Luther after Derrida - by Marisa Strizzi (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Luther after Derrida, Marisa Strizzi argues that Luther's theology has a significant deconstructive drive and, through the careful reading of texts, illustrates how this theology interacts with Derrida's thought.

Book Synopsis

In Luther after Derrida, Marisa Strizzi argues that Luther's theology has a significant deconstructive drive and, through the careful reading of texts, illustrates how this theology interacts with Derrida's thought.

Review Quotes

In her highly original and well-written study, Marisa Strizzi brings main ideas of Jacques Derrida, which are presented in brilliant clarity, into dialogue with writings of Martin Luther. She convincingly shows that some important and still relevant ideas of Martin Luther - formulated in pre-modern times - are close to the ideas of the post-modern intellectual Jacques Derrida. Interpreting Luther after reading Derrida throws a new light on both authors despite their very different historical and intellectual contexts. Marisa Strizzi's book presents excellent information on the philosophical and theological ideas of Derrida and Luther, and shows similarities in thought between pre-modern and post-modern times.

Marisa Strizzi's book is a cutting edge and compelling confrontation between Luther and Derrida. Luther after Derrida demonstrates how valuable a deconstructive reading can be, revealing the unsaid and unthought in texts written in a distant past, and hence bringing them to life in an unexpected and fascinating way in our time.

Marisa Strizzi's fascinating book breaks new ground by placing Luther and Derrida at the same table as imaginary interlocutors. She unearths surprising overlaps between the deconstructive epistemologies of both thinkers, in resistance to entrenched dogmatisms and hierarchical orders. She provokes to open up to the radically Other and the unavailable outside ourselves. Her work is a passionate call to continue subversive deconstructions in one's own theological thinking, resonating to the challenges in a globalized world; and, in particular, to critically re-read and thereby revitalize the Lutheran tradition and Luther's work itself. I strongly recommend paying attention to this admirable book.

Readers of Luther after Derrida will be pleasantly struck by the multiple ways in which Marissa Strizzi plays with postmodern irreverence in conjunction with postcolonial hybridity. A Latin American theologian dealing with two "European" thinkers, Strizzi make them enter a conversation that one could imagine it was taking place yesterday, in any café of the mysterious Buenos Aires. Her incursions into the pre-modern from a post-modern place show that throughout epochs and contexts, we are still grappling with the same spiritual and existential themes that make us humans. This book is a fascinating reading of Derrida with his deconstructive apparatus from within the theological text offered by Martin Luther, which opens a scenario for a very "happy exchange" between two authors separated by time and location, yet united by the passion of a Latin American theologian. Dr. Strizzi convincingly demonstrates that Derrida offers a key to making Luther speak afresh to persons, contexts, cultures, and churches that he would have never imagined. And through the doors that this key has opened, the author graciously invites us into a world of impossible possibilities, that is as fascinating as the worlds imagined by the great Dutch artist Maurits Etscher.

About the Author

Marisa Strizzi is professor of theology at the Ecumenical Network for Theological Education (REET) and at the Institute for Contextual Pastoral Studies (IPC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.