reason. Derrida's voice reminds the scholars of philosophy of religion once again through deconstruction that in philosophy there is no escaping faith—no language or community without faith—and that everyone and every community enjoys the privilege of faith.