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Plurality and Ambiguity
Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope

By David Tracy
New York, Harper & Row, 1987. 148 pp. $15.95.

I

In the light of the worldwide neoconservative resurgence, an insistence on the plurality of ways within every great religion is an ethical and religious responsibility. No thunderings from the Ayatollah Khomeini to his fellow Muslims, no preemptory decrees from the "Holy Office" to Roman Catholics, no threats from Reverend Falwell to his fellow Protestants, and no terror tactics by Rabbi Kehane directed at his fellow Jews should be allowed to destroy such an insistence.

As these words from his new book, Plurality and Ambiguity, suggest, public issues are at stake for theologian David Tracy in his calls to appreciate plurality. Readers of Tracy's previous works, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975) and The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), have already been exposed to the dazzling array (for some, exasperating multiplicity) of citations with which he creates a conversation among so many voices in the church, in theology, in diverse academic audiences, and in the wider society. The style of this Divinity School theologian teaching at The University of Chicago is technical and esoteric, but he can also be eloquent and engaging on public issues-as an essay in Newsweek magazine (August 24, 1981) and a cover story in The New York Times Magazine (November 9, 1986) testify. Tracy affirms, in life and theology, a public conversation in response to the plurality that marks our present situation.

Tracy's emphasis on conversation is more than another liberal plea for tolerance in a pluralized polis. Tracy calls for conversation, because it is a mode of interpretation demanded by a present situation of "cultural crisis." Casting both retrospective and prospective glances, Tracy writes that we Westerners "find ourselves in a century where human-made mass death has been practiced, where yet another technological revolution is occurring, where global catastrophe or even extinction could

With this Review Symposium, THEOLOGY TODAY introduces a new feature. Periodically, we shall be taking an important and often controversial new book and asking several theologians to respond. For our first such symposium, we chose David Tracy's Plurality and Ambiguity. Mark Kline Taylor presents a synopsis of the book while Sallie McFague, Jeffrey Stout, and Sharon Welch each provides a critical review. David Tracy responds to these assessments.

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occur." There is no one tradition, surely no homogeneous one, alone adequate for the alleviation of this crisis. Tracy calls for a conversational model of interpretation as a lived response to the present cultural crisis, eschewing the monolithic and exclusivist voices of the Khomeinis, the "Holy Offices," the Falwells, and the Kehanes of our time, yet insisting on the value of the West's classic traditions in hope that mutually enriching interpretations will spark acts of resistance to cultural crisis.

In the compact volume reviewed in this symposium, Tracy reflects explicitly on conversation as "that often neglected but central fact of our intellectual lives." The opening chapter presents Tracy's view of what conversation is and how it may function as a model for interpretation. As a fundamental key to hermeneutics, conversation involves "three realities" of concern to all interpretation theories: (1) a phenomenon to be interpreted (here, usually, a text), (2) someone interpreting that phenomenon, and (3) the interaction between them. The text to be interpreted is usually a classic. "Classics," for Tracy, are "those texts that have helped found or form a particular culture." Classic texts-including biblical texts-are highly specific in their origins and modes of expression, but they bear "an excess and permanence of meaning" that always prompt further interpretation.

Among the three realities, conversation occurs as a "game," full of indeterminacy and seriousness. In it, we give ourselves to a movement required by "questions worth exploring." Late-night conversations with friends, Tracy suggests, often feature this movement more than do our academic seminars. "The movement in conversation is questioning itself. Neither my present opinions on the question nor the text's original response to the question, but the question itself, must control every conversation." But in the movement of conversation, we play by "some hard rules": say what you mean, and be willing to correct or defend yourself, to argue, and to change your mind. These rules are variations on the imperatives formulated by one of Tracy's most influential teachers, Bernard Lonergan: "Be attentive, be intelligent, be responsible, be loving, and, if necessary, change."

This vision of conversation has informed Tracy's method from his earlier works. Indeed, his understanding of what the Christian message is about orients him to this kind of conversation. Tracy believes that interpretation modeled on conversation both illumines the distinctive content of Christian Scripture and tradition and also facilitates its encounter with public concerns.

In this book, Tracy does not take up an explicitly theological agenda, though he does promise a "more strictly theological companion volume ... that will assess the implications of these reflections on plurality, ambiguity, and hope for interpreting my own Christian tradition."

Following his general introduction to conversation, the rest of the book, broadly summarized, studies ways in which conversations are interrupted. Achieving understanding through conversation is often delayed, deflected, distorted, or cut off. Apparently, for Tracy, "interruption"

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can include the travail of methodological rigor that is ultimately enriching to conversational understanding, the uncovering of those ideological distortions that deflect conversation from its goal, as well as the terrifying holocausts that seem to leave every conversation partner speechless.

Various critical methods of explanation are, according to Tracy, interruptions of conversation. He discusses them in these terms in chapter two. Historical criticism, literary criticism, and social scientific criticism all delay an interpreter's understanding of a given text. The "delay" involves some further development of an interpreter's understanding as well as outright challenge of it. Tracy finds these methods indispensable to the world of conversation. Thus he vigorously affirms, for example, historical criticism. It does matter whether the Holocaust happened or not. And "it is irresponsible ... for Christians not to care if Jesus ever lived at all and then go on to state their firm belief in Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ." But just as vigorously, he questions any historian's claim to privilege or objectivity in historical explanation. For Tracy, historical explanations occur within conversation, not before it or outside of it. This means that historians must always be willing to put into play and at risk the interests that make up their own preunderstandings.

Conversation is also interrupted by "radical plurality," the issue of Tracy's third chapter. The radical plurality of language is the focusing case in point. Tracy takes readers through the insights of writers to whose names the adjective "postmodern" is often attached: not only Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, but also Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Paul Ricoeur. It is clear by the conclusion of this tour de force that the plurality Tracy means is not just that of words, sentences, and texts, but of "discourse," that whole linguistic complex involving "someone saying something about something to someone." When language is studied in this larger sense, the problem of plurality is etched into society and history. This gives Tracy's study of language and plurality an ethical-political tone, calling for analyses of how power is organized and how it forces its way into the realm of texts and text-making. "And all texts, theirs and mine, are saturated with the ideologies of particular societies, the history of ambiguous effects of particular traditions, and the hidden agendas of the unconscious."

This prepares the way for Tracy's consideration in chapter four of the most radical interruption: the ambiguities and terrors of history. The litany of terrifying events is well-known, but it is often not allowed to interrupt our interpretation of classic texts. Tracy claims that our very hopes of understanding classic texts must be interrupted by the genocide of six million Jews, the Armenian massacres, the Gulag, Hiroshima, Uganda, and Cambodia. Western civilization is especially subjected to critique: "We must recognize that Western humanist history includes the guards at Auschwitz who read Goethe and listened to Bach and

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Mozart in their 'spare time.' " The near destruction of North American Indians, the enslavement of blacks, and the oppression of women all interrupt our easy conversations, challenge received interpretations of our classics, and place interpretation in a very new context.

Tracy ends chapter four by suggesting strategies that should be incorporated into the conversational model to enable interpreters to face these forms of evil. No one strategy is adequate. Many are needed: attending to postmodern writers, rock musicians, film makers who can dramatize the chaos of our present; allowing the victims of history to speak with their own voices; analyzing the material forces that underlie a classic's formation and reception; using critical theories to study the systemic distortions of our period so that cognitive illumination allows some "emancipatory action."

These are among the many available "strategies of resistance," but for Tracy, the religions are key. They, as he argues in chapter five, "at their best always bear extraordinary powers of resistance." Through what he terms their "fundamental beliefs in Ultimate Reality," the religions can resist their own terrorizing propensities as well those of the general culture. And religious classics are at the heart of religions' resisting effect. To interpret them is to receive from them a challenge to what now seems possible.

This is the point where Tracy articulates the task of theology. Theologians nurture genuine conversation with religious classics by focusing specifically on them, trying to envision a "believable hope," rooted in Ultimate Reality, that enables our discovery of "new modes of action that are ethically, politically, and religiously acts of resistance to the status quo." This final chapter goes beyond simply setting an agenda for theologians, however. He invites all to be interpreters of religious classics, because of the power for resistance and hope to be found in them. For Tracy, religious classics address what is essential in any attempt to become human at all. Hence, they can become the center of conversations that lead beyond the realms of the theologian.

Tracy claims that religion's power to resist and generate hope depends on each religion's ability to affirm plurality and ambiguity in its own communal life. Again, affirming plurality does not mean mere tolerance. It requires what Tracy calls an "analogical imagination"-an imagination that articulates differences as genuine but also in some ways similar to what we already know. It is, existentially, "a willingness to enter the conversation, that unnerving place where one is willing to risk all one's present self-understanding by facing the claims to attention of the other." Part of this willingness involves a preferential option for the poor. This does not mean that whatever they claim is right, but that the readings of the oppressed "must be heard and preferably heard first." Tracy seems to view the oppressed as possessing the readings of our religious classics that the rest of us most need to hear. Theologians, especially, will be led by those readings beyond the elitism that so often reigns in their settings. "The ego of the academic theologian, like that of

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all postmodern intellectuals, needs to learn better ways to dispossess itself of its sense of having exclusive rights to interpretation."

Tracy concludes by noting that he has not discussed all that constitutes his own Christian hope, much less the particular hope generated by, other resisting religions. But his "principal concern" in this short work has been to set forth a "more modest but crucial hope," namely, "that all. those involved in interpreting our situation and all those aware of our need for solidarity may continue to risk interpreting all the classics of all. the traditions." In his writings, Tracy has sought to live after such a general hope, even while delineating the particular Christian faith and hope that nurtures his own resistance in an age of plurality and ambiguity.

MARK KLINE TAYLOR

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey

II

Many voices clamor to be heard and profound evil pervades our most cherished traditions and texts. Interpretation is, thus, necessarily a risky, fragile, and open-ended affair. Tracy's genius for dealing with this situation is, in part, his refusal to be overwhelmed by it. He refuses retreats of any kind, whether fashionable ones such as deconstruction or less favored ones such as fundamentalism or romanticism, while insisting that the ancient ideal of conversation with its "hard rules" be the metaphor for understanding interpretation-even for, and most especially for, our difficult times. In this model of rational, public discourse, one assumes the sincerity and equality of the conversation partners as well as the openness of all participants to the primacy of the question at hand rather than to one's opinions about it.

Should conversation be the metaphor for understanding interpretation in the closing decades of the twentieth century, a time characterized by mass poverty, genocide, ecological deterioration, political totalitarianism, nuclear escalation? Is "conversation" adequate to address such horrors? Is it not too polite, too civilized, too Western, too elitist, too leisured, too male? In a sense, it is all of these, and if one wanted to undercut Tracy's position, these adjectives could be trotted out. But that would be a very "un-Tracy-like" thing to do, for he himself never undercuts any serious position. On the contrary, the outstanding characteristic of Tracy's work, here as well as in his other books, is its inclusiveness, its openness to other voices, other methods, other ways. Tracy does not simply give lip service to inclusiveness; it is his hallmark. The particular kind of inclusiveness he supports, however, is the crucial issue. The clue to Tracy's special brand of inclusiveness is what he does with positions other than his own that he respects but may not agree with: he focuses on the value to the conversation that each brings. Tracy's particular contribution is not primarily as participant in conversation,

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but as interpreter of conversation. His contribution is at the level of examining the nature of conversation itself as the model for interpretation.

Central to Tracy's conversational model is the "analogical imagination," which involves the ability to recognize "otherness" as possibility in classic texts or in the views of conversation partners. Tracy's inclusiveness is one that allows for and encourages what is different, other, and even alien within an overall framework of acceptance. When conversation partners encounter otherness, the movement should be toward the entertainment of what is new or other as possible, and, eventually, toward its acceptance as "similarity-in-difference." Tracy's assumption, although he does not state it so boldly, is that no serious position on important issues is utterly alien to other serious positions. Classic texts necessarily confront us with their otherness. An analogical imagination recognizes in them points of insight that either challenge what we hold to be the case or illuminate what we hope may be the case.

Over a decade ago, Tracy described the analogical imagination as the Catholic sensibility. It is an understanding that all beings are related to Being-Itself, to God, but each in its own way. It is a sensibility that appreciates particularity and difference within an overall framework that unifies. He contrasts the Catholic analogical imagination with the Protestant dialectical imagination, which is aware of discontinuity rather than continuity between different forms of being and, especially, between beings and Being-Itself. The former stresses the hermeneutics of retrieval, while the latter stressed the hermeneutics of suspicion. Both are necessary, Tracy claims, and neither is limited to members of Catholic or Protestant ecclesial bodies. With each new publication, however, one sees greater appreciation for the sensibility not intrinsic to Tracy's own, that is, the voices protesting the deep negativities of existence. His conversational model is increasingly more open to the negations of illusion, idolatry, alienation, and the oppression of racism, sexism, and classism.

Nevertheless, the foundation is still the analogical, not the dialectical, imagination. This makes for a basic trustfulness and hopefulness. He takes the negativities very seriously, but they are negativities within what can finally be trusted. In the eloquent closing paragraphs of Plurality and Ambiguity, Tracy says that neither despair nor apathy are fitting responses, even for these parlous times; rather, we must fight for hope. "Whoever fights for hope, fights on behalf of us all. Whoever acts on that hope, acts in a manner worthy of a human being. And whoever so acts, I believe, acts in a manner faintly suggestive of the reality and power of that God in whose image human beings were formed to resist, to think, and to act." Still, the analogical imagination is very toughminded, open to real difference, to the painful oppression of other voices, to genuine otherness. No easy inclusiveness is imagined or expected. Perhaps the most one can hope for, even Tracy admits, is that the

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conversation will continue, that the conflict of interpretations will go on, that we will all persevere in risking interpretations of our classics in conversation with one another.

A second feature of Tracy's conversational understanding of interpretation is its oral rather than written character. Though he does not stress this feature, it is important for several reasons. First, to understand. language primarily as discourse rather than as discrete words may open. the door to deconstruction, but not to its extremes. To be sure, says Tracy, "when Jacques Derrida enters, the conversation stops"-or at least it halts for the time being. Tracy listens attentively to the voice of deconstruction, finding it helpful as "linguistic therapy." It exposes the illusion that "we language-sated beings can be fully present to ourselves or that any other reality can be fully present to us either." Nonetheless,, he insists that when discourse is the primary model-that is, someone saying something about something to someone-then deconstruction's view that language is mere play is also revealed to be an illusion, for discourse moves us into ethical and political criticism of hidden, even. repressed, social and historical ideologies.

A second important effect of Tracy's oral model of conversation is its ability to include the non-expert, the unlettered, the voices of the "non-persons" of history in the task of interpretation. He is opposed to the elitism of the academy that supposes only those with theological credentials can interpret. He claims there is a "natural hermeneutical competence" possessed by anyone "willing to confront critically and be confronted by any classic," and sides with those liberation theologians who claim that "if the religious classics are both classics and religious at all, they should be intelligible to all." Again, however, one sees the basic balance and inclusiveness that characterize his perspective, for while he claims that the voices of the poor and oppressed should be heard first in the Judaeo-Christian conversation, they are not the only voices to be attended to. Nor is praxis the beginning and the end of theological conversation to Tracy. He says that all interpretation is an exercise in practical application, but concern with praxis does not free one from the demands of theory or the fuller-complexities of interpretation.

What is the contribution of a Tracy, of one who primarily interprets the conversation rather than participates in it? The values are great, for, as the central chapters of the book illustrate, he takes the reader through a profound exercise in dealing with radical plurality and painful ambiguity. The result is that we can see why no contemporary interpretation of a religious tradition and its classic texts is credible if it fails to deal with the plurality of other religious traditions and with the multitude of competing voices within one's own tradition. Dreams of domination and certainty are over. Interpretation is a risky and perilous affair, which must accept the conflict of interpretations as normal and healthy.

Moreover, the ambiguity (admittedly, he says, a weak word for the great good and frightening evil) in all religious traditions means that

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most of us, most of the time, are appalled by the religious traditions we also believe in and support. Tracy puts it nicely when he says, "the religions are exercises in resistance" to the status quo when they are not, as they often are, supports for it. They are both, but Tracy calls us to whatever degree of sanity, rationality, and resistance we can muster to all forms of "totalization"-the ideology that only one method, one voice, is right and true.

While I have characterized Tracy's position as in some sense standing above or outside conversation, he is also a participant. As such, he abides by the hard rules of the game and does not pretend to be anything other than who he is: a white, well-educated, Catholic, male academic whose insights have arisen from his social location, which he names as the University of Chicago, where, as he says, "serious conversation is more often than not a way of life." Academic theologians have an important and rightful place in the conversation. Though they used to control the whole of it, that day is over. Nonetheless, Tracy's model of interpretation is the academy's contribution at its best: a highly-nuanced, well-balanced, inclusive vision of serious dialogue among all who wish to participate. Moreover, Tracy has given us this vision in a book that could be characterized as a "learned essay" rather than a scholarly treatise. It is a tightly-written, clearly-argued essay, presenting a thesis free of jargon and, at times, with eloquence. Any reasonably well-educated person could read and benefit from the book, could "enter the conversation." How nice and how rare to have a book that is one in form and in substance.

SALLIE McFAGUE

The Divinity School
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee

III

Text: "Postmodern coherence, at best, will be a rough coherence: interrupted, obscure, often confused, self-conscious of its own language use and, above all, aware of the ambiguities of all histories and traditions" (p. 83).

Commentary: In the late 1960s, when the city still seemed secular to Harvey Cox and Time was covering the death of God, rumor had it that the mainline divinity schools were crawling with draft-dodgers. These young men were allegedly happy to be kept busy reading accounts of the funeral, talking about liberation, and identifying (at a safe distance) with the victims of oppression. Meanwhile, some of theology's former admirers were already charging that it had become little more than a succession of fads. People who cared about its responsibility to a broader public were wondering who among the theologians might step forward to take up the cultural roles that had only recently been played by Reinhold

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Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, nearly everybody's favorite tough-minded moralist and European dilettante, respectively.

Then, over the next decade and a half, the plot thickened. Various groups began to enroll in unprecedented numbers in the divinity schools: not just alienated sympathizers but real victims of oppression (women and people of color from home and abroad); twice-born evangelicals who had been swept into the new wave of piety in American popular culture; and revisionist Catholics whose passion for reform had been kindled by Vatican II and then placed in jeopardy by Cardinal Ratzinger and company. Before long, faculties and curricula had become more diverse, if less coherent in outlook. Liberation was still often the watchword of the day, but it had come to mean very different things to the very different people now studying and teaching in the divinity schools, and it was sometimes contested by the new evangelicals. By this time, academic study of religion in the universities had been moving steadily away from theological moorings and strange intellectual currents were reaching our shores from Europe and Asia.

To count as a well-read professor of theology, one now has to know something about recent scholarship on Buddhism and Taoism and have views about Habermas and Derrida. To count as intellectually respectable, one has to take seriously the results of historical and sociological studies of the New Testament. To count as morally upstanding, one has to speak to the increasingly plural concerns and demands of one's increasingly militant students and colleagues. And to count as a theologian at all, one still has to maintain a discernible connection with religious tradition and have something recognizably religious to say about religious texts.

The task is simplified for those who see themselves as spokespersons for oppressed groups to which they belong. But it is not an easy time to be a white, male theologian, let alone a revisionist Catholic one, who would like to be well-read, intellectually respectable, and morally upstanding. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that while a few theologically informed writers have managed to win an audience for discussion of the place of religion in American life, no one has really been able to step into the shoes of a Niebuhr or a Tillich and show us how everything hangs together. The job would be too complicated. There are just too many loose ends to tie up, too many constituencies to address, too many debts to pay, too many books to read.

Hegel once said that philosophy is "its own time apprehended in thought." Tracy's task in Plurality and Ambiguity is to apprehend his own theological time in thought, insofar as that can be done. It is not a work of theology. It is rather the work of a theologian standing back from his theological project in a moment of philosophical reflection and trying to make sense of' the various forces impinging on him in his situation. Hegel, in most of his moods, thought he could show how everything hangs together. Tracy thinks no such thing. The reason is

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that things don't in fact hang together in anything approaching a coherent and unified whole.

Text: "Conversation in its primary form is an exploration of possibilities in the search for truth. In following the track of any question, we must allow for difference and otherness.... To recognize possibility is to sense some similarity to what we have already experienced or understood. But similarity here must be described as similarity-in-difference, that is, analogy" (p. 20).

Commentary: To apprehend his time in thought, Tracy believes, is precisely to recognize the extent to which it is marked by plurality and ambiguity, by the reality of difference. It is to take full measure of the diversity of traditions, the cry of those only now being heard for the first time in the academy, the conflict of interpretations, the impossibility of arriving at determinate readings, the challenge of reductionistic construals of classic religious texts, and events (like the Holocaust) which just can't be neatly absorbed into an essentially coherent total view. Any overarching synthesis, under the circumstances, would inevitably be a sham. So we'd better try our best to get a conversation going.

Toward this end, Tracy, in effect, invites us to take our seats around his seminar table, where we can listen in as he tries to strike up conversation with the interlocutors who do the most to reveal the plurality and ambiguity of our situation. He will try to come to terms with each interlocutor's contribution, taking note of the difference it makes without either domesticating or exaggerating it.

Text: "We may still experience moments of true manifestation in our conversation with classics. But even these moments of recognition come to us now not as returns of the same but as unsettling acknowledgments of the other and the different, become, at their best, the possible as analogous" (p. 83).

Commentary: We will be sorely tempted to treat the genuinely strange as "more of the same," thus reducing the potential threat of uncomfortable truths we can and should take to heart; or to stigmatize others by invoking derogatory stereotypes, thus exploiting their strangeness in order to congratulate ourselves for being what we are; or to romanticize others by invoking stereotypes of another kind, thus projecting upon them our displaced wishes for ourselves. Succumbing to any of these temptations is a way of conscripting others against their will into roles in the already-authored plot of our own transference.

Tracy is extraordinarily sensitive to these temptations, and he is often at his best when calling them to our attention. They are insidious not only because they are so often shrouded in unconscious desire, but also because each masquerades as an innocent means for avoiding others. Tracy has a keen eye for the traps they lay. He also has a tendency, in

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describing them, to resort to philosophical rhetoric so inflated that it comes uncomfortably close to self-parody.

Text: "When we risk genuine conversation with the classics, it can become too easy to rattle off the usual list of hidden skeletons in the Western closet-those systemic 'isms' that we sometimes know, more often sense, through some discomfort that afflicts us: sexism, racism, classism, elitism, cultural parochialism" (p. 68). "To see how ambiguous our history has been ... is not simply to retire into that more subtle mode of complacency, universal and ineffectual guilt" (p. 69).

Commentary: We have had each of these "isms" called to our attention before-one by one. We know their names by heart. Each has summoned forth its great unmaskers. Tracy can go on for long stretches merely gesturing in the direction of unmaskings performed by other authors. But then he brings us up short, as in these texts, by showing how close we have come, while stepping away from a particular temptation, to falling backwards into another. And, in as little as a sentence or two, he proves his mettle as our seminar leader.

Text: Chapter 3, "The Question of Language" (pp. 47-65).

Commentary: Unfortunately, the long stretches in Tracy's book between the flashes of insight are too long and too numerous, the gestures too obscure. Chapter 3, in particular, can be used to illustrate the problem. Anyone who has not read most of the books on the professor's syllabus will have trouble following the discussion. Everything is mentioned, but nothing is examined in detail. Everyone is around the table, everyone is acknowledged, everyone is accorded respect and encouraged to speak, but the table is simply too crowded for any voice but the professor's to be heard. The conversation barely begins. In the end, we are apt to have been impressed by our professor's remarkable erudition, his determination to discover the truth in every perspective, his interest in conversation. But we may be forgiven for doubting whether he is has really engaged most of his interlocutors or tried hard enough to communicate clearly with us.

Text: "'Reality' is the one word that should always appear in quotation marks" (p. 47).

Commentary: Tracy begins his third chapter by quoting this line from Nabokov. It would have been a good line to reflect upon. Does it really always need quotation marks? Or is the feeling that it always needs quotation marks a sign that we are still held captive by a philosophical picture? There is no time for such questions.

Text: "Reality is constituted, not created or simply found, through the interpretations that have earned the right to be called relatively adequate or true" (p. 48).

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Commentary: This, too, would have been a good line to mull over. In what sense is reality constituted? What does this claim come to over and above the idea that one's perception and thought about reality are shaped by one's language, what one takes for granted, and related cultural factors? What would Wittgenstein, who is mentioned a little later in the chapter, want to say about all this? Questions like these might have initiated conversation. But no such questions are raised.

Text: "The analysis of the ineradicable plurality of languages and forms of life was the singular contribution of Wittgenstein. The insistence that every disclosure is at the same time a disclosure and a concealment, since Being always both reveals and withdraws itself in every manifestation: this was the unique achievement of the late Heidegger" (p. 51).

Commentary: Wittgenstein runs on stage to pronounce his line only to be ushered off so that Heidegger can pronounce his. He in turn will rapidly give way to Saussure and Levi-Strauss, Derrida and Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Freud, Gadamer, Certeau, Kristeva, Jameson, Said, Benveniste, Ricoeur, Husserl, and Nabokov. The unintended effect is to reduce great thinkers to characters in a farce, their ideas to slogans.

Text: "Use all that can be used" (pp. 9, 72).

Commentary: This line from Kenneth Burke appears twice in Tracy's book. It could easily have been its epigraph, a crisp summary of Tracy's eclecticism. Some people object to such eclecticism as a symptom of postmodernist decadence. I do not. Tracy should be applauded for reading as widely and with as much generosity as he does. He deserves praise, not mockery, for trying to retrieve everything of value he can find. What Tracy tries to do in the long stretches of name-dropping, I suspect, is to perform a kind of thought-experiment. He wants to see how much he can encompass within a single frame without creating unbearable tensions or outright contradiction. But the thought-experiment, at least as undertaken here, lacks the kind of attention to detail that might supply resistance of an interesting sort to Tracy's wishes for reconciliation. All too often, at just those points where one wants Tracy to subject his views to a severe test, he either explicitly defers further consideration of the matter to another occasion or simply moves on to another name.

The real challenge Tracy's eclecticism faces, then, is how exactly to reconcile everything that strikes him, at first blush, as worth saving. If we should embrace the results of historical and sociological scholarship on the New Testament, take seriously the various masters of suspicion, and simultaneously preserve something valuable from the classic text itself, we need to see how this is to be done. If a Gadamerian view of tradition, conversation, and historicity like the one stressed in Tracy's recent work is to be combined with the transcendental arguments he offered in earlier work or with the neo-Kantian critical theory he now draws from Habermas, we need to be told how the combination is going

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to be carried out. Tracy has every right to defer such tasks as he sees fit. But if he doesn't think this book is the right place to take them on, one wonders how Plurality and Ambiguity is intended to advance the discussion.

Text: "To give an interpretation is to make a claim. To make a claim is to be willing to defend that claim if challenged by others or by the further process of questioning itself " (p. 25).

Commentary: This passage, if taken to mean what it says, is false. I canmake a claim without being willing to defend it. Suppose I am vicious, and never defend my claims, even when I should. Perhaps Tracy means, that if I make a claim, I should be willing to defend it. No matter what the claim is? No matter what the circumstances are? Suppose that I make a claim the truth of which seems so certain that I wouldn't know how to begin defending it if challenged by others. In that case, I might still have the right, epistemically speaking, to make the claim. Wittgenstein, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others discuss many such cases.¹ Or suppose I have claimed that killing Jews merely for sport is morally evil. Might I not reasonably resist defending such a claim, on the theory that anyone who did challenge it didn't deserve an answer?

Text: "It is, after all, reasonable to recall that all argument assumes the following conditions: respect for the sincerity of the other; that all conversation partners are, in principle, equals; saying what one means and meaning what one says; a willingness to weigh all relevant evidence, including one's warrants and backings; a willingness to abide by rules of' validity, coherence, and especially possible contradictions between my theories and my actual performance" (p. 26).

Commentary: This, too, is false, at least if taken to mean what it seems to say. It is perfectly possible, for example, to argue with someone you know to be insincere (and therefore cannot respect for his or her sincerity) or with someone you don't regard as an equal.² The subsequent paragraph suggests, however, that Tracy may be sketching "ideal-speech conditions," which never actually obtain in real life but are nonetheless presupposed (or should be presupposed) as a set of critical norms by actual argument. Tracy does not begin to address doubts, however, on either of two points: first: that all argument in fact

¹Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainly (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?" in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 135-186.

²There is more than one sense, of course, in which you might not treat someone as your equal. For example, you might wrongly fail to acknowledge someone's full moral standing as a fellow human being, given your mistaken beliefs about the inferiority of women or blacks. Or you might rightly insist that your child, your student, or a novice in theology isn't yet able to speak with authority, given your correct beliefs about differential distribution of authority within a social practice. But in either of these two types of case, you can argue with the person in question.

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assumes such conditions, even as a counter-factual ideal; and, second, that our argument should always aim to fulfill such conditions. Did argument in pre-dynastic Egypt implicitly assume such conditions?³ Would the fourth book of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine be better if each step of argumentation meant what it said?⁴

Text: "Whoever fights for hope, fights on behalf of us all. Whoever acts on that hope, acts in a manner worthy of a human being" (p. 114).

Commentary: I am not sure what hope Tracy has in mind here. Two paragraphs before this passage, he speaks of the hope "that all those involved in interpreting our situation and all those aware of our need for solidarity may continue to risk interpreting all the classics of all the traditions." He then refers to the hope "that interpretation will show us a way to resist." To which, if either, of these hopes he is referring remains unclear. But the more pressing question is whether Tracy means to suggest that anybody who acts on such hopes, no matter what means he or she uses toward the ends of solidarity and resistance, acts in a manner worthy of human being. I trust not. He is too decent a man for that. He must have in mind a kind of hope the very content of which is incompatible with unjust acts--the hope that we shall all flourish in fellowship and virtue, a good from which we would alienate ourselves by adopting unjust means in its pursuit.

JEFFREY STOUT

Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

IV

Tracy's book is of immense theological significance. If his methodological injunctions are heeded by other liberal, male, middle-class theologians, we will have a joining of the resources of liberation theologians and liberal theologians. Tracy's work can be read as a method for doing liberation theology from the perspective of privilege. His method includes both a moment of decentering and a moment of reclamation and affirmation. Tracy advocates decentering: acknowledging

³See Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 3, esp. pp. 66-67.

⁴Stanley Fish argues that the fourth book of On Christian Doctrine is a "self-consuming artifact." Augustine begins by proposing to do one thing, perfectly in line with the classical conception of rhetoric, but by the time he's finished it becomes clear that he didn't mean what he said, that he was actually creating expectations in the reader only to deconstruct them, and that he intends to subvert the classical conception of rhetoric for Christian purposes. See Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 21-42. Elsewhere in his book, Fish shows that the self-consuming artifact has a long history. Many of the figures discussed in Plurality and Ambiguity, ch. 3, are masters of the genre. Would Tracy oppose this mode of argumentation as a matter of principle? Probably not, but then I wonder what he means by saying that meaning what one says is a condition of argument.

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the immensity of oppression, an oppression partially carried by valued philosophical and religious traditions and texts. He also recognizes the necessity of learning from those who have been marginalized. Tracy also advocates a reclamation of the resources in the Western tradition that enable a response of compassion and action when confronted with the charge of complicity in structural forms of oppression. Thus, Tracy discusses types of interpretation that can enable those who are privileged to exercise solidarity with the marginalized in work, against radical evil. As one who is oppressed by reason of gender, I welcome his work. As one who is an oppressor by reason of race, I am challenged by it.

Tracy claims that conversation, or adequate interpretation, can "increase the possibilities of meaningful action." He argues that this end can be met only by careful attention to the practice of conversation. Well aware of the dangers of abstract reflection on practices or texts, he challenges the conventions of understanding that lead academics to talk only among themselves. He acknowledges the difficulty that elites have in genuinely hearing the voices of excluded others, yet enjoins a practice of first listening to the poor, to all those who have been marginalized.

All the victims of our discourses and our history have begun to discover their own discourses in ways that our discourse finds difficult to hear, much less listen to. Their voices can seem strident and uncivil-in a word, other. And they are. We have all just begun to sense the terror of that otherness. But only by beginning to listen to those other voices may we also begin to hear the otherness within our own discourse and within ourselves. What we might then begin to hear, above our own chatter, are possibilities we have never dared to dream.

I concur with Tracy's charge to the academy and will explore further the practices constitutive of such open, mutually challenging conversation. Conversation, as Tracy describes it, assumes trust. Trust between those who belong to groups that are oppressed and those who belong to groups that have been, or are still, oppressive is not gained easily, and is rarely obtained through conversation alone. The give and take of genuine conversation assumes respect by the powerful for those who are marginalized and confidence on the part of those who are marginalized. Respect and confidence are borne of action, not of reflection. Respect and confidence are created in acts of solidarity, in acts of working together for justice.

Without a basis of solidarity in action, those who are relatively privileged tend to disparage the pain and the vision of the oppressed. Such disparagement is, unfortunately, present at times in Tracy's work. He states that "it can become too easy to rattle off the usual list of hidden skeletons in the Western closet-those systemic 'isms' that we sometimes know, more often sense, through some discomfort that afflicts us: sexism, racism, classism, elitism, cultural parochialism." A recognition of these "skeletons" is not easy, is not usual, and does not arise from "discomforts." As we work with the victims of oppression, we

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remember that it is not easy to list these forces. It requires courage, persistence, and painfully won self-respect to challenge an ostensibly humane tradition with the account of its complicity in structures of oppression. It has not been easy for women and minorities to raise these concerns. As Tracy acknowledges, such voices are often dismissed as strident and uncivil. We are also accused of a historicist reduction of the meaning of texts.

Not only is it difficult to raise the challenges; the process of becoming aware of them is itself rooted in deep pain. It is unfair to describe this pain as "discomfort." Such a benign phrase makes a travesty of the suffering of women brutalized by rape or battering; it masks the degradation that attends racism and economic exploitation.

In other sections of this book, Tracy speaks eloquently of the costs of structural oppression. The tone of impatience in this passage seems grounded in the condition he so rightly deplores, isolation from those who are oppressed. In the preface, he names the places of conversation central to his work-universities or colleges and an institute working primarily with business leaders. No mention is made of conversation grounded in action with those who are oppressed. Given this primarily academic location, it is not surprising, though still distressing, that more respect is voiced in this one passage for "beloved classics" than for the victims of the hidden legacy of oppression carried within those texts. It is through the practice of solidarity that a genuine conversation can occur in which the emphasis remains on people, and not on texts. We interpret for the sake of humanity and its well-being, and not for the sake of the classics.

Tracy urges intellectuals to expand their interpretation of the Western tradition by including the readings of those who are oppressed and by contrasting these texts with other classics (including paradigmatic events) that are central to the traditions of the oppressed. I am in wholehearted agreement with this suggestion, and following it leads me to a substantive, not methodological, challenge to one of Tracy's conclusions. From my reading of "other" classics, I would dispute his suggestion that authentic interpretation sometimes requires forgetfulness. Tracy acknowledges the power of memory, yet goes on to state that

we also know that sometimes it is important to distance ourselves from the past, even to forget, in order to go on at all. An inability to forget, to let go of painful memories and of the desire for vengeance, can so poison an individual or a culture that it is no longer possible to understand humanly.

Tracy gives as an example of the need for forgetting, the ecumenical Christians in Northern Ireland.

As I have read the works of Afro-American women, and as I have reflected on my own experience of oppression and liberation as a woman, I would argue that only a deeper memory can enable the movement from bitterness and hate to action, to the envisioning of new possibilities.

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Paule Marshall, for example, argues that forgetfulness poisons the efforts of reform of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Forgetting the past, the oppressors are bound to repeat patterns of oppression even in their attempts to help others. Forgetting the legacy of oppression, they repeat its patterns of disrespect for others, of certainty of privilege and the right of control. For the oppressed, forgetfulness leads to being victimized again, accepting partial solutions, not living fully out of a sense of dignity, and believing, therefore, that partial change is all they have a right to expect.¹

The alternative to life-destroying bitterness and to shallow hope is not. forgetting, but a deeper timefulness, a rich memory in which a particular oppression is put in its larger context, a context in which a people can. find the resources that enable survival and transformation. Gloria Naylor describes such a healing memory in her novel, The Women of Brewster Place. Naylor portrays the agony of a woman whose life is. almost destroyed by racism and sexism. These structural evils have resulted in the death of her only child, a two-year old daughter. Ciel is consumed by her daughter's death and by an agony greater than grief. Her healing does not come from forgetting the multiple causes of her tragedy-the oppression of blacks by whites, the oppression of women by men-but through a full memory of the suffering caused by racist and sexist acts. She is held by another woman and, with the support of Mattie's love, remembers both her pain and the pain of other women:

Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and. above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal,, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother's arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slaveships. And she rocked on.²

Mattie leads Ciel to see that she is not alone in her pain. Far from diminishing the significance of Ciel's tragedy, placing it in the context of these other horrors is a recognition of its immensity. Once the pain is fully seen and remembered, healing can begin. It may be paradoxical to the eyes of those who are privileged, but Naylor claims that remembering more of the suffering caused by oppression enables healing.

I interpret Naylor as claiming that we cannot move into the future, we cannot create new possibilities for ourselves and our common life, unless human life is fully honored. Such honor requires a deep grief for the lives destroyed by oppression. Without acknowledging the magnitude of this loss, our love remains shallow, our imagination stunted. In the face of so

¹Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (New York: Random House, 1984) and Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Dutton, 1984).

²Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 103.

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much evil, healing love is impossible without great pain. This is the wisdom carried in the novels of Afro-American women and men, in the music of gospel, blues, and reggae. Even in songs that affirm the beauty of life and the "sheer holy boldness" of resistance,³ there is an emotional undercurrent of pain: a memory and a mourning of the costs of resistance and of the tragic losses that give much of the impulse for resistance. Only as we love humanity enough to remember and to grieve its destruction do we have a love strong enough to withstand the challenge of radical change, the confusion and complexity involved in the redistribution of wealth and power.

Tracy's work speaks most clearly of the need for honesty and openness: honesty about the pluralities constitutive of our world and of the traditions we value; openness to the voices of others and to the negative as well as the positive legacies of our traditions. The power of Tracy's work lies not only in its methodological clarity, but in its passion-love for the classics of the Western tradition, the conviction that rigorous thought can aid responsible action, and compassion for the victims of oppression. With this combination of passion and clarity, Tracy challenges academics to enter a potentially transformative and healing conversation between those who are privileged and those who are marginalized. and oppressed.

SHARON D. WELCH

The Divinity School
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

V

There is no good hermeneutical reason to suppose that any author's intentions should have any privileged status for interpretation. Once a text exists, it exists on its own-open to, indeed vulnerable to, the conversation that is reading. The author becomes one more reader of the work-and one who must support a reading, not with appeals to what "I" intended, but only to what the text actually says.

This sound hermeneutical rule for genuine conversation with any text is one to which both Sallie McFague and I adhere. Nevertheless, it is only "human, all too human" for any author to like a reading of one's work that both articulates and clarifies what the author did intend. McFague's close reading of Plurality and Ambiguity provided me with that kind of rare and happy experience. She states clearly and systematically the central argument of the book: interpretation should be understood on the model of conversation, which, in our parlous time of radical plurality and radical evil, must be acknowledged as porous, multivoiced, conflictual, and open-ended. That conviction, as she insists, led me to structure the book with an interpretation of conversation at the

³Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt-Eaters (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 265.

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beginning followed by a series of increasingly severe "interruptions." These latter are of such magnitude that, in my judgment, the once firm certitude of classical models of dialogue from Plato through Gadamer (and the even firmer certainty embedded in the sufficiency of rational argument from Aristotle through modern hopes for formal, topical, or critical theoretical arguments) must remove their just claims to truth from any claim to certainty. What remains is reasonable hope for reason. Yet, even this chastened hope cannot suffice. Hence, the final chapter insists, as McFague makes clear, that the religions-here interpreted as rhetorics of hope and resistance-can alone ground hope itself in Ultimate Reality.

On all this, McFague and I seem clearly to agree. More needs to be said, however, in response to what her reading clarified for me about certain terms in the text and her suspicions of other moves. First, the clarification. Although I can understand why she chooses the term "inclusiveness" for my position, I am somewhat reluctant to accept it. If "inclusiveness" implies that interpretation as conversation can remove all interruptions, differences, otherness, and "include" them under a common rubric, then I must reject the term "inclusive" as the principal attitude defended in this book. If "inclusive" means openness to otherness, difference, interruption (as McFague also suggests), then I thankfully accept the term-but even here with certain reservations, and ones McFague herself clearly shares. The reason why the text stresses resistance almost as much as hope and "openness to otherness and difference" is to preclude any liberalist motion of openness that never resists the other and the different. Certain forms of difference and otherness (sexism, racism, classism, elitism, anti-Semitism) demand resistance, not openness. They demand exclusion from conversation, not inclusion in it. Lacking such resistance and the various intellectual strategies of interruption of the usual, "civilized" conversation which resistance demands (ideology-critique, feminist theory, genealogical methods, prophetic and mystical hermeneutics of suspicion), the conversation model of interpretation would, indeed, be all too "inclusive." It would, as McFague so nicely puts it, be "too polite, too civilized, too Western, too elitist, too leisured, too male."

McFague's essay also helped me to see that "the analogical imagination" is not merely a "strategy" for conversation, but, as she correctly insists, also a theological conviction. It is the latter that ultimately grounds my own trust and hope in conversation itself. Can that Christian theological conviction be defended once the strictly theological realities of radical plurality and ambiguity are articulated? That is the basic question of the volume I am presently writing. I have become convinced, reluctantly, that neither the classical theological language of analogy nor of dialectic is equal to a firm acknowledgment of either radical difference or genuine otherness. Only a revision of both (and both, as McFague insists, together) could suffice. The uniting of a revised model of a theological analogical imagination with the conversational model of

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interpretation and reason is, as she correctly infers, my principal hope for Christian theology.

It is difficult to respond to Professor Stout's interesting reflections. The difficulty is not the important critical questions he raises, but, initially, the genre in which he chooses to raise them. There is, of course, nothing wrong with the genre "texts with commentary," for, as Stout's skills demonstrate, it can be valuable for expressing a reader's ad hoc positive and negative responses to certain mini-texts within a larger text. The difficulty is that, on the basis of this review, I do not know what Stout's understanding of the argument of the book as a whole is-as distinct from his comments on individual quotations, his several critical questions, his often generous praise, his sociology of knowledge observations, his use of Wittgenstein, and his liking for irony and, occasionally, sarcasm. Before responding to his principal critical comments, therefore, I shall first attempt to infer from his review (as well as from his important book, The Flight From Authority) where our significant agreements and disagreements seem to be. In that context, I can then respond to his individual critical comments and questions.

Neither of us believes in the liberalist assumption of philosophical and theological discourse: a purely autonomous, coherent, unified, and rational self who is capable of grounding all claims to knowledge. This liberalist-foundationalist assumption, although still powerful in our individualist culture, is intellectually a spent force. Its collapse has impelled a number of diverse intellectual, ethical, and religious moves. One such move-one my book defends-is hermeneutical and, in its later forms, probably best described as postmodern. My whole book can be read as a meditation on what the subject is after the death of the ego and why a revised hermeneutical model of conversation is the more fruitful model for reason in a postfoundationalist age.

There are several alternatives to this postmodern hermeneutical route. If I understand him rightly, Stout takes an alternative that may be described not as postmodern but as postliberal. This route, too, takes several forms. Sometimes it is an antimodern and neoconversative one (as in the work of Leo Strauss, represented, recently, by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind). At other times, postliberals appeal to Wittgenstein as bearing the best intellectual resources for our postliberal (and post-Tractatus) period.

I have high respect for this latter option: its antifoundationalist stance and that of hermeneutics closely converge. I also have the highest respect for Wittgenstein's ability (in the Investigations) to help us dissolve false problems rather than continue old ones or invent new ones. But I do have several reservations about postliberal models. First, the hermeneutical model of conversation demands what Wittgensteinians, on the whole, seem too willing to leave to ad hoc arrangements; namely, how the interactions among "language-games" and "ways of life" are to be adjudicated in a postfoundationalist context. It is instructive here

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that Stout never even acknowledges, much less argues against, my claim that conversation rather than argument is the principal category for the kind of interaction we need. Instead, he observes that there are many further questions I must address the relationship between Gadamer's interpretation-as-conversation and Habermas' (for him neo-Kantian, for me transcendental-linguistic) position. He states this in spite of the fact that the first chapters address this very issue in terms of the relationship between an encompassing model of conversation and the necessary but limited role of arguments.

Secondly, postliberal models of a Wittgensteinian sort seem to be suspicious of (but almost never directly argue against) a hermeneutical model of conversation. Their suspicion is revealed in many ways; in Stout's case, in his repeated charge that my "eclecticism" is empowered by a wish for "reconciliation"-indeed, by my presumed desire "to reconcile everything that strikes me, at first blush, as worth saving."

There is no implication in my book of such a desire. Indeed, the central point of the model and the use of the category "interruption" is to disallow any easy liberal reconciliations. This is why the book ends with what Stout can only find puzzling: hope, not reconciliation. A temptation for postliberals-and a temptation, I regret to say, which Stout, in his ironic haste to comment on individual texts that interest or provoke him, readily succumbs to-is to believe that any model that is postfoundationalist (other than the postliberal one) is, by definition, really just tired liberalism with its secret desire to reconcile all.

This kind of problem surfaces in several of Stout's commentaries on individual texts. The problem with his commentary on chapters one and two is that he ignores the argument on conversation, arguments, and truth. The problem in his commentary on chapter three is that he seems to have read another text than the one under discussion. Anyone who reads only Stout's commentary on chapter three (but not the chapter itself) would assume the chapter begins with a strange quote from Nabokov and, then, without reflecting on it, proceeds through "long stretches of name-dropping" to "reduce great thinkers to characters in a farce, their ideas to slogans." Every time a question needs addressing, the text runs on to further names and slogans. In sum: eclectic, too desirous of reconciliation at all costs, hopeless. There may be problems with the argument in that chapter, but Stout has given no aid in seeing what the problems might be. Instead, he offers what can only be called caricature, bizarre at best.

The central argument of chapter three is with Derrida. The early sections are clearly meant to recall the basic questions of the various formulations of the "linguistic turn" before the entry of Derrida. Hence, the need for the introductory descriptions of the two reigning and opposed instrumentalist motives of language (Romanticism and positivism) and the properly brief descriptions of the breakthrough strategies of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Saussure. In the structure of the

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chapter, these introductory observations set the basic context within which Derrida's position-which is analyzed and interpreted at the length required-can be understood and assessed. My agreement with Derrida is made clear, as is my serious disagreement. This, in turn, leads to a clarification of why so many postmodern (though not postliberal) thinkers have been lead to develop a notion of "discourse." This latter notion is clarified, while, at the same time, the reader is reminded that no universal agreement exists among various (and often conflicting) discourse-analysts on the nature of discourse.

Is this strategy really so strange? The argument of the chapter is with Derrida. All that precedes and follows is there to clarify either the context within which his position emerges or the character of my conclusion on discourse. The argument may be wrong. But it will not be answered by being first ignored and then replaced by a caricature of Stout's own invention. If his reading of chapter three is an example of the "careful attention to detail" and need to ask "further questions" that he urges upon me, I must decline the invitation.

A similar problem emerges in Stout's reflections on the "falsity" of my descriptions of the conditions for true argument. After several irrelevant, because strictly empirical, observations on arguments, claims, and sincerity, Stout admits that, as the text states, I am, in fact, defending ideal-speech conditions for argument. What counts as argument and not some other phenomenon (for example, confrontation) fulfills such conditions. There are, as the book argues at some length, other truth-producing procedures. Above all, conversation as distinct from argument allows an acknowledgment of the claim to truth in the manifestations of art and religion (which are not, on the whole, argumentative). Moreover, the acknowledgment of language's destabilizing role allows for all the disclosures one could wish from Stanley Fish's "self-consuming artifacts." Though they may not have argued in pre-dynastic Egypt, they may have produced legitimate truth claims, nonetheless. These we may still find disclosive of truth through serious conversations; and we can argue about them if we find this "interruption" necessary. But sometimes-when listening to Mozart, when at prayer, in worship, or when meditating-argument is inappropriate. In such cases, truth is disclosed in other ways. Isn't that the kind of reasonable advice that Wittgenstein tried to give us? On Certainty is a wonderful meditation (and, at times, argument) on the need to distinguish when we do and do not need to argue. Indeed, Plurality and Ambiguity is clearly in agreement with Wittgenstein on exactly this point.

The differences, which are real and perhaps irreconcilable, between postliberals and postmoderns lie in the discussion over which strategy for dealing with our postfoundationalist position is most adequate and most promising. On that issue, the discussion has barely begun. For initiating this increasingly important discussion with such sharpness and vigor, I

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thank Jeffrey Stout. I hope the conversation will continue in the future. There are few more crucial issues than whether a postmodern or a postliberal strategy is best following the collapse of foundationalism.

Professor Welch's review demonstrates the insight, directness, and passion that mark all her work. I am grateful for her generous opening and closing comments, and express my hope, too, that my book may hell) to encourage precisely the alliances she highlights.

Welch's first major criticism is pointed and demands further reflection and some self-correction on my part-and, perhaps, on hers as well. It is a little strange that Welch gives the quote she does without the beginning of the sentence: "When we risk conversation with the classics, it can become too easy ...." As that introductory phrase makes clear, the comment she objects to so strongly is (as both the paragraph preceding it and the introductory phrase she omits make clear) not making a general observation on the "ease" of facing sexism, racism, classism, elitism, and cultural parochialism. Rather, it is simply refer.ring to the fact that facing the classics with all their concrete ambiguity and plurality is a more fruitful way to acknowledge these evils than simply by announcing these relatively abstract categories.

This seems clear in the text, so I must ask myself how so careful El reader as Welch could read it otherwise. I don't pretend to know the full answer to this question, but perhaps self-correction on my part is in order. The word "discomfort," which seems most provocative to Welch, is, in retrospect, an unfortunate choice. Even for the limited point the phrase is making, the word "pain" would, indeed, be more accurate as a description of the experience involved. I acknowledge that and thank Welch for helping me to see it.

A similar problem emerges with her criticism regarding memory and forgetting. This time she gives a quote that clearly says "sometimes." In the text, an example of one such time for "forgetting" is given: the need of both Protestants and Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland to follow the lead of the many courageous ecumenical persons in that terrifying situation and learn ways to "forget" and, Christianly, to forgive. Welch's reluctance to acknowledge the point of that example (the only one I give) is disturbing. The situation in Northern Ireland is among the most painful and seemingly intractable in the world. Part of the problem, as many Christians and secular Irish have argued, is precisely the refusal of so many, both Catholic and Protestant, to let go of their impacted memories of a horrifying past to find ways to forgive and to forget. There is no suggestion here or anywhere in my book that we should disown the memory of the suffering of the oppressed. Indeed, the notion of the subversive memory of suffering (from Walter Benjamin) serves as a principal motif of the entire book.

"Sometimes" simply means sometimes; clearly, not "all times" or "no times." Northern Ireland is one example of that sometimes. At other times, as in the powerful examples Welch gives from Afro-American

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women, the situation is entirely different. Here any plea for forgetting would be a travesty of the facts and an insult to persons. The same is true of many other memories of oppression, especially, the need not to forget the Holocaust. Most of the time what is needed is the "deep memory" Welch so powerfully portrays. At the same time, the sentences Welch quotes on forgetting are, I still believe, true for such situations as Northern Ireland. In fact, the sentence immediately following the one Welch quotes serves to acknowledge that difference: "To discern the difference [between when to remember and when to forget] demands powers of critical reflection as well as that courage that informs any historical consciousness."

DAVID TRACY

The Divinity School
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois