Assessing the Function of Irony in Continental Philosophy's Return to Religion: After the Death of God (the Vattimo/Caputo Dialogue)

Abstract

John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo are two of the main thinkers in continental philosophy’s return to religion. This return is accommodated by the basic theoretical framework of irony, which is predominantly an unspoken determinant upon textual meaning. In this continental sense, irony affirms and negates the subject matter that it speaks about. Adopting this framework, Caputo and Vattimo suggest that a new Christian-irony is desirable to avert a collapse back into the violence that results from metaphysics, either modern or classical, by remaining in deconstruction’s loosely held wavering between theism and atheism. The question that remains to be proven, however, is whether their ironic method of writing is not inadvertently continuing the negative effect of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian paradigm by persisting with the literary style of writing that is intrinsic to it, even while openly refuting it by their affirmative Judeo-Christian surface content.