“If It Be Your Will”: Making Promises with Derrida,Ricoeur and Chauvet

Abstract

Through a critical engagement with the work of Derrida, Ricoeur and Chauvet, the author defines the Christian vow or promise as an ever-new performance of the self in favour of the “other”. The notion of the asymmetry of one's relationship with the other is explored in terms of a “call” in the face of another, any other, which is experienced as more originary that one's own sense of self. This call has a particularly apocalyptic or eschatological dimension to it. It unsettles and destabilises the Christian self in the same movement as it produces and makes that self real. The call effects a radical destabilisation of the self such that the self may only come to be by making room for the other who is Christ. The paper concludes that eucharistic worship, as a constant re/membering of the Christian's death and resurrection in Christ, is a primary or exemplary instance of the vow so defined.