Beyond the Limits of Language: Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631670286, 9783653062007, 3631670281

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Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Agata Wilczek

Beyond the Limits of Language Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse

The book explores the way in which apophatic discourse of negative theology has illuminated contemporary critical theory. It demonstrates the significance of apophasis both in Jacques Derrida’s search for a “new language,” responsive to singularity and alterity, and in the analyses of the experience of transgression developed by Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille and Michel Foucault. Following Derrida’s understanding of negative theology as a transgressive concept that transcends the linguistic, historical and religious contexts from which it arises, the book proves that apophasis is not merely a discourse on language restricted to one theological tradition, but should be viewed as a mode of dialogue and openness, essential to all responsible thinking.

Agata Wilczek is a research and teaching assistant at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia (Poland). Her research interests focus on contemporary philosophy, postsecularism and Christian mysticism.

Beyond the Limits of Language

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 44

LITERARY AND AgataCULTURAL Wilczek THEORY

 

General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

 

   

Beyond the Limits VOLUME 44 of Language Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse

       

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilczek, Agata, 1986- author. Title: Beyond the limits of language : apophasis and transgression in contemporary theoretical discourse / Agata Wilczek. Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011850| ISBN 9783631670286 (Print) | ISBN 9783653062007 (E-Book) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages--Philosophy. | Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. | Negative theology. | Discourse analysis, Literary. Classification: LCC P105 .W63 2016 | DDC 400--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011850 The project was funded by the National Science Centre allocated on the basis of the decision number DEC-2012/07/N/HS2/00669.

Reviewed by Jacek Gutorow. ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-67028-6 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-06200-7 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-06200-7 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2016 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

I dedicate this book to the improbable, that is to say, to what is. To a spirit of vigil. To the negative theologies. To a poetry longed for, of rains. Of waiting and of wind. To a great realism that aggravates instead of resolving, that designates the obscure, that takes clarity for clouds that can always be parted. That has concern for a clarity high and impracticable. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

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Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................9 Part One: (Un)saying God: Jacques Derrida’s Dream of “New Language”.........................................................25 Chapter One: Derrida’s (Negative) “Theological Turn”?........................................28 1. “Theological Turn” or Political Comeback?....................................................... 28 2. Religious Readings of Deconstruction............................................................... 33 3. Deconstruction and Negative Theology............................................................. 42 Excursus: Mode and Idiom........................................................................................63 Chapter Two: Dialogue...............................................................................................67 1. Two Voices, Two Visions, Two Powers: Together and/or Separately.............. 69 2. Responding to the Call: “After-writing” and Rethinking God......................... 80 Chapter Three: Silence................................................................................................98 1. Silence as a “Modality of Speech”...................................................................... 100 2. Speaking Of and Within Promise..................................................................... 105 3. Keeping God’s Silence......................................................................................... 110

Part Two: Language and Beyond: Apophatic Transgression........ 121 Chapter Four: The Linguistic Turn of Transgression.......................................... 124 1. The Step/Not Beyond.......................................................................................... 126 2. Nothing Except Nuance: the Neuter................................................................. 128 3. Language as Non-Vision.................................................................................... 138 4. Writing as the “Essential Experience”............................................................... 145 5. Apophatic Theology and the Space of Literature............................................ 155

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Chapter Five: Transgression and Transcendence................................................. 163 1. Transgression and the Sacred............................................................................ 164 2. Transgression as the Path to God...................................................................... 169 3. Transcendence and the Sense of Transgression.............................................. 173

Conclusions.......................................................................................................... 181 Bibliography......................................................................................................... 185

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Introduction How would what still comes to us under the domestic, European, Greek, and Christian term of negative theology, of negative way, of apophatic discourse, be the chance of an incomparable translability in principle without limit? Not of a universal tongue, of an ecumenism or of some consensus, but of a tongue to come that can be shared more than ever? Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom

In his 1971 landmark essay, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” Cleanth Brooks identifies irony as a crucial trope of his age, arguing that as “an acknowledgment of the pressures of context” it best reflects a host of historical circumstances: [I]n the poetry of our time, this pressure reveals itself strikingly. A great deal of modern poetry does use irony as its special and perhaps its characteristic strategy. For this there are reasons, and compelling reasons. To cite only a few of these reasons: there is the breakdown of a common symbolism; there is the general scepticism as to universals; not at least important, there is the depletion and corruption of the very language itself, by advertising and by the mass-produced arts of radio, the moving picture and pulp fiction.1

While Brooks’s diagnosis of his historical era and the state of literature and culture in the second half of the twentieth century has reverberated in the subsequent decades, yet, at the same time the vision of irony being the final word of Western culture has not been so eagerly embraced. A decade later, while comparing our times with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, William Gass observes – in a tone that could undeniably be called “ironic” – that though we live in less joyous times, nevertheless they are undoubtedly truer: “The universal impulse to believe,” as Emerson both manifested and expressed it, was a positive in his time as is negative in ours, because beliefs are our pestilence, Scepticism, these days, is the only intelligence. The vow of a fool – never to be led astray or again made a fool of – is our commonest resolution, doubt, disbelief, detachment, irony, scorn,

1 Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd ed., ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), p. 763.

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measure our disappointment, since mankind has proved even a poorer god than those who did not exist.2

Under the guise of irony, Gass seems to suggest that the costs of “our disappointment” we have so easily thrown off as if they were a nothing, in fact, represent a profound something, a denial of the “impulse to believe” – albeit in a negative way. As irony, together with doubt and detachment, are now envisaged as the only tools to deal with the world around us, it has become extremely difficult to find a discourse able to express that which used to matter so much to Emerson and his antecedents, and still do matter to some of us, even if we tend to deny it so vehemently. Therefore, as George Steiner firmly states, although “[t]he relaxed ironies and liberalities of this position are attractive,” we cannot disregard the possibility “that they inhibit not only a deeper, more vulnerable access to the matter of the generation of meaning and of form, but that they are, themselves, the reflection of a certain reduced condition of the poetic and of the act of creation on culture.”3 A similar observation is also made by Tobias Wolff, for whom “[i]rony” often proves itself as “a way of not talking about the unspeakable,” a way “to deflect or even to deny what is difficult, painful, dangerous – that is, consequential.”4 Interestingly, Wolff himself admits his own need of irony: “I can’t live without it,” thus expressing the prevailing mood of his time; yet at the same time he is cognizant of the dangers of letting oneself be seduced by irony: “I do think it has its temptations, and one of them of course is to make flippant what is not to be taken flippantly.”5 While the present work does not intend to question the view of irony as a dominating trope of recent times, yet, in the light of the above remarks, it shall propose to acknowledge apophaticism as a parallel trope or a linguistic strategy, a conjunct of irony, which has proven capable of counterbalancing the latter by offering a mode of discourse to talk about the obscure, the unfathomable, the unsayable – through the negative tropology, through the silences and failures of language, disconcerting gaps, interstices and fissures, through the denials, erasures, contradictions, insubstantial presences, and the unspoken supplements that violate the signifying fixities of any text. Hence, the main aim of this study is to 2 William Gass, Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 21. 3 George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 200. 4 Tobias Wolff, “Introduction,” in Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff (Green Harbor, MA: Wampeter Press, 1983), p. x. 5 Wolff, “Introduction,” p. x.

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provide an analysis of apophasis in contemporary theoretical discourse and to demonstrate parallels between its logic, or rather a/logic, and postmodern textual practices. The following discussion is grounded in the conviction that the situation of contemporary culture makes it peculiarly receptive to a great variety of apophatic discourses, the evidence of which can be found in an explosive proliferation of creative and critical endeavours drawing from and transforming traditional apophatic currents in remarkable new ways. Following J. P. Williams’s remark from 2000 about a “budding renaissance of apophatic theology”6 and witnessing the abundance of studies on the logic and language of apophatic discourse,7 it might be suggested that we have arrived at a predominantly apophatic phase. The resurgence of this ancient tradition is not reduced solely to theology or religious studies but, as William Franke insists, has become “a major topic in all the disciplines of the humanities,”8 with diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse intersecting literature, philosophy and the arts. The reasons for this ongoing interest and appropriation of apophasis shall be traced in the peculiar state of our contemporary culture whose rational foundations for thought and discourse have fallen into crisis.

6 J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2. 7 Including the works of Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence I: The Rise and Fall of Logos (Bonn: Hanstein 1986) and From Word to Silence II: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986); Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (London: SCM Press, 1992), Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon: 1980), four volumes edited by Steven T. Katz: Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London: Sheldon Press, 1978); Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Mysticism and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mysticism and Sacred Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994); J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Knut Alfsvåg, What No Mind Has Conceived: On the Significance of Christological Apophaticism (Peeters: Leuven 2010); Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (eds), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8 William Franke, On What Cannot be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts. Volume 1: Classic Formulations, ed. William Franke (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 3.

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George Steiner rightly points out that we live in the times of “radical flinching,” which occurs in the face of the mysterious, the spiritual. It is a sense of discomfort, even “embarrassment we feel in bearing witness to the poetic, to the entrance into our lives of the mystery of otherness in art and music,” which “terrorizes even the confident.” As a result, we strongly feel the intellectual and societal duty to hide our embarrassment, to mask it with sophisticated forms of rationalizations, to “play it cool.” 9 However, at the same time, we have started to become embarrassed not only with our past pieties but also with our modern Western culture, grounded in the unshakable belief in the possibility of the rational control of the world by autonomous human subjects, “masters and possessors of nature,”10 the sole creators of their own existence. Through this self-affirmation of self-producing humanity, through scientific and technological progress and the development of institutions that guarantee freedom and security, the nature has been stripped of its frightening, inexplicable, mysterious elements, and a society has reached a state when God as the ultimate Cause and Logos is no longer needed. The situation of humanity which had finally liberated itself from religious ties and become free to take control of history was most famously depicted by Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1882 parable of a madman who proclaims the “death of God” to the baffled onlookers gathered on the marketplace.11 Yet, this spreading banishment of transcendent dimension has not necessarily been interpreted euphorically, but more and more often – tragically or nostalgically. As Ilse N. Bunhof and Laurens ten Kate remark: […] Western modernity and its philosophical reflection contain both latent and open signs of embarrassment at this self-made world of self-production. The affirmation of the Western subject and his or her rational project seems to be interrupted regularly by tendencies and voices that express skepticism and that point to an ‘outside’ the subject and to the limit of rationality. At this limit the question again arises whether humanity is sufficient unto itself and whether in its claim to be able to live without God and in its desire to exclude every dimension that transcends its existence humanity is wandering into a dead end.12

9 Steiner, Real Presences, p. 178. 10 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), p. 35. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sec. 125. 12 Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, “Echoes of an Embarrassment: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology – an Introduction,” in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, eds. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kafe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), p. 4.

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Instead of triumphant shouts elevating humanity and human reason, echoes of deep embarrassment and discomfort can be heard in various corners of Western culture. For the “death of God” does not only symbolically mark a turning point in the history of human development, a new stage of human emancipation from divinely power, but it also initiates an experience that still haunts modernity and postmodernity: the experience of loss, emptiness and nothingness. This experience was already prophesied by Nietzsche, who wondered whether with the sacrifice of God we have not in fact sacrificed ourselves “for nothingness”: “Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and, out of cruelty against oneself, worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness – this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising.”13 The perplexing question put to us by Nietzsche’s madman is whether we are able to live in this empty space without “outside” and survive the last cruelty we have imposed on ourselves by sacrificing ourselves-as-God for nothingness; or whether the traces of transcendence still remain and continue to work in our Western culture. This is the “paradoxical mystery” of which Nietzsche speaks, a double sacrifice present in his words “God is dead,” which cannot be treated as a statement of truth or a stable proposition, but as an evocation referring us to an ambivalent experience. As Nietzsche himself suggests, the meaning of “the death of God” unfolds in at least two directions. Within the first perspective, God has to be sacrificed to enable humanity to liberate itself – from God – through reason. This self-emancipatory deed results in the development of secularization, whereby the old God is replaced by human reason. However, by subjugating the whole world and instrumentalizing all Being in a movement toward appropriation, human reason becomes a new “god,” and, paradoxically, a new, “secular” religion is established – a religion without exterior, without transcendence. However, the second possible interpretation of Nietzsche’s ambiguous dictum draws a vision of humanity, which, having liberated itself from the new god, that is reason, sacrifices itself and, as a result, is left in a meaningless space, deprived of any goal, after the death of both the old God and humanity-as-God.14 Hence, “the death of God” shall be read not merely as a symbol of historical and cultural analysis 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), sec. 55, p. 63. 14 The death of God as a vision of the end of humanity is also explored in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) and Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982).

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of a stage of human development, a one-time occurrence that has given rise to modernity, but an event which recurs incessantly, not so much to guide as to constantly disrupt our culture. As Nietzsche points out, modern humanity is forced to constantly pay for its decision to live without God: “who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not greatness of this deed too great for us?”15 The idea of “compensation,” proposed by the author of The Gay Science and endorsed by many philosophers following him, is to surpass our humanity and in this transhumanizing movement to reach the stage of Übermensch. After “the old god is dead,” it might seem that an “unending horizon” has been opened for the “free spirits.” As Nietzsche writes: “We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us –indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us.”16 This infinite horizon, however, is empty, uninhabitable, resembling a sea, of which Nietzsche speaks: “the sea, our sea, lies open.”17 Still, this very emptiness and meaninglessness create an opportunity for a new experience of transcendence which no longer exists in a relationship to the God who is the Highest Being, but to the God who is dead; but his “death” is not the simple negation of his existence, for it is in his very absence that God proves that he is God. While interpreting Nietzsche’s parable, Maurice Blanchot draws our attention to the madman’s complaint: “I have come too soon,” insisting that there will never be the right time for him to come and announce the death of God as an actual and complete event since the world will never be ready to understand his laments. That is why “God is dead” cannot live in Nietzsche as knowledge bringing an answer, but as the refusal of an answer, the negation of a salvation, the “no” he utters to this grandiose permission to rest, to unload oneself onto an eternal truth, which is God for him. “God is dead” is a task, and a task that has no end. History carries with it the moment that it goes beyond. “God is dead, but men are such that there will still, perhaps for millennia, be caves in which one will show his shadow…. And we … we still must conquer his shadow.” The Death of God keeps the sacred, enigmatic quality of the sacrifice that its name evokes.18

15 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 125, p. 181. 16 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 124, p. 180. 17 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 343, p. 280. 18 Maurice Blanchot, “On Nietzsche’s Side,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 292.

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Since the death of God humanity has been marked by its own “death” and “end.” In order to reach its autonomous completion it killed God, yet this deed has led to the destruction of the movement of history and to the end of humanity. In history unfolding itself without reaching completion, the shadow of God will forever remain and his death will return eternally in different forms: as the death of God or as the death of divinized humanity. It is most justifiable to argue that this eternal return of God and his death finds its powerful and presumably unexpected manifestation in our secularized times. It seems incontestable today that for a few decades we have been in the midst of a “theological turn” in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory (after ethical and political shifts in the 1980s and 1990s), a turn which is inscribed within a broader framework of “return of the religious.”19 As Frederic Jameson notices, 19 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in: Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Andijar, trans. Samuel Weber (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 42–101 (p. 78). An early, significant analysis of this “turn” is offered by Dominique Janicaud’s Le Tournant théologique de la phenomenologie française (Paris: L’Éclat, 1991); English translation: Phenomenology of the “Theological Turn” (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), and later by Hent de Vries’s Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Further examinations of this philosophical phenomenon are proliferate, including: Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Pat Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Mary Bryden, Deleuze and Religion (London: Routledge, 2000); Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion, (London: Routledge, 2000); Kevin Hart, Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009); Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press 2008); Michael Purcell, Levinas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: The MIT Press 2003). The attempts to track down the source of this contemporary trend are provided by such scholars as Philippa Berry, who ascribes it to a rethinking of Heidegger’s ideas, or Gianni Vattimo, who relates it to a postmodern crisis of meta-narratives and considers the possible ways of approaching “the religious need of common consciousness independently of the framework of Enlightenment critique.” See Philippa Berry, “Introduction,” in Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, eds. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–8 (p. 6), and Gianni Vattimo,

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“religion is once again very much on the agenda of any serious attempt to come to terms with the specificity of our own time.”20 The problem of the death of God and the question about the viability and thinkability of a culture without “outside” – posed but left without an answer by Nietzsche – have become today a subject of a series of cultural philosophical reflections, which strive to find the ways of thinking of a place for transcendence in the world which cannot deny its own secularized situation. Nietzsche’s enigmatic words, revealing God’s unbearable appearance and disappearance, have been given exceptional intensity and complex ambivalence by the double experience of postmodernity. On the one hand, this experience arose from the aforementioned discomfort and embarrassment with the principles of metaphysics of presence founding all Western thought and discourse. This discontent, resulting in the “crisis of onto-theology,” in fact had its roots in a critique of modern culture, with its Enlightenment thinking, affirmation of reason, self-emancipation of human subject and secularization. On the other side of this experience, or rather at the heart of it, there emerges a passion to speak and think about transcendence, the “outside,” the Other, the Unknown. This new way of thinking is extremely sensitive and open to all signs and echoes of exteriority and alterity, which cannot be integrated or excluded by modern culture. They come to us from different directions and different historical epochs, arising from the margins of our culture only to fade again. Within one of these margins the echo of apophatic theology can be heard. This echo of the other, of a desire to interact with transcendence, has been at work at various stages in the history of Western culture when confidence in the Logos flagged dramatically and language entered “The Trace of the Trace,” in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 79–94 (p. 84). It is also worth mentioning that the interest in “the postmodern return of God” has found its forum in the series of conferences organized regularly by John Caputo at Villanova University and Syracuse University, and in a slew of publications ensuing from it (John D. Caputo & Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley & Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), Questioning God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; John D. Caputo & Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005; John D. Caputo & Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), Transcendence and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007; John D. Caputo & Linda Alcoff,(eds.), St. Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009; John D. Caputo & Linda Alcoff (eds.), Feminism, Sexuality and the Return of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 20 Frederic Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), p. 166.

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into a generalized crisis. Now, in the postmodern times, it resonates once again and unexpectedly powerfully among a host of philosophers, cultural and literary theorists, writers or artists. If we are to understand the reasons for the intense receptivity of apophatic discourse to contemporary thought and trace the points of contact between these two seemingly distant fields, a brief discussion of the meaning of apophasis and its roots, which are to be found in the tradition of negative theology and mysticism,21 seems to be a prerequisite. However, as the wide contemporary scholarship on apophaticism proves, it is extremely difficult to identify any consensus view on what “apophasis” or “negative theology” is. Despite numerous attempts to delimit it, apophasis remains recalcitrant to all definition. As the experience of the unsayable, it resists any effort of speech to articulate it; all that can be said about it fails to attain anything like its “essence.” Analogously, “negative theology” cannot be considered as a static concept, a set of theological tenets and practices, which could be sharply delineated and unequivocally unified under a common rubric; rather, its nature is elusive and aporetic. Moreover, while defining this term, we inevitably circumscribe it within the Western onto-theology, which it so strongly opposes. How then could any study of “apophasis” talk about it? Yet, how could it not? Hence, it is with apologies and respect for that which is beyond our comprehension that I shall dare to trace the parameters of apophasis in the hope that a very basic and vague definition which I will attempt to provide could – for all its inadequacy – serve as a valid point of departure for the more detailed reflections that follow. In its original employment by Plato and Aristotle, apophasis simply meant negation, a negative proposition or a denial. Neoplatonists, followed by Christian negative theologians, most notably Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, as well as Renaissance mystics such as St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila, extend the term to mean the negation of language in the face of what exceeds its possibilities of representation. Within the context of theological tradition apophasis forms a response to the transcendence of infinite God, which even the most daring linguistic ventures cannot express. In Denys Turner’s definition, apophatic theology is a “speech which, in the face of the unknowability of God, falls infinitely short of the mark.” It is “that speech about God which is the failure of speech.” Turner explains: “It follows from the unknowability of God that there

21 Throughout this study, the terms apophatic theology, negative theology and mystical theology are used interchangeably as numerous contemporary thinkers do not differentiate between them in their texts.

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is very little that can be said about God: or rather, since most theistic religions actually have a great number of things to say about God that follows from the unknowability of God is that we can have very little idea of what all these things said of God mean.”22 While acknowledging the absolute unknowability and irreducibility of the divine to human thought as well as insisting on his radical otherness from all human images of him, negative theology employs apophatic discourse as a way of approaching the divine not by affirmative language but by negative, paradoxical, contradictory mode of discourse which persistently exposes the failures of language to grasp God’s transcendence. In apophatic discourse, so widely reappropriated in the humanities and arts, words constantly negate themselves in order to evoke what is beyond them, beyond the limits of language altogether. As Turner explicates, “[t]he apophatic is the linguistic strategy of somehow showing by means of language that which lies beyond language.” 23 Therefore, “apophasis” does not merely refer to the strategy of negating the propositional, but it implies a deeper sense of negation – a negation of language per se. It is about discourse, indicating the utter inability of language to express what infinitely exceeds it; yet it is not only about discourse itself as by exposing the intrinsic limits of language it also demonstrates its being insufficient onto itself and surpassed by what it cannot say, which is neither discourse nor anything that can be incorporated into discourse. Being touched by something it cannot put into words, in the face of which it is left speechless, apophatic discourse testifies to some dimension of experience which has traditionally been treated under the rubric of ontology. As William Franke suggests, “[t]his realm is redefined by apophasis as the open space into which discourse opens at the limits of what it is able to articulate – as what it cannot formulate and determine in terms of itself. So beyond its necessary self-critical moment, apophatic discourse is all about this something other, other than itself, other than discourse altogether.”24

22 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 20. 23 Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 34. 24 William Franke, “Apophasis and the Turn of Philosophy to Religion: From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negation of Theology,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 60 (2006), p. 67.

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Even if this “something other,” the inexpressible cannot be made manifest “itself,” “directly” at all, it nonetheless “shows itself ”25 and there must be some way of “showing” what cannot be said. The ultimate apophatic expression shall be silence, nevertheless, this silence as negation of saying in fact “says” and its modes and methods are innumerable. Driven by the irresistible impulse to “speak,” apophasis has developed a paradoxically rich discourse with its own logic or rather a/logic, self-contradictory and self-unsaying techniques and devices that make up the repertoire of its rhetoric, such as grammatical negation, oxymoron, paradox, aporia, ellipsis, contradiction, irony, anacoluthon, double prepositions, cleft units, etc. Yet, while stretching language to the unsayable, it can only touch upon this “beyond” of language by endless withdrawal from representation, by interrupting and undoing discourse, by annulling itself, leaving only a trace of that which it can never re-present but can only mark as vanishing, inaccessible. It is in this very cancellation of expression that language, by its self-unsaying linguistic manoeuvres, can hint at what it cannot directly convey, “perform (rather than assert) a referential openness.”26 This is the understanding of apophasis in performative terms, which is most fully developed by Michael Sells in his groundbreaking work Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Having pointed out that it is impossible to say that God is transcendent without in some way naming him, Sells presents apophasis as a mode of discourse that forms the best response to this aporia of ineffability: instead of leading to silence, it accepts the dilemma between naming and unnaming as a genuine, irresolvable aporia; yet it does not simply states it but rather performs through the ”language of unsaying.” While the term “apophasis” was originally treated as synonymous with the act of negation, Sells insists that etymologically, it means more than this: it is an act of un-saying or speaking-away. Following the understanding of theology as an interplay between kataphatic (speaking-with) and apophatic (speaking-away), demonstrated most thoroughly in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, Sells maintains that “[e]very act of unsaying presupposes a previous saying.”27 The logical impasse of ineffability forces the infinite linguistic regress in which unstable and dynamic discourse incessantly turns back upon its own propositions, transforming normal logical and semantic structures and 25 “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles Kay Ogden (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.522, p. 107. 26 Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 8. 27 Sells, Mystical Languages, p. 3.

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generating unresolvable paradoxes. In an endless series of retractions it denies what it says only to further deny that denial, to unsay even its negative statements – ad infinitum. This process ultimately creates a tension where it becomes possible, yet only momentarily, to stand in the in-between, between saying and unsaying. It is this very tension which makes the discourse meaningful. Within the performative reading of apophasis provided by Sells, mystical union is considered to be enacted in language that effaces grammatical distinctions between subject and object and thereby collapses reference. Apophatic discourse of negative theology, which pivots around negations, denials and a rhetoric of absence, resonates with the secular notions of otherness, absence and difference, developed in the contemporary intellectual environment, where negation is frequently regarded as more appealing than affirmation since it captures something basic of the spirit of the postmodern times, reflecting reality as process, disjunctive, fissured and ultimately resistant to any schematization, and the self as dissolved and fragmented. In 1968, Gilles Deleuze wrote that difference is “manifestly in the air,” and indeed the thinking of difference has widely characterised continental philosophy down to the present day, most significantly in the writings of such thinkers as Deleuze himself, Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan or Emmanuel Levinas.28 The critical revolution of recent decades has led to the dramatic loss of confidence in the Logos, in the ability of the word to grasp reality and disclose truth. Rethinkings of language as a form of lack and inadequacy, and the recognition of the negative play of the signifier have made silence, unspeakability, absence and negativity significant dimensions of postmodern textual practice. In the light of this collapse of verbal assurance it might be argued that Western culture has entered an apophatic stage, characterised by widespread worries about the reliability of words, refusal of rational discourse and attendance to the ruptures and silences that displace the discourse and break the circuits of sense, opening it to the nonsense or surplus of sense. Unable to dispose of language altogether, contemporary theory explores its negative operations, its denials, erasures, contradictions. As has been already indicated by a significant body of scholarship that has been growing in the last decades, the “negative” operations of language and representation regarding God (Thomas J.J. Altizer’s discourse on the “death of God,” Mark C. Taylor’s a/theology, Georges Bataille’s atheology), human subject (critique of subjectivity offered by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida’s dissolution

28 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. xix.

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of cogito, Michel Foucault’s “negative anthropology”), or the functioning of language and representation only in and through their silences and failures (Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot) are, in fact, fundamental to the decidedly premodern traditions of apophatic theology and its textual practices. The argument of this work maintains that these two spheres of questioning, at once so close and so distant, the premodern and postmodern reflections on language and its interstices, can and should be read in light of one another. Given a wealth of contemporary critical, not to mention literary, texts that have creatively transcribed and theorized anew a classical theological theme of apophasis within the postmodern landscape, it is not possible within the scope of this study to traverse such a vast territory. Therefore, instead of making futile efforts to engulf all relevant instances of the presence of apophasis in contemporary theoretical discourse, I am merely attempting to suggest by the selected theoretical pieces the powerfully apophatic thrust of postmodern writing diffusely operating throughout various areas of thought and creation. It goes without saying that many extremely significant currents of thinking have been omitted or given insufficient attention, for example Jean Luc-Marion’s notion of “God without [sans] Being”29 and his phenomenology of gift; Michel Foucault’s “thought from the outside”30 and his “negative anthropology;”31 psychoanalytic linguistic formulations which strain beyond words towards the unarticulable (Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva),32 or feminist

29 Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) or Jean Luc-Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kossky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 30 Arthur Bradley, “Thinking the Outside: Foucault, Derrida and Negative Theology,” Textual Practice, 16 (2002), pp. 57–74. 31 James Bernauer, “The Prisons of Man: An Introduction to Foucault’s Negative Theology,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 27/4 (December 1987), pp. 365–80. See also James Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Amherst, New York: Humanities Press, 1990), Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion, (London: Routledge, 2000); James Bernauer, Jeremy Carrette (eds), Michel Foucault and Theology: the Politics of Religious experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 32 See Michael A. Sells and Richard E. Webb, “Psychoanalysis and the Mystical Language of ‘Unsaying,’” Theory & Psychology, 5/2 (1995), pp. 195–215; Edith Wyschogrod, David Crownfield, and Carl Raschke (eds.), Lacan and Theological Discourse (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Samuel Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva, The Sacred and the Feminine, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

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discourse, fecund in reflections about the significance of silence.33 Yet, the goal which is given precedence over all-encompassing exposition of diffuse presence of apophasis as an influential element in postmodern culture is to demonstrate that apophasis is not merely a discourse on propositional language restricted to one theological tradition nor is it essential only to contemporary thought, but should be viewed as something central to all thought and action which search for a responsible way to address the other. Therefore, my point of departure will be Derrida’s reading of negative theology as a linguistic force which, due to its own self-difference, breaks with the contexts from which it arises and thereby opens in the direction of the other. The aforementioned impossibility of determining exactly what apophasis is provides, in fact, a crucial insight into its meaning. Raoul Mortley argues that negative theology “covers the whole question of how it is that thought jumps beyond itself to other levels of being and experience: like an electric current, thought can jump out from that which conducts it along its path, making connections that are beyond it.”34 This hyperbolic, transgressive tendency to transcend all boundaries makes apophatic theology a significant resource for a wide group of thinkers, ranging from theologians to secular philosophers. In its very emptiness, not of content but of conceptual purchase on absolute reality, it offers a powerful instrument for dialogue between Christianity and secularism, and between Christianity and other religions. Since Derrida’s concept of negative theology is fundamental for my understanding of apophasis as a mode of openness and dialogue, an examination of his engagement with the apophatic tradition constitutes the first and major part of the present study: “(Un)saying God: Jacques Derrida’s Dream of ‘New Language.’” Its primary aim is to demonstrate the significance of negative theology in Derrida’s search for a “new language”: non-hierarchical, responsive to singularity and alterity, and to what Derrida understands by “God.” Given the central role of textuality for the author of Glas and his view of language as performative and productive, it will be argued that the choice of an appropriate mode may provide a way to bear witness to the experience of singularity and otherness. Hence, while Chapter One of this part offers an overview of the relationship between deconstruction and negative theology against the background of the contemporary 33 See Lynn Keller and Cristanne Meller (eds.): Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (eds.), Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 34 Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence II: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986).

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critical debate over the theological dimension of Derrida’s writing, the following two chapters focus on the interrelated discourses of dialogue and silence in order to investigate how apophasis informs Derrida’s writing strategies. Chapter Two analyses the importance of the dialogical mode and apophatic gestures for Derrida’s development of his conception of performative, plurivocal and non-logocentric “after-writing,” which enables him to rethink God outside the onto-theological framework. Moreover, it will be explicated how the potential of apophasis contributes to the reinforcement of the idea of undecidability and unconditionality, which founds Derrida’s new mode of thinking about ethics, religion and politics. In Chapter Three, I examine another mode employed by negative theology, that is discourse of silence, which in Derrida’s writing shall be interpreted as a type of linguistic silence. By embracing this apophatic mode of “avoiding speaking,” both negative theology and deconstruction prove to be able to preserve silence – through language – and bear witness to God as anchored in language and associated with its infinitude. Further, it will be argued that such a link of God with language opens the possibilities of multiplying definitions of God and thus breaking with the monolithic notion of divinity. Following Derrida’s thesis on the ability of negative theology to be repeated and reconceptualized in different contexts, Part Two of this work, entitled “Language and Beyond: Apophatic Transgression,” offers a parallel reading of apophatic theology and the works of the selected representatives of modern French critical theory, primarily Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, with an aim to demonstrate how the topos of ineffability present in their discourses reveals the intrinsic transgression of language. Chapter Four, devoted chiefly to the discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s thought, attempts to prove that apophatic efforts to convey divine experience through a self-subverting, self-annuling, transgressive language resonate with Blanchot’s idea of the experience of writing understood as the step/not beyond, the “pas au-delà,” taken in order to reach the (im)possible Outside. Chapter Five further pursues the consequences of transgression with reference to the concepts of inner experience and transcendence. The juxtaposition of apophatic mystics’ personal experience of God with Blanchot’s and Bataille’s quest for the Unknown reveals the similarities in their individual approaches and in their transgression of all boundaries, all concepts of law, order and language. What is important, however, is that for apophatic theologians such transgression on political, cultural and linguistic level becomes at the same time an act of transcendence towards God who grants them infinite freedom and love.

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Part One: (Un)saying God: Jacques Derrida’s Dream of “New Language” If I do not invent a new language (through simplicity rediscovered) another fluid, a new SENTENCE, I will have failed in this book, which does not mean that that’s the place to start, on the contrary, you have to drag on in the old syntax, train oneself with you, dear reader, toward an idiom which in the end would be untranslatable in return into the language of beginnings, learn an unknown language. Jacques Derrida “Circumfession” … the name of God is a way to keep things open, to open them up to what eye hath not seen nor ear heard, to hope for and believe impossible things… John D. Caputo “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida”

Already in the first out of fifty-nine periods (each designating one year of life) which form the self-consciously autobiographical “Circumfession,” a highly personal text, Jacques Derrida speaks of his lifelong dream of “another language”1 that will flow like blood from a vein. Later, in an entry dated 1976 he seems to have a faint glimpse or maybe an intuitive insight into this medium, “a new language (through simplicity rediscovered) another fluid, a new SENTENCE,” but predicts that the path toward the desired destination will be fraught with difficulties as it will have to pass through the old language of logocentrism: “[one must] drag on in the old syntax, train oneself with you, dear reader, toward an idiom which in the end would be untranslatable in return into the language of beginnings”2 (cf. p. 300: “in the beginning the logos”). The longing for a “new language” or “syntax to be invented”3 arises mainly from the dissatisfaction, or even frustration with the current status of language, which – like circumcision – tends to be used 1 Jacques, Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), p. 4. 2 Derrida, “Circumfession,” p. 115. 3 Derrida, “Circumfession,” p. 128.

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almost exclusively to exclude and divide. In contrast, “Circumfession” destabilizes systematisation, classification, homogeneity or purity of discourse, consistently looking to the other, the singular and difference. Responding to Geoffrey Bennington’s attempts to systematise the Thought of French philosopher, Derrida offers only his thoughts, scattered fragments of life, interwoven with multiplying signatures, confusing apostrophes or doubled discourses. Thus, “Circumfession” presents itself as neither a thetic undoing nor a descriptive analysis, but as an unpredictably singular, confessional testimony, “the interrupted autobiothanatoheterographical opus.”4 This search for “new language,” “idiomatic writing,”5 which would express the singularity of experience, accompanied by the yearning for the “’impure’ purity”6 of the idiom, has permeated the whole work of Derrida, though taking different forms. The aim of this part of my study is to prove that Derrida’s desire for a new way of writing which would be not controlled by hierarchy, logocentrism and homogeneity, but by the structure of the trace, finds its expression in his “search and desire for the appropriate speech with respect to God.”7 Reading two of Derrida’s later texts, “Sauf le nom” and “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” I shall demonstrate the significance of negative theology in Derrida’s striving towards “another language,” arguing that it is apophatic discourse which motivates Derrida’s development of “after-writing” or a mode of “avoiding speaking,” and thus enables him to articulate a new model of God, which is impure, dynamic and non self-identical. While accentuating the crucial role of the processes of writing in the reworking of God, it will be shown that, for Derrida, God must be ascertained within and through the text, and hence can no longer be perceived as a fixed external reference point. Consequently, such an alliance of God with textuality leads to the rejection of the orthodox theological and philosophical models of the divine. God is no longer a stable figure of infinity, but becomes aligned with the changing possibilities of language.

4 Derrida, “Circumfession,” p. 128. 5 Jacques Derrida, “Unsealing (‘the old new language’),” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 118. 6 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 47. 7 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1999), p. 312.

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Derrida’s intention to unsettle the totalising systems through resistance to the traditional, coherent and ordered structures of argument, classificatory schemata or clear-cut definitions, is always realized by the performative “working through” in writing itself. Therefore, after providing an analysis of the relationship between deconstruction and negative theology in Chapter One, I will proceed to examine how Derrida engages with a new way of writing through the interrelated discourses of dialogue (Chapter Two) and silence (Chapter Three), looking to discover what these discourses reveal about the changing concepts of God and its ethical and political implications.

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Chapter One: Derrida’s (Negative) “Theological Turn”? I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology. Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom”

1.  “Theological Turn” or Political Comeback? When Gayatry Chakravotry Spivak first introduced Derrida to the Englishspeaking world in her “Translator’s Preface” to Of Grammatology (1976), she presented him as a follower of secular philosophy of the late Enlightenment, a successor of the famous, or notorious, “masters of suspicion”8: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. However, this initially dominant secular reception of Derrida has been recently widely contested and a new trend has started to take the lead in Derridean studies. A brief survey of the scholarship on Jacques Derrida from the last three decades will suffice to note the sheer volume of work dealing with the subject of a relation between deconstruction and theology, including the texts by such critics as Kevin Hart, John D. Caputo, Hent de Vries or Graham Ward, among others, who considerably advanced theologically oriented readings of Derrida’s writing in the late 1980s and 1990s. The most probable cause of the upsurge of studies that give a theological or ethical9 account of deconstruction may be found in Derrida’s own, presumably most surprising move in the theological territory in the late 1980s. Although his earlier writing bears clear theological traces, Derrida’s explicit engagement with religious and ethical themes, such as giveness, hospitality, testimony, sacrifice, forgiveness, the messianic, faith and reason, in his later works10 prompted a widespread reassessment of the relationship between deconstruction

8 The term used to refer to three modern thinkers: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud was introduced by Paul Ricoeur. See Paul Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 32–36. 9 The illuminating ethical reading of Derrida’s work is Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Critical accounts of Critchley’s stance can be found in Marko Zlomislic, Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007) and Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 10 There are no clear and unequivocal divisions between Derrida’s early, middle and late works. Here I use the phrase “later works” to refer to those published from about the late 1980s onwards.

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and religion. It may be reasonably argued that it was Kevin Hart who initiated this “theological turn” in Derrida studies with his claim that in deconstruction we can find a revival of Heidegger’s distinction between the God of ontotheology (from the Aristotelian model of being and essence) and the God of faith and revelation (who is beyond the order of being and human knowledge).11 Since that time, as Arthur Bradley remarks in his seminal study “Derrida’s God: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn,” “Derrida’s work has arguably been the defining site where theological debates within continental philosophy are played out.”12 However, despite Derrida’s work being more and more frequently viewed in the light of the “theological turn”; yet the opposite stance, questioning the existence and nature of such a “turn” in Derrida’s thought, has also been widely adopted.13 Referring to the words of James K. Smith, this change, which Derrida himself attributes to the transformation in his strategy of the text,14 may be aptly depicted as a move “from the theoretical frameworks that shape our given institutions to [a] consider[ation] (and disturb[ance]) [of] the institutions themselves,”15 or, in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerra’s terms, to “the phase of affirmative deconstruction.”16 The proponents of the concept of the “turn” are not unanimous in their views, either expressing an enthusiastic attitude toward 11 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 71–104. 12 Arthur Bradley, “Derrida’s God: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn,” Paragraph, 29 (2006), p. 22. 13 See, for example, Kuisma Korhonen, Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida (New York: Humanity Books, 2006). Korhonen maintains: “The term “ethical turn” is, however, misleading, because there is not any radical reorientation or rupture in Derrida’s work,” p. 363. Mark Cauchi investigates the implications of the “turn” for secularity, whereas David Wood draws attention to the problem with the term “religious” which has been given a new meaning by Derrida himself: “For it is all very well to call Derrida a ‘religious thinker’, but, after Derrida, the meaning of ‘religious’ has arguably changed.” See Mark Cauchi, “The Secular to Come: Interrogating the Derridean ‘Secular,’” JCRT, 10.1 (Winter 2009), pp. 1–25; and David Wood, “God: Poison or Cure? A Reply to John D. Caputo,” in Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God, eds. S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 205–211 (p. 206). 14 Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith: An interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, eds. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 37. 15 James K. A. Smith, Jacques Derrida: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 65. 16 Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, “Introduction,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, eds. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 6.

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the new phase of deconstruction, like John D. Caputo, who sees in the “turn” a fulfilment of deconstructive philosophy, or dismissing the religious elements of Derrida’s writing, as is in the case of Slavoj Žižek, who rejects the contemporary re-emergence of religious interest as a “massive onslaught of obscurantism”17 and aims to separate and recuperate the “earlier Derrida of différance”18 from the “‘postsecular’ Messianic turn of deconstruction.”19 Although the religious and ethical readings of Derrida’s thought are still prevalent and persistent, in the recent years the contrary, non-ethical, non-religious – and often more explicitly politically-focused trend – is achieving a greater popularity. Undoubtedly, this shift in the critical approach should be considered in a larger philosophical context, as a response to continental philosophy’s increasing divergence from Derrida’s work, noticed, for instance, by Slavoj Žižek, who in 2006 – quite contentiously – proclaimed that “the Derridean fashion is fading away.”20 The frustration with deconstruction, which Alain Badiou expressed in his indictment of the paralysis of philosophy and critique of “those who intend to fill the gap with meagre reflections on ethics,”21 is fuelled by the urgent desire for a new, more prescriptive politics. This appeal for a more overtly political philosophy may be seen as one of the triggers for what John Mullarkey calls “post-continental philosophy,” arguing that “the interest in Deleuze and growing interest in Badiou, for instance, is partly related to their positive engagement with both the sciences and radical politics.”22 The divergent tendencies within deconstruction were already identified in 1996 by Richard Beardsworth, who in his work Derrida and the Political outlined two possible futures of Derrida’s philosophy: the first, called “a left-wing Derrideanism,” would return to the earlier writings of Derrida in order to read the metaphysical logic in terms of the relationship between the human and the technical; while the second, “a right-wing Derrideanism,” would untie the aporia of time from logic and technics by reorganizing and prioritizing religious

17 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 1. 18 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 141. 19 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 3. 20 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 11. 21 Alain Badiou, “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” in Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 114. 22 John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 3.

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discourse in the recent Derrida’s work.23 A decade later, in the light of new critical tendencies in Derrida studies, Arthur Bradley affirms the prophetic nature of Beardsworth’s prediction, adopting a critical stance to the direction of the development of Derrida’s thought. His main charge is levelled against a “transcendentalization of the aporia of origin”24 in the later work of Derrida. Bradley insists that “over the course of Derrida’s career the empirical context and history of the aporia of origin is effaced as he resorts to increasingly transcendental means of articulating it.”25 The consequence of such privileging of the transcendental in the expression of the aporia of origin is the risk of an “empirical deficit”26 and disavowal of techne and politics: “To understand Derrida’s work in terms of a quasi-religious vocabulary of the promise, the impossible or the messianic is […] to reduce the material and historical scope of his work and even to evacuate the ethico-political dimension of deconstruction.”27 Seeing in Beardsworth’s position the underlying belief in the inevitable inconsistency between religious and political readings of Derrida, Bradley rejects the former in favour of the latter, convinced that “the theological turn must be consigned to deconstruction’s past if the historical present it describes is to gain inventive or transformative power and the radical future it affirms is to open.”28 Notwithstanding the fact that such a strict separation of religion and politics seems to be against the main tenets of deconstruction, suspicious of any binary oppositions, the new critical current dismissing religious analyses of Derrida as a hindrance to a true political deconstruction attracts more and more followers. Amongst them are Martin Hägglund and Patrick O’Connor. Against the “wrongheaded” attempts to incorporate Derrida’s thought into religious studies, Hägglund devotes his profound study Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life to demonstrating how Derrida rethinks such notions as gift, messianicity or 23 Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 156–157. 24 Bradley, “Derrida’s God,” p. 26. Bernard Stiegler’s extensive, three-volume monograph Technics and Time provides probably the most important and influential accounts of the technical and material in Derrida. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) 25 Bradley, “Derrida’s God,” p. 28. 26 Bradley, “Derrida’s God,” p. 32. 27 Bradley, “Derrida’s God,” p. 22. 28 Bradley, “Derrida’s God,” p. 38.

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God in accordance with a logic of “radical atheism,” which, based on the unconditional affirmation of life as a matter of survival, turns out to be incompatible with a desire for immortality or God.29 A similar demand for a rebuttal of religious accounts of Derrida’s writings can be found in Patrick O’Connor’s Derrida: Profanations, whose aim – as the author explains – is to present Derrida’s work as “at once essentially egalitarian, atheistic and profane.”30 While praising all those commentators whose insights allow for such atheistic and profane interpretations of Derrida, and represent what he, after Beardsworth, calls “a strictly ‘leftDerridean’ orientation”31 (especially Bradley whom he commends for his desire for “a materialist turn in deconstruction”32), O’Connor calls for a re-appraisal of deconstruction as radically philosophical. Undeniably, the motivations behind such suspicious or even hostile responses to the ethical and religious readings of deconstruction are valuable, as their chief intention is to foreground the role of Derrida’s ideas in the development of both philosophical and political thought in the times when his work is becoming less and less popular or even criticised as outdated, politically insufficient and unable to answer the questions raised by current sciences and technologies. Yet, it must be pointed out that this political power or, even more importantly, Derrida’s concept of responsibility, when detached from the realm of ethics or religion, appears to be deprived of its necessary theoretical background. Moreover, as Geoffrey Bennington notices, such a critical approach risks situating the political beyond the reach of deconstructive critique: “‘politics,’ so often invoked as though it were eo ipso something ‘radical,’ remains in just the same position of passive inheritance until its metaphysical genealogy is interrogated, and it is to that extent no more promising a candidate for ‘radicality’ than anything else.”33 Faced with such a “political” trend in Derrida studies, I do not intend to follow the path trodden by its advocates, since their tendency to condemn all ethical and religious analyses as outdated or depoliticising seems to me oversimplistic and reductive. On the contrary, this part of my work aims to recuperate the controversial issue of the theological “turn,” analysing Derrida’s engagement with the question of God and its implications for his conceptualization of religion, ethics and politics. Before proceeding to the main line of my analysis, which will 29 Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 30 Patrick O’Connor, Derrida: Profanations (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 4. 31 O’Connor, Derrida: Profanations, p. 1. 32 O’Connor, Derrida: Profanations, p. 3. 33 Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 22.

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attempt to provide an in-depth exploration of the relationship between deconstruction and negative theology, it might be useful to review some major trends within the contemporary multi-faceted debate over the theological dimension of Derrida’s work, which has involved theologians and philosophers, liberals and conservatives, enthusiastic admirers, such as John D. Caputo, who dreams about a new deconstructive religion, and their more antagonistic interlocutors, such as John Milbank, who accuses deconstruction of nihilism.

2.  Religious Readings of Deconstruction Surprising as it may seem, one of the earliest attempts to adopt Derrida’s thought were made by the scholars from Biblical Studies, who have been drawing inspiration from Derrida’s religious analyses since the early 1980s.34 Encouraged by the fact that Derrida himself showed a predilection for studying the Bible, though in a manner deviating from the official, orthodox interpretation,35 they have applied a deconstructive strategy of reading to classical biblical texts, thus offering alternative, unconventional and unquestionably intriguing approaches to biblical exegesis. Although the first examples of acknowledging Derrida’s importance for religious studies were mainly rooted in the Christian tradition,36 soon

34 “Derrida and Biblical Studies,” Semeia, 23 (1982) is probably the earliest example of this. Among later works, those worth mentioning are: The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. John Barton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Patrick J. E. Chatelion Counet, John, a Postmodern Gospel: Introduction to Deconstructive Exegesis Applied to the Fourth Gospel (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Brian D. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Theodore W. Jennings, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); The Postmodern Bible Reader, eds. David Jobling, Tina Pippin and Ronald Schleifer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Stephen D. Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross, (Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 1994); David Rutledge, Reading Marginally: Feminism, Deconstruction and the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1996) and David Seeley, Deconstructing the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 35 See Yvonne Sherwood, “Introduction: Derrida’s Bible,” in Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida, ed. Yvonne Sherwood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 1. 36 Although I am sceptic about giving Christianity priority in the appropriation of deconstruction, yet, there can be found some reliable evidence for Christianity’s privileged position in the relationship to deconstruction. See Derrida’s description of the Christian origins of the term “deconstruction” in Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith: An interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, eds.

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the scholarship has become less homogenous, encompassing critical endeavours from other religious perspectives, yet, with a majority of them coming from Jewish thinkers37 – the fact which can presumably be explained by Derrida’s own engagement with his Jewish roots. Unfortunately, however much both the analyses from Biblical Studies and specifically Jewish readings have contributed to the development of their own fields by introducing the elements of Derrida’s thought into Christian theology or Judaism, their frequent tendency to apply their own methodology and conceptual framework in the analyses of deconstruction seems to have resulted in some cases in what Yvonne Sherwood refers to as “certain institutionalised misreadings of vintage Derrida.”38 An illustration of this point might be Gideon Ofrat’s Jewish Derrida – undeniably a comprehensive and insightful study – which seems to slightly overemphasise the role of Judaism in Derrida’s thought, claiming for instance that “circumcision is Jacques Derrida’s most basic philosophical experience.”39 In a similar vein, Walter Brueggeman

Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 33. See also Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith (New York, Fordham University Press, 2008) and Leonard Lawlor’s claim that Derrida’s text Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins “opens a larger, more ambitious project that we can call ‘the deconstruction of Christianity.’” Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 31. 37 Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University Of New York Press, 1982); Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). Other non-Jewish examples include Ian Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction: a comparative study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi (London: Routledge, 2004); Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Mustapha Chérif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1984); Youxuan Wang, Buddhism and Deconstruction: Towards a Comparative Semiotics (London: Routledge 2001), and Buddhisms and Deconstructions, ed. Jin Y. Park (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 38 Sherwood, “Introduction: Derrida’s Bible,” p. 7. 39 Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), p. 44.

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views Derrida’s deconstruction as “indeed a form of Jewish iconoclasm”40 and Susan Handelman reads Derrida’s work (especially the early texts) as “the latest in the line of Jewish heretic hermeneutics.”41 If we are to look for a more thorough and multi-faceted account of the religious dimension of Derrida’s thought, it might be worth referring to John D. Caputo’s writing, now considered as “the classic treatment of Derrida and religion.”42 According to Caputo, “deconstruction itself is structured like a religion – it lives and breathes a religious and messianic air; like religion it turns on a faith, a hope, even a prayer for the possibility of the impossible.”43 Emphasising the affirmative religious passion that drives deconstruction, the philosopher claims that this passion is characterised primarily by a desire for the impossible and infinite openness to heterogeneity. What is particularly important for Caputo, who seeks to avoid the violence associated with traditional, content-full “religions of the Book,”44 is the recognition that the concept of religion proposed by Derrida, while committed to the general structure of religion, attempts to distance itself from all the specific historical exemplifications of this structure, to go beyond the traditional categories of the religious towards the idea of a generalized “religion without religion,” which exceeds the dogmatic certitude of every determined religion and is unbound by any institutional, often violent, powers: Deconstruction regularly, rhythmically repeats this religiousness, sans the concrete, historical religions; it repeats nondogmatically the religious structure of experience, the category of the religious. It repeats the passion for the messianic promise and messianic expectation, sans the concrete messianisms of the positive religions that wage endless war and spill the blood of the other, and that, anointing themselves God’s chosen people, are consummately dangerous to everyone who is not so chosen. 45

40 Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 740. 41 Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University Of New York Press, 1982), p. 163. 42 Smith, Jacques Derrida: Live Theory, p. 142. Smith is talking here particularly about Caputo’s monograph The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. 43 John D. Caputo in John D. Caputo and Carl Raschke, “Loosening Philosophy’s Tongue: A Conversation with John Caputo,” JCRT, 3.2 (Spring 2002), http://www.jcrt.org/ archives/03.2/caputo_raschke.shtml [accessed 25 September 2013]. 44 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 36. 45 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. xxi.

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The propelling force of such indeterminate religiousness is the passion for the messianic promise, which – as Derrida explains – takes an amorphous form of “a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianism without messianism.”46 In such a model there is no question of a messianic content, but it is in a messianic structure that Caputo finds the most explicit convergence between deconstruction and the religious. Mistrustful of various religious fundamentalisms and of a Christian political version of Europe, Derrida offers us an alternative religious thought that envisages a possibility of a radical messianic structure, unencumbered by the dangerous baggage of determinate messianic faiths that divide humanity into warring parties. In Caputo’s view, deconstruction is permanently haunted by this messianic, structurally “open-ended hope” for the coming of the tout outre,47 which expresses the necessity for individuals to anticipate the future (Viens! Viens!) affirmatively (oui, oui), while at the same time recognizing the impossibility of this anticipation as the coming of the Messiah is infinitely deferred: deconstruction takes the form of a certain re-ligious re-sponsibility to what is coming, to what does not exist. Deconstruction turns on a certain pledging of itself to the future, on a certain religio that religiously observes its covenant with the revenant and the arrivant, to what is coming back from the past, and to what is arriving from the past as the future. Deconstruction is, in that sense, a messianic religion within the limits of reason alone, that is, it is inhabited and structured in a messianic-religious way.48

Unlike Caputo, who traces in Derrida’s work powerful Levinasian and Kierkegaardian tendencies, manifesting themselves through such notions as singularity or face-to-face encounter with the wholly other,49 Mark C. Taylor’s interpretation of deconstruction is founded on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Influenced by the radical death-of-God theologies from the 1960s, with Thomas J. J. Altizer as their main representative,50 Taylor asserts in his study Erring: a Postmodern A/Theology that “deconstruction is the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of

46 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 59. 47 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 48. 48 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, pp. 149–150. 49 Caputo, “Loosening Philosophy’s Tongue.” 50 An analysis of the relationship between the “death-of-God” theologies and deconstruction is provided in Thomas J. J. Altizer, Max A. Myers, Carl A. Raschke, Robert P. Scharlemann, Mark C. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982).

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God”51 and establishes a distinctively postmodern theology, which he marks as necessarily a/theological, and for many, as intrinsically antagonistic toward traditional religion. Within the same framework of thinking, Carl A. Raschke depicts deconstruction as “the death of God put into writing.”52 While this still ongoing scholarly movement has led to a renewed appreciation of modern theories of religion (including, for instance, the works by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud), as well as to the recognition of the important, yet so far not thoroughly examined, link between God and writing in deconstruction, still their approach is rather reductive, offering interpretations which ignore the nuances of Derrida’s multi-dimensional concept of God. As Caputo, engaged in a sustained effort at deconstructing postmodern a/theology, writes in Prayers and Tears: “The problem with Erring is that it is insufficiently aporetic, that it allows itself to be led straight down the path (poreia) inerrantly I would say, of the death of God. […] That version of deconstruction is undone by deconstruction itself, which refuses such closure, such exclusions and clean sweeps.”53 In a similar way, Steven Shakespeare formulates his critique: Their use of the trope of incarnation (especially when allied to Altizer’s notion of total presence) suggests a total emptying out of God into writing, God embodied as the trace. This risks losing sight of ways in which God names a future and an otherness that resist embodied immediacy. The undecidability in Derrida’s thinking, which still maintains contact with reference and the singular otherness named by God, here becomes “decided,” a sacralization of purely immanent flows.54

Despite Caputo’s substantial contribution to the advancement of theological revisionary readings of Derrida’s work, the idea of “deconstructionist theology” has met with a mixed reception and still remains a controversial issue, provoking critical responses, coming not only, as we have already seen, from the realm of philosophy or cultural studies, but also from those representing theological or religious studies. The serious critique of deconstruction is offered by English theologians grouped under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. Against the putative arrogance of the modernist claims of human autonomy, this movement, including in its core such thinkers as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock or Philip Blond, inaugurated thinking about new theology which emphasises the

51 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984), p. 6. 52 Carl A. Raschke, “The Deconstruction of God,” in: Deconstruction and Theology, p. 27. 53 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 14. 54 Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2009), p. 180.

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necessity to start from revelation and incarnation and to return to the theological resources of the Christian tradition, mainly Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Radical Orthodoxy is mostly concerned with secularism in theology and, more broadly, in culture. The manifesto-like collection of essays Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology begins with a complaint against “the dismal promenade” of postmodern ontological nihilism.55 Here Derrida is perceived as one of the prime instigators for secular (a)theological perspectives (along with, for example, Foucault or Deleuze) and his thinking – postmodern “elaborations of a single nihilistic philosophy,” which “articulates itself as, first, an absolute historicism, second as an ontology of difference, and third as an ethical nihilism”56 – is blamed for the supposed decadence of postmodern culture. According to Milbank, deconstruction’s anti-foundationalism “implies a tiresome, red-guard politics of ceaseless negativity.”57 Still in another place, he criticises Derrida’s thought for the assumed affirmation of an infinite and absolute otherness, which, as Milbank argues, leads to a situation where all differences are equally different and ultimately become undifferentiated from one another.58 It might be also important to note that while denouncing secularism and all its expressions of nihilism, Radical Orthodoxy is also suspicious of the recent revival of interest in negative theology, which, being often appropriated by secular thinkers in the recent years, risks the conflation with the dangerous trends of nihilistic secularism: […] nor does it [the project of radical orthodoxy] indulge, like so many, in the pretense of a baptism of nihilism in the name of a misconstrued “negative theology.” Instead, in the face of the secular demise of truth, it seeks to reconfigure theological truth. The latter may indeed hover close to nihilism, since it, also, refuses a reduction of the indeterminate. Yet, what finally distances it from nihilism is its proposal of the rational possibility,

55 John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 4. 56 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1990), p. 278. Derrida’s nihilism has not only been asserted by Radical Orthodoxy. In a similar vein, Julian Young dismisses Derrida’s work as an expression of “the nihilism of postmodernity.” See Julian Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 196. The attempt to rebut this nihilist charge against Derrida is made by Hugh Rayment-Pickard. See Hugh Rayment-Pickard, “Derrida and Nihilism,” in Wayne J. Hankey and Douglas Hedley, Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005), pp. 161–175. 57 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 395. 58 John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 61.

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and the faithfully perceived actuality, of an indeterminacy that is not impersonal chaos but infinite interpersonal harmonious order, in which time participates.59

Proclaiming a traditional affirmation of divine transcendence, Radical Orthodoxy thinkers are reluctant to endorse the move in the contemporary theological thought that re-appreciates the value of negative theology, since for them, negative theology has become a paradigm of the secular culture, and thus associated with its perversions, emptiness and valuelessness. Nevertheless, such remonstrances against deconstruction and negative theology seem to be misinterpretations of both movements. As William Franke observes, “negative theology would become nihilism if it took itself or simply negation or emptiness to be a transcendental hermeneutic that provides the ‘mathesis’ or general framework for all knowledge.”60 But this is exactly what both negative theology and deconstruction want to avoid in their rigorous process of rejecting all idols. Their critical thrust should be rather viewed as an antidote to nihilism. I can neither go into the details of all the contemporary controversies surrounding the relationship between deconstruction and religion, nor offer an exposition and critique of all the multiple and diverse instances of Derridean scholarship in this area, but for the purpose of this study I believe it might be useful to mention briefly still three other thinkers, who have been at the forefront of articulating religious reading of deconstruction, namely Graham Ward, Kevin Hart and Hent de Vries, as their analyses which give priority to the issue of language in Derrida’s oeuvre seem to be most relevant to the subject of this work and thus might illuminate my further argumentation. In his profound study Barth, Derrida and Language of Theology, Graham Ward does not only find parallels between Derrida and Karl Barth in their shared concern with “the ineradicable otherness which haunts discourse and yet the impossibility of transcending metaphoricity and positing a real presence,”61 but also demonstrates how what he recognizes as Barth’s central flaw of employing two antithetical models of language to explain how the Word comes to expression in human words can be resolved by Derrida’s economy of différance, which “calls the theological in play”62 and in which “discourse is the presentation of otherness and 59 Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, Radical Orthodoxy, p. 1. 60 William Franke, “Apophasis as the common root of radically secular and radically orthodox theologies,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 73 (February 2013), p. 63. 61 Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 247. 62 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, p. 232.

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human representations of it.”63 The economy of différance, governed by “a law of textuality, a law of performance and repetition,” 64 is thus presented by Ward as adding a necessary “philosophical supplement”65 to Barth’s theology of language, which confirms the movement, instability and open-endedness of Barth’s theological language. The theologian argues that God’s hiddenness, the mystery of otherness that evades domestication and prevents foreclosure, is “constitutive of discourse itself.” He further explains: “It is the process of discourse, the logic of its referring and deferring in which the hermeneutical project is both disrupted and returned to, which is the focal interest of both Barth and Derrida.”66 Still another crucial observation made by Ward concerns Derrida’s “turn,” which he perceives as a movement towards “‘spiritualizing’ the economy of representation – that is redescribing the economy through distinctively theological categories.”67 Kevin Hart’s project aims explicitly at promoting a “non-metaphysical theology.” 68 Hart concurs with Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, but points out that deconstructive forces are already present in theology: “If we take écriture to signify ‘scripture’ what we have, in sum, is the view that scripture performs the deconstruction of the metaphysical elements within theology.”69 Therefore, the Scriptures, with their dynamics of narrative and plurality of voices and genres, evade any attempts to become reduced to a fixed set of theological or philosophical propositions. For Hart, the most powerful exemplification of deconstruction at work can be traced in apophatics or the via negativa, which deconstructs positive theology.70 He expresses his view in a bold statement, which later becomes a subject of criticism71: “My position is not 63 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, p. 245. 64 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, p. 9. 65 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, p. 256. 66 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, p. 245. 67 Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology p. 229. 68 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. xi. A similar stance is taken by Don Cupitt, whose intention is to “get religious belief (and myself, and you) into this new completely postmetaphysical world without subverting myself.” Don Cupitt, Only Human (London: SCM Press, 1985), p. xi. Rowan Williams in his article “Hegel and the gods of postmodernity” offers a critical view on this “sharpening of the anti-metaphysical thrust of apophaticism.” See Rowan Williams, “Hegel and the gods of postmodernity,” in Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, eds. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 72–80. 69 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 41. 70 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 95. 71 Both Graham Ward and Hugh Rayment-Pickard take issue with Hart over this point.

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that deconstruction is a form of negative theology but that negative theology is a form of deconstruction.”72 What is more, Hart claims that Derrida overlooks the “deconstructive power” of negative theology,73 however, this assertion may be justified by the fact that Hart wrote before the publication of some of Derrida’s crucial religious texts, such as “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum),” which invalidate his allegation. A special attention to a decisive link between God and textuality in Derrida’s work is given by Hent de Vries in his engaging study Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. While emphasising the significance of Derrida’s use of religious language, de Vries maintains that the French philosopher consistently exposes the connections between Western philosophy and the religious inheritance, from which this philosophy seeks to dissociate itself. He concentrates his analysis around the figure of the adieu, which he reads as a simultaneous approach and departure from God. This position is depicted as “being at once extremely close to and, as it were, at an infinite remove from his heritage.”74 Such double movement turns out to be not only an intrinsic feature of Derrida’s writings, which “can be taken to reaffirm, if not justify, both the traditional ontotheological notion of God and whatever has come to take its place, or the place of God’s name, including its most radical negations and denegations,”75 but also a key characteristic of God, who is a self-contradiction, a “performativity” that deconstructs itself. Derrida’s work challenges any stable division between the secular and the religious, yet the religious elements of language, which bear specific legacy, are privileged by de Vries, who argues that “even the most secular, profane, negative, or nihilistic of utterances, directs or undirects itself unintentionally toward alterity for which – historically, systematically, conceptually, and figuratively speaking – ‘God’ is, perhaps and so far, the most proper name.”76 Still in other places, he insists: “‘God’ is the best word for the trace, for its always necessary and possible erasure,”77 and that which evokes “the very structure of experience, language, and thought, in general.”78

72 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 186. 73 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 198. 74 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 79. 75 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, p. 89. 76 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, p. 126. 77 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, p. 94. 78 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, p. 67.

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The above outlined religious readings of Derrida constitute just a small part of vast scholarship which has addressed the question of the religious dimension of Derrida’s thought, albeit from various critical perspectives, applying different methods and pursuing divergent aims – either drawing a picture of Derrida as homo religiosus or as a radical atheist. Despite this diversity in style, aim and theoretical perspective, they share certain characteristics and exhibit similar limitations. The responses from Biblical Studies or Judaism provide interesting and insightful accounts, but, lacking sufficient focus on deconstruction, fail to illuminate our perception of Derrida. Radical Orthodoxy seems to be so much concerned with promoting its own programme of new theology that it offers a very superficial critique of deconstruction, focused almost exclusively on tracing Derrida’s connections with postmodern nihilism. Some thinkers, for example, Graham Ward, Kevin Hart, or John D. Caputo, either show a tendency to exaggerate Derrida’s engagement with religion, enclosing Derrida within the boundaries of some orthodox position, which the author of Writing and Difference would most certainly reject; or attempt to resolve tensions intrinsic to deconstruction, thus not respecting its aporetic nature and constitutive undecidability. Other reductive approaches take great interest in religion but ignore the question of God, or overshadow the connection between Derrida’s analysis of religion and issues of language, mode, style and performativity. Against this background of both political and religious readings of Derrida, I propose my own critical approach which aims to reveal a key role of apophatic discourse in Derrida’s search for a new way of writing about God. Therefore, the following section of this study will focus on the relationship of negative theology with, and its implications for, deconstruction, as the former clearly influences Derrida’s writing strategies, particularly concerning the modes of dialogue and silence, which Chapters Two and Three deal with. By placing my discussion in a larger context of a theoretical debate, engaging various religious and nonreligious critics, I intend firstly to present the definition of negative theology provided by Derrida, and secondly, to demonstrate parallels between via negativa and deconstruction, such as their exploration of non-dialectical negativity, their attention to textuality, and their contribution to the new way of thinking about ethical and political life.

3.  Deconstruction and Negative Theology Derrida’s initial attempt to suggest the parameters of negative theology appears in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” a paper which he delivered in Jerusalem in 1986 at a colloquium entitled “Absence and Negativity.” At the opening of the 42

essay, which he calls “the most ‘autobiographical’ discourse [he] has ever risked,”79 the author proposes two possible approaches to the issue discussed. The first definition depicts negative theology as “a certain form of language, […] a textual practice attested or even situated ‘in history,’ although it does sometimes exceed the predicates that constitute this or that concept of history.”80 Yet, as Derrida notices, “the unity of its archive is difficult to determine,”81 hence, any treatment of negative theology as a “subject” turns out to be highly problematic. The second explanation takes a less rigorous form of a “provisional hypothesis”: negative theology has come to designate a type of attitude toward language, and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, semantic or conceptual determination. If one supposes, by provisional hypothesis, that negative theology consists in regarding every predicate, or even all predicative language, as inadequate to the essence, that is, to the hyperessentiality of God, and that, consequently, only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God, to prepare us for a silent intuition of God.82

In this narrow, albeit the most essential, sense, negative theology cannot be understood as a certain discourse (in Foucault’s meaning of the term) referring to a particular epoch, a particular culture or religion. On the contrary, Derrida identifies it as a “certain attitude to language,” defying any attempts to reduce it to any specific place or time. Seen from such a perspective, the linguistic modes and strategies of negative theology are not reserved for mystics but may be as well adopted by, for example, postmodern atheists. Focusing on the exploration of a complex relationship between negative theology and the deconstructive project, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” stresses the similarity between the “textual practice”83 of negative theology and deconstruction: one will recognize some traits, the family resemblance of negative theology, in every discourse that seems to have recourse in a regular and insistent manner to this rhetoric of negative determination, endlessly multiplying the defenses and the apophatic warnings: this, which is called X (for example, the text, writing, the trace, différance, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, etc.), “is” neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside, neither superior

79 Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 309. 80 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 143. 81 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 143. 82 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 144. 83 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 143.

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nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent, not even neutral, not even dialectizable in a third term, without any possible sublation (Aufhebung).84

Other features common to both discourses include: reflexivity, performativity,85 self-regulating nature,86 the employment of the structure of the address and the form of the “without” which “deconstructs grammatical anthropomorphism.”87 Deconstruction proves to be comparable to negative theology in its non-dialectical rethinking of the meaning of negativity and a notion of promise which is seen as both historical and ahistorical. Still another point of similarity concerns the significance both discourses attach to prayer. Explaining his own understanding of prayer as “the address asking the other – perhaps beyond request [demande] and gift – to give the promise of its presence as other”88 and insisting that the prayer must be inseparable from the quotation of prayer and the address to the reader,89 Derrida suggests that his own text might be considered as such prayer. However, given that prayer is an example of a performative utterance, it is necessarily “perverformative,”90 intrinsically instable, aporetic, destined to err, wander, interrupt, or be interrupted and distorted along the way to its destination. An intriguing, albeit provocative, attempt at drawing parallels between deconstruction and negative theology can be tracked down in Don Cupitt’s work Mysticism and Modernity, where the Cambridge theologian presents mysticism91 as a revolutionary counter movement, which had a kind of political role to play within the medieval Christianity, a role that could also extend into a broader society. Cupitt stresses that “the mystic was compelled to deconstruct orthodoxy,”92 showing how his or her “subversive and transgressive writing”93 bypasses institutional channels of salvation and “melts down” ontological assumptions about 84 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 144. 85 Hent de Vries believes that: “Religion is to be conceived of as the problem of performative utterance ‘as such,’” de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, p. 11. 86 See Nicholas Lash’s description of negative theology as “the endless and endlessly demanding disciplining of language and imagination.” Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 17. 87 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 148. 88 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 177. 89 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 182. 90 Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 136. 91 Although Cupitt refers here mainly to mysticism, it may be argued that in his works the two traditions of mysticism and negative theology overlap. 92 Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 4. 93 Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, p. 3.

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God as an absolute metaphysical other as well as their attending psychological structures – in order to produce a euphoric condition of immediate religious happiness in the here and now of the mystical encounter.94 Such subversion corrupts the unassailable authority of the Church and of the God of happiness the Church, as a sacramental and orthodox machine, hierarchically structured to produce a salvation, allegedly mediates, but never delivers because of its insistence on a never-ending dualism between the divine and the human. In contrast to ecclesial spirituality, the mystic seeks and attains the happiness – indefinitely deferred by the Church – in the present through an identity with the divine in which all the dualism is defeated. If we now turn to Derrida’s account, we can recognize an analogous view of negative theology as a “subversive marginality”95 which “launches or carries negativity as the principle of auto-destruction in the heart of each thesis.”96 Further, Cupitt remarks that both negative theology and deconstruction investigate the issue of the relationship between language and event. His observation is thoroughly developed by Michael Sells in his artful literary studies of apophatic language. Understanding apophasis in essentially performative terms, Sells defines it as a “meaning event” in which language unsays itself: “The meaning event is the semantic analogue to the experience of mystical union. It does not describe or refer to mystical union but effects a sematic union that re-creates or imitates the mystical union.”97 Don Cupitt goes even further, arguing that language determines religious experience “all the way down” and consequently, that “the very composition of the poem was itself the mystical experience […] Writing is redemption.”98 Although I cannot fully concur with this rather reductive approach to mystical experience, I find Cupitt’s postmodern model worth rethinking, since it effectively collapses the mystical and the hermeneutical, the past and the present, into a single textual process. Here both the classical mystical author and the contemporary writer, philosopher, literary or cultural critic can be seen as employing deconstructive, apophatic hermeneutical strategies. This preoccupation with the issue of textuality leads both deconstruction and negative theology to scepticism about human language, which they find 94 Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, p. 9. 95 Derrida, “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum),” trans. John P. Leavey Jr. in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 71. 96 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 67. 97 Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 9. 98 Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, p. 74.

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unable to directly grasp reality or disclose the truth about the essence of things, in particular, the essence of God. The mystics, trying to describe their ultimate experience, press language to the limits, only to expose its utter inadequacy in expressing anything about the absolute Other. As Knut Alfsvåg asserts, negative theology “results in a scepticism toward the epistemological cogency of human language which issues in a rejection of the possibility of proving the existence of God; what can be proved to exist through an argumentative strategy manifest in human language, is certainly not God.”99 Hence, when dealing with the question of God, neither deconstruction nor negative theology aspire to resolve the dispute over the existence or essence of the divine subject; instead, they explore the nature and power of language which addresses the divine. Therefore, in the light of their suspension of any truth claims, it seems reasonably to argue that both deconstruction and negative theology serve the role of “a second-order discourse,” which aims to critically investigate the conditions and false premises of such claims. From the examples outlined above it may be inferred that there are numerous, often methodological, points of similarities between deconstruction and negative theology; yet the nature of their relationship is far more complex and nuanced. Thus, in order to avoid superficiality of analysis and overinterpretation, I will now attempt to listen attentively both to Derrida himself, especially to those of his statements when he explicitly comments on the relation of deconstruction to the apophatic tradition, and to the commentators of his thought. Already in his very early essay “Différance” (1968) Derrida admits that negative theology has always had a close resemblance to a deconstructive method: So much so that detours, locutions, and syntax in which I will often have to take recourse will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology. Already we have to delineate that différance is not, does not exist, is not present-being (on) in any form […] It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent.100

The “detours, locutions, and syntax” in which Derrida is forced to take refuge are clearly at times “indistinguishable from negative theology.” The eternal deferral of différance mirrors in many ways the retreats of negative theology from both Being and non-Being; and yet Derrida insists in “Ousiā and Gramme” that

Knut Alfsvåg, What No Mind Has Conceived: On the Significance of Christological Apophaticism (Peeters: Leuven, 2010), p. 1. 100 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 6. 99

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différance “upsets […] all theology”101 – suggesting that even negative theology is upset by différance. He continues along these lines in “Différance”: And yet those aspects of différance which are thereby delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies, which as one knows are always concerned with disengaging a hyperessentiality beyond the finite categories of essence and existence, that is, of presence, and always hastening to recall that God is refused the predicate of existence, only to acknowledge His superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being.102

As the non(essence) of deconstructive critique is to reinscribe all ideas and philosophies in the movement of différance in order to question the authority of presence, identity, unity and totality, and to uncover the so far suppressed differences, negative theology becomes also subjected to this deconstructive critique. The earlier texts by Derrida emphasize the propositional form of apophatic discourse, which still operates within the horizon of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s main objection towards negative theology concerns its reaffirmation of a hyperessential reality, even if it is beyond being, which makes it remain in fact a metaphysics of presence in a more refined form. Yet, even though Derrida distances himself from the tradition of via negativa, denying that his work can be identified with any form of negative theology (“No, what I do is not negative theology”103), the formal, rhetorical similarities persist. Taking an example even from his very early text “Letter to a Japanese Friend” (1983), it becomes easily noticeable that his approach in defining deconstruction recalls the gestures of negative theology: “Deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique […] Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one […] What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course!” he declares.104 The resemblance of negative theology to the contours and detours of a deconstructive method, indicated by Derrida in “Différance,” is further expanded to become a “family resemblance”105 in “How to Avoid Speaking” from 1986, which may suggest that deconstruction finds a kindred spirit in negative theology. From here onwards, Derrida has been 101 Jacques Derrida, “Ousiā and Gramme,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 67. 102 Derrida, “Différance,” p. 6. 103 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 147. 104 Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” trans. Andrew Benjamin and David Wood, in Derrida and Différance, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 3–5. 105 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 144.

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haunted by the possibility that “perhaps there is within it [negative theology] hidden, restless, diverse, and itself heterogeneous, a voluminous and nebulous multiplicity of potentials to which the single expression ‘negative theology’; yet remains inadequate.”106 The persistent attempts to retrieve these potentials of negative theology have allowed Derrida to finally express such an affirmative conviction in “Sauf le nom” (first published in English in 1992): “I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology.”107 It is in these two last texts, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum)” that Derrida offers a most detailed and penetrating examination of the similarities between his writing and apophatic discourse. Derrida’s engagement with the apophatic tradition has become a subject of a heated debate over different readings of the “negative theology” in relation to various understandings of the “deconstruction.” Much ink has been spilled in this confrontation: is deconstruction simply the latest incarnation of negative theology and Pseudo-Dionysius or Meister Eckhart the ancient or medieval “Derrideans,”108 or must a stark line be drawn between them in order to safeguard the originality of the postmodern shibboleth?109 Despite the wealth of writing on the subject, this debate, involving a wide spectrum of scholars from different fields of study: theology, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, remains curiously stunted.

106 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 82. 107 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 69. 108 See, for instance, Bert Blans, “Cloud of Unknowing: An Orientation in Negative Theology from Dionysius the Aeropagite, Eckhart, and John of the Cross to Modernity,” in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, eds. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kafe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), especially p. 75; Jeffrey Fischer, “The Theology of Dis/similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius,” The Journal of Religion, 81/4 (2001), especially p, 530; Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 183. 109 See, for instance, John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 1–19; David E. Klemm, “Open Secrets: Derrida and Negative Theology,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Robert Scharlemann (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 8–22, see especially pp. 8–9; Mark C. Taylor, nOTs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 47–49; Hent de Vries, “The Theology of the Sign and the Sign of Theology: The Apophatics of Deconstruction,” in Flight of the Gods, especially pp. 184–194.

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Among this great variety of critical works on the subject, there is a considerable number of commentaries which acknowledge both the significance of deconstruction for negative theology and vice versa; yet scholarly opinion is divided as to what this significance entails. This lack of critical consensus is foregrounded, for example, by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, who, pondering over the impact of deconstructive practice for negative theology, notice two types of reading of Derrida: Deconstruction, for example, brings to the surface the hyperousiology, the Neoplatonic hierarchy, the ontotheology that leaves its traces even in the beyond-being. It ceaselessly searches out the radical limits of an epistemic certainty lodged somewhere near the top, under the cover of that luminous dark. Deconstruction, then, can be, and has been, interpreted theologically as a structural movement that performs the corrective service of saving the name of God from theology itself – a postmodern, non-appropriable apophatic gesture ridding us of God for the sake of God. However, it can be, and has been – earlier and more widely – interpreted as a structural movement that simply rids us of God, or rids us of notions of a God behind “God”, such that the sign “God” can now be employed more appropriately and less toxically as a name we use for the structural conditions of possibility.110

Toby Foshay draws attention to the wide divergence in critical approaches among those who trace the parallels between negative theology and deconstruction, attributing it to the difference in theoretical perspectives and aims the particular critics look to achieve. He observes: The attempt of Derrida’s critics to turn the analogy of negative theology and deconstruction into an equation and the family resemblance into a filiation is itself conducted from two opposing fronts. On the one hand, there are those who accuse Derrida of being a “mere” negative theologian, simply negating and turning on its head the ontotheological tradition, and thus as contained within the dialectical play of the logocentricity which he purports to deconstruct. On the other hand are negative theologians themselves, such as Jean-Luc Marion, cited by Derrida, who challenge Derrida’s analysis of the God of apophatic theology as a hyperessentiality, which, as a “beyond being,” can only be grasped in its relation to classical cataphatic ontotheology.111

110 Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, “Introduction,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, eds. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 8. 111 Toby Foshay, “Introduction: Denegation and Resentment,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 3.

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Another discussion concerns the question of the priority of one discourse over the other. While Derrida notes that deconstruction “has been called […] a type of negative theology,”112 such thinkers as Graham Ward, Morny Joy and Kevin Hart invert this statement, arguing that “negative theology is a form of deconstruction.”113 In a similar vein, Arthur Bradley asserts that “deconstruction is not a form of negative theology because negative theology is already in a state of deconstruction.”114 The attempts to resolve this rather marginal issue seem to be futile, leading only to the polarisation of views, but adding little to our understanding of relationship between deconstruction and negative theology. In response to Derrida’s rejection of negative theology as hyperessential and restoring the order it puts into question, Kevin Hart contends that “Derrida fails to recognise that negative theology has deconstructive power.”115 However, this assertion, which forms a basis of Hart’s analysis in The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy, soon becomes invalidated by Derrida’s appreciation of the mystical language of unsaying in “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum).” Further claim about the structural rather than thematic similarity between the two discourses makes Hart “a prisoner of a problematic opposition between form and content,” a disjunction which, according to Derrida, “is a philosophical prejudgment that not only the one can or must deconstruct, but that, in its very possibility, the event named ‘negative theology’ will have powerfully contributed to calling into question.”116 An intriguing, though not really enthusiastic, assessment of Derrida’s thought in relation to the apophatic tradition seems to be provided by another theologian, Denys Turner, who accuses Derrida of completely changing and misrepresenting negative theology by reading the extremes of apophaticism into the mystical writing and reducing it to a post-metaphysical rhetoric of différance, excised of any “hyperessentiality.” Consequently, Turner cast doubts on the alleged symmetry between negative theology and deconstruction: “this Derridean wholesale deconstruction of theological metaphysics, this

112 Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” p. 3. 113 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 186. Joy writes: “rather than deconstruction being a form of negative theology, negative theology is itself a form of deconstruction.” Morny Joy, “Conclusion: Divine Reservations,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 279. 114 Bradley, Arthur. Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 30. 115 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 198. 116 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 49.

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concession to a ‘theology’ which is the ultimate agent deconstructive of metaphysical theism, is in fact unrecognisable in the mirror of medieval apophaticism […].”117 However, the exploration of the relationship between Derrida’s thought and negative theology which I find the most insightful and significant for the purpose of my argument is provided by Arthur Bradley. By showing, in his book Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy, how Derrida’s deeply ambiguous desire to “save the name” of God resonates in different ways in the work of his contemporaries, the author argues that for Derrida negative theology is a name worth saving for the future. Bradley distances himself from all the wild critical allegations interpreting Derrida’s theological engagement as everything from a nihilist critique of a modern “death-of-God” atheist to a neo-Christian apologia of a new-born mystic. Instead, his guiding argument is that “Derrida’s attempt to ‘save’ negative theology is neither the theological recuperation of an unlikely born-again Christian nor a secular appropriation or demolition job on the via negativa by a polemical atheist or nihilist but an attempt to repeat it differently.”118 Derrida identifies apophatic discourse as a mode of what he calls a “paradoxical hyperbole”119 – an aporetic movement of passion torn between the desire not to speak of the unspeakable and the need to fulfil the “pre-originary ‘promise’ of language,”120 or in other words, an essential tension between the finite and the infinite, the condition and the unconditional. Such a view canvasses for a reading of the via negativa as something central to all thinking worthy of the name – whether theological or non-theological, secular or sacred – that seeks to responsibly address the other as absolutely other. This openness to alterity is described by Bradley in the following way: Negative theology becomes a privileged name for a linguistic force, excess or opening in the direction of the other traced in other contexts under the figure of the messianic (Caputo 1997) or the adieu (de Vries 1999) – that refuses to be locked within any particular theological or philosophical determination. Negative theology’s ambiguous status thus exceeds the distinctions between the Christian and the non-Christian, the theological and the secular, and the transcendental and the empirical.121

117 Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 21. 118 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 11. 119 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 63. 120 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 31. 121 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 3.

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We can think of at least two possible important consequences of such generalized, essentially undecidable concept of negative theology, as proposed by Derrida. Firstly, positing this radical undecidability at the heart of every distinction between the religious and the secular, the Christian and the non-Christian, the philosophical and the theological, does not mean their complete destruction but aims to save them by challenging their self-identical purity, which excludes the other, and by revealing their originary openness. Such reconfiguration of these distinctions may lead to a reformulation of the conceptions of God and religion, as well as their mutual relationship. Secondly, and even more crucially, Derrida’s negative theology asks us to see the necessary instability within every concept as an ethico-political opportunity. If negative theology is, according to Bradley’s interpretation, a “privileged name for the relation to the other as absolutely other that constitutes the basis for all responsible thought and action,”122 then it cannot be considered apolitical, “the most apparently ethereal conceptual thinking,” as Richard Beardsworth maintains.123 The basic undecidability of negative theology, its aporetic oscillation between the transcendental and the empirical “stops […] the ethical from ossifying into the merely ethical and the political into the merely political,”124 thus opening up a possibility of “transforming an ethics and politics of legalistic administration into one of infinite responsibility and decision-making, today, tomorrow, and in the future.”125 In Bradley’s reading, Derrida’s account of the affinities between negative theology and deconstruction draws our attention to their ethical and political implications, thus foregrounding the essential contamination between theory and practice in both discourses. However, as Gregory Rocca’s comment suggests, there might be observed a discrepancy in the perception of negative theology: either as a source of theoretical study or as a spiritual practice of the via negativa aimed at transformation of the self and uplift to the divine: the so-called “negative way” (via negativa) and negative, apophatic theology, though closely related, are not exactly the same. Negative theology often refers to a theory about how the divine predicates signify in the discipline of theology, even academically understood; and while via negativa can sometimes function as a synonym for negative theology so understood, it can also refer to a spiritual way or method by which one lives and thinks in order to arrive at union with God, and in this case it is not merely

122 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 189. 123 Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. 19. 124 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 212. 125 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 219.

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of academic interest but amounts to a life program with ascetic, moral, mystical, and spiritual elements.126

The issue of tensions between theoretical and practical dimensions in both negative theology and deconstruction is also touched upon by Derrida in “Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum).” Although Stephen D. Moore’s contention that Derrida’s later interest in negative theology marks a radical change in his views, so that his “cold suspicion has warmed into outright infatuation,”127 is probably an overstatement, yet “Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum),” a text written originally in the response to the conference on “Derrida and Negative Theology,” undoubtedly provides grateful and appreciative meditation on the apophatic mode. Negative theology is no longer perceived by Derrida as “ontotheology to be deconstructed” (“Différance”) or as an inevitable, thus tragic articulation of the ineffable (“How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”), but becomes considered as an affirmative experience comparable to that of deconstruction. Reinforcing the statement from “How to Avoid Speaking” about the “family resemblance” between apophatic discourse and his own deconstructive practice, Derrida expresses even greater affinity with negative theology, in which he finds a desire for an experience that is absolutely heterogeneous to the order of being: This thought seems strangely familiar to the experience of what is called deconstruction. Far from being a methodical technique, a possible or necessary procedure, unrolling the law of a program and applying rules, that is, unfolding possibilities, deconstruction has often been defined as the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible, of the most impossible, a condition that deconstruction shares with the gift, the “yes,” the “come,” decision, testimony, the secret, etc. And perhaps death.128

Negative theology strives to exceed language, traditions, its own original sociopolitical context. Apophatic discourse desires to move beyond the frameworks of human concepts, representations, symbols, past the binary of affirmation and negation in speaking about God; it pushes the frontiers, transgresses the order of being, breaks the circuit of sense. This movement of passion to think

126 Gregory P. Rocca, O.P., Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), p. 4. 127 Stephen D. Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross, (Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 1994), p. 41. 128 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 43.

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the unthinkable and experience the impossible is that which brings it close to deconstruction. Concerned with the history and meaning of negative theology, Derrida’s final text on the apophatic tradition, “Sauf le nom,” circulates around the writing of three major mystics: Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius. Dionysius’s Corpus Dionisacium is often regarded as a ground-breaking work in the history of negative theology, not only because the very concept of apophatic theology is first formulated here, but more importantly, owing to its reinterpretation of the ineffable Neoplatonic One in terms of the transcendent God of monotheistic religion, it marks the beginning of a new configuration, marrying the ancient Greek heritage of the negative way with biblical revelation and theology, which will become canonical for the whole of the Christian Middle Ages. Therefore, Dionysius may be seen as a threshold figure, epitomizing the synthesizing approach – so central to negative theology – which bridges the gaps between epochs, cultures or religions and builds a dialogue between traditions. The key role of this approach is highlighted by Arthur Bradley, who claims: “Negative theology, as we understand the term today, is the result of an imaginative philosophical synthesis between the Christian concept of the revelation of Christ and the Neoplatonic concept of the transcendence of the One.”129 Derrida tracks down the reasons for this exceptional tendency of negative theology to constantly move between traditions in its undecidability and radical plurality within it, which put it in a constant motion between ontotheology and its other(s). This is what Derrida refers to as deconstructive hyperbolism or transgressiveness that have pushed apophatic theology out of its ostensibly originating, fixed place and identity within Christian Neoplatonism into completely new contexts. As we have seen in the interpretation provided by Bradley, owing to its constitutive self-difference, the meaning of negative theology is radically indeterminate and remains to be decided, as its two opposite identities interpenetrate in a continuous movement of grounding and deracination: “[w]hat permits localizing negative theology in a historical site and identifying its very idiom is also what uproots it from rooting. What assigns it a proper place is what expropriates it and engages it thus in a movement of universalizing translation.”130 There is inherent ambiguity in this movement of simultaneous appropriation and expropriation: on the one hand, negative theology’s faith in the truth of the name, in the locality of idiom, forms the basis of its concrete

129 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 13. 130 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 63.

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historical and theological status; on the other hand, its interrupting and uprooting of the metaphysical principles from which it comes forces it out of its stable place and identity within a certain tradition into new, sometimes not very sympathetic environment. Bifurcated by two contrary impulses that detach it from itself, apophatic theology at the same time contests and confirms its “domestic, European, Greek and Christian” origins: In this sense, the principle of negative theology, in a movement of internal rebellion, radically contests the tradition from which it seems to come. Principle against principle. Parricide and uprooting, rupture of belonging, interruption of a sort of social contract, the one that gives rise to the State, the nation, more generally to the philosophical community as rational and logocentric community. Negative theology uproots itself from there after the fact [aprés coup], in the torsion or conversion of a second movement of uprooting, as if a signature was not countersigned but contradicted in a codicil or in the remorse of a post-scriptum at the bottom of the contract. This contract rupture programmes a whole series of analogous and recurrent movements, a whole outbidding of the nec plus ultra that calls to witness the epekeina tes ousias and at times without presenting itself as negative theology.131

This indeterminate, aporetic state of negative theology – simultaneously faithful and subversive, contingent and transgressive – might offer a new concept of politics that addresses both the conditional and unconditional demands of justice, taking place within the pragmatic, juridical context, but at the same time being capable of negating and suspending all determinations at the moment of infinitude or unconditionality, which any politics should have in order to recognize otherness and build unrestrictive political community. The movement of rupturing, the hyperbolic or self-transgressive dimension that incites negative theology to break with its seemingly originary traditions, the supplement, the essential post-scriptum that it carries within itself and that enables it to be repeated differently in different places and times – lay foundations for the universalizing politics. Yet, this is universality that cannot impose any kind of hegemonic universal but must remain open and always directed to future in order to pave the way for “democracy to come.”132 And it is exactly the openness and indeterminacy of negative theology that Derrida finds necessary for any possible “politics,”

131 Derrida, “Sauf le nom, pp. 67–68. 132 The notion of “democracy to come” is one of the most enduring principles that emerges from Derrida’s later work. It is developed in a number of his books and interviews, most notably in Specters of Marx: State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994); The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), finally given its

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for any idea of contemporary Europe, for any form of responsible thought and action whatsoever: – Would you go as far as to say today there is a “politics” and a “law” of negative theology? A juridico-political lesson to be drawn from the possibility of this theology? – No, not to be drawn, not to be deduced as from a program, from premises or axioms. But there would no more be any “politics,” “law,” or “morals” without this possibility, the very possibility that obliges us from now on to place these words between quotation marks.133

Derrida notices in negative theology the only possibility of universal translability, which can receive and transmit the other on its own terms and thus lead to the formation of an open, democratic, unrestrictive community, which would involve no exclusions and have no set definitions. In the end, the philosopher wishes to make apophaticism, he admires so much for its movement of universalization, self-effacement and self-deconstruction, into what John D. Caputo calls a general apophatics that concerns all people – whether religious, atheists, Western or none of the above.134 Understood in this way, “religion of religion” is for him “the condition for a universal politics, for the possibility of crossing the borders of our common context – European, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and philosophical […] I use the problematic of deconstruction and negative theology as a threshold to the definition of politics.”135 Derrida’s conclusion is obvious: we all need to learn the humility of negative theology or at least a generalised apophatics. After outlining Derrida’s vision of negative theology as paving the way for a general, universal apophatics, which he sees as a necessary precondition for a universal politics to come, let us now return to his readings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, with an aim to indicate some points of similarity and divergence between his philosophy and the thought of these two prominent mystics. While commenting on Pseudo-Dionysius’s writings from the contemporary perspective, some scholars argue for their proto-deconstructive character. Jeffrey Fisher’s observation may serve as an example here: “Dionysius gambles with high fullest elaboration in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michal Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 133 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 81. 134 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 57. 135 Jacques Derrida, “On the Gift: A Discussion Between Jacques Derrida and Jean LucMarion, Moderated by Richard Kearney,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 76.

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stakes, rising nihilism on the one hand and the semantic reinscription of affirmative theology on the other. He engages in a deconstructive maneuver both daring and deft: opening the door to nihilism while at the same time refuting even that form of closure to the mystical project.”136 Fisher’s claim that “the différance of God is played out by Dionysius in The Mystical Theology,”137 may sound like an exaggerated opinion, which, failing to consider a crucial difference between the thinkers, reduces Dionysius’s thought to a post-metaphysical rhetoric of différance, of the ultimacy of postponement, and all alterity to indeterminacy. As a consequence of such reasoning, negative theology itself may simply disappear in deconstruction. While Fisher stresses a close similarity, almost identity, between Dionysius’s and Derrida’s writing, Mary-Jane Rubenstein pays attention to the divergence between their political visions. In the case of Dionysius, whose texts in a great part circulate around the concept of hierarchy, there are two possible interpretations of his views: either as “radically elitist” or “radically welcoming.”138 Derrida explains that “[t]wo concurrent desires divide apophatic theology. The desire to be inclusive of all, thus understood by all (community, koine) and the desire to keep or entrust the secret within the very strict limits of those who hear/understand it right, as secret, and are then capable or worthy of keeping it.”139 But, as Rubenstein insists, even if we follow this more “welcoming” approach, we will discover that in Dionysius the other is welcome insofar as he undertakes a specific, Christian path. The problem of the path is not only connected with the concern of exclusionary politics but with its determinate nature which closes off any relation to the indeterminate. Such an approach seems to be for Rubenstein irreconcilable with Derrida’s critique of teleology, which calls for a messianic opening “with no way out or any assured path, without itinerary or point of arrival, without exterior with a predictable map and a calculable programme […] The emergence of the event ought to puncture every horizon of expectation.”140 To the extent that Derrida perceives any sense of Dionysius’s attachment to ontotheology, he “pulls 136 Jeffrey Fisher, “The Theology of Dis/similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius,” The Journal of Religion, 81.4 (October 2001), p. 535. 137 Fisher, “The Theology of Dis/similarity,” p. 540. 138 Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of ‘Ontotheology,’” Modern Theology 24:4 (October 2008), p. 736. 139 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” pp. 83–84. 140 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 47.

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back from Dionysius.”141 However, as Rubenstein concludes, it is a task of antiontotheological retrieval of Dionysius to open the horizon of expectations in the mystic’s writing and to hold him to his own word(s). Such retrieval of Dionysius is provided by deconstruction’s most respectful kind of critique which reads him through, and against himself: “For it is the case that the order of things is a creative disorder, that the path obliterates the path, and that the lowest is most highly reflective of God, then we have in Dionysius a theo-ethic that unsettles the very hierarchy and teleology it posits.”142 Having found in Dionysius’s work repeated reference to hyperessentiality, to being beyond being,143 Derrida argues that such reference is not so much subverting a positive theology as replacing it, and even strengthening the order it undermines. The mystic employs the rhetoric of negative determination in order to deny that God is this or that, that God can be named by either affirmative or negative names. Yet, through the use of the “hyper” terms, apophatic language of Dionysius’s theology remains within the thought of Being or essence, for the purpose of such language is to find a way to express truly, without falling into idolatry, the manner in which God actually is – even if beyond or above Being. According to Derrida, such hypernegation, which apophatic language employs in order to pass beyond affirmation and negation alike, does not liberate God from Being but indicates the excellence of God’s being and its superabundant presence as God is in a manner incomparable to any finite being. If negation, instead of denying God’s presence or keeping it undecided, saves it, the negative movement in apophatic language of Dionysius turns out be “economic”: it rejects finite language about God with an aim to save God’s infinite presence.144 Consequently, Derrida is still mistrustful of Dionysian language, which on the one hand, attempts to speak the name of God as beyond all names and endlessly insists on its own inadequacy, but on the other, does so in the name of a truth, and thus in fact remains faithful to an ontotheological economy that seeks to speak truly of God and his Being. When Derrida turns to Meister Eckhart’s writing, similar elements arouse his suspicions:

141 142 143 144

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Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of “Ontotheology,”’ p. 735. Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of ‘Ontotheology,’” p. 738. See Derrida: “How to Avoid Speaking,” pp. 144–148. See John D. Caputo, “The Apostles of the Impossible,” in God, Gift, and Postmodernism, pp. 195–197.

When Meister Eckhart seeks to go beyond these determinations, the movement which he sketches remains enclosed in ontic transcendence. “When I said that God was not a Being and was above Being, I did not thereby contest his Being, but on the contrary attributed to him a more elevated Being” (Quasi stella matutina …). This negative theology is still a theology and, in its literality at least, is concerned with liberating and acknowledging the ineffable transcendence of an infinite étant, “Being above Being and superessential negation.”145

In Derrida’s reading of Eckhart “a more elevated Being” is not beyond or otherwise than Being, but rather God is in the most excessive, inconceivable, and ineffable mode. Thus, for Derrida, the redoubled negation of Eckhart’s apophatic discourse is part of a process that aims not beyond the logic of Being but to an infinite being. Kevin Hart suggests that Derrida ignores the fact that Eckhart refuses to ascribe any existential predicates to the Godhead.146 The French philosopher cites one passage from the sermon Quasi stella matutina, but if one reads this in the context of Eckhart’s entire sermon, it may be found out that Eckhart says that God (or Being) is to be thought in a distinct manner from beings. For the German mystic, God lives without “why,” without a ground; and we can only be the one with God when we have overcome all desire to ground our belief in God.147 Don Cupitt claims that Derrida’s suspicious attitude towards negative theology is noticeable throughout all his work, and particularly in his treatment of Eckhart: “Derrida is reading Eckhart only in order to sniff out precisely what metaphysical dogma he teaches, and then consigning him to one camp or another accordingly.”148 Thus, similarly to Hart, Cupitt draws attention to Derrida’s incomplete, limited interpretation of mystical writing, indicating, for example, Derrida’s failure to see that “[t]he mystic has to be a deconstructor.”149 However, Derrida’s position is not so easily determined and it is highly important not to ignore a multiplicity of its, often contradictory, facets. What should not be omitted in the analyses of any aspect of Derrida’s writing is the equivocal approach of the French philosopher. As with so many other topics, on the topic of negative theology Derrida is all the time speaking in

145 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 146. 146 Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 256. 147 Edmund College and Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 60. 148 Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, p. 97. 149 Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, p. 4.

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several voices at once – as we will see in the next section of this study, this plurality of voices is necessitated by negative theology itself. Hence, while stressing that apophatic theology remains faithful to an ontotheological economy that looks to speak the truth of God, the French philosopher recognizes at the same the subverting potential of its negativity, which may pose a threat not only to the ontothelogical, but also to any other tradition: “[P]lacing the thesis in parenthesis or in quotation marks ruins each ontological or theological proposition, in truth each philosopheme as such. In this sense, the principle of negative theology, in a movement of internal rebellion, radically contests the tradition from which it seems to come.”150 Notwithstanding the charges against the ontotheological dimension of Eckhart’s writing, Derrida admires the mystic’s act of uprooting himself from the rational, logocentric community and challenging the existing, institutionalized system of traditional values and norms; and, even more importantly, he is fascinated by the mode of discourse employed by Eckhart: self-contradictory, self-unsaying linguistic manoeuvres, techniques or devices that make up the repertoire of apophatic rhetoric. The author of Glas finds close parallels between Eckhart’s ambivalent attitude towards language, which for the mystic is both “the obstacle” and “the place of our redemption,”151 and his own understanding of discourse. As Denys Turner highlights, the most characteristic feature of Eckhart’s language is performativity – a feature that plays such a key role in the deconstructive project. The apophaticism of his theology is not a mere formal, epistemological principle, but a rhetorical strategy, a praxis of negativity. Being at once a language, but “a language of unsaying,” “it both directly says and as directly unsays in the one act of saying. Thereby the language performs rhetorically what it says technically.”152 Turner explains that Eckhart’s primary intention is “to constrain all the paradoxical tensions of the theological project into each and every theological speech-act,”153 because, after abandoning all the constructions of positive theology, the rhetorical dimension of discourse must do all the theological work. Although – sharing Turner’s hesitation – I would not go so far as to conclude that Eckhart’s theology is “‘all rhetoric,’ postmodern,”154 it seems unquestionable to me that it is particularly this similarity concerning textuality which 150 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 67. 151 Oliver Davies, “Meister Eckhart: An Introduction to his Life and Thought,” in Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. xi–xxxviii. 152 Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” p. 32. 153 Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” p. 33. 154 Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” p. 33.

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aligns deconstruction with negative theology, allowing Derrida to establish a link between the figure of God and the processes of writing, as well as to open new directions of development of the relationship between deconstruction and religion.

Conclusions Jacques Derrida’s reading of negative theology is neither a hostile critique nor a deferential and unequivocally enthusiastic reappraisal of negative theology but an attempt to explore radical plurality and heterogeneity of via negativa in order to reconceptualize it in an alternative way. It is his understanding of apophatic theology as a remarkable manifestation of the originary self-difference or supplementation, an example of the constitutive non-identity, which eludes any attempts to reduce it to a singular theological, philosophical or historical concept, that allows Derrida to reveal its intrinsic ability to be repeated in different contexts, not necessarily theological ones, and thus to demonstrate that “negative theology is itself not simply negative theological all the way down.”155 As Arthur Bradley highlights, Derrida’s recognition of the radical undecidability at the heart of negative theology paves the way for his concept of generalised apopohatics, which creates new ethico-political possibilities by offering us a model of the relation to the other as absolutely other – and therefore, as Derrida insists, it shall become a foundation of any responsible thought and action. However, as the brief sketch of a wide spectrum of critical responses to the issue of “theological turn” in Derrida’s later work has tried to show, not only this ambiguous status of apophatic theology but also the nuanced, paradoxical approach of Derrida has been frequently underemphasised. Both the critics who see deconstruction as a hope for “the reconstitution of the structure of religion”156 and those who warn against its nihilistic and atheistic inclinations, supporters and opponents of linking deconstruction with negative theology, seem to offer more or less limited, often one-sided readings of Derrida’s engagement with religion, and in particular, with negative theology. Moreover, despite such a great number and diversity of critical assessments of the relationship between negative theology and deconstruction, it seems that most of the commentators tend to overlook the importance of mode in Derrida’s writing on negative theology, an oversight I shall address in my own readings. Therefore, the primary aim of the analysis provided in the next two chapters is to elucidate the key role of mode 155 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 36. 156 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 294.

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for Derrida’s exploration of apophasis and to demonstrate how the interrelated discourses of dialogue and silence inspired by negative theology, influence his search for a “new language” and his development of the concept of God. However, prior to the examination of these two modes, it will be worth paying attention to the importance of mode and idiom in the deconstructive project.

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Excursus: Mode and Idiom It has been widely recognized that writing and textuality are at the centre of Derrida’s interest, however, the role of mode and genre in his philosophy seems to have been disregarded, whereas a brief glance at some of Derridean texts would be sufficient to realize how important the choice of mode is for the author of Glas and what responsibility it bears. Adopting a particular genre is for Derrida not simply a matter of rhetoric or style since, as he insists, “[i]t is necessary in each situation to create an appropriate mode of exposition, to invent the law of the singular event, to take into account the presumed or desired addressee.”157 With performativity starting to play a key role in Derrida’s later texts, this sense of responsibility has become even greater. Let me cite a relevant passage from “The Law of Genre” to illustrate this point: “Genres are not to be mixed / I will not mix genres. / I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.”158 The above utterance is interpreted by Derrida himself in two ways: on the one hand, he considers it as a set of constative, descriptive propositions, which do not carry any ethical value; on the other, the statements are viewed as performative, summoning one to obey the law which forbids the mixture of genres, and thus immediately drawing a limit and establishing the system of norms. In that way, Derrida emphasises the necessary interconnection between the constative and the performative, and makes performativity inseparable from its ethical consequences.159 As a result, the issue of responsibility comes to the fore in his later thinking. But the problem then arises with a seemingly impossible reconciliation between the responsibility which must respond to singularity and the “generic generality.”160 According to Derrida, the concept of genre is founded mainly on the binary judgment of opposites, under which a work may be only classified as cohering 157 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007), p. 31. 158 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 223. 159 A detailed analysis of the relationship between the constative and the performative can be found in Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” trans. Catherine Porter, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume 1, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–47. 160 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 234.

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or not cohering with the standard of a certain genre. It is thus limited within the demarcated boundary where certain norms and interdictions are privileged so that the genre, endowed with a naturally given and complete identity, and impervious to any form of contamination, may maintain its purity and authority. Dissatisfied with this predominant principle of genre that devotes itself to the maintenance of purity, Derrida proposes a counter-law as a baffling element that would disturb the order of the law. He uses the concept of “text” to reveal the possibility of subversion within the law: “This text, as I shall try to demonstrate, seems to be made, among other things, to make light [se jouer] of all the tranquil categories of genre theory and history in order to upset their taxonomic certainties, the distribution of their classes, and the presumed stability of their classical nomenclatures.”161 Unassimilated to the general law of genre, the text advances to dismantle the organized distribution of works so that a more proliferate kind of textuality may emerge from the undermining of the general principle. The multiplicity implied in the concept of the text corresponds to what Derrida calls “the law of the law of genre,” which “is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy.”162 It is this “parasitical economy,” this subversive rejection against the law that is able to destabilize the generality of genre and protect singularity. The question of singularity which one must attend to is also bound with the notion of idiom, with the possibility of idiomatic writing “whose purity […] is inaccessible, but about which [Derrida] continue[s] to dream.”163 As the philosopher observes, the idiom inevitably entails the binding of the singular with the general. The uniqueness of the singular, of one’s own idiom is always already compromised, divided, haunted by “a common language, concepts, laws, general norms.”164 Yet, the “desire for idiom,” which is an endless desire, for the idiomatic is “a property that one cannot appropriate,”165 pervades Derrida’s writing, and the quest for the “unknown grammar,”166 which he associates with literature,

161 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 228. 162 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 227. 163 Jacques Derrida, “Unsealing (‘the old new language’),” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 118. 164 Jacques Derrida, “There is No One Narcissism” (Autobiophotographies),” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, p. 200. 165 Derrida, “Unsealing,” p. 119. 166 Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), p. 287.

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God and the “paraph, that is, the musical signature, of your most unreadable history,”167 remains one of his main preoccupations. Searching for the singularity of the idiom, Derrida turns firstly to writing and literature. In writing the singular is intertwined with the general, as an “absolutely pure singularity […] would not be available for reading”: in order to be “readable,” what is singular (a wink, a word, a sentence, a novel) has to participate in “the genre, the type, the context, meaning, the conceptual generality of meaning.”168 As a result, reading becomes “a mixed experience of the other in his or her singularity as well as philosophical content, information that can be torn out of this singular context. Both at the same time.”169 Since philosophy aspires to universality and thus rejects its idiomatic nature, Derrida turns to literature, which attempts to preserve its own singular idiom and creates the place of the secret and “the untranslatable.”170 Moreover, for Derrida, the issue of mode and idiom is linked with the concept of God and the “name of God.” The name of God is the idiom which is structured by a double bind. Historically, it refers to Babel, a story of God’s proper name and its (mis)fortunes in translation. The story ends with God pronouncing his proper name and thus imposing a completely irresolvable double bind on the Shems: on the one hand, translate my words into your language and obey them; but also on the other, do not translate me, for I exceed your worldly economy of life.171 This is a call at once for recognition (translatability) and for singularity and a status of absolute non-appropriation (non-translatability). This double bind is also fundamentally ethical: there is a demand, a duty to understand, to enter into relation with the other (to translate them into one’s own idiom), but at the same time to preserve the otherness of the other (to not translate them). What the above, necessarily very short, analysis has attempted to present is the Derridean vision of language and mode, whose main features turn out to be productivity and performativity. It is through textuality, particularly through the choice of an appropriate mode that we can bear witness to particularity, to the irreducible otherness. As Paul Ricoeur insists: “A different discourse is needed, 167 Derrida, “Unsealing,” p. 119. 168 Jacques Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 68. 169 Derrida, “’There is No One Narcissism,’” p. 201. 170 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie MacDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 148. 171 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 10.

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therefore – one which will attend to singularity and give it expression.”172 In view of the considerable attention given by Derrida to the question of textuality and responsibility ensuing from it, it is my intention in the course of the following two chapters to prove that the employment and examination of the apophatic mode in Derrida’s later work is by no means accidental or of little significance. On the contrary, apophatics may be considered as this “different discourse” Ricoeur and Derrida dream about, as a new way of writing, not controlled by hierarchy, logocentrism and homogeneity, which would challenge the theoretical grounding of repressive structures and institutions, and could provide a way to respond to singularity and to what is understood by “God”, thus opening up the possibility of rethinking the question of religion and politics. Chapter Two acknowledges the importance of the dialogical mode that defines deconstruction. Reading “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum)” as an expression of similarities between deconstruction and negative theology, I demonstrate how the dialogical nature of the text and the replication of the gestures of negative theology enables Derrida to follow a non-dogmatic way of investigating the nature of language and develop his conception of “after-writing” through which he can envisage a non-ontotheological God. Proceeding from the dialogical mode to the discourse of silence in Chapter Three, I offer an analysis of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” reasoning that the apophatic mode of silence which Derrida espouses refers to a type of linguistic silence. This mode, I argue, while being linked with the notion of promise, facilitates the reconceptualizion of God as inscribed within language, coming to name either the inherently promissory nature of language itself or the infinite movements of language.

172 Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophy after Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 21.

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Chapter Two: Dialogue Even there where there are dialogues, in Plato […] these dialogues remain in the service of the monologic thesis. In my case – and I’m not going to compare myself with Plato! – monologism, univocity, a single voice – is impossible, and plurivocity is a non-fictional necessity, a necessity that I put to work in a fictional fashion of course but that is not feigned… Jacques Derrida, 2004 conversation with Hélène Cixous More than one, it is necessary to be more than one to speak, several voices are necessary for that… Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom” Two texts, two hands, two visions, two ways of listening. Together simultaneously and separately. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy

Derrida’s penchant for experimenting with language and the form of text, his tendency to employ a variety of novel, unusual literary devices, techniques or modes of writing, is well-known. One of his frequent practices is to create a textual space where dialogical elements can coexist, where several voices can be heard, converse, answer each another, and yet where no voice dominates the others. This dialogical mode, which is in contrast to the monologism of traditional discourse where one, usually authorial voice attempts to govern the discourse, makes it possible to play with the multiplicity of language, to reveal the unforeseeable configurations of “plurivocity.”173 Yet, it is a mode which cannot be imposed on the text, for example by the author; on the contrary, “the plurality of voices [imposes] itself in some way and [one have] to let it through.”174 Derrida adopts the rhetorical procedure of polylogue in a couple of his texts, such as “Tympan” in Margins of Philosophy, “The Double Session” in Dissemination, Glas, The Truth in Painting, “Envois” in The Post 173 Jacques Derrida, “Passages – from Traumatism to Promise,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 392. 174 Derrida, “Passages,” p. 393.

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Card, “Pas” in Parages, “At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am,” Cinders, and Right of Inspection – but not as a device or technique but as a confession of the impossibility of appropriation, the impossibility of maintaining mastery and control of a monologue or a dialogue. These texts are a concession to polyvocity, a way of letting a plurivocity, which is already there, break loose so that he cannot sign them, no one can sign them, for the call of the other to come happens in several voices. Plurality, difference and dialogue stand in opposition to the “authoritarian norm,” “an intrigue of the hierarchies (ontological, theologico-political, technico-metaphysic),”175 to the dominant demand in the history of philosophy which requires linearity, a single voice on the line, a continuous and transparent speech, in order to clearly demarcate one, reliable path to “truth,” but which at the same time underestimates the power of language which is inherently untraceable and thus uncontrollable. As Derrida points out, the deconstructive analyses, with their heterogeneous modes, voices and registers, when “[d]eployed with a certain consistency, […] destabilize the concepts as well as the institutions and the modes of writing. But since one may presume that the whole of tradition is at stake there, I don’t know where such upheavals are situated. They situate us. These events do not take place, rather they are seeking their place, within and without; their space is already foreign, in any case, to what is called the history of philosophy, but they also affect it another way.”176 Derrida’s purpose is, however, not to question the role of philosophy or even to reject it, but by letting the multiplicity of lines and tones through text, to develop a discourse which embraces both “the philosophical experience and the poetic experience of the language,” and “causes one to think and causes the language to think, or philosophy in the language.”177 In the light of the above remarks, it becomes clear that any analysis of Derrida’s texts must pay attention to their rhetorical dimension. In the case of “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum),” the text, which I consider to be one of the most intriguing and enigmatic of all Derrida’s studies of the theological, it is absolutely necessary to respect the very brio of the discourse – its abrasiveness, its elusiveness, the rhetoric of its polyphonic performance – otherwise Derrida’s discourse can too easily be enclosed within a rigid framework of a single interpretation, either extolled as marking the advent of new religious thinking, or dismissed as hostile to metaphysical certainties and thus nihilistic. 175 Jacques Derrida, “Unsealing (‘the old new language’),” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 130. 176 Derrida, “Unsealing,” p. 130. 177 Derrida, “Passages,” p. 375.

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The purpose of the examination of “Sauf le nom,” undertaken in this chapter, is to highlight the significance of “plurovicity” that Derrida incorporates into his writing. Firstly, it will be shown that the dialogical mode of the text, which presents itself as the “fictive dialogue”178 in the tradition of polylogues, provides an unorthodox way of investigating the nature of language and in that way exposes its “braided polyphony.”179 When the heterogeneous potential, previously suppressed by logocentrism and the homogeneity of a dialectic, is unleashed, new political possibilities may be generated. Secondly, the chapter shall explicate how the adoption of a form of dialogue facilitates Derrida’s exploration of the relationship between negative theology and deconstruction and reveals such points of similarities between these two movements as the recognition of the limits of language, the aporetic and performative nature of their discourse, the desire to protect singularity, and eventually the search for a new type of writing. Characterised by performativity, liberated from the constraints of logocentrism and capable of addressing singularity and alterity, the idea of “after-writing” (53) allows Derrida to offer an inscription of a new concept of God, who becomes closely linked to the structures of textuality and, consequently, incomprehensible, untranslatable, essentially paradoxical. Finally, I shall argue that by employing the dialogical mode and replicating the apophatic gestures – though, as Arthur Bradley remarks, in a different way – Derrida reinforces the undecidability within the religious as well as the political, and rethinks deconstructive politics, whose potential he sees in the name of God, saved by “after-writing” from sovereignty and self-identity.

1.  Two Voices, Two Visions, Two Powers: Together and/or Separately If we were to pinpoint at least one theme that recurs in Derrida’s reading of negative theology, it might be the conviction that the via negativa is not a homogenous concept but a “pluralized chorus of competing voices or desires.”180 In response to Jean-Luc Marion’s allegations expressed in his lecture “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of ‘Negative Theology,’” Derrida clarifies that a non-totalizing perspective on the via negativa is possible, hence his texts on this subject are

178 Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum),” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 34. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 179 Jacques Derrida, “Voice II,” trans. Verena Andermatt Conley, in Points, p. 162. 180 Arthur Bradley, Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 37.

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marked by plurality, performativity and inevitable incompleteness, and should not be treated as transparent, adequate descriptions of some “real”: Marion constantly refers to what I said about negative theology as if I had a thesis, one thesis, phrased in one form through a single voice – concerning the metaphysics of presence, the distinction between position and negation, and so on. Now I think that if time permitted I could show that my texts on the subject are written texts, by which I mean that they are not a thesis on a theme. They have a pragmatic aspect, a performative aspect that would require another kind of analysis. There is a long displacement of a number of voices, not only in myself, on my side, but on the other side, so to speak, on the side of what I always refer to as “what one calls negative theologies.” Each time I address the question of negative theology, I very cautiously put these words in quotation marks, in the plural.181

For Derrida, “negative theology” does not name a singular event, a clearly defined corpus of texts or a certain tradition; on the contrary there are multiple voices at work within this deceptively singular name and its restricted tradition. Hence, the French philosopher insists that “negative theology” shall be considered as a problem, not a reference. This transformation of the expression “what one calls negative theology” or “negative theologies” into a problematic entity is foregrounded especially in “Sauf le nom.” The first few phrases of the text make it clear that there is nothing like one negative theology, since it is based on inherent aporia, which forces it to speak through more than one voice. Though often regarded as a “voiceless voice” (35), in fact, apophatic theology speaks not only in multiple, but also heterogenous, contradictory voices. Therefore, its “pluralized chorus” justifies, or even necessitates, the adoption of a rhetorical procedure of polylogue in “Sauf le nom,” as it is necessary to speak in a plurivocal manner, especially when the subject is God or death or both. And, as Derrida emphasises, this is true “[s]till more […] when one claims to speak about God according to the apophatic [l’apophase], in other words, according to the voiceless voice [la voix blanche], the way of theology called or so called negative. The voice multiplies itself, dividing within itself: it says one thing and its contrary, God that is without being or God that (is) beyond being” (35). Throughout the whole text Derrida attempts to prove that negative theology’s mode of operation is not singular or monolithic but plural and multiple. In addition, it is worth noting, following Bradley’s argument, 181 Jacques Derrida, “Response by Jacques Derrida” to Jean Luc-Marion, “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking about ‘Negative Theology,’” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 43.

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that the “expression ‘negative theology’ always designates a point of chiasmus or crossroads between two or more lines – Neoplatonic and Christian, theological and non-theological, and so forth – rather than a single point of origin.”182 What is of paramount importance here is that this plurality of origin may result in two or more voices constantly wrestling with each other under its name, with none of them drowning out the others, as it is in the case of “Sauf le nom,” where (at least) two voices are clearly distinguishable: These two powers are, on the one hand, that of a radical critique, of a hyper-critique after which nothing more seems assured, neither philosophy nor theology, nor science, nor good sense, nor the least doxa, and on the other hand, conversely, as we are settled beyond all discussion, the authority of that sententious voice that produces or reproduces mechanically its verdicts with the tone of the most dogmatic assurance (66–67).

At the beginning of the text, the two speakers, engaged in a conversation concerning the subject of negative theology, seem to stand on the opposite poles, holding almost contrary views and expressing divergent aims. One interlocutor relates most of the issues discussed to deconstruction and follows the practice of challenging, putting into doubt and questioning – typical of deconstructive analyses. S/he asks, for instance, “By what right are these aphorisms, these sententious fragments, or these poetic flashes linked together, as if they formed the continuous tissue of a syllogism?” (42). The other speaker, who seems to be more trustful towards negative theology, attempts to steer the conversation onto its original subject, that is apophatic theology. His/her intention is to shed some more light on the issue rather than deconstruct it and in contradiction to his deconstructive interlocutor, s/he does not have qualms about using the terms which may be seen as taken from “metaphysical dictionary,” such as “essential” (36) or “proper” (37). However, as dialogue facilitates an interpenetration of ideas, it ultimately leads to alteration, convergence and even reversal of their positions. Apart from being in a dialogue with his/her deconstructive counterpart, the proponent of negative theology makes statements which are themselves dialogical; while expressing his views in the first person, at the same time he/she speaks in the words of other mystics, quoting, for instance, the poetic aphorisms of Angelus Silesius: “One knows not what one is” or “I am as God and God as I” (66). The “unusual alliance of two powers and of two voices” (66) within these aphorisms questions not only the alleged self-identical, self-conscious subjectivity, but the ipseity of God, so that both identities can be now perceived as liberated from the constraints of “being, essence, the proper or the self-same” 182 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 34.

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(65). Negative theology “radically dissociates being and knowing, existence and knowledge. It is, as it were, a fracture of the cogito” (65–66). The participants of the dialogue in “Sauf le nom” embody two visions of negative theology: the first interpretation is based on the belief in a fixed, determinate, immutable essence, which can be grasped in each of its historical manifestations; the second one treats negative theology only as a name for all these historical events and inscriptions, and thus as an unstable phenomenon, which undergoes constant transformations, taking on supplementary, often unpredictable meanings. The text endeavours to explicate not only the meaning and function of negative theology but also its relationship with deconstruction; however, instead of giving an informative, professional lecture on the given topic, Derrida proposes an ongoing discussion, where none of the aporias are resolved by intellectual adroitness, but strained against performatively while the speakers discuss, or rather flounder, meander through various names and concepts, pacing back and forth, going endlessly around in circles. Even the idea of negative theology being a “topic” and, like any other “topic,” subjected to an objective analysis, is dismissed. Thus, we are left with a lingering question: “How, today, can one speak (that is, speak together, address someone) on the subject of and in the name of negative theology? How can that take place today, today still, so long after the inaugural openings of the via negativa?” (47). Since the historical instances of negative theology are given to us in a form of a linguistic corpus, the question of the relationship between negative theology and language instantly comes to the fore. One of the speaker even suggests that “[w]hat is called ‘negative theology,’ in an idiom of Greco-Latin filiation, is a language [langage]” (48); yet because of the dialogical mode of the text and the altering views of the speakers, this proposition serves only as one of many “provisional hypotheses,” which is open to further modifications or complete rejection.183 In response, the second speaker ponders whether negative theology is not rather that which undermines language and surpasses its limits, and 183 An apparently similar “provisional hypothesis” appears at the opening of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”; however, in that case it is formulated by a single speaker: “Under the very loose heading of ‘negative theology,’ as you know, one often designates a certain form of language, with its mise en scène, its rhetorical, grammatical, and logical modes, its demonstrative procedures – in short a textual practice attested or even situated ‘in history,’ although it does sometimes exceed the predicates that constitute this or that concept of history.” Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 143.

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consequently, its essence lies outside of language. This characteristic of negative theology is accepted by the first interlocutor, but s/he insists that it still refers to negative theology as a language. Is it possible to resolve this tension? “How does one leap out of this circle?” (48) – this question posed by the first voice has haunted Derrida throughout his whole work. If we follow this line of argument, the next problematic aspect arises with the question of reflexivity. However, as J. P. Williams points out, it is thanks to this reflexivity that negative theology can “escape the one-sidedness of either dogmatism or nihilism.”184 The speaker from “Sauf le nom” expounds on this point by depicting negative theology as “the most thinking, the most exacting, the most intractable experience of the ‘essence’ of language […] in which language and tongue speak for themselves” (54) as its “formalizing rarefaction” (49) is suppressed by a “poetic or fictional dimension” (54). This poeticality and fictionality is further complicated by the generic analysis. The structure of the text evidently shows that what we deal with here is dialogue; the subtitle implies post-scriptum, but it may also at the same time refer to the form of autobiography, to the confessional mode. It becomes clear that the genre of “Sauf le nom” is difficult to be clearly determined and thus reading and interpretative options may freely multiply and cannot be in any way limited. When the first speaker rebukes the other for trying to arrange Silesius’s aphorisms within a coherent, linear narrative, he may also leave us some indirect injunctions concerning our own reading process with regard to “Sauf le nom.” His strong remark: “You cannot treat this peregrination of writing as a treatise of philosophy or theology, not even as a sermon or a hymn,” (42) should draw our attention both to the performativity of the text and the significance of place, the issue which I shall later expound on while discussing the figure of God. The performativity of writing is also related to the question of subjectivity and kenosis. When writing ceases to be considered as having power of creating and then sustaining the sovereignty of the self, subjectivity may develop, or rather dissolve. Analysing Silesius’s aphorism “Go and become yourself the writ and yourself the essence” (41), the speakers arrive at a conclusion that becoming writing and becoming divine merge together. It is writing that makes “this becoming-self as becoming-God-or Nothing” (43) possible, that is the most impossible possible. Subjectivity is inseparable from writing, as the self is becoming “in writing itself, in scripting itself [en s’écrivant, en s’écriturant]” (42).

184 J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 9.

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Negative theology seeks to avoid speaking about God in an ontotheological, idolatrous manner while renouncing all inadequate attributions, “while negating or effacing all, while proceeding to eradicate every predicate and claiming to inhabit the desert…” (53). This figure of the desert, recurring in Angelus Silesius’s Cherubinic Wanderer, is recognized by Derrida as “a paradoxical figure of the aporia” (53) that problematizes the ontological status of negative theology itself. The speakers in “Sauf le nom” are faced with the question of what, if anything at all, remains after this kenosis of discourse, after this endless desertification that brings language into crisis: – Despite this desert, then, what we call negative theology grows and cultivates itself as a memory, an institution, a history, a discipline. It is a culture, with its archives and its tradition, and accumulates the acts of a tongue […] However much one recalls […] that negative theology “consists,” through its claim to depart from all consistency, in a language that does not cease testing the very limits of language, and exemplarily those of propositional, theoretical, or constative language… (54)

Despite all its denouncement of constative language, of all the propositions, even of the word, apophatic theology must in its transgressive movement, in its surplus, also make its point. If it wants to make itself known, to make any difference, it must leave its trace, “by testifying it remains” (54). The trace is necessary so that language can testify to that which has no ontological essence. Therefore, negative theology “would be nothing, very simply nothing, if this excess or this surplus (with regard to language) did not imprint some mark on some singular events of language and did not leave some remains on the body of a tongue…” (55). But what might this remaining mean? “Is it a modality of ‘being’?” (55) Is it a possibility of Being? Or rather, a mere, never fully actualized “possibility” of the impossibility of Being? Does negative theology and the subject to which it bears witness to need to be? Can negative theology itself be seen as “something (determinable) and not nothing,” or as a theology that “wants to be or become something rather than nothing” (55)? Derrida does not seem to seek any definite answers to the above questions; what is more, he purposefully adopts a dialogical mode in his text in order to shift from one side to the other and thus evade taking a firm stand. The aporetics studied and performed here enables and even forces him to maintain both positions simultaneously. Consequently, negative theology turns out to operate both within and without language. On the one hand, as the theological speaker boldly states, it takes place “over the edge” (60) of language; aspiring to say nothing about God, to speak without speaking, it surpasses the discourse. On the other hand, as the deconstructive speaker notices, apophatic theology is inevitably entangled in language, as “this jealous anger of language 74

within itself and against itself ” (59–60). In other words, the movement beyond language signals and “imprints” itself in the body of language: “Some trace remains right in this corpus, becomes this corpus as survivance of apophasis (more than life and more than death), survivance of an internal onto-logico-semantic auto-destruction: there will have been absolute rarefaction, the desert will have taken place, nothing will have taken place but this place” (55). While attempting to “save the name” of via negativa and its aporetic structure, Derrida decides not to resolve dialectically the tensions between the above positions but to leave them in a state of undecidability. His goal is not determine the identity of negative theology but to save it from determination which seeks to reduce the plurality of voices only to one; whereas the voices of negative theology do not form a clear system of oppositions but constitute two sides of the same system, which itself is in a permanent state of deconstruction. It is impossible to describe negative theology as if it were some historical, theological or philosophical phenomenon since its defining characteristic is “paradoxical hyperbole” (63), the movement of transcendence that exceeds all the determined objects, being, essence, the proper, the self-same: “It announces in a double sense: it signals an open possibility, but it also provokes thereby the opening of the possibility. Its event is at once revealing and producing, postscriptum and prolegomenon, inaugural writing” (64). As a mode of “paradoxical hyperbole,” whose identity consists in its own self-difference and supplementation, negative theology has an ability to be repeated outside its original theological context. Hence, “Sauf le nom,” as post-scriptum, that is writing both after event and as the event, repeats the gestures of negative theology, but does it differently. As Arthur Bradley remarks, “Derrida seeks to listen to negative theology’s other voice, then, the voice that questions every certitude including its own, that refuses to remain content within any theological, institutional or political doctrine or body and surrenders itself to an unknowable object,” a voice which responds to “the alterity of the other.”185 Still, although this voice strives to dissociate itself from the tradition, history, culture, which it seems to originate from, it does not reject them completely but remains in a dialogue with its own heritage, thus forming a double bind, an “uprooting rooting” (67), or “double truth of filiation” (73), which situates negative theology in the aporetic place of (non)belonging. The ambiguous relation of negative theology to its origins echoes Derrida’s own attitude to his philosophical predecessors. While identifying himself as an “heir” to traditional philosophy, Derrida recognizes that the “scene of the gift

185 Bradley, Negative Theology, pp. 42–43.

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also obligates us to a kind of filial lack of piety, at once serious and not so serious, as regards the thinking to which we have the greatest debt.”186 Thus, it may be argued that the paths of deconstruction and negative theology, with their multiplicity of voices and double movement of both a “rupture” (67) and “a countersignature” (68), once more intersect. The openness to interaction and dialogue, even if this involves the risk of contamination, has been fundamental to the development of negative theology; hence, our current understanding of via negativa is impossible without acknowledging the elements of tension within its history as well as practice. Since its beginning it has formed a distinct movement within the realm of theology, yet, it cannot be forgotten that it emerged as a result of the encounter of two dissimilar traditions, of the cross-pollination of ideas between philosophy of Greek provenance and Christian mysticism. “These two trajectories, these two paths [trajets] thus arrowed would cross each other in the heart of what we call negative theology” (62) – observes one of the speakers in “Sauf le nom,” whose own dialogue with his/her interlocutor takes place in a similar, unstable crossing between theological and deconstructive positions. Though seemingly incompatible, the two currents within negative theology were able to converse with each other, and it was exactly this conversation that gave rise to such an intriguing phenomenon as negative theology, which remains a rich source of inspiration to the present day. The interchange between two different views, two theories and practices, which led to the emergence of Christian negative theology, later takes another form within the Christian tradition itself, with a result that “two concurrent desires divide apophatic theology” (83). On the one hand, apophaticicim, constituting a crucial and integral part of official theology, operates within the institutional system of Christianity, on the other, it follows a practice of critique – similar to that of deconstruction in its relation to philosophy – which does not cease exposing the idolatrous elements of Christian thought, thus questioning some of its main tenets and unsettling its structure. Derrida signals here an important ambiguity within any tradition of apophatic theology. At once dependent on and destructive of the self-identity of its tradition, the apophatic movement would mark “one of the most remarkable manifestations” of the self-difference of all traditions (71). In the case of “Sauf le nom,” apart from examining the tensions within negative theology, the text also exposes a parallel interaction between the apophatic and the kataphatic, thus entering into discussion on a much broader theological issue.

186 Jacques Derrida, “Dialanguages,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points, p. 130.

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William Franke observes that the history of negative theology has always been marked by the recognition of the inescapable contradiction between the “strict unsayability of God according to his essence” and “the prolix languages about him in relation to the created universe,”187 which resulted in the persistent tension between the language of affirmation and negation in any attempts to speak about God. In “Sauf le nom” Derrida writes that what makes apophatic discourse “formalizable,” “mechanizable and easily reproducible” is the fact that “the statement of negative theology empties itself by definition, by vocation of all intuitive plenitude” (50). In order to depict this procedure of “emptying itself,” Derrida proposes to reinscribe it in a more familiar theological idiom, that is, to translate the concept of kenosis from the biblical passage Philippians 2:7, where St. Paul says that Christ “made himself nothing” (New English Bible) or “emptied himself,” into the language of phenomenology. Apophatic statements devoid or strip each word or phrase of its semantic, metaphorical and deictic value, thus representing what Edmund Husserl called the moment of crisis: “forgetting of the full and originary intuition, empty functioning of symbolic language, objectivism etc.” (50). Therefore, there is a need in negative theology for a kind of protective moment in a form of prayer or hymn or other affirmative utterance that would prevent the stripping of names, concepts, qualities, and predicates becoming merely mechanical. The abstraction, formalization, and emptiness of the “purely apophatic instance” (51) must be always counterbalanced by an acknowledgment of a certain presence, albeit a presence beyond being, a being otherwise than being. The speaker stresses “the measure of a relation, and this relation is stretched between two poles, one of which must be that of positivity de-negated” (51). Here, the “de-negated positivity” is both every predication based upon a full or fulfillable intuition and of the purported “plenitude” of the prayer or the hymn that is said to give the logoi spiritual, though not necessarily protective, quality. The two poles of this necessary relation are that of the said which in turn is being unsaid, and that of the saying, which becomes exposed to an unsaying: “each is the abyss and the sublime of and for the other, which is just another way of saying that neither of them is, that is, stabilizes itself in any presence or present.”188 By using the term “de-negation” Derrida questions the simple binary opposition between affirmation and negation, highlighting instead the dynamics of their relationship. 187 William Franke, On What Cannot be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts. Volume 1: Classic Formulations, ed. William Franke (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 16. 188 Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 338–339.

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To quote Mark C. Taylor, “Verneinung [of which dénégation is the French translation] is an affirmation that is a negation and a negation that is an affirmation. To de-negate is to un-negate […] More precisely, denegation is an un-negation that affirms rather than negates negation.”189 Therefore, denegation, as a subversion of the dialectical affirmation of negation captures the undecidable oscillation that Derrida figures between the apophatic and the kataphatic and enables him to think their relationship undialectically. Such undialectical thinking does not correspond with the interpretation provided by Thomas Aquinas,190 which has been later accepted by the majority of Western scholars. Among the advocates of the dialectical view of the relationship between kataphasis and apophasis one can find Jeffrey Fisher, who tracks down the roots of theological language “in the transcendence of the conjunction” between the two terms,191 Kevin Hart,192 and Denys Turner, who contends: “The apophatic therefore presupposes the cataphatic ‘dialectically’ in the sense that the silence of the negative way is the silence achieved only at the point at which talk about God has been exhausted.”193 Turner illustrates his argument by referring to the exemplary text of Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, which functions as an apophatic corrective to the exuberant linguistic excess of The Divine Names, arguing that interdependence of Dionysius’s works “shows the dialectical pulsation between affirmations and negations that characterises the enterprise of Christian negative theology as a whole.”194 Derrida cannot accept such a reading of negative theology, insisting in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” that “this de-negation does not give dialectic a chance.”195 While dissociating himself from the Western understanding of apophasis, Derrida gets closer to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, represented, for instance, by Vladimir Lossky. Rowan Williams in his paper on Vladimir Lossky’s understanding of via negativa 189 Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 36. 190 See Gregory P. Rocca, O.P., Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004). 191 Jeffrey Fisher, “The Theology of Dis/similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius,” The Journal of Religion, 81.4 (October 2001), p. 548. 192 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 193. 193 Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 18. 194 Oliver Davies and Denys Turner, “Introduction,” in Silence and the Word, p. 3. 195 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 163.

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points out the dissimilarity between Western and Eastern theology, expressed in Lossky’s statement that “the conventional Western view of the apophatic method as essentially a corrective to cataphatic theology, a qualification which acts as a necessary dialectical stage between the via affirmitiva and the via eminentiae, is a misunderstanding of its real nature.”196 Lossky instead asserts that apophasis should undergird all theological discourse as it is the perfect, in fact, the only way in regard to God. Its function is not merely “corrective”; it is true that it exposes the inadequacy of a predicative language but at the same time it confesses its own discourse, which does not need any conceptual via eminentiae to intrude with a facile synthesis. These few examples of the controversies surrounding the understanding of apohasis in relation to kataphasis lead us to the recognition of at least two types of negative theology, which J. P. Williams explicates in the following way: In summary, the two competing theories of apophasis are: first, a negation which is complementary to affirmation and is anterior to a transcendent or superlative affirmation about the divine; or second, a negation which is posterior to both affirmations and firstorder negations about the divine.”197

Gregory Rocca traces the roots of this division in the writing of PseudoDionysius: It is hard to escape the conclusion that to some degree Dionysius recognizes two kinds of negative theology: one is exoteric and forms a dialectic with the assertions of affirmative theology, while the other is an esoteric mystical unknowing based on the dark ascents. This second type is not a part of discursive theology at all since its primary act is silence and its object is the God beyond reason.198

It seems that Derrida is aware of this split within negative theology and while rejecting the dialectical interpretation, he takes sides with the second option, which J. P. Williams further expounds: The apophatic negation of negation offers a different approach to the divine. Through its dialectical affirmation, negation and subsequent negation of both preceding stages, it creates a contradiction which cannot be resolved in favour of either of the contradictory positions, or of a third position, even that of no-position. Now the mind can only

196 Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (London: SCM Press, 2007), p. 2. 197 J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity, p. 5. 198 Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, p. 21.

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“hover” between the poles of the contradiction, affirming both and neither, negating both and neither.199

Here, Williams does not really depict two divergent interpretations or types of negative theology, but maintains that these are two stages of the same movement, which are not amenable to dialectical resolution, especially as the second stage seeks to surpass dialectical reasoning and forms of expression. The apophatic negation of negation aims at the cessation of discourse but it can only approach this state through some mode of discourse that attenuates, annuls or unsays itself: “apophasis can actually be apprehended only in discourse – in language insofar as it negates itself and tends to disappear as language.”200 As we have already noted, this irresolvable tension of the second stage becomes Derrida’s central preoccupation in “Sauf le nom.” Rejecting a dialectical resolution, which in its aspiration to the moment of transcendence denies difference by reducing it to the same, Derrida reinforces his dialogical approach and aims to develop a discourse which would not allow any hint of dialectic closure or totality and certainly any binarism, reifying the terms in opposition, but would expose and maintain undecidability between any contending terms. And once again, negative theology turns out to be a source of inspiration for Derrida, who, by combining deconstruction, “the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible,” with Angelus Silesius’s “denegation,” opens the path for “an absolute heterogeneity in the order and in the modality of the possible”: “what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible, more impossible than the impossible if the impossible is the simple negative modality of the possible” (43). The next section will attempt to demonstrate how negative theology’s desire to express what is currently inexpressible stimulates Derrida’s mode of “after-writing” (53).

2.  Responding to the Call: “After-writing” and Rethinking God “Sauf le nom” brings out the plurality and multiple voices at work behind and within both deconstruction and negative theology with the aim of revealing their undecidability, indeterminate plurivocity, irresolvable paradoxicality. The duplicity of their meanings, their aporia and dialogical character are rendered explicitly through Derrida’s use of different speakers. The dialogical mode is not simply one of the rhetorical strategies but a necessity which by liberating the heterogeneity inhibited by logocentrism facilitates the development of a new 199 J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity, p. 8. 200 Franke, On What Cannot be Said, p. 1.

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language, responsive to singularity and alterity, which would exceed “the irresponsible unfolding of a program” and “pass through the madness of the undecidable and the impossible” (59). This idiomatic form of writing, which I have decided to term “after-writing,”201 may provide a way of thinking otherwise, a mode of thought which is not underpinned by binary oppositions that issue from the philosophical logic. This section intends to explore this notion of “afterwriting” and its influence on Derrida’s reformulation of the concept of God. Undeniably, Derrida’s rejection of monologism and univocity in favour of plurivocity can be considered as one of the crucial factors which pave the way for the development of “after-writing.” It is interesting to note that Derrida’s desire to throw off the shackles which constrain writing echoes his appeal for the rejection of the idea of the book, made in Of Grammatology, where he insists that “the idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and […] against difference in general.”202 His life-long attention to difference finds its expression in his desire for “after-writing” as well as his alignment with negative theology which questions the self-identical purity of theology, uncovering its unavoidably heterogeneous structure. In the light of Derrida’s argument from Of Grammatology that the totality of the book suppresses the energy hidden within writing, “Sauf le nom” does not present itself as a closed, autonomous entity but – as the subtitle implies – as a post-scriptum. In its self-reflexive movement the text incessantly exposes the prolegomena, pretexts203 or post-scripta within itself, thus appearing as 201 I propose to use the term “after-writing” instead of, for example, “post-writing”, because of the frequent misunderstanding connected with the prefix “post,” which is used with reference to certain closure and chronology, whereas, according to Derrida, this prefix questions both these notions and carries the meaning of change and otherness. In “In Discussion with Christopher Norris” Derrida explains: “As you know, I never use the word ‘post,’ the prefix ‘post’; and I have many reasons for this. One of those reasons is that this use of the prefix implies a periodisation or an epochalisation which is highly problematic for me. Then again, the word ‘post’ implies that something is finished – that we can get rid of what went before Deconstruction, and I don’t think anything of the sort,” Jacques Derrida, “In Discussion with Christopher Norris,” in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Catherine Cooke and Andrea Papadakis (London: Academy Editions, 1989), p. 72. 202 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 18. 203 Mark C. Taylor defines the “pretext” as the “before-text” which “always comes ‘after’ […] always follows the title and ‘its’ text. Hence the pretext of the text is a before that is (always) to come.” See Taylor, Nots, p. 35.

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fragmentary, aporetic, decontextualised, simultaneously present and absent. It celebrates its generic impurity, artificiality of its “fictive” dialogical form or repetitiveness. Derrida describes this mode of “after-writing” in terms of excess, (re)inscription and dislocation or displacement, which enable him to exceed the logic of philosophy and transgress the limits of the discursive difference, thus becoming disruptive of any fixed oppositions between concepts, of any familiar binary categories, such as inside/outside, before/after, beginning/end. In the case of negative theology, it starts from “this astonishing fact [fait], this already done [déjà fait], this all done [tout fait]” (53) and is always and already “repeating, continuing, importing and transporting” (52). Seeking a way to record and transmit the incomprehensible and ineffable experiences, negative theology embraces “after-writing,” which surpasses the limits of language in its hyperbolic, transgressive movement. The destination of such performative, unconstrained writing is never fully present in its stable identity, but rather endlessly deferred and multiplied. One voice in “Sauf le nom” remarks that The Mystical Theology has a double addressee: “Dionysius the Areopagite […] articulates a certain prayer, turned toward God; he links it with an address to the disciple, more precisely to the becoming-disciple of him who is thus called to hear” (38). What this means is that the apophatic address which is to be directed to God is, in fact, turned toward another apostrophe. It is important to note that Derrida locates in the apophatic apostrophe, and more generally in “after-writing,” a relation that is at once vertical and horizontal. Much like the redirection of the Levinasian Good, “This conversation turns (itself) toward the other in order to turn (it) toward God, without there being an order to these two movements that are in truth the same, without one or the other being circumvented or diverted” (38). Derrida elucidates this idea of “after-writing” by relating it to the notions of translation and prayer, as both of them face and explore the limits of language. In the case of translation “the untouchable (unberührbar) is what fascinates and orients the work of the translator,”204 who wishes to touch the remnant of the text after the communicable meaning has already been removed from it – but the untouchable will always remain intact. Apophatic discourse is viewed as “the chance of an incomparable translatability without limit,” not as a “universal tongue” (47) that would eradicate all the differences but as a more generalized “tongue” that could be shared by all cultures and religions. It surrenders itself completely to

204 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 124.

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an unknowable object and surrenders even that act of surrender to an otherness that is essentially indeterminable: Unless I interpret it too freely, this via negativa does not only constitute a movement or a movement of deprivation, an asceticism or a provisional kenosis. This deprivation should remain at work (thus give up the work) for the (loved) other to remain the other. The other is God or no matter whom, more precisely, no matter what singularity, as soon as any other is totally other [tout autre est tout autre] (74).

If negative theology wants to respect the alterity of the other, it cannot identify the other exclusively with one concept of “God,” for instance the God of Christian negative theology, but should maintain an indifference towards its object and “let the other be.” Arthur Bradley comments on that: “This hyperbolic act of Gelassenheit [letting-be] translates the via negativa from a discourse addressed with dogmatic certitude to the Christian community into a discourse addressed to the ‘no-matter-whom’ which drives a wedge between being and knowing, between creator and created and between the human and the animal.”205 Both translation and negative theology operate at the threshold between the singular and the general, all the time staying alert to “save the name,” to rescue the singularity of idiom. Derrida argues that negative theology negotiates this tension through prayer, which can protect the apophatic discourse from being reified in citation and recitation, mechanical repetition and parody. He states in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”: “I will try to show how negative theology claims, at least, not to be assimilable to a technique that is exposed to simulacrum and to parody, to mechanical repetition. It escapes from these by means of the prayer that precedes apophatic utterances.”206 The role of prayer is not introductory or secondary but essential. Prayer “regulates discursive asceticism, the passage through the desert of discourse, the apparent referential vacuity that avoids empty delirium and prattle, only by beginning by addressing itself to the other, to you.”207 The prayer Derrida talks about is “pure prayer” in the sense of pure address to an indeterminate addressee, to the other as other. In so doing, this invocation or supplication does not ask for anything in particular: “The ‘pure’ prayer demands only that the other hear it, receive it, be present to it, be the other as such, a gift, call, and even cause of prayer.”208 This purity of invocation (“no matter what”) is characteristic of prayer as a discourse that is not predicative,

205 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 43. 206 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 144. 207 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 176. 208 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 176.

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theoretical, or constative. It is a pure “speaking to,” not a “speaking of,” a pure apostrophe without further determination. As a non-predicative, non-propositional form, incapable of being true or false, prayer exemplifies a performative utterance. Moreover, for Derrida, in order for prayer to be authentic, it must involve both faith and scepticism, or rather “suspension of certainty”209 and knowledge. It would not only form a coded practice, a ritual repeating well-known gestures and phrases, but as a singular, self-critical act, it would challenge the institutional principles and discourses, making itself appealing to both believers and nonbelievers. Whereas the book highlights its status as a totality, finite and complete, “after-writing” presents itself as a fragment, unfinished or ongoing; it is “a tongue to come” (47), which is “always on the way” (68). As it does not exist as a selfenclosed system of meaning and reference, it cannot escape being contaminated by discordant voices, and thus becoming impure and plurivocal, a mark never fully present or identical to itself. Indeterminate and self-transgressive, it brings this indeterminacy into the text of “Sauf le nom,” questioning the stable identities of the speakers, which undergo the process of constant transformation in the course of dialogue, blurring the boundaries between Derrida’s text and other pieces of writing. It is in negative theology that Derrida finds the potential of plurivocity which motivates his development of “after-writing.” It is voiceless when faced with the ineffable God, but it necessarily must remain a voice in speaking of God. It is atheistic in speaking of God beyond being; yet, this atheism expresses the most intense desire of God. It is negative, but this negativity contains in itself an act of affirmation. Negative theology spells the end of monologism, so much longed-for by Derrida. As “the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible,” negative theology introduces “an absolute interruption” in the order, modality and regime of the possible.210 At its root it contests the very idea of identity and self-interiority of any tradition, such as the one metaphysics, the one ontotheology, the one Christian revelation, the one history, or self-identity. Negative theology as a discourse of “absolute” heterogeneity and interruption is viewed by Derrida as “one of the most remarkable manifestations of […] self-difference” (71): while being central to the history of Christianity, at the same time it tries to remain independent of revelation, of all the canonical language of the Scriptures. 209 Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith: An interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, eds. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 31. 210 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 43.

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The exploration of this constitutive self-difference, of the dissonant aims of apophatic discourse is facilitated by the dialogical mode of “Sauf le nom.” Nevertheless, in its contradictory movement negative theology does not fully embrace the idea of difference. In contradistinction to its preoccupation with refusing, denying, rejecting all the inadequate attributions of God, who cannot be grasped within the framework of ontotheological categories, apophatic theology tends to focus on the promise of unveiling the truth and hearing the proper name of sovereign God. This “[d]esire to say and rejoin what is proper to God” (69), noted by the theological speaker, is questioned by his interlocutor, who dismisses the idea of sovereignty and propriety and rejects the concept of onto-theological God: “– But what is this proper, if the proper of this proper consists in expropriating itself, if the proper of the proper is precisely, justly [justement], to have nothing of its own [en propre]? What does ‘is’ mean here?” (69). When the foundations of ontotheological thinking and writing are shaken, one has to address anew the questions concerning the nature and significance of God. While seeking to rethink a Christian version of ontology outside the fixed ideas of totality and identity, Oliver Davies refers to Derrida’s reflections upon the issue of God. In his A Theology of Compassion Davies points out that Derrida’s departure from God understood in terms of Being leads the philosopher to the exploration of the possibilities of negative theology read otherwise than according to the idea of absent presence.211 In “Sauf le nom” Derrida seems to offer his own interpretation of negative theology which, for him, seems to be like a faint memory of an immemorial event that leaves a mark on language and a faint glimmer of a future that is always still to come (54). One of the speakers in the text describes it as a “passion that leaves the mark of a scar in that place where the impossible takes place” (59–60); it carries a wound, just legible, and bears witness to an unnameable God who has nothing save a name (60, 55–56). Davies thus comments on this presence-absence of God: “the radical otherness of God can at any point emerge as address from within language itself: ‘God’ can again become ‘word.’”212 The theologian draws our attention to Derrida’s recognition 211 In “How to Avoid Speaking” Derrida insists that “‘negative theology seems to reserve, beyond all positive predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 77. The attempt at rehabilitating negative theology was made by Kevin Hart, who interprets the “hyper” in “hyperessentiality” as carrying a negative rather than positive meaning; hence it should not be read as a surplus, excess, but rather a rupture of essentiality. See Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, p. 202. 212 Oliver Davies, A Theology of Compassion (London: SCM Press, 2001), p. 128.

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of the inescapably theocentric nature of language: “God as presence-absence is already inscribed within the language, as trace and memory, and, once thought, cannot easily be set aside.”213 Asserting both the impossibility of eradicating all the marks of “God event” from language and the possible danger of the return to the ontotheological once such an attempt at eradication is made, Derrida further pursues his engagement with the question of God, seeking other ways of approaching his name, and eventually of “saving” it. The speakers of “Sauf le nom” describe God as “certain absolute secret” (59) within language, the “unnameable nameable” who lies “beyond the name” (59). The matter of their disagreement concerns the issue whether, taking into account that language is “sealed with an indecipherable signature” (60) which is “legibleillegible” (60), it is possible to reveal this “secret” and whether it is a right thing to do. While their discussion of God leads them to the question of the limits of language, the speakers themselves probe these boundaries, as the text moves at the edge of language, “withdrawing and overflowing” (60). The deconstructive speaker expresses his doubts about the apophatic intuition of language, the ideal possibility of dispensing with language and any representation altogether in the mystical ascent, in the passage beyond the intelligible itself, which aims toward absolute rarefaction of signs, figures, symbols, toward silent union with the ineffable. Instead, he emphasises that apophasis itself takes place within language and can never be disengaged from it. The very language this theology wishes to renounce, in fact makes it possible and defines it. Although apophatic discourse “prescribes overflowing this insufficiency,” and “necessitates going (Geh, Go!) there where one cannot go” (59), it seems not to be able to escape repeating the same linguistic gestures. In contrast, the theological speaker still holds the belief in the power of apophatic discourse to purify the process of signification and unveil “the forgotten secret” (69) by developing a mode of speaking “in the name of a way of truth” (69). Paradoxically, the speakers’ consistent engagement in negotiating and re-inscribing limits, with the aim of clearly determining their positions, results only in blurring the boundaries between their views as well as between interior and exterior. Throughout the text, Derrida explores this double bid of apophaticism, its effort both to negate the name of God and to preserve, hold it in reserve for that to which it most truly refers. This ambiguity is best captured by the use of the term sauf. John D. Caputo explicates its internal rhythm of multiplication and contamination by referring to its three operations in the context of negative

213 Davies, A Theology of Compassion, p. 129.

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theology: prepositional (save/except), adjectival (safe) and verbal (to save): “Saving (sauver) the name of God by keeping it safe (sauf); sacrificing the name of God precisely in order to save it. Sacrifice everything, save or except (sauf) the name of God. Save everything about God (keep God safe) save (except) the name of God, lest it become an idol that blocks our way.”214 Thus saving is inscribed in the process of losing in order to save. The “sweet rage against language” (59) of negative theology, all its wounding, scarring, violence of language, within language, on the “edge of language,” this auto-deconstructing of writing, which aims to empty itself of every predicate of God, and thus of its very content, has an affirmative end: to save the name of God it crosses out. What is left after this complete desertification of language is only the name that “names nothing that might hold, not even a divinity (Gottheit), nothing whose withdrawal does not carry away every phrase that tries to ensure itself against him” (56). God is safe in the bottomless abyss of nothingness, yet He leaves His trace on language, a trace of this “internal onto-logical-semantic auto-deconstruction” (55) – the desert will have taken place, nothing will have taken place but this place, this event of which nothing can be said. Negative theology cannot name what it most desires and thus it cannot win, but in the same breath it cannot lose, as its failure is its success. “The double bind is a double save.”215 Therefore, there are at least two voices of negative theology, which Derrida lets us hear in “Sauf le nom.” The first is hypercritical, questioning all the certainties, deconstructing all philosophemes and theologemes. This is a voice of nothing, of desertification. Yet, there is also a second voice of dogmatic certitude that speaks from out of the heart of truth. In contrast, this is a voice of plenitude. Although negative theology reduces everything to ruin – and in this movement resembles différance – it does this in response to a certain ontotheological call: be faithful to God and keep God safe from any form of idolatry. Negative theology as a post-scriptum remains a counter-signature (a response-recall) to and from God. Consequently, a name is necessary as all signatures require a name, unless the name names what “effaces itself in front of what it names” (68). “Then ‘the name is necessary’ would mean that the name is lacking [fait défaut]: it must be lacking, a name is necessary [il faut un nom] that is lacking [fasse défaut]” (68). This necessary name effaces itself and in doing this, it saves itself:

214 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 43. 215 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 45.

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In the most apophatic moment, when one says: “God is not,” “God is neither this nor that, neither that nor its contrary” or “being is not,” etc., even then it is still a matter of saying the entity [étant] such as it is, in its truth, even were it meta-metaphysical, metaontological. It is a matter of holding the promise of saving the truth at any price, of testifying, of rendering oneself to the truth of the name, to the thing itself such as it must be named by the name, that is, beyond the name (68).

The discussion on the ambiguity of “saving” the name of God reveals still another aporia concerning the correlates interior/exterior, inside/outside. Although one voice suggests that the name of God marks the exterior of language, with the statements of negative theology able to pass “over to the other edge” (70) into an absolute outside, the other voice disagrees, claiming that the “event remains at once in and on language, then within and at the surface” (58). As Graham Ward, commenting on Derrida’s dialogue, contends, “there is no pure outside, and therefore no experience of the outside as such, there is no transcending of language.”216 The exterior is instead already operating within. While negative theology persists in the rigorous kenosis, there is no escaping the fact that “everything would remain intact […] after the passage of a via negativa.” (74). Although God, recalling Angelus Silesius, is named “bottomless collapse,” it becomes questionable whether such “collapse” can ever take place, whether it is possible to pass over the edge, into that which is absolutely exterior and unknowable, into the desert. The abyss as such is inaccessible as the kenotic process cannot be fully completed. One of the voices draws quite an intriguing, though controversial, conclusion, arguing that the desertification shall be interpreted only as a form of playing within God, rather than a passage into a total alterity: “Negative theology then can only present itself as one of the most playful forms of the creature’s participation in this divine play” (75). Not only is the outside reproduced on the inside, but, as Oliver Davies asserts, it is even the limit of language, traditionally considered as marking the boundary between language and the world or as referring to the failure of language to circumscribe the wholly other, which “becomes internalized, taken into language, as the ‘asceticism,’ ‘kenosis,’ or ‘passion’ of language itself.”217 Consequently, what is exposed as one of the main features of language (and thus of the language of negative theology) is its unavoidable reflexivity. Further, the analysis of the discourse of negative theology provided by Derrida demonstrates that when language becomes the object of inquiry, it can only empty itself and show its original desertlike quality. In the light of such 216 Graham Ward, “‘In the Daylight Forever?’: Language and Silence,” in Silence and the Word, p. 178. 217 Davies, A Theology of Compassion, p. 128.

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an understanding of language, the name of God no longer refers to an origin of language, the creator situated outside of it, but only to a trace of this “outside,” firmly embedded in the “inside.” It seems that at most the name of God might be called a productive absence at work in language, an absence that never fails to manifest itself and that in this way is both inside and outside language. If we assign to this absence the status of the source, it is only provisionally, for this “source” is always already entangled in language. Thus, as Arthur Bradley notes, Derrida rethinks God of negative theology as “nothing other than this essential openness or incompleteness of language which has always already started and will never be absolutely finished.”218 This “incompleteness of language” blurs the division between interior and exterior, creating “transcendence in immanence”219 or “an absolute transcendence that announces itself within” (70). Yet, as Oliver Davies highlights, although the acknowledgment of the emptiness of reference and the consequent enclosure of language results in Derrida’s criticism towards all the simplified notions of language as corresponding with some “world” which is exterior to itself, it also “creates in him (or in language, as he would say) a deep longing for the other, the impossible exterior.”220 And, since he “invests language itself with the properties of subjectivity,”221 this might be viewed as a very personal longing. For a figure of this internalised exterior Derrida turns to the ancient Greek non-concept of khōra, which Davies depicts as “the spatial world of the extra-linguistic real […] drifting as a non-spatial entity across and over the boundaries of language (world) and world (language).”222 Moreover, the linguistic strategies used to evoke it echo those of apohatic theology – as can be seen in Derrida’s essay “Khōra,” published in the same volume as “Sauf le nom.” Through a reading of Plato’s Timaeus, Derrida considers a problematic question of the meaning of khōra. Translatable variously as place, location, region, country, but also naming the figures of mother, nurse, receptacle, imprint-bearer, khōra is used in Timaeus as the name for the (non)place which, serving both as a receptacle and as “a mother” or “a nurse,” gives birth to the cosmos, shaped as an ordered, intelligible entity by the demiurge. Yet, as the use of the term “(non) place” shall suggest, the figure of khōra eludes fixation in any (one) place and thus its ontological status is very unclear: “There is khōra […] but what there is, 218 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 32. 219 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) p. 99. 220 Davies, A Theology of Compassion, pp. 126–127. 221 Davies, A Theology of Compassion, p. 127. 222 Davies, A Theology of Compassion, p. 127.

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there, is not […] This there is […] gives nothing in giving more sensible thing, place or in giving to think.”223 According to Derrida, it is impossible to speak about this “place,” but it “dictates an obligation by its very impossibility; it is necessary to speak of it.”224 As John Caputo aptly comments, a talk about the khōra is “discourse about a desert, about a barren and naked place, a pure taking place, an empty place […] no-place.”225 Being – to use Caputo’s words – “neither an intelligible form nor one more sensible thing, but, rather, that in which (in quo) sensible things are inscribed,”226 khōra defies conceptualization. It questions the topological grid on which the philosophy’s status as a purely rational discourse stands, problematizing a binary distinction between sensible and intelligible, mythos and logos. Derrida’s reading of Timaeus reveals that the cosmos cannot be viewed as simply the outworking of an intelligible order, since the realization of the creative principle necessitates khōra, which precedes the rational construals and comes from other than the rational, immutable order. As a third genus, available to neither sense experience nor intellectual reasoning, khōra cannot be expressed positively. However, Derrida points out in his earlier text “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” that even the matrix of dialectical negation, in which a negating movement becomes fundamental to a more positive movement of affirmation, so that the “neither/nor” is converted into a “both…and,” is insufficient to convey the ambivalence present in khōra. The negations, warnings, evasions and detours cannot be reappropriated into a synthesis of “neither/nor” and “both…and,” as khōra marks “irreducible spacing”227 within the Platonic system, the radical negativity which can no longer be subject to these movements. In Mark Taylor’s words, “[t]he khōra marks the margin of the neither/nor that ‘is’ neither either/or nor both/and.”228 Nonetheless, the question remains whether it is possible to express this radical negativity of margin through a metaphysical language that is founded on presence and affirmation? Both Taylor and Derrida contend: “It is necessary to avoid speaking of khōra as ‘something’ that is or is not, that could be present or absent, intelligible, sensible, or both at once, active or passive, the Good (epekina tēs ousias) or the Evil, God 223 Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” trans. Ian MacLeod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 96. 224 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 173. 225 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 37. 226 John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 84. 227 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 172. 228 Taylor, Nots, p. 48.

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or man, the living or the nonliving […] Khōra is nothing positive or negative.”229 These negations and retreats no longer lead anywhere except into this radical negativity which itself is neither place, nor non-place, nor not non-place. The negative metaphors of dialectical negation are no longer metaphors; becoming instead pure retreat, pure denial, pure negation. The thought of khōra thus destabilizes all polarities as well as troubles the definition of each term in this binary opposition. Khōra by definition cannot be defined, and any positive or negative defining formulas concerning it are neither true nor false, as khōra does not fall within the categories of the rational, conceptual framework. Transcending the logic of identification and exclusion, it bears instead multiplicity of meanings in itself. Similarly to the God of apophatic theology, khōra names what cannot be named and thus its function is not only excessive but its procedures are aporetic, undoing the logic of definition and introducing ambiguity and undecidability in structures, such as binary oppositions, whose aim is to produce single definite meanings. Still another aspect of khōra that attracts Derrida’s attention concerns its role in relation to textuality, that is the way in which its aporetic status troubles Plato’s work at the very level of its form. Most of the Timaeus’s interpreters “gamble on the resources of rhetoric without ever wondering about them.”230 They “speak tranquilly about metaphors, images and similes,” ignoring that which lies beyond this metaphoricity and which in turn dismantles the logic of the sensible the economy of rhetoric is founded on. The choice of particular narrative techniques and rhetorical tropes is not accidental but plays a key role in the understanding of the issue discussed in the Timaeus. Textual features of the work function to perform the meaning of khōra and thus problematize the simplified interpretation which, basing solely on the content of the text (the philosophy of Plato), aims to provide philosophemes and an abstractable, conceptual system of thought. Referring to the understanding of khōra as a great abyss or void of empty space, Derrida observes that the discussion of khōra appears in the middle of the text – where there should be a centre – like a great chasm or abyss, thus figuring the khōral, abyssal structuring. Moreover, the employment of the rhetorical trope mis en abîme – a play of reflections, in which the same notion or image is reflected across several structures within the work – serves to enact the meaning of khōra as an infinite play of reflections, where the paradigms produce their images by “reflecting” intelligible things, but khōra itself is like a mirror

229 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 173, cited by Taylor in Nots, p. 48. 230 Derrida, “Khōra,” p. 92.

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that is not changed by the images it reflects.231 Caputo thus explicates Derrida’s reading of “the text of Plato” (which the French philosopher juxtaposes with “the philosophy of Plato,” raised above the text, above the writing): The discussion in the Timaeus of the bottomless abyss of the khōra is staged in the text by a reflection without limit, without bottom or ground, of “khōral” images, by a play of reflections that induces in us, the readers of Plato, a sense of dizziness and vertigo as before an abyss. Whence Derida’s scrupulously close reading of the text […] consists in exhibiting the several mis en abîme to be found in the text, and this by way of leading us into the indeterminate abyss toward which Plato’s own categorial determinations advance.232

Caputo’s comment on the significant role of the structure, images and literary devices of the Timaeus and its effects on the readers recalls Michael Sells’s understanding of apophasis as a meaning event, a literary mode which is able to re-enact the mystical experience, so that the reading of apophatic texts do not assert but perform a referential openness. As it has been already highlighted in this section of the study, a similar performative function can be found in “Sauf le nom,” where the dialogical mode enacts plurivocity and undecidability of the via negativa, as well as the radical otherness of khōra. In “Sauf le nom” khōra is also presented as that which eludes any definition, both positive and negative determinations. On top of that, the speakers reflect upon the connections between khōra and the concept of God in negative theology, finding the first similarity in their close relation to the issue of naming, and consequently, in their common feature of reflexivity. While speaking of (or rather speaking to) God, negative theology turns its eyes “toward the beyond of the name in the name” (59), the “singular without concept” (40), and khōra is recognized as having an “impossible relation to the possibility of naming.”233 Khōra and God alike challenge “all our onto-topological prejudices” (56) and the only responsible response to them should be devoid of any form of idolatry or anthropomorphism. Nonetheless, Derrida emphasises that the name of God, though referring to a profound abyssal eternity, inevitably belongs to a particular tradition, opening “a history and an anthropo-theological dimension,”234 whereas khōra is free from such limitations. Unlike the name of God, the abyss of khōra is without a foundation and without any memory of experience of revelation – past

231 Derrida, “Khōra,” p. 104. 232 Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 86. 233 Derrida, “Khōra,” p. 91. 234 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 183.

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or expected to be fulfilled in the future; there is only a faint memory of an immemorial past that was never present and a future that is always still to come. In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” Derrida thus describes khōra’s nontemporality, impassability and heterogeneity: The name for place, a place name, and a rather singular one at that, for that spacing which, not allowing itself to be dominated by any theological, ontological or anthropological instance, without age, without history and more “ancient” than all oppositions (for example that of sensible/intelligible) does not even announce itself as “beyond being” in accordance with a path of negation, a via negativa. As a result, chora remains absolutely impassable and heterogeneous to all processes of historical revelation or of anthropo-theological experience, which at the very least suppose its abstraction. It will never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacralized, sanctified, humanized, theologized, cultivated, historicised.235

Although it seems that these two abysses are absolutely heterogeneous and, as Caputo contends, Derrida must decide between God and the “absolute exteriority”236 of khōra, the author of “Sauf le nom” wonders whether it is possible to make such a choice and whether one has to choose between the two at all. Khōra excludes the God of negative theology, (sur)passing Him and completely doing without Him, as it is “older” than the God of negative theology; but still, Derrida argues, they should not be opposed to each other but remain interrelated, haunting each other, moving around with each other because of “this strange preposition, with-without or without-with, without” (76). The two are then simultaneously joined and disjoined to each other. As both khōra and negative theology are aporetic and characterised by paradoxical hyperbole, they offer simultaneously affirmation and negation, expansion and uprooting of any tradition, any reading, even of the canonical texts. While discussing this relation between God and khōra, the speakers of “Sauf le nom” refer to a mystical idea of Gelassenheit – in the sense of letting God go, letting him to arrive at his own effacement (79) – the Gelassenheit of undecidability as one cannot decide between these two abysses. The abyss of khōra and the abyss of negative theology is an openness and Gelassenheit towards and for the other, either specifically the other as God (negative theology) or the other as every other (khōra). The best way to describe this Gelassenheit is by referring to the notion of hospitality: hospitality

235 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 58. 236 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 57.

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as a radical openness and welcome of the other as other, without any reduction of the other to the same. Given that khōra names “a site [lieu] where the proper no longer has any meaning,”237 Derrida notes that it may play a significant role in the search for a language for God which, contrary to historical accounts or teleo-eschatological narratives, would not address God in an idolatrous and anthropomorphic manner but in a mode which would respect His singularity and radical otherness. Interestingly, while describing such a language, Derrida uses bodily images, thus implying its profound rootedness in the body: “The event remains at once in and on language,” “in and on the mouth,” precisely, “on the tip [bout] of the tongue” (58). The emphasis is here once again placed on the issue of limits – not only of language, but also of the body and of subjectivity. As the surface turns out to be “open, exposed, immediately overflowed, outside of itself ” (58), even the clearcut distinctions between subject and object are being questioned. The words, flowing freely against the current of a clearly structured monologue, “name God, speak of him, speak him, speak to him, let him speak in them, let themselves be carried by him…” (58), and consequently, in this self-transgressive movement, lead to the dissolution of subjectivity, which is no longer so easily discernible. Similarly, the acknowledgement of the essential and irreducible equivocity of the desire of God, marked by the double genitive operative in this desire: “does it come from God in us, from God for us, from us for God?” (37), provokes the discussion about the origin not only of this desire, but also of subject and object. Reflecting upon the status of subject and object before their “grammatical or ontological upsurge” (37), the speakers come to the conclusion that no relation to one’s self can precede a relation to the other, that is the “desire of God,” which, in result, is perceived as naming the structure of the formation of subject. Having observed that even atheism testifies to the desire of God, the speakers find it necessary to consider the structure of such testimony. Looking to answer the crucial, yet for Derrida ultimately unanswerable question: “Who speaks to whom?”, “To whom is the discourse of negative theology addressed?”, they attempt to shed some more light on the relationship between God and language. As it has been already presented, the characteristic provided by the speakers diverge from the orthodox concept of God. Not only do they accentuate the fact that God is the one who exceeds ontological categories, as “it is said that he names nothing that is, neither this nor that” (56), but, most importantly, God’s name marks “the name of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification

237 Derrida, “Khōra,” p. 105.

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of language” (55–56). Through the figure of desertification the speakers lead us to the recognition of the double movement within the name of God. “God” enacts the auto-destruction, self-emptying, burning of language, which becomes reduced to its skeletal form through a radical “negative operation” (56); yet, given that this “negative operation” is “inscribed in and on and as the event” (56), it leaves its trace on the scarred body of language. God, not as being, but as becoming, the event of writing, finds in the surrender of fixed and stable reference, in the kenotic gestures of annihilation, “the most decisive condition of its coming or its upsurging” (56). The consequence of such reformulation of the relationship between God and language is the necessity of abandoning the singular concept of God as self-identical, immutable, sovereign, transcendent, who has so far been referred to in the form of a fixed noun, and instead thinking about God in terms of movement, process – as a verb. This would in turn facilitate the simultaneous coexistence of multiplicity of definitions of God, often contradictory, yet remaining in a permanent dialogue with each other. The move towards describing God by making inconsistent statements about him – for instance evoking both emptiness and plenitude, as in the case of such definitions provided in ‘Sauf le nom” as God as “desertification of language’ and “the divinity of God as gift or desire of giving” (56) – recalls in fact a popular apophatic strategy, which, as Oliver Davies demonstrates, is most visible in the writing of Eckhart, who has a “tendency to contradict himself when presenting a theology of God”238 in order to highlight God’s transcendence. In a similar vein, Pseudo-Dionysius presents God as the one who “refuses to stand still like a good metaphysical lodestone,” who “defies the logic of rest and motion, internality and externality,”239 and ultimately escapes any conceptualization. Hence, it can be reasonably argued that Derrida’s attempt to “to save the name of God, to shield it from all onto-theological idolatry” (62) echoes the efforts made by his apophatic predecessors; however, Derrida’s divergence from determining what is “proper” in God, from the perspective which concentrates on His self-identity and sovereignty, has also its political dimension. In the collection of his seminars entitled The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida describes the modern state sovereignty as highly oppressive and authoritarian and views it as closely linked with divine sovereignty. The French philosopher persistently speaks of an onto-theologicopolitical structure, whose origins must be traced in the model of omniscient, 238 Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin, 1994), p. xxxiii. 239 Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of ‘Ontotheology,’” Modern Theology 24:4 (October 2008), p. 731.

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almighty God, and which must be necessarily deconstructed.240 Therefore, the hope for reconfiguration of this power structure should be pinned on a new mode of thinking about God. The similar conviction reverberates in “Epoché and Faith,” where Derrida thus clarifies his intentions: I have tried again and again to dissociate two concepts that are usually indissociable: unconditionality and sovereignty […] If I think of God on the side of grace, forgiveness, hospitality, unconditional law, then in order not to have to agree with what I call the onto-theological tradition of sovereignty, one has to dissociate God’s sovereignty from God, from the very idea of God. We would have God without sovereignty, God without omnipotence. If one thinks of this possibility of the name of God being dissociated from the absolute power, then this would be a strategic political lever to think of unconditionality without sovereignty, and to deconstruct the political concept of sovereignty today, which I would argue is a heritage of onto-theology.241

What becomes evident from the above passage is the invaluable political potential of Derrida’s concept of God as devoid of sovereignty and omnipotence, which may further lay the foundations for our re-conceptualization of both political and ethical notions, such as power, law, hospitality, responsibility, within the perspective of “unconditionality without sovereignty,” and thus making the name of God “a strategic political lever.”

Conclusions In this chapter I have attempted to highlight the importance of the dialogical mode and apophatic gestures for the reinforcement of the undecidability in Derrida’s text “Sauf le nom.” It has been demonstrated how the potential of apophasis stimulates the development of the idea of non-logocentric “after-writing,” which by rewriting the significance of the name of God, enables the articulation of nonsovereign divinity. The many conflicting definitions of God in “Sauf le nom” both follow a certain tradition of negative theology, and, in looking to save God from “idolatry,” sovereignty and self-identity, give the name “God” the potential to become a “strategic political lever” in rethinking deconstructive politics, so that it will be founded on the idea of unconditionality and undecidability within itself and in relation to religion and ethics. Such a prominent role of negative theology for the reconfiguration of religion, ethics and politics has been also emphasized by Arthur Bradley who writes:

240 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 46. 241 Derrida, “Epoché and Faith,” p. 42.

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If the via negativa has a meaningful contribution to make to any current debates on hospitality, then, it is not to sponsor this or that position, but to uphold the basic undecidability between the ethical and the political, to stop, in other words, the ethical from ossifying into the merely ethical and the political into the merely political.242

It is worth noting that apophatic theology raises still another problematic of the relation between private and public. In opposition to the common, one-sided perception of mystics or negative theologians as separated from their religious community, and more generally, from the public life, Derrida draws a vision of negative theology which combines these two aspects: the private individual experience of faith and political commitment, which is visible in the mystics’ efforts to disrupt the institutionalized principles and traditions. Moreover, its openness and indeterminacy may open the path for creating an alternative nonhegemonic, unrestrictive community or “gathering-together of singularities” (46), and a new mode of thinking the political. Therefore, I cannot but agree with Bradley’s observation that “what passes under the name of ‘negative theology’ might even provide the basis for a politics of decision-making that addresses both the conditional and the unconditional demands of justice.”243 In the next chapter I shall continue to unravel the role of negative theology for Derrida’s understanding of God – this time by examining the apophatic mode of silence.

242 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 212. 243 Bradley, Negative Theology, p. 43.

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Chapter Three: Silence We must find a speech which maintains silence. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Even if I decide to be silent, even if I decide to promise nothing, not to commit myself to saying anything that would confirm once again the destination of speech, and the destination to speech, this silence still remains a modality of speech: a memory of promise and a promise of memory. Jacques Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking: Denials

As early as in 1967, in Of Grammatology, Derrida argued that we are utterly incapable of finding some absolute beginning, some absolutely originary, presuppositionless point of departure, unmarked by the traces of anything that preceded us; rather, “[w]e must begin wherever we are, and the thought of the trace, which cannot take the scent into account, has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely.”244 We begin within a set of traces, in the midst of language, in the middle of an inescapable web of intersecting and conflicting beliefs and practices, called upon by the cacopohony of voices and counter-voices accumulated in language. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” the text written over twenty years later, returns to this issue of our inevitable entanglement in signification while pondering over the possibility of avoiding speaking through silence: “It is no longer a question of not speaking. Even if one speaks so as not to say anything, even if an apophatic discourse deprives itself of meaning or of an object, it takes place. What initiated or made it possible has taken place.”245 Although, as Derrida contends, absolute silence is impossible, it does not mean that silence should be valued negatively, as “a cut, a suspension or interruption,”246 a “mere ‘structural fault’ in the everlasting flow of noise,”247

244 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 162. 245 Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden and Elizabeth Rottenberg. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 164. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 246 Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 81. 247 Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (London: The Harvill Press, 1948), p. 92.

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or “a ‘primitive’ and ‘prelogical’ condition of nihilism.”248 On the contrary, it may perform an invaluable communicative function as a “modality of speech,”249 silence which is always already embedded within discourse and which is able to “keep the promise” that language is.250 In his chapter I shall examine a key role of this type of relative silence in Derrida’s development of the link between God and language. Reading “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” I will attempt to prove that Derrida follows negative theology in his desire for finding a discourse which could speak of God. My intention is to demonstrate that the embracement of an apophatic mode of “avoiding speaking,” which adheres to the relative silence, enables both negative theology and deconstruction to preserve silence through language and thus to bear witness to God who comes to name a “promise” within language or the infinite movement of signification. Finally, it will be shown that, similarly to the dialogical mode of undecidability, the discourse of silence, by highlighting the association of God with language, may open the possibility of multiplying definitions of God, which would break with the monolithic, restrictive conception of divinity.

248 George Kalamaras, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 202. 249 Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 153. 250 A traditional interpretation presents silence and speech as opposed to each other. The adherents of this stance include, for example, Max Picard, for whom “Speech is […] opposed to silence,” Peter Bien, who claims that “language sounds as an impediment whereas silence is a perfect ritualistic means to renew our connection with true reality,” and Bernard P. Dauenhauer, who is against undervaluing silence in relation to speech: “There is no good reason for assigning language ontological priority over silence.” See Picard, The World of Silence p. 27; Peter Bien, Words, Wordlessness and the Word: Silence Reconsidered from a Literary Point of View (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1992), p. 20, and Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance, p. 106. The relativistic view of silence is provided by Adam Jaworski, who proposes to see silence and speech as parts of the same continuum (Adam Jaworski, The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives (London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 43). The advocate of Jaworski’s position, Rachel Muers indicates the further consequences of adhering to the notion of absolute silence: “A ‘silence’ set in unmediated opposition to speech and other communicative activity […] can rightly be criticized as ethically, politically, and theologically inadequate.” See Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 15.

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1.  Silence as a “Modality of Speech” Prior to his commitment to the search for a way to avoid speaking, Derrida was already haunted by the imperative to give due consideration to the issue of silence in his essay “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve” (published in 1967 in Writing and Difference), where he insisted that “[w]e must find a speech which maintains silence.”251 Later, in the lecture “Force of Law: On the Mystical Foundation of Authority,” given in 1989, the concept of silence as “a modality of speech” appeared, together with the contention that “[t]here is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language.”252 However, it is “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” the paper presented at the conference in Jerusalem in 1986, which seems to most effectively gather Derrida’s scattered intuitions and dreams concerning silence. By assuming the apophatic mode, Derrida wonders what “avoiding speaking” might in fact encompass: “Comment ne pas dire?” can mean: how to be silent, how not to speak in general, how to say nothing, how to avoid speaking; but it can also mean: how, in speaking, not to say this or that, in such and such a way, which is both transitive and modalized? In other words: how, in saying and speaking, to avoid this or that discursive, logical, rhetorical mode? How to avoid a particular predicate, and even predication itself? For example: how to avoid a negative form, or how not to be negative? How to say something finally? Which comes back to the apparently reverse question: how to say, how to speak? Between the two interpretations of “Comment ne pas dire?” the meaning of the uneasiness thus seems to get reversed: from “How to be silent?” (How to avoid speaking at all?) one passes – moreover, in a completely necessary way and as if from within – to the question, which can always become the prescriptive heading of a recommendation: How not to speak, what words to avoid, in order to speak well? How to avoid speaking is thus at once or successively: how is it necessary not to speak, and so on. The “how” always shelters a “why,” and the “it is necessary” has the double value of a “should” or “ought” and a “must” (154).

Instead of at least shedding some more light on the meaning of “avoiding speaking,” the unanswerable questions and apophatic manoeuvres from the above passage further problematize the analysed issue. By leaving the tension between the absolute and relative silence unresolved or by implying the ethical, religious or 251 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 332. 252 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: On the Mystical Foundation of Authority,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 242.

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political consequences of any statement, as one may speak “well” or unwell, they reveal the complexity and equivocity of the apophatic mode. Indeed, the whole text is nothing other than a sustained interrogation that raises questions without offering answers. Mark C. Taylor remarks that even the title “Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations” is itself an ambiguous gesture that creates unresolvable problems for translators: The duplicity of the title is repeated in the single word that serves as the subtitle of the essay: dénégations. At this point, translation becomes impossible. Dénégation is the word the French translators of Freud use for the German Verneinung. There is already a certain duplicity in Verneinung. The prefix ver- can mean: removal, loss, stoppage, reversal, opposite, using up, expenditure, continuation to the end, alteration. Ver-nein-ung, then, suggests both the presence and absence of negation, both the continuation and end of the not. The complexity of Verneinung is not captured in the standard English translation of Freud’s term as “negation.” Difficulties are compounded by the choice of “Denials” for the English translation of Derrida’s dénégations. “Denial” is one of the English words (the other is “disavowal”) used to translate Freud’s Verleugnung. Though closely associated, Verneinung and Verleugnung are not equivalent. To translate dénégations by denials is, therefore, a mistranslation. However to translate dénégations “properly” (by way of Verneinung) by negations would also be a mistranslation. Moreover, the “proper” translation would be more misleading than the “mistranslation.” Here, as elsewhere, mistranslation, it seems, is unavoidable. Dénégations captures the irresolvable duplicity of Verneinung in which affirmation and negation are conjoined without being united or synthesized. Verneinung is an affirmation that is a negation and a negation that is an affirmation. To de-negate is to un-negate; but un-negation is itself a form of negation. More precisely, denegation is an un-negation that affirms rather than negates negation. The affirmation of negation by way of denegation subverts the dialectical affirmation of negation by way of the negation of negation. To think or rethink negative theology with Derrida, it is necessary to think the negative undialectically by thinking a negative that is neither both negation and affirmation nor either negation or affirmation.253

By using the term dénégation Derrida questions the simple binary opposition between affirmation and negation and the necessity of resolving the movements of apophasis through a dialectical affirmation of negation. While quoting PseudoDionysius’s request that Timothy abandon “all non-being and all being” (149), he suggests that negative theology negates both being and non-being, both affirmation and denial, both position and negation, and still in another place, claims that it “exceeds the opposition between affirmation and negation. In truth, as Dionysius expressly says, it exceeds position (thesis) itself, and not merely curtailment, 253 Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 36.

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subtraction (aphairesis). At the same time, it exceeds privation. The without of which I spoke a moment ago marks neither a privation, a lack, nor an absence” (158). Denegation neither asserts nor denies. It negates negation without negation. It says not-saying without saying. It avoids language without avoiding saying. To quote Taylor once again: “The avoidance of language, however, is not merely negative but is at the same time the saying of not-saying. This saying without saying is an unsaying that is, in effect, the denegation of language.”254 The use of the English word “denial” in the subtitle might seem to provide an answer to the question posed in the title: one can avoid speaking through the very denial of speech; yet as the ambiguity of the term dénégation reveals, there is no escaping from speaking, for all these denials take place in language, and as such must deny themselves, lingering at the threshold of an answer, unable to carry themselves across to respond to the question in Derrida’s title: “How to avoid speaking?” The path trodden by both negative theology and deconstruction, whether towards the “silent union with the ineffable” (150) or to the impossible fulfilment of a promise, is unavoidably a linguistic one, meandering through the interweaving web of negations and affirmations. The result of this entanglement within language is the heterogonous, infinite and, as has been already presented through an analysis of “Sauf le nom,” dialogical movement. As Derrida describes, there is within negative theology a hidden diversity, “a massive and indistinct multiplicity of possibles” (151). Despite its struggle to pass beyond the discourse and intelligibility towards the pure intuition, negative theology “cannot contain within itself the principle of its interruption” (150), the principle consisting of the “absolute rarefaction” of its ineffable signified. The paradox of apophatic discourse is that, irresistibly driven by “positive predication,” it defers indefinitely the collusion with the signified that would silence the movement of predication, and thus turns out to be “[a]lien, heterogeneous […] to this experience of the ineffable and the mute vision that seems to orient this apophatic” (150). In view of such an understanding of apophasis, it is necessary to rethink the relationship between language and silence in a way that recognizes silence as integral to communication, as a form of communication, a “modality of speech.” This “rhetoric of silence,” espoused by Derrida, is vividly illustrated by Graham Ward: Silence becomes analogous to the blank margins of a page, the space beneath the vaulting of a Cathedral, or a music interval. The margin frames and focuses the text. The empty spaces here establish a certain tension between the arrangement of the letters, the words and the syntax into a communication and the empty margins which create a space

254 Taylor, Nots, p. 41.

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for the cessation of intellect. It is a space for/of breathing. The margins, therefore, articulate, possibly at a somatic level, a certain rest, a certain Sabbath, a space for the activities of prayer and meditation. In silence a rest is written into the fabric of creation. There is articulation through this rhythm and in this rhythm. And every poet knows how to take advantage of the rhythm of the margins and make it part of the poem through enjambment, line length, and the spatial dynamics of the typesetting. The margins are not silent as such. The silence is architectured and integral to the speaking or the phrasing.255

This poetic passage demonstrates that there is no emptiness beyond communication, no independent existence of gaps, ruptures, fissures as such, as they are always simultaneously constructed by language. It further reinforces Derrida’s conviction that it is not possible to consider “avoiding speaking” from the perspective of absolute silence, but only with reference to silence which is a rhythm in speech itself. This relative silence is engaged in the constant negotiation of irreducible aporia through supplementation, in the interminable process of exceeding its own limits – which makes it a dialogical silence as well. Since his very early texts Derrida has openly expressed his hostility towards dialectic, which reunites all the opposites, suppresses contradictory elements, domesticates and masters difference – thus ignoring the fact that even after the return of difference to identity there still remains an irreducible, disruptive difference, for which Derrida coined the term différance. Having recognized this “irreducibly polysemic,”256 subversive and unmasterably excessive différance, which falls outside of Hegel’s dialectical economy, Derrida feels compelled to persist in rejecting all the possibilities of dialectical resolution, which may lead to any sort of ontological or theological – ontotheological – reappropration. This vehement opposition to any form of dialectic is also easily traceable in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,”257 where, striving to think beyond dialectic, the author looks to a dialogical mode as well as to “a trace whose affirmation is not symmetrical” (156). Given an exceptional effectiveness of a dialogue in maintaining plurality, contradiction and undecidability – which was shown in the previous chapter of this study – Derrida consistently merges it with silence throughout the whole text of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” His recourse to the dialogical

255 Graham Ward, “‘In the Daylight Forever?’: Language and Silence,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 179. 256 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 8. 257 For examples of the rejections of dialectical resolutions, see Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” pp. 144, 163 and 167.

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movements is clearly visible, for example, in the analysis of khōra, whose depiction in Timaeus in inscribed within a dialogical structure, with “two concurrent languages” (171) offering their own conflicting interpretations, and thus making explicit the intrinsic ambivalence present in khōra. The first “language” Derrida points out, is the language of dialectical negation, which reappropriates the thinking of khōra for the Platonic ontology. By being neither sensible nor intelligible, the khōra becomes a participant in both, and hence its multiple negating movements form only a passage to a more fundamental positive movement of affirmation. The second “language,” which Derrida is much more interested in expanding, is a radically negative counterpart to the former Aristotelian reading of khōra. Highlighting the radical negativity of khōra, it presents it as “an irreducible spacing” (172), an unknowable silence, which lies so deeply at the interior of ontology and dialectic that it can no longer be subject to these movements and become incorporated within the Platonic system. A second, even more evident illustration of the intertwining of dialogue and silence can be found in Derrida’s account of Pseudo-Dionysius, who, according to the author of Writing and Difference, follows the practice of “the double inscription of his knowledge,” thus evoking “a dual tradition, a dual mode of transmission (dittēn paradosin).” The two modes – on the one hand “ineffable, secret, prohibited, reserved, inaccessible (aporrhēton)”; on the other, “philosophical, demonstrative (apodeiktikēn)” – intersect in Dionysius, so that the inexpressible is woven together with the expressible. However, the point of their crossing is indivisible, belongs to none of them, becoming the place where each of the languages “bears the silence of the other” (162). Consequently, once again, through the reference to the double mode, Derrida draws our attention to silence which is to be found in language itself. To adduce still one more instance of this “double movement” in “How to Avoid Speaking,” we may refer to Derrida’s use of the form of the apostrophe, which he interprets as that which “turns the discourse away in the same direction” (182). Sinaro Kamboureli’s discussion of this trope may serve as an elucidation of Derrida’s remark: Perhaps the only conclusion I can draw with some certainty is that the rhetorical figure of the sacred is that of apostrophe […] Apostrophe in Greek, however, means something more than simply addressing someone. Apostrophe also means to avert one’s face from

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someone or something, to turn away. This turn, this rhetorical trope, seems to sum up what is unsummable. Unreadability: turning toward and away from divine locution.258

Finally, a dialogical mode can be traced in Derrida’s own structuring of the text, which functions both as a philosophical and pedagogical treatise, but is also thought to performatively fulfil his promise “to speak of ‘negative theology’ itself, assuming that such thing exists” (151).

2.  Speaking Of and Within Promise While examining how negative theologies attempt to avoid speaking, Derrida makes the following observations. First, that about which they cannot speak remains secret. Second, apophatic discourse becomes a command not to speak and a promise both of this possibility and of the ensuing divine union. Third, this discourse, as a discourse, is fraught with paradox and contradiction, for it betrays the secret, disobeys the command and breaks the promise. Derrida claims that negative theologians concentrate their reflections on a secret which they never cease denying and which consists in this precise act of constant denial: “a secret of denial and a denial of the secret” (162). This, says Derrida, is a move of negation that denies and denegates itself. Negative theology will not divulge “what God is,” and yet simultaneously denies that it is keeping the answer secret, for there is no answer. Likewise, deconstruction refuses to divulge, for example, “what différance is,” and yet simultaneously denies that it is keeping the answer secret, for there is no answer. Eckhart, however, goes beyond this secret denial, for what he does, claims Derrida, is “to speak in order to command not to speak” (186). This command, claim the negative theologians, comes from God. It is the same command of separation and purification given to Moses as he was preparing to climb Mount Sinai. These theologians, therefore, are merely repeating the command they themselves have been given and are pedagogically passing it along to their disciples. This repetition, though, itself seems to disobey the very command they wish to pass along to their disciples. Still, it does not imply that in order to avoid speaking one must be merely silent. Remaining mute, uttering nothing mistakes this radical silence for the mere opposite of speech. It says nothing while saying something, constantly retreating from any misplaced efforts at either speech or silence. This is possible, Derrida insists, because “[t]his order cannot be distinguished from a promise. 258 Sinaro Kamboureli, “St. Teresa’s Jouissance: Toward a Rhetoric of Reading the Sacred,” in Silence, the Word and the Sacred, eds. E. D. Blodgett and H. G. Coward (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989), p. 62.

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It is the promise itself ” (160). This promise is not merely the promise of divine union,259 but is also the promise to permit this radical silence. God’s command to remain silent carries with it God’s promise to make that silence possible and to speak God’s command without breaking the silence. In fact, the very event of revelation carries within it this command and this promise; one cannot separate the event of divine revelation and the command to remain silent. As the realm of language is only the place of revelation, and not revelation itself, this revelation points “behind” language to the command to say neither nothing nor something. The divine command to avoid speaking is not an incidental curiosity but an integral necessity of God’s revelation. The order is the promise itself: the promise of divine union and the promise to “speak in order to command not to speak.” It is in fact the same promise, which is also a command, that prompts Derrida to write “How to Avoid Speaking.” He begins his lecture by saying: Even before starting to prepare this lecture, I knew that I wished to speak of the “trace” in its relationship to what one calls, sometimes, erroneously, “negative theology.” More precisely, I knew that I would have to do this in Jerusalem. But what does such an obligation mean here? (143) I return to my opening words. I knew, then, what I would have to do. I had implicitly promised that I would, one day, speak directly of negative theology. Even before speaking, I knew that I was committed to doing it […] Having already promised, as if in spite of myself, I did not know how I would keep this promise. How to speak suitably of negative theology? Is there a negative theology? […] Can one adopt a discourse to it? Is there some discourse that measures up to it? […] Is there ever anything other than a “negative theology” of “negative theology”? (151–152).

Before speaking, before starting to prepare the lecture, Derrida was already obliged to speak of it, for he had already promised to do so. “Even before speech,” he explains,“there is necessarily a commitment or promise” (151). His own silence concerning negative theology is inscribed within an implicit promise to speak of negative theology, which in turn commands him to speak of it. Does Derrida fulfil his promise and “explain himself ” directly on negative theology? Throughout the whole text the philosopher does not cease speaking about negative theology; nonetheless, he neither provides any clear definition of it nor clarifies his own relation to the apophatic tradition, but speaks about negative theology by

259 Though it is this also, as Derrida notes, when he discusses, “the promise of that presence given to intuition or vision. The promise of such a presence often accompanies the apophatic crossing […]. Leading to union with God.” Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 149.

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retreating from and denying it. Multiplying apophatic gestures, warnings, evasions, detours, Derrida continues to defer the fulfilment of his promise to speak about negative theology, a promise inscribed in his texts “from the very beginning” – still offering only a “negative theology” of “negative theology.” This repeated postponement cannot lead to any closure since a promise, by its very nature, invariably escapes the demand of presence and thus cannot be realized here and now. Derrida further ponders over this impossibility: Will I do it? Am I in Jerusalem? This is a question to which one will never respond in the present tense, only in the future or in the past anterior. Why insist on this postponement? Because it appears to me neither avoidable nor insignificant. One can never decide whether it does not give rise, as postponement, to the very thing it defers. It is not certain that I will keep my promise today; but nor is it certain that in further delaying its fulfilment, I have not, nevertheless, already kept it. (152)

Mark Taylor remarks that inasmuch as it is required by many theoreticians (including John L. Austin and his followers) that the promise be made in the present and with full self-presence,260 the promise would not be possible. For, as Derrida argues, there “is always a remainder that escapes totalization, and hence the present can never be fully present.”261 The full presence of the present is inconsistent with the deconstructive idea of temporality, according to which “[one] cannot think the trace – and therefore, différance – on the basis of the present, or of the presence of the present.”262 Still, as Derrida emphasises, promising is unavoidable. In his Memoires for Paul de Man, he insists, “the promise is impossible but inevitable […] Even if a promise could be kept, this would matter little. What is essential here is that a pure promise cannot properly take place, in a proper place, even though promising is inevitable as soon as we open our mouths – or rather as soon as there is a text.”263 Seen from such a perspective, language is unavoidably promissory. Derrida modifies Heidegger’s famous saying “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks us, speaks before human speech) by saying with Paul de Man “Die Sprache verspricht” (language promises us; we are promised over in

260 Taylor refers here to the definition of a promise provided by John L. Austin, who describes a promise as a performative speech act that “requires the presence of selfconsciousness and the self-consciousness of presence.” See Taylor, Nots, p. 40. 261 Taylor, Nots, p. 40. 262 Derrida, “Différance,” p. 21. 263 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 98.

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advance in language to language)264 and then responds to this promissory nature of language by declaring: “I will speak of a promise but also within the promise” (153), thus simultaneously acknowledging that the “promise is older than I am” (153) and that we are always already inscribed by its trace within the linguistic system. Although the trace marks a “primal” lack in language, it does not imply that we are to keep silent, but, on the contrary, it releases the linguistic event, in which “to speak is to say the impossibility of saying by promising what cannot be delivered.”265 The unspeakable trace in language, which invariably gestures “toward a past and toward a future that are still unpresentable” (150), prevents an event from reaching its full realization in the present. Hence the promise, whose place is not here and the time is not now, also eludes any attempts at present fulfilment. However, this state of non-closure is not negative, as it enables a promise to be preserved. It may be even argued that not fulfilling the promise somehow turns out to be a way of “fulfilling” it. In this sense, the strategies of the relative silence, the mode of “avoiding speaking” through language, this saying of not-saying, or unsaying, allow Derrida to respond to the intrinsically promissory structure of language. Hent de Vries suggests that “How to Avoid Speaking” “is just as much a treatise on place – that is to say on the trope, the topos, topology – as an inquiry into the specifically linguistic problem of ineffability.”266 Such a view finds its evidence in the attention given by Derrida to the question of place in his analysis of the promise, which he relates to the event, in fact, “the event of the event, history, the thinking of an essential ‘having-taken-place,’ of a revelation, of an order, and a promise” (175). The spatial focus of Derrida’s text is inspired by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, in which the topoi constitute one of the main concerns of their apophatic procedures. In Pseudo-Dionysius’s On Mystical Theology as well as in Eckhart’s sermons, one cannot see God faceto-face but can only find access to the divine place where He resides. However, there is also a certain “atopics” in this motif, as the place in which God gives Himself to be contemplated is not itself God. Similarly, the privilege of the place determines Derrida’s apophatics in many ways. The problem of the unsayable and its relation to what can and cannot be said must include the question of place since “[e]ven if one speaks and says nothing, even if an apophatic discourse 264 Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 97. 265 Taylor, Nots, p. 41. 266 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 94.

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deprives itself of meaning or of an object, it takes place [emphasis mine]. What initiated or made it possible has taken place” (164). Here, once again, Derrida denies the possibility of absolute silence, reasserting his linguistic approach that results in the endorsement of a notion of relative silence. It is worth noting that the close link between silence and place were already explored by such scholars as Rachel Muers,267 George Kalamaras,268 Cheryl Glenn,269 and Stefan Hertmans.270 In the case of Derrida, the question posed in the title of his lecture: “How to Avoid Speaking” does not only direct him toward the question of place but is in fact “the question of place as place of writing, of inscription, of the trace” (168). To conclude, it may be stated that through the figure of promise, linked with the event that has already taken place or is about to take place, the text combines a mode of “avoiding speaking,” topology and even opens up the discussion on God. Although it might seem that, convinced about our inescapable entrapment in language, Derrida does not go beyond experimentations with language, beyond the analyses of various linguistic tropes, manoeuvres, detours and contours, speaking “only for the sake of speaking, in order to experience speech” (145), yet, such an accusation is explicitly denied by Derrida who insists that “once the apophatic discourse is analysed in its logico-grammatical form, if it is not merely sterile, repetitive, obscurantist, mechanical, it perhaps leads us to consider the becoming-theological of all discourse,” (146) or later in the text: “I am not certain that only rhetoric is at stake” (193). Therefore, while considering “avoiding speaking” and “speaking within promise” as actions unavoidably taking place in language, Derrida is much more interested in its wider implications. As we have already observed, he views “avoiding speaking” as a mode making it possible to keep the secret and save the name, and the promise as a form of an order, imperative “to protect access to a knowledge that remains in itself inaccessible, untransmissible, unteachable” (161). Apart from this ethical dimension revealed in “avoiding speaking,” the relative silence and the concept of promise proposed by Derrida allow him to rethink the concept of divinity.

267 “To fall silent is, after all, to create a space …,” Muers, Keeping God’s Silence, p. 149. 268 “Silence is a condition of emptiness,” Kalamaras, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension, p. 1. 269 “Silence [is] […] a space that draws us forth,” Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), p. 160. 270 “Silence as a space in which history can reflect on itself,” Stefan Hertmans, “A hole in speech,” trans. Peter Vosch, in Wordlessness, eds. Bart Verschaffel and Mark Verminck (Dublin: Lillipt, 1993), pp. 25–35.

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3.  Keeping God’s Silence Silence and negation have always played an important role in different religions, being foundational to the dynamics of their way of speaking. In the context of Christian tradition the apophatic discourse does not only appear as a consequence of the recognition of the inadequacy of language and the limits of expression, but it is also embedded in liturgical and devotional life as response to a divine presence, and thus turns out to be foundationally celebratory. However, as Graham Ward argues, silence is a kind of “rhetoric,” a paradoxical figure which very easily crosses boundaries and thus can gain new significances in different times and places.271 This is particularly visible in contemporary, extremely heterogeneous scholarship, which draws extensively upon the thematics of silence, assimilating it from the context of Judeo-Christian tradition into their own, often even secular one. This phenomenon has been analysed, for instance, by Oliver Davies or Rachel Muers, who espouse a relativistic, dialogical view of silence. The main intention of Davies is to present silence, firstly, as a “distinctively religious sign,”272 and secondly, as an empty sign which gains its different meanings from the surrounding signs, and consequently can become a powerful instrument for furthering dialogue between Christianity and postmodern secularism, between Christianity and other religions. In contrast to the notion of silence as the refusal to speak, Davies, inspired by Judeo-Christian tradition, reframes silence as “the primordial and generative ground,”273 which allows the language to be formed and heard. Continuing his examination of the meaning of silence within Christian community, he demonstrates how Christianity, based on the faith in divine revelation as address, “necessarily promotes a metaphysics and linguistics of address”274 as well as the notion of language governed by a foundational relationality. His argument leads him to the recognition of the potential fertility and creativity of silence, which may not only advance linguistic analyses but, even more importantly, enrich the understanding of oneself, the world and the other. As a sign that is dependent on other signs for the inscription of its meanings, silence constitutes “the possibility of discourse and utterance, and with that, the possibility of a new way of speaking and understanding the

271 Ward, “‘In the Daylight Forever?,’” pp. 178–179. 272 Oliver Davies, “Soundings: Towards a Theological Poetics of Silence,” in Silence and the Word, p. 202. 273 Davies, “Soundings,” p. 203. 274 Davies, “Soundings,” p. 210.

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world.”275 If employed within our contemporary community, it may allow us to engage in dialogue with multiple silences and voices in the world, and thus teach us to be more attentive to the voice of the other and responsibly formulate our response to them. Within the same framework of thinking silence as relative and dialogical, Rachel Muers highlights the superiority of silence over speech, claiming that the former is able to go beyond all the distinctions speech makes and therefore it is “the best communicative ‘likeness’ for the God who transcends all the distinctions between created things.”276 In her analyses of a relationship between silence, listening and communication, Muers refers to Eberhard Jungel’s proposition of reaffirming God as the one who is not silent but “constitutes the world by speaking,”277 and in that way creates a relation between his word and a hearer of the word. In opposition to the violent silencing of God through “theology,” “rituals,” and theological etiquette, Jungel offers the possibility of response to the “silencing of God,” which would leave scope for a more positive reading of the communicative function of silence. The importance of listening is also emphasised by Nelle Merton, who maintains that God “hears us to speech,”278 and we in turn should also hear each other to speech. Inspired by the above analyses, Muers shows how attention to the significance of silence and of God’s silence can reshape our understandings and practices of communication in the contemporary cacophonous world of competing voices which silence the weakest and ignore the silent. While asserting that God communicates with us through listening silence, the silence in which he hears the world, the theologian argues that we shall not only recognize this silence but also share in it by “keeping God’s silence,” and mediating it upon the other. Participating in God’s patient listening begins with the recognition of the claim of the other upon me – the claim of the other not to be “silenced,” either by being ignored or by being treated as a mute object of comprehension. The active, open, and interruptive silence turns out to be the only responsible form of response which acknowledges and enables the “irreducible otherness of the other,”279 as well as reveals and enacts our inner human freedom. While in the first part of this chapter, I traced Derrida’s attempts to “save the name” of God, the present brief analysis, illuminated by the parallels between theological and deconstructive notions of “avoiding speaking” or silence, shall 275 Davies, “Soundings,” p. 222. 276 Muers, Keeping God’s Silence, p. 11. 277 Muers, Keeping God’s Silence, p. 29. 278 Muers, Keeping God’s Silence, p. 51. 279 Muers, Keeping God’s Silence, p. 66.

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focus on Derrida’s quest for a way to “keep God’s silence.” As I have already demonstrated, both deconstruction and negative theology express an acute sense of textuality, of the differential structure of any discourse and its paradoxical, aporetic nature. Their shared concern with the limits, but also possibilities, of language as well as their praxis of negativity and the employment of the language of unsaying, which performs rhetorically what it says technically, “reveal the most significant modalities of language, meaning and reference ‘as such.’”280 Derrida’s adoption of the gestures of negative theology in “How to Avoid Speaking” aims at speaking of God in the way that would destabilize the prevalent notions of God. Yet, he finds out that the use of the apophatic mode leads him repeatedly to the point where the name of God becomes re-appropriated by theology. What is more, even if he does not address God but uses his name with reference to a certain state of language, his statement is immediately transformed into an invocation. Derrida wonders: “I do not say God, but how to avoid saying God here, from the moment that I say the name of God?” (163). Although Derrida acknowledges that the possibility of “ontotheological reappropriation” of language remains inevitable, he still insists that the failure of this movement of reappropriation is equally inescapable. Hence, the question of God in relation to language “remains at the heart of a thinking of différance or of a writing of writing” (148). Given the fact that language is haunted by God, such a question cannot be dismissed; however, it must be addressed from a perspective which would allow for other than ontotheological conceptualizations of God. Therefore, Derrida turns to negative theology, which, with its rejection of idolatry and emphasis placed on the alterity and withdrawal of the other as an excess which cannot be comprehended, seems to envisage a responsible response to the question of God. Moreover, the adoption of apophatic mode in Derrida’s analysis is grounded on the recognition of the subversive potential of this discourse, its aporetic and heterogeneous character, which triggers interminable supplementation and suspension of meaning, and its creation and upholding of a space where God’s nature has not been already – and is not to be finally – determined. Following his initial assumption that “once the apophatic discourse is analysed in its logico-grammatical form, if it is not merely sterile, repetitive, obscurantist, mechanical, it perhaps leads us to consider the becoming-theological of all discourse” (146), Derrida demonstrates how, by multiplying its negations and denegations, the apophatic discourse exposes the link between God and all negativity, so that “God would be the truth of all negativity” (146) – not in the sense

280 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn of Religion, p. 41.

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of being produced by it but being productive. Hence, God shall be not merely considered as the end but the origin of the work of the negative, and, as Derrida argues further, the origin of speech, an origin that is not simple or present, but “the trace of the singular event that will have made speech possible […]” (165). Language precedes those who speak it or those through whom it speaks, and “[t]his is what theology calls God […] (166). The path trodden by negative theology leads Derrida to the association of God with the unspeakable trace embedded in language, which makes signification simultaneously possible and impossible, as well as with the infinitude of language and its inherently promissory nature. As the trace of singularity, God’s name opens the possibility of speech – both as address, and in calling for a response. It signifies the need for speech or discourse in order to create a space where a singular relation becomes possible. It signifies this, in part, by always already being a trace: this first speech, only gesturing toward what it names, thereby calls forth further speech: “it is necessary, it will have been necessary, to speak.” Because of this trace of both necessity and injunction, coming from the “before-language,” from “a past that was never present and yet remains unforgettable” (166), we are committed to speaking, to naming God, even before being a subject, even though our speech always fails in its reference because it is always already too late: Order or promise, this injunction commits (me), in a way that is rigorously asymmetrical, even before I myself have been able to say I, and to sign – in order to reappropriate it for myself, to restore the symmetry – such a provocation. This in no way mitigates my responsibility, on the contrary. There would be no responsibility without this forecoming [prévenance] of the trace, or if autonomy were first or absolute (166).

The anterior otherness, the unnameable voice, which Derrida understands as the givenness of language, antecedent to our use of it, as the promise, which is internal to the language itself, is provocative. It articulates the call which is both undeniable and unavoidable and which opens up every subject to responsibility preceding even its self-determination. This provocation displaces our self by sending us on a way with the debt whose paying off, though impossible, becomes our responsibility. Die Sprache verspricht, reiterates Derrida after Paul de Man; thus, to speak is to be indebted to the other for whom and to whom we are unconditionally responsible. This responsibility, as Emmanuel Levinas explains, is prior even to freedom: The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a “prior to every memory,” an “ulterior to every accomplishment,” from the non-present par excellence, the non-original, the anarchical, prior to or beyond essence. The responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of

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subjectivity, where the privilege of the question “Where?” no longer holds. The time of the said and of essence there lets the pre-original saying be heard, answers to transcendence, to a dia-chrony, or to the irreducible divergence that opens here between the nonpresent and every representable divergence, which, in its own way […] makes a sign to the responsible one.281

Following Taylor’s interpretation, it may be said that for Derrida this responsibility is realized in the subject’s “response-ability, that is in its ability to respond to the provocation of the other. ‘Viens … Come!’”282 We were endowed with a gift that cannot be repaid. And now, living in this situation of debt to the other, we must forever stay alert to his call: “Stay awake! [Esto vigilans, says the Latin translation] Strengthen what remains, so near dying…. … If you do not stay awake, I shall come like a thief you will not know at what hour I shall come upon you.” (Apocalypse 3:1–3) I shall come: the coming is always to come. […] I am coming means: I am going to come, I am to-come in the imminence of an “I am going to come,” “I am in the process of coming,” “I am on the point of going to come.”283

Feeling committed to respond to this call and to fulfil the unavoidable and unfulfillable promise of language, which, as we have seen, is endowed with a sense of religious or ethical responsibility, Derrida follows the apophatic mode of “avoiding speaking,” believing that “[t]he experience of negative theology perhaps holds to a promise” (153). As this promise becomes linked with God, who “inscribes us with its trace in language – before language” (153), Derrida’s recourse to apophatic discourse and his insistence on the preservation of the promise, might be read as a way of – to use Muers’ words – “keeping God’s silence.” The promise, which “will have always escaped this demand for presence” (153), and negative theology, which “deconstructs grammatical anthropomorphism” (148), may pave the way for a discourse making it possible to speak about God in a completely

281 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), pp. 10–11. 282 Taylor, Nots, p. 43. 283 Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 55.

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new manner. Derrida’s quest for such a language, which in “Sauf le nom” took the form of “after-writing,” is motivated by his constantly repeated assertion that for deconstruction “X (for example, the text, writing, the trace, différance…) […] calls for another syntax […] It is written completely otherwise” (144). Yet, Derrida simultaneously follows and deviates from via negativa. While objecting to the fact that negative theology privileges the authority of the name, he embraces instead a mode of naming provided by khōra, “not a question of a proper name, but rather of appellation, a way of addressing oneself ” (173–174), which undermines the self-identical sovereign identity of the one who bears this name. Derrida argues that even if negative theology turns to prayer while relating to the other, the structure of this prayer often involves praise (hymnein) or encomium, which determine the addressee by referring to this “you” as “Trinity! Higher than any being, any divinity” (176). Still, having recognized the unquestionable value of prayer as a non-predicative discourse which is able to keep the silent secret by not speaking about God while at the same avoiding mere silence by speaking to God, Derrida dissociates prayer from praise and embraces Levinas’s notion of speech as address to the other, who cannot be thematized but for whom we are infinitely responsible. As a result, a structure of address to the other as totally other becomes for Derrida the essence of prayer: “The act of addressing oneself to the other as other must, of course, mean praying, that is, asking, supplicating, searching out. No matter what, for the pure prayer demands only that the other hear it, receive it, be present to it, be the other as such, a gift, call, and even cause of prayer” (176). Insofar as negative theologians incorporate encomium within their prayers, they thematize and thus restrict the address and responsibility. Derrida emphasises that “to reject this doubtless subtle distinction [prayer/praise], inadmissible for Dionysius and perhaps for a Christian in general, is to deny the essential quality of prayer to every invocation that is not Christian” (177); consequently, the non-Christian speech is denied prayerfulness. Interestingly, as Derrida notices, while speaking to God in prayer, the address goes beyond its own limits of the name, towards another person in a relation of friendship. The multiplication of address can be traced in some mystical works which are addressed not simply to God but to brothers: Pseudo-Dionysius writes to Timothy, Augustine in Confessions – to Christian brothers. Thus the performative address of this speech exceeds its object and transforms itself into the order of fratenity, with love of God being extended to love of neighbour. However, the excessive movement of prayer necessarily occurs within naming God, as the address is impossible without the inscription of name. Naming God 115

goes “over there, toward the name, toward the beyond of the name in the name. Toward what, toward he or she who remains – save the name.”284 This “toward the beyond,” which Derrida and Levinas term “testimony,” is only possible through language and naming; nevertheless, for the singular name to be kept secret, to retain its singularity, which exceeds the classificatory schema by which we know what things are, it must remain unknowable and cannot be revealed as such in language. Consequently, the name remains at the threshold, “at once in and on language, then, within and at the surface.”285 The secret of testimony is preserved as secret through its sharing, through the dissimulation, and most importantly in the name itself.286 Given that names cannot provide adequate reference and thus remain improper, they point beyond the naming of the proper in singular appellation, in an expropriating, indeterminate address of prayer or testimony, which guards the alterity of the other and allows for thinking in terms of infinite responsibility. This expropriative function of language may be viewed in a broader context of Derrida’s idea of writing that should be given priority over speech because of its openness beyond closure. As Richard Kearney comments, in naming God there is “a violence which Derrida identifies with a form of writing which remains faithful to the other and yet estranged, which respects the alien precisely by alienating us from it, which refuses the facility of immediate possession or the certainty of decidable affirmation and negation.”287 This “violence” can be found within the context of the relation between apophatic theology and Platonic figure of khōra. As it has already been shown, khōra transcends any determinations, being neither spatial nor temporal, material nor spiritual. Consequently, the relation to it cannot be simply classified as either singular or universal, but it is the relation “without”: without any concrete address. Yet, negative theology tends to limit the thought of khōra by presenting it as derivative from God’s creation, which results in a determinate form of address.

284 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 59. 285 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 58. 286 It is worth alluding here to Derrida’s discussion on the name in his “Aphorism Countertime.” Commenting on Romeo and Juliet, Derrida maintains that when Juliet tells Romeo: “deny thy father, and refuse thy name,” she calls for him to go beyond his name by calling him by his name. Without the name, Derrida argues, Romeo could not be beyond the name. See Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume 2, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 127–142, especially aphorisms 17–21. 287 Richard Kearney, “Derrida’s Ethical Re-turn,” in Working Through Derrida, ed. Gary B. Madison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 46.

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Seeing this danger of ontotheological reappropriation of the singular name of God, Derrida proposes to think khōra outside the space of negative theology in order to open the possibility of other, multiple and heterogeneous, modes of address to God: It remains to be known (beyond knowing) if the place is opened by appeal (response, the event that calls for the response, revelation, history, etc.), or if it remains impassively foreign, like Khōra, to everything that takes its place and replaces itself and plays within this place including what is named God. Let’s call this the test of Khōra…288

The figure of khōra as lingering between that which gives birth to everything and that which receives everything that is given by God allows Derrida to think the (non)place beyond determination, even before negative theology, a moment of undecidability, which could serve as the condition for any particular address the discourse of negative theology is directed to. Emphasising the significance of such a way of naming God which would protect his singularity, Derrida finds a possibility of a singular relation in prayer – a mode of address to the other as other, undetermined by encomium or predication – which opens onto a structure of witness and testimony. Yet, such a relation will never appear as such in name, since no name can grasp this singularity in full. The condition of any testimony is “belonging-without-belonging” of “witness,”289 which separates itself from the singular and thus allows for the preservation of singularity. The name makes singularity possible when it resigns from trying to provide adequate reference, to capture the essence of God, but let God be himself beyond his name. Thus it becomes subjected to the process of interminable substitution by other names. Derrida asserts that without this possibility of replaceability and supplementation singularity cannot be preserved: “Each thing, each being, you, me, the other, each X, each name, and name of God can become the example of other substitable X’s. A process of absolute formalization. Any other is totally other (tout autre tout autre).”290

Conclusions The analysis of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” provided in this chapter, explored how the adoption of the apophatic discourse of silence within the framework of deconstructive project enables Derrida to reinforce the link between 288 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 57. 289 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 79. 290 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” p. 76.

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God and language. Sharing with negative theology a desire to find such a way of speaking of God that would respond to His singularity and alterity as well as be able to “keep the promise,” Derrida develops the mode of relativistic silence or “avoiding speaking” that he learns from his apophatic antecedents. The further argument aimed to demonstrate that while suspending the question of the reality of God and rejecting his traditional, idolatrous accounts, deconstruction rewrites God as otherness or promise, recognized as internal to language itself, as well as the infinite movement of language. Finally, it has been suggested that the concept of God, being anchored in language, has the potential to challenge the powerful, self-same, immutable notions of God by opening the possibility of multiple unorthodox definitions of the divine. Notwithstanding the numerous questions left unanswered, problems unresolved, doubts not dispelled, this part of the study has attempted to demonstrate that negative theology may be reasonably argued to have an affinity with deconstruction, and even if it reveals any points of divergence from the latter, it still seems to be loyal to deconstructive double movement, to its dialogical mode. Given numerous similarities indicated on the preceding pages, one may wonder whether the two discourses can be separated at all. Oliver Davies asks – albeit with great suspicion – whether Derrida’s practice of denial and “avoiding speaking” may not create a possibility of thinking theology outside of the language of being, even being “under erasure.” He further explains: “Indeed, his [Derrida’s] view that it is only the intentionality of the speaker which divides deconstruction and Christian apophatic theology may already contain a tacit admission that he now finds himself situated on a ground which is defined as much by the theological object of his critique as it is by his deconstructionist reflections upon it.”291 While exposing the differences between his discourse and negative theology, Derrida nevertheless seems to point out that such inconsistencies are not of great significance: “But since the structure of the trace is in general the very possibility of an experience of finitude, the distinction between a finite cause and an infinite cause of the trace appears – let us venture to say – secondary here.”292 The difficulty in drawing a clear distinction between negative theology and deconstruction may result from the fact that both of them are second-order discourses. Caputo terms deconstruction “armed neutrality,” explaining that its neutrality manifests itself in its suspension of any judgements about the existence or non-existence of any entity; but at the same time it is armed because it remains

291 Davies, “Soundings,” p. 207. 292 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 166.

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suspect of all such existential claims.293 Further, he suggests that this lack of ontological commitments results from the status of Derrida’s project, which shall be regarded not as a substantive position, offering a coherent body of theories, but as a “parasitic practice”: It needles its way into the discourse of others and shows them how much trouble they have brought upon themselves. Deconstruction does not want to deny that something exists but only to show the difficulty we have getting that said. This is what it means to say that nothing exists outside the text – viz., that existence claims cannot be disentangled from the web of discourse which make them possible to begin with.294

Merold Westphal, strongly objecting to a view that Derrida’s writing provides a philosophical justification for atheism, argues that “[d]econstruction is not able and does not try to settle the question of the reality of God.”295 What it only claims is that the whole of being, or God, or any other being, can never be fully present to our cognition, either at the level of meaning or fact. Unable to go beyond the dialectic of presence and absence, we can only track down a trace that points beyond itself to what is not present. With regard to the theological assertion about the reality of God, deconstruction can only remain undecided. Having formulated a hypothesis that “God would be the truth of all negativity,” Derrida comments on it: “This reading will always be possible. Who could prohibit it? In the name of what?” But “what is thus permitted is never necessary as such…”296 Thus, as Westphal stresses, Derrida’s writing, persisting in maintaining its radical undecidability, remains inescapably agnostic. On the other hand, deconstruction seems to provide explanations of God, insisting that the figure of God is unnecessarily used to account for the nature of language, both its primal lack and excess. Rowan Williams observes: “For Derrida himself, it is reasonably clear that ‘God’ is an ‘effect of the trace’: to speak of God is to try to put a face upon that which haunts language – what is over the shoulder, round the corner, what is by stipulation not capable of being confronted, being faced.”297 A similar point is made by Derrida in “How to Avoid Speaking,” where he reiterates his 293 John D. Caputo, “Mysticism and Transgression: Derrida and Meister Eckhart,” in Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverson (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 24. 294 Caputo, “Mysticism and Transgression,” p. 30. 295 Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 105. 296 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” p. 146. 297 Rowan Williams, “Hegel and the gods of postmodernity,” in Shadow of Spirit, eds. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 73.

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statement from “The Supplement of Origin” that “infinite différance is finite,”298 implying that we cannot associate the trace with God, if this God is still understood in its traditional, ontotheological sense as a cause or an origin. We are once again left in a state of confusion, with seemingly inconsistent views. Yet, this state of undecidability can be perfectly inscribed within a double movement of both deconstruction and negative theology, in which none of the interpretations shall be fully accepted or totally dismissed. And this undecidability necessarily calls for a decision, such a decision which is not without ethical or religious implications: Since Derrida shows that it is only the matter of intentionality which divides deconstructive negation as “armed neutrality” and apophasis as Christian affirmation, then it appears finally to be a matter of choice. And when you have a choice, or our choosing, then is it not only a short step, as he might himself say, to having divine choice, as election?299

298 Jacques Derrida, “The Supplement of Origin,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 102. 299 Davies, “Soundings,” p. 207.

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Part Two: Language and Beyond: Apophatic Transgression Transgression deranges the promise of a beyond or the promise of an otherwise: it is an act, always active and for that reason unassignable, ungraspable otherwise than by that which it opposes. Making the immoveable squeak and upsetting the state of things, transgression never rests. That is why it needs to maintain that which it annuls, and why it aims not at annihilation of its limit, but at rerouting it in other forms to another place. Transgressing is always exceeding but never achieving. It is bending without breaking, biting without consuming. Georges Bataille, 1958 interview

We are accustomed to viewing transgression as simply a going against established law or order. However, in this traditional sense, which implies a clear opposition between those who obey and those who oppose authority, it turns out that transgression inevitably recognizes or even seems to reassert the order it strives to undermine. For it may be argued that while being publicly punished in the name of the law, transgressors in fact confirm and reinforce it. While following the main line of investigation of the whole work, this Part intends to take up the challenge of rethinking the notion of transgression through reading apophatic mystical writing while at the same time taking cues from the remarkable insights provided by contemporary French theorists, eminently Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. It will be demonstrated that within the postmodern reconceptualisation, transgression becomes reconceived as not oppositional at all. This type of transgression belongs to a completely different order: the deepest and probably the most dangerous type, yet arguably also the most messianic one. Transgression in this sense renders ineffective any form of dialectical opposition, any binary principles enabling clear-cut distinctions between inside and outside, between transgressors and non-transgressors. By upsetting the very possibility of decidable exclusions, it restores a fundamental openness and connectedness of all. In such an understanding of transgression one may find the echoes of the medieval apophatic tradition, which by offering no affirmative conception of God but only multiplying negative statements about the Absolute, is able to 121

maintain unconditional openness to all that is coming and to reject nothing, whereas any affirmation, which inevitably places determinate limits on God, risks excluding something essential of his nature. This perspective can be seen as inherent in Christianity or, more exactly, in the Christ event as embodying just such a radical trangressivity in the complete giving up of self. In Christian terms, transgressiveness concerns the relation between finite and the Infinite. The Word incarnate, the Infinite erupting into the finite, God’s saying himself in the creation and in the historical revelation, marks scandalous transgression. Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks about Christ’s paradoxically abject “glory” (Herrlichkeit),1 while in the postmodern times numerous theological thinkers, such as Bruno Forte, writing within the AugustinianThomistic tradition, emphasise that any relationship with the Unsayable must go beyond form and harmony and be governed by irreducible tension or rupture aimed at transgression: It is in the Word’s being made flesh that Thomas perceives the irruption of the Other, the Silence of the Word becoming present and perceptible, to the supreme cry at the ninth hour, the ecstasy of the living God in love with his creature. And it is here that Thomas senses that there must exist another relationship between the Whole and the fragment which surpasses the “Greek” approach of proportion and form, even as this was reworked from a Christian point of view by Augustine: Thomas senses a relationship that includes brokenness, scandal and transgression.2

By combining literary-critical analysis with philosophical and theological reflection, we shall demonstrate that philosophy of difference, especially of French provenance, may be used to elucidate, in terms corresponding to our present times and cultural horizon, the nature of apophatic discourse. Conversely, mystical writing shall become our guide to rethinking some of the most pressing issues developed within contemporary theory. Since the purpose of this Part is to read negative theology within the conceptual framework of Blanchot’s, Bataille’s or Foucault’s theories, the proposed discussion relies predominantly on theoretical arguments rather than on textual analysis. The primary argument underlying the following investigation concerns a pronounced transgressiveness inherent in apophatic language. As it will be attempted to prove, the mystical word can be characterised as being of great verbal

1 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikasis. ed. John Riches (Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1982). 2 Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics, trans. David Glenday and Paul McPartlan (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), p. 25.

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impertinence and of great linguistic transgressiveness. The works of mystics culminate in transcendence of language towards a purely ineffable experience beyond any verbal expression. Nevertheless, negative theologians convey their experience in and through language and specifically through the transgression of language, that is by violating its normal order, its representational and referential functions. Their unparalleled textual performances enact a deconstruction of the sign that is going to be examined in the light of Blanchot, Bataille or Foucault, as transgressing and transfiguring the very sense of sense. The central contention of Chapter Four “Linguistic Turn of Transgression” is that Blanchot’s “negation of theology” is comparable to negative theology viewed as opposite to dogmatic assertions of orthodox theology and maintaining that we can only know what God is not. Further, it will be suggested that apophatic discourse can be considered as linguistic transgression since it is a violation of the sign, abnegating all affirmative and negative meanings alike in the movement of unsaying what it says. Both for apophatic theologians and Blanchot writing is a descent into namelessness, into the dark abyss of the inconceivable. Chapter Five, entitled “Transgression and Transcendence,” pursues the examination of the relationship between negative theology and transgression even further by referring to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the sense of transgression in the profane world and by using the concept of inner experience, explored by Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Finally, it will be shown how transgression of all cultural and linguistic limits – for both apophatic mystics and French theorists – ultimately becomes an act of transcendence towards the Unknown.

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Chapter Four: The Linguistic Turn of Transgression … the only possible transgression of current order would be a theological one. John Milbank, The Future of Love The sign and divinity have the same time and place of birth. The epoch of the sign is essentially theological. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Negative theology seeks to transcend language in order to reach a realm allegedly beyond language. As language turns out to collapse on the mystical journey to the divine and the discursive mechanism of sign and referent proves inadequate to grasp the intuitive and visionary meaning of the Unsayable, apophatic writers decide to convey their experiences through transgression of language, intensively exploiting the possibilities of language, violating the grammatical rules and going beyond the referential function of language towards the exposure of its self-referentiality and performativity. It is neither by saying anything while properly using the linguistic means nor by completely abandoning language, but by unsaying what it says that the apophatic discourse attempts to achieve its transcendence. A mystic transgresses the boundaries of language, that is, s/he steps across3 a series of linguistic thresholds on his/her way to the Unsayable. However, the ultimate transcendence is impossible to be attained since each step directed by and towards it cannot break through the sphere of immanence. Although the mystical efforts are aimed at the divine vision, they are doomed to failure – and this theme of the failure to express the divine vision pervades and underlies the works of negative theologians. What motivates apophatic writers is not simply a desire to say that they had a direct experience of God but to re-enact this experience within and by means of language – a self-subverting, self-annuling, transgressive language. In the end, it turns out that the mystical vision is paradoxically achieved in and through writing, through this rhetorical performance in which language is not dismissed but imposed even more directly. It is evoked by the text itself which persists in reproducing its insurmountable difficulties, in repeating the excuses for the inability to communicate what it wants to say, thereby 3 “Transgression” (from the Latin trans, across, and gradior, to walk, to step) etymologically means “stepping across.”

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foregrounding the experience of its impossibility. Hence, the mystical vision should be rather called a “non-vision” since God cannot be “seen”: he is not a visible object; rather the language itself in its absoluteness, transgressiveness, dissolution and self-annihilation is revealed as a manifestation of the absolute and the alterity. Contrary to the common view of language as performing primarily a referential function, in apophatic texts language fundamentally serves to indirectly manifest the unseen. When all the positive and negative predications are relinquished, the furthest capacities of language transcended, meaning transgressed, sense suspended – God can be encountered. This is the experience of what Maurice Blanchot, a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist, names the Outside, which – to use his suggestive, self-contradictory terms – is (im) possible to be reached by taking the step/not beyond – the “pas au-delà.” For Blanchot, writing in its purest form, when it does not serve any extrinsic aims but “through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself,”4 opens up the ways of relating to all that is radically other, outside language, all that cannot and never could be said, and which writing constantly questions. It “brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One […].”5 In this sense, writing is “the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every law, and also its own.”6 As a creative force, writing has thus potential to remake the world; yet in this process of creation of its own order or disorder, it leaves nothing intact, nothing in its own place, but makes the world collapse by placing into question the established laws which it is purportedly based on. This type of transgressive relation is also a manner of relating to the transcendent “ground” that can be found in negative theology, where the ground comes to be the unrepresentable, unattainable God, who is approached through the vehicle of writing, through the dissolution of language and the breakdown of the mystic’s own human speech. Apophatic writers persist in leaping outside of their discursive site, yet it is still the word, the letter that leaps; hence the leap “outside” inevitably remains immanent to discourse. This movement of non/transcendence which defies the simple opposition between transcendence and immanence echoes Blanchot’s idea of the

4 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xii. 5 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. xii. 6 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. xii.

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experience of writing understood as the step/not beyond, the step beyond oppositional logic. While aspiring to track down in language its Other and thus open it to its Outside, Blanchot pushes the experience of the unsayable in language to its furthest limits, exploiting the ways of unsaying language, which turn out to be never sufficient enough to liberate what it oppresses. In the course of the analysis provided in this chapter it shall be demonstrated that his exploration of the possibilities of discourse resembles in many ways the transgressive movements of apophatic writing. Arising from the experience of an impossibility of expression in language, Blanchot’s texts foray into the elusive, apophatic terrain, discovering the apophatic a/logic or rather il/logic (illness of Logos) in writing. However, it is necessary to stress that although Blanchot describes the Outside as “infinite,” he does not identify this radical infinite openness with God, as negative theology does.

1.  The Step/Not Beyond The meaning of the phrase pas au-delà, employed by Blanchot, is radically ambiguous since pas in French can refer either to a particle of negation “not” or to a noun “step,” thereby giving “the step beyond” as well as “the step not beyond.” In the same phrase there are simultaneously rendered the moments of prohibition and of transgression; transcendence becomes confounded with immanence. What it further suggests is a possibility of interpreting transcendence as a negation of its own movement beyond, that is a “step/not.” However, for Blanchot such negation which negates itself cannot be considered as simply negation, for negation posits a definite something that is negated, whereas here we deal with what Blanchot terms the neuter (le neutre). An indeterminate “not-quite-nothing,” left by the indefinite moves of retractions, a neither/nor sort of negations, is the trace of the neuter. Slipping in between the pitfalls of both affirmation and negation, it opens to an Outside. The idea of ambiguous transcendence, which is in fact simultaneously not transcendence, not beyond, is worked out by Blanchot within his discussion on the relationship between eternity and time. By adopting his self-contradictory vocabulary of the pas au-delà, the author of Infinite Conversation writes about eternity as a “step beyond” of time, which nevertheless falls within it and can be experienced solely in time’s breaking open, in its ungraspable moment of fissure:

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Time, time: the step not beyond that is not accomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this “outside of time in time” towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear.7

Although the “step/not beyond” does not take place in time, all the steps accomplished in time depend on it. In this primordial step of “impossibility,” even the “I”, attracted by the Outside, disappears. Blanchot’s neuter as indeterminable Nothing or no-thing without definable qualities may be seen as performing a similar role to that of the Absolute in apophatic thought. In a way analogous to the all inclusive Neoplatonic One – being both all things and nothing in itself, the source out of which all things emanate and yet none of these things – everything (or nothing) is potentially in the indefinable neuter. Both apophatic One or God as well as the neuter are transcendentally present in everything, but nowhere present or graspable in itself. On the one hand, apophatic texts are essentially the experience of language, characterized by contradiction, self-erasure and retraction, on the other hand, this apophatic language is itself a step beyond, even beyond itself. Apophasis demonstrates discourse not to be sufficient unto itself, exposing how at the limits of what it is able to articulate it opens into the outside. Therefore, beyond its necessary self-critical moment, apophatic discourse is all about this beyond, this other, other than itself, other than discourse altogether. This passionate orientation towards what is irrevocably outside discourse is also traceable in Blachot’s writing, which turns out to be more than just linguistic nihilism.8 Yet, while negative theology does not exclude but rather embrace the possibility of theological interpretations of this beyond and the Outside, though consistently stressing the intractability of the transcendent Other to any kind of linguistic treatment, Blanchot, in contrast, evades any such appropriations of the Outside by theology. Still, Blachot’s disavowal of theology is not a simple negation and, consequently,

7 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 1. 8 See, for example, Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1995), p. 16 (“The discourse on passivity necessarily betrays passivity”), p. 21 (“It is upon losing what we have to say that we speak”), pp. 38–39 (“Trust in language is the opposite”), p. 51 (“Silence is perhaps a word”), p. 53 (“May what is written resound in the stillness”), p. 59 (“The language of awaiting – perhaps it is silent”), p. 87 (“There remains the unnamed”), p. 114 (“In ‘indiscretion with respect to the ineffable’”).

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exclusion, but an interminable disappropriation, incessantly reinstating an appropriation which it forever dismisses. Hence, the possibility of juxtaposing writing with theology is not completely effaced as it is still in a never-ending process of being effaced. In this sense, Blanchot’s distancing from theology is “infinite” and thus becomes an “infinite conversation” with it. Conversely, the language of negative theology, which does not aspire to ultimately affirm an independently determinable and normative theological meaning, can be treated as both disappropriation and appropriation of theology. The introduction of the concept of the step/not beyond enables Blanchot to rethink the negation as really the beyond, not as a passage to affirmation, to some positive term which is not to be negated. Beyond all affirmations and negations there is the neuter which cuts across the world of things, preceding their emergence as definite, definable entities. This radical negation, which repeatedly and endlessly negate each and every determinate form instead of producing a negative form of whatever is negated – as is in the case of normal negation – and leaves things in a state of becoming, of undecidability, freed from any final determinate meanings. This is something which is also revealed in the mystics’ efforts to express definitively their experience of the divine. Yet, despite language proving its own defeat and impossibility of representation, it still in its very failure serves to perform what it cannot articulate. In the constant process of surpassing any name, superseding any form of expression, what becomes manifest is the neutered expression of no-thing. The radical apophatic writers, such as Meister Eckhart, peer through the cracks of the linguistic system to that which lies beyond language. Their attempts at transcending language result in fact in the more intense concentration on language, in its absolutization, so that the transcendent is ultimately approached in the immanence of language. This is the paradoxical logic of the pas au-delà, of neither transcendence nor immanence, which Blanchot pursues in terms of the neuter.

2.  Nothing Except Nuance: the Neuter The non-concept of the neuter (le neutre), one of the key terms in Blanchot’s conceptual achievement, may be best approached by referring to its etymology, to the Latin expression ne-uter, meaning “neither this nor that.”9 The neuter shirks every name and attribution, endeavouring to remain the name for nothing which 9 See Christophe Bident, “The Movements of the Neuter,” in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, eds. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 13–34.

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could be named and, in fact, for namelessness itself. While claiming that the neuter is irreducible both to the clear and to the obscure, Christophe Bident explains that “it is in the first instance because it is also irreducible to itself: broadly undefined, it does not present itself as a concept which is clear, or that clarifies, or that serves as a source of clarification, or one that is operative or operational.”10 In its movement away from all determinations, the neuter hints at some indeterminate ground, a neutral namelessness that lies at the core of every name: neither this nor that, though not quite nothing, a name which continuously and infinitely effaces itself as a name.11 Yet, being after all a name, a noun, though naming nothing, it does not negate the process of naming but persistently strives to neutralize all determinate namings, all affirmative and negative attributions that a name can make. Such an un-working or worklessness (désoeuvrement) of the neuter – irreducible to all dialectic and serving only as a residue that cannot be taken up into the process of negation, mediation and work – is at work within every name, being even “grafted on to every word.”12 Blanchot thus describes this “pseudowork,” which brings both the affirmative and the negative back into play: Something is at work by way of the neuter that is immediately the work of worklessness: there is an effect of the neuter – this says something of the passivity of the neuter – that is not an effect of the neuter, not being the effect of a Neuter pretendedly at work as a cause or a thing. There would then not be a work of the neuter as one speaks of a work of the negative. The Neuter: paradoxical name: it barely speaks, mute word, simple, yet always veiling itself, always displacing itself out of its meaning, operating invisibly on itself while not ceasing to unwind itself, in the immobility of its position that repudiates depth. It neutralizes, neutralizes (itself), thus evokes (does nothing but evoke) the movement of Aufhebung, but of it suspends and retains, it retains only the movement of suspending, that is, the distance it creates by the fact that, occupying the terrain, it makes the distance disappear. The Neuter, then, designates difference in indifference, opacity in transparency, the negative scansion of the other, which can reproduce itself only by the averted attraction – omitted – of the one.13

The concept of radical namelessness and otherness marked by the neuter is developed by Blanchot within his dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, whose concept of the unnameable transcendence of God Blanchot strives to rethink outside the theological context and transpose into the political and social arena: “it may be that everything that can be affirmed of the relation of transcendence – the

10 Bident, “The Movements of the Neuter,” p. 13. 11 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 75. 12 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 84. 13 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 75.

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relation of God to creature – must be first (for my part, I would say only) understood on the level of the social relation.”14 While endorsing Levinas’s notion of radical alterity that transcends every system of language and knowledge, and the relation of non-relation between the Same and the Other, ensuing from it, Blanchot is highly suspicious of the use of religious vocabulary and the equation of transcendence with God, even if it is not the God of ontotheology, insisting that such a thematization may deprive transcendence of its absolute otherness, so that it becomes nothing more than just a mirror image of the humanistic immanence. Therefore, responding to Totality and Infinity, Blanchot replaces the substantializing question “Who is ‘the Other’?” Who is Autrui’?”15, formulated previously by one of the interlocutors in The Infinite Conversation, with another question, referring to the issue of “community” – placed purposefully within the neutralising quotation marks: “What of the human ‘community,’ when it must respond to this relation of strangeness between man and man – a relation without common measure, an exorbitant relation – that the experience of language leads one to sense?”16 While answering this question, the French philosopher finds it necessary to reformulate the model of the relationship between humanity and God, and think transcendence solely within the intersubjective space occupied by humans themselves, within what he calls “community.” It is to this human other, “not the other as God or other as nature but, as ‘man,’ more other than all that is other,”17 which is no longer addressed in terms of transcendence or immanence, but as other than alterity itself, that Blanchot’s neuter makes a silent appeal. In his reading of Levinas, which refuses the Other’s proximity to the Name of God in the name of the radical namelessness of the Other, Blanchot does not relinquish his fidelity to the author of Totality and Infinity; he rather follows his own principle of always choosing a more difficult reading, thereby allowing himself to be challenged by the text. His understanding of reading implies responding to the strangeness of the text, to its dissymmetry beyond conceptuality, to the interval between the Said (“le Dit”) of the text and the Saying (“le Dire”) of language, which enacts the address to the Other. The reader is thus obliged to read sceptically, vigilantly, with respect for the namelessness of the neuter. Leslie Hill insists that in any analysis of Blanchot’s work a sufficient attention must be given to “the suspensive motion of a fragmentary mode of writing in which 14 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 54. 15 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 70. 16 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 71. 17 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 72.

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every statement, assertion, or question in Blanchot’s text is interrupted by the boundlessness of the neutre and its strange (il)logic of continuity and discontinuity, silence and infinity.”18 For Blanchot there is no single language or system of thinking that can have an authority over all the others, but there must be always at least two languages, two demands simultaneously at work: “one dialectical, the other not; one where negativity is the task, the other where the neutral remains apart, cut off both from being and from not-being.”19 It is crucial to leave the discordance between these two languages unresolved and thus maintain and respect the gap of dissymmetry between these two requirements. This is a way of thinking within the neuter, which in fact surpasses the limits of thinking itself. Blanchot expounds on this: The necessity of living and dying according to this double task and in the ambiguity of time – time bereft of present and time as history, capable of exhausting (so as to accede to the fulfillment of presence) all the possibilities of time – such as the irreparable decision, the inevitable madness, which is not the content of thought, for thought does not contain it, any more than either consciousness or unconsciousness offers it a determining status.20

The neuter reveals “the beyond” within language, an otherness, which cannot be grasped within any possible conceptualization of the Other and which effaces all the possible names. Viewed in such a way, the neuter may be considered – as Levinas suggests in the 1971 conversation with André Dalmas – simply another name for transcendence. Levinas explains: “I think Maurice Blanchot’s thought can be interpreted in two directions at the same time.” The first direction is toward a “loss of meaning […] as if one were at the extreme pinnacle of nihilism.”21 What we are left with here is only a sense of meaninglessness and threatening “nothing,” a destructive, hopeless instability of il y a. Yet, the second direction, opened up by the unravelling of meaning, leads toward the rupture of totality: An uninterrupted noise […] does not let the world sleep, and troubles the order in which being and non-being are ordered in a dialectic. This Neuter is not a someone, nor even a something. It is but an excluded middle that, properly speaking, is not even. Yet there is in it more transcendence than any world-behind-the-worlds ever gave a glimpse of.22

18 Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (New York: Routledge, 1977), p. 180. 19 Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, p. 20. 20 Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, p. 27. 21 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 154. 22 Levinas, Proper Names, p. 155.

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Levinas invites us to read Blanchot “in two directions at the same time” since this way of interpretation may allow us to appreciate the complexity of the “neuter,” to see both its threat and value. Undoubtedly, Blanchot’s work can be interpreted as the destruction of all stability and certainty, yet when viewed from the other side, this instability turns out to be able to enliven the ossified structures, to trouble the existing order by exposing its cracks and discontinuities. Thus, through its movement toward “more transcendence,” it opens up a new space within language: an unnameable “excluded middle.” In response to Levinas’s recourse to a non-ontological God, Blanchot suggests that if the name of God signifies nothing, it becomes “pure name that does not name […], without nominative power, attached as if by chance to language and, thus, transmitting to it the power – a devastating one – of non-designation, that relates it to itself.”23 What it implies further is that the name of God allows to maintain the sickness of language. As the name remains always irrecuperable, always to be named and naming nothing, it makes any attempt to cure language of its malady impossible, but at the same time the name such as “God” becomes impossible as well, and it is exactly this impossibility that is the very condition of the possibility of God’s name itself. Within the thinking of the neuter, the name of God is taken by Blanchot out of the theological context and rewritten as the name for that which is elusive in language, which always escapes language – and this is, in fact, what the indeterminate, slipping neuter itself is. Such an association of the name of God with the neuter paves the way for the return of the name of God in Blanchot’s later writing, however, only on condition that the moment it is written, it is immediately effaced and re-named as the name of an Other. Leslie Hill observes that for Blanchot, it “is a way of affirming that, in the face of the absolute alterity of the Other, the only beginning of response, in the impossibility of its possibility and its withdrawal both of what is and of what is not, beyond immanence and transcendence alike, is what Stéphane Mallarmé used to call: ‘le seul acte d’écrire,’ the sole act of writing.”24 Rejecting the logic of simple negation, which reproduces a certain something to be negated and thus makes an attribution to that which eludes each and every attribute and form, Blanchot strains to negate even all the negative aspects of the neuter, highlighting its power of recursive self-abnegation, which lets “an indefinite series of negations”25 accumulate and be repeated ad infinitum. The formula

23 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 48. 24 Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, p. 184. 25 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 75.

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“neither … nor … nor” and so on, which marks the movements of the neuter, depicts the never-ending, infinitely incomplete process of negating or “othering” that does not aim to definitively define a concept but to involve all the concepts in the procedure of transformation without end, in a becoming, or rather unbecoming, a losing of whatever they are (not), even the possibility of being designated as “what cannot be named.” This is not so much a procedure of knowing as of non-knowing, non-savoir – an extremely important term in the exchanges between Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Christophe Bident asserts that, given its originally grammatical impersonality and atopia, that is, its neutrality in terms of semiological category, it may be argued that “the neuter is the written form of non-knowledge, unreconciled in its very reconciliation,”26 which is reminiscent of Nothing (le Rien). He recognizes Blanchot’s interest in the “ineffable power” of an impenetrable, unnameable “obscure presence” already in his first published piece of literary criticism, on Ce qui était perdu by François Mauriac.27 The neuter is the non-sense, the absence of sense [l’absence du sens] – therefore it is impossible to provide a strict definition of it – and yet it is decisive for sense, making any sense possible, thus playing a transcendental role as a condition of both the possibility and validity of sense: “No ontological, ethical or linguistic discourse would be feasible without the absence of sense that the neuter manifests, and of which it is the sole manifestation. Absence is what Blanchot later begins to call interruption.”28 The neuter, with its interruptive power, complements the negative in the struggle against nihilism. While the neuter names the possible and transforms values, the negative, responding to the impossible, suspends them, cognizant of the fact that the affirmation of these values may also conceal nihilism. As Bident further explains, the role of the neuter is to “keep at bay the restless wanderings of the negative,” to evade the nihilism which comes as an effect of negation. At this point, it is tempting to draw a parallel between the presented task of the neuter and negative theology, whose vocation consists in saving theology from being simply negative. By persistent de-negating, un-saying, rejecting all the ontological, rational, idolatrous conceptualizations of God, apophatic discourse is able to save God’s name as unnameable. Analogously, while the neuter conditions the possibility of everything, it nevertheless remains neutral and undetermined itself, eluding all the affirmative and negative attributions alike. 26 Bident, “The Movements of the Neuter,” p. 17. 27 Maurice Blanchot, „François Mauriac et ce qui était perdu,” La Revue française 26 (1931), quoted in Bident, “The Movements of the Neuter,” p. 18. 28 Bident, “The Movements of the Neuter,” p. 23.

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In order to further explicate the apophatic a-logic of the neuter it may be helpful to refer briefly to one of the early texts by Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), where the neuter becomes identified with the zero degree. After his trip to China in 1974, Barthes, influenced by Zen Buddhism and Taoism, reconceives his notion of the neuter in the context of Oriental apophaticism, and finally, finding in the neuter the means to “baffle” the paradigm, makes it a subject of a series of his lectures delivered in 1978 at the Collège de France.29 Le neutre, as described by Barthes, is able to loose the power in discourse, to escape or undo the binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in the Western thought, thereby opening the possibility of “suspension” of the conflicts of meaning. The Neutral revolves around twenty-three “figures” (also called “traits” or “twinklings”) which may be considered as embodiments of the neuter (le neutre is translated here as “the neutral”). One of such “figures” is silence, which Barthes views as a tactic to outplay the “oppressions, intimidations, the dangers of speaking.”30 However, at the same time he observes that silence quickly turns into a sign: Here, we reencounter a process that struck me as early as Writing Degree Zero and has obsessed me ever since: what is produced so as not to be a sign is very quickly recuperated as a sign. That’s what happens to silence: one would like to reply to dogmatism (heavy system of signs) with something that outplays signs: silence. But silence itself takes on the form of an image […] fatality of the sign: it is stronger than the individual.31

Barthes elucidates that although silence was at first employed as a “weapon assumed to outplay the paradigms (the conflicts) of speech,” it then “congeals itself into a sign (which is to say, is caught up in a paradigm).” In the end, the Neutral, whose function was to “baffle” paradigms, now has to attempt to outplay silence as a sign, that is, as a system. Thus, “the Neutral would be defined not by permanent silence – which, being systematic, dogmatic, would become the signifier of an affirmation […] – but by the minimal expenditure of a speech act meant to neutralize silence as a sign.”32 The neuter is perceived by Barthes as nuance, as that which cannot be associated with any positive feature but which nevertheless makes a difference. Being a nuance of, it orients us toward something else, the “something” which bears its mark but which itself remains unknown and indeterminate; it suggests the

29 Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 30 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 23. 31 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 26. 32 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 27.

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existence of something of which it is a nuance but offers no definite assertions about its existence – it remains simply a nuance. While pondering upon the essence of the art of poetry, Paul Verlaine insists that it is nuance and nuance alone that is required for poetry: For Nuance, not Color absolute, Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue! Nuance! It alone is what lets you Marry dream to dream, and horn to flute!33

Although the translation of the title of this collection of lectures, The Neutral, might suggests that the neuter is neutral, indifferent or tepid, the meaning given to it by Barthes is opposite. It is rather “an ardent, burning activity,”34 passionate, intense and greatly committed, yet supportive of neither of the sides of the binary poles within the hierarchical system imposed by society and its power structures. The “paradigm,” which the neuter is intended to outplay or baffle, stands for the violent production of meaning through the conflict of opposing terms. As Barthes writes: “meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.”35 Divisiveness is necessary for making sense. A must be divided, differentiated from not-A if any definable sense is to occur. This is the procedure that the neuter resists, allowing instead to envisage a language that would dismantle paradigms and escape from their grids of oppositions and, in a way, from language itself. Yet, the neuter does not impose its own violence of, for example, indifference or “arrogance” of paradigm. What it offers is a kind of lesson in nuance, which may be treated as “an introduction to living, a guide to life.”36 This “drifting far from arrogance” is a way of drifting that holds on to “a desperate vitality,” a way of remaining “so to speak suspended in front of the hardenings of both faith and certitude and incorruptible by either one.”37 While saying that there is a nuance of autumn in the air, we do not need to commit ourselves to stating that it is autumn or that the word “air” refers or does not refer to air in any sense of it. It is an affirmation that obliterates all its

33 Paul Verlaine, “Ars Poetica,” in One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: a bilingual edition, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 127. 34 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 7. 35 Barthes, The Neutral, pp. 6–7. 36 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 11. 37 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 14.

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possible presuppositions. Undeniably, there is something that makes us discern a nuance of autumn, yet it will remain undefined whether this “something” is really autumn, air or anything else. Still, in order to feel the nuance of “autumn” in the “air,” we do not need to determine what the nuance is a nuance of. The same limitations of our cognitive capabilities seem to apply to the whole reality which we live and have our being in. Thinking in terms of the neuter implies the awareness that, when considered at their deepest ontological level, all determinations of meaning, as well as authority and power based on them, are suspended over a void. Thus, any ultimate foundation, such as God, need to surpass all determinate meaning given to it by human beings, since our process of meaning-making consists in nothing more than reproducing fakes and idols. If we are to align the neuter with God, it seems that there is no better way than following the path delineated by the apophatic tradition, which humbly accepts the limited cognitive abilities of a human when faced with the mystery of God, and relinquishes any pretensions to have found the notions which fully and adequately grasp the nature of God. The neuter – preceding both sense and nonsense – serves as the precondition of all sense. Yet, it is always given in a position of quasi-absence, coming to be glimpsed in various guises but never presenting itself as such. Deprived of any proper meaning, it is only through its different modalities, different incarnations, which infuse it with a certain “sense,” that the neuter can convey meaning and give “value” to words. Through the movement of retreat, infinite reduction and the singularity of an effacement, the neuter lets the meaning appear and at the same time suspends it, placing it within parentheses or quotation marks. The meaning could thus exist only by way of the neuter, which itself is foreign to any meaning, yet not indifferent, but haunting the possibility of sense and non-sense with its spectral presence. Neither a word nor sense itself, it remains “an unidentifiable surplus” which gives sense to all of them: The neutral is always elsewhere than where one would situate it; not simply always on the hither side and always beyond the neutral, not simply devoid of a proper meaning and even of any form of positivity and negativity, but also preventing either presence or absence from proposing it with certainty to any experience whatsoever, even that of thought. And yet every encounter – where the Other suddenly looms up and obliges thought to leave itself, just as it obliges the Self to come up against the lapse that constitutes it and from which it protects itself – is already marked, already fringed by the neutral.38

38 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, pp. 305–306.

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For Blanchot, this “unidentifiable surplus” of the neuter, which affirms itself outside every affirmation and every negation alike, parallels the force of ontological argument, according to which “God, whether he is or he is not, remains God,” as all the affirmations and negations refer to the sense of “God,” yet he himself evades any definite sense attributed to him, whether assigning him existence or nonexistence: “God: sovereignty of the neutral, in relation to Being always in excess, empty of meaning, and through this emptiness absolutely separate from all meaning and non-meaning.”39 The neuter, slipping away as much from affirmation as from negation, erasing any positive determinations of being, cuts across language, letting it go, slip into oblivion, freeing meaning as a phantom, a haunting. By leading language to its own destruction, by dismantling the structurings of language, undermining the ordering functions of the linguistic operations, the neuter exposes an inevitable loss of language, a primal disorder that cannot be affirmed or articulated. It is only in language’s ceding to chaos that this discontinuity below and outside the ordered constructions of words is exposed. All that the language’s saying and the unity of the name denies and belies, is revealed: the most secret, unsoundable, unsayable reserves, the nameless violated by naming and its mendacious unities. As “the very silence dispersed,”40 the neuter penetrates beyond all determinations of language into that which cannot and never can be said, what is outside language, or even without relation to language. Paradoxically, what cannot be said may be approached only in the loss of relation to it through language, in a relationless relation, in becoming a non-relation – made possible by the neuter, which “changes the relation into nonrelation.”41 Blanchot thinks the nameless within this paradoxical apophatic a/logic or il/logic of what cannot be said, since “what cannot be said” must be necessarily said. The attempt at liberating the nameless from the oppressive, violent power of language proves to be excruciatingly difficult as all the ways of unsaying language, of its self-effacement, and self-erasure turn out to be insufficient to ultimately unsay human language. Yet, indifference is not the right strategy. The hope in the impossible should be cherished and the search for a language that could form a relation with an Other through passion for the Outside of the whole realm of the possible can never be abandoned.

39 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 304. 40 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 75. 41 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, p. 73.

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3.  Language as Non-Vision For many mystics who share the desire to express their vision of God, the difference and interdependence between seeing and saying is vital. Though driven by a seeing that cannot be said, their writings tenaciously offer excessive saying. In their attempts to evoke a Presence which is utterly unutterable, they emphatically say that this Presence cannot be captured within verbal representations, and thus, paradoxically, persistently hold to words. Yet, their texts themselves, with their skilful arrangements of words and images, are not the final objects since they are, after all, relations to what cannot be seen, aimed to direct our gaze beyond themselves, even if there is no-thing that can be seen beyond them. Seeing and saying are intrinsically interrelated and dependent on each other, and it is owing to this mutual relation that they break open to an outside, thereby “neutralizing” each other – in the sense of Blanchot’s neuter. The relation of language to that which cannot be seen or illuminated is of paramount importance for Blanchot. His main concern is this dark side of language which cannot be positively depicted but only indirectly approached by means of apophatic discursive strategies of the self-unsaying, self-annihilating of language, of an unworking of any work. It is through this unworking, through its own undoing, which opposes any dialectical return to the Same and affirmation of the One, that the work can open to the dimension of the unrepresentable and the invisible, towards the infinite Outside, le Dehors. The final gaze looks beyond the work itself and beyond all its verbal representations. Even if some of the mystical texts provide images for their visions of God, yet these are inevitably merely images of the Invisible, shadows, re-presentations, bearing only the mark of the inaccessible meaning which itself is sealed up in that which eludes any representation. Blanchot presents the image as that which holds us at the limit of visible-invisible, veiling-unveiling. It is the duplicity of revelation, covering at the moment of uncovering: “The image is what veils by revealing; it is the veil that reveals by veiling in all the ambiguous indecision of the word reveal.”42 Apophatic texts seek the fulfilment of their dream of encountering transcendence in the breakdown and scattering of its own images and revelation. These scattering and dismantling are themselves transgressions and destructions of the whole regime of representation and theological revelation of truth that have for centuries shaped both theological or spiritual works and their intellectual and cultural tradition. It is through the transgressing of every order of presentation and representation that apophatic mystics convey their divine visions, or rather 42 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 30.

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non-visions, for what language in its failure opens the text upon is actually Nothing, no object. The infinite other, who is never given it its presence but as a shadow cast by the non-vision, glimpsed on the far side of language in the act of its disappearing, is understood by negative theologians as divinity, though at the same time it is acknowledged by them that “no one has ever seen God” (1 John 4:12) “or can see” him (1 Timothy 6:16). Consequently, the “vision” becomes reinscribed within the writing – into the very language of an apophatic text. Yet, since the destructuration of language has uncovered nothing under the elaborate constructions of words, language itself in its neutralization of every affirmation and negation, in its dispersion of meaning becomes No-thing, the neuter. Though not relating to any particular “something,” nevertheless in its indetermination it releases the limitless potential of all things to relate to one another, to enter into infinite relations. Thus language, as understood by Blanchot, is an Opening to the infinite possibilities: the Impossibility, the Infinite. The next point of convergence between seeing and saying is tracked down by Blanchot in their mutual forgetfulness: “To see is, perhaps, to forget to speak; and to speak is to draw from the depths of speech an inexhaustible forgetfulness.”43 Forgetting, appearing underneath seeing and saying and exposing their mutual interdependence, obliterates and neutralizes both of them, thus opening language to the infinite space of the neuter, which, unconstrained by the tyranny of the unifying order, allows for totally free invention. The apophatic representations of the mystical revelation cannot be thus classified as either visual or verbal, as they become totally other, “divine.” Traversing at the threshold, approaching a limit one cannot encounter, a boundary one cannot reach, entering the place not found there, they linger as though in suspense between the visible and the invisible, maintaining the ambiguity – in Blanchot’s sense of infinite “holding between” (entre-tenir) and also of conversing – of “infinite conversation” (entretien infini).44 As it has been stated, the non-vision of the mystical work, dependent on the words, releases an unlimited field of free invention as no constraints are imposed on it by a finite object. It might seem that, unable to objectively express their experiences, mystics may take the liberty of using language in whatever way they wish, even to the point of making saying absolute. Yet, Blanchot is suspicious of such freedom of language which has no object as its limit, since it can be easily abused and may turn into a perversion:

43 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 29. 44 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, pp. 30–31.

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– There is a facility in this liberty. Language acts as though we are able to see the thing from all sides. – And then begins perversion. Speech no longer presents itself as speech, but as sight freed from the limitations of sight. Not a way of saying, but a transcendent way of seeing.45

Although such negative theologians as Meister Eckhart explore the radical negativity of discourse, thus revealing that even the consistent procedure of selfabnegation of language, the diverse ways of unsaying are not enough to unsay our human language and liberate what it oppresses, it might seem that in some mystical texts the use of language is aimed to “lift it up” to a transcendent form of sight, to enact, qua language, the final divine vision. As Blanchot claims, such a “perverse” orientation of language to a “transcendent way of seeing” is a danger clearly observable in our culture, which since its Greek beginnings has been marked by an interplay of saying and seeing. The possibility of presenting a transcendental vision in language can be traced, for example, in Saint Augustine’s works, such as De Trinitate, Book XV, where the author reflects upon a vision of and in the divine Word which is experienced neither through physical senses nor through the visible and audible words. Blanchot juxtaposes the look which is limited by its object as a positive presence, with the word which knows no restrictions but being “transgression” per se, takes a step over the threshold towards the Outside, the unlimitedness of all”: “For sight, speech is war and madness. The terrifying word passes over every limit and even the limitlessness of the whole: it seizes the thing from a direction from which it is not taken, not seen and will never be seen; it transgresses laws, breaks away from orientation, it disorients.”46 Even if apophatic texts offer seemingly comprehensive presentation of their vision, ultimately, through their exploration of the unlimited potential of language, they underline the disproportion of the divine experience with anything that can be said. Any possible visual referent becomes dissolved into saying that surpasses all limitations imposed by an external determinable object. God, who is the focus of either visions or any other forms of representation, serves not as a final point of reference, a circumscribable object, other than language itself, immediately seen in external space and delimiting the movements of language, but as an inscription within language which heightens the claims of the word to convey infinity and unreachable totality. To this extent, the only vision that apophatic writers might provide takes place

45 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, pp. 28–29. 46 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 28.

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in and through language, and thus transcends vision; to use Blanchot’s terms, it belongs to the speaking as not seeing. The invisible divinity is only present in a lingusitic medium which is im-mediate and limitless, and not as referred to an extra-linguistic object. According to Blanchot, every visual object creates a distance. In its totalizing gaze, it captures what it sees in the unified form of an object, within the whole: “To see,” Blanchot contends, “is to make use of separation, not as mediating, but as a means of immediation, as immediating. In this sense too, to see is to experience the continuous and to celebrate the sun, that is, beyond the sun: the One”47 – the unifying principle of all. Blanchot refers here clearly to the analogy Plato draws between the sun illuminating the visible with light and the highest idea of One or goodness that illuminates the intelligible with truth, thus allowing us to see true reality, to get knowledge of things as they truly are. Since Plato’s theory of the direct intuitive vision of the Ideas, the model of cognition based on sight has dominated Western epistemology. Mistrustful of seeing, Blanchot opposes this dominant model and contrasts sight with speech, which is not directed at a concrete, determined object but is infinitely open to an Other – not treated as an object of a totalizing view aimed to get only knowledge, but as a partner in “infinite conversation.” Blanchot writes: “Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.”48 The words freed from the limits of sight are bestowed with the privileged power, which, for Blanchot, may tempt with the possibility of recasting such unlimited freedom as still a certain vision – but now the absolutized one. This is particularly visible in literature, where, by the extraordinary power of the word, “[t]he novelist lifts up the rooftops and gives his characters over to a penetrating gaze. His error is to take language as not just another vision, but as an absolute one.”49 While making vision absolute, speech leads it to infinity, so that the invisible nature of things could be contemplated. Yet, according to Blanchot, what the word then sees is nothing – no thing. Not referring any longer to a thing, it turns out to be blind, with no discernible content; however, this “blindness” makes the word intrinsically open, open to all the things.50 47 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 28. 48 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 27. 49 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 29. 50 Jean Luc-Marion’s “saturated phenomenon” also leads to such a “hyper-blindness,” yet in Marion, it is caused by excess rather than some deficiency in seeing that transcends its

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Blanchot’s disapproval of such an absolutization of language indicates a threat of idolatry ensuing from it, thereby following a theological critique of positive depictions of God developed and renewed over centuries within the apophatic tradition. Having recognized the danger of creating and worshipping idols of God, negative theologians have persisted in questioning every image, vision, concept, linguistic expression that have tried to capture the essence of God. Even while using the language of metaphors and analogies to convey their experience of God, apophatic writers invariably point out its limits, aware that what they endeavour to grasp is the transcendent Other, the absolutely Unknowable and Unsayable, who outstrips all visual or discursive approaches. Language in Blanchot’s view is presented as absolute, transcending its referential status and thus not delimited from outside by any referent, but finding only immanent limits within itself. In contradistinction, sight always refers to the object “seen” from distance, separated from it and marking its boundaries. This quality of infinity of language in itself, being unlimited by anything external, has been analysed from many perspectives by such modern linguists as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir or Émile Benveniste; for Blanchot this immanent infinity of language plays a crucial role when juxtaposed with limited sight. Apophatic mystics explore the same features of language as infinite in itself as well as failing to represent the experience to which it refers to. By staging the break-down and failure of representation, they shatter any claims to attain absolute vision or even to express it through language, thereby shaking the foundations of scopocentrism, with its promise of access to knowledge granted by sight, and taking a step beyond – into the infinite space of Blanchot’s “sacred.” In The Space of Literature, while discussing Hölderlin’s Oedipus, Blanchot asserts that we live in the time of distress, in the empty time of “double infidelity” of both gods and men, who withdraw from one another. This double departure and, in effect, absence open an empty place, “something like an in-between” that the writer must maintain, retaining rather than bridging a gap.51 For Blanchot, it is in this space of in-betweenness that sacred poetry may arise. Such a perspective seems to be close to the efforts of apophatic mystics who do not aspire to mediate the totality of their vision by means of their speech, but, faced with the im-mediate, which makes language break off, re-enact the divine experience through withdrawal and rupture. This breaking off from totality imposed own limits. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). 51 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 272.

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by language, this tearing asunder, this counter-movement of separation, of taking a step backwards and leaving a bridgeless gulf between them and the Other, constitute the essence of what Blanchot calls the sacred: “this empty and pure space which distinguishes between the spheres [of gods and mortals] is the sacred, the intimacy of the breach which is the sacred.”52 Both negative theologians and French thinkers of difference, such as Blanchot, Bataille or Derrida, react against the prominent metaphysical assumptions of their respective eras, which tend to overlook the negative dimension of the sacred, underestimating or even effacing its manifestation in emptiness and loss. Rather than being treated as impediments that have to be bypassed in order to reach one’s aim, it is in fact in and by these negative features that the quest of apophatic writers is constituted and, as Blanchot insists, the literary work finds its accomplishment. Blanchot’s aesthetical analyses are grounded in the conviction that art is closely related with the sacred which manifests itself in the obscurity, as the ungraspable: Why is art so intimately allied with the sacred? It is because in the relation between art and the sacred, between that which shows itself and that which does not – in the movement whereby disclosure and dissimulation change place without cease, appealing and reaching to each other where, nevertheless, they are realized only as the approach of the unreachable – the work finds the profound reserve which it needs. It is hidden and preserved by the presence of the god, manifest and apparent through the obscurity of the divine, and again kept safe in reserve by this obscurity and this distance which constitutes its space and to which it gives rise as though thus to come into the light. It is this remove that permits the work to address the world and at the same time to reserve comment, to be the ever reserved beginning of every story.53

While in literature there is a need for distance and detachment from the world, which is achieved by the process of removal and effacement, similarly, the sacred space separates mystics from God, who remains hidden and obscure; yet his mystery and unreachability is not a hindrance on the spiritual journey; on the contrary, it propels apophatic theologians to explore the “impossible” vision of the Absolute. While comparing negative theologians with Blanchot, the attention must be drawn to the difference in their views concerning the issue of the actual “occurrence” of the vision or the sacred. Blanchot contends that the sacred is always inactual, “the impossible,” a non-empirical experience of unmediated being that cannot be comprehended within the scheme of possibilities dictated by the 52 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 274. 53 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 233.

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general order of language; nevertheless, it is this impossibility, ungraspability, this non-event of the sacred that Blanchot’s work centres around, finding in it the origin of any work of art. Apophatic mystics, by contrast, seem to insist on an actual experience of divinity which conditions and makes their writing possible. Yet, at the same time their texts, while relentlessly engaging themselves in the apophatic unsaying, testify to the impossibility of any actual presentation, thus offering in fact an experience of language drawn to its limits, which in turn may be seen as the experience of divinity itself. Likewise, such a dissolution and ultimate collapse of both experience and language characterize Blanchot’s novels. As Jean Pfeiffer observes, in Thomas l’obscur, Aminadab and Le Très-Haut “the language of experience is not different from the experience of language” and hence, while recording the “lived experience” of their characters, each of these works does not provide so much an image of a completed event as of “its incompletion, its obsession and its drama.”54 Although there is a marked difference between Blanchot’s limit-experience of Nothing and the mystical vision in which this unsayable Nothing is not emptiness but God, on a structural level the experiences seem to be similar, both being experience of the limits of experience as well as taking place in writing. Blanchot’s exploration of the undoing of the work (désoeuvrement) and the process of its being reduced to no-thing concerns mainly the literary work, yet it might be argued that apophatic texts of mystics can serve as a good illustration of his theory. These works challenge our assumptions of the vision as related to seeing and thus independent of writing, since their writing is, in essence, the vision, openness to the non-experience of the unsayable and indescribable Outside which passes beyond the dimension of the absolute language and the realm of experience. Both the writing of negative theologians and of Blanchot become an “infinite conversation” on the impossible. Of course, mystics view their experience from the theological perspective as an encounter with God; still the Name of God ultimately renounces all determinate conceptualizations, thus becoming devoid of any positive content. It is not by descriptions and visionary images but through the undoing of their writings that apophatic theologians are able to deliver anything of their non-experience – their texts keep an empty space, a yawning gulf separating them and the Other, infinitely open in the direction of the ungraspable, ineffable divine. The work of the consistently unfolding words

54 Jean Pfeiffer, “L’expérience de Maurice Blanchot,” Empédocle 11 (1950), p. 56, quoted in Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), p. 136.

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never achieves completion but becomes transformed into its opposite: the désoeuvrement which opens a wordless dimension, pointing to something that transcends the representative capacities of any writing. Both negative theology and Blanchot pursue a quest for a thought and language of the impossible. Beyond the structure of possibility that appropriates all that is, reducing the whole multiplicity and diversity to the determinate conception of what could be, a new language is hoped to form relation to an unnamed Other – but only through passion which precedes consciousness, initiative or any act. This is the passion for an experience free from all structures of possibility, for an experience of the Outside. This is the hope in what is beyond the reach of language, in the impossible – the hope that can never be actually realized as it is only hope in “what is always yet to come”: There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope. The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirms it: I hope little when what I hope for is almost at hand. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope.55

4.  Writing as the “Essential Experience” Negative theologians concordantly admit that the “vision” of the Absolute remains beyond the compass of their representational capacities. Acknowledging the inadequacy of every conceptualization and the impossibility of all linguistic grasp of God, they progressively renounce any discursive representations and delimiting definitions of the world, subjectivity and, most importantly, of their allegedly necessary Foundation – thus gradually entering into an experience of the divine. The movement of apophatic texts towards “a point zero” (Blanchot) or a “degree zero” (Barthes) reverberates in Blanchot’s radical notion of writing. It shall be argued that it is through the process of writing wherein all being is neutered, that is deprived of all the determinations, unhinged from our customary classificatory structures, normally delimiting the possibility of its presence to us, and thereby experienced solely as nothing, that Blanchot’s limit-experience as well as God of negative theology can be approached.

55 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 41.

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Despite their divergence in religious beliefs and aims of their pursuits, both negative theologians and Blanchot adopt in their approach to the space of writing an asymptotic logic of deferred fulfilment, the very logic of desired (im)possibility, which leads them to revealing the absolute as “the obscure.” By radical de-negation of all notions and names, by pushing the language to the limit at which nothing is left untouched or tied to the firmly established system of being and qualification, the world becomes remade within the obscurity of writing, thus opening us onto the experience of the groundless ground. For negative theologians, this is the moment of the mystical encounter with God, whereas Blanchot, following Georges Bataille, offers a non-theological or a-theological interpretation of this immersion in absolute obscurity, seeing it rather as an “inner experience.” Yet, notwithstanding these discrepancies, mainly resulting from the different cultural backgrounds and worldviews, Blanchot’s and negative theologians’ experiences of the absolute show clear similarities in their exploration of the space of writing and its relation to that which transcends its limits. Blanchot’s “essential experience,”56 as an experience of the absolute which cannot be grasped within the frameworks of the sayable or the order of being, cannot be understood as the experience “of ” anything but should be pursued through relinquishing all attribution, recognising its impossibility, and thus following the apophatic, asymptotic trajectory of the infinite that cannot be named. Although refusing to align himself with any type of theology, no matter how radically negative it may be, Blanchot engages in a ceaseless conversation with negative theology, recognizing its critical importance which manifests itself with the greatest force in the voice of others. The French philosopher draws an explicit link between his desired idea of poetry and negative theology in The Infinite Conversation, in the part entitled “How to discover the obscure?” I dedicate this book to the improbable, that is to say, to what is. To a spirit of vigil. To the negative theologies. To a poetry longed for, of rains. Of waiting and of wind. To a great realism that aggravates instead of resolving, that designates the obscure, that takes clarity for clouds that can always be parted. That has concern for a clarity high and impracticable.57

Negative theology is presented in the above passage as bearing resemblance to poetry and thus not only affirming theological impossibility but also transposing it to improbability. The depiction provided by Blanchot alludes to the mystical image of the “cloud of unknowing,” derived from the Mystical Theology of 56 Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 121. 57 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 41.

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Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite and referring to the hidden presence of God in the darkness of Synai. In his seminal work, Pseudo-Dionysius bids his reader leave behind both the sense and the operations of the intellect and follow Moses in his ascent of the mountain in order to ultimately plunge into “the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing,” where s/he could be united (henoumenos) with God “by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”58 In a similar manner, the author of the anonymous, fourteenth century The Cloud of Unknowing, alluding to a famous statement of Pseudo-Dionysius made in his treatise On the Divine Names: “The most godly knowing of God is that which is known by unknowing,” claims that “[…] if, in this life, you hope to feel and see God as he is in himself it must be within this darkness and this cloud.”59 While God in negative theology is never present to us cognitively but can be experienced only in a cloud of luminous darkness, analogously in poetry the ultimate truth of reality is given to finite consciousness only as shrouded and obscured. What is most true and real hides itself behind clouds, which, however, can be ripped apart, thus providing illumination by uncovering the light and clarity which we are constantly dreaming of. Neither enclosed within the horizons of possibility and its calculations nor totally alienated in impossibility, the real remains at a liminal point as the “improbable.” Since language is the secret centre of violence which reduces the diverse to unity, the absolute reality, the unknown can be approached only through an apophatic undoing of discourse. According to Blanchot, it is a certain type of poetry which is able to reinvent a new hope for what in fact is given in the form of “the improbable” – by “naming the possible” and “responding to the impossible”: We ought not to count on a simple confrontation of words to prove that poetry might orient us toward another relation – a relation with the obscure and the unknown that would be a relation neither of force [puissance], nor of comprehension, nor even of relation. We sense even that it is not the role of language, be it literary or that of poetry, even true poetry, to bring to light or to the firmness of a name what would affirm itself, unformulated in this relation without relation. Poetry is not there in order to say impossibility: it simply answers to it, saying in responding. Such is the secret lot, the secret decision of every essential speech in us: naming the possible, responding to the impossible. […] Poetry does not express [impossibility], does not say it, does not draw it under the attraction of language. But it responds. Every beginning speech begins by responding; a

58 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology (MT), 1000D, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 137. 59 The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, ed. and trans. William Johnston (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1973), chapter 3, p. 41.

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response to what is not yet heard, an attentive response in which the impatient waiting for the unknown and the desiring hope for presence are affirmed.

Although Blanchot finds the most compelling cases of this essential experience of literature in the modern poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, René Char or Ives Bonnefoy, it may be argued that it is not an exclusively modern phenomenon but even more forcefully characterizes postmodern experience. Hölderlin becomes Blanchot’s privileged poet, appreciated mainly as a pioneer of a distinctively modern apophaticism which responds to the withdrawal of God or his default (Gottes Fehl). In the light of the absence of God, the vocation of the poet has changed. Whereas in ancient Greece, the poets mediated the overwhelming presence of gods to humanity, since the modern times onward the poet’s task has been to witness the absence of the gods by following their track toward the empty heavens and seeking their traces in the hollows, breaks and silences of his/her own poetic language. As Blanchot, echoing Hölderlin, notices, we are now in the time of distress, which is a time of double infidelity of both humankind and the gods. Since the gods have abandoned humankind, the poet is called to remember and reproduce precisely their defecting: “What he must contain and preserve is the divine infidelity. For it is ‘in the form of infidelity where there is forgetting of everything’ that he enters into communication with the god who turns away.”60 The essential experience of writing – as conceived by Blanchot – does not aim at self-realization of the writer through the process of his individual active creation but rather becomes merely an articulation of an incomprehensible event that is beyond one’s control. As it has been already demonstrated, language is capable of unselfing, of losing its identity, undoing and “othering” by opening itself to what is other to it. It is in the passivity from which writing unconsciously comes when it steps outside time and reality, in unworking (désoeuvrement), in allowing itself to plunge into obscurity and the darkness of night, that writing can work this undoing of language and enable the absolute experience to be attained. Such an approach seems to parallel the mystical ascent to the divine, which Meister Eckhart describes by developing the idea of Gelassenheit, or “letting-be.” In this process of “freeing oneself,” of releasement, the soul must “detach” itself from all the “representations,” suspend its “will” (desires), cast off all talk, both inner and outer, all concepts and images, completely emptying out the intellect, in order

60 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 274.

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to experience God in his naked being.61 This process of detachment is called Abgeschiedenheit in German, and as Michael Sells points out, Eigenschaft, or “attachment,” means “possessiveness” as well as “self.”62 Hence, the detached soul becomes a soul that neither knows, wants, possesses, nor is anything, replacing its will-toward-possessiveness with Gelassenheit. It becomes like tabula rasa on which God alone can draw his lines. Completely disarmed and deprived of any mastery, the soul, shrouded by a cloud of unknowing, is being led by God into the dark night of nothingness and unknowability where God and self can truly become one. The mystical encounter with the divine is thus not anything that can be reached by one’s own efforts but it is what just happens to a mystic in an uncontrollable manner – an overwhelming, unconditional grace given to him or her by God. The mystic’s direct communion with God shows an affinity with the essential experience of the poet, whose paradigmatic example for Blanchot is Orpheus. It is an experience of writing which is able to sever all ties with what is already given in the world, thus erasing the present and allowing one to start everything anew, to create the world once again, out of nothing. There is nothing, at least nothing in a fixed form, which precedes writing itself. Being bound by no logic, interrupting and withdrawing from both the whole of being and non-being, of the One and the Other, it remains outside the dichotomy of the linguistically constructed concept of inside and outside, in the state of aridity and obscurity which emulates the condition of blankness. Writing is a part of no whole, but – as its etymology suggests (“writ” refers to cutting) – a cut into the existing order of things, a void in the present, which frees all that it touches from the tyranny of the One, breaking its unity necessary to being said. Cutting from nowhere into nothing and setting aside all a priori established systems of the world, it opens the abyss of namelessness from which things emerge – outside the ordered constructions made by words. Similarly to negative theology, which urges the soul to take a leap of faith into the abyss, devoid of any images, words, concepts, and even God, into the “dark night,” the night of doubt and despair, in Blanchot’s conception, the act of writing demands destroying all certainties, relinquishing idolatrous images, renouncing 61 Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries and Treatise, and Defense, eds. Edmund College and Bernard McGinn (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1981), pp. 200–201. 62 Michael Sells, “The Pseudo-Woman and the Meister: ‘Unsaying’ and Essentialism,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York, NY: Continuum, 1994), p. 137.

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sense and abandoning one’s self, Therefore, those who “dig at verse” run the risk of dwelling in the void, in the space where the gods no longer offer any support: “Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets with the absence of the gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence, becomes responsible for it, assumes its risk, and endures its favor. Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything.”63 In the process of selfannihilation, comparable to Gelassenheit, Blanchot’s writers have to abandon all their aspirations to being autonomous creators, instead surrendering themselves to that which emerges from nowhere. Their main role is not to express themselves or their own ideas, which would inescapably reflect the order of the reality they live in, but become passive recipients, invaded by the Other they cannot properly conceive or name. In this unselfing movement of language, they are released into nothingness and unknowability since the leap into a cloud of unknowing is necessary for their act of unworking to be accomplished. Writing, as conceived by Blanchot, inevitably leads to the experience of night, the night of the absence of God, which suspends us in interminable nothingness. This sense of abandonment and forlornness ensuing from the renouncement of absolutes, which used to serve as a source of order, security and meaning, is powerfully captured by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science, with his famous account of the madman announcing the death of God: “Whither is God?” [the madman] cried; “I shall tell you! We have killed him – you and I! All of us are his murderers. […] Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him!”64

Within the tradition of negative theology, it is the light of God that blinds the mystic and makes him enter the darkness, which is the darkness of unknowing and non-presence. Both Blanchot, who could – after Nietzsche’s madman – proclaim that God is dead, and negative theologians, for whom God is inconceivable, immerse themselves in the act of writing, which turns out to be not so much an act as a passion. While commenting on Blanchot’s study, Thomas Carl Wall maintains

63 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 38. 64 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sec. 125, p. 181.

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that in writing one passes to the space where speaking becomes “pure passion of speaking-itself ”: To write, or to speak, is to enter into that which, in itself, precedes itself. It is to be stripped of all identity and to become a pure image (of no one) – unable anymore to be, or not to be. It is to become, not another persona, but instead the pure passion of communication, where passion is communication and where my identity is this passionate, vertiginous “no one” who cannot answer for what is written.65

Although negative theology insists on the mystic’s renouncement even of his or her self, that does not imply the total annihilation of one’s identity and its dispersion in divinity. Likewise, when Blanchot speaks about the necessity of the erasure of the self in writing, he does not mean the complete exclusion of the writer’s subjectivity from the literary production. As Timothy Clark points out, Blanchot’s understanding of the “origin of the work of art” still carries an affective dimension, which differs, for example, from Martin Heidegger’s approach. Whereas in Heidegger’s vision of great art “the artist [is] like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge,”66 Blanchot views the writer as the one who desires that which has already erased him and it is in this (impossible) desire, in this movement towards the “space of literature” that the writer becomes a writer, even if unselfed and dispossessed. The phrase “passion of the origin” in Blanchot’s study names, among other things, “a desire in the writer to possess the movement whence the work is coming forth. It is this passion, more than technical skill, that marks the writer as writer.”67 Similarly, it is also the infinite passion for the impossible, overwhelming, all-transcending love of God, that makes mystics sacrifice themselves, give up themselves up to their desire of the absolute. It drives them on their quest to the abyss of the divine, where they can “see” God only in his nocturnal obscurity, in the presence of his infinite absence. While Blanchot argues that “[t]he end of the act of writing does not reside either in the book or in the work. Writing the work, we come under the attraction of the absence of the work,”68 for Meister Eckhart, this would be the desire for God, which entails losing oneself in its consummation, in which the ego itself is consumed. 65 Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 118. 66 Martin Heiddegger, “The Origin of Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstander (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 40. 67 Timothy Clark, Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-romantic Writing (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 249. 68 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 425.

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Blanchot insists that this experience, which is for him the experience of the neuter cannot be equalled with God; yet it seems that the French philosopher does not take into account the understanding of the divine within the tradition of negative theology, which undermines all dogmatic assertions and pursues the radical negation of any human, and thus insufficient, apprehension of the transcendent. His description of the neuter as neither completely passive nor merely negative, but as prevenient, that is equipped with the power prior to all our efforts, might be equally well applied to God and his prevenient grace, which precedes human decision and action. Blanchot stresses that the neuter should not be viewed as a transcendental unknown, as “‘the absolutely unknowable,’ a subject of pure transcendence, refusing itself to all manner of knowledge and expression,”69 but can be indicated (never revealed) at the threshold between the known and the unknown, being neither of them – “the unknown as unknown.” In a similar manner, God in negative theology is not placed in a remote sphere of transcendence as an abstract Unknown, but dwells in and among us, the unknown and immanent at the same time as his mystery lies in incarnation.70 The space of literature is described by Blanchot as a region of obscurity, the il y a [there is], that is alien to any revelation since “it transforms everything that has access to it, even light, into anonymous and impersonal being, the Nontrue, the Nonreal and yet always there.”71 Blanchot argues that writing involves a withdrawal of the self into this region of ambiguity where nothing is revealed because nothing is hidden. It is “the existence outside of being, an existence without objects: existence that cannot be objectified by a subject but which invades the subject, turning it inside out, depriving it of refuge.”72 Blanchot thus clarifies his claim of radical exteriority: “to write […] is to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.”73 The il y a withdraws language from the

69 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 300. 70 See Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds.), Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) or Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (eds.), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 71 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 31. 72 Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 56. 73 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 26.

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world (as a separation of power), not into interiority or privacy but “into an exile in which inwardness itself is unhoused.”74 The primary condition of writing is the “essential solitude” of the writer, which requires a retreat from language and some sort of cognitive void. In this solitude and retreat, the writer transports himself to the outskirts of his world, where language has been already annihilated. What is affirmed in that annihilated or “neutral” space of literature is in fact no real thing. Literary as well as religious discourse are the affirmations of otherness as nothing, which is nothing but an alternative language, marked by the neuter. The condition of the “essential solitude” concerns both the artist and the work, which – to refer to Heidegger’s notion – must be alien, separated from the world, with all ties to human beings severed. Echoing Heidegger, Blanchot speaks of the work of art as analogous to “being,” a “being” in this special sense, in that it is. External to all determinations and categories, it cannot be understood as any kind of thing. It “is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says exclusively is this: it is – and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing.”75 Thus the work cannot mediate anything. It is – in Heidegger’s terms – only the sheer fact or event of existing: es gibt. Being just a remainder, it remains beyond the reach of the world. “It exists, but not as what is given exists: call it existence that cannot be objectified,”76 since in this essential solitude of writing, all subjectivity and objectivity have drained away. What remains is only existence. While addressing the role of the solitude of the writer, who loses authoritative control over his work, Blanchot presents literature as containing statements which “state nothing, that is not the repose, the dignity of silence, because it is what is still speaking when everything has been said, what does not precede speech because it instead prevents it from being a beginning of speech, just as it withdraws from speech the right and the power to interrupt itself.”77 The writer does not put language to use in order to express “the exactitude and certainty of things and values according to the sense of their limits” but instead must “surrender to the interminable.” If the unveiling of language is to take place, the “I” of the speaker must disappear, his voice must recede into the background. Discussing Kafka’s narratives, but extending the implications to literature, Blanchot demonstrates the erasure of the self in writing in terms of a movement 74 Bruns, Maurice Blanchot, p. 57. 75 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 22. 76 Bruns, Maurice Blanchot, p. 57. 77 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 26.

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from the personal “I” to the impersonal “he.” This impersonality refers neither to any third person “he,” able to express meanings objectively, nor to the idea of a self-sufficient work, but should be understood as “irreducible strangeness” within the work itself or as the arrival of “the neutral into play” that “marks the intrusion of the other.”78 This neutral voice unseats every subject, suspending the power to say “I”: “to write is to break the bond that united the word with myself,”79 to pass from “I” to “he,” il, the neuter, the space of literature which is interminable and perpetually noncontemporary. It is the time of inaction and no initiative, in fact, the shadow of time. Thomas Carl Wall explains further: “To pass to il is to pass to ‘he’ who carries out an infinite movement (‘infinite degrees,’ Blanchot says). Writing moves us toward that which is always in-itself, that which depends on no condition since it is alien to all actuality, initiative, and accomplishment.”80 When the writer enters into the essential solitude – the space: the it is of the literary work – he moves beyond the subjective into an objective flow, the incessant. What he affirms is not personal or individual but something completely other to him, a response to the impossible and therefore deprived of self. Blanchot embroiders on this idea: The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, any more than he can appeal to you, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.81

What then remains is only a “pure passivity.” It is pure as long as it is exterior, outside the alternatives of outside and inside, action and repose, subjectivity and objectivity. It does not imply that the subject declines to act but it consists in the “passivity of being,” that is passivity of existence without being. Entering into the dark, obscure night of writing, where all the preconceived and linguistically fabricated concepts vanish, Blanchot and negative theologians find that it is neither in the transcendent, a priori established order of things which exists independently of language, nor in an external object that can be grasped and comprehended, but in the surrender to the passivity of writing

78 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, pp. 384–385. 79 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 26. 80 Wall, Radical Passivity, p. 118. 81 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, pp. 26–27.

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which takes them to an abyss of namelessness, to the origin of all, that they can encounter the absolute. Despite their different understandings of this absolute, Blanchot and negative theologians alike highlight its “impossibility,” unknowability and unsayability, and hence concordantly neuter all the attempts of their discourses to provide any positive affirmations of their experiences. For Blanchot words do not function as tools used to express his thoughts and feelings or to provide a passage towards things themselves as they supposedly exist within the order of the world. Rather, writing is about entering into words as they emerge from being in order to come down to their origin in the abyss of namelessness. Such an experience of writing may be attained only by an unworking of the artist’s activity, that is by ceding into writing, by sacrificing one’s work. This intense passivity seems to capture the sense comparable to John Keat’s notion of “negative capability” or to the experience of some mystics, for example, John of the Cross’s noche oscura. Whereas for Blanchot the experience of writing leads to the discovery of the “neutral space,” the neuter, negative theologians find there God. As it has been already demonstrated, the neuter is conceived by Blanchot as being without attribution, without determination – which in fact corresponds to the understanding of God within the apophatic tradition. Even this determination of “being” must be subjected to the recursive process of self-abnegation, open to a series of retractions “neither/nor.” There is no adequate definition that is able to grasp the (non) essence of the neuter and God as they efface any type of naming that would attempt to capture them within determinate meaning of any content – either of A or not-A type. As Blanchot accentuates, in this indistinct, naked being of the word, which neutralizes all names in the infinite movement of unworking, language becomes the pure indeterminate dispersed in silence.

5.  Apophatic Theology and the Space of Literature Blanchot’s vision of literature is essentially marked by what Kevin Hart has aptly named “dark gaze.” The protagonist of his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, enters into the night of unknowing, where what he sees with his eyes is in fact what hinders his vision: Night soon appeared to him to be darker, more terrible than any other night, as if it has issued from a wound of thought that no longer thought itself, of thought taken ironically as an object by something other than itself. This was night itself. Images that constituted its darkness inundated him and his body, transformed into a demonic spirit, sought to represent these images to itself. He saw nothing, but, far from being overwhelmed, he made his absence of vision the culminating point of his gaze. His eye, useless for seeing,

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took on extraordinary proportions, developed beyond measure, and, stretching itself out on the horizon, allowed the night to penetrate its centre to create an iris for itself. Through this void, therefore, it was his gaze and the object of his gaze that mingled. Not only did this eye, which saw nothing, apprehend the source of its vision; it saw as an object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own gaze seemed the death of every image.82

The above passage serves Hart to explain his idea of the “dark gaze,” which in Blanchot’s novel allows Thomas to glimpse mystery of night: the dark flowing into his eyes prevents him from seeing things in a usual manner but at the same time enables him to see the night as it truly is. While tracing the recurring appearance of this motif of “dark gaze” and its importance in Blanchot’s writing, Hart observes that with consciousness being set in writing, “[w]e have passed from a subject’s gaze at an object to an object’s gaze at a subject […].”83 He continues his reflection by quoting Blanchot: “It is the gaze of fascination in which ‘blindness is vision still, vision which is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing, the impossibility that becomes seeing, which preserves – always and always – in a vision that never comes to an end: a dead gaze, a gaze becomes the ghost of an eternal vision.’”84 The vision of an object is transformed here in a linguistic vision, which, based on a principle of difference, does not grasp positively visible objects, but only the shadows of beings. For Blanchot, these shadows are “images” which constitute the obscurity of the night. Likewise, the mystical vision is not the vision of light that brings clarity and revelation, but the vision of darkness that dims down the radiance of divinity. What is more, in the efforts to convey their experiences, mystics relentlessly make avowals of failure to communicate it. Rather than presenting the vision as such, they reiterate the declarations of their impotence – so that the topos of ineffability ultimately becomes the primary subject of the vision itself. The insistence of negative theologians on the impasse of the self is what opens them into the ultimate, divine

82 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (New York: David Lewis, 1973), p. 15. 83 Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 12. The passage was first cited by Georges Bataille in Inner Experience. See: Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 103. 84 Hart, The Dark Gaze, p. 13, quoting Blanchot, “The essential solitude,” in The Space of Literature, p. 32. Jean-Luc Marion, while analysing the icon in Being Given, speaks of a counter-gaze that inverts “my” gaze. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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vision. On the other hand, it also provides a link with an aporetics in which the experience of the divine takes place as its own impossibility. In consequence, a negation of negation or a movement of transcendence which removes all the barriers turn out to be inadequate. The absolute is to be approached precisely on this barrier, which shall not be lifted, at this threshold, which is not to be crossed. Not any type of representation, either referring to it in terms of “above” or “beyond,” or discursive powers, but the breakdown of reference and the collapse of the self open us into an untractable Outside, ungraspable Other. The question which now requires due consideration is whether the experience of language pursued to its limits by negative theologians can be perceived as an opening of Blanchot’s “space of literature,” the space of transgression, implosion of the universal order, of the “dés-astre,” 85 which is effectuated through writing. Presumably, a participation in such destruction was not the primary aim of negative theologians, yet it seems that for anyone who has decided to tread the path of writing as their way to God, the experience of the explosion of the whole known system becomes unavoidable. Yet, whereas for Blanchot the limit experience of writing is hallowed out of theological context, negative theologians believe that it is exactly this implosion that opens to God as the wholly Other, to the incomprehensible and ineffable order which transcends all our human systems and structures. Blanchot’s view of transgression, intrinsically interlaced with what he calls thinking the neuter, cannot be regarded as a violation of a code of laws – even if this violation would imply adherence to a higher code – but as undoing law and order altogether.86 In the light of such an understanding of transgression, the space of literature becomes conceived as a transgressive dimension where nothing can be definitely, unequivocally determined, and thus, where both the law and its violation turn out to be impossible. According to Blanchot, the authentic outcome of attending to the neuter is not the choice of this order in preference to the other, as all the oppositions are neutralized in the constant movement of the neuter. Such profound sensibility for the neuter that eludes every paradigm is also manifested in the writing of negative theologians, who, even if attempting to construct a seemingly rigid, coherent, hierarchical system – as in the case 85 Blanchot expounds on this motif in The Writing of Disaster. 86 Among the interpretations of Blanchot’s thought on transgression, it may be worth mentioning the texts by Michel Holland, Jill Robins, Vivian Liska, Gerald L. Bruns and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman (eds.), The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004), as well as John Gregg’ work Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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of Pseudo-Dionysius – immediately highlight its undoing. In Dionysius’s works, kataphatic theology is ultimately absorbed back into apophatic theology, as the whole system of multiple hierarchies turns out to merely serve a movement back into the encounter with what no system can explain and no word can grasp, thereby undermining the possibility of mastery, of any positive knowledge of God. No less than Blanchot’s, Dionysius’s and other apophatic theologians’ writing explores what escapes words, striving to preserve the unknown as unknown and thus not efface the neuter. It is in the crease between any opposites concerning God that negative theologians open a kind of path to the inaccessible – not by effacing but rather by maintaining and underlining its inaccessibility. Constantly dwelling on the verge of impossibility – they seem to think the neuter. Just as Dionysius presents both an ordered system and its undoing, so Blanchot’s thought is marked by this essential tension, by the affirmation of abyssal ambiguity: For if Blanchot is a thinker of extreme possibility, of the literary work as a reaching to the limit, an exhaustion of the possible, of totalization, force, and decision, he is also, simultaneously, and with even greater intensity, the thinker of impossibility, of worklessness, radical weakness, undecidability, and otherness, of writing therefore as an ever futural response to what is unthinkable within the horizon of the present and the same, the familiar, the already known.87

As Blanchot himself expresses it in one of his most resonant watchwords from The Infinite Conversation, the perpetually recurrent task of thinking is to move between “naming the possible” and “responding to the impossible.”88 Dionysius draws a vision of a cosmic, unified, divinely given order, with clearly established hierarchies. Yet, at the same time he demonstrates that any depiction of this order has to burst asunder in the encounter with the absolute that transcends our comprehension and saying. When put into language, the whole vision comes apart, revealing its limits – what Blanchot calls disaster or dés-astre (literally “dis-staring,” undoing of the stars, which implies an absence or collapse of cosmos) behind the immense verbal construction. Through the insistence on the topos of ineffability, Dionysius’s texts turn out to be aporetic as they move beyond dialectics while exploring the impasse between any oppositional

87 Leslie Hill, “Introduction,” in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, eds. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimistris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 1–2. 88 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 48.

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determinations and thus pushing aporia to the limit, where the mystic is taken beyond his subjectivity in ultimate immersion in God. Negative theologians insist that the perfect divine order, that is the inconceivable, ineffable simplicity of God, remains beyond representation, and instead witness to the fragility of inadequacy of any humanly apprehended order and its embeddedness in disorder – Blanchot’s dés-astre. Beneath the surface of their works the deep sense of transgression seems to lurk. Although Dionysius admits that he was granted the vision of the divine order, yet, since it turns out to be the vision of the invisible which surpasses rational comprehension, to humans this order might appear as disorder, as chaos. Certainly, it does not imply that negative theologians refuse all order. On the contrary, their repeated refusals serve to reinforce a legitimate divine Order; yet it is the inscrutable Order which cannot be captured within the framework of human terms and definitions. It seems that one of the underlying intentions of negative theology is to highlight the incongruity between our human ideas of, for example, love or justice, with the Love and Justice we have no direct access to, though they interpenetrate all our spheres of life and have manifested itself throughout ages. The works of negative theologians, created most often in those historical periods which were marked by the growing suspicion towards the measures of reason and the values dictating the only acceptable ways of thinking and acting, serve as a contestation of the culture which usurped knowledge incommensurate with humanity, for example by attempting to transgress the separation between God and his creatures and thereby launching an assault upon his inviolable unknowability. Revolting against the world they lived in, apophatic mystics envisage another order of the world – one which is proffered in writing. Yet, it is not an elaborate construction founded on the abundance of words and prolixity of style, but a fragile one, fundamental yet without foundation, which is embodied in the works of apophatic theologians only by the relentless declarations of its inadequacy and an indefinite series of retractions. This apophatic process by which the mystical texts undo their own creative efforts and let themselves to be redone from above and beyond their powers in fact finds its inspiration in the Christian revelation itself, in the kenotic self-empting and self-offering of the divine power which manifests itself in the sacrifice of Christ, in his refusal of force and retaliatory violence. According to Blanchot, in this constant undoing of language, writing reveals its primary role as an act of transgression, of removal from the existing order. Thus, following Blanchot’s il/logic of ambiguity and indeterminacy, it becomes a gesture of both inscription and withdrawal, affirmation and suspension. Furthermore, Blanchot emphasises that such a gesture situates a writer outside 159

any articulable, representable order, making him or her an eternal vagabond, an errant wanderer who inevitably dwells in exile. His endless roaming among the vestiges of sense, in the world that has been drained of meaning and coherence and become merely a heap of fragmentary truths, is described by Blanchot in the following way: The wanderer’s country is not truth, but exile; he lives outside, on the other side, which is by no means a beyond, rather the contrary. He remains separated, where the deep of dissimulation reigns, that elemental obscurity through which no way can be made and which because of that makes its awful way through him. […] He departs; he becomes, as Hölderlin calls him, the migrator – he who, like the priests of Dionysos, wanders from country to country in the cared night. This errant migration can sometimes lead him to insignificance, to the facile contentment of a life crowned with approval, the platitudes of honorific irresponsibility. Sometimes it leads him into wrenched vagrancy which is only the instability of a life bereft of a work. And sometimes it takes him to the deep where everything wavers, where everything meaningful is undermined, destabilized, where this upheaval ruins the work and hides in forgetfulness.89

Such an experience of wandering and erring is what essentially characterizes mystics. As Michel Certeau argues in his prominent study The Mystic Fable: “He or she is mystic who cannot stop walking and, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of every place and object that it is not that; one cannot stay there or be content with that.”90 Mystics are those who never allow themselves to stop, abide and stay in any place. Having glimpsed the truth, they relentlessly move in search of what has befallen them. They may at first make an impression that they know where they are going – as it is in the case of Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, who meticulously maps out his way through different levels of the ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchies. Yet, this assiduous charting provided within kataphatic theology of Corpus Dionysiacum turns into its opposite in the later apophatic part, where Dionysius emphasises the futility of all his efforts and the impossibility of his enterprise. The numerous ways of mediation, for example a cognitive process of analogy, so fundamental for theology, all the measures, strategies, rhetorical devices applied, prove to be useless when confronted with the measureless and inscrutable Other. In the light of the conviction that the goal and organizing principle of the universe is the Unknown, everything that a human being, here specifically Dionysus, allegedly “knows,” becomes relativized and turns out to be 89 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 238. 90 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 299.

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nothing in relation to the ultimate goal which orients the mystic’s and every human being’s journey as well as the whole cosmos – the unknown which must be preserved as unknown in his absolute inadequacy. Turning back to de Certeau’s broad definition, we may conclude that apophatic mystics are those who, drawn by inspiration whose source remains unknown, filled with illumination without knowledge, driven by impossible desire, hasten on the dark, untraced path, the path winding through an endless desert deprived of any signposts, the path marked solely by a wandering-off step. The excessive desire, “a noble je ne sais quoi, neither this nor that,”91 which leads these “cherubinic wanderers”92 to vagrancy – but also towards their Origin – makes them exceed every place and go still further, elsewhere. This is the essential and necessary condition of exile of Blanchot’s poet, who only lives in the place left behind. As de Certeau astutely comments, what remains in our contemporary culture of this self-surpassing spirit of a mystic, seduced by the Origin or End, is the “movement of perpetual departure”; yet this is the experience which, no longer able to ground itself in a belief in God, keeps only “the form and not the content of traditional mystics:” Unmoored from the “origin” of which Hadewijch spoke, the traveler no longer has foundation nor goal. Given over to a nameless desire, he is the drunken boat. Henceforth this desire can no longer speak to someone. It seems to have become infans, voiceless, more solitary and lost than before, or less protected and more radical, ever seeking a body or poetic locus. It goes on walking, then, tracing itself out in silence, in writing.93

Conclusions The first chapter of the second part of the study, devoted to the analysis of apophatic transgression, brought negative theologians into dialogue with Maurice Blanchot, in order to address the issue of language as an experience of the unsayable. It was once more accentuated that while apophatic writers aim to express what is beyond language, they inevitably realize this aim through language itself. In this movement beyond, they transgress the traditional use of language as sign and its function of reference, revealing how language can serve as manifestation. It was argued that although mystics do not deny the Incarnate Word being a

91 Hadewijch d’Anvers, Écrits mystiques (Paris: Seuil, 1954), p. 141, quoted in de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 299. 92 See Maria Shrady, Angelus Silesius: The Cherubinic Wanderer (New York: Paulist Press, 1986). 93 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 299.

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guarantor of language, they no longer consider its meaning to be stable, immune to any transformations, permanently fixed, but within their own texts performatively present the collapse of finite meanings into the Infinite. To explain the task undertaken by apophatic writers, the conception of the neuter developed by Blanchot was linked with medieval apophaticism. The neuter, embracing no divisions or binaries and comparable to Barthes’ nuance which does not make any propositions about the existence of that which it is nuance of, has proven to be a useful concept for understanding apophatic desire for a unity that transcends all divisions. This desirable unity is to be found in God, who within the apophatic tradition turns out to exhibit similar features to the neuter as both exceed all oppositions, all definitions, all ontological categories, forming the ground of sense and non-sense – and thus being indescribable. While refusing to become simply silent, apophatic mystics and French theorists alike persist in their attempts to describe the indescribable, to somehow make visible that which is invisible, to step beyond the expressible to the ground of all that is. Using the most deceptive form of expression, that is language, which would never provide adequate representation of the experience of the Unknown, they must break it down and instead perform this experience which lacks any corresponding linguistic sign. On the way to the Infinite, it is also necessary to renounce all images, memories, concepts, even the self; all that has been built in their writing must be ultimately surrendered if one is to experience the Other they cannot describe.

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Chapter Five: Transgression and Transcendence Transgression […] is like a flash of lighting in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up in the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression”

According to George Steiner, between the early 1870s and the turn of the century, there occurred an “epistemic break” in the history of Western literature, which divided “a literature essentially housed in language from one for which language has become a prison.”94 From its very beginnings poetry and prose were in organic harmony with language. Even if there were some distortions in vocabulary and grammar, some idiosyncratic statements, obscurities and subversions of logic, they were invariably grounded in the transcendent generality of traditional and communal speech. As Steiner observes, “[a] classic literacy is defined by this ‘housedness’ in language, by the assumption that, used with requisite penetration and suppleness, available words and grammar will do the job”95 and fulfil the poet’s needs. With the advent of modern poetry, especially of Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, Western literature enters a new phase, marked by the concept of “the lacking word.” Having exposed the lies and illusions created by the established language, the inertia and dryness of its metaphors, writers no longer have any hope for peaceful dwelling in a generalized authority of speech, which has now become their enemy. Hence, they perceive their fundamental task in moving against the current of traditional discourse characterised by its natural tendency to express the real, in rescinding “the classic continuities of reason and syntax, of conscious direction and verbal form,”96 and thus transgressing reason and its rules. In the twentieth century this suspicious attitude, transgressive of the rational, has been further developed as a consequence of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. The words carrying consciously willed meanings

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 184. 95 Steiner, After Babel, p. 185. 96 Steiner, After Babel, p. 186.

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become subverted by unconscious intentions manifesting themselves in slips and shifts. Beyond the control of reason another message erupts, allowing the voice of the Other to be heard. Although Steiner draws a clear demarcation line between the literature before and after Rimbaud or Mallarmé, it seems that the pact negotiated between word and world was broken much earlier and the seeds of this historical transformation may be found already in the seams of medieval writings of negative theologians or in Baroque mysticism. However, it must be pointed out that transgressiveness within the tradition of apophatic theology is not so much against reason per se, for negative theologians persist in striving after the mysterious divine Verbum, Logos, which infinitely exceeds and countermands all finite human reasons. Since this Word is the source of human rationality and cannot be conceived in other way than by means of human reason, a simple oppositional logic appears to be misleading. Moreover, transgressiveness of apophatic writers certainly does not seek to dismantle the divinely ordained order of things; rather, it exposes the unbridgeable gap between the wretched state of fallen humanity, with its perverted culture and institutions, and the absolute and ideal order of the divine reality. Finally and most importantly, the writings of apophatic theologians enact still another form of transgression which cannot even say what it transgresses. In its self-transgressing movement, whereby it transgresses itself and all its possible foundations, it shows some similarities to what has been investigated by Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille under such notions as “transgression, “the principle of contestation” and “inner experience.” Transgressiveness in this sense is not aimed to defy any specific authority but to let us discern a grain of impossibility in all positive affirmations, in all our attempts to establish a fixed, rigid order with allencompassing power.

1.  Transgression and the Sacred The issue of the relation between transgression and the sacred, deeply analysed by Blanchot, is taken up by Michel Foucault in his essay “Preface to Transgression,” which offers an interpretation of Georges Bataille’s work. In terms clearly indebted to apophatic theology, Foucault attempts to explain why transgression has become a decisive experience for contemporary culture. The reason for that is found in the lack of any positive idea of the sacred, which has ceased to be linked to the divine. The only possible, and necessarily indirect, way to approach the sacred in our times is through a profanation without object, which is turned inward upon itself. This is a type of transgression which identifies the absence of the sacred, dissipates it and opens onto its “scintillating” form: 164

Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred – is this not more or less what we may call transgression? In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, though it becomes all the more scintillating.97

In the world marked by the death of God and drained of any ideas, objects and spaces that used to bear the marks of the divine, only transgression is able to restore a sense of the sacred – even if only as missing from our life. The world which we are faced with after the death of God is not a limited and positivistic one but “a world exposed by the experience of limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it.”98 Profanation, which turns out to be crucial to the manifestation of the divine in human life, so perverted in the fallen world, acknowledges the intrinsically negative character of theological revelation. Similarly to the God of apophatic theology, the sacred is grasped mainly through the process of negation which lifts us into the dark night of God’s absence, where the sacred becomes just “empty form.” Therefore, we might dare to suggest that transgression itself constitutes the essence of the event signifying divinity. Although the logic of transgression expounded by Foucault could find its relevance in the discourse of apophatic theologians, yet there are undeniably some points of divergence between them. One of such similarities concerns the concept of emptiness developed by Foucault, which negative theologians consider as relative to human beings. However, as mystics believe, what now we can only see as emptiness by means of our imperfect sight, in infinite absolute reality turns out to be unfathomable plenitude, the saturated phenomenon99, surpassing our limited horizons of perception and imposing itself with its excessive being, with an overwhelming givenness. The sense of transgression articulated by Foucault does not merely place us at the limits of cognition and language but also crosses them, thus apart from revealing the limits it also evokes what lies beyond them. This beyondness, limitlessness, openness to that which transcends the limits brings the logic of transgression close to the final stage of the apophatic way, which is believed to be the divine union. Transgression of limits is defined as obscure, most probably 97 98 99

Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 30. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 32. See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

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inconceivable space where limits are crossed in the movement of pure violence, yet without being completely erased. This inevitably unstable space must necessarily contain limits which both make transgression possible and constrain it. “Transgression is an action that involves limit,”100 marking the location of limits and thus showing us how far it is possible to proceed. “Transgression forces the limit […] to find itself in what it excludes.”101 At the same time, it turns out be relative to the limit it violates since the point where the limit is crossed and recrossed serves as “a glorification of the nature it excludes: the limit opens violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plenitude which invades it to the core of being.”102 The limit and transgression are not opposite to each other but, quite conversely, mutually dependent on each other, and their relationship is both pure and complex. Foucault thus explicates his understanding of transgression as the illumination of the limits: Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lighting in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up in the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity […]”103

It is worth noticing that Foucault’s analyses are being carried out with the use of transparently apophatic terms. Transgression is here depicted as “a flash of lightning in the night” which brings interior illumination and with its sovereignty marks the space of inner experience before becoming silent “now that it has given a name to obscurity.”104 Foucault insists that due to the complexity of its nature, transgression can be associated neither with ethics nor with its oppositions, with the subversive or the scandalous, since its aim is not to oppose one thing to another or to shake any solid foundations. The space it opens is beyond all these divisions and oppositions, as an infinite distance that is not negative but “affirms limited being – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time”105; yet, accordingly, this affirmation has 100 101 102 103 104 105

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Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 33. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 34. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 34. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 35. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 35. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 35.

no positive content with strictly defined boundaries. Transgression shall be thus understood as an essentially apophatic affirmation, intransitive, that is one of nothing but itself, since any thing, any “this” or “that” could possibly restrict it. This is philosophy of pure transgression indicating the existence of difference, of “nonpositive affirmation,”106 which Foucault recognizes in Blanchot’s “contestation.” According to the “principle of contestation,” which Blanchot depicts in terms that could equally well serve for apophatic mystical writing, one proceeds to the heart of the void, until one reaches “the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being.”107 Transgression does not overcome limits but shows that our human being depends on the existence of limits. To erase limits would lead to the end of being which is necessarily finite. Still, transgression is more than simply an examination of limits, as it proves that no limits are absolute. The embodiment of the most absolute limit was the existence of God, in whom human finitude became revealed but at the same time his own infinity was proclaimed and a limitless being, transcending the realm of limits, was positively affirmed. God is “word that surpasses all words,” designating that which is inexpressible in language. By denying the existence exterior to limits and non-positively affirming the intrinsically limited and finite nature of being, the death of God “discloses […] the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. In this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the impossible. The death of God is not merely an ‘event’ that gave shape to contemporary experience as we now know it: it continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline.”108 Transgression is possible only if the limitedness of the limit is recognized. Yet, as Foucault contends, it is not easy to attain the experience of transgression since in the contemporary times the spheres which used to be associated with transgression, namely sexuality and eroticism, have become reduced to reversal of prohibitions within humanist discourses. Therefore, Foucault seeks such forms of discourse which would make transgressive gestures by highlighting the limits of language without transcending them or aspiring to some existence “beyond,” to the exteriority of being. Not only is transgression inconceivable but it is also intrinsically unstable, as it has no firm and secure grounds but may be grasped solely in its acts and fleeting moments. As work on limits, the space of transgression is precarious and

106 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 36. 107 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 36. 108 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 30.

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uncertain, verging on a void or an absence, suspended between absolute limitlessness, which one is tempted to leap into, and complete limitation. Those who venture on an act of transgression risk teetering on the brink of an abyss, and often succumb to temptation to make a leap into this abyss, to free themselves of constraints and think without limits, think the impossible. Foucault observes that the experience of transgression which was originally linked with the divine has been in our times reintroduced at the centre of thought. However, it turns out that no forms of dialectical thinking, no in-depth examination of constitutions and their transcendental ground, can support the thought of the limit. Since discursive language becomes no longer effectual to convey this experience, Foucault directs his attention to the extreme forms of language in which Blanchot and Bataille dwell, claiming that only the nondiscursive, disruptive language, never complete or fully in control of itself, may allow us to discover that form of thought in which we could recognize the essential experience of finitude and being, of “the instantaneous play of the limit and of transgression.”109 While contrasting Bataille with Marquis de Sade’s writing of desire, Foucault asserts, “Bataille’s language, on the other hand, continually breaks down at the center of its space, exposing in his nakedness, in the inertia of ecstasy, a visible and insistent subject who had tried to keep language at arms length, but who now finds himself thrown by it, exhausted, upon the sands of that which he can no longer say.”110 Faced with the lack of a language, transgressors are placed in the situation of the insoluble impasse, their efforts being doomed to failure, their projects already ruined. As no established discourse, no matter how dense and multi-layered, would suffice for the experience of transgression, Foucault argues that instead of seeking a language for the transgressive, we should rather attempt to “speak of this experience and [make] it speak from the depths where its language fails, from precisely the place where words escape it, where the subject who speaks has just vanished, where the spectacle topples over before an upturned eye.”111 Bataille’s upturned eye, turned upwards as well as against itself, in a movement leading back to the nocturnal, towards the interior of the skull, serves as a fundamental figure for inner experience and transgression: it does not have any meaning since it marks its own limit. While turning back on itself in a self-reflexive move, it nevertheless sees nothing in the empty skull. There is no revelation of

109 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 37. 110 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 39. 111 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 40.

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truth but the abyss of total night in which the eye plunges. For Foucault this indicates the moment when language, reaching its limits, collapses, explodes, dismantles itself, its emptiness being exposed and its unity fractured: The enucleated or upturned eye marks the zone of Bataille’s language, the void into which it pours and loses itself, but in which it never stops talking – somewhat like the interior, diaphanous, and illuminated eye of mystics and spiritualists that marks the point at which the secret language of prayer is embedded and choked by a marvellous communication which silences it.112

The French philosopher finds here, just as we might find in apophatic writings, “the turning back of language upon itself at the moment that it fails.”113 In the moment of its breakdown the language is discovered to return upon itself – in order to open one’s eyes into and towards the Unlimited.

2.  Transgression as the Path to God When the threshold into the realm of the divine is crossed, the perspective of transgression as defiance of authority and restrictive order may change radically, turning in crucial ways into its opposite. Instead of violating divinely law, the step beyond may actually become the step into the plenitude of the experience of the divine. According to Neoplatonic texts, in the heavenly sphere the humanly instituted hierarchies with their power structures no longer apply and God himself is all authority; all hierarchy is consummated in him – in oneness without limit. There is no longer need for forceful authority or coercive commands since all is perfectly conformed to divine order. Within this sublime realm everything occurs in holy transgressiveness, which is marked by unlimited freedom of the divine. Therefore, finally, transgressing as stepping beyond turns into following the path to God. As it has been already discussed in the previous chapters with reference to the analyses of Don Cupitt and Michael Sells, one of the most recurring elements of mystical writings is an attempt to deconstruct orthodox discourse, to deny traditional authority and transgress the social norms of the conservative cultures mystics dwell in, often for reasons that we might now recognize as profoundly ethical. In this sense, at least, apophaticism can be taken as a kind of individualist counter-culture working to deconstruct the hegemonic forces of oppression and the theological necessity of divine transcendence, which constitute the heart of many religions. Thus apophaticism becomes a kind of “dangerous writing” that 112 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 48. 113 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 49.

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seeks to melt down the oppressive structures of tradition in order to effect a state of religious happiness in the reader. The mystic writes in such a way as to destabilize the institution, working to corrupt the absolute power of the Church, of the clerical industry. In contrast to the ecclesial spirituality, the mystic wants and attains the happiness, indefinitely postponed by the institutionalised structure of the Church, in the present through an identity with the divine.114 It goes beyond doubt that the aim of apophatic writers is not to abandon all authority, even if they question the foundations of their oppressive culture and the claims of the Church to the absolute knowledge and power. The question then remains where this authority has been now transposed. It seems that mystics want it to be located everywhere, in each and every individual, not in any exterior entity that would impose the all-encompassing rules of thinking and acting on them. This individualistic approach of apophatic theologians makes them a kind of prophets of the modern world as well as serves as a model of spirituality of all ages dreaming of revolution and liberation for all. Likewise, the French thinkers, particularly Blanchot and Bataille, but also Foucault or Levinas, endeavour to smuggle their counter-authoritarian, emancipatory ideas into the theological realm, responding to the rallying call of the “inner experience” to be the only true authority. Apophatic mystics hold a firm belief in the transcendent, absolute authority of God, still they strive to encounter it while following their own spiritual path, through their own irreducibly individual experience of the divine, which they devote their life and writing to. Hence, their privileging of individual experience as sole authority and sole value may be regarded as corresponding to the approach taken by a plenitude of modern prophets who have made inner experience some form of the highest authority for conscience,115 and, as in the case of Bataille and Blanchot, have absolutized it as the opening to the Outside. The individual versions of Christian doctrines delivered by mystics on the basis of their own direct experience of the divine mysteries have been frequently perceived as controversial, however, in fact, they are deeply inspired by the Christian tradition itself. For Christianity is a religion with a strong emphasis placed on the interiorization of truth and doctrine, which was most powerfully expressed by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), where He accentuated the role not so much of outward acts as of intentions and dispositions of heart in

114 See Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 115 Such an individualistic approach to faith is particularly visible within the Protestant tradition.

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obeying the Commandments. Undeniably, there is a good reason for arguing that this authority of “inner experience” lying at the root of Christianity but also recurring in its later renditions, offered for example by negative theologians of different epochs, is most pertinent to Bataille’s sense of transgression and Blanchot’s understanding of contestation. In Inner Experience Bataille praises Blanchot for his prominent recognition of the sole authority of inner experience, which he acknowledges as the basis of a “new theology,” emerging from the writing of his French friend. For Bataille, the traces of this notion of inner experience are notably to be traced in a passage from Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, which he comments on in the following way: Outside of the notes in this volume, I only knew of Thomas the Obscure, where the questions of the new theology (which has only the unknown as an object) are pressing, though there they remain hidden. In a way that is entirely independent from his book, orally, yet in a way that he in no respect lacked the feeling of discretion that demands that close, to him. I thirst for silence, I have heard the author pose the foundation of all “spiritual” life, which can only: – have its principle and its end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of hope, – affirm of inner experience that it is the authority (but all authority expiates itself), – be contestation of itself and nonknowledge.116

While pursuing the inner experience to the limit of the Unknown, Blanchot and Bataille once more prove their affinity with the tradition of apophatic theology. In fact, Blanchot himself insists that the crucial germ of the experience described by him are to be found in Meister Eckhart, who fostered the idea of a mystic death of the self.117 Such references to apophatic writing are by no means rare, as it is shown by Kevin Hart, who in the first chapter, “Art or the Mystical,” of his book on Blanchot, attempts to disentangle a dense web of allusions and reflections within Blanchot’s and Bataille’s work, which touch upon not only medieval but also later mystics such as Nicholas of Cusa, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.118 What all of them tend to demonstrate is the necessary trangressiveness of their quest for “inner experience,” which unavoidably requires the violation of all the known, firmly established principles and norms. Such an experience which cannot be supported by any exterior criteria or values but must find its 116 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 104. 117 Maurice Blanchot, “Master Eckhart,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 23–27. 118 Kevin Hart, “Art or the Mystical?” in The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 22–49.

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own inherent authentication is termed by Blanchot the “essential solitude” and interpreted by the French theorist in terms of the relationship between the artist and his work. Blanchot frequently emphasises that literature should play a self-transformative role and become a contestation of authority by transgressing religious dogmas and ossified principles of thought. Both Blanchot and Bataille show a considerable interest in the relation between inner experience, literature and mysticism. Despite the differentiating nuances in their conceptions, the French thinkers appear to be unanimous in their perception of writing as “a ceaseless questioning that undoes its own claims to authority and indeed to power,”119 and united in pursuing the quest for self-transformative and self-sacrificing form of writing under the aegis of inner experience. Apophatic mysticism likewise is emphatically individual and experiential as mystics seem to filter the doctrines of their religion and all their cultural background through personal experience. Since their mystical experience attained in the personal encounter with the divine and taken as revelation turns out to be able to revise the dogmatic knowledge of theology by disrupting, disorganizing and then reorganizing the “known” and seemingly indisputable doctrine, it may be interpreted as a “transgressive” inner experience – in the sense given to it by Blanchot and Bataille. The transgressive aspects of writing, explored most thoroughly by Blanchot, seem to be already realized in the works of apophatic theologians and poets; hence, it might be suggested that transcendence becomes there transgression in a way that is not without affinity to what occurs in the realm of language in the texts of these two eminent, though quite radical, thinkers of transgression and contestation. The experience which mystical visions are founded on and which is given primacy by both Bataille and Blanchot is in fact the experience of the limit of experience or – in the words of Blanchot – non-experience. The impossible writing of apophatic theologians, cognizant of the inevitability of misrepresentation, taking steps which immediately erase themselves, never in the presence but merely in the shadow of God, who remains ineffable, brings them into the proximity of the French philosophers. As Blanchot puts it, writing is an experience that is enabled by non-experience. Taking the phrase “experience of non-experience” from Blanchot’s essay “L’Expérience-limite” (1962), Hart uses it to characterize the aim of both Bataille’s and Blanchot’s quest, yet pointing out the following difference in their emphases: “where Bataille sought raptures occasioned by mediation, Blanchot opened himself to nonexperience by writing: the sacrifice

119 Hart, The Dark Gaze, p. 36.

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of words and the author.”120 Such experience of the limit and of the necessity of sacrifice of one’s self and of all one’s concepts, images and words in approaching their ultimate desire of the absolutely Other is persistently evoked by apophatic theologians as that which constitutes both the final limit of their spiritual ascent to God and its origin, eventually obliterating all their writing. Although they feel compelled to convey this overwhelming experience of non-experience, which for them is the vision of God, they nonetheless find this non-experience transgressive of all knowledge and of all language. It is this transgressive character of the impasse faced by apophatic mystics that becomes a key subject of the reflections of Bataille and Blanchot, whose penetrating analyses of transgression and contestation cast a new light on this issue. Within the apophatic current of the Christian mystical tradition, the via negativa bears witness to this recognition of experience facing the threshold of nonexperience. This non-experience lying at the core of experience is what cannot be truly named and which in the end turns out to be not even “experience” – in the common sense of the word – as the experience itself may be realized only when negated. In so far as mystical speech of such writers as Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa or Angelus Silesius proves to be inadequate to their experience, it cannot originate from this experience but rather – being based on no experience or non-experience – from Nothing. As a result, apophatic discourse allows for language to be uncannily free, its absolute freedom being realized in limitless transgression, at the moment of mystical union when all limits are transcended as the soul becomes immersed in the Unlimited.

3.  Transcendence and the Sense of Transgression While transgressing the laws of men and defying the constraining order, apophatic mystics do it in the name of the higher authority of God. Yet, what they ultimately transcend is authority and law altogether, perceiving their foundation to be beyond any law or order, beyond any conceivable content, even the concept of “transcendence.” Such a movement outward may be read as rooted within the Christian vision of Creation, which is a radical and unconditional act of openness and giving. Although it may seem that this approach leads to the invalidation of the religious metaphors mystics tend to use in their depictions of the divine experience, it rather validates them in so far as they are treated precisely and merely as metaphors for what no language is able to grasp. All the pretensions to get a straightforward access to a literal truth, while remaining 120 Hart, The Dark Gaze, p. 47.

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within the enclosed order of representation, become undermined with apophatic writings, which project themselves outside any regimes of representation. Some “revolutionary” mystics such as Meister Eckhart seem determined to transgress every type of human authority, but their acts of transgression are always taken in the spirit of obedience to the only ultimate authority, that is the authority of God to whom they are freely subjugated. They yearn for the perfect divine order and law to be actualized in our world; yet if this dream is to be fulfilled, this order cannot be represented in other than human categories or find its concrete realization in other than institutional forms – though this realization shall be infinitely open and never fully determined, and thus subject to the critique from the outside, from the beyond of the actuality of the event. Eventually, the clash between the impossible ideal of divine justice and its concrete embodiment which can never remain its absolute purity creates unresolvable tension. This paradox of the relation between transcendence and immanence is most clearly discernible at a semiological level of apophatic writing. Language, being taken to its limits and having no definable object to refer to, captures transcendence immanently, as it is in itself and as liberated from any external constraints. It might be then supposed that seen from such an angle, the very nature of language presents itself as intrinsically self-referential and free in its self-expression, yet this “self ” is inescapably embedded in the process of un-binding and being un-bound. It does not possess any rigid structure that is not renounced while it opens itself wholly and unconditionally to the Outside – thus proving its perfect, God-like nature. In the language of apophatic works, the collapse of the external order leads to the suspension of all finite limits. However, the consequence of this lack of any representable order is not sheer chaos but the order which is intrinsic to every self, the order in the like of God’s one, which, being perfect in its divine simplicity, eludes any form or definition. In this higher form of order or ultraorder transgression is not excluded but embraced. The divine transcendence envisaged by mystics ultimately and necessarily transgresses every definable order. Moreover, this transcendence dwells within them and might also dwell in every individual who gives themselves over to God in the act of total surrender. It is God, the supreme Being, the author of the universe, who summons apophatic mystics to cross every threshold and to whom their writings are turned. In the course of moving towards their own outside, towards the absolutely Ineffable, mystical works transgress themselves, step beyond all boundaries, even those imposed inevitably by themselves. The absolute relation to the Unfathomable is more determining for them than any of their defining features, structures or own 174

principles. That is why apophatic texts become like self-consuming artefacts in the act of total surrender of themselves aimed to open them upon the Outside. Due to this vertical relation to the supreme deity, mystics might give an impression of not fitting into an image of transgressors, yet at the same they are determined to transgress every known and worldly authority, every order of knowledge and representation in the quest for the transcendent calling. In the end, their pursuit of the experience of the Beyond necessarily leads to transgression even of their own works, to destruction of all that has been previously created and subversion of their own discourse, for the sake of the absolute authority of unknown and incomprehensible God. Like Bataille’s and Blanchot’s inner experience of contestation, apophatic transgression seems not to be merely a stage which in the end becomes subsumed into familiar orthodoxy, but the infinite, open-ended act that does not cease transgressing every order, especially the one it creates itself with its own mastery, by carefully drawing its distinctions, paying attention to nuances and relentlessly proceeding in crossing the successive thresholds – in order to open to the Outside which transcends all order known to us. It might be argued that in some sense this gesture captures the essence of what is enunciated by Blanchot through the peculiar range of his concepts, including most importantly the Outside (le Dehors) itself, as well as by Bataille, for example through such a notion as “sovereignty.”121 In Infinite Conversation Blanchot envisages a turning from human-centred history towards “the absence of work.” The French theorist insists that the importance of every literary work lies in its ability to turn into its worklessness, in result of which discourse ceases and pure writing, driven by its desire for the outside, may freely move. This is “the absence of the work that is the other name for madness.”122 In order to let the Other speak, the works of apophatic mystics must also un-work themselves. The opening to the Outside is only possible when the writer evacuates his work, effaces his or her self, and thus steps beyond it, towards the space which is created neither with human powers nor with signs; although it is precisely these signs, and, more generally, the whole order defined and mediated by human beings, which bring the writer there – only to be ultimately transgressed.

121 See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 122 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 32.

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Although this final step/not beyond which completes the mystics’ journey and brings them to God might seem to be merely a gesture of deconstruction, yet the insight into this issue provided by Bataille and Blanchot makes it equally reasonable to claim that it is as much a gesture of creation. The analyses of not infrequently poetic passages of mystical writings allow us to argue that what is achieved through this unworking, through the kenotic procedures of language, and self-sacrifice of the work, leading to its radical absence, is in fact a sort of “sovereignty,” understood in the sense given to it by the French theorists – which, in the end, verges on the sublime.123 In the apophatic transgressive movement, even the intricately crafted pieces of Angelus Silesius or St John of the Cross finally exceed the beauty they seemingly aimed to evoke, so that the whole textual construction formerly erected is shattered, with only vestiges of its former beauties left: the blasted fragments, the ruined syntax, the scattered words. In their experiments of language, apophatic writers may seem to surpass all barriers, all human limits, signs, even the signification itself – in a movement that could be compared to “transhumanization.” However, this “step beyond” shall not be considered as an ultimate and irreversible step beyond humanity towards the full immersion in divinity, where the self becomes totally annihilated; rather, it aims at radical transformation within human beings themselves, even if it entails the effacement of the self and its being broken open to what is beyond it. For mystics, the internal, unlimited transformation, which they undergo during their mystical ascent and which opens them into the Ineffable, is the true mystery of God. Such a vision arguably might be treated as corresponding to the notion of “humanity” as “transhumanizing,” given so much attention in postmodern culture, fascinated with margins and the transgressing of borders, concerned with the experience of finitude and with the speech of finite beings who desire to speak of the infinite, of that which is not containable in language. Having revealed that the human experience in its unfolding in language and desire – at their limits – opens into the unlimited and inconceivable, postmodern theorists stress that what is unique in the human should be recognized as something uncompletable and therefore ungraspable. In the self-negating, self-transcending, transgressive movement, the human capability of relationship which knows no borders opens the finite world into an infinite “beyond,” into something which

123 For postmodern reinvestments of the sublime, see Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, [sections] 23–29 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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belongs to a completely different order, not excluding even the possibility of “divinity.” The movement of transhumanization, whose roots within postmodern context may be sought in Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch, which personifies the process of overcoming and going beyond the human, in the mystical tradition is discovered as an incomprehensible dimension of transcendence within every human individual, hence the human itself turns out to be essentially “transhuman.” The idea of transcendence piercing the immanence is discovered and enacted by apophatic writers at a semiological level of their writings, where language, having lost its object of reference, collapses and implodes. Yet, through this deconstruction of sign and self-annihilation, their visions open to the dimension which is no longer discursively divided. This discovery of transcendence as being at work in immanence in fact finds its origin and inspiration in Christian revelation, in the mystery of Incarnation. However, this is what our culture has lost or erased – and it seems that now – consciously or not – it desires to find again. The path taken by apophatic theologians has been retraced along the line of reflection upon writing down to its contemporary followers, such as Georges Bataille or Maurice Blanchot. Although the pursuit of this quest under the sign of transgression seems to be more explicit in postmodern writing, yet it might be reasonably argued that it was already marked as such by apophatic mystics. What is then transgression for them? Undeniably, it entails the transcending of all linguistically as well as institutionally imposed limits towards what in the Christian discourse is called infinite freedom and love. Such a reading of negative theology appears as paving the way for modern humanism. Yet, while emphasizing the fact that the divine is immanent to the spiritual faculties of humans, it reminds of its transcendent source which can be approached only by transgressing all its possible conceptualizations. After entering into the space of ineffability, the sense of transgression, as it has been so far presented, radically changes. There is no need or even possibility of further transgression since all human authority, legality, order have been already transgressed, all limits and definitions have been suspended. Such a sense of transgression may become particularly relevant to our present times when approached along the line of thought of such contemporary thinkers as Blanchot, Bataille or Foucault. Undeniably, one might equally argue that their ways of conceiving transgression and contestation are very far removed from what apophatic mystics would have proposed, yet they seem to develop from the same work (which is in fact unworking) of language in its quest for the unsayable 177

which was set in motion by the first medieval apophatic theologians and which has been pursued in different forms, whether in poetic, prosaic or philosophical ones, down to our times, the times preoccupied with what they cannot say.

Conclusions In the course of the analysis conducted in this chapter the concepts of inner experience and transcendence were used in order to explore the consequences of transgression. The juxtaposition of French philosophers and apophatic mystics once again revealed the points of correspondence between these two seemingly divergent discourses, yet it tried not to overlook the essential differences: the experience with no content and no expression in language, which Michel Foucault describes as an inner experience of illumination, for negative theologians is always an experience of God. It was further shown that mystics place considerable emphasis on their personal experience of God, thus making their inner experience – rather than some external institution – authoritative. Such an individual approach unites them with Blanchot’s and Bataille’s quest for the Unknown. In pursuit of this inner experience, both apophatic mystics and the French theorists step beyond every threshold, transgress all boundaries, all, not only human, authority, all concepts of law, order and language. For apophatic theologians transgression of all linguistically, culturally imposed limits, all religious or political authority is at the same time an act of transcendence towards God who grants infinite freedom which knows no distinctions and limitations, and love which is pure and unconditional. The primary interest of Part Two of the study was in how the topos of ineffability present in the discourse of negative theologians as well as of the examined French authors reveals the transgression of language. What I have intended to demonstrate in the above pages is not only that Christian negative theology has impressed the French philosophers, serving as the starting point for their reflections of transgression, but also that – by projecting the greatly ambiguous and admittedly contradictory apophatic sense of transgressiveness – we might in some sense be able to restore the matrix from which Blanchot or Bataille have formulated their ideas, and thus elucidate the understanding of transgression in our own times. Hence, finally, reading the French theorists side by side with apophatic mystics allowed us to prove that the meaning of the sacred can be traced only kenotically by radical emptying and renunciation of all that has been held as sacred, so that the space of the sacred could be filled not by our own idols but only by the Impossible, by the wholly Other.

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The parallel reading of negative theology and modern French theory, proposed in this Part, intended also to reveal what – from the perspective of religious thought – seems to be lacking in the contemporary French thought when juxtaposed with the apophatic tradition. It might be argued that Blanchot, Bataille and Foucault (and especially their followers) occasionally tend to provide a nihilistic interpretation of the Outside or the Open; hence, instead of leaving an Outside infinitely open to an indefinite beyond, they seem to suggest that “nothing” is the last word, and thus lose the theological mystery of apophatic discourse. Although aware of the inextricable difficulties of their chosen viewpoint, they still hold on to their atheistic outlook.124 However, it must be emphasised that such a position cannot be simply and decisively determined by the nature of reality. It is rather a decision – a decision of faith which further influences their existential orientation.

124 Maurice Blanchot, “Atheism and Writing. Humanism and the Cry,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 246–263. Relevant reflection is also provided by Richard Kearney, Anatheism. Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

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Conclusions Go where you cannot go; see what you cannot see; Hear where there is no sound, you are where God does speak. Angelus Silesius. The Cherubinic Wanderer

While stumbling across the wide field of contemporary theory, I have attempted to listen to the echoes of apophasis, which although coming from an old theological tradition, resounds in our secular times in the reactions to the dethronement of autonomous reason and the overwhelming experience of loss and meaninglessness after the death of God. Resisting reason’s “hubris,” contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, and many others, propose a mode of thinking which is open to all the signs of exteriority and alterity. Therefore, they look beyond the borders of the Western foundation of Being to meet the unknown, the unsayable – transcendence, as well as search for a new mode of speaking about it. In apophatic discourse they have found a mode which enables them to address the other in a truly responsible way. Although this study made efforts to negotiate a pivotal position for the apophatic discourse within contemporary thought, its intention was not to turn medieval mystics into deconstructionist philosophers, nor to transform deconstructionist philosophy into apophatic theology. Rather, my wish was to put them into fruitful conversation, which would not erase the significant differences between the two discourses. Notwithstanding their strong resemblances, the postmodern employment of apophasis should be carefully discriminated from negative theology, rooted in a particular religious tradition, since the majority of its practitioners still live too much in the realm of doubt, of irony, remaining suspicious of any positivity. Michael Sells’s definition of apophasis as a “language of unsaying,” which does not reduce it simply to negation, but reveals its quality of negativity and unresolvable tension between saying and unsaying, might give an impression to being akin to Cleanth Brook’s understanding of irony as “an acknowledgment of the pressures of context”; yet since apophasis (un-saying) is “paired with kataphasis (affirmation, saying, speaking with),” it highlights, if only indirectly, the tussle between belief and unbelief and thereby does not exclude the possibility of affirmation.

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Undoubtedly, what conjoins apophatic discourse of negative theology and its postmodern manifestation is the rhetoric of negativity and deconstructive elision, but, even more importantly, a sense of longing, of seeking. Seeking itself has always been considered as an essential part of human nature. To quote Charles Taylor, “we are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good.”1 Yet, it might be further suggested that seeking is intimately bound with finding. Here the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer from The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy might substantiate my point: “Questioning is seeking, and as such it is governed by what is sought. One can only seek when one knows what one is looking for. Only then, only with what is known in view, can one exclude the irrelevant, narrow the inquiry down, and recognize anything.”2 At Martin Heidegger’s funeral Bernhard Welte called the author of Being and Time, well-known for his attachment to the notions of concealment and mystery, a “seeker after God,” whose thinking was a matter of listening to the beckonings of the divinities and of calling to God out of the depths (de profundis) of His absence.3 Heidegger’s acknowledgment that the withdrawal of God, which awakens the call de profundis, does not mean a mere lack but “the presentness, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness of what is already,”4 confirms that which apophatic tradition, despite its persistent tropology of negativity, repeatedly reminds us of: absence does not preclude the possibility of presence. Gadamer expounds further on this idea: “Seeking presupposes measuring, as does measuring knowing – that which is absent, granted, but that which is absent is not not. It is “there” [da] as absence.”5 Yet, even this matter of seeking becomes a subject of questioning and doubt for Derrida, who invariably strives to situate himself in the state of betweenness and undecidability:

1 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 34. 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 59. 3 Bernhard, Welte, “Seeking and Finding: The Speech at Heidegger’s Burial,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), p. 74. 4 Martin Heidegger, “Letter to a Young Student,” quoted in Welte, “Seeking and Finding,” p. 75. 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 179.

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There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, throughout his entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.6

The two interpretations outlined by Derrida imply two positions that are “absolutely irreconcilable”; nevertheless “we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy,” so it might be suggested that there is no “question of choosing”, especially for those “who in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself.”7 Derrida’s approach is neither negation nor affirmation, though I would more readily agree with those of his commentators who interpret his thought as leaning more towards affirmation, even if it fends off commitment. This would be an apophatic affirmation which breaks the boundaries of the solely critical, closed, self-centred circle of ideology, instead offering openness of the horizon to something that approaches us from the outside of discourse, the impossible that can never be actualized but which we are anxiously and passionately awaiting, a gaze of the other that we do not see and that remains secret from us although it commands us to respond to his/her call.8 The apophatic experience is not so much an event of a confession as of a circumfession in which we are wounded by something wondrous – but we do not know what.9 Ultimately, the essence of this experience turns out to be the passion, even if its object remains forever indeterminate and concealed in “the cloud of unknowing”: [Apophatic experience] entails a sort of belief in, or an openness to, something – that is, to something or other that is surely no thing – that cannot be said and that refuses itself to every desire for expression. There is not even any “what” to believe in, but there is

6 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 292. 7 Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” p. 293. 8 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27. 9 John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 4.

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passion – for nothing, perhaps, certainly for nothing that can be said: and yet that passion itself is not just nothing.10

The constitutive non-identity of apophatic theology, its ambiguous status and hyperbolic, transgressive tendency to transcend all distinctions between the Christian and non-Christian, the theological and the secular, make it open to a possibility of repetition outside its linguistic, historical and religious context. Therefore, as it has been proven in the course of this analysis, it serves as a significant resource for a wide group of thinkers, ranging from theologians to secular philosophers, who have transcribed and theorized it anew in postmodern landscape. Another implication of the originary openness and non-propriety of apophasis might be the recognition of the necessity of rethinking Christian identity as no longer based on self-identical purity obtained through the acts of exclusion of the other, but as a non-essentialized community whose essence would lie in its relation to the other. Hence, apophasis could offer an extraordinarily powerful and flexible instrument for dialogue between Christianity and contemporary secular culture, and between Christianity and other religions. Finally, I believe that Derrida’s generalized notion of negative theology as the impossible experience of the other as totally other that is central to all thought and action may pave the way for transformation of ethico-political sphere into one of infinite responsibility and unconditional hospitality.

10 William Franke (ed.), On What Cannot be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts. Volume 2: Modern and Contemporary Transformations (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 3.

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