Double Reading

Double Reading names the hermeneutical and ethical posture demanded by what Peter Rollins, in peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, calls the "law of love" — a mode of engaging scripture and moral life that holds two irreducible obligations in permanent, non-synthesisable tension: on one side, the singular, open-ended encounter with the concrete other (the neighbour, the stranger, the one in front of you), and on the other, the weight of received tradition and its accumulated wisdom. Neither pole can be collapsed into the other or resolved into a higher unity. The double reading is "double" precisely because it refuses the comfort of a single, closed interpretive key: no ethical rulebook, no codified norm, no final hermeneutical decision can absorb the surplus that the encounter with the other always generates.

This structure is directly a theological re-inscription of the Lacanian insight that the law and desire are asymmetrical. Just as the moral law cannot fully account for the Real of desire — the beyond that exceeds every rule — so the Christian tradition cannot exhaust the encounter with the living other. The double reading enacts, within a theological register, the impossibility of closing the gap between universal norm and singular situation: it keeps that gap open as the very site of genuine moral responsibility, preventing any "absolution" from the hard work of decision. It is, in this sense, a practice calibrated to structural lack — the lack in the Other (S(Ø)) guarantees that no tradition, however rich, can deliver a complete ethical algorithm.

Within peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, Double Reading functions as the practical-hermeneutical corollary of the book's central theological argument: that love exceeds and fulfils ethics in the manner of a radical surplus, analogous to what Lacan would call surplus-jouissance — the excess that overflows every symbolic accounting. The concept directly cross-references the Law of Love (the only genuine "foundation," which is itself a non-foundation insofar as it cannot be codified) and Beyond (the dimension of experience that exceeds the pleasure principle, here transposed into the excess of genuine encounter over rule-governed ethics). The double reading is the hermeneutical practice that keeps the subject exposed to that beyond rather than retreating into the security of a closed text.

The concept also bears a structural relation to Lack and Ethics of Psychoanalysis: just as Lacanian ethics refuses the "service of goods" and insists that the subject remain answerable to the Real of desire, the double reading refuses the "service of tradition" as a mere rulebook — it insists the reader remain answerable to the singular other. The connection to Das Ding is also operative: the living encounter with the other retains something of the Thing's unassimilable alterity, and the double reading is precisely the refusal to fully symbolise (domesticate) that encounter into codified norms. The concept might also be read as a theological re-inscription of Sublation — but crucially, it resists sublation: neither the traditional pole nor the encountered-other pole is aufgehoben into a higher synthesis. The two readings remain irreducibly two, and it is their non-synthesis that guarantees ongoing moral seriousness. Universality enters insofar as the Christian tradition supplies the universal horizon, which the singular encounter perpetually exceeds and renegotiates.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

It is this double reading that ensures that we are never absolved from the difficult job of making moral decisions. The double reading requires not only a commitment to listening to and serving the people we meet, but also a deep respect for the Christian tradition.

The phrase "never absolved" is theoretically loaded: absolution would mean the closing of lack, the fantasy of a complete Other that delivers a final moral answer. By insisting on a permanent double obligation — "listening to and serving the people we meet" (the singular, Real encounter) alongside "deep respect for the Christian tradition" (the Symbolic universal) — the formulation structurally preserves the gap between Real and Symbolic as the irreducible site of ethical responsibility.