| Summary: | In this thesis we respond to the chalrenge posed to the Church and the Academy by some of the 'Signs of our Times'; in particular Postmodemism, Deconstruction and the Narrative Identity of the Subject. In pursuing a genealogical hermeneutic through various fields of discourse we discover emerging Postmodemism(s) that are characterised by a sense of mourning for a lost metanarrative and a tension between an impulse towards narrative and an anti-narrative impulse. Deconstruction, we argue, intensifies the antinarrative impulse within postmodemism and therefore represents one important site for the Death of the Subject. However, in order to place Deconstruction in context we investigate the question of Derrida's style(s) of writing in relation to his strategic philosophical aim. In addition, the distorting effects of the Reception of Deconstruction in the USA are broached. This enables us to go on to pursue the opening of Deconstruction in the text of Husserl's phenomenology. It involves a detailed reading and critique of Derrida's 'Introduction' to Husserl's Origin of Geometry and Speech and Phenomena. Throughout we will be guided by a structural feature of a Borromean knot linking together the themes of the Self, the Sign and Time; as well as a Historical revisionist picture of Husserl's project. The third sign of our times investigates the rediscovery of the Narrative Identity of the Subject by using the later Paul Ricoeur's notion of Narrative and the Narrative Identity of the Self. We trace a path through the sign, the text, and narrative in order to recover a notion of the narrative identity of the Self. In conclusion we argue that the Church's response to the postmodern is to learn again that we must 'speak more than one language'. Accordingly we indicate three possible voices or idioms: a witnessing self, a worshipping self and a listening/acting self.
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