Review: [Untitled] Author(S): Agehananda Bharati Reviewed Work(S): Derrida and Indian Philosophy by Harold Coward Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol

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Review: [untitled] Author(s): Agehananda Bharati Reviewed work(s): Derrida and Indian Philosophy by Harold Coward Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 42, No. 2, Moscow Regional East-West Philosophers' Conference on Feminist Issues East and West, (Apr., 1992), pp. 339-343 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1399297 Accessed: 25/07/2008 12:30

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Derrida and Indian Philosophy. By Harold Coward. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Pp. 200. Hardcover $35.50. Paper $10.95.

The spate of books produced by that most aggressive publisher of Indian Reviewedby esoterica, SUNY Press, continues with this most sophisticated philosoph- AgehanandaBharati ical study. Harold Coward mentions a simpler attempt at bringing Derrida SyracuseUniversity and Buddhism face-to-face, made by Robert Magliola a few years ago. On that book, however, this reviewer wrote a lengthy review to end all reviews1 (a brief word on that a bit later). The dust jacket promises a book that builds a bridge between traditional Eastern views on language and the latest in modern Western thought. The blurb also whets our appetites as it hints a special nexus between Bhartrhari,Taoists, and Derrida, and a nonnexus between the latter and Samkara's and Nagarjuna's views on language. Coward starts off by announcing that it is anvlksikt,that is, the discursive aspect of Indian thought, which can be juxtaposed, and which he does juxtapose, with Derrida. Interestingly, it was my friend (or was he?) the late East German Indologist Walter Ruben who stated in some detail, before and after his conversion to communism, that Indian philosophy is not darsana, as the received lexicographical wisdom held, but precisely anviksik. After a blitz-like foray into philosophical elements of the samhita portion of the Vedas, and the Brahmanas (p. 6) and the first clearly monistic Ansatz in the Upanisads, then Buddhist nairatmya (non- self; Tibetan, bdag med) and its axiomatic doctrine of momentariness, he states that each of these statements, when carried to its extreme, denies the possibility of the other. "Such an extreme polarization of philosophic positions invites the application of Derrida's corrective deconstruction" (p. 8), the author stipulates. The author pays due homage to K. C. Bhattacharya (p. 9). At this point, he does not yet marshal the central axiom of Derrida's deconstructive thought, that is, that every system collapses into itself by its own weight, without the incursion of conflicting systems. He also does not stress sufficiently that Derrida never cared for Indian or any non-Western thought; his thinking world, including its deconstruction, ends about an hour's jet flight east of Paris. His and his European cohorts' Eurocentrism is known to all, stated with ire or with a shrug, as the case may be. Coward sees Magliola's earlier attempt as an incipient, simple bridge- building effort. Every bridge, however, is not advantageous. Derrida's abortive encounter with analytic philosophers (Austin and Searle, p. 17) is given short shrift. Derrida's encounter with Bhart- hoped-for possible PhilosophyEast & West rhari,Samkara, Nagarjuna, and Aurobindo might make matters worse for Volume 42, Number2 Bhartrhariand the others than a nonencounter. Derrida did not decon- April1992

339 struct or even dent analytic philosophy, and his perennial buzzword "logocentrism" hardly fazes his opponents; if I were Bhartrharior Nagar- juna, I would say "more power to logocentrism, Monsieur Jacques." This reviewer, for one, feels that Samkara and Nagarjuna, and maybe Bhart- rhari-but not the philosophically marginal Aurobindo-could provide intertextuality with linguistic philosophy beginning with Wittgenstein and continuing into the official anglophone academic philosophy of today. It is amazing, and disappointing, that Coward, in his references to Heidegger, never mentions the late J. L.Mehta, a brahmin Hindu philoso- pher who knew Heidegger personally and whose work on Heidegger is highly respected. Coward believes that Derrida, in his attack on logocentrism and in his use of Rousseau's notion of the originary trace, or force of writing, connects him to Bhartrhari,and not to Nagarjuna (p. 33). As to the unbridgeable difference between Derrida and Nagarjuna (as well as the other salvifically oriented Indian thinkers), "rather than seeking or reduc- ing critical thought to silent meditation, Derrida concludes with positive statements about 'writing' as the dynamis or originary force in all language" (p. 34). Coward seems to homologize Samkara's advaita with logocentric (Western) philosophy, contrasting him with Bhartrhariand Derrida (p. 42 and throughout). The metamessage here is clearly that he likes Derrida and Bhartrhari,and that he does not like Samkara and traditional Western philosophers too much-and here I am talking about aesthetic choices. Scholarly readers who have not been touched by hermeneutics or the postmodern style, be they Indologists, social scien- tists, or Western academic philosophers, will be less than sanguine about Coward's entire enterprise; Bhartrhari,Samkara, and Nagarjuna on the one side, and Derrida, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Austin, Searle, Heidegger, Rorty, and the classical Western system builders, including Kant, uncom- fortably seated together on the other, use their cognitive and conative equipment with such different purposes and with such unrelated inten- tions and methods, that bridging them, or trying to do so, is a matter of faith-well-informed faith no doubt-and of a desire for some sort of intellectual ecumenism. With these caveats in mind, we can proceed. What Magliola did poorly, Coward does very well indeed; Coward is too charitable about that preceding effort. No effort, however valiant and well-meant, should disabuse us of the fact that nobody from Kant to Heidegger, Rorty, and Derrida has been interested in moksa, while nobody from Nagarjuna to Bhartrhari and Samkara has not. Coward is wrong, I think when he suggests that Derrida's notion of writing, characterizing the inner and the outer word, bears a resemblance to the philosophy of language in the Vakyapadfya. Bhartrhari,like all other brahmins, was embarrassed about PhilosophyEast & West writing or having to write, instead of working by rote. By no leap of any

340 learned imagination can Derrida's "writing"be rallied for gathering points of resemblance with the Indian thinkers, whatever other elements of Derrida's thought might be thus rallied. From Bhartrharito Samkara and the Nambuthiri brahmins of Kerala today who officiated at Frits Staals' Agnicayana, enacted in Kerala in the early eighties, all of them were embarrassed about those who had to read from a text rather than recite from memory the unwritten and unwritable word. Of course, Coward knows and states clearly that writing has been a low-esteem pursuit in traditional India, but he regrets it (p. 55). The cat is out of the bag when Coward, becoming more specific, approximates or equates Derrida's arche-writing or trace to Bhartrhari'ssabdatattva (word, essence, word principle, or whatever, on p. 59 and throughout). Derrida would not have anything to do with brahman even if he knew its meaning. In other words, the Indian cause for the trace is different from Derrida's cause of traces. Vive la difference. Critics of neo-Hindu jargon, like this reviewer, will frown on Coward's frequent use of "spiritual realization" (p. 66 and throughout). It is an overworked and overrated neologism of the Hindu Renaissance brought into vogue by Vivekananda around the turn of the century. It does not translate any Sanskrit term, although Hindus have been trying to fit such experiential roots as anubbhava and (ISvara)-darsanainto it. Using "spiritual realization" for moksa and the other salvific terms is a bit neo- Hinduistic-like Pandit Nehru's stating during his keynote address at the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of Buddhism: "Buddhism is good because it is good for world peace." Whatever it is, moksa is more interesting than "spiritual realization," whatever that is. If "Grammatol- ogy" can also be construed as a means for spiritual realization, all the worse for Derrida. Trivializationcannot be deconstructed, it can only be abandoned. Sunya (p. 70) is not "silence." Let us not make things simpler than they are. Deconstruction makes them more difficult, preferringthe lectio difficilior to the lectio facilior in each given case-so what's new in that-in the scholarly parlance Derrida never mastered. Scholarliness finds its own nondeconstructible rewards. Although Coward is obviously not a devotee of Samkara, the chapter on Derrida and Samkara is one of the best, from his positioning of Samkara in the Vedantic tradition to a comparative hermeneutic between the two divergent, albeit at times parallel, evaluations of language. I wish my colleagues would stop mis- translating neti neti, the obiter dictum of the Vedantic template, as "not this, not that" (p. 88), but rather as "not this, nor this" or some such phrase. "Not this, not that" would have to be neti naitad in Sanskrit, and it isn't. Coward neo-Hinduizes Derrida (p. 93 and throughout) by making him look for "self-realization" or "deconstruction of the illusions of per- manence ... being superimposed on the becoming of language" (ibid.). Book Reviews

341 However, "superimposition" is at least based on a genuine technical lexeme, that is, adhyasa or adhyaropa, whereas "self-realization" is a midnight child of neo-Hinduism, devoid of serious Sanskrit background- ing. It is true that Derrida "deconstructs all theology, philosophy, and ordinary language," but "self-realization"does not fit, because it is a state of mind, part of the neo-Hindu religious imperative, and whatever it is, it cannot be deconstructed. This is a category error, redolent of Gilbert Ryle's lady "who comes with an umbrella and a bad mood." Derrida's (and Coward's, I would presume) animus toward analytic philosophy yields a negative payload: Samkara and Nagarjuna and Bhartrhariare closer, philosophically speaking, to Wittgenstein, Rule, Ayer, and David- son than to Derrida, Kristeva, and Gayatri Chakravarti-Spivak. In this chapter, Coward masterfully, and elegantly summarizes the crucial, unbridgeable polarization between the two: "Whereas for Derrida, there is nothing outside of language and text [il n'y a pas de hors-texte, his obiter dictum, and like all obiter dicta, overworked, and milked for more than it's worth-reviewer's comment] for Samkara there is nothing of the text left in the anubhava experience" (p. 97). Neither is there for Nagarjuna and anyone in his or kindred leagues. I have a problem here, too, since anubhava means experience; since the nirvana, moksa, apavarga, and other related experiences are experiences par excellence, the Indian use is synecdochical, much as karma meant, and still means to the learned pundit, ritualistic action, which is the prototype. Chapter 5, on Derrida and Aurobindo, is of concern for all, but interesting only for those-their number is legion-who regard Aurobindo as the arch-hierophant of the age, and who take him seriously in the Indian great tradition of philosophy qua darsana, and not as a religious, metaphysical ("spiritual")bricoleur, as this reviewer and many others in the field do. A bricoleur, that is, with an amazing grasp of convoluted English,and virtuallynone of his native Bengali.Add to this that Aurobindo interiorized and adopted a version of the evolutionary idiom then in vogue, harnessing it to his own brand of yogic neo-Hindu language, a stratagem which became part of much Indian, and some Western, pre- sentation after him. To wit, "the evolution of language takes place by the repeated association of ideas with specific mantras until the multisignifi- cance of the original root sound is narrowed down by usage into a fixed relationship with a particular idea" (p. 103). Coward apparently buys Aurobindo's mastery of Panini and Yaska, which belongs to the local legendary at Pondicherry. We are on solid and fascinatingly important ground in chapter 6, on Derrida and Nagarjuna, with essential asides from other Buddhist tradi- ions. The author says rather too much in praise of Magliola here, though -a token-of scholarly kindness. Magliola's attempt, however, is vitiated in toto as he concluded his book by stating and elaborating that Roman PhilosophyEast & West Catholic magisterial theology supplies what both Derrida and the Bud-

342 dhists were missing (see my review mentioned above). In his analyses, Coward refers to Ricoeur, Habermas, Gadamer, and-wouldn't you know it-Foucault, all for good measure. He pays due attention to the important, recent work of David Loy (p. 126). This pivotal chapter man- dates slow, solid, even stolid reading as praxis: regardless of whether we agree that Derrida and Nagarjuna either do or do not have ideas in common, and/or whether it is important that they do, the unfolding of Buddhist and Derridean thought, their different deconstruction by totally different paths and for radically different purposes is a valuable, scholarly exercise. With all of Coward's painful conflicts and sympathies, the critical scholar emerges unscathed in the final analysis, when he says toward the end of the Buddhist chapter: "... for Nagarjuna language is empty of reality and must be transcended for reality to be realized. By contrast, Derrida sees language to be rooted in reality (p. 141). In this reader's own critical terms, both Nagarjuna and Derrida may be deconstructing language and reality, but whatever language and reality mean to the two, they are different, albeit bearing family resemblances; their methods are radically different, and there is no family resemblance between these methods. The conclusion (pp. 147-158) is so well crafted that I would advise non-lndologists to start off with this conclusion, since it contains the full template of the book in nuce, positioning the themes of the work not in hindsight, but in the critical perspective that immediately qualifies the book as must-reading for comparative philosophers. If therapy be the central concern, as it was and has remained with Indian autochthonous thinking, then Derrida does not deconstruct anything at all. Derrida's anger with whatever is written and spoken, especially east of Attica, needs deconstructive therapy.

Notes

1 - Agehananda Bharati, review of Derrida on the Mend, by Robert Magliola, in Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger41, no. 1 (1988): 62-68.

The Man.dukya Upanisad and the Agama Sastra: An Investigation into the Meaning of the Vedanta. By Thomas E.Wood. Monograph of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy No. 8. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 240.

This is a spirited attack on a number of commonly held theories about Reviewedby Advaita authorship. Wood believes that the Man.dikya Upanisad is not a KarlH. Potter strict advaitic text; rather, it more closely reflects Vallabha's Suddhad- Universityof vaita or Kasmir Saivism. As for the commentarial material known as the Washington Agama Sastra, commonly ascribed to Gaudapada, Wood believes it is a Book Reviews

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