Participation, Mystery, and Metaxy in the Texts of Plato and Derrida

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PARTICIPATION, MYSTERY, AND METAXY

IN THE TEXTS OF PLATO AND DERRIDA

Travis Michael DiRuzza

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

California Institute of Integral Studies

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in

Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness

California Institute of Integral Studies

San Francisco, CA

2015

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read PARTICIPATION, MYSTERY, AND METAXY IN

THE TEXTS OF PLATO AND DERRIDA by Travis Michael DiRuzza, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

______

Steven Goodman, PhD, Chair

Professor, Asian Comparative Studies

______

Jacob Sherman, PhD

Associate Professor, Philosophy and Religion

Travis Michael DiRuzza California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015 Steven Goodman, PhD, Committee Chair

PARTICIPATION, MYSTERY, AND METAXY IN THE TEXTS OF PLATO AND DERRIDA

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores Derrida’s engagement with Plato, primarily in the texts “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and On the Name. The themes of participation and performance are focused on through an analysis of the concepts of mystery and metaxy (μεταξύ). The crucial performative aspects of

Plato and Derrida’s texts are often under appreciated. Neither author simply says what he means; rather their texts are meant to do something to the reader that surpasses what could be accomplished through straightforward reading comprehension. This enacted dimension of the text underscores a participatory worldview that is not just intellectually formulated, but performed by the text in a way that draws the reader into an event of participation—instead of its mere contemplation. On this basis, I propose a closer alliance between these authors’ projects than has been traditionally considered.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... iv

I). Introduction to the Topic ...... 1

Areas of Inquiry...... 1

Some Historical Background ...... 5

Antiquity ...... 5

Modernity ...... 10

Postmodernity ...... 13

The Way Forward is the Way Back ...... 15

II). Introduction to Analysis: Literature Review ……...... 19

Schematization of Secondary Literature...... 20

Derrida and Plato are both Metaphysical ...... 21

Derrida is Metaphysical and Plato is Literary ...... 24

Derrida is Literary and Plato is Metaphysical ...... 30

Derrida and Plato are both Literary ...... 33

Significance...... 35

Chapter One: Plato………...... 38

1.1: Symposium ...... 45

1.2: Iamblichus and Plotinus ...... 60

1.3: Phaedo ……………...... 69

Chapter Two: Derrida ...... 95

2.1: On the Other...... 98

v 2.2: Derrida and Marion: On God ...... 115

2.3: On the Self …...... 134

Chapter Three: Plato and Derrida ...... 143

3.1: Republic ...... 144

3.2: Timaeus ...... 162

3.3: Sophist ...... 186

3.4: How to Avoid Speaking: Denials ...... 196

Conclusion ...... 218

References ...... 234

vi I). Introduction to the Topic

In order to describe it you have to face it.1 – James Baldwin

This thesis explores Derrida’s engagement with Plato, focusing on the themes of participation and performance through an analysis of the concepts of mystery and metaxy (μεταξύ). Incomplete understandings arise when readers overlook the performative aspects of Plato and Derrida’s texts, taking their words as simply constative. Neither author simply says what he means; rather their texts are meant to do something to the reader that surpasses what could be accomplished through straightforward reading comprehension. This enacted dimension of the text underscores a participatory worldview that is not just intellectually formulated, but performed by the text in a way that draws the reader into an event of participation—rather than its mere contemplation. On this basis, I propose a closer alliance between these authors’ projects than has been traditionally considered.

Areas of Inquiry

In his essay, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Derrida brings attention to the term triton genos (τρίτον γένος, third genre or kind) and its use in three Platonic dialogues: (1) light in the Republic’s analogy of the Sun is called triton genos, as well as (2) khora (χώρα, space or interval) in the

Timaeus, and (3) the einai (εἶναι, being) or the “is” that can be said of both

1 Baldwin, “Interview – pt. 1,” 5:08.

1 terms in any pair of oppositions in the Sophist—each is described as a “third kind,” something in-between, which relates two opposite poles. A close reading of the moments in question supports Derrida’s agenda of disrupting binary metaphysical schema, but also shows how Plato was a conspirator in such an agenda all along. Derrida’s enemy is not Plato but Platonism:

Platonism is certainly one of the effects of the text signed by Plato, for a long time the dominant effect and for necessary reasons, but this effect is always found upon return to be contrary to the text.2

By highlighting such a counter-Platonist reading of Plato, much of the enmity between he and Derrida is dissolved (though certainly not all of it). The texts above set the scene for an examination of (1) textual content that refers to participation, as well as (2) formal structuring and performative textual practices that embody that content, eliciting (3) a participatory experience between reader and text that models participation in the world.3

The hackneyed Plato of a static, two-tiered world gives way to the participatory Plato who theorizes the contrast between the mystery of an ineffable beyond and the immediacy of the sensible present in order to make room for the metaxy, the in-between, the triton genos. Plato’s two worlds become two sides of a coin: Pure forms without a sensual world would be

2 Derrida, Khora, 81–82, quoted in Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 239.

3 My use of the term “participation” is never the classic Platonic version (methexis [μέθεξις]) in which instantiations of a form participate in the form itself; e.g. all beautiful things, to the degree of their beauty, participate in the eternal form of the Beautiful). My use of “participation” is actually closer to the original Greek meaning of μέθεξις, which pertained to Greek theatre, where the audience participates, creates and improvises the action of a ritual. See “methexis” in the Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy .

2 empty, while the senses without forms would be blind to any order.4 The transcendence of the forms acts as a kind of lure, quickening the soul in a metaxic dance between the two poles. By showing us Plato in a new light,

Derrida helps us remember the Plato for whom “wonder is where philosophy begins and nowhere else,” and that such wonder in fact never ceases.5 This alliance brings out the ways in which Derrida’s engagement is neither deflationary nor self-defeating, but rather creatively unfolds what has become calcified, bringing forth concealed dimensions of Plato’s texts through its interrogations.

Derrida’s triptych On the Name, for which “How to Avoid Speaking” is a kind of introduction, will be the other main text under consideration.

Derrida’s deconstruction of the presence of self and other transforms each into a receding abyss, a secret, a vanishing point in a hall of mirrors, a mystery. Like the God of negative theology, every other is wholly other (tout autre est tout autre6). But this alterity of others, their unknowability, is actually what draws me toward them, constituting a space that is all the more dynamic for the fact that it can never be fully bridged. Be it in community interaction or in prayer, separateness is always necessary for relating. What appears first as a space of alienation actually allows metaxic eros to circulate.

4 In contrast to Kant’s forms of intuition, Plato’s forms exist outside the subject.

5 Plato, Theaetetus, 155d.

6 Derrida, Gift of Death, 69.

3 There is no pure, self-subsistent eros; eros is always intentional, always eros for something or someone else, and thus remains beyond a metaphysics of presence. The Derridean critique of pure presence opens the way to dynamic participation.

If the metaphysics of presence were an adequate description of reality, then a metaphysical treatise could hypothetically convey a satisfactory ontology: Things are simply and substantially present, thus words can capture their qualities and relationships, and an account of the state of affairs, though perhaps exceedingly complex, could potentially be composed. But the scenario changes drastically if some or all of the things in the world (e.g. especially persons, but objects too) turn out to be inexhaustible mysteries, singularities, or instances of transcendence. Persons are best known, not under exhaustive treatise description, but in living interaction. They are best spoken to, rather than spoken of. In a metaphysics of participation, knowing thus involves a doing—knowing is a doing. This is why a text that underwrites such a worldview must operate beyond the letter of what it simply says. The saying is no longer enough to adequately describe the world and would alone imply a metaphysics of presence. The mysteries of the world that are better related to must inhabit the text itself.

The barriers between being and discourse must breakdown, and thus too between ontology and epistemology. The text must perform and thereby draw the reader into relation with its mystery, opening up a metaxic space of participation. The participatory event between reader and text can then

4 translate to a new relationship between reader and world: a participatory epistemology. A text must engender a participatory experience in order to do justice to such a metaphysics.7

Some Historical Background8

Now if Plato had stopped here, the subsequent history of Western thought would, it can hardly be doubted, have been profoundly different from what it has been. But the most notable—and the less noted—fact about his historic influence is that he did not merely give to European otherworldliness its characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic, but that he also gave the characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic to precisely the contrary tendency—to a peculiarly exuberant kind of this-worldliness.9 – Arthur Lovejoy

Antiquity

Arthur Lovejoy, in his text The Great Chain of Being from which the above quotation is taken, gives a classic exposition of two opposite consequences of Plato’s work. For some interpreters, a dialogue like the

Republic seemed to declare the reality and perfection of the form of the good in its lofty transcendent heights as opposed to our derivative or even

7 For the sake of clearly illustrating my point, I often risk drawing an overly stark difference between treatise and literary writing, or analogously, between constative and performative discourse. Certainly, many famous treatises have given rise to myriad interpretations and have not managed to simply and unequivocally say what they mean. Likewise, no discourse could ever be wholly constative; it is not in the nature of language and discourse to be so. The repeatability, or iterability, of words, which is what makes them comprehendible, also makes them prone to new interpretations in new contexts. Thus all language to some degree exceeds its content. I solicit the reader’s charity in this regard.

8 While a full study of historical context is outside the scope of this essay, this section aims to tell a story in broad strokes that will better illuminate the thrust of the thesis. It is thus meant to be more evocative than exhaustive.

9 Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 45.

5 superfluous realm of becoming and mere appearance. By contrast, other readers saw in the Timaeus:

the World of Ideas now becoming an insubstantial thing, a mere pattern, having, like all patterns, value only when given concrete realization, an order of “possibles” which had but tenuous and meager being in a sort of ante-mundane Kingdom of the Shades until the boon of existence was conferred upon them.10

It is all the more notable that the exemplar dialogues in question traditionally form a diptych of sorts, with the Timaeus presented as a supplement to the

Republic. In this composite we see the seeds of the grand debates and problems of the Western philosophical tradition: nominalism and realism, empiricism and rationalism, materialism and idealism, the “hard problem” of consciousness. Even before Aristotle, Plato already contained a School of

Athens within himself.

And though there is not much sense in arguing about “what Plato really thought,” I do feel Lovejoy underestimates Plato when he says:

This implication, it is true, is not fully drawn out by Plato himself; but since it is plainly immanent in the Timaeus, he thus bequeathed to later metaphysics and theology one of their most persistent, most vexing, and most contention-breeding problems.11

Rather than seeing this heterogeneity as an oversight or even as an example of the text deconstructing itself, I wish to consider how Plato’s dialogues are consistently structured to contain this self-annulling tendency, an undecidability that puts the text at odds with itself. This heterogeneity is

10 Ibid., 53.

11 Ibid., 54.

6 finally an aspect of the dialogues deeper coherence, as it reflects the structure of Plato’s ontology itself. Let us briefly trace this double legacy of immanence and transcendence through several epochs.

One echo of this perennial problem is the Neoplatonist controversy over the descended soul, which holds special import for this study. Plotinus held that a portion of the soul does not descend and remains united to the

One, allowing a reunification with the Godhead through inner contemplation or philosophic ascent.12 In contrast, Iamblichus believed that the soul descends completely into the body, requiring an intercession of the gods from without that can be brought about by the ritual praxis of theurgy.13

While Plotinus leaned toward an “up-and-out” cosmology in line with an otherworldly Platonism, Iamblichus emphasized the sanctity of this world and the importance of matter for connecting with the divine. At first glance the distinction seems to follow the otherworldly/this-worldly split asserted by Lovejoy, but there is more nuance to this division. The choice is not simply between above and below, but between a dualist and a participatory relationship of above and below. While for Plotinus the divinization of the soul amounted to a retreat from a fallen world, Iamblichus considered the

12 Plotinus, Enneads, 163 (IV, 8, 4).

13 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 72.

7 goal of theurgy to be the co-enactment of an inherently good cosmogenesis with the Demiurge.14

We see a similar structure of dualism versus participation in the

Platonic reception in Augustine and Aquinas’s work.15 For Plato, evil (kako,

κακό) was something “upside-down” or out of place (anatrope, ἀνατροπὴ),16 and though the privatio boni doctrine is suppose to amount to the same,

Augustinian Platonism takes on a more righteous tone. What was primarily an ontological dualism in Plato becomes the moral schism between city of

God and city of man, between the prince of heaven and the prince of this world: “two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”17 And while Aquinas does accept a dualism between

Creator and creation (in fact the only dualism he accepts), his emphasis is on creation’s participation in God, who is the dynamic act of being itself.18

Participation expresses our dependence upon the divine in the very act of

14 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 22–23. An Iamblichean reading of Plato in section 1.2 will bring out many of the participatory themes that I wish to emphasize in contrast to a dualist Platonism. Finally though, Plato’s text constitutes a double oscillation: between the either/or of dualism and the both/and of participation. 15 We know that Aquinas had no direct contact with Plato’s lost dialogues, though he still received his fair share of Platonism second hand through Aristotle and others. For a discussion on the degree of Plato’s influence on Aquinas, see Fran O’Rourke, “Aquinas and Platonism,” 247–79.

16 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 9.

17 Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 28.

18 Sherman, “Genealogy of Participation”, 91.

8 our being, moment to moment. Existence itself flows as a gift from the infinite source.19 Though distinct, God is not in any way exterior to his creation. His transcendent otherness stands not in contrast to his presence, but is precisely the superlative breadth and depth of his presence in all things—and in which all beings participate.20

After being lost for most of the Middle Ages, it is Marsilio Ficino who resurrects the Platonic dialogues, both in translated letter and in living spirit.

He is an interesting combination of the two positions that we have been considering—dualist and participatory. On the one hand Ficino is greatly influenced by Plotinus, emphasizing the ascent of the soul to lofty heights and an ideal of spiritual beauty that renounces the body;21 yet on the other, he anticipates the Lockean notion that

since the cognition of our minds has its origins in the senses, we would never know the goodness hidden away in the inner nature of things, nor desire it, unless we were led to it by its manifestations in exterior appearance.22

Furthermore he insists that ritual practice must supplement philosophy, embracing a theurgic praxis reminiscent of Iamblichus. Here we see the

19 While Plato’s theory of forms depicts how a being’s essence participates in a certain form, Aquinas expands on this by outlining how a being’s existence also participates in—is due to—the divine act-of-being.

20 For a discussion of the Thomist existential turn in participatory theory, see Sherman, “A Genealogy of Participation,” 87–92.

21 Ficino, Commentary on the Symposium, 130.

22 Ibid., 164.

9 fullness of the Platonic aporia23—now dualist, now participatory—again held in tensional unity in a way perhaps fitting for the dawn (Greece) and high noon (Renaissance) moments of the western philosophical tradition.24

Modernity

With Descartes and later with Kant, the preoccupation with ontology so prevalent in the thinkers and ideas we have been considering so far shifts decisively to epistemology. While Iamblichus was concerned with the vertical hierarchy of beings upon that great chain connecting to hen (το εν) to us mortals—and Plotinus with the express elevator in between—Enlightenment thinkers become more concerned with the horizontal link between a subject and the object of his or her knowledge, or more generally between self and world. Plagued by doubt, Descartes dismantles all his beliefs until he is left with only his thinking, doubting mind, res cogitans. He divides this self- certain subject from the rest of the world, res extensa, instigating a radical mind/body dualism that, despite his best efforts to bridge, haunts us to this day. The cogito provides a sure foundation for knowledge but at the price of dividing itself from the world, perhaps irrevocably—the dualist position par exellence.

23 Aporia means “no way” in Greek. Various paradoxes, contradictions and self-annulling gestures present in both Plato and Derrida’s texts will concern us throughout. I intend to show how both writers use aporiai to elucidate a metaphysics of participation.

24 My contention is that at dusk we see this fullness of aporia held once again in Derrida’s engagement with Plato.

10 The conversation has shifted away from a transcendent God and onto a transcendent subject,25 yet the structural dynamics in question remain the same: what is the relationship between the seemingly radically opposed terms in the binaries of divine/human, mind/body, subject/object and self/world? If Descartes presents a dualist framework, what would a participatory one look like, and what other compromise positions are available? Is the divide so intractable that we must disbelieve or explain away one of its terms (eliminative monism)? Is the pineal gland, which

Descartes contended was the interface in between, robust enough to hold together two worlds so starkly severed? Will an effort at reconciliation collapse the real differences at stake? What is the topography of these primal regions and which of our faculties will best navigate them? These questions were pertinent for Plato and Descartes, and are still pertinent for us today.

Kant for his part, sought to secure the foundations of knowledge and freedom through his transcendental method, but at the expense of ever having full access to the things in themselves (noumena). The phenomenal world is knowable through mathematics and science because it is shaped by the forms of our intuition: space and time. In his own de-centering

Copernican Revolution, Kant declares that the world conforms to our cognition, not vice versa. It is our minds that impose time and space upon the

25 And this is no arbitrary shift: “With the movement from Descartes, through the Enlightenment, to Idealism and Romanticism, attributes traditionally predicated of the divine subject are gradually transferred to the human subject. As God created the world through the Logos, so man creates a ‘world’ through conscious and unconscious projection” (Taylor, Deconstruction in Context, 3).

11 things of the world; time and space are the conditions of possibility for the appearance of any object and do not exist independently of our minds. Thus mathematics and science do not describe the things in themselves, but the structures of our own minds. While Kant secures a reliable link between the subject and the object of knowledge, that knowledge becomes of dubitable import. Though phenomena may be fully grasped, noumena remain concealed, opening Kant to the threat of skepticism. Cartesian dualism, though assuaged, has not been overcome.

Fichte’s subjective idealism eliminates the tortuous existence of unknowable noumena by going further to suggest that the whole of Nature is a projection of the human mind—thereby absolutizing the ego and perhaps collapsing into solipsism. Under the influence of the emerging science of geology, Schelling’s objective idealism reverses course, asking instead, what must nature be like such that mind could emerge from it? Hegel would like to think he neatly wraps up this dialectic in the closed circle of absolute idealism: history is the unfolding of Geist, both the absolute subject and the objective whole, coming to know its own freedom. The phenomenological reduction of difference to identity overcomes all of the binaries of above and below, inside and outside, and the dream of a pure presence in absolute knowledge, undisturbed by any absence or lack, is achieved—the end of history and the end of philosophy.26

26 Taylor, Deconstruction in Context, 8–10.

12 Postmodernity So goes one overly cavalier reading of the story of German Idealism.27

Whether or not we agree with Hegel or affirm the success of his project, he has set the terms of debate for many of those who come after him and remains an important interlocutor for Derrida, who says:

The horizon of absolute knowledge is the effacement of writing in the logos… the reappropriation of difference… Yet all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all, that is, except eschatology, may be reread as a meditation on writing. Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference… the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.28

Though Hegel’s final end was the identity of identity and difference, he thinks deeply how each term contains the other within itself and assiduously avoids collapsing one into the other—until the last possible moment. In classic deconstructive fashion, Hegel provides resources for thinking beyond himself, beyond the collapsed, self-referential circle of a self-present subject who knows no other and no difference.

Ferdinand de Saussure also provides resources to Derrida for a general rethinking of the philosophy of the subject that characterizes the epoch from Descartes to Hegel. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure famously declares that in the system of language “there are only differences

27 For an alternative telling that casts Schelling as the hero, even according to Hegel’s own logic (after all, Schelling is the last man standing in the march of history, as he outlives Hegel), see Jason Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life. However it is Heidegger who, in his lectures (collected in Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom), first began to pull Schelling out of Hegel’s shadow. We will return to this idea in the next section.

28 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 26.

13 with no positive terms.”29 It is the phonic or graphic differences between words and syllables in a language that allow the terms to take on any meaning at all.30 Dog means what it does by virtue of its difference from hog and bog. This means that identity arises out of difference, giving a certain priority to the latter. Furthermore, dog has no special relationship to the barking animal but rather an arbitrary one. Additionally, temporality and history inevitably cause signifiers to shift and change, making impossible any rigorous systematization. Finally, it is not the subject who constitutes language but rather who is constituted by it.31 Hegel’s dreams of pure identity, coincidence of subject and object, absolute knowledge and self- knowledge in the system, are all called into question.

If, as Heidegger declares, philosophy is the metaphysics of presence,32 and the identity of identity and difference secures the closure of the system and the exclusion of any lack, then a more originary difference is required to think before and beyond philosophy—this is the “Task of Thinking.” For

Heidegger this will be the ontological difference between Being and beings, the opening or clearing that precedes and allows the possibility of any

29 Quoted in Taylor, Deconstruction in Context, 13. 30 And on this point Derrida has much to say, contending that the western tradition has consistently privileged the spoken word over the written.

31 Taylor, Deconstruction in Context, 13–14.

32 Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 427.

14 presence or absence.33 But older still, says Derrida, is différance, the heterogeneous origin that is the condition of possibility of all differences, but which due to its impurity and multiplicity no longer strictly merits the name origin.34 If Hegel’s project is to think the identity of identity and difference, we might say that Derrida’s is to think the différance that permits identity and difference.

The Way Forward is the Way Back

In the spirit of Heideggerean retrieval, we circle back to Schelling, where we already find the resources to begin to think beyond Hegel. In his later work Schelling describes a divine, Absolute Subjectivity, which contains a multiplicity within itself and does not coincide with itself in simple self- presence, but which ecstatically overflows itself. Composed of two opposite forces that are bound in tensional unity by a third force—which is a ground of otherness which secures the non-disunion of the opposed forces without collapsing their difference—the divine’s ground is bottomless, its origin non- simple and inscrutable, its telos unpredictable and never final. In contrast to

Hegel’s project and as a forerunner to Derrida’s, this non-totalizing vision

33 These are technical terms whose full exposition is outside the scope of this study. Briefly put, the ontological difference is the difference between the sheer fact of Being—that there is existence at all—and the being-things that populate our everyday world. According to Heidegger, the relationship between these two, i.e. the ontological difference, is interpreted differently in successive historical epochs. See Vail, Heidegger and the Ontological Difference.

34 Derrida, “Différance,” 22.

15 sees an untamable rulelessness that precedes and exceeds all form and order:

This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things. The indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in the understanding but remains eternally in the ground. Without this preceding darkness there is no reality of the creature; the gloom is its necessary inheritance.35

Furthermore, Schelling outlines a creative form of participation: we in our temporal, subjective becoming participate in the generative, churning overflow that is the becoming of the divine, Absolute Subject. Through the productive imagination, our artistic, revelatory and mythopoeic activities expressively partake in the divine unfolding, which alone allows us an understanding of that divinity. Schelling thus proposes viable ontological and epistemological alternatives to the closed system of self-presence and absolute knowledge—opening a space for both difference and participation.36

Circling back further, we find another parallel to Schelling’s divine

“multeity in unity” (to borrow a term from Coleridge) and to Derrida’s différance in Iamblichus’s notion of huparxis [ὕπαρξις]: “the anterior and commanding principle which contains in and around itself otherness and

35 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, quoted in Sherman, “A Genealogy of Participation,” 101.

36 Though it is outside the scope of our investigation, Alfred North Whitehead’s primary principle of Creativity offers a comparable ecstatic ground, i.e. a ground that overflows itself in creation. Also of note is Whitehead’s rallying against the bifurcation of nature into primary and secondary qualities in the wake of Descartes’ mind-body dualism.

16 multiplicity.”37 “Huparxis… pre-exists beyond all things and is the cause of every ousia but is not yet itself ousia.”38 It is the “hypo” + “archein,” the origin below origins, which contains a certain heterogeneity and is the condition of possibility for any being or lack thereof. As compared to simpler concepts of a unified, original source, huparxis does bear a certain resemblance to

Schelling’s Absolute and Derrida’s différance. We will return to this idea later in the thesis.

To offer another parallel, theurgy itself is a kind of proto-creative participation. As mentioned earlier, Iamblichus considered the goal of theurgy to be the co-enactment of an inherently good cosmogenesis with the

Demiurge.39 To this end, it was in fact necessary that the soul not coincide with itself (a position similar to Schelling and Derrida’s notions of subjectivity).

The loss of the soul’s unity and stability [via its descent] caused it to suffer, but this was the soul’s way to participate in the activity of the Demiurge. To deny diversity to the soul would deny its role in cosmogenesis where it bestowed coherence and unity to the chaos and diversity of generated life… The soul’s demiurgic unity, ironically, was available to it only through the act of self-division.40

However because the soul’s dividedness is integral to its essence, it can never intellectually grasp the undividedness through which it participates in the divine work. Ritual theurgy finally transcends philosophic thought: “What

37 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis Liber, quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 121.

38 Damascius, Dub. et Sol., quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 119.

39 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 22–23.

40 Ibid., 101.

17 the embodied soul could never know, it could, nevertheless, perform in conjunction with the gods. As discursive, however, the mind remained enantios, barred from union with the gods.”41 The theurgical practitioner makes their soul a vehicle for divine action through ritual activity.42

Iamblichus suggests that there is something that can be performed but not known, that can be participated in but not stated from the outside—Derrida might call it the secret. While necessarily cursory, this brief survey is meant to gesture toward some of the through lines running between these authors.

The distinction between performative and constative discourse, already at work in Plato and still active in Derrida, will be of central concern to this study.

We testify to a secret that is without content, without a content separable from its performative experience, from its performative tracing.43 – Derrida, “Passions”

41 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 110.

42 Ibid., 83

43 Derrida, “Passions,” 24.

II). Introduction to Analysis: Literature Review

Both Derrida and Plato have received myriad interpretations, which may be conveniently illustrated as falling on a spectrum between the poles of philosophy and literature. We can ask of each thinker, does he write philosophy or does he write literature? This distinction finds a loose parallel in the one mentioned above, between constative and performative discourse.

Often when we speak of Platonism, we are imagining a body of metaphysical doctrines that could be extracted from the Platonic corpus and laid out in treatise fashion. On the other hand, the dialogues can offer themselves as literary objects, which present compelling narratives that are ripe for analysis, but do not make overt statements about “how-things-really-are-in- the-world.” While most readers lie at neither extreme, we might say that the philosophers tend toward the former pole, while the classicists temper that urge with a healthy dose of the latter.

Some readers of Derrida, such as Christopher Norris and Rodolphe

Gasché, interpret him as a quasi- or ante-metaphysician who identifies

“infrastructures” or conditions of (im)possibility that allow any metaphysics or structural meaning to come about in the first place (and thus can dissolve them too).44 They extract a system or a method of deconstruction from the

Derridean oeuvre that can be acknowledged generally and shared publically.

Other readers, such as Richard Rorty, consider Derrida an ironist who writes

44 Norris, Derrida, 142–62; Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, 142–185.

19 provocative books about his own private fantasies using familiar philosophical personae, but who knows the futility of making any metaphysical claims about reality.45 Derrida simply stretches our imagination by presenting something novel in the familiar terms and using the familiar reference points of the Western philosophical tradition.

Very generally, the secondary literature regarding these two thinkers’ intersection divides into two camps according to the writer being championed. Some side with Derrida and attack Plato or Platonism, generally seeing deconstruction as a forceful, valid and necessary critique (Rorty,

Gasché, Norris).46 Others side with Plato, trying to defend him from deconstruction, usually by neutralizing its criticisms and portraying Plato as a “deconstructionist avant la lettre” (Hyland, Halperin, Ferrari),47 which suggests that Plato foresaw and incorporated such critique. Jasper Neel is a rare case of a reader not overtly taking sides; he sees each as a necessary corrective to the other.

Schematization of the Secondary Literature

An interesting, if formalistic, way to organize the secondary literature is according to the metaphysics/literature distinction given above, applied to

45 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 123.

46 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 122–25; Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, 255–71; Norris, Derrida, 28–62. 47 Hyland, Questioning Platonism, 86–106; Halperin, “Erotics of Narrativity,” 62; Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 206–221. 20 each thinker and recombined to give four possibilities, each of which will be examined in turn:

1). Derrida and Plato are both metaphysical. Derrida undercuts Platonism by showing the contingency of its binaries in an ante- metaphysical gesture (Gasché, Norris).

2). Derrida is metaphysical and Plato is literary—for when read closely we see that Plato’s text contradicts itself.

(a) Plato realized certain deconstructive insights about difference, but chose to background them and foreground others as an ethico-political strategy; Derrida simply brings the margins to the center in the service of a different ethico- political strategy (Zuckert).

(b) Another version of this position champions Plato, claiming he undercuts Derrida by undercutting himself. He foresaw deconstructionist critique and thus chose a literary form, speaking on multiple levels and never quite saying what he means in order to evoke something that cannot be said or written (Ferrari, Halperin, Hyland).

3). Derrida is literary and Plato is metaphysical. Derrida undercuts Plato by realizing the futility of Plato’s project, thus writing otherwise himself (Rorty).

4). The fourth position, that both take a multi-level literary approach which consciously undercuts its own message, is the one which will be considered in this thesis. The commentator who comes closest to this position is Jasper Neel, who shows how both Derrida and Plato undercut their apparent doctrines—yet he believes only Plato is doing this consciously.

Derrida and Plato are both Metaphysical

Christopher Norris, in one of the earliest (1987) chapter length treatments of Derrida and Plato, writes:

It is in Plato—and in the Phaedrus most strikingly—that Derrida discovers a certain protological scene of instruction, one that concerns the priority of speech over writing and the dangers

21 (philosophical, moral and political) of thinking to invert that priority.48

The stage is set and each fighter takes his corner in the ring:

Thoth makes the offer of writing as a gift to King Thamus, but the latter, having weighed up its virtues and vices, decides that man is better off without writing and therefore firmly declines the offer. His reasons (to which Plato evidently subscribes) are set forth in detail.49

Norris takes Plato as a philosopher, explaining through the mouthpiece of

King Thamus, why speech is superior to writing. Norris states that Derrida too (despite his own protestations to the contrary) has written a philosophical book whose theme is: “the prejudice against writing among philosophers, linguists, anthropologists and others down through the history of Western ‘logocentric’ thought.”50 Derrida is engaged in a “‘rehabilitation’ of writing against the superior truth claims of speech.”51 Norris presents both thinkers as philosophers arguing from opposed positions. Derrida wishes to upend the status quo by revealing the contingency of a foundational privileging of one side of the binary, speech/writing.

Rodolphe Gasché takes a similar position in his 1988 book, The Tain of the Mirror. He states Plato’s position as to the art of dialectical interweaving according to the Statesman:

Only between real opposition does the dialectical art of symploke weave what Plato, at one point in the Timaeus, calls “the fairest

48 Norris, Derrida, 28.

49 Ibid., 30, emphasis mine.

50 Ibid., 63. Derrida’s book is Of Grammatology.

51 Ibid., 80.

22 bond”… Such a bond alone effectuates the true koinonia with the Other, unifying itself and the Other in One whole.52

In contrast to Plato’s “real opposition” which Gasché likens to Hegelian contradiction,

The new art of weaving suggested by Derrida’s heterology… is no longer governed by truth values, and it escapes regulation by ideas of totality and unity. Derrida’s deconstruction of symploke—his generalization of interlacing, and his thinking of radical alterity—are subversive of thought itself, of what has been called by that name in the tradition, namely the thinking not only of something specific but of one determined thing, of a thing in its Oneness… [Derrida’s heterology focuses] in a nondialectical manner on the ways in which truth compounds with nontruth, on how principles and nonpresence are welded together.53

To Gasché’s ear, both thinkers propound a clear metaphysics, though

Derrida’s ceases to be a metaphysics strictly speaking, as it goes “under” the foundation of metaphysics by interrogating its very limits—thus Gasché prefers to call Derrida’s metaphysics, “infrastructures.” He frames the issue much more generally here:

Derrida is primarily engaged in a debate with the main philosophical question regarding the ultimate foundation of what is. Contrary to those philosophers who naively negate and thus remain closely and uncontrollably bound up with this issue, Derrida confronts the philosophical quest for the ultimate foundation as a necessity. Yet his faithfulness to intrinsic philosophical demands is paired with an inquiry into the inner limits of these demands themselves, as well as of their unquestionable necessity.54

52 Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, 98.

53 Ibid., 99–100.

54 Ibid., 7.

23 Derrida is presented as a kind of ante-metaphysician, exploring the conditions of possibility of any metaphysics, which when found, make that metaphysics contingent, thus becoming also its conditions of impossibility.

Derrida is Metaphysical and Plato is Literary

Catherine Zuckert offers a reading of Derrida and Plato (as well as

Strauss and Plato) that takes large steps toward acknowledging the complexity of Plato’s text, i.e. its different and often conflicting registers:

Because both Strauss and Derrida argue that a careful reading of classic texts shows that they have multiple meanings, commentators have characterized the analyses of both commentators as Talmudic… both argue that a careful reading of the dialogues shows that all the apparent arguments and doctrines are undercut.55

So while the text offers a doctrine on its surface, it questions that same doctrine upon closer reading. Zuckert suggests that Derrida thought this undercutting was not intentional on Plato’s part:

Plato recognized the interplay of opposites in the Sophist, but… suggested that the differences were, like the virtues, all parts of a larger whole. Plato did not concede, perhaps even to himself, what his dialogues show—namely, that the necessary condition for the existence or intelligibility of a differentiated world is the absence, the non-existence of an ever-present, homogeneous origin or first principle… Nothing "is" eternally. The "other" of the finite forms of existence is a negative infinity which has no characteristics or qualities of its own, no beginning or end, not even mere presence. Plato did not, therefore, correctly understand the character of his own activity.56

55 Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 202.

56 Ibid., 224.

24 Zuckert herself however thinks that Plato did understand the character of his activity and presented the metaphysical façade to serve an ethico-political agenda:

Plato suspected that open recognition of the interminable play between opposites would endanger all order—intellectual as well as social. He thus had his major spokesman suggest that an investigation of the logoi would lead to knowledge of an eternally intelligible order of ideas, and that those who acquired this knowledge would make the best rulers.57

Or again:

Plato concealed his or Socrates' insight into the non-presence, which is to say, non-intelligibility of Being in itself or the first cause (the Idea of the Good), Derrida suggests, because he perceived that this insight served, for example, in the works of the sophists, to undermine the oppositions between good and bad, life and death, upon which human moral and political life depend.58

These glosses suggest that Plato foresaw some of Derrida’s insights concerning difference, but intentionally withheld them for strategic reasons that served ethical and political ends.

Historically however, Zuckert notes, Plato’s efforts have had effects contrary to his intentions, thus prompting Derrida to take an opposite approach:

Rather than undermine established authority, philosophers following Socrates have shown rulers how to acquire power and impose order more effectively by showing them how to rationalize social relations. The greatest threats to the preservation of human life and society in the twentieth century have not come from the dissolution of traditional order or morals as a result of philosophic questioning; the greatest threats have arisen from the imposition of total(itarian)

57 Ibid., 225.

58 Ibid., 224.

25 orders with an ideo-logical justification. Derrida responds to the threat posed by attempts to "rationalize" everything—in both the philosophical and social sense—by showing that the logos by means of which philosophers from Socrates onward have conducted their investigations has no eternal basis or origin; on the contrary it proceeds by a continuous process of differentiation that does not produce any stable order or meaning.59

Here Zuckert suggests that Plato has chosen the wrong horse by betting on eternal order and suppressing interminable difference—but that he made that choice consciously and that the multiple registers can still be teased out of his text. Derrida unveils the bad political wager in hopes of winning a more just result.

* * *

The second version of “Derrida is metaphysical and Plato is literary” runs a little differently. This camp of readers considers the conflicting registers in Plato’s texts to be intentional ironies (taken by Derrida as unintentional). Rather than such an ironic case representing a fore- and back-grounding decision made by Plato (as with Zuckert above), the tension purposely carries a third meaning beyond either register. The classicist G.R.F

Ferrari demonstrates this admirably with regard to the infamous “speech vs. writing” debate in Phaedrus and treated in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Rather than straightforwardly favoring speech over writing,

Plato is at pains to suggest that the barrier Socrates sets up between speech and writing should be seen as a membrane prone to osmosis; that speech too is liable to the dangers of writing, and that writing can partake of the advantages of speech.60

59 Ibid., 225.

60 Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 207. 26

Ferrari’s close reading shows that Socrates is not Plato’s mouthpiece and that the dialogue undercuts Socrates’ explicit argument—not to negate it in favor of writing, but to create for the attentive reader a performative experience.

“What ultimately matters is neither writing nor speaking but the way of life in which they can find a worthy place.”61 To evoke this living activity, “Plato devised his text such that for the event which we cannot experience—his creative performance as author—we may substitute our own performance as interpreters.”62 Irony and contradiction in the text demand interpretation.

Plato includes these in order to spur the reader toward a certain experience, exemplifying a certain way of life. Ferrari engages Derrida explicitly, noting that he

refuses to push the idea that Plato intended this irony. Rather, [he] takes Socrates' words to represent a serious attempt on Plato's part to argue the value of the spoken over the written word; an attempt which fails, however, for metaphysical reasons which go to the heart of Plato's whole philosophic enterprise, and which would cause any such attempt to undermine itself.63

Derrida tries to show metaphysically why Plato’s argument is undercut, but he has missed the point by mistaking Socrates’ explicit position for Plato’s.

Rather, in the tension between the explicit and the implicit arguments of the dialogue, the reader is drawn to embody the philosophic way of life.

Another proponent of this position is David Halperin:

61 Ibid., 221.

62 Ibid., 211.

63 Ibid., 206–7.

27 The Symposium, and the Phaedrus in its own way, while seeming to privilege the erotics of narrativity, is actually privileging writing over dialectical speech. Or, rather, it privileges dialectical speech in certain passages and privileges inscription in others. The dialogue’s “official” position is balanced against, and undercut by, an “unofficial” critique of that position… I read Plato in opposition to Derrida not as a metaphysical dogmatist but as a kind of deconstructionist avant la letter, a cunning writer fully alive to the doubleness of his rhetoric who embraces différance and who actively courts in his writing an effect of undecidability… Without denying the positive philosophical thrust of the Symposium and the other dialogues, we must also learn to come to terms with Plato’s equally serious determination not to leave his readers with a body of dogma.64

Halperin goes on to argue that the undecidability inherent in Plato’s textual strategy in the Symposium creates in its interpreters the very unfulfilled erotic dynamism of which it speaks, unifying the doctrinal and anti-doctrinal registers of the text in a third purpose.65 The Phaedrus engenders a similar effect:

That Plato's interpreters should have scrutinized the Phaedrus in exactly the same terms in which the Phaedrus represents its interlocutors as scrutinizing literary texts indicates, among many other things, something of the extent to which Plato's texts mimetically construct the desires of their readers, engaging them in a hermeneutic activity that imitates the philosophical activity of the interlocutors represented in the dialogues. (Plato’s texts read us, evidently, as much as we read them, even if they also seem to write, to prescribe, our own responses to them.)66

For Halperin, Derrida mistakenly takes Plato as a metaphysical dogmatist in need of deconstruction. But, as we saw in Ferrari, Plato in fact self-

64 Halperin, “Erotics of Narrativity,” 61–62.

65 Ibid., 63.

66 Ibid., 67.

28 deconstructs in order to create in his readers an experience that could never be conveyed by the content of his text or its deconstruction alone.

More recently Drew Hyland has made a similar argument in his work

Questioning Platonism. He puts the point more generally, focusing on the dialogue format itself:

For making assertions and uttering propositions clearly and persuasively, there is simply no better format than the treatise. But suppose that, with the Platonic dialogues, you hold that philosophy, one might say the life of philosophy, is not so much assertive (of this position or that) as interrogative. If so, then the fundamental speech- act of philosophy is no longer the assertive proposition but the question.67

Though he doesn’t spell out the purpose of the tension in the text quite as clearly as Halperin, he also suggests that the dialogues are invitations to philosophy, evoked by the effect of undecidability:

What if the text in question contains no author’s assertions to deconstruct? What if there is no set of manifestly central theses that marginalize other meanings? What if the very point of the text in question is to set into play a host of meanings, of theses, of questions, to play off against each other in a dialogue without conclusion and without end?68 Hyland criticizes Derrida for assuming there is a body of Platonic dogma

(Platonism) to deconstruct and praises Plato’s complex literary style for prompting the reader to do philosophy in a way a treatise never could.

Two other authors who assume a similar position but go in rather different directions than those stated here deserve mentioning. Samuel

Wheeler in his work Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy acknowledges

67 Hyland, Questioning Platonism, 92.

68 Ibid., 94.

29 Plato’s self-deconstructing tendencies with regard to the Parmenides and

Phaedo and in his final chapter draws out some ways in which Derrida’s project is parallel to Plato’s.69 Additionally Catherine Pickstock in her fine work After Writing portrays Plato as anticipating deconstructive critiques.

She critiques Derrida’s emphasis on writing for amounting to a denial of the physical body and proceeds to argue for the liturgical consummation of philosophy in the field of religious studies.70

Derrida is Literary and Plato is Metaphysical

Richard Rorty’s reading of Derrida depends upon a not arbitrary division of his work into an earlier, “more professorial” phase and a later phase that is “more eccentric, personal, and original.”71 The first phase includes works like “Plato’s Pharmacy” and Of Grammatology, while the second includes pieces like Glas and The Postcard. Rorty interprets Rodolphe

Gasché and Christopher Norris’s reading of Derrida along the same lines traced above—a position he calls ironist theorizing: Derrida’s earlier period is a search for

words which express the conditions of possibility of all previous theory—all metaphysics and all attempts to undercut

69 Wheeler, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, 238. The chapter is entitled “Derrida’s Différance and Plato’s Different.” The rest of the work examines some affinities of Derrida with Davidson and other analytic philosophers as well as with Wittgenstein. On Derrida’s similarities and differences to Wittgenstein, see Henry Staten’s excellent book Wittgenstein and Derrida, which is examined in Wheeler’s work.

70 Pickstock, After Writing, 19.

71 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 123.

30 metaphysics…[and yet] words which get us “beyond” metaphysics— which have force apart from us and display their own contingency.72

This project is both constructive and theoretical in its search for the most comprehensive framework, and yet critical and ironic in its refusal to ascribe any necessity to such a framework, or the words describing it—ironist theorizing. Rorty objects that “the obvious problem with any such reading…

[is] that the whole idea of ‘undercutting’ and ‘conditions of possibility’ sounds terribly metaphysical.”73 A pragmatist like Rorty vehemently eschews any metaphysical pretenses, be they Plato’s or Derrida’s.

Whether or not Derrida was initially engaged in such a transcendental project, Rorty suggests “we read Derrida’s later writings as turning such systematic projects of undercutting into private jokes.”74 Rorty goes on to state that the later Derrida privatizes philosophical thinking and thus breaks the tension between irony (the critical, undercutting project) and theorizing

(the constructive project). Derrida gives up publically shared theory—which would mean engaging with his predecessors on their own terms—in favor of privately fantasizing over his predecessors with no attempt at social utility or moral prescription (for example, The Postcard imagines numerous, often ludicrous, lewd, and hilarious, fantasies about the relationship between

Socrates, Plato and their Ideas).

72 Ibid., 123.

73 Ibid., 124.

74 Ibid., 125.

31 Falling back on private fantasy is the only solution to the self- referential problem which [ironist] theorizing encounters, the problem of how to distance one’s predecessors without doing exactly what one has repudiated them for doing.75

The problem is how to undercut Plato’s metaphysics without simply presenting a well-disguised, “deeper” metaphysical system. It cannot be done, says Rorty, thus “Derrida’s importance [lies] in his having had the courage to give up the attempt to unite the private and the public.”76 The philosophical personae, terms and concepts that appear in a work like The

Postcard, are being treated creatively and literarily, rather than metaphysically. Rather than showing us something about the structures of reality, Derrida has written

a kind of book which nobody had ever thought of before. He has done for the history of philosophy what Proust did for his own life story… Both he and Proust have extended the bounds of possibility.77

Derrida has trumped Plato’s metaphysical efforts by realizing their impotence and engaging in a successful literary project instead.78

75 Ibid., 125.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid., 137.

78 “Rorty’s further contention that the fiction has only a private meaning is contradicted, however, by the comment reported from 15 March 1979, ‘I do not believe in propriety, property, and above all not in the form that it takes according to the opposition public/private’ ([Postcard] 185)” Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 336n23.

32 Derrida and Plato are both Literary

More precisely put, both Derrida and Plato are both metaphysical and literary. However it is the literary dimension to which I wish to draw special attention. This does not mean that there are no positive metaphysical doctrines in these authors, just that such considerations need to be made in light of the literary operations also taking place. This position is the one that I will adopt and consider in the main body of the thesis. However it is worth examining Jasper Neel’s work, Plato, Derrida and Writing, as a precursor to my interpretation. Neel’s presentation unfolds in multiple stages: He takes

Plato’s critique of writing at face value; he then deconstructs it along the lines of Derrida’s strategy; and finally rehabilitates it by showing how Plato’s text anticipated Derrida’s critiques. Alongside this he defends deconstruction against its detractors, teasing out a theory of writing from Derrida’s texts, only to then show how this theory undermines its own foundations and thus collapses: “Tearing down Phaedrus only to set it up again coupled with setting up deconstruction only to tear it down again.”79 Neel’s text thus incorporates all of the positions and arguments mentioned above—taking each writer at face value and then showing how their texts undercut themselves. He thinks Plato may have done this intentionally, but does not consider such an intention on Derrida’s part. Neel’s chiasmic reading suggests that Plato and Derrida’s texts have a complementary relation:

79 Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing, xii.

33 Plato and Derrida are two moments of the same maneuver. One argues that truth is a possibility and then sets out on a quest whose destination is the end of the human condition. The other shows that any sort of claim to truth conceals not only from its reader but also from itself the process of différance that forever prevents truth either from appearing (which would be the transcendental signified) or from having a place in which to appear (which would be pure self- presence).”80

On the surface Plato presents a metaphysical truth to be sought, but by his literary undercutting of the possibility of that truth, evokes a quest without end. Derrida, in a kind of negative complementary gesture, argues for the impossibility of that truth ever being arrived at—but his very argument precludes its own truth.

Though insightful, in the last analysis Neel takes Derrida’s argument at face value, notes its naiveté, and deconstructs it in much the same way that the metaphysical Derrida takes Plato’s argument at face value and deconstructs it:

There is no way to explain what leads Derrida to attempt showing that Plato, rather than using language, got caught being used by language. My hunch, however, is that Derrida suffers from a radically oversimplified, even nostalgic, conception of what Plato, and other thinkers since his time, considered truth to be.81

Neel suggests that it is rather Derrida who got caught being used by language.

So in the end Plato is the more astute thinker and writer, though deconstruction presents a valuable corrective to his tendency toward metaphysical hypostatization. But what if neither Plato nor Derrida got

80 Ibid., 203.

81 Ibid., 197.

34 caught being used by language? What if Derrida, like Plato, was consciously embracing a multi-register literary approach that was meant to reveal its own inner contradiction upon close reading? What if his text was meant to do something to the reader rather than impart information? This is the position I will argue in what follows.

Significance

This joint reading of Derrida and Plato reveals their hidden continuities by highlighting the performative or literary dimension in each.

Plato and Derrida, often seen in opposition, are shown to be engaging in similar projects, albeit from different angles. After arguing for the presence of such a performative dimension in these thinkers, we must ask: Why would they adopt such a strategy? Why not write in a straightforward, treatise fashion? I feel this performative dimension ultimately reflects a belief about how meaning is made in the world: through a subject’s co-creative participation with the field that encompasses them. By this I do not mean what is normally understood by Platonic participation in the forms, but rather what Richard Tarnas describes as “participatory epistemology.”82

This position suggests that meaning is neither something outside the human mind waiting to be found in the field (the typical modernist/structuralist position), nor is it constructed or projected by the subject onto a meaningless field (the slightly caricatured postmodernist/poststructuralist position).

82 See Tarnas, Passion, 434. See also Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, 155, and Ferrer and Sherman, Participatory Turn.

35 Rather, in line with some phenomenological accounts, meaning is a co- creation, enacted by the participation of the subject with the encompassing field. The subject draws forth a meaning that exists in potentia, but which must go through the process of articulation to be made manifest.

If meaning isn’t out there to be found, Plato cannot simply state metaphysical beliefs as if he could stand outside the system as an impartial and objective observer; thus he writes literary dialogues that undercut themselves in an attempt to faithfully portray the impossibility of metaphysical doctrine—as well as to draw his close readers into a participatory experience that might allow them to create meaning for themselves. Complementarily, if meaning isn’t constructed by human subjects, Derrida cannot just read into Plato’s text whatever he likes; he rigorously follows its contours, bringing to light the very contradictions that

Plato hid there, but finally undercutting himself, showing his attentive readers that both he and Plato are intimating something of the fundamental impossibilities of the world.

In both cases the writers’ performative utterance is meant to evoke a performative experience in the reader83—precisely something that cannot be uttered, whether written or spoken. Such an experience is participatory epistemology at work, creating meaning through the subject’s participation with all that is “outside” the subject. Meaning isn’t out in the text, nor is it

83 Here and throughout, I use “utterance,” a bit incorrectly, as a third term that would encompass both speech and writing.

36 projected by the reader, rather each reading is an act of writing, an interpretation made by the reader with the text. When we consider Derrida’s famous il n’y a pas hors-texte in its widest sense, it is the entire world as it presents itself for interpretation with which we are participating. Both Plato and Derrida choose a performative, literary strategy to reflect their commitment to a participatory epistemology and to evoke the same in their readers.

Chapter One: Plato

Never tell what you’re doing, and, pretending to tell, do something else that immediately crypts, adds, entrenches itself.84

Every reading is a writing, an act of interpretation. What if I told you, you are participating in the creation of this text? What if I said, you are providing a supplement? What I if told you, you had read this sentence wrong? Go ahead, read it again. Your separation from the text as a neutral observer is an illusion. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. That was not parallel construction. It is only when something goes awry that you realize your entanglement in the creation of meaning. And because of your contribution, it deosn't eevn mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The sense of the text coalesces somewhere between you and the page. And though these kinds of syntactic supplements will not be our focus, they illustrate the way we will explore participation semantically: The meaning of a text is crystallized through interpretation. Every reading is a writing.

The same holds true for the meaning of the world around you:

Consider the rainbow and ask yourself, is it really there?85 Even though the rainbow is to some degree publically verifiable, in a crucial way its reality converges somewhere between the raindrops, the sunlight and your eyes.

While the rainbow and the sentences above are particularly salient examples,

84 Derrida, “Living On,” 175–76.

85 This example comes from Owen Barfield’s marvelous book on participation, Saving the Appearances, 15–18.

38 whether you are aware or not, you always participate in creating your reality.

The preceding sentence said that you participate, while the preceding paragraph actually did something to you through its performance; it drew awareness to the role you play in creating meaning. The philosophic life is one that has consciously awoken to its participation in the creation of reality.

Plato aims not only to say this to us, but also to do it to us through the performative aspects of his text.

* * *

This chapter especially, highlights how Plato’s text stimulates participation in two ways—saying and doing86:

1). First, by supposing a transcendent realm of forms, Plato spurs the philosopher into action, onto a quest for truth.87 The forms may even be thought of as noble lies necessary to incite the journey.88 They are lures which awaken a spark in the heart of the seeker. In the Symposium, we will see that eros [ἔρος] is the lover’s guide on this pilgrimage toward a mysterious beyond. Sated desire is desire no longer, thus true lovers of

86 Neither of which is the classic Platonic version (methexis [μέθεξις]) in which instantiations of a form participate in the form itself; e.g. all beautiful things, to the degree of their beauty, participate in the eternal form of the Beautiful). As mentioned at the outset of the essay, my use of the term participation is actually closer to the original Greek meaning of μέθεξις, which pertained to Greek theatre, where the audience participates, creates and improvises the action of a ritual. See “methexis” in Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, Penguin Books, 2005. 87 Eric Voegelin’s reading of Plato has helped to inform mine. He regularly uses the phrase “quest for truth” in Order and History.

88 Insofar as they cannot be discursively proven or made fully present.

39 wisdom may realize that their odyssey is eternal. In this sense Plato’s vision is a participatory one. Philosophy’s business is never finished; a form is never fully known; and the world itself is always necessary in that process of coming to know, in a yearning love affair with a receding insight, a withdrawing wisdom. In this way, the message or content of Plato’s text promotes participation with the world, which leads toward increasing yet always-incomplete knowledge of eternal ideas.89

2). Second, Plato’s text engenders participation on the level of form, in the very way it is written, through what I’m calling its literary quality. The performative aspects of the text end up doing more than what is simply said in a constative manner. In the Phaedo for example, with death looming, the conversation suggests that the body and material world be eschewed in favor of the immortal soul and its converse with the transcendent realm. Yet a close reading in section 1.3 will show how the body is highlighted in the dramatic staging of the dialogue at key moments. The discussion of the characters suggests one thing, while their enactments draw attention to the opposite. What are we to make of this contradiction and what does Plato really mean? When we ask ourselves these questions, we have entered into the second form of participation present in Plato’s text. No longer able to be neutral and detached readers, the dialogue has urged us for an interpretive contribution. The text undercuts its own surface meaning, demanding some

89 To elaborate on my interpretation: The forms are eternally incomplete as regards materiality, never wholly manifest in our realm and thus perpetually absent. What can never be known partakes of a certain negative eternity.

40 explanation on the part of the reader to resolve its apparent contradiction.

And though the various readings we can offer do make sense of the text, what

Plato really means is finally undecidable. This is because his words are not simply constative—saying what they mean in a straightforward way—but performative.90 Saying something negative about the body does not simply mean something negative about the body, but is rather a single moment in a web of dramatic choreography that ends up doing more than the sum of its parts say (indeed the sum of its parts are in contradiction). What Plato “really means” recedes behind his performative utterance, which is meant to evoke a performative experience in the reader. Thus on the level of form, Plato brings about an engagement between reader and text that is analogous to the one he is describing between philosopher and world on the level of content. The reader, by interpreting the text, can evocatively approach its meaning but never offer a definitive reading; just as the philosopher, through participation in the world, can meaningfully grow his or her knowledge but never master wisdom—only love it. The reader’s interpretive relationship with the text serves as exemplar to cultivate a new philosophic relationship with the world.

Throughout the thesis, two concepts will help us to elucidate this participatory way of knowing. Mystery will refer to any structural absence

90 Again, I perhaps risk overstating my point, for in the end even constative discourse is subject to multiple interpretations that cannot be cast aside to lay bare what-is-really-meant. I simply wish to point out how much more this is the case when the text at hand is purposely performative. 41 such as the undecidable meaning of the text or the unreachable beyond of the form of the good.91 These are not hidden things that could somehow be unveiled by superior means but are in fact necessary in their non-being, serving to organize what exists in relation to them—like a vanishing point coordinates perspectival space or a pregnant pause speaks most loudly precisely by not speaking. This is a concept I aim to build throughout the thesis rather than offer as given. Nietzsche said that philosophers “must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing.”92 This thesis will make use of the concept mystery but will also make it, through use of the texts in question. The textual evidence helps give body and definition to the concept while the concept serves as a center of organization through which to analyze the text.

The creation of concepts presupposes what Deleuze calls a plane of immanence. When we run a transversal line through these texts, forcing ourselves to think each author within the same plane, concepts emerge, which group numerous clusters of variations—the concept being a center of consistency and vibration with which the different variations resonate.93 To give a few more illustrations of mystery: the infrared and ultraviolet (they

91 Beyond = epekeina (επέκεινα), as in “epekeina tes ousios” or “beyond being,” which is how Plato describes the good in the Republic at 509b. 92 Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, 5.

93 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, 23.

42 exceed vision, they are the hyper- and hypo-visual, they are beyond vision and indicate a region that is structurally absent from vision); mise en abyme

(literally, “placed into abyss,” this is the effect created when one stands between two mirrors, or more formally refers to a technique in Western art where an image contains a smaller copy of itself, in a sequence appearing to recur infinitely; the end point is structurally absent); Zeno and Godot (Zeno is famous for his paradox in which one must, in order to traverse a distance, first traverse half that distance, and then half that, and then half that, and so on infinitely without ever arriving; Godot is the name of Samuel Beckett’s famous character who is constantly awaited, but who never arrives)—these are all variations on the conceptual theme of mystery. But Deleuze is clear: a concept is not a category. While the latter subsumes particulars bearing the same predicates under the banner of a monolithic identity, the former surveys variations yet grants them their diversity, weaving a nexus that is enriched by contrast rather than leveling it. The category reduces variations to instances of the same, while the concept is fertilized by their differences.

Another concept always accompanies mystery, and is implied by it, insofar as a mystery always invites speculation: metaxy [μεταξύ]. When we are drawn toward the mystery, like “X” longing for infinity, we have entered the place of metaxy.94 Plato calls eros metaxy in the Symposium—the lover’s guide on the odyssey toward the mysterious beyond. The metaxy is the in-

94 Thinking mystery and metaxy is like a “metaphysical calculus” that takes up the limit (X∞) into its terms, in an attempt to describe the shapes of life that resist an arithmetic portrayal. This “X” will visit us again later in the thesis.

43 between, what joins mortals to gods and the immanent to the transcendent, what allows us, in Deleuze’s terms, “to think transcendence within the immanent,” rather than remaining in a dualist ontology.95 “Being in the middle of the two, [it] round[s] out the whole and binds fast all to all.”96 The metaxy is always the third term, or as we shall discuss in chapter 3, the triton genos (τρίτον γένος, third genre or kind). It is the joiner of opposites that, unlike Hegelian aufhebung, never collapses differences but holds them in yearning tension—basking in a Sisyphean optimism not unlike Oscar Wilde’s description of a cigarette: “the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”97

Section 1.1 will examine the Symposium and the presentation of eros as the classic exemplar of metaxy. This inquiry will also highlight the two forms of participation on the levels of content and form mentioned above.

Section 1.2 will revisit Iamblichus and Plotinus with regard to the issues mentioned in the historical background section: While the former is a professed monist, the latter leans toward an implicit ontological dualism, helping to illustrate and reconcile the potential readings latent in Plato’s text.

Section 1.3 presents the Phaedo as another instance of textual performativity that evokes a participatory experience in the reader, and also considers death as a classic instance of mystery. The Symposium and Phaedo stand as

95 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 47.

96 Plato, Symposium, 202e.

97 Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 55.

44 bookends to this chapter: love and death, eros and thanatos, metaxy and mystery.

1.1: Symposium

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies98 – Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

In the Symposium we read the most vivid and direct account of metaxy as eros. Eros is always intentional, desiring some object that it does not possess. There can be no desire, and thus no true love for what one already possesses. Socrates is quite clear and firm on this point:

it’s necessary that this be so: a thing that desires desires something of which it is in need; otherwise, if it were not in need, it would not desire it. I can’t tell you, Agathon, how strongly it strikes me that this is necessary.99

Love’s object is the structural absence or mystery we are elucidating, while eros is the dynamic intermediary that constitutes the yearning between lover and beloved. And as Alcibiades illustrates in the account of his love affair with Socrates, the yearning must never be consummated or else extinguish the fecund spark of eros. Metaxy never manages to unveil mystery, nor could it, without transmuting mystery into something else, and thereby quelling its own urge. For metaxy to remain in between, mystery must remain inviolate.

Despite his pleadings and advances, Alcibiades proclaims, “my night with

98 Shakespeare, “Antony and Cleopatra,” act 2, sc. 2, lines 245–48.

99 Plato, Symposium, 200a–b.

45 Socrates went no further than if I had spent it with my own father or older brother!”100 This is Socrates performing the role of eros. Plato does not simply tell us what love is, but dramatically stages the nature of the true lover in the coy character of Socrates—who knows that physical consummation would be a vulgar end to love’s generativity, “gold in exchange for bronze.”101

Let us dwell for a moment on the ways Socrates performs eros, before turning to the content of his erotic theory. In Diotima’s description of eros we cannot help but see the image of Socrates:

He is always poor, and he’s far from being delicate and beautiful (as ordinary people think he is); instead he is tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always lying on the dirt without bed, sleeping at people’s doorsteps and in roadsides under the sky, having his mother’s nature, always living in Need. But on his father’s side he is a schemer after the beautiful and the good; he is brave, impetuous, an intense, an awesome hunter, always weaving snares, resourceful in his pursuit of intelligence, a lover of wisdom through all his life, a genius with enchantments, potions and clever pleadings.102

Socrates is described in parallel fashion as “utterly unnatural” (219c), almost always in “bare feet” (220b), habitually standing for long periods of time on other people’s porches (175a), having extraordinary powers of endurance and bravery (220d) and being a weaver of ensorcelling speeches (215b-e).

Like eros is the child of Poverty (πενίᾳ) and Plenty (πόρος) and partakes of

100 Ibid., 219d.

101 Ibid., 219a. We will later examine how Plato repeats this move in the Timaeus where Socrates enacts the khora, another metaxic figure.

102 Ibid., 203c–d. Translation slightly altered.

46 both,103 Socrates is wise in knowing his own ignorance, always hanging between these poles, a lover but not a possessor of wisdom. At the end of the dialogue we find Socrates-eros seated between Agathon and Alcibiades.

Agathon’s name [ἀγαθόν] means “Good” in Greek, while Alcibiades has just drunkenly dashed in with wreathed head, an image of Dionysus.104 Socrates- eros is seated between the heavenly Good and the earthly figure of sensible beauty. Leaning toward Agathon at 222c-e, Socrates-eros is the metaxy that stretches from the sensible toward the good-beyond-being.105 Everything that is conjectured about love applies by analogy to Socrates, and thus to the philosophic life. This performative portrayal is important because it implies that philosophy is not just an intellectual activity, but something more fully participated in, something that involves and grips the whole-person as much as does being in love.

Returning to the content of the dialogue, it is Diotima the wise who instructed Socrates in the art of love, teaching him that eros is neither the good nor the beautiful nor even a great god. “Is love ugly, then, and bad,” asks

103 Penia [πενία] means poverty or need, and poros [πόρος] means plenty, wealth or possession. Together the sense of need and possession further underscore how the philosopher never quite possesses that for which he or she longs.

104 This moment was foreshadowed in the first pages of the dialogue at 176a: “Dionysus will soon enough be the judge of our claims to wisdom!”

105 The dialogue concludes with Socrates arguing that playwrights should compose both comedy and tragedy, another metaxic intervention between opposites.

47 Socrates?106 Of course not, Diotima responds, countering with a parallel question: “if a thing’s not wise, it’s ignorant? Or haven’t you found out yet that there’s something between wisdom and ignorance?”107 It is correct judgment without a reason, or true belief without justification, which lies between wisdom and ignorance108—just as love too, is of a middling nature.

Love is not a god, for the gods are surely good and beautiful, nor is he a mortal, but rather a metaxic daimon (δαίμων) shuttling between gods and humans, between what is beautiful and ugly and between wisdom and ignorance. This is more than a passing analogy and is thus no small claim:

Plato is stating that the structure of understanding mirrors the structure of desire. And so just as true lovers eschew a vulgar consummation of their eros, so too do true lovers of wisdom accept the necessary absence of the object of their knowledge. Both of the pairs—philo-sophia and eros- beloved—resemble the structure of metaxy-mystery. And so it is no surprise that love is described above as a philosophoon (φιλοσοφῶν) or lover of wisdom.109 We are now in a position to better understand Socrates’ earlier quip that “erotics is the only subject I’ve ever claimed to understand.”110 The

106 Plato, Symposium, 201e.

107 Ibid., 202a.

108 We may also call this “right opinion.” When we treat the Republic in Chapter 2, the metaxic role of opinion will again concern us. 109 Plato, Symposium, 203d, as above. Interestingly, love is also described here as a pharmakeus (φαρμακεύς), as well as a sophistes (σοφιστής).

110 Ibid., 177e.

48 root of “erotics,” ta erotika (τά ἐρωτικά), sounds related to the root of erotao

(ἐρωτάω), which means “to ask” or “to question.”111 Given Socrates’ well- known propensity for questioning, such a pun was certainly not lost on his audience, but with regard to the parallel structures of knowledge and desire, such a pun is also certainly not trivial. Diotima sums things up by saying that those who are mistaken about love think it is “being loved, rather than being a lover.”112 If we extend this formulation to the parallel structure of understanding, we may say that some mistakenly think wisdom is being surrounded by and in possession of knowledge rather than in its pursuit. So far we have seen how Plato both explicates the nature of love and the nature of wisdom along parallel lines, and also performs this concurrence of eros and philosophy in the person of Socrates.

Diotima’s speech takes a turn at this point, betraying a second discourse on love that the attentive reader will notice does not quite square with the first. She says that love desires immortality and partakes of it in part through reproduction.113 Diotima asks: “The lover of beautiful things has a

111 Reeve, “Plato on Friendship and Eros.” Indeed this supposed etymological connection is taken up explicitly in the Cratylus (398c). Furthermore, this is what Socrates does in the Lysis when asked by Hippothales (206c), “what should someone say or do in order to get his prospective boyfriend to love him?” Socrates demonstrates for Hippothales, submitting Lysis to the elenchus: You make him love you by asking him questions. Along with the Symposium, the Lysis does much to paint the philosopher as the canonical lover.

112 Plato, Symposium, 204c.

113 Ibid., 207a.

49 desire; what does he desire?”114 Socrates answers: that those things become his own. And what will the lover of beautiful and good things have when they become his own? Socrates answers: Happiness. Our interlocutors seem to have forgotten their stress upon desire not attaining its object. “In a word, then, love is wanting to possess the good forever,” which is achieved by

“giving birth in beauty, whether in body or soul.”115 As Luce Irigaray points out, this new emphasis on creation or procreation turns love into a means, annulling its intermediary function and subjecting it to a telos.116 She explains:

Something gets solidified in space-time with the loss of a vital intermediary milieu and of an accessible, loving, transcendental. A sort of teleological triangle replaces a perpetual movement, a perpetual transvaluation, a permanent becoming. Love was the vehicle of this. But if procreation becomes its goal, it risks losing its internal motivation, its fecundity ‘in itself,’ its slow and constant regeneration.117

Oscar Wilde has finally been satisfied by his cigarette. Sisyphus has completed his labor. We have stepped out of the metaxy and unveiled the mystery. We have exchanged gold for bronze.

Just when we feel that we have lost the love of perpetual becoming,

Diotima seems to back pedal, returning to her first discourse on love by focusing on the individual: A person “never consists of the same things,

114 Ibid., 204d.

115 Ibid., 206a–b.

116 Irigaray, Sorcerer Love, 44.

117 Ibid., 38.

50 though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body.”118 She goes on to say that our personalities and even our knowledge are subject to the same transience and regeneration. It is only through “care” or “attention,” meletan (μελετᾶν), that knowledge is preserved in the face of forgetting. Everything that is aging, through striving, recreates something of itself and thereby shares a piece of immortality through this zeal of love.119 Diotima has returned to a notion of love as it was before she invoked procreation, a love that is in permanent motion within oneself, wresting from the flow of time a presence between mortality and immortality.

But then only sentences later, she considers the quest for immortality through fame, again casting the object of love outside of oneself into an attainable goal: Achilles loved Patroclus to the end and died for him only because he expected the memory of his virtue to become immortal.120 And so the memory has become immortal, as evinced by my writing. But this is no longer the love who, like the phoenix, dies and springs to life in the very same day, oscillating between what’s mortal and immortal.121 Instead, this is a love become static, a love that has obtained its object, a love as assured of its

118 Plato, Symposium, 208d–e.

119 Ibid., 208b.

120 Ibid., 208d.

121 Ibid., 203b–e.

51 immortality as it is assured of its death. Irigaray criticizes this latter method of Diotima’s argumentation on love, claiming it “risks losing its irreducible character and being replaced by a meta-physics.”122 The second model both calcifies the difference between life and death and collapses the dialectic between love and its object. Furthermore, whichever approach to love we take will define how we interpret the critical final portion of Diotima’s speech. In “the final and highest mystery,”123 the lover must climb the “rising stairs”124 of love. From first loving bodies, he then learns to love souls, followed by knowledge, in an ascent culminating in love of the form of Beauty itself. Now if we read this ascent on the second model, we might indeed see here in Plato a metaphysical hierarchy, with a transcendent realm available to the philosopher through an erotic noesis. But if we stay true to the insights of the first model, we must see this as an evocative gesture toward a mystery that is structurally absent—an object of philosophic love that stokes our noetic eros in its transcendence. Diotima’s speech is performative rather than constative—it is not meant to describe an ontological reality, but to be an invocation.

This mystery is a kind of noble lie that spurs the initiate to engage with the deeper questions of the cosmos rather than bask, in the extreme case, in hedonism. But as we shall see in our examination of the Phaedo, this

122 Irigaray, Sorcerer Love, 44.

123 Plato, Symposium, 210a.

124 Ibid., 211c.

52 is no real denial of the body, but simply the discipline needed for a novice on the path. In fact it is precisely bodies and things of this world that are necessary to even begin to intimate the form of beauty. It is only within the world, by bumping up against bodies and things, that any other knowledge can begin to dawn on us. Finally, seeming to intentionally avoid the suggestion of a metaphysics, Diotima ends with a question, never claiming to have seen beauty herself: “Do you think it would be a poor human life for a human being to look there and to behold it?”125 No. Rather, “if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed,” then one would give birth not to images of virtue, but to true virtue.126 This conditional “if” is critical:

The structural mystery of the form of beauty is evoked but not claimed, with eros leaning ever toward it. We will later encounter more examples of Plato hedging his claims through questions and conditionals and thereby protecting the mystery.

But why does Plato make it all sound so terribly metaphysical and then go to pains to undermine that suggested metaphysics? My contention is that Plato has an ethical agenda:127 The forms can strategically shore up this agenda by providing an absolute standard and imperative upon which right action can be based and justified. However if the structure of knowledge is

125 Ibid., 212a.

126 Ibid., 211e–212a, emphasis mine.

127 This is in line with Zuckert’s explanation of the issue discussed in the Literature Review.

53 like the structure of desire, knowledge of the forms is not possible and in fact their non-existence as structural absence is implied. Plato has political goals, for which he is willing to employ rhetoric in his dialogues, and yet he is equally committed to the interminable dialectics of desire and wisdom, thus undercutting his own overtures. Procreation, loyalty to one’s lover, honor upon the battlefield, and the ideals represented by the forms, are all virtues that Plato wants to support for the sake of political order and social cohesion.

Interminable dialectics do not run cities; noble lies do—even if the former seem to represent the structure of desire and knowledge more authentically.

So at times we find Plato’s text strategically saying one thing, and doing another thing with its structure—his text is performative, not just constative.128 Let us examine the consequences of several ways in which the form of the Symposium is at times consonant and at times dissonant with its purported message.

Most immediately obvious for our purpose is that, like the metaxy, we begin in the middle—in media res. Apollodorus, our narrator, tells an unnamed friend that, “In fact your question does not find me unprepared,”129 for he has just recounted the story at hand—about Agathon’s victory party— to another acquaintance the day before. However this acquaintance had

128 We do not wish to suggest that Plato’s text is never constative. It does at times say what it means and certainly offers positive doctrines and imperatives to ethical action. It does not, however, do so in a straightforward way—as we are examining.

129 Plato, Symposium, 172a, the opening line of the dialogue.

54 previously heard a quite garbled version from a man who had heard it from

Phoenix. Both Phoenix and Apollodorus heard it from Aristodemus, who was at Agathon’s victory party with Socrates—whose speech in turn recounts what he heard from the wise woman Diotima. At four removes from the source, we are alerted to the fact that the preservation of information depends on a process of retelling, or rebirth, as the story slips from the memories of those who first heard it. We are reminded of the “care” or

“attention,” meletan (μελετᾶν), that allows knowledge to be preserved, and indeed in the first line of the dialogue Apollodorus says that he is not

“unprepared,” ameletêtos (ἀμελέτητος), to tell the story. He repeats this word a second time for emphasis at the close of his introductory speech.130

This clue suggests that the narrative frames invoked by Plato at the outset of the dialogue are performing the phenomena discussed. At first glance, the compositional form of the Symposium, with its inset narrative frames, follows the structure of love’s yearning for immortality. The series of receding narratives makes present to the reader these moments that otherwise would have been lost to the flow of time. David Halperin, whose reading I follow here, puts it thus:

The attempt to recapture lost time is marked by Plato (no less than by Proust) as an expression of desire: the successive narrators and enduring narrative of the Symposium enact the very processes of loss and renewal, of emptying and filling, with which Plato’s dialogue as a whole is concerned.131

130 Ibid., 173c. This insight is gleaned from David Halperin’s “Plato and the Erotics of Narrativity,” 50.

131 Halperin, “Erotics of Narrativity,” 49–50. 55

The Symposium treats eros not just in the dialogue’s content—a story about love—but also manifests and dramatizes the structure of desire in its compositional form. This is because narrative, in its ability to collapse temporal distance and bring to the present an event that is in fact past—and yet at the end of the day to leave that event in the past and even call attention to the gap between the “now” and the “then”—precisely mirrors the workings of desire. Narrative displays “the same dialectic of presence and absence, of loss and renewal, that informs the erotics of sexual passion.”132

Narrativity succeeds in birthing a worthy account that resembles the story from which it sprung, thus preserving that story’s essence without denying its transience. All of this shows how Plato’s form is in harmony with what

Halperin calls “the official doctrine of the Symposium.”

Let us turn now to “the ‘unofficial’ story about the erotics of narrativity” also present in Plato’s text.133 If we turn back to the opening of the dialogue, where the narrative frames like so many progeny are supposed to testify to the success of eros in allowing the Symposium’s speeches to partake of immortality, we may become a bit disconcerted. Rather than preserve these speeches, we see that oral transmission has failed to do so, as

Glaucon was unable to obtain a clear account from the person who had heard

132 Ibid., 54.

133 Ibid., 56.

56 it from Phoenix,134 who, like Apollodorus, had heard it from Aristodemus.

This nameless intermediary is no further in the order of descent than we the readers are, and yet from this man the story was “badly garbled.” This man even went so far as to give the impression that the party happened recently, when in fact it must have taken place over a decade before. Halperin summarizes:

In short, the Symposium’s dialogic opening dramatizes the loss of Diotima’s logos as much as it signals its retention… Far from rescuing the memory of what was said and done at Agathon’s from forgetfulness, far from securing the preservation of Diotima’s precious teaching, the process of narrative transmission is evidently just as liable to dissipate as it is to save valuable knowledge.135

Thus Plato’s compositional approach is also seen to run counter to his erotic doctrine.

Or does it? Recall that this piece about procreation was the one with which we took issue above, following Irigaray. When the interminable yearning of love becomes satisfied in a telos as child, as a worthy recounting, then perhaps we have embraced a vulgar consummation of our love.

Apollodorus seems to do just this by assuming he has the right version, the authentic version, which he even submitted to a paternity test by verifying it with Socrates!136 Yet the text is also at pains to suggest the contamination

134 Plato, Symposium, 172b.

135 Halperin, “Erotics of Narrativity,” 56.

136 Plato, Symposium, 173b.

57 present in oral transmission.137 So Plato seems to be playing a double game—invoking both the desire for an authentic telling and its impossibility.

On the one hand he “actively courts in his writing an effect of undecidability,”138 and on the other he seems to acknowledge the need to decide, to draw a line in the sand, to say something prescriptive, to offer a positive though necessarily tentative philosophical doctrine (this is the ethico-political front mentioned earlier). It is only natural that the effect of the one hand often serves to contradict the other. Yet this very oscillation in textual strategy has erotic consequences upon the reader on the level of interpretation: we seek a definitive interpretation only to have it undermined; we find a positive doctrine only to have it undone. Halperin states:

The perpetual loss and renewal of understanding on the part of the interpreter… reflects a familiar erotic operation, namely the dialectic of presence and absence that structures the phenomenology of desire—in this case, the phenomenology of hermeneutic desire.139

The Symposium draws us into participation with it and elicits in us the very phenomena it is trying to describe in its content and embody in its structure.

Where earlier for simplicity’s sake we spoke of two types of participations in

Plato’s text, we must now differentiate three: The text speaks of participation

137 See 178a and 180c: even Aristodemus and Apollodorus cannot remember it all.

138 Halperin, “Erotics of Narrativity,” 62.

139 Ibid., 63.

58 in its content, performs it in its structure and form, and thereby draws it out from its reader.

Interpretation itself is an erotic activity.140 This highlights a new way in which knowledge shares a similar structure with desire and narrativity.

Transmitted knowledge is always situated, always dressed in the clothes of this world. So like the speech of Diotima, this knowledge always demands interpretation, making knowing a participatory activity. “Interpretation, like desire, like narrativity, is both the solution to its own problem and the problem posited by that solution.”141 For interpretation only arises, suggests

Diotima, in response to a perceived loss of understanding. This is the structural absence that calls forth elucidation, but also the gap in understanding that is always carried by any act of interpretation. There can be no definitive reading, only the endless hermeneutic circle, making interpretation’s business never finished, laying bare its own perpetual shuttling and metaxy-mystery structure.

I have shown how the performative and literary aspects of Plato’s

Symposium, while at times undermining its own perceived content, draw the reader into a participatory experience, mimetically constructing his or her hermeneutic desire—to use Halperin’s phrase. Indeed this thesis and the copious, conflicting scholarship on the Symposium, are testament to the

140 As Diotima herself suggests at 202e–203a. Eros as daimon serves as an interpreter between gods and mortals.

141 Halperin, “Erotics of Narrativity,” 65.

59 dialogue holding true to the interminable dialectics of desire, narrativity, knowledge and interpretation. In this section I have tried to demonstrate how these dialectics are portrayed in the Symposium’s content, enacted in its form and elicited from its reader. Now we turn to two thinkers who will help us to elaborate the erotic ontology entailed by this participatory Platonic vision.

1.2: Iamblichus and Plotinus

The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.142 – Alan Watts

This section examines two of the principal Neoplatonic schools of thought that carried forward Plato’s lineage. As mentioned in the historical background, Plato’s legacy found somewhat opposed expression in the work of Iamblichus (245–325 AD) and Plotinus (204–270 AD). While the former was an insistent monist who championed embodied ritual activity as a co- creative performance with the gods, the latter endorsed an inner contemplative practice leading to a mystic ascent, which implied a devaluation of the material realm.143 By illustrating their disagreements on the status of matter and the soul, we can more fully explicate the underlying propensities toward both participatory and dualist interpretations of Plato.

142 Watts, Wisdom of Insecurity, 23.

143 Plotinus’s work was carried forward by his disciple Porphyry (234–305 AD), who was a closer contemporary of Iamblichus.

60 We set aside for a moment the paradox of a contradictory text and the literary devices that compelled an interpretive participation from the reader in the last section. Instead we will focus on two specific interpretations of the

Platonic vision. In section 1.3 we will return to Plato’s dramatic form, examining how his text can carry each of these conflicting interpretations on a different register.

Iamblichus’s central contention in his polemic against Plotinus concerns the descended nature of the soul.144 Plotinus held that a portion of the soul does not descend and remains united to the One, allowing a reunification with the Godhead through inward meditation or philosophic ascent.145 In contrast, Iamblichus believed that the soul descends completely into the body, requiring an intercession of the gods from without, which can be brought about by the ceremonial praxis of theurgy.146

Before explicating these views more fully, it is important to understand the cosmology that each position entails. What is at stake is nothing less than the sanctity of the world. A third position, that of the classic dualist Gnostic, is illustrative in this regard, for the Gnostics viewed both the

144 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 5.

145 Plotinus, Enneads, 163 (IV, 8, 4). Consider also: "The point of action is contemplation. … Contemplation is therefore the end of action" and "Such is the life of the divinity and of divine and blessed men: detachments from all things here below, scorn of all earthly pleasures, the flight of the lone to the Alone” (Plotinus, as quoted in Rothberg, “Connecting Inner and Outer,” 353)

146 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 72.

61 individual soul and the World Soul as fallen.147 The path of gnosis however could lead out of a world of suffering and evil to reunification with the divine.

While Plotinus held that neither the individual soul nor the World Soul is fallen, he condemned sensible matter as the “cause of all evils” and “evil in itself.”148 From it arises all confusions affecting the descended portion of the soul, but because the soul “always remains united by its higher part to the intelligible realm,” it can achieve divinization by retreating from the sensible realm in inward contemplation.149 Iamblichus, for his part, accused both parties of conflating the ontological levels of individual soul and World Soul, albeit in opposite ways.150 The Gnostics saw both souls as fallen, while

Plotinus contended that both were essentially divine, with only matter being fallen. Regardless, both positions lead to a dualist worldview that denies the divinity of the cosmos, construes sensible matter as evil, and projects the demonic outside of the soul.151 This is an extreme version of the Platonic two-tiered world of divine forms and mere appearances so familiar to the modern ear.

147 It is important to note that “Gnostic” is a very general term that encompassed many varieties of beliefs and metaphysics. However, the position outlined here was the one referred to in Plotinus’s Ennead II, 9, entitled by Porphyry, Against the Gnostics, and to which Iamblichus made reference. 148 Plotinus, Enneads (I, 8, 3, 38–40).

149 Ibid. (IV, 8, 6, 8).

150 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 65.

151 Ibid., 11.

62 By contrast Iamblichus, being a monist, insisted on “an unbroken continuity between divine and sensible matter.”152 While the divine and the sensible occupy hierarchically distinct ontological levels (as do the World

Soul and individual soul), the mortal realm is connected to the heavenly by various intermediate heroes and daimons.153 This position allows

Iamblichus to differentiate the terrestrial from the celestial without demonizing the cosmos by projecting evil out of the individual soul—thus keeping more in line with a traditional Platonic worldview.154 In this orientation,

evil and the “demonic” arise only when something is “out-of-place”; in Plato’s taxonomy, the demonic was relegated to the province of the inverted soul, turned “upside-down” (anatrope [ἀνατροπὴ]) and alienated from the Whole.155

Somewhat akin to the doctrine of privatio boni later espoused by the

Christians, evil here is seen as a ‘confusion’ or ‘lack of order’, something accidental rather than essential in the cosmos.156

152 Ibid., 29.

153 Ibid., 79. This is the metaphysical version of what Lovejoy would call “The Great Chain of Being.” 154 Ibid., 8–9. A Platonic worldview expressed in Laws, Republic and Timaeus.

155 Ibid., 9.

156 As noted in the historical background, Christianity carries forward the ambiguities present in these two readings of Plato. While in theory it holds fast to the privatio boni doctrine, a world-denying, dualist tendency is certainly present at moments in Augustine, for example. And yet it seems that neither Plotinus nor Augustine intended the kind of hard bifurcation that their writing’s legacy may have actually supported.

63 While for the Gnostics and for Plotinus the divinization of the soul amounts to a retreat from a fallen world, Iamblichus considered theurgy to be the co-enactment of a benevolent cosmogenesis with the Demiurge.157

Here we see the etymology of theurgy come to the fore: activity or work

(ergo, έργο) with the God (theos, θεός). Furthermore the anatropic nature of the individual soul, its being out of alignment, was a necessary condition for this cosmic labor. In the words of Gregory Shaw quoted earlier:

The loss of the soul’s unity and stability caused it to suffer, but this was the soul’s way to participate in the activity of the Demiurge. To deny diversity to the soul would deny its role in cosmogenesis where it bestowed coherence and unity to the chaos and diversity of generated life… The soul’s demiurgic unity, ironically, was available to it only through the act of self-division.158

So while Iamblichus held to a cosmological monism, the descent of the soul into body produces a psychological dualism. “The dualism experienced by the soul was caused by its mediating function, linking the oppositions of same and other, unified and divided, immortal and mortal.”159 In this way, the divided human soul is an essential part of the unbroken continuum of creation, without which the work of the Demiurge would be incomplete.160

Iamblichus presents a participatory Platonism where the soul plays the role of intermediary between the distinct levels that it serves to join.

157 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 22–3.

158 Ibid., 101.

159 Ibid., 108.

160 Plato, Timaeus, 41b.

64 Hearing an echo of the Symposium, we learn that the soul, like eros, is

“paradoxically both mortal and immortal.”161 Both eros and the soul are metaxy, joining sensible matter to the mystery of the transcendent. Matter and the descended soul are vehicles for the divine expression of eros:162 Eros is the desire that draws the soul down into a mortal body and that will lead it back up to the immortal realm.

In a word, the will of the Demiurge was revealed as Eros… Embodiment was simply the pivot through which the eros of the Demiurge returned to itself. In this light, the embodiment of the soul and the tension caused by its separation from divinity was not a fall or an error but the sine qua non to stimulate the circulation of Eros.163

It is only through becoming divided and becoming other to itself that the divine can experience true separation, and thus, an eros for itself—making embodiment a true felix culpa in the drama of cosmogenesis.

The return of eros to the divine depends upon the participation of the soul through performative rites in the material world. Because the soul’s dividedness is intrinsic to its essence, it can never intellectually comprehend the undividedness through which it partakes of the divine work. Iamblichus conceived knowledge as working within a dualistic structure that knows

“other” as “other”, and so cannot bring about union with the divine.164 This

161 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 16.

162 Ibid., 56.

163 Ibid., 124.

164 Ibid., 96.

65 is why he considered Plotinian contemplation inadequate and why ritual theurgy finally transcends philosophic thought:

What the embodied soul could never know, it could, nevertheless, perform in conjunction with the gods. As discursive, however, the mind remained enantios, barred from union with the gods.165

It is in this sense that the theurgical practitioner makes his or her soul a vehicle for divine action through ritual activity166 (much in the same way that material objects used in ritual are conduits for celestial powers, rather than magical in themselves). The theurgist does not achieve union by breaking free from materiality but by “embracing matter and multiplicity in a demiurgic way.”167 In this way Iamblichus reverses the traditional symbolism of his time: “apotheosis in theurgy could no longer be imagined as the ascent (the well-known Plotinian metaphor), without a corresponding descent and demiurgy.”168

Iamblichus criticizes the excessive rationalism of Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry,169 bringing to the forefront the critical issues of performance and participation. Theory helps to orient the soul but it is theurgy that brings about its apotheosis. Iamblichus characterizes such

165 Ibid., 110. See also 108 for theurgy as “a discipline that claimed to transcend philosophy.” 166 Ibid., 83

167 Ibid., 24

168 Ibid., 24.

169 Ibid., 97.

66 activity as more erotic rather than intellectual,170 and warns of the dangers of making conceptual idols out of what should remain evocative icons,171 continually pointing beyond themselves. His negative theology ultimately demands that, “even the terms ‘one’ and ‘good,’ should not be taken descriptively but symbolically.”172 In this way he rejects “the notion of static perfection as an idol of the discursive mind.”173 The mystery of the “one” or the “good” is violated if hubristically and vulgarly portrayed as a thing like others that could be known, designated or defined. Rather, we exist in the metaxy, in living participation with the unifying and beneficial effects of these veiled forms: “La bonté caractérise la cause, non parce qu’elle possède le bien, mais parce qu’elle la crée.”174 We only know the forms by the effects they create, so just as the beloved evokes our eros on the condition that he or she remain unpossessed, so too do the gods ingress from a beyond that is linked to this world by daimonic intermediaries. The goal is not to ascend to that beyond, nor to understand it. Rather through performative ritual, theurgists participate in this ingression, making themselves receptacles or channels for the divine cause.

170 Ibid., 121.

171 Ibid., 97.

172 Ibid., 117, quoted in Trouillard, “La Joie de quitter le ciel.”

173 Ibid., 117.

174 Ibid., 117, quoted in Trouillard, “La Joie de quitter le ciel.” [Goodness characterizes the cause, not because it possesses the good, but because it creates it.] My translation.

67 The highest condition for souls was not their enjoyment of divine status, but their bestowal of divine measurements in cosmogenesis. This made theourgia superior to the highest forms of theoria.175

And though Iamblichus did believe that theurgic activity led to an apotheosis of the soul, it did not result “in the soul’s escape from the cosmos.

The perfectly purified soul continued to ‘descend’… for the benefit of others.”176 This “bodhisattva” doctrine, as John Dillon refers to it, ensures the soul’s continued metaxic participation in the divinization of the cosmos in a ritual performance without end.177 The intelligible is brought into deeper union with the sensible through the theurgist’s activity in the material realm.

This is a far cry from Plotinus’s severing declaration: “As there are these two realms, the intelligible and the sensible, it is better for the soul to dwell in the intelligible.”178 And yet this dualism, which is clearly present in Plato, creates the metaxic space for erotic participation in a world that stretches between immanence and transcendence.

I have tried to bring out how Iamblichean theurgy elaborates and unfolds the participatory themes present in Plato, revealing “more completely the wellspring of Platonic wisdom.”179 The metaxic and erotic

175 Ibid., 117.

176 Ibid., 144.

177 Dillon, Iamblichi Chalcidensis, 243, quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 144. 178 Plotinus, Enneads, (IV, 8, 5, 7).

179 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 7 (Shaw’s claim references Larsen’s Jamblique de Chalcis, 151–2).

68 role played by the soul in relation to the divine mystery presents a structure similar to the dialectics of desire and knowledge examined in the first section, but now presented as a developed ontology. For emphasis, and because the average reader may be more familiar with the dualist Plato, I have perhaps painted an unfair picture of Plotinus, whose own Platonic vision is also deeply authentic and whose work paved the way for much of

Iamblichus’s thinking. The themes that Plotinus developed are also present in the dialogues and cannot be ignored. We must face squarely the moments in Plato’s text that do seem to underwrite a philosophic ascent and condemn the nature of matter and embodiment. But as I have tried to show through

Iamblichus’s teachings, we would be wrong to think that Plato’s position here is simple, as we will now examine further through a close reading of the

Phaedo.

1.3: Phaedo

Call the world if you please, “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world…180 – John Keats

This section examines Plato’s negative evaluation of the body and matter in the Phaedo, drawing out contrary messages that suggest this appraisal is simply a propaedeutic corrective for the aspiring initiate. In fact, matter and the body provide the necessary particulars that allow the philosopher to approach the forms. So while one register of Plato’s text

180 Keats, Selected Letters, 196. 69 embraces a provisional ascetic dualism, a deeper register lays bare the indispensable role played by immanence. The sensible realm is never left behind, except in death. Likewise rational arguments that build upon sensible details never prove the existence of the forms, but only evoke and tend toward them. Both the sensible world and reasoned discourse are metaxy to the mystery of the forms, as the philosophic life is a metaxic practice toward death. The Phaedo intimates but does not prove the immortality of the soul, for doing so would discharge the philosophic soul of its restless inquiry and thereby render it impotent and unprepared for death.

The soul’s immortality is a structural absence in the text, just as death is a structural absence in life. Furthermore, as we saw in the Symposium, Plato builds the architecture of the philosophic life into the very form of the dialogue itself, offering a performative modeling of the praxis he recommends, which draws out the same from his reader.

There are many moments when this dialogue and others condemn the senses and the sensible world, opposing them to the eternal and unchanging higher realm:

When the soul makes use of the body to investigate something, be it through hearing or seeing or some other sense… it is dragged by the body to the things that are never the same, and the soul itself strays and is confused and dizzy, as if it were drunk.181

The thrust here is that the erring soul, by too intimate commerce with certain material things, can become “dizzy, as if it were drunk.” The image of

181 Plato, Phaedo, 79c.

70 drunkenness does not seem arbitrary, as the dialogue is concerned with how to live a philosophic life. Indeed the sensible realm threatens the soul with becoming

polluted and impure… bewitched by physical desires and pleasures to the point at which nothing seems to exist for it but the physical, which one can touch and see or eat and drink or make use of for sexual enjoyment.182

However, gluttony and lasciviousness do not imply that food and sex are inherently bad, but rather incur judgment on the person who indulges. The primary danger is that the soul become too engrossed in the material and lose sight of the intelligible. There is a certain precariousness to the sensible, but it is not harmfully disposed in its very nature. Following Iamblichus’ interpretation,

there was nothing essentially perverse about material things or embodied experience. Yet… if the soul directed excessive attention to the body it became subject to the rules governing corporeal action.183

Socrates puts it thus:

As [the soul] shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state.184

Matter and the body are not innately bad, but they are problematic; they must be deployed in the proper way if they are to aid rather than hinder the soul on its path. Iamblichus understands the Phaedo’s negative view of embodiment “as a medicinal shock, intended to disturb the soul’s

182 Ibid., 81b.

183 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 47.

184 Plato, Phaedo, 83d.

71 complacency and later to be ameliorated with a more complete understanding.”185 We regulate habits in order to bring them under our conscious control. A certain discipline is necessary on the road to mastery.

Something must be sacrificed to make room for what one is growing into. We may even say that one needs to learn the rules before he or she can break them. “The cleansing of the soul’s particular fixations by purgation and withdrawal from the body was merely a preliminary stage, to be followed by a positive reinvestment in particulars.”186

We can find hints of this positive reinvestment at other moments in the dialogue, which seem to contradict the initial devaluation. For example, when discussing the form of the Equal, Socrates says, “it is definitely from the equal things, though they are different from that Equal, that you have derived and grasped the knowledge of equality,”187 and that “this conception of ours derives from seeing or touching or some other sense perception, and cannot come into our mind in any other way.”188 It is only through the sensible that any knowledge of the intelligible is even possible! Thus embodied perception and the material objects of the world are the necessary tools or

185 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 37.

186 Ibid., 53.

187 Plato, Phaedo, 74c.

188 Ibid., 75a. We are reminded here too of the Lockean notion from Ficino quoted in the historical background: “since the cognition of our minds has its origins in the senses, we would never know the goodness hidden away in the inner nature of things, nor desire it, unless we were led to it by its manifestations in exterior appearance” (Commentary on the Symposium, 164).

72 “mnemonic prods” leading toward recollection (anamnesis, ἀνάμνησις) of the forms.189 The body and matter can be obstacles on the path if fixated upon

(e.g. in hedonism and greed), but serve the seeker properly when they lead beyond themselves. This leading beyond itself is what characterizes the sensible as metaxy in relation to a mystery.

We can also point to the metaphors of the lyre and its harmony, as well as the weaver and his cloak, to demonstrate the dependence of the intelligible upon the sensible. Simmias likens the soul to harmony that is produced from a lyre and its strings, but which will exist no longer if the lyre is destroyed.190 Cebes likens it to a weaver who is surely more durable than many a cloak he weaves, but whose last cloak may in fact outlive him.191

Both worry that the soul may not be immortal, but they must have recourse to material analogies to even state their fears. In this way the realm of becoming is shown necessary to even contemplate the possibility of something eternal.

While Socrates dispatches the lyre as a bad analogy for the soul, it serves as an adequate one for recollection (anamnesis, ἀνάμνησις) earlier in the dialogue.192 For when a lover sees a lyre, the image of the boy to whom it

189 Theurgy itself is a further development of this “epistemological theory into a ritual praxis where the prods of sensate experience were carefully controlled in rites designed to awaken the soul to the Forms” (Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 24).

190 Plato, Phaedo, 85e.

191 Ibid., 87b.

192 Ibid., 73d.

73 belongs often comes into his mind. This straightforward example serves as an analogy for anamnesis: when we see sticks or stones of equal size we may recall the Equal, of which we must have had knowledge before birth. So far so good, equal things lead us back to the Equal, just as beautiful things lead us back to the Beautiful. But equality is different than beauty in a crucial way, for equality must relate two or more things, while beauty is an attribute inherent in a thing by itself. This issue is again underlined when Socrates says that it is through Bigness that big things are big, and through Smallness that small things are small. And while the Equal may have passed unnoticed as an arbitrary example of a form, the relativity of Bigness and Smallness is highlighted precisely by their tandem presentation.193 Socrates goes on to say that a form never admits its opposite: “either it flees and retreats whenever its opposite… approaches, or it is destroyed by its approach.”194 A form can never co-habitate with its inverse. And yet only sentences before he says something contradictory, along with a non-sensical explanation, and even seems to acknowledge the conceit:

Simmias is called both short and tall, being between the two, presenting his shortness to be overcome by the tallness of [Phaedo] and his tallness to be overcome by the shortness of [Socrates]. He smilingly added, I seem to be going to talk like a book, but it is as I say.195

193 Plato, Phaedo, 100e.

194 Ibid., 102e.

195 Ibid., 102d.

74 Now if one is short by virtue of Shortness and tall by virtue of Tallness and a form never admits of its opposite, then it should not be possible for

Simmias’s height to be between Socrates and Phaedo’s, short compared to one and tall compared to the other. This is, of course, absurd. But attending closely to the text we see that certain forms do not inhere in a single object but spread out, relating those objects that are equal to one another and also those of relative sizes. If Socrates’ glib rhetoric hid this fact from us, the dialogue itself helps to alert us that something has gone awry, for in the very next paragraph an unnamed speaker interjects:

By the Gods, did we not agree earlier in our discussion to the very opposite of what is being said, namely, that the larger came from the smaller and the smaller from the larger, and that this simply was how opposites came to be, from their opposites, but now I think we are saying that this would never happen?196

And while this moment serves as a red flag, it also serves as a red herring, because the objection made is the wrong one. The argument from contraries says that something tall comes to be from something initially smaller, as in the case of growth.197 This is different, Socrates points out, than the claim that “the opposite itself could never become opposite to itself.”198 While on the one hand it is not clear that this latter statement is anything more than a tautology, on the other, Simmias is clearly tall compared to Socrates and short compared to Phaedo, effectively admitting of opposites within the

196 Ibid., 103a.

197 Ibid., 69e–72e.

198 Ibid., 103b.

75 same. This is important because the forms, which are usually distinct and absolute, begin to be seen as in some way mixed and relative.199 Phaedo is narrating this whole story to Echecrates, and after it begins there are only two breaks in Phaedo’s narrative when Echecrates interjects, reminding us that we, like he, are listeners to this story. So here the irony of Echecrates’ comment regarding the discussion of Bigness and Smallness, though clearly lost on himself, may not be lost on us: “I think [Socrates] made these things wonderfully clear to anyone even of small intelligence.”200

This is not just comic relief, because Plato’s humor, as usual, underscores a deeper point: While on the surface defending a traditional version of the theory of forms, the focus on Equality, Bigness and Smallness, clearly introduces a relationality into the forms that make them more immanent to the particulars they animate.201 Furthermore, the argument from contraries mentioned above—which is the first argument given for the immortality of the soul—places the accent upon change and transformation, with all things arising from their opposites in a cyclic flux. Rather than

199 We will return to this mixture of the forms when we examine the Sophist in section 3.3.

200 Plato, Phaedo, 102a, emphasis mine.

201 These internal relations remind us more of Whiteheadian eternal objects and offer in-roads to a process philosophical interpretation—bringing the poles of transcendence and immanence even closer. This is in keeping with Iamblichus’ notion of the Demiurge’s act of creation: “There was no spatial or temporal separation between the Forms and their sensible expression” (Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 35). Iamblichus imports the Aristotelian entelechia here and might even be seen to prefigure Deleuze’s plane of immanence, upon which transcendence is but a fold in the fabric.

76 deploring this Heraclitean notion, Socrates in fact laments the thought of its cessation:

If two processes of becoming did not always balance each other as if they were going in a circle, but generation proceeded from one point to its opposite in a straight line and it did not turn back again to the other opposite or take any turning, do you realize that all things would ultimately be in the same state, be affected in the same way, and cease to become?... If for example, there was such a process as going to sleep, but no corresponding process of waking up… there would be no point to it because everything would have the same experience… and be asleep… If everything that partakes of life were to die and remain in that state… how could all things avoid being absorbed in death?202

Rather, death comes after life just as life springs again from death, in a balanced process of becoming. It is precisely this argument from contraries that entails an anterior existence to this incarnation, and thus provides the basis for anamnesis, and by implication, the immortality of the soul. And so, far from denying the sensible realm, a close reading serves to highlight its necessity and collusion in coming to know transcendence. The material world is vitally linked as metaxy toward the divine mysteries. It may mislead if taken as an end in itself, but serves properly when it illuminates something beyond itself.

Just as Socrates performs eros in the Symposium, we find him here performing the central themes with which the dialogue is concerned. In our first encounter with him, he rubs his just unbound legs, leading him to reflect on the nature of pleasure and pain. This seems a clear instance where sensible particulars prod one toward the concerns of the intelligible. The

202 Plato, Phaedo, 72b–d.

77 dramatic action of the opening scene is drawing attention to the body, even though later moments in the dialogue seem to deprecate that body. What has the body prompted Socrates to consider? The “astonishing [θαυμασίως] relation” of pleasure and “what’s thought to be its opposite, namely pain.”203

Socrates foreshadows the position considered above, namely that a form never admits of its opposite: “A man cannot have both [pleasure and pain] at the same time.” Yet only paragraphs before, Phaedo recounts his

“astonishing [θαυμάσια] experience” with Socrates that day and recalls his

“strange feeling, an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and pain at the same time as I reflected he was about to die.”204 Phaedo explains that this unaccustomed mixture is due to the noble, fearless and even happy way in which Socrates faces death. Socrates, as the living embodiment of a philosophic life, has negotiated a different relationship of life to death, life becoming more than death’s mere opposite. The philosophic life, as practice for death, brings these two poles into commerce rather than leaving them at odds. Death becomes a lure that gives meaning to the philosophic life, enriching it with, rather than finally robbing it, of meaning. The philosophic life stands in generative, metaxic tension toward the mystery of death—the two are co-implicated in a dynamic relationship, rather than standing as divided extremes.

203 Ibid., 60b.

204 Ibid., 59a, emphasis mine.

78 Socrates’ parallel consideration of the opposites, pleasure and pain, also seems to make this advance. He says, “a man cannot have both at the same time,” but then continues, “yet if he pursues and catches the one, he is almost always bound to catch the other also, like two creatures with one head.”205 If Aesop had thought of this, muses Socrates, he would have written a fable of a god who wished to reconcile their opposition but unable to do so, joined their heads together so that whenever we have the one, the other is sure to follow later. This seems to be happening to my legs, he goes on, the shackles causing pain that is followed by pleasure. What is

“astonishing” about their relation is that, though seemingly opposite, the two are co-implicated—in a way that prefigures the argument from contraries, discussed above.

We may speculate that other oppositions in the text exhibit this same feature of appearing divided while in fact constellating one another and somehow co-operating (as we have already with immanence and transcendence). If we keep this in mind, we can make more sense of the very next sentence of the dialogue, which at first glance seems a non sequitur.

Cebes cuts in, asking on behalf of Evenus what compelled Socrates to write poetry after coming to prison, “you who had never composed any poetry before.”206 Socrates had never written poetry, of course, because he was busy philosophizing—reminding us of the “ancient quarrel between poetry

205 Ibid., 60b.

206 Ibid., 60d.

79 and philosophy” referred to in the Republic. Socrates responds that a dream has told him to “practice and cultivate the arts.” At first he thought this referred to the art of philosophy but just in case, decided to compose an ode.

“After that I realized that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must compose fables, not arguments.”207 From the point of view of a naively dualist or logocentric

Platonism, it must seem strange that at the outset of the dialogue, on the authority of a dream, philosophy is questioned in favor of poetry, argument in favor of fable, logos in favor of mythos. Unless of course we keep in mind the preceding, namely that these seeming opposites are colluding toward something that neither could achieve on its own.208

Argument is not abandoned of course, just as little as philosophy is.

Indeed, much, though not all, of the subsequent dialogue is filled with arguments. But arguments have limits beyond which they cannot take us.

Just as the sensible becomes a hindrance if given too great attention, so too do argumentation and discourse itself. As Iamblichus states, philosophic ideas are problematic if fixated upon as a set of conceptual idols rather than evocative icons leading beyond themselves.209 Simmias and Cebes put

Socrates’ arguments for the immortality of the soul into question with their

207 Ibid., 61b.

208 In the conclusion we will consider whether such a description could also apply to Derrida and Plato taken as a unit, opposites “colluding toward something neither could achieve on its own.”

209 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 97.

80 analogies of the lyre and the weaver, but Plato is at pains to show us that argumentation will never be enough:

When we heard what [Simmias and Cebes] said we were all depressed… We had been quite convinced by the previous argument and they seemed to confuse us again, and to drive us to doubt not only what had already been said but also what was going to be said, lest we be worthless as critics or the subject itself admitted of no certainty.210

Not only is all that has come before put into question, but also everything that might be said now or in the future, as well as our very ability to verify whether or not this is the case! And right here, at the crucial center point of the dialogue in terms of line numbers,211 the only other narrative frame break occurs. Echecrates interjects: “What argument shall we trust, now that that of Socrates, which was extremely convincing, has fallen into discredit?”212 Like Echecrates, we are listeners to this tale, and like the interlocutors, we have not been convinced. Plato is reminding us of our role as critical readers, which stimulates our participation with the text. Will

Socrates’ arguments convince us? Will he prove the immortality of the soul?

Clearly neither is a foregone conclusion, but even his inability to do so has drawn us as readers to philosophically engage his arguments for the immortality of the soul. The philosophic life consists of this dynamic engagement, along with a kind of faith in the mystery being approached,

210 Plato, Phaedo, 76, emphasis mine.

211 We will see all the dialogues we examine make use of this formal device to highlight a specific moment in the work.

212 Plato, Phaedo, 88d.

81 insofar as it remains a lure for our activity—be that mystery death, the immortality of the soul or the forms. The philosophic life has to do with our being-toward-death, to borrow a Heideggerean phrase, or what we may construe more broadly as our metaxic-becoming-toward-mystery.

Just such a becoming-in-the-world is what Socrates is trying to invoke in his pupils. But their doubt still leaves them “quite in need, as if from the beginning, of some other argument to convince [them] that the soul does not die along with the man.”213 This “as if from the beginning” is important, as what follows when Phaedo resumes his account is another moment that highlights the body—that sensible entity with which we begin the philosophic quest. Socrates strokes Phaedo’s head and presses the hair on the back of his neck, as was his habit, noting that the next day Phaedo would likely cut his beautiful hair, as was the mourning custom. We recall that it is through “beginning” with the sensible things that the philosopher approaches the intelligible. Socrates says that both he and Phaedo should cut their hair that very day instead, “if our argument dies on us, and we cannot revive it.” From the sensible we have moved to the intelligible—an argument—but it is a kind of sensible-intelligible, as it is an argument that can die and be revived. If the argument escapes and Simmias and Cebes defeat Phaedo, Socrates counsels him to take a vow like the Argives, who would not let their hair grow back until they recovered what they had lost to the Spartans. So rather than cut his hair on the occasion of death, Socrates

213 Ibid.

82 advises Phaedo to cut his hair as a commitment to the philosophic life. Such tangible metaphors suggest that the immortality of the soul, far from being a rational surety, must rather be fought for and believed in if it is to survive.

And if there is no unchanging proof for the immortality of the soul, but only arguments that must be mustered in its defense depending on the assailants, the strict division between the intelligible and sensible seems to break down.

We may think of them rather like the “two creatures with one head” of pleasure and pain, mentioned earlier. The intelligible and the sensible, rather than being opposed, finally work together toward some mystery beyond themselves. And in a kind of inversion of the “two creatures with one head,”

Phaedo, to rally Socrates to his side, alludes to the Hydra when mentioning the myth of Heracles and Iolaus. Heracles, with the help of Iolaus, defeats the many-headed beast, who, upon losing a head, would grow back two in its place. This invocation of comradeship seems no accident either, for philosophic discourse requires intercourse, dialogue and friendship.

Philosophy is a living activity that one does with others and in this sense is always in the making. The strong reasoning of Socrates is made to quiver, revealing the provisional nature of arguments. But if every argument is provisional, then in some sense, every logos is a mythos, a “likely story.”214

And so like a mythos and the sensible things of the realm of becoming, logos points beyond itself, rather than describing an eternal reality.

214 The famous phrase from the Timaeus to which we will return in Chapter 3.

83 As if he wanted to preempt any vulgar consequences of the line of reasoning that finds the logos to be provisional, Socrates passes abruptly from the Heracles reference to a warning against misology: “There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.”215 Like one who is betrayed by a close friend and then jumps to the misanthropic conclusion that all people are bad, so too may one who sees an argument appear at one time true and at another time false, then jump to the misologic conclusion that all discourse is unreliable. As always, Plato’s analogy is not arbitrary: One’s love for their fellow human being, or friendship and intercourse, runs parallel to one’s love of the logos, or philosophy.216

Socrates goes on to say that we mustn’t allow our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it: “much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness.” Again the philosophic life is portrayed as a metaxic striving toward a finally unattainable soundness, a truth that cannot be proved but only nobly argued for:

[L]ike those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position that they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. For I am

215 Plato, Phaedo, 89d.

216 Obviously philosophy is more than just love of the logos, as its name implies. It is love of the mythos too and that which is beyond both mythos and logos.

84 thinking—see in how contentious a spirit—that if what I say is true [i.e. the soul is immortal], it is a fine thing to be convinced; if on the other hand, nothing exists after death, at least for this time I shall distress those present less with lamentations.217

Socrates presents his belief in the immortality of the soul as a kind of noble lie, worthy of being believed regardless of its truth. I present this more relativistic moment as support that the prospect of the immortality of the soul is a veritable mystery. Plato is not simply paying lip service to the limits of the logos, only later to recover some hyperessentiality, but truly evoking an unknowable beyond.218

However, just because the mystery remains withdrawn does not mean that there is not meaningful movement within the metaxy. Rather, moving on from sensibly “investigating things” in the manner of natural science,

Socrates becomes interested in the true cause which animates them. He proceeds to

take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of things by means of words… taking as my hypothesis in each case the theory that seemed to me the most compelling.219

The quest for truth proceeds provisionally, taking hold of a good explanation and believing in it. “And when you must give an account of your hypothesis itself you will proceed in the same way: you will assume another hypothesis, the one which seems to you the best of the higher ones until you come to

217 Plato, Phaedo, 91a.

218 This will be important when we consider Derrida’s critique of Plato and Jean-Luc Marion, suggesting that negative theology negates God’s being only finally to affirm it on a higher level (hyperousios). 219 Plato, Phaedo, 101.

85 something acceptable.”220 Incontrovertible truth seems to be neither an option nor the goal of this quest, which more resembles Simmias’s proposed alternative should the truth prove unavailable:

Adopt the best and most irrefutable of men’s theories, and, borne upon this, sail through the dangers of life as upon a raft, unless someone should make that journey safer and less risky upon a firmer vessel of some divine doctrine.221

Intelligible theories are likened to sensible rafts. They are crafts that may carry us well for a time, but which may also rot and need be abandoned for a more seaworthy vessel. Arguments, like matter and the body, are not ends in themselves but vehicles that carry us yonder, that serve beyond themselves, that act as metaxy toward a mystery.

By way of transition, let us point to another moment when argument seems less than persuasive. After hearing the first two arguments for the immortality of the soul, Simmias and Cebes remain unconvinced. Socrates accuses them of a childish fear that the wind will dissolve and blow away their souls, especially if they die on a windy day. Cebes replies: “perhaps there is a child in us who has these fears; try to persuade him not to fear death like a bogey.”222 And rather than take up another argument, Socrates says to “sing a charm over [that child] every day until you have charmed away his fears.” Indeed this is what Socrates seems to be doing in the

220 Plato, Phaedo, 101d.

221 Ibid., 85d.

222 Ibid., 77e.

86 dialogue as a whole. The immortality of the soul is never proven, as all the arguments finally lead to a myth—but we are soothed, as if he were singing us a lullaby or reading us a bedtime story. In this way, what the text does or performs, is different than what any of its arguments say. Let us examine other ways in which the text performs its content—implicitly calling on philosophers to walk their talk, to let their theories erotically inform a peripatetic life.

The first word of the dialogue is “self,” autos [αὐτός]. We begin with the self, as the dialogue addresses the question of where the self will go after death. We learn that Plato, the author, was not present at the events he is recounting. What happens when we ourselves are no longer there? What account can we give of something we will never be present for as a living being? The questions aroused by the text’s formal qualities are the same that are aroused by its content. Even Echecrates asks: Were you yourself there,

Phaedo, at Socrates death, or did someone recount the story to you? Oh, I was there myself, replies Phaedo. In a Platonic trope familiar from the Symposium, the veracity and accuracy of the transmitted story are at issue. This is another example of logos bleeding into mythos. The dialectic of narrativity is in effect as we read from Plato’s pen the words of Socrates to his friends, told by Phaedo to Echecrates. Something that was absent is brought back into presence through narrative, but something is inevitably lost in transmission, reintroducing absence to that recovered presence. Earlier passersby to

Phlius brought no great detail about the story of Socrates’ death, says

87 Echecrates. We can surmise from the locale that he is a Pythagorean, as we can judge the same of Simmias and Cebes based on their motherlands. This is important, as the surface doctrine of the Phaedo clearly echoes the tomb=body, sema=soma (σῆμα = σῶμα) equation of the brotherhood. If dialectical speech is meant to adapt itself to its interlocutors, the presence of two narrative layers of Pythagorean listeners goes a long way to explain the dialogue’s apparent negation of the body! The narrative frames suggest that the dialogue has a Pythagorean bias, which may need recalibrating for a different set of ears. But if we take seriously the provisional status of argument and knowledge, this already comes with the territory. The best raft for Simmias may not be the best raft for Phaedo, as arguments are a means for putting the philosophic life into motion, not ends in themselves.

This putting into motion is the trajectory made by the form of the dialogue as a whole. By the end of the Socratic jousting, no reader will feel that ironclad proof for the immortality of the soul has been given. At precisely this point Socrates departs from the logos and offers a myth of the soul, which concludes the dialogue. I wish to suggest that this structural shift from logos to mythos is meant to indicate the limits of argument and intellectual discourse. The arguments themselves will not prove the immortality of the soul or the existence of the forms. As was the case with matter and the body, the seeker must understand how the arguments serve a higher goal by pointing beyond themselves evocatively. Indeed, at the end of the dialogue Socrates states:

88 No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it fitting for a man to risk the belief… that this, or something like this, is true about our souls… and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation.223

And so we are left with neither a philosophic nor a mythic explanation, but a kind of prayer and intimation of an ineffable mystery. The text points beyond itself, not saying what it means but doing it—indicating a vector or line of flight that runs off the page. Like the philosophic life it endorses, the dialogue is a continual striving rather than a final solution. Its words are not only constative but structurally perform a shift from logos to mythos that finally is a self-transcending gesture. All of which is in keeping with Iamblichus’s view that discursive knowledge and philosophic reflection are not sufficient for the soul’s apotheosis. There is something that must be lived, that is continually in the making, that arises from a philosophic life of interchange and dialogue with friends. Additional support for this reading is found in

Plato’s seventh letter:224

There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul.225

223 Plato, Phaedo, 97 (114d).

224 Assuming, of course, they are authentic.

225 Plato, Letter VII, 341c. See also 342e and 344c. A similar statement is also made in Letter II, 314c.

89 It is not the words themselves that represent the goal but something beyond them and beyond oneself, a performative experience that happens in lived, embodied intercourse.

This is why philosophy is a participatory activity, and why Plato’s text, if it is to be consistent with its own vision, must draw us into participation.

We are like Simmias who wants “to experience the very thing we are discussing.”226 Ironically, the reference here is that Simmias has forgotten the argument from recollection for the immortality of the soul. And perhaps for the reader too something will be stirred in the soul when Socrates charms us with his song. What does it do to the reader that the dialogue spends its better part arguing for the immortality of the soul and then gives up on that proof? Given the fact that Socrates on two occasions yokes together the existence of the forms and the immortality of the soul, if one falls, does the other?

Is this the position, that there is an equal necessity for those realities [the forms] to exist, and for our souls to exist before we were born? If the former do not exist, neither do the latter? I do not think, Socrates, said Simmias, that there is any possible doubt that it is equally necessary for both to exist, and it is opportune that our argument comes to the conclusion that our souls exist before we are born, and equally so that reality of which you are now speaking.227

226 Plato, Phaedo, 73b.

227 Ibid., 66e–67a. Also at 100b Socrates says: “If you grant me [the forms] and agree that they exist, I hope to show you the cause as a result, and to find the soul to be immortal.” This certainly suggests that if the forms do not exist, the soul may not be immortal either, and to a lesser degree that if the soul is not immortal, then perhaps the forms do not exist. On my reading however, the crux of the matter is that neither can be proved.

When Socrates finally relinquishes proving the immortality of the soul, what is the reader to think of the genuineness of the forms? The dialogue does not bring up this issue explicitly, but a close reading cannot help but bring it into focus, forcing the reader to further question the bedrock of Platonic doctrine.

This is the dialectic of interpretation: shuttling to and from the mystery of a meaning that is never wholly unearthed, and that when it is unearthed already presupposes a lack in order for it to appear—that is, interpretation presupposes something missing which necessitates interpretation, but the restored meaning, because it has passed through the act of interpretation, never coincides with the original meaning, which is thus by definition structurally absent. The dialogue prompts us to question its own doctrines, which rather than making it lose coherence, elicits from the reader the very qualities of philosophical living that the dialogue strives to voice and perform. The undermining of the theory of forms creates a lacuna in the text that is akin to the unproved immortality of the soul. Both are mysteries that serve to coordinate and draw out our metaxic philosophic inquiry.

* * *

Death is the mystery par excellence. It is totally inaccessible from the side of the living and yet it defines our mortal existence. It is an absence in relation to one’s life, necessarily not a part of life, necessarily unknown, and yet also what makes us feel we must seize the day and not waste precious time. It is perhaps no accident that Oscar Wilde so well described the

91 cigarette as metaxy,228 as it certainly leans toward the mystery of death. The body and the world become what they are by transcending themselves through the knowledge of finitude in death. Being-toward-death shows the futility of the sensible-for-the-sensible and even the rational-for-the- rational—both only find their meaning by pointing beyond themselves, by transcending themselves and putting our souls into participatory motion. We live in the metaxy. And just as phoenix-like eros shuttles between life and death, we too die in the contemplation of our eventual end and are reborn in the renewed care (meletan, μελετᾶν) of philosophical living. In the

Symposium, as a correlate or eros, this word, meletan, marked the care that allowed knowledge to remain in the metaxy rather than slip away in forgetting. And here Socrates says that practicing philosophy is nothing other than “training for death,” melete thanatou (μελέτη θανάτου),229 the most noble way to live in the metaxy. In this training or care, philosophers humble themselves to the mysteries that they seek to grasp. As Iamblichus’ theurgy was “a synthesis of worship and divine philosophy,”230 so too can our lives fold intellectual insight into embodied acts of devotion and ethical ways of relating. The philosophic soul is quickened by the sensible world and the

228 “The perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it never leaves one satisfied. What more can one want?” (Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 55).

229 Plato, Phaedo, 81a.

230 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 241.

92 ideas that arise from it, putting that soul into vital motion in relation to mysteries it will never fully know.

This section has argued that Plato’s apparently negative view of the body and matter is simply one moment in a more comprehensive vision that sees both as coming into their own through acts of self-transcendence, by pointing beyond themselves. Arguments and rational discourse too, must finally evoke beyond themselves if they are not to become “conceptual idols,” must embrace a performative connotation beyond their constative denotation. Both the sensible and the intelligible are ultimately metaxic and exist in dynamic tension with unknowable and unprovable mysteries like the theory of forms and the immortality of the soul. Thus philosophy is a participatory way of life that is always in the making, always on the way, always in-between—always transcending itself by practicing for and loving the mystery that exceeds it: death. In addition to voicing these positions in the content of the Phaedo, Plato also performs them in the character of

Socrates and through the formal structure of the dialogue. Finally, the text transcends itself, inciting those positions in the reader by drawing him or her into a participatory encounter with a text that mirrors the same positions.

This chapter has aimed to present a Plato who transcends doctrinaire and metaphysically dualist clichés through performative literary practices that enjoin and educe an embodied engagement with a world that is contiguous with mystery and shot through with wonder. We turn now to an examination of Plato alongside Derrida’s readings of him, intending to show ultimately

93 that the same performative textual practices and multi-leveled dynamics of metaxy and mystery are at work both in Derrida’s text, and in its relationship to Plato’s.

Chapter Two: Derrida

Apophasis [1657]: “A kind of an Irony, whereby we deny that we say or do that which we especially say or do”231

I have already told you that you are participating. This would not be the place to do it again. How do I address you now that you are watching, now that I have your attention? How do I honor your attention? How do I respond to it? I have already told you that you are participating, and now that we have reached chapter two I ask you to imagine a second act, a second sailing. Instead of content becoming form, we will see form becoming content. How do I participate in form becoming content? I speak of the form:

The reader will notice a parallel construction between this chapter and the last, and a pattern of self-similarity running through the thesis’s entire structure. We are in the second sailing now, as we turn toward Derrida and make a critical shift. And yet the two movements are of a piece, one necessarily following the other—or so it seems, once the second movement is made. Our challenge is always to draw a transversal line through two complementary halves, but we always come up with a remainder.

* * *

Being is the desire of God.

“Imagine we were to leave this utterance to its fate.”232 This is what

Derrida says of a different phrase, one that he wrote instead of I, centered in

231 Oxford English Dictionary, quoted in Derrida, On the Name, 141n11.

95 italics at the beginning of the first chapter of Literature in Secret. And indeed, he did leave it, as all authors do when they write, not knowing where their words will land or how they will be used. Now Derrida’s words are being used to justify a conceit perhaps a bit like his own, but also anathema to it, and thereby faithful—for reasons we will see in due course.

“Being is the desire of God” could mean at least four things, depending whether “Being” is taken as a noun or a gerund, and whether “God” is taken as the subject who desires, or as the indirect object of “desire”:

1. Being is the desire of God: To be is what God desires; God wants to experience being. We think of the Incarnation and Carl Jung’s Answer to Job. (gerund/subject)

2. Being is the desire of God: Being as the whole drama of creation is what God wills because God wants to. God has a desire to create and does so. Existence is God exercising God’s will. (noun/subject)

3. Being is the desire of God: When one is, let us say when one is ecstatically, they are in pursuit of God. We think of bhakti yoga, the path of devotion. (gerund/object)

4. Being is the desire of God: The human drama is generated by the pursuit of the Deus absconditus. (noun/object)

Without clarification, the meaning of such a phrase would not be self- evident, thus demanding our interpretive participation. Each of the options above makes sense of the phrase, but together they testify to the polysemous nature of language. By its nature, language resists fixity or singularity of interpretation. In order to carry meaning, a word must be repeatable; it must not be utterly unique each time it is uttered or its sense could never be

232 Derrida, Literature in Secret, 119. Derrida’s phrase is “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire.”

96 ascertained. But by this repetition it is destined to take on new meanings in new contexts, to gradually slip toward new significations in new surroundings.233 Is this a shortcoming of language? Or does this make language particularly well-suited to describe the endlessly fecund mystery?

What if the best way to describe the state of affairs is not a single interpretation of the phrase above, but multiple ones, even all of them, even when the different interpretations are mutually contradictory? What if something like this corresponds better to reality, and to us and to our desires?

* * *

This chapter examines several of Derrida’s texts in light of the concepts of mystery and metaxy elaborated in chapter one. Section 2.1 will consider the relationship to the other, primarily focusing on “Passions: An

Oblique Offering.” This text was originally part of Derrida: A Critical Reader

(1992), but was then collected in On the Name (1993), which includes three essays: (1) “Passions,” (2) “Sauf le nom,” and (3) “Khora”—all of which will occupy our attention in due time. In section 2.2 we consider a 1997 conference discussion between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion on the subject of God and negative theology, transcribed in God, the Gift and Postmodernism.

I then offer a close reading of the opening lines of “Sauf le nom” to elaborate

233 Derrida calls this condition iterability, with the root iter- meaning “other.” This is the “othering” or “other-ability” of words as they play in the metaxic space opened up by the mystery of différance.

97 the themes present in their discussion. Section 2.3 examines the self in relation to the other and death by bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis, The Gift of Death (1999) and “Circumfession” (1991) into conversation with what preceded.

Each of the three sections delves into a different structural absence: the other, God and the self. As argued in chapter one, a space of absence can become a metaxic space of participation. That which it is impossible to know or possess fully is also that which sets us in motion, which creates an erotic in-between, drawing us out us into relation, prayer and reflection. In the same way, the performative quality of Derrida’s text elicits from the reader the very participation of which he writes. Additionally, I briefly highlight in each section how Derridean interpretations of the terms, other, God and self, are prefigured in Plato and Iamblichus, showing parallels between the two traditions. While this chapter demonstrates how Derrida and Plato’s texts can be analyzed according to similar concepts and dynamics, chapter three will take up Derrida’s explicit engagements with Plato’s texts.

2.1: On the Other

ROBERT: No man ever yet lived on this earth who did not long to possess… the woman whom he loves. It is nature's law… If you love... What else is it? RICHARD: (hesitatingly) To wish her well.234 – James Joyce

234 Joyce, Exiles, 77–78.

98 In 1991 Derrida was invited to contribute a response to eleven other essays, which together would constitute a publication called Derrida: A

Critical Reader. Instead of responding directly to the subject matter of the other essays, Derrida’s essay reflects upon the very invitation itself to compose a response, and his simultaneous compulsion and inability to do so.

While the Platonic dialogues examined above embody their content in their formal structure, “Passions: An Oblique Offering” interrogates as its content the role it was suppose to play formally in the collection: It asks, “How to respond to the other?” For both Plato and Derrida this content/form mirror- play is a performative gesture that evokes a performative experience in the reader—when the reader makes this connection, he or she is drawn into the ritual, so to speak, rather than being a mere observer. As we shall see,

Derrida must respond without responding, because responsiveness turns out to have an aporetic structure. Surely “Passions” is a response of sorts, but it is one that questions its very ability to respond properly, thereby annulling itself. Making sense of such aporiai calls upon the reader’s interpretive participation, drawing her or him into the very ritual Derrida is enacting, but also beyond that ritual. The ritual, hinted at in the title, is both enacted through textual allusions and formal devices, but at the same time cancelled or surpassed, in order to mirror the central idea contained in the essay: the double bind posed by the invitation to respond to the other, i.e. its necessity and impossibility.

* * * 99

Derrida’s position on the other can be most readily summed up in his economical phrase: tout autre est tout autre.235 Each and every other is every bit, or wholly, other. While this section primarily treats the other as another person, we should keep in mind that the term could apply to any other, be it animal, object or God. Like the God of negative theology, which we will examine in section two, the other’s alterity and finally, transcendence, remain beyond my concepts and cognition, inscrutable. Because the other is a mystery, resisting mastery by my knowledge, my relationship to the other in friendship, politeness, invitation, and responsibility, all give rise to aporiai, pulling me into a dynamic, metaxic space of undecidability. How so? Derrida explains:

A gesture “of friendship” or “of politeness” would be neither friendly nor polite if it were purely and simply to obey a ritual rule. But this duty to eschew the rule of ritualized decorum also demands that one go beyond the very language of duty. One must not be friendly or polite out of duty… Would there thus be a duty not to act according to duty?236

This is the double bind of responding to the other. If I am polite to the other only in accordance with social norms, because this is what I am supposed to do, and without thought or feeling, then I simply go through the motions of politeness. This is not truly polite, because there is no genuine care for the other. Likewise, it would be unfriendly of me to respond to a friend out of duty, i.e. only because I feel obliged to do so. Nor can I consider myself a good

235 Derrida, Gift of Death, 69.

236 Derrida, “Passions,” 7.

100 friend simply by acting in conformity with popular conventions: “That would indeed add to the essential dereliction, one further fault: to consider oneself beyond reproach by playing on appearances just where intention is at fault.”237 Because it effaces the other’s uniqueness, blind application of a societal rule precludes the authentic, personal concern of a true friend.

Nor can we say that the “ought” of friendship or politeness must not be on the order of duty. For a counter-rule remains a kind of rule. As soon as a general prescription is applied to all singular cases, the gesture of friendship or politeness is destroyed. “The internal contradiction in the concept of politeness, as in all normative concepts of which it would be an example, is that it involve both rules and invention without rule.”238 The rule is that I know the rule but am never bound by it. This aporetic indecidability creates a metaxic space between two unsatisfactory options (i.e. following the rule and not following it), where “invention” must take place if we are to do right by the other. This space beyond rules, norms, and hence ritual too, is a space of participation. Like a text that demands an interpretive contribution, the letter of the ritualized rule alone is insufficient for lived friendship with another. Each act of friendship must be invented anew—with regard for duty but not simply according to it—by attempting to rise to the infinitely particular occasion of responding to another.

237 Derrida, “Passions,” 8.

238 Ibid., 9.

101 What do we make of this entreaty to go beyond ritual, if Derrida himself is enacting a kind of ritual in “Passions: An Oblique Offering”? How is he enacting one? Already in the title we hear echoes of the Christian Passion and Jesus as the sacrifice. Derrida: A Critical Reader brings together twelve authors who become deconstructive apostles of sorts, Derrida suggests.

Faced with the double bind of responding, Derrida says, “my two hands are tied or nailed down.”239 After an initial sermon on offering a response, the end of “Passions” takes on the formal quality of a kind of litany, repeating invocations upon “the secret.” Additionally, Derrida more than once begins a paragraph with the phrase, “n’y allons pas par quatre chemins” which means something like “let’s not beat around the bush,” but literally translates “let’s not go there by four paths.”240 This “four paths” is the colloquial phrase for a crossroads. So while Derrida says, “let’s not beat around the bush,” feigning a frontal presentation rather than an “oblique offering,” he also alludes to the way of the cross, the cruciform or the crucifixion—saying, “let’s not go that way.” Derrida later confirms our suspicions saying that his “oblique offering” has

a flavor that [is] ironically, sarcastically, eucharistic… The “this is my body which is given for you, keep this is remembrance of me,” is this not the most oblique offering? Is this not what I commented on… in my last seminars on “eating the other” and the “rhetoric of cannibalism”?241

239 Ibid., 22.

240 Ibid., 9.

241 Ibid., 19.

102

Derrida playfully casts himself as the Christ whose corpus will be ritually consumed by his critical readers. But like Plato’s humor, Derrida’s too underscores a deeper meaning: to stay simply within the orbit of ritual is to make a Last Supper of the other, while the text is telling us that we must go beyond ritual to be a true friend. Derrida enacts a kind of ritual in his text, and undercuts it in what that text actually says. He enjoins us not simply to read and consume his words, nor to interpret his text as if it were a ritual whose prescribed movements we could identify—but rather to participate, not just in the ritual of textual interpretation, but by inventing beyond it, off the page and perhaps into our own lives.

From the first line of “Passions,” Derrida acknowledges the possibility of such a ritual, as well as our own presence as readers and interpreters:

Let us imagine a scholar. A specialist in ritual analysis, he seizes upon this work… he makes quite a thing of it, believing he can recognize in it the ritualized unfolding of a ceremony, or even a liturgy, and this becomes a theme, an object of analysis for him.242

As that scholar, I have just done to Derrida’s text the very thing he both here suggests I might do and later warns against doing! This evokes my participation, as I must wonder at a text constructed so as to be susceptible to analysis as ritual, which yet speaks of the insufficiency of ritual. Yet in this participation, I have become not just an analyst of Derrida’s text as object, but an actor in its ritual unfolding. I have passed from one to the other. But we must not even stop there, for Derrida intimates the difference between

242 Ibid., 3.

103 analyst and actor of ritual, only then to trouble this distinction: To participate properly in a ritual we must analyze it to some degree, and, in any analysis of ritual we have already become inscribed in its logic:

Between the actor and the analyst, whatever the distance or differences may be, the boundary therefore appears uncertain. Always permeable. It must even be crossed at some point not only for there to be analysis at all but also for behavior to be appropriate and ritualized normally… Even the “spectator,” here the reader, in the volume or outside the volume, finds himself in the same situation in this regard.243

(Not only I, but you too find yourself in the same situation in this very moment) Derrida is commenting on the oscillating effect that his text engenders in his reader.244 At one moment, (1) the reader is on the outside, analyzing the text as object; that text speaks of a ritual by which the critical reader would consume the corpus of Derrida through interpretation; suddenly (2) the critical reader realizes their complicity in just such a ritual; they are in fact on the inside rather than the outside; and then (3) this shock propels the reader to a space beyond ritual, eliciting their conscious participation in what we might call a higher ritual.245 Derrida’s text draws us into participation in its ritual, only to question the value of such ritualization in the name of something beyond it, spurring us still further.

243 Ibid., 4.

244 We recall the Symposium and how Plato’s oscillation in textual strategy has erotic consequences upon the reader. 245 It is important to distinguish Derrida’s use of ritual from Iamblichus’s. If forced to do so, I would equate Iamblichus’s ritual theurgy with Derrida’s higher ritual—a lived participation beyond theoria—while Derrida’s normal sense of ritual as rational, rule-bound activity is closer to theoria itself.

104 “It is in the name of a higher responsibility and a more intractable moral exigency that one declares one’s distaste, uneven as it may be, for both moralisms.”246 These moralisms are, on the one hand, considering deconstruction a modern form of immorality, amorality or irresponsibility, and on the other, portraying it as simply an embrace of ethics, morality or responsibility. Insofar as either moralism is a ritualized norm, rather than a participatory seeking for and inventing of a higher but seemingly unattainable ethic, we have not risen to the occasion of the aporia of responsibility—of responding to the other. As with friendship and politeness, we can see how responsibility contains an internal contradiction: It seems to arise as a duty, yet if performed out of an externally imposed duty, would not be a true taking on of responsibility that springs from oneself. Indeed if an outside norm defines one’s sense of responsibility, one is not yet responsible but merely commanded by convention.

The aporia of responsibility, like the other aporiai, arises because of the alterity of the other, because of the other’s mystery. Derrida thematizes this inaccessibility in The Gift of Death, treating

what a responsible person is, what it must be[:] namely this exposing of the soul to the gaze of another person, of a person as transcendent other, as an other who looks at me, but who looks without the- subject-who-says-I being able to reach that other, see her, hold her within the reach of my gaze.247

246 Derrida, “Passions,” 15.

247 Derrida, Gift of Death, 26–7.

105 This transcendence entails the impossibility of truly knowing the other, and thus of being wholly responsible to them. It is not enough to make a list of the other’s desires and needs and to act accordingly. The other is inexhaustible in their desires and needs, which remain not even wholly accessible to the person in question (this is the subject of section three). The most one can do is humbly submit to this incomprehensibility and attempt to let it guide one’s necessarily inadequate efforts. The aporia of responsibility inhabits a metaxic space opened up by the mystery of the other: our good will is put into motion by its inability to fully do right by the other.

Like responsibility, Derrida’s ability to respond to the invitation to contribute to Derrida: A Critical Reader is marked by this double bind: his response is put into motion by his inability to respond fully, and by his inability to refuse the invitation. He notes several pitfalls involved in responding, such as endorsing the Last Supper of Derrida mentioned earlier, but more pointedly the hubris of assuming that he could adequately respond to the discourse of the eleven other contributors. Derrida fears he cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of their work. And so it may seem more judicious not to respond, to humbly remain silent. But such a strategy would involve even graver risks, such as appearing ungrateful and indifferent to the contributions of the others, or simply hiding behind silence and thus failing in one’s responsibility toward the others. Whether or not Derrida responds, he risks failing in his responsibility to the others. He will fail in some regard.

Thus he offers the provisional solution of a response that does not respond, a

106 discourse on his inability to respond properly, and his inability not to respond at all, an interrogation of the act of responding and responsibility itself. Such questions remain open questions when their responses remain structurally absent. The structural absence of the other is what gives rise to the aporia of responsiveness. So while Derrida cannot make present what is absent, or dissolve the paradoxes that absence engenders, he can frame his text as a question whose response is absent, thereby mirroring or performing the structure in question. This allows him to provisionally assuage the double bind: he accedes to his responsibility to respond to the invitation of the other, but avoids the dangers of responding, by responding interrogatively (and later on, as we shall see, apophatically).

Faced with this double bind, Derrida employs a strategy that draws his readers and interpreters into the same double bind. Do I have the hubris to think I could adequately respond to “Passions,” a text which plays with and against itself on the levels of form and content? How does one begin to gloss a response that overtly says it is not a response? Will I then be silenced by my inability and say nothing? But wouldn’t that be cowardly and even ungrateful, not even to attempt to muster a response? Am I not rather being grateful toward Derrida’s oblique offering by spending my time and effort creating this interpretation? But isn’t my offering oblique as well, insofar as it necessarily misses, shifts, transgresses Derrida’s own invisible and inscrutable intention? And won’t every act of response, no less than

107 responsibility, be marked by this double movement of humbly offering and necessarily falling short?248

Such litanies of questions—and they are endless—show how

Derrida’s text, by interrogating in its content its ability to be what it is intended to be in its form, draws the reader to interrogate their own ability to respond to the text. It is in this sense that Derrida remarks “the Critical

Reader is a priori and endlessly exposed to a critical reading.”249 In interpreting we are interpreted. Indeed the very title Derrida: A Critical

Reader, could mean a reader, i.e. a book, on Derrida, or, that Derrida himself is a critical reader, i.e. Derrida is one who reads critically, interpreting us back to ourselves through his text. Who is the reader and who is being read?

Derrida refuses to respond or to collapse this symbiotic participation or co-constitution, and instead says:

Let us say that there is a secret… We will leave the matter here for today, but not without an exercise on the essence and existence of such a secret, an exercise that will have an apophatic aspect.250

It is here that the text begins to mark at intervals an italicized refrain: il y a là du secret. In a footnote, Derrida gives the definition of “apophasis” from the

Oxford English Dictionary that was this chapter’s epigram: “A kind of an Irony, whereby we deny that we say or do that which we especially say or do.”

248 Even before interpretation proper, just the re-presentation of Derrida’s text is subject to iterability, to a shift in meaning due to its recontextualization into my thesis.

249 Derrida, “Passions,” 23.

250 Ibid., 23–24.

108 Again Derrida alerts us to a certain performative contradiction in his text, a way in which his text says one thing but does another. The refrain, “There is something secret,” seems to announce the existence of something, but that such a thing must remain unannounced to remain itself, i.e. to remain a secret. The secret is thus another way of formulating the mystery, the structural absence which gives rise to the living metaxic space of aporia, interpretation and eros. The general structure of the secret will apply not only to the other, but to God and the self as they are treated later in this chapter.

Derrida says: “We testify to a secret that is without content, without a content separable from its performative experience, its performative tracing.”251 This secret is not provisionally hidden until some later date when it is told; rather it cannot be revealed because it has no content. No content, that is, apart from its performative tracing. This performative tracing takes place in the dynamic metaxy created by the content-less mystery. Even though Derrida cannot say the secret, he can do it. The series of apophatic utterances concerning what the secret is not, nonetheless evoke something of the secret. The secret is what gives rise to the play of hiding and revealing, and thus precedes or exceeds those terms. The secret

does not conceal itself…but it cannot be unveiled. It remains inviolable even when one thinks one has revealed it. Not that it hides itself

251 Ibid., 24.

109 forever in an indecipherable crypt or behind an absolute veil. It simply exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling.252

The secret is not absolute, for “one can always speak about it… One can speak about it ad infinitum.”253 The play of veiling/unveiling, or any other binary, occurs in the metaxy created by the mystery of the secret. An example of this is Derrida’s earlier description of the play of responding/not-responding that occurs in the metaxy created by the mystery of the other. The mystery or secret has no content, save the metaxic performances to which it gives rise.

“In place of an absolute secret. There would be the passion. There is no passion without secret, this very secret, indeed no secret without this passion.”254 Here Derrida describes the co-implication of secret and passion, which we could also render as mystery and metaxy—passion pairing nicely with our first example of the metaxy as eros in the Symposium. The secret remains withdrawn, but gives rise to passion, just as the bond with the beloved remains unconsummated, giving rise to eros:

It is the call of this secret… which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself which keeps our passion aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us.255

Both Derrida and Plato offer another person as an example of structural absence which gives rise to endless strivings (the unanswerable question of

252 Ibid., 26.

253 Ibid. 254 Ibid., 28.

255 Ibid., 28–9.

110 how to respond; the eternal yearning of lover for beloved). Elaborating on this relation to the other in “Sauf le nom,” Derrida says:

But why not recognize there love itself, that is, this infinite renunciation which somehow surrenders to the impossible? To surrender to the other, and this is the impossible, would amount to giving oneself over in going toward the other, to coming toward the other but without crossing the threshold, and to respecting, to loving even the invisibility that keeps the other inaccessible… a love without jealousy that would allow the other to be—after the passage of a via negativa.”256

In Derrida no less than Plato, the inaccessibility of the other becomes the precondition for eros. We recall Iamblichus:

Embodiment was simply the pivot through which the eros of the Demiurge returned to itself. In this light, the embodiment of the soul and the tension caused by its separation from divinity was not a fall or an error but the sine qua non to stimulate the circulation of Eros.257

Iamblichus demonstrates how a certain “othering” or “making-other” is necessary for the expression of eros, similar to Derrida noting that there is

“no passion without secret.” Already we begin to notice the structural similarity of the relationship to another person and the relationship to God, which will be addressed in the next section.

Recalling the erotic dimension of interpretation (how a lack always gives rise to it) in the Symposium, we notice a parallel insofar as that secret is a precondition for discourse itself: “no discussion would either begin or continue without it.”258 We discuss because we are conveying something

256 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 74.

257 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 124.

258 Derrida, “Passions,” 27. 111 that is not present. Derrida offers the secret and the passion as a general structure to describe all such absences, similar to my general structures of mystery and metaxy. Derrida’s further point however, is that even the names

“secret” and “passion” attempt to speak or name what cannot be unveiled or named (the question of the name will also concern us in section 2.2). This is why he will change his terminology in each of his works, employing “text, writing, the trace, différance, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, etc.”259 I acknowledge my use of the single set of terms “mystery” and “metaxy” in this thesis to provide coherence of meaning. Perhaps in another essay I would need to change them, to elongate the eros of interpretation, to bear new fruits from the endlessly fecund mystery, to not, as Iamblichus would say, make conceptual idols out of what are meant to remain evocative icons.

* * *

In accord with the “performative tracing” of the secret, the larger structure of “Passions” does just this, in a way similar to the Phaedo. The shift from discursive interrogation of aporia in the first portion of the essay to apophatic invocations on the secret later on, structurally performs the very inaccessibility of the secret which gives rise to aporia. We discussed in chapter one how the shift from arguments about the immortality of the soul to a myth about the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo indicates the limits

259 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 74.

112 of rational knowing and the necessity of a participatory becoming-toward- mystery. Similarly, the rational discussion of the aporiai of responsibility, friendship, politeness, etc., gives way to a more performative apophasis on the overarching theme of the secret, thus indicating the lived nature of those normative concepts that appear aporetic from the perspective of the intellect.

We manage to be responsible, friendly and polite, even though it seems impossible to be so when analyzed discursively. Such acts are always in the making, and must never be assumed but always “invented” anew. Yet in lived participation they do occur (though perhaps not in their apodictic form). Here we recall Iamblichus again: “What the embodied soul could never know, it could, nevertheless, perform in conjunction with the gods. As discursive, however, the mind remained enantios, barred from union with the gods.”260 Though the secret lacks discursive content, it can be performatively traced. In the next section we will explore how the structure of the secret that helps conceptualize the mystery of the other also helps us trace the mystery of God.

To close, let us note in passing that Derrida at the end of “Passions” indicates the special place of literature: “There is in literature, in the exemplary secret of literature, a chance of saying everything without touching upon the secret.”261 This underlines the distinction I made earlier between metaphysical and literary writing. If the secret or the mystery is a

260 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 110.

261 Derrida, “Passions,” 29.

113 structure we discover in the world, then clearly a philosophical treatise is ill- suited for authentically expressing it, as the treatise only says what it means, no more, no less. Literature by contrast does not abide by this one-to-one relationship between what is said and what is meant. A poetic or fictional sentence unmoors itself from its presumed source. The author recedes in secret behind the text to a point where it no longer makes sense to treat this secret as one that could somehow be unveiled. Literature epitomizes the passion play springing from the secret, a saying without saying, which is why both Derrida and Plato employ a literary style. It is in this sense that Derrida declares, “An iconoclastic fiction must be thought,” that is, a fiction that is more real than the real.262 There is a fiction that is imaginary; and there is the non-fiction of the real world; but when the real world turns out to be structured by mysteries that never coincide with what we can say about it, an iconoclastic fiction becomes a more apt description of the real. Perhaps now we have a better sense why Derrida, in responding to Plato’s text, can neither simply affirm or deny it—rather he must say one thing and do another, respond without responding, be drawn into Plato’s ritual and yet go beyond it, beneath it, beside it—if he is not simply to consume the Platonic corpus, but to express his gratitude to Plato’s offering by offering his own performative tracing.

262 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 54.

114 2.2: Derrida and Marion: On God

Everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all.263 – Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling

As noted at several points above, both another person and God exhibit parallel structures of transcendence. Derrida notes: “one should say of no matter what or no matter whom what one says of God.”264 The God of negative theology is an exemplary case of the wholly other: a paragon of unknowability, alterity and mystery—a singularity that gives rise to the same aporiai discussed above: “If I obey in my duty toward God (which is my absolute duty) in terms of duty alone, I am not entering into a relation with

God.”265 Ritualized rule is not enough. A true faith in God, in the unknowable

God, would go beyond reason, knowledge and the generality of convention.

God ceases to be God the moment God is brought out from mystery and into the sphere of complete understanding.

Unless I interpret it too freely, this via negativa does not only constitute… a moment of deprivation… The deprivation should remain at work (thus give up the work) for the (loved) other to remain other. The other is God or no matter whom.266

Just like friendship is continually invented anew rather than being something achieved once and for all, so too does the devotee in their love, responsibility

263 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 16.

264 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 73

265 Derrida, Gift of Death, 64.

266 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 74.

115 to and knowledge of God, always face a lack—the deprivation remains at work. But it is not a lack that can be overcome—thus the work is given up.

This inclining toward the mystery of God is interminable, but it is in the metaxy created by the endless inclining that we

recognize there love itself, that is, this infinite renunciation which somehow surrenders to the impossible… a love without jealousy that would allow the other to be—after the passage of a via negativa.267

And so we see how this statement applies equally to God, as it did to another person in the preceding section.

To highlight the perpetual suspension involved in such a surrender,

Derrida suggests that some negative theologies (because, as he insists there is not just one, but multiple “negative theologies”) are not up to the task.

Simply put, Derrida’s critique of these negative theologies is that they negate

God’s being only finally to affirm it on a higher level (hyperousios

[ὑπερούσιος] is the classic Greek term). In his landmark 1968 essay,

“Différance,” Derrida states that (in contrast to différance),

negative theologies… are always concerned with disengaging a superessentiality 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 in order to acknowledge his superior, inconceivable and ineffable mode of being.268

These negative theologies finally betray their intuition that God is beyond being and without essence, thus bringing Him within the horizon of presence:

267 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 74.

268 Derrida, “Différance,” 6.

116 Negative theology… also belongs, without fulfilling, to the space of the philosophical or onto-theological promise that it seems to break: … to say God such as he is, beyond his images, beyond this idol that being can still be, beyond what is said, seen, or known of him… It is to this end that the negative procedure refuses, denies, rejects all the inadequate attributions. It does so in the name of a way of truth and in order to hear the name of a just voice… that speaks through its mouth: aletheia as the forgotten secret that sees itself thus unveiled or the truth as promised adequation. In any case, the desire to say and rejoin what is proper to God.269

Negative theology wants to say the true name of God beyond the inadequate images and idols of this world. The question becomes whether this “desire” is ever fulfilled—similar to our analysis of eros in the Symposium. Any final unveiling, or even the sense of an eventual unveiling, places God back into the categories of being (veiled/unveiled). In order not to undercut itself, negative theology would have to hold to a formulation of God closer to “the secret” that “exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling,” and to what we have been calling mystery.

Now it is by no means a foregone conclusion that all negative theologies fall prey to this temptation, as we shall examine imminently in

Jean-Luc Marion’s response to some of these arguments. Indeed, Derrida concedes to Marion a “large space of agreement… in which I agree on a very general and structural level.”270 But this caveat to the agreement seems critical. Derrida is attempting to trace a more general structure of negativity, of which negative theology would be an instance. He does not wish to refute

269 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 69.

270 Derrida, “Response by Jacques Derrida,” 46.

117 negative theology but to broaden it, as I am suggesting by examining the parallel structures of other, God and self. The dynamic aporiai examined in relation to another person, via their translatability to the divine, help to quicken a relation to God, which might otherwise risk becoming austere in its solemnity—especially in our day.

It is a matter of recording the referential transcendence of which the negative way is only one way, one methodic approach, one series of stages. A prayer, too, and a testimony of love, but an “I love you” on the way to prayer and to love, always on the way.271

Acknowledging the singularity of the mystery of the other opens a passage for an active loving on the way, in the metaxy.

Let us turn to the famous Marion-Derrida debate to help highlight the stakes and pitfalls of mystery as God, before concluding this section with further reflections on the performative aspects of Derrida’s texts on the subject. Jean-Luc Marion, in a talk entitled “In the Name,” ably responds to

Derrida’s criticisms of negative theology, painting a compelling picture of

Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology and his “third way.” He quotes and then comments on Dionysius’s text:

“for the perfect and unique cause of all things is above every assertion in the same way that what surpasses the total suppression of all things and is found beyond their totality is also above every negation.” The game is therefore not played out between two terms, affirmation and negation, but between three, different from and irreducible to each other.272

271 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 68.

272 Marion, “In the Name,” 24.

118 This is very much in line with Derrida’s declaration that the secret “exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling, dissimulation/revelation.”273 Marion offers and comments on another example of the third way from Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ingnorantia:

“According to negative theology, infinity is all we discover in God.” This infinity does not revert to affirmation after passing through negation, but lays bare and circumscribes the divine truth as the experience of incomprehension: “in the shadows of our ignorance shines incomprehensibly the truth defined more precisely.” This is not a description of an hypostasized apophasis, but of a third position.274

Thus, Marion traces the lines of a “theology of absence”275 which goes beyond the categories of affirmation and negation, of affirmation disguised as negation, beyond the famous metaphysics of presence. It is important to note that much of what Marion says, Derrida in fact accepts:

I very often agree with Marion and share some of his views… the arguments that he opposed to me, notably around what he calls the third way and denomination, can be found in my own texts… They even play a decisive role in these texts.276

The opposition that is sometimes played up between these two thinkers is thus slighter than it is often made out to be. Much of the disagreement seems to stem from them misreading one another.

We can examine the word dénomination to exhibit this agreement further. In French the word means “name” or “naming,” but its structure (dé-

273 Derrida, “Passions,” 26.

274 Marion, “In the Name,” 25.

275 Ibid., 37.

276 Ibid., 42.

119 nomination), also suggests a negation of the name, a de-naming. While the kataphatic path piles up honorific names and qualities of God—the one or oneness, the good or goodness, spirit, son, father etc.—the apophatic way proceeds to deny all these names as unacceptable. Dionysius writes: “The negations are true in what concerns divine things; the affirmations are unfitting.”277 But this is only a stage on the path, as the “third way” finally aims at what remains “above every negation and affirmation.”278 Now the pitfall noted by Derrida, and avoided by Dionysius and Marion, would be that the negation stays at the level of a negative affirmation, that the “God-is-not- this” slips into being a pseudo-name, that the “is-not” still retains too much of the “is.” This is what Marion points out with the term dénomination: It economically traces both the affirmative and negating paths, and finally undoes the saying of the negative in its inherent self-contradiction. Marion explains:

In its ambiguity, de-nomination bears the twofold function of saying (affirming negatively) and undoing this saying of the name. It concerns a form of speech which no longer says something about something (or a name of someone), but which denies all relevance to predication, rejects the nominative function of names, and suspends the rule of truth’s two values. Dionysius indicates this new pragmatic function of language.279

277 Dionysius, Celestial Hierarch, II, 3, 141a, quoted in Marion, “In the Name,” 26. 278 Dionysius, Mystical Theology, I, 2, 1000b, quoted in Marion, “In the Name,” 26.

279 Marion, “In the Name,” 27.

120 This turn to the pragmatic function of language, what I have been calling its performative and literary quality, seems to mark the threshold of the third way (I dispense with the quotation marks). On this Marion and Derrida seem to agree.

What is left unresolved in the debate is whether the “prayer that praises” predicates and names, thus succumbing to the metaphysics of presence, or whether prayer via the third way evades this temptation.

However, it is not clear that just because we give a name or a predicate to

God, like good, and say that God is in some way related to what is good— though I cannot know the divine goodness, nor comprehend the way in which it is related to mundane goodness—that we are therefore inscribing

God in the horizon of presence. For isn’t this what Derrida does, when he describes a certain non-thing as “secret.” It certainly seems to be related to a normal secret in some way, but certainly not in any way that we could comprehend and thus reveal.280 What protects Derrida no less than

Dionysius in this regard is his pragmatic use of language, the performative quality of his discourse. It is what he says about the secret (that it is not an everyday secret that could be unveiled) no less than how he says it (in a quasi-liturgical and apophatic refrain) that seems to both trace and deny the affirmative and negative paths, thereby avoiding the snares of each—in a manner similar to the structure of the word de-nomination. While the essay

280 The same seems to hold for différance. It is in some way like difference and like deferral, though exceeding both—that exceeding being marked by the performativity of its orthography.

121 “Différance” may be overly polemical, making a straw man of negative theology, On the Name seems to mark a different strategy, more fully incorporating that pragmatic use of language championed by Marion and

Dionysius.

In this regard, Marion may be no less guilty of making a straw man of

Derrida:

Marion constantly refers to what I said about negative theology as if I had one thesis, phrased in one form through a single voice… My texts on the subject are written texts, by which I mean they are not a thesis on a theme. They have a pragmatic aspect, a performative aspect that would require another kind of analysis.281

Or again: “Sauf le nom… is clearly different from a thesis about the metaphysics of presence and negative theology.” While Marion’s essay “In the Name” affirms and denies certain theses attributed to Derrida, “Sauf le nom” and other texts signed by Derrida actually attempt to operate on the level of the third way. This is how I have been trying to analyze Derrida (as well as Plato). Their texts do more than they say, and in this sense, they open onto the third way, beyond the positions or negations of the letter of the text.

But it does seem unfair to suggest that the prayer which praises (more so than prayer pure and simple) would not also fall into this category. Indeed it seems to be an exemplary case of the relation of metaxy toward mystery: prayer toward the unnameable or de-named God. Marion writes:

The de-nomination operated by prayer (and praise)… confirms the function of the third way, no longer predicative (whether this means predicating an affirmation or a negation) but purely pragmatic. It is no

281 Derrida, “Response by Jacques Derrida,” 43.

122 longer a matter of naming or attributing something to someone, but of aiming in the direction of . . . , of relating to . . . , of comporting oneself towards . . . , of reckoning with . . . —in short of dealing with. . . . By invoking the unattainable as . . . and in as much as . . . , prayer definitively marks the transgression of the predicative, nominative, and therefore metaphysical sense of a language.282

Here Marion’s text begins to perform. His use of ellipses indicates the inability of language to reach into the mystery; the phrases that precede each ellipsis are examples of metaxic-becoming-toward-mystery. But it is also important to note that the break with predicative and nominative discourse perhaps need not be as “definitive” as Marion, and sometimes Derrida, suggest.

Is the content of prayer without sense? Is it purely performative? Is any text purely performative? Surely a prayer says something, though this saying occurs with a knowledge of saying’s inabilities and limits, even of saying’s contrary nature to the thing being addressed, an understanding of the exigencies of its restricted relation to the thing addressed, and even to the inappropriateness of the word “thing,” and the non-application of the category of appropriateness. Marion: “There is never a proper nor an appropriate name to speak of God.”283 But this does not make the names meaningless, nor their negations—just limited. Similarly, both Derrida and

Plato’s texts have (1) positive content, (2) self-annulling moments, and (3) a pragmatic or performative dimension—they contain all three ways.

282 Marion, “In the Name,” 30.

283 Ibid., 26.

123

* * *

We turn now to a close reading of the opening of “Sauf le nom.” We provide it here in its entirety in both languages for ease of reference:

— [. . .]

— Plus d’un, je vous demande pardon, il faut toujour être plus q’un pour parler. Il y faut plusieurs voix.

— Oui, je vous l’accorde, et par excellence, disons exemplairement, quand il s’agit de Dieu.

— Plus encore, si c’est possible, quand on prétend parler selon ce qu’ils apellent l’apophase, autrement dit selon la voix blanche, la voie de la théologie dite ou soi-disant négative. Cette voie se démultiplie en elle- meme : elle dit une chose et son contraire, Dieu qui est sans être ou Dieu qui (est) au delà de l’être.284

* * * — . . .

— Sorry, but more than one, it is always necessary to be more than one in order to speak, several voices are necessary for that…

— Yes, granted, and par excellence, let us say exemplarily, when it’s a matter of God…

— Still more, if this is possible, when one claims to speak according to what they call apophasis, in other words, according to the voiceless voice, the way of theology called of so-called negative. This voice multiplies itself, dividing within itself: it says one thing and its contrary, God that is without being or God that (is) beyond being.285

Just as Marion used the ellipsis earlier, Derrida begins “Sauf le nom” with the first speaker saying: “[. . .]”. Is this a saying? Is it a non-saying because it contains no content? Or is this a negative affirmation, the saying of

284 Derrida, Sauf le nom, 15.

285 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 35.

124 a non-saying? Why does Derrida use brackets? Was there something there that has been omitted?—(the brackets are, in fact, omitted in the English edition). Is this the trace of something that was once present, but is no more?

Will it ever be again? Was it ever in the first place? Does such an absence give rise to all that follows? Within the context of Derrida’s thought, three dots can prompt such questions, as we recognize again the participatory nature of a performative text. The second speaker answers the first (but how does he or she answer, if nothing was said?): “Plus d’un, je vous demande pardon, il faut toujour être plus q’un pour parler. Il y faut plusieurs voix.” The first three words are a familiar Derridean construction, which can mean both

“more of one” or “no more one.”286 This ambiguous structure functions in a way similar to de-nomination. From the moment that we multiply the names of the singularity that is God (more of one), we are no longer doing justice to

God’s singularity (no more one). The phrase traces the kataphatic way (more of one) and then enacts an apophatic cancellation of that enumeration of divine names (no more one)—creating a paradoxical overall structure which gestures toward the third way. Indeed, “Il y faut plusieurs voix.” In context

“voix” seems to mean “voices” but can also mean “ways”: “Multiple ways are necessary for that.”

The second phrase, “je vous demande pardon,” is rendered “sorry” in the English translation but means more literally, “I ask you for forgiveness,”

286 If the “s” of “Plus” is pronounced, the word has the sense of “more,” while if it remains silent, the negative construction “ne… plus” is implied, indicating “no more.”

125 which gives more of a sense for the encounter with the other, and the responsibility of responding before the other. We respond to someone. “Il faut toujours être plus q’un pour parler. Il y faut plusieurs voix.” I translate:

It is always necessary to be more than one (which also echoes “no more one”) in order to speak, several voices/ways are necessary for that. Speech is always addressed to someone, be it another, God or even, as we shall examine in the next section, a self that does not coincide with itself. The precondition of speech, writing, communication—in short, text—is this splitting that annuls the one by multiplying the one. As soon as the first word is spoken, it will never coincide with the object it describes, nor necessarily arrive at the subject to whom it is intended.

And so the third speaker says (or is it the first speaker responding to the second?): “Oui, je vous l’accorde, et par excellence, disons exemplairement, quand il s’agit de Dieu”: Yes, I grant it to you, and par excellence, let us say exemplarily, when it’s a matter of God. Whoever or whatever God is, “God” is surely just a name, which never coincides with

God’s essence. But even speaking of God’s “essence” suggests that there is some thing there, thus inscribing God within the horizon of being and presence. Rather, God is a mystery that can never be named. And God is an

“exemplary” case of naming in the double sense of being an “exemplar” or paradigm case, and in the contrasting meaning of being “but an example.”

For as we realize the parallel structures of every other (another person, God, self), i.e., that they are wholly other (shrouded in the same mystery), the

126 distinction between original and copy begins to break down. Marion confirms: “the case of divines proper names only reproduce[s] an aporia that is already unavoidable in the proper names of the finite world.”287 This indicates the more generalized structure of negativity, or perhaps we should say a more generalized third way, that encompasses every other as wholly other.

A fourth voice (or perhaps the second again—multiple voices/ways in any case), replies:

Plus encore, si c’est possible, quand on prétend parler selon ce qu’ils apellent l’apophase, autrement dit selon la voix blanche, la voie de la théologie dite ou soi-disant négative.

Still more, if this is possible, when one claims to speak according to what they call apophasis, (otherwise said) according to la voix blanche, the way [la voie] of theology called of so-called negative.

The first phrase, “Plus encore,” if rendered “still more,” gives the straightforward translation above. It is “still more” the case that multiple voices are necessary in speaking of the exemplary case of God when it is a question of the apophatic way. The apophatic way multiplies negations (God- is-not-this, God-is-not-that…) ad infinitum as a metaxic gesture toward God’s mystery. In this case the, “if this is possible,” gestures to the budding contradiction of a “still more” accompanying a multiplicity of negations. As negations accumulate, is there more of something or less? This is the paradox that is gracefully carried by the “plus.” For the “Plus encore” still echoes the double-meaning of “plus” from above, carrying the affirmative (more) and

287 Marion, “In the Name,” 29.

127 the negative (no more). So in addition to “still more,” this phrase could be interpreted as “not again” or “nevermore,” giving the sentence another sense:

“Not again, if this is possible, when one claims to speak according to what they call apophasis…” As the way of apophasis involves the negation of the attributes of God, this “not again” interprets the apophasis as a way of not speaking, of annulling the kataphatic names that accumulate around the mystery of God. Here the, “if this is possible,” points to the contradiction that follows, i.e. that apophasis is still called a form of speaking. So, like de- nomination and “Plus d’un,” the “Plus encore” serves a double-function that could be seen to point toward the third way.288

The sentence concludes by describing apophasis as “la voix blanche, la voie de la théologie dite ou soi-disant négative.” “La voix blanche,” is an expression that translates literally as “white voice” but which means a hushed or toneless voice, one restrained and flattened by fright or emotion, or unsure of itself. Here we think of a trembling voice, in the sense of fear and trembling before God, a voice that is unsure because it knows it cannot but fail in speaking the name of God. But additionally, the literal meaning of

“white” carries a blankness or emptiness (like in expressions such as carte blanche, meaning a blank check), which is closer to the ideal of leaving the

288 One could also read “encore” as signaling its homophone, “en corps,” which means “in body.” In addition to the binary play between spirit and flesh that one could elaborate here, a reference to Lacan’s seminar XX, titled in French “Encore” (On Feminine Sexuality), which plays on this very homophony, would bring in the subject-matter of the limits of love and knowledge in relation to feminine sexuality construed as a lack—topics all very germane to this thesis, though they do reek of patriarchy in their Lacanian formulations.

128 mystery inviolate, of saving the name of God. (As an aside we can mention that this latter idea is carried by the title of the essay, “Sauf le nom.” Like the

English, “save,” “sauf” carries the double and opposite meanings of “to keep safe” and “except.” We keep the name of God safe, i.e. we keep the mystery inviolate, by excepting the name of God, i.e. by not being able to ever speak the true name of God). Following “la voix blanche,” we read, “la voie de la théologie dite ou soi-disant négative.” Here Derrida makes explicit the homophony between voix and voie,289 voice and way, placing them in close proximity. This way is that of a theology that is called or so-called negative.

Again Derrida seems to be acknowledging that there is not just one negative theology, and that the name “negative theology” will never perfectly coincide with those texts and thinkers who are loosely grouped under its heading.

The following sentence reads:

Cette voie se démultiplie en elle-meme : elle dit une chose et son contraire, Dieu qui est sans être ou Dieu qui (est) au delà de l’être.

This voice [or way] multiplies itself, dividing within itself: it says one thing and its contrary, God that is without being or God that (is) beyond being.

Again with “démultiplie” we have the same structural paradox we examined in de-nomination. “Démultiplie” means “to multiply” but also contains its own cancellation with the prefix de-. In its proliferation of negations the apophatic voice circumambulates the mystery of God’s singularity—a singularity that is precisely not multiple. The apophatic contains a certain

289 What compounds the issue earlier is that the plural of both voie and voix, is voix.

129 doubling within itself, the affirmation of a negation, that points toward the third way which attempts to describe that which is beyond affirmation and negation: “Dieu qui est sans être ou Dieu qui (est) au delà de l’être.” The first part of this phrase, “Dieu qui est sans être,” can be read as “God who is without being,” i.e. a God who has no beingness; or it can be read, a “God who is, without being,” i.e. God who is, without being so—a God who is and who is not. This construction enacts the third way that goes beyond any simple or substantial negation. If one is only to say that God has no beingness, that God is without being, one would stay within the realm of pure negation. In addition to tracing that apophatic path, the phrase also questions the negative affirmation that it carries (negative affirmation: “God is without being”), through the alternate meaning of “God is—without being so.” This is summed up and extended in the final phrase: “Dieu qui (est) au delà de l’être.” The idea that God is, without being so, is captured in the parenthetical

“(is)”: “God who (is) beyond being (without being so in a way that is inscribed in being, since God (is) beyond it).” But what is further contained in this phrase is the homophone “lettres” which sounds identical to “l’être.”

“God who (is) beyond letters,” or the God who cannot be named. Thus the whole phrase puts itself into question, puts language into question, in its ability to designate the mystery, to contain it or render its content—except through such pragmatic functioning of language: “We testify to a secret that is without content—without a content separable from its performative tracing.”

130 I have offered this close reading of the first 11 lines of “Sauf le nom” in an attempt to show how Derrida’s literary style embodies the third way, going beyond what could be simply affirmed or denied by ordinary language.

Derrida’s text bears the same traits he ascribes to negative theology: “a language that does not cease testing the very limits of language, and exemplarily those of propositional, theoretical, or constative language.”290 In this sense Derrida is performing the subject matter of his text. “Sauf le nom” is a text about negative theology, but it also adopts in its form those very structures it describes in its content. The ambiguous and self-transgressive structures employed (e.g. “plus,” “de-,” “(est)”) demand first a disambiguation from the reader, an interpretive participation. But finally, as the reader becomes accustomed to such paradoxical language, a participatory experience is evoked where, in flashes, the reader can perhaps intuit or glimpse, though not understand or grasp, what is described by the third way:

God, the wholly other, mystery. As we saw in Plato, the relationship of reader to text models a potential relationship between philosopher and world, or in this case, self and other. Going beyond understanding and language suggests that what is at stake is less a matter of knowledge or belief, than, as Marion says, “of relating to . . ., of comporting oneself towards . . . , of reckoning with .

. .—in short of dealing with . . .” I would say: in short of participating in . . .

And this participation takes place in the metaxy, in the space opened up by

290 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 54.

131 the fact that language and knowledge never coincide with the mysterious other.

I would also submit that this kind of participation, one that surrenders to the impossible in an act of loving on the way, is a form of prayer. We pray in the metaxy when we bring our curiosity, love and faith to bear on the mystery of the other. We interpret the other; we realize the limits of our interpretation; we try to interpret via the third way. Though a detailed discussion is out of the scope of this thesis, such an emphasis on action and lived experience seems to intimate the presence of Derrida’s Judaism in his work. Though never observant and often de-claiming ambiguous and provocative phrases like, “I quite rightly pass for an atheist,”291 Derrida never denied his Jewish heritage. We have been examining some of the ways, it might be argued, that he inadvertently translated or sublimated it into his own textual practices. Christianity may be said to have a bias toward what you believe (underscoring its Greek inheritance of the emphasis on presence) versus the Judaic emphasis on how you live, how you treat your neighbor, and the dictates of law: Belief and knowledge on the one hand, versus ethical- praxis on the other. While treating this point thoroughly would be another entire thesis, I find it worth noting. Some of the freshness of Derrida’s thought seems to arise from his identification of traces of Judaic and other marginalized traditions within the Greco-Christian tradition itself—because clearly such resources are present in Dionysius, for example. Derrida says as

291 Derrida, “Circumfession,” 155.

132 much himself, noting the sometimes-Judaic character of his thought, though it does not come from any specific Jewish source:

I often feel that the questions I attempt to formulate on the outskirts of the Greek philosophical tradition have as their ‘other’ the model of the Jew… And yet the paradox is that I have never actually invoked the Jewish tradition in any ‘rooted’ or direct manner. Though I was born a Jew, I do not work or think within a living Jewish tradition. So that if there is a Judaic dimension to my thinking… this has never assumed the form of an explicit fidelity or debt to that culture.292

In this regard a comparison of Derrida, the Algerian outsider, to a certain Syrian outsider seems poignant: Iamblichus’s theurgy is also a kind of performative prayer. It is precisely because the ineffable cannot be taken up into discursive content that theurgic ritual is necessary: “What the embodied soul could never know, it could, nevertheless, perform in conjunction with the gods. As discursive, however, the mind remained enantios, barred from union with the gods.”293 Iamblichus too called upon resources present in the

Platonic tradition to create a vein of Platonism that was deeply authentic and yet bore the Chaldean traces of a pre-Greek, not to say barbarian, lineage.

I have outlined how God, like another person, is an example of mystery that can be approached though not attained through various metaxic practices. We have traced this idea through Derrida’s encounter with Marion, noting points of agreement and friction. Finally we plunged into Derrida’s text “Sauf le nom” to explore how its form enacts its content, eliciting from

292 From a 1981 communication to Richard Kearney, quoted in Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 339n47.

293 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 110.

133 the reader an interpretive participation that leads to a participatory experience. Of note is the way that these performative linguistic practices engender a relationship with the text that can serve as a model for prayerful participation with the other. Let us turn now to our final and perhaps most peculiar example of an other that does not coincide with its concept or name: oneself.

2.3: On the Self

Our faith is not assured because a faith never can be, it must never be a certainty. We share with Abraham what cannot be shared, a secret we know nothing about, neither him nor us. To share a secret is not to know or to reveal the secret, it is to share we know not what: nothing that can be known, nothing that can be determined. What is a secret that is a secret about nothing and a sharing that doesn’t share anything? Such is the secret truth of faith as absolute responsibility and as absolute passion.294 – Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death

We now consider the self as another instance of mystery. Commenting on Angelus Silesius’s negative theology, Derrida writes in “Sauf le nom”:

Carrying itself beyond, this movement radically dissociates being and knowing, and existence and knowledge. It is, as it were, a fracture of the cogito (Augustinian or Cartesian) as the cogito gives me to know not only that, but what and who I am. This facture is as valid for me as for God; it extends its crack into the analogy between God and me, creator and creature.295

In this way negative theology can be translated to the self. The inaccessibility of God and the other also applies to oneself—we are indeed made in the image of our creator. Derrida quotes Silesius: “I know not what I am. I am not

294 Derrida, Gift of Death, 80.

295 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 65–66.

134 what I know.”296 Just as we do not know God, nor is God what we know of

God (e.g. God’s names), so too do I exhibit a transcendence that creates a gap between the apparent fact that I am (existence) and what I could say about myself (knowledge).297 When philosophy disavows this structural mystery it forgets “that there is secrecy and that it is incommensurable with knowing, with knowledge, and with objectivity, as in the incommensurable ‘subjective interiority.’”298 Knowledge can never master subjectivity, neither another’s nor my own.

How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself... My secret self… is a secret without reflexivity… [which necessitates thinking] beyond an axiomatic of the self or the chez soi as ego cogito, as consciousness or representative intentionality, for example, and in an exemplary fashion, in Freud and Heidegger.299

The same structural absence that was analyzed in relation to God and the other reappears closest to home as the unconscious. Closer to Derrida’s thinking than Freud however, is Lacan. Going beyond Freud, Lacan characterizing the unconscious not as primitive or archetypal, but rather as structured like a language,300 with an unclear division from the conscious

296 Ibid., 66.

297 We could also call this the gap between being and discourse. Later especially, but throughout the thesis, we discuss how a metaphysics of participation serves to mitigate this gap. 298 Derrida, Gift of Death, 92. On “subjective interiority,” see Kierkegaard, Either/Or. 299 Ibid.

300 See Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” 135 linguistic ego, and just as sophisticated a structure. Not only are we not

“master of our own house” but there is no single master and the house is under interminable construction. Motivations we cannot identify or understand influence us, not only from within as the psychoanalytic unconscious, but from without as the linguistic, social and political unconscious. For Lacan, subjectivity never coincides with itself, and it is just this fracture that sets it in motion.301 The mirror stage, for example, describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance of being whole and one's emotional experience of being fragmented on the sensory-motor level. This conflict gives rise to desire, and often a desire to resolve the conflict. Many a Lacanian patient’s psychodrama follows the paradoxical and interminable formula: “He/She desired to be without desire.” The analysand, no less than the history of western metaphysics culminating in Hegel, seems to be marked by this desire for fixity, finality, and absolute knowledge. What Lacan no less than Derrida reminds us however, is that mystery is a structural feature of the Real and that we can thus never step out of the metaxy—except in death.

It is precisely the enduring alterity of the wholly other that constitutes my subjectivity, and constitutes it as mystery. Negative theology again provides an exemplary case of this relation to the other: “to testify to the

301 “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection,” in McQuillan, Deconstruction: A Reader, 334.

136 desire of God.”302 Derrida’s use of the ambiguous double genitive indicates this constitution of self through the other, or co-constitution of self and other.

Is “the desire of God” my desire for God? Is it God’s desire for me or something else? The double genitive equivocates between subject and object, gesturing toward their co-constitution:

And as we do not determine ourselves before this desire, as no relation to self can be sure of preceding it, to wit, of preceding a relation to the other, even were this to be through mourning, all reflection is caught in the genealogy of this genitive… Does [this desire] exist… before its actualization, before its performative accomplishment?303

What makes me a subject is the insatiable desire or impossible responsibility arising from the other’s alterity: “the constitution of the self in general, [is] through this secret nucleus of responsibility.”304 So it is not knowledge but participation that should be the model for a metaphysics without closure.

The performative act precedes the division into subjects and objects upon which knowledge is based. Derrida suggests that subjective interiority itself co-arises with God, with the internalization of the mystery of the other:

God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. As soon as such a structure of conscience [or, “consciousness,” as the word conscience means both in French—TD] exists, of being-with-oneself, of speaking, that is to say of producing invisible sense, as soon as I have within me, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, as soon as I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, as soon as there is

302 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 37.

303 Ibid.

304 Derrida, Gift of Death, 115.

137 secrecy and secret witnessing within me, and for me, then there is what I call God, what I call God in me, I call myself God—a phrase difficult to distinguish from “God calls me.”305

The two meanings of the French conscience (conscience and consciousness) suggest the mutual dependence between the moral sense and subjective awareness. By internalizing the “secret nucleus of responsibility,” a space of interiority in opened, a chasm even. I become as God in becoming mystery. In calling to God in me and in heeding God’s call, in this double movement that is the desire of God, I come into relation with myself through the other. I am doubled and thus no longer coincide with myself, living in the metaxy opened up by that doubling, reflected by an I who can say “I.” Whoever I am, it is certainly not the name “I,” anymore than it is my given name—which paradoxically singles me out and generalizes me (many people share my surname; this is the aporia of naming discussed earlier).

The notion of a divided subject seems to be prefigured in Iamblichus.

He describes how, “in embodiment, the soul literally became other to itself… was self-alienated”306 and that, “the soul…‘both changes itself and is always being changed, thus, it possesses its being precisely by always changing its essence.’”307 Furthermore, this autokinesis of the soul is derived from the principle of huparxis, discussed earlier, which is “not conceived as a deeper

305 Ibid., 108.

306 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 80, 102.

307 Ibid., 103.

138 substrate (ousia [οὐσία]) of the soul but as its pre-essence.”308 Such a pre- modern soul characterized by self-alienation and inner otherness seems to anticipate postmodern notions of the self. In this light, the modern Cartesian conception of the soul as a self-present, transparent and unified subjective center, can be seen as a departure from both the pre-modern and postmodern characterizations.

We could also consider the Delphic injunction, know thyself, alongside the proclamation that Socrates is the wisest man in Athens because he knows he knows nothing. Knowing that one knows nothing: it is this kind of learnèd ignorance that is said to constitute wisdom. We might even say that there is a

Catch-22 at the foundation of western philosophy: one must know him or herself, but in knowing him or herself the philosopher learns that he or she knows nothing, undercutting the self-knowledge that was assumed in the first place. Of course the original meaning of the Delphic maxim was “know your place,” i.e. “know that you are mortal.” Just such paradoxes seem to be what being mortal is all about.

There is another other that makes me myself, that is a condition of possibility for my being a subjectivity—but which is also a condition of my impossibility:

What is, for Dasein, for its possibility, purely and simply impossible is what is possible, and death is its name… What if negative theology were speaking at bottom of the mortality of Dasein?309

308 Ibid.

309 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 44.

139

Death is a condition of my impossibility because in dying I cease to be; I am no longer a possibility. But death is also a condition of possibility for my being who I am, in that it defines me as mortal. My death is not mine; it is not an event in my life; it marks where my life ends; it marks where what is mine ends. All of my projects, in short all my meaning, unfolds in the metaxy that ceaselessly approaches the mystery of death. My death is not mine, but it is not someone else’s either. In its structural absence, something that is not there is what creates me.

This is what Derrida calls “the gift of death.” Though this departs from the French construction (donner la mort), we can again read the double genitive as indicating death as a gift, as well as a gift given by death—this latter gift being the sweet life that is envied by the gods. Interesting here is that the first sense of death as the gift is not borne out in reality: death is not an event in my life; it is not something I receive. This double-construction performs the idea that death is outside an economy. A true gift is given without any thought of recompense, outside of calculations of being owed anything back, even gratitude. Rigorously speaking one should not even reap the benefit of feeling like a do-gooder—and thus one need be unaware of one’s own giving, dead to it, so to speak, and much less aware of what one is giving. The gift is not the object, but the free-willed giving outside of an economy of exchange. It is in this sense that death gives freely the sweetness of life (2nd sense of the genitive) without actually giving any object (1st sense

140 of the genitive: death is not something we ever possess or experience as an event in life). Dasein, no less than negative theology, is gifted its particular shape and definition by a structural absence, the mysteries of death and

God—the latter of which, Derrida muses, may be a translation of the former.

In “Circumfession” and elsewhere Derrida repeats this equation of

God and death:

the only ally, the most secure, it’s to death that already I owe everything I earn, I have succeeded in making of it, as I have with god, it’s the same thing, my most difficult ally, impossible but unfailingly faithful once you’ve got him in your game, it costs a great deal, believe me, a great deal of love.310

Death—or God: both lie at the limit and indicate a beyond. Neither can be made into objects for analysis, refusing, in their silent mystery, to be pinned down or mastered. Derrida writes: “Here I give myself the gift of death.”311 In reflecting on his own death throughout “Circumfession,” Derrida enacts a kind of melete thanatou. The writing itself is a practicing for death, a learning to die well in order to live well. In this sense “Circumfession” is a performative act. It is not a treatise that is meant to impart knowledge on the reader, but a practice that is meant to transform Jacques Derrida, and of which the reader is witness:

if this book does not transform me through and through, if it does not give me a divine smile in the face of death, my own and that of loved ones, if it does not help me to love life even more, it will have failed.312

310 Derrida, “Circumfession,” 172–73.

311 Ibid., 285.

312 Ibid., 77.

141

Derrida seeks a participatory experience, to be touched and transmuted through an enacted engagement toward the mystery of death. This writing which is confession is performative, what Augustine calls “doing the truth”

(veritatem facere): “Confession does not consist in making known… it is quasi-apophatic in this regard.”313 Derrida thus models for us, in another way, what participation can look like as metaxic-being-toward-mystery.

This chapter has tried to demonstrate how the concept of mystery can be used to fruitfully translate between the other, God and the self. Such mysteries give rise to metaxic aporiai that make ethics, religion and subjectivity tremble. But rather than seeing moral relativism, atheism or despair in this undecidability, Derrida shows us the conditions of real life in a world radically open to a future we help create, and before which we stand in humble awe.

The prayer does not change God but it changes the one who offers it. It is the same with the substance of what is spoken. Not God, but you, the maker of your confession, get to know something by your act of confession.314 – Søren Kierkegaard

313 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 39. 314 Kierkegaard, Purity of the Heart, 34.

142

Chapter Three: Plato and Derrida

However old I am, I am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle. I love them and I feel I have to start again and again and again. It is a task which is in front of me, before me.315 – Jacques Derrida.

We turn now to an examination of Derrida’s engagement with Plato, using the essay “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” as a centerpiece, and interpolating portions of the larger triptych, On the Name, to which “Denials” was a forerunner. On the Name, collects “Passions,” “Sauf le nom,” and

“Khora.” “How to Avoid Speaking” addresses the Greek tradition, Christianity and Heidegger in the context of a broader treatment of “what is called negative theology.” Within the Greek moment, Derrida examines the

Republic, Timaeus and Sophist. He brings together these three Platonic dialogues because they each treat a “third kind” or triton genos [τρίτον

γένος]: (1) light in the Republic’s analogy of the Sun is called triton genos, mediating between sight and visible things; as well as (2) khora (χώρα) in the Timaeus, providing the space in which the intelligible can be impressed upon the sensible; and (3) the einai (εἶναι, being) or the “is” that can be said of both terms in any pair of oppositions in the Sophist—each is described as a

“third kind,” something in-between or in addition to a pair of two.

My first intention is to show that the triton genos in each case can be understood through the concepts of metaxy and mystery, suggesting that the dialogues are not enforcing the binary reifications of Platonism with which

315 Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 9.

143 Derrida finds fault. I will find resources in the Platonic text to offer an alternate interpretation to Platonism, along the same lines as chapter one, bringing Plato more into harmony with the reading of Derrida presented in chapter two. This will occupy the first three sections (3.1: Republic, 3.2:

Timaeus, 3.3: Sophist). In section 3.4, I consider “How to Avoid Speaking” as a whole, demonstrating how it performs according to similar dynamics, displaying analogous formal techniques to Plato’s, despite sometimes conflicting content. By exploring what the performative dimension of their texts do beyond what is said, Derrida and Plato’s projects can be seen as more closely aligned than they often appear. This confluence shows itself in the participatory experience evoked in the reader through an engagement with a performative text. Such an experience in relation to the text models the relationship of reader to world as metaxic-becoming-toward-mystery according to a metaphysics of participation.

3.1: Republic

THEAETETUS: A limit, it seems, never appears. STRANGER: Even if you can only make a little progress, Theaetetus, you should cheer up.316 – Plato, Sophist

The ostensible project of the Republic is to discover what justice is. To find the nature of justice as concerns the human soul, Socrates proposes an analogy of the soul to a city. By finding justice in this latter blown-up model,

316 Plato, Sophist, 251b.

144 he and his interlocutors will be aided in identifying justice in the more opaque labyrinth of the soul. They thus proceed to construct in words a justly governed city and arrive at the conclusion that its guardians must be philosophers—for only then will they possess true knowledge, as opposed to mere opinion. These aspiring guardians must be tested as to their aptitude for knowing the form of the good, as “it’s by their relation to it that just things and the others become useful and beneficial.”317 Indeed, Socrates asks:

“won’t our constitution be perfectly ordered, if a guardian who knows these things is in charge of it?”318 Glaucon assents and Socrates, after debunking two false conceptions of the good as pleasure and knowledge,319 is prompted to offer his own account. But we find Socrates uncharacteristically sheepish and evasive when he is “forced” to tell his “opinion about”320 “the form of the good [which] is the most important thing to learn.”321 For indeed, he admits

“we have no adequate knowledge of it.”322 With these prefatory remarks,

Plato puts us on guard that what follows is not a straightforward presentation of his views. Socrates will “abandon the quest for what the good

317 Plato, Republic, 505a.

318 Ibid., 506b.

319 Ibid., 505b–d.

320 Ibid., 509c.

321 Ibid., 505a.

322 Ibid. 145 itself is,” but will tell “about what is apparently an offspring of the good and most like it,” setting the stage for the famous analogy of the sun.323

Socrates’ hesitations are not mere modesty but are meant to perform the structural absence or mystery of the good. It is not as though someday, someone will have the “adequate knowledge” which is lacking. Rather the good is “beyond being” in a necessary way, unable to be obtained as one would obtain a being-thing. This is why when Glaucon suggests that the road of dialectic will “lead at last, it seems, towards that place which is a rest from the road, so to speak, and an end of journeying for the one who reaches it,”

Socrates replies:

You won’t be able to follow me any longer, Glaucon, even though there is no lack of eagerness on my part to lead you, for you would no longer be seeing an image of what we’re describing, but the truth itself.324

Socrates cannot take Glaucon all the way to the form of the good itself, not because he doesn’t want to, but because it is a structural mystery. It is simply not the kind of thing one can arrive at; it is not a destination or an end. But we can see “images” of the good, likenesses that lie somewhere in between and tend toward the mystery. Like in the Symposium “right opinion” was between wisdom and ignorance, so too is “opinion” here a metaxic agent leading toward knowledge of the good. Socrates will offer his “opinion about” the good by describing “what is apparently an offspring of the good and most

323 Ibid., 506d.

324 Ibid., 532e–533a.

146 like it.”325 But Plato interposes an additional screen, lest Socrates feign to know too much about this mystery, stating, “opinions without knowledge are shameful and ugly things.”326 Not only is Socrates venturing into the treacherous realm of opinion against his own better judgment, but it is also only by analogy, a kind of suggestive intimation, that he and his interlocutors will perhaps glimpse a trace of the good.

Socrates begins by reminding Glaucon of the theory of the forms. And this reminding is not incidental but points toward the faculty of anamnesis, the remembrance by which the philosopher reaches toward the forms. But even after Socrates finishes the analogy of the Sun, we will not have arrived at the good. Indeed Socrates will proceed to offer no less than seven repetitions of the story of the cave, the path by which we approach the sun.327 And it is in the midst of the fifth repetition that Glaucon points out that repetition itself—as is being carried out here by Socrates—is necessary:

“we’ll have to return to these things often in the future, rather than having to just hear them once now.”328 This suggests that the anamnetic work is never finished, is never finally consummated in a possessing of the good, but must always be begun anew, invented again, in this world of becoming. We recall

325 Ibid., 506d.

326 Ibid., 506c.

327 Ibid., 517a–535a.

328 Ibid., 532d. 147 here the Iamblichean interpretation of anamnesis, that the things of the world are “mnemonic prods” to aid in the remembrance of the forms.

Socrates begins by reminding Glaucon of the theory of the forms: “the many beautiful things and the rest are visible but not intelligible, while the forms are intelligible but not visible.”329 The analogy hinges upon this division. Sight may be present in the eyes, and colors in the visible things, but without the aid of a third kind of thing (triton genos), i.e. light, sight will see nothing and the colors will remain unseen.330 And so Socrates points out that the sun is the “cause and controller” of light, that which allows our sight to see and for visible things to be seen.331 In addition, the sun itself is seen by sight. Socrates states the analogy:

what the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.332

Thus when an object of knowledge is illuminated by the light of truth, which shines forth from the good, the soul knows this object and possesses understanding; but if the soul “focuses on what is mixed with obscurity… it opines and is dimmed… and seems bereft of understanding” (note here the dim view taken on opinion, despite the fact that Socrates’ whole account is

329 Ibid., 507b.

330 Ibid., 507d–e.

331 Ibid., 508a.

332 Ibid., 508b.

148 one of opinion).333 In addition to being the cause of knowledge and truth, the good is also an object of knowledge (like the sun is an object of sight), but one more beautiful than they.334 Just as the sun is considered superior to light and sight (though these latter are akin to it), so is the good more prized than truth and knowledge (though they too are “good-like”).335 To sum up: The sun provides light, which allows visible objects to be seen and the eyes to see; light and vision are sun-like, but the sun is superior to these; the sun can also be seen. The good illumines objects of knowledge with truth and allows the knower to know; knowledge and truth are like the good, but the good is superior to these; the good can also be known.

Socrates then elucidates a further aspect of the analogy. Not only does the sun allow visible things to be seen, but also provides them with “coming to be, growth and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.”336

Likewise the form of the good not only allows objects of knowledge to be known, but is also responsible for their very being—although the good is not being, but “superior to it in rank and power.”337 It is epekeina tes ousias

[ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας]. It is at this moment that Glaucon comically declaims:

333 Ibid., 508d.

334 Ibid., 508e.

335 Ibid., 509a.

336 Ibid., 509b.

337 Ibid. 149 “By Apollo, what a daimonic superiority [daimonias hyperboles;

δαιμονίας ὑπερβολῆς]!”338

First let us emphasize some aporiai in play here. One needs knowledge of the form of the good for the city, and thus the soul, to be justly governed—but Socrates admits that he has no adequate knowledge of the good. He has conceded that we have no knowledge of that which he goes on to say allows knowledge (i.e. the good). Socrates abandons the quest for the good and instead offers his analogy, which he himself admits is “opinion.”339

In the course of the analogy he derides opinion and states that it will not lead to understanding.340 The text has undermined itself, thus demanding our interpretive participation. While a cursory reading may have assumed that the text simply means what it says about the good, does this closer reading now annul that content, leaving us with an affirmative negation (“we have no adequate knowledge of it”)? Or is there a third way at work here? By protecting, or saving the mystery with his negations, while he simultaneously gestures toward the mystery with his affirmations, Plato begins to enact the third way, which will be carried fully by other performative aspects of his discourse.

Derrida does not seem to take this into account when he questions

338 Ibid., 509c.

339 Ibid.

340 Ibid., 508d.

150 the discontinuity marked by this beyond (epekeina) in relation to Being… The excellence is not so alien to Being or to light that the excess itself [i.e. the good or the sun] cannot be described in terms of what it exceeds.341

Derrida seems to be questioning how far beyond being the good can really be, if it can still be described in terms of being. This seems to intimate the issue of predication and presence discussed in section 2.2. By describing the good in terms of the sun and light, are we inscribing it within the horizon of presence and thus undermining its status as epekeina? I recall the argument I made in that section: Our speech, and even more so our writing, can be performative, even in its predication, and especially in its similes. To speak of the good in terms of light and the Sun, or to say it is like them, is a gesture rather than reification. To say that the good shines like the sun, does not say that I can know the good like I know the sun. The reader may object that in fact Socrates does say that the good is knowable—however we must keep in mind that he also says that we have no adequate knowledge of it and that the dialogue never provides that knowledge. The lynchpin of the whole ethical edifice of the just city, and by analogy, the just soul, is conspicuously absent.

So it turns out that Plato has set up and respected the negative limit of the good as epekeina tes ousias. Additionally, he has intentionally undermined his argument through the aporiai mentioned above to underline that this is an intimation of the good, to suggest that we somehow can and cannot know it.

Wisdom itself is this striving of the understanding in the light of truth toward

341 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 101–2.

151 that highest form necessary for perfect justice; but Socrates, disciple of erotics, does not pretend that such striving will ever be fully consummated or lead to the “end of journeying” of which Glaucon spoke.

Furthermore, it is this world of visible things, with its colors, light and sun, that becomes the metaxy, mediating the soul’s ascent via analogy to a participated understanding of the realm of forms. In a manner reminiscent of theurgy, we can know by participation but not discursively. The mystery is left inviolate as the beyond is intimated, not grasped; and seeing itself is not incidental to the analogy or to other moments in the ascent from the cave where the higher realm is glimpsed.342 At the very beginning of Book VII of the Republic, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine in his mind’s eye the scene of the cave: “See [ἰδέ] human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling.” At the end of Socrate’s description, Glaucon responds: “I see

[ὁρῶ].” Socrates continues, “Then also see [ὅρα] that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts.”343 For a text that supposedly denounces the image, image is central to the Republic (sun, divided line, cave, ship of state, etc.). What we said in relation to the body in chapter one, also applies to image and mimesis: They are not inherently bad, but problematic.

As was the case with matter and the body, it’s a question of how image is deployed. Is it a mere copy that in vain seeks to capture the essence of the

342 This ocular orientation recurs throughout the Platonic corpus, for example, in the myth that ends the Phaedrus, when the charioteer ascends to the highest sphere of the heavens and beholds the forms.

343 Plato, Republic, 514a–b. Translation slightly amended.

152 original? Or does it quicken the soul in an intimating gesture toward the mystery? Vision, unlike touch or taste, acts at a distance, refusing any final consummation of the ascent in a seizing or incorporating of those highest forms of knowledge. By remaining a lure, the forms, and the images that intimate them, draw the soul into an ongoing participated experience of self- transcendence. Seeking the unattainable good, like unattainable perfect responsibility, draws us out of ourselves, leading the whole embodied person toward a more just ethics.

* * *

In addition to calling the sun “an offspring of the good and most like it,” one other metaphor is employed which relates the two:

[GLAUCON:] The story about the father remains a debt you’ll pay another time. [SOCRATES:] I wish that I could pay the debt in full, and you receive it instead of just the interest [τόκους]. So here, then, is the child [τόκον] and offspring of the good. But be careful that I don’t somehow deceive you unintentionally by giving you an illegitimate account of the child/interest [τόκου].344

Plato plays on two meanings of the word tokos, interest and child, giving us two metaphors for the relationship between the good and the sun. As mentioned earlier, Plato’s punning humor always serves a purpose beyond mere amusement. If we consider the first metaphor, the analogy of the sun is the interest on a debt that remains unpaid. That debt is an account of the good, which remains promised for another time—a time that never comes in

344 Ibid., 506e–507a.

153 Plato’s oeuvre. An indeed a Derridean reading of the promise points out that it always contain a structural futuricity, a still yet to come, what Derrida will call the messianic. Once a promise is fulfilled, it is no longer a promise, and in the moment of saying “I promise,” I really cannot be sure that I will be able to keep my promise. A promise that has no chance of being broken would not be a promise; it would be a cog in a calculating machine. So the condition of possibility of keeping a promise is being able to not keep a promise; or the condition of its possibility is it impossibility. Promising rather is performative; one does a promise rather than simply saying it in a way that could be calculated or computed; the saying becomes a doing and gives rise to a lived enactment in the metaxic present toward a future mystery.

Similarly, the debt, precisely as an absence, accrues interest. But it is a debt that can never be paid because of the structural absence of the good— and yet it keeps accruing interest (not only the analogy of the sun as interest but also the parable of the cave and the divided line—even the metaphor of debt and interest itself). The debt is an image of the absence of the mystery, while the metaxic analogies to which it gives rise are the interest—but not only those analogies, because the good grants being to all objects of knowledge (like the sun provides growth and nourishment to visible things), indeed “the Good gives birth to Being.”345 Such debt and interest belong to a general economy rather a restricted one, to an economy of surplus and of the gift. And indeed, the sun is a classic example of a gift economy, giving its light

345 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 101.

154 in exchange for nothing. But unlike the sun, the good is beyond being, and thus not a thing. I would contend that the structure in question is similar to the gift of death: the gift that death gives, which is a fully lived life, it gives by itself not being a part of life and being life’s very end. The condition of possibility for a fully lived life is its condition of impossibility. Similarly the condition of possibility for being, as interest, is the absent capital beyond being.346

Here the deeper sense of the homonymy between interest and child

(tokos) comes to the fore. The good gives birth to the sun and to being, not as a present father but as absent capital. The present father names his children, while the absent capital multiplies interest, giving us a loose parallel to the kataphatic and apophatic paths. Plato’s third way is carried by the performativity of combining both. He gives image after image depicting the philosopher’s ascent to the good and yet we have no “adequate knowledge” of it, and it is never reached—which amounts to a gesture or invocation toward the mystery.

As Derrida writes in “Sauf le nom,” it is the figure of hyperbole that is crucial, announcing both the structure of this intimation, but also announcing its future:

Huperbole names the movement of transcendence that carries or transports beyond being or beingness epekeina tes ousias… This hyperbole announces. It announces in a double sense: it signals an open possibility, but it also provokes thereby the opening of a

346 For a different and fascinating reading of the absent capital as Plato’s unwritten teachings, repaid in oral dialectic, see Reale, Toward a New Interpretation.

155 possibility. Its event is at once revealing and producing, post-scriptum and prolegomena, inaugural writing. Its event announces what comes and makes come what will come from now on in all the movements in the hyper, ultra, au-delà, beyond, über, which will precipitate discourse or, first of all, existence. This precipitate is their passion.347

In French the verb “to announce” is “annoncer,” which does not change its form when taking on the form of the Christian annunciation: “Annonciation.”

I hear an echo of the announcing of the Incarnation to Mary. What is pertinent about the Annunciation is its structural futuricity with regard to the Christ-Being, the announcing of the “beyond being” begetting being. The epekeina “signals” this possibility but it also “provokes” it—and even provokes it in a double sense. It announces a history of apophasis, instantiations and non-identical repetitions of one another that could be crudely sketched as Plato-Dionysius-Heidegger-Derrida. We certainly cannot reduce the treatment of apophasis in each of these authors to the same, for they are crucially different. The Platonic apophasis concerns a neutral object, the good, while the Christian concerns a “You” or a “Person.” Heidegger, concerned with the ontological difference, understands “the beyond as the beyond of the totality of beings and not as the beyond of being itself, in the sense of negative theology.”348 What seems to emerge instead is precisely the play of différance or the multiplication of voices/ways on the apophatic path. The mystery cannot be spoken; it is not this; it is not that; it is not Plato or Dionysius or Heidegger or even Derrida. But what we have here are

347 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 64.

348 Ibid., 65.

156 variations on an apophatic theme that seems to run through this chain of thinkers, creating an image of a kind of macro-negative theology: “Its event…will precipitate discourse or, first of all, existence. This precipitation is their passion.” The speaker here (for we mustn’t confuse him or her with

Derrida) makes the interesting parallel between the multiplication of discourses on the mystery, and the multiplication which is being itself,

“existence.” In this sense, being is textual. Interpretation multiplies because of an absence of fully present meaning, like interest accrues on a debt which is absent capital, like being is begotten of a mystery beyond being. “This precipitation is their passion.” Again “passion” seems to indicate the metaxic, generative space where interpretation, interest and being gather (and even these three instances I offer are all interpretations, all interest accruing from the mystery, all instances of objects of knowledge given their being by the intelligible sun). The concept différance tries to point out this multiplication of ways/voices but is resigned to itself becoming yet another example, another voice on the way. In this way Derrida’s project does and does not encompass negative theology, pointing to its contingent status as an apophatic voice among many, but also relegating itself to the same status. But the point is very much that this is all we can hope to say about what (is) beyond being when we speak in a constative manner—which is in the end the same point that negative theology is making, at its best. In both cases any attempt at mastery is foiled. That is, any attempt to step outside the chain of variations on negative theology and pronounce what the essence of this

157 negativity is for all of its examples will necessarily fail—because the

“essence” of such a negativity turns out to be beyond being. This is why the difference between paradigm and copy, exemplar and example, is seen to break down. Every attempt to indicate the “essence” of negative theology or différance or, as we shall see, khora—will just be one more example of negative theology or the others…

* * *

To conclude this section, let us turn to a few performative moments in the text with regard to the central theme of ethics. The basic argument of the

Republic is that justice is in everyone’s best interest. A soul at peace within itself is ruled by its highest, rational part and because justice is simply the rule of souls by their rational part, there is no happiness without justice. So goes the surface argument and guiding thread of the ideal, rational city and soul. And what does this rationale lead the “true philosophers” to do?

They’ll send everyone in the city who is over ten years old into the countryside. Then they’ll take possession of the children, who are now free from the ethos of their parents, and bring them up in their own customs and laws, which are the ones we’ve described.349

If we are not to take this thinly veiled genocide seriously, then we also have to seriously question the guiding rational which has brought us up to this precipitous conclusion in Book VII. And indeed the timing does not seem arbitrary. This satiric endnote to Book VII seems to stress that we shouldn’t

349 Plato, Republic, 541e.

158 take Plato’s modest proposal too literally, that beyond the letter of his text we should always seek out the gesture it is tracing.

And indeed the Republic is a special case where rational order rules the day. Socrates even says, “a king lives seven hundred and twenty-nine times more pleasantly than a tyrant,” emphasizing how an overly quantified approach becomes ridiculous at its limit.350 At another he point he says, “the right kind of love will have nothing mad… about it.”351 But the Socrates of the Phaedrus insists, “madness from a god is finer than self-control of human origin.”352 Or consider how democracy is denounced as a many-headed beast,353 alongside the fact that it is only in a democracy that such a political discussion as that of the Republic could take place. I offer these examples to bring our attention to the performative dimension of Plato’s text. Plato employs the rational faculty in the Republic in a true attempt to intimate justice, but he also realizes its limits. Where is eros in this city? Such inspired love would resist these cold calculations. But it is the circulation of just such eros in the friendship of philosophical conversation, permitted by the democratic milieu, which gives rise to the discussion in the first place. So while the affirming, rational path finally fails the ideal of justice it aims toward, the negative, comic and satiric moments indicate Plato’s

350 Plato, Republic, 590b.

351 Ibid., 403b.

352 Plato, Phaedrus, 244d.

353 Plato, Republic, 588.

159 foreknowledge of such failure. Read together we can see the performative dimension of the text that gestures toward justice and the good.

The use of analogy does not seem incidental in this regard. The crucial

Book VII is full of analogies to explain the heights of philosophic ascent and the good itself. As we have noted, Plato seems to think that something like the good cannot be discussed directly. What does it say about the world, if at its highest or deepest levels, it is best spoken about by analogy? What if a certain dimension of the world resists straightforward, quantified and rational description? Sometimes the use of analogy in Plato is decried as a sort of faulty or sub-par logic, but that already presupposes that logic is the best way to describe the state affairs. When we consider a metaphysics of participation, such a disconnection of subject and object is actually a poorer description. If my world becomes itself in part through my participation in it, then I do not need a detatched, rational description of something like the good, but something that brings me into the equation. This is what the analogy does by indicating a kind of vector of force, but allowing me to complete the picture with a participatory supplement. Furthermore, the analogy is a kind of relational knowledge. It never says what the good is, but it intimates the ways it relates to what comes from it and what moves toward it. In the same way that light is triton genos, mediating between the sun and visible things, so is the analogy of the sun as a whole a kind of third term, mediating between the mystery of the good and an intelligible and sensible subject. Far from reifying a strict division between the sensible and

160 intelligible, Plato brings both into relation with each other and with the good in the metaxy.

To sum up, I would suggest that Plato has anticipated certain cracks in the solar façade, and that the performative dimension of his text allows him to intimate the good without trying to make an airtight argument or statement about its nature. Socrates’ reticence before the task of describing the form of the good should not be read as philosophic weakness, but as humility before an ineffable mystery—just as his awareness that he knows nothing makes him the wisest man in Athens. The offering of an opined account within which opinion itself is disparaged is a way of intimating the good while at the same time masking it, a way of evocatively circumambulating the good while allowing it to remain behind the veil of beyond-being. Finally, Glaucon’s comic invocation of Apollo serves a double function. With the humorous element, Plato undermines himself, urging us to think twice about what he is actually saying. Additionally it solidifies the connection to myth and “likely stories” which consistently mark the limits of reason in Plato’s works and often indicate a certain leap into the beyond.354

Similar to our analysis of the Phaedo, the Republic itself, after exhaustive logocentric inquiry, concludes with the myth of Er, performatively marking the limits of rational discourse. Socrates has found a way of saying the good without saying it; this is perhaps all one could hope to (not) say about that which (is) beyond being and thus predication; with and against Derrida, one

354 The Phaedrus is another classic example.

161 might call this “how to (not) avoid speaking.” We turn now to another triton genos in what some consider the Republic’s companion piece. If the Republic was about the ascent to the sun, Plato’s Timaeus considers the descent unto the earth and even into the abyss.

3.2: Timaeus

Yes, there is much of the ancients in what I have said. Everything perhaps.355 – Jacques Derrida

In Plato’s Timaeus the reader is presented with a “likely tale,”356

“beginning with the origin of the universe, and concluding with the nature of human beings.”357 While the Republic begins “down” in the Piraeus and ascends up toward the sun, the Timaeus descends through the heavenly spheres to the biome with its living things and their processes and properties. It is a sweeping cosmologic account told by the learned Timaeus, at the very center of which we encounter the enigmatic khora [χώρα], a third kind (triton genos). Simply put, khora seems to be the space or interval within which the eternal forms are pressed into the changing world of becoming—being and becoming, the other two kinds. And yet it is not so simple; for even as khora is the intermediary which allows being to enter the world of representation, so too does she resist this intrusion:

355 Derrida, “Interview with Walter Kaufmann,” 93.

356 Plato, Timaeus, 29d.

357 Ibid., 27a.

162 [khora] does not depart from its own character in any way. Not only does it always receive all things, it has never in any way whatever taken on any characteristic similar to any of the things that enter it.358

Why does Timaeus introduce this puzzling entity that upsets the familiar two-tiered Platonic world of being and becoming? What is one to do with khora? Is it as Derrida suggests: “The ontologico-encyclopedic conclusion of the Timaeus seems to cover over the open chasm in the middle of the book.”359 Does Plato have something to hide? Or on the contrary, does khora upset Platonic binaries in an anticipated way? We will suggest several ways that khora helps us to think metaxy and mystery—thereby both upsetting and redeeming classic notions of Platonic dualism.

But first let us examine several hesitations, negations and equivocations that, like in the Republic, serve to undermine surety in advance or “save the name” of the mysteries in question. As already mentioned, numerous times throughout the dialogue Timaeus will refer to his account as a “likely tale.” After all, he and his interlocutors are “only human. So we should accept the likely tale on these matters. It behooves us not to look for anything beyond this.”360 Though we should never take a character’s view for Plato’s own (and here it is not even Socrates speaking), the precautions have been made and the mystery saved in terms of any ultimate unveiling.

Timaeus makes other precautions as well:

358 Ibid., 50c–e.

359 Derrida, “Khora,” 104.

360 Plato, Timaeus, 29d. 163 we are about to make speeches about the universe—whether it has an origin or even if it does not—and so if we’re not to go completely astray we have no choice but to call upon the gods and goddesses, and pray that they above all will approve of all we have to say, and that in consequence we will, too.361

Timaeus will give an account of the origin of the universe, but here, before he has even begun he has already conceded that perhaps it doesn’t have an origin after all—quite a contrary, if not blasphemous, thought for one who is about to invoke the Demiurge. In any case, it underlines the contingency of the tale. He then invokes the gods and goddesses, which by itself can be seen as a performative gesture, an indication that all that follows points toward a beyond that is out of Timaeus’s full comprehension. But additionally he prays that because the gods approve, so too will he and his company. This too seems a bit odd for one who is going to give an ordered and rational account of cosmogenesis. It seems that his account should be evaluated on its

“likelihood” rather than the approval of gods and goddesses, but this again suggests a certain humility before mystery rather than a hubris of reason.

Timaeus continues to preface his account:

Now to find the maker and father of this universe is hard enough, and even if I succeeded, to declare him to everyone is impossible…. Which of the two models did the maker use when he fashioned it? Was it the one that does not change and stays the same, or the one that has come to be? Well, if this world of ours is beautiful and its craftsman good, then clearly he looked at the eternal model. But if what it’s blasphemous to even say is the case, then he looked at the one that has come to be. Now surely it’s clear to all that it was the eternal model he looked at, for, of all the things that have come to be, our universe is the most beautiful, and of the causes the craftsman is the most excellent. This, then, is how it has come to be: it is a work of

361 Ibid., 27c.

164 craft, modeled after that which is changeless and is grasped by a rational account.362

First we learn that declaring the maker is impossible but shortly thereafter we are told that this craftsman is the most excellent of causes. Not only this but that our universe, with which we have no others to compare, is most beautiful. Even if the universe itself did not give us reason to question such declarations, they themselves are already clearly not a “rational account.”

Already, Plato is intimating the inability of a rational account to deal with the ultimate mystery of origins. Indeed Timaeus continues:

it is of the utmost importance to begin at the natural beginning, and so, on the subject of an image and its model, we must make the following specifications: the accounts we give of things have the same character as the subjects they set forth.363

Here we have but to apply Timaeus’s own words to Plato’s dialogue to evaluate whether the former is the mouthpiece of the latter, and in what proportions we must evaluate content and form. “One, Two, Three…Where’s number four Timaeus?” Right away in the opening line of the dialogue there is someone or something missing. The interlocutors then recall a dialogue from the day before that appears to be the Republic, but badly botch it, forgetting many critical moments like the myth of Er and the discussion of poets and mimesis (here Plato seems to acknowledge that even Socratic speech can be ineffective for “writing on the soul,” being easily misremembered or misinterpreted). Finally, Critias launches into an ancient

362 Ibid., 28c.

363 Ibid., 29b. 165 tale about a deed performed by Athens that carries on for pages. For a dialogue that will be concerned with cosmogenesis, none of this seems like a

“natural beginning”: something missing, faulty memory, a mythic tale from generations past. Or does it? Here is where Plato’s text performs on multiple levels: It is certainly not a natural beginning for Timaeus’s story on the whole, thus undermining it in a way and distancing Plato from such an overly rational account; but at the same time, it is a natural beginning for an important moment in the story, with each of the three items mentioned reflecting a crucial aspect of khora, to which we now turn.

After recounting the origins of the universe in the Demiurge’s fitting together of the circles of the Same and the Different with all the heavenly spheres,364 as well as the virtuous powers of sight and hearing,365 which allow human beings to attune their imperfect selves to the more perfect revolutions of the cosmos, Timaeus pauses. Everything relayed thus far has been the work of Intellect, but to provide a full account, Timaeus must “go back once again to the beginning,” taking Necessity into consideration too:

“For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is an offspring of the union of

364 Ibid., 36c–d. Interestingly, at 36c when the Demiurge joins together the circles destined to be the rotations of the Same and the Different, he joins them “together center to center like an X.” This “X” is the word “xi [χεί]” in the Greek original, the first letter of khora [χώρα]. Khora is destined to be a mediator of opposites, such as the Same and Different, or Being and becoming. The shape of the letter itself performs this chiasmic role, offering another example of how we must think beyond the simply rational in order to understand khora and the full implications of Plato’s thought. We will return to this “X” later in our considerations of Derrida, Heidegger, and Marion.

365 Ibid., 47a–e.

166 Necessity and Intellect.”366 Timaeus must make a second beginning in his rational account—which seems, no less than the third beginning he will make later, neither natural nor rational. To effect this union between Intellect and

Necessity, Timaeus must introduce a “third kind” (τρίτον γένος) in addition to changeless being and visible becoming.367 It is khora (χώρα), “a receptacle of all becoming—its wetnurse as it were.”368

Wetnurse is the starkest use of metaphor thus far in Timaeus’s speech. Up until this point we have been presented with an ordered construction via forms according to Pythagorean ratios; but now we encounter a host of images and metaphors to aid in this “strange and unusual exposition.”369 Indeed, Timaeus expresses trepidation before his “difficult task”370 and invokes the god as savior for a second time.371 The stylistic shift to metaphor and image, the rhetorical second beginning with a divine invocation, and the structural placement of the section in the exact center of the dialogue all serve to mark the importance of khora—and to performatively suggest that what is about to be presented goes beyond straightforward and rational discourse.

366 Ibid., 48b.

367 Ibid., 49b.

368 Ibid., 49a.

369 Ibid., 48e.

370 Ibid., 49b. We are reminded of sheepish Socrates faced with giving an account of the good in the Republic.

371 Ibid., 48d. 167 Timaeus goes on to examine a preliminary problem about the elements. Simply put, because each element can transform into the others through various processes, it seems incorrect to designate fire, for example, as some one, specific stable, and unchanging thing; for fire can be extinguished and turn into air, air condense into water, and so on.372 The only thing that meets these immutability criteria is khora:

it does not depart from its own character in any way... the thing that is to receive in itself all the elemental kinds must be totally devoid of any characteristics.373

Timaeus illustrates this with an image of gold being molded into different shapes over and over in sequence. When someone asks, what is it?,

your safest answer by far, with respect to truth, would be to say “gold,” but never “triangle” or any of the other shapes that come to be in it, as though it is these.374

That Timaeus chooses the shape triangle in this example is surely not arbitrary, for several pages later he will begin his detailed explanation of how triangular surfaces which come together to form Platonic solids are the structural bases of the elements and thus most all of what exists in the realm of becoming. In this metaphor, along with two that follow (i.e. khora as an odorless base for perfume-making; khora as an unshaped plastic material for molding), khora seems to approach Aristotle’s interpretation of it as prima

372 Ibid., 49c.

373 Ibid., 50c–e.

374 Ibid., 50b.

168 materia, or hyle [ὕλη]—a word, however, that Plato never uses to describe the enigmatic khora.

Already in the word materia, we hear those other metaphors of mother and pseudo-mother (wetnurse). In opposition to the last set of metaphors, the wetnurse is not shaped into a child but sustains and cares for him or her; the mother does not become the child but provides the generative matrix within which the father’s imprint can spring forth as a “nature between them.”375 And so in these two images, khora remains more distinct from the world of becoming, providing its necessary support-system or womblike container, but not being a mere medium or stuff of becoming.

If the first set of metaphors (gold etc.) try to cast khora as a merely passive substance to be shaped, and are somewhat upset by the second set of metaphors (mother etc.), which offer khora more separation and individuality, then the third set of metaphors (the winnowing sieves and the shaking machine376) seem to present khora with some sense of agency:

“[khora] is shaken by those things [that enter it], and being set in motion it in turn shakes them.”377 This begins the work of separating the four elements to their appropriate places (fire and air above, water and earth below).

Surely khora has become more active than in her former instantiations: “the four kinds were being shaken by the receiver, which was itself agitating like a

375 Ibid., 50d.

376 Ibid., 53a.

377 Ibid., 52e, italics mine.

169 shaking machine, separating the kinds.”378 No longer a neutral base to be imprinted upon, nor a wetnurse hired to selflessly tend to the child, khora has become an actor, sifting “the different kinds… [into] the different regions of space, even before the universe was set in order and constituted from them.”379

What to make of these multiple and sometimes contradictory images, metaphors and personifications of khora? Is it not because it brings together the seemingly opposed realms of being and becoming that it can only be

“apprehended by a kind of bastard reasoning?”380 Khora introduces the very possibility of relation into the cosmos, comprehending but at the same time standing outside of all the binaries it serves to relate.

We look at [khora] as if in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t exist at all.381

Khora is that third species (triton genos) which encompasses both the transcendent and the immanent, and is thus a strange hybrid, amalgamating the ordered ratios of the Intellect with the Straying Cause382 of Necessity.

Though eternal and sharing “in a most perplexing way in what is

378 Ibid., 53a.

379 Ibid., 53a.

380 Ibid., 52b.

381 Ibid.

382 Ibid., 48a.

170 intelligible,”383 she refuses to be thought as an intellectual form, but only by recourse to varying images from the realm of becoming (receptacle, gold, plastic, odorless base, wetnurse, mother, winnowing sieve, shaking machine), which nevertheless, she is not. Khora upsets any easy notion of Platonic dualism, for indeed this cosmos is tripartite: “There are being, space, and becoming, three distinct things which existed even before the universe came to be.”384 But “Where’s number four, Timaeus?” Let us not forget the

Demiurge who forged the cosmos, the first of several fourths who we will encounter.

Derrida, for his part, describes khora as “back behind and below the elementary principles.”385 It is the abysmal matrix, the condition of possibility of all oppositions (e.g. sensible/intelligible), giving rise to these binaries without submitting to description under their terms. Making the connection to the “third species” as light of the sun in the Republic, Derrida calls khora “another manner of treating what is beyond (epekeina) the border.”386 However, contrasting khora to the Platonic agathon, John Caputo calls her “a quasi-transcendental anteriority, not a supereminent, transcendent ulteriority.”387 Indeed Derrida stresses its difference from the

383 Ibid., 51–52.

384 Ibid., 52d.

385 Derrida, “Khora,” 125.

386 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 104.

387 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 3.

171 agathon: “one must distinguish between two movements or two tropics of negativity. These two structures are radically heterogeneous.”388 We will return to this relationship between agathon and khora in the conclusion, but it is always percolating below the surface here. Instead let us turn to two heterogeneous movements within the discourse on khora itself.

Recalling the three sets of metaphors for khora outlined above, we can see khora oscillate between, what Derrida calls, “two concurrent languages,” that of the “neither/nor” and the “both/and.”389 The first is khora as passive, anterior spacing that never takes on any of the qualities of the binaries to which it gives place, neither being, nor becoming. The second language,

Derrida describes thus:

[it] multiplies the negations, the warnings, the evasions, the detours, the tropes, but with a view to reappropriating the thinking of the khora for ontology and for Platonic dialectic in its most dominant schemas. If the khora… is neither sensible nor intelligible, it seems to participate in the intelligible in an enigmatic way (51a). Since it “receives all,” it makes possible the formation of the cosmos. As it is neither this not that… one may speak as if it were a joint participant in both. Neither/nor easily becomes both… and.390

We feel the heat of Derrida’s accusation of a metaphysics of presence throughout the passage, and yet Plato’s best defense would simply be to cite the other concurrent language, the one Derrida says

interest[s] me more… All the aporias, which Plato makes no effort to hide, would signify that there is something that is neither a being nor a

388 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 101.

389 Ibid., 104–5.

390 Ibid., 105.

172 nothingness; something that no dialectic, participatory schema, or analogy would allow one to rearticulate together with any philosopheme whatsoever… Hence the so-called “metaphors” are not only inadequate, in that they borrow figures from the sensible forms inscribed in the khora without pertinence for designating the khora itself. They are no longer metaphors.391

I assert that Plato makes no effort to hide the aporias because he intends them. As we have been suggesting, elements of Plato’s content and form intentionally chafe against Timaeus’s account. So while Timaeus would like to neatly wrap up the cosmos in a philosophical, and even maximally rational, account, Plato wants to show such a thing’s impossibility. Or rather that even the possibility of attempting such a rational explanation rests on its anterior condition of impossibility in the khora: the khora gives rise to the rational as opposed to the irrational, and yet it also resists reappropriation by the rational in an account of its nature: the condition of possibility of a rational account of khora is its condition of impossibility.

But what this Derridean language brings to the fore is the necessity of holding both poles of the double oscillation (both/and, as well as, neither/nor). For in fact it is in khora’s more passive roles as gold or wax that it seems to take on the qualities of those things imprinted in it, while in its more active roles as winnowing sieve or shaking machine it more clearly resists conforming to what passes through it. It is no accident that there are

“two concurrent languages” regarding khora that are irreducible to one another, for khora gives place to binaries: “It is this structural law… a matter

391 Ibid., 105–106.

173 of a structure and not of some essence of the khora, since the question of essence no longer has any meaning with regard to it.” This structural law seems to indicate a process more than a thing (process/thing: another binary no doubt), and a process that in giving rise to opposites effaces its own containment in any such system of opposites (such as the distinction between process and thing I just drew).

This fact is bore out by the very history of interpretations of khora:

Rich, numerous, inexhaustible, the interpretations come, in short, to give form to the meaning of khora… it which, however, can “offer itself” or promise itself only by removing itself from any determination… But what we are putting forward here of the interpretation of khora… reproduces or simply brings back, with all its schemas, Plato’s discourse on the subject of khora. And this is true even down to this very sentence in which I have just made use of the word schemas. The skhemata are the cut-out figures imprinted into the khora, the forms which inform it. They are of it without belonging to it.392

The definition of khora as that which gives place to a form imprinting itself on an instantiation, determines in advance that when we attempt to describe khora’s form we will always only be enacting another instantiation in the space it has already provided. It is in this sense that Derrida calls it

“anachronistic,”393 because even the name khora itself and Plato’s discourse on it are already one more example of such an instantiation, one more attempt to give form to that which already made form-giving possible. The

392 Derrida, “Khora,” 94–95.

393 Ibid., 94.

174 khora, or whatever that name refers to, will always have preceded us, “has always already taken place.”394

So Derrida asks: How to speak of it? How to avoid speaking of it? He takes his answer from Plato, offering a retranslation:

to call it, address oneself to it in the same manner (“tauton auten aei prosreteon”; 50b)[ταὐτὸν αὐτὴν ἀεὶ προσρητέον]. This is not a question of a proper name, but rather of appellation… and sometimes: I adore—divinity.395

And even though Derrida will go on to insist on the a-theological character of khora, he did just compare its address to an adoration of divinity. The appellation is a performative, it is the act of calling rather than naming, it is yearning, a metaxic adoration of this mystery to which we sometimes call:

“Oh, khora.” We would like to put it in the vocative case. Like the other, like

God, like any mystery, khora must be related to in a performative manner, must be spoken to by the third way. Indeed, this close connection between khora and performance seems to be performed by the dialogue itself.

As he unfolds his reading of the Timaeus, Derrida evocatively suggests a connection between khora and Socrates. With reference to the discourse from the day before (perhaps the Republic), Socrates declares himself

“unable to sing fitting praise to our city and its men,” and so to be a little like the poets and sophists, those imitators and wanderers whose

“representations of those philosopher-statesmen would simply miss the

394 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 107.

395 Ibid.

175 mark.”396 It is rather Timaeus and his compatriots, who engage in philosophy and politics, who would be fitting for this task, and so Socrates declares: “Your speeches are your hospitality gifts, and so here I am, all dressed up for the occasion. No one could be more prepared to receive your gifts than I.”397 Derrida states of Socrates:

Hence he holds himself in a third genus, in a way, neither that of the sophists, poets, and other imitators (of whom he speaks), nor that of the philosopher-politicians (to whom he speaks, proposing only to listen to them)… Doesn’t he already resemble what others, later, those very ones to whom he gives the word, will call khora?398

The imitators correspond to becoming, the philosopher-statesmen to being and Socrates to khora—this last creating the space that calls forth Timaeus’s speech, which weaves “probable accounts” (mythos) and truth (logos) (In this regard, Timaeus is not unlike the Demiurge, who is told to “weave what is mortal to what is immortal, fashion and beget living things.”399). Indeed it seems to be Socrates’ character in general to receive all interlocutors who come to him, facilitate the imprinting of a certain knowledge of the forms upon them, and yet to take on none of the characteristics of either, remaining steadily and paradoxically wise in his ignorance.

Sometimes Derrida seems to imply that Plato was unaware of how critically powerful the khora is—as if he did not realize that it is a kind of

396 Ibid., 19d–e.

397 Ibid., 20c.

398 Derrida, “Khora,” 109.

399 Plato, Timaeus, 41d.

176 bottomless chasm upon which the ontology of the Timaeus is constructed.

But we need only follow Derrida’s own observations to convince ourselves of

Plato’s awareness. Structurally speaking, perhaps two of the most telling moments in any Platonic dialogue are the opening line and the middle (in terms of number of lines). It is at the middle of the dialogue that the main discussion of khora transpires. And in the famous opening line Socrates refers to the “absent friend” who is not in attendance: “One, two, three…

Where’s number four, Timaeus?”400 Plato seems to be acknowledging the importance of a certain absence in the ontology that is subsequently constructed. We might also note in passing that in the end there are four people present, once we include Socrates, a kind of stand-in for the absent friend, further underscoring his performance as khora.

However, another way to read those opening lines would consider

“One, two, three…” the primal constituents of Timaeus’s universe (becoming- khora-Being),401 and the missing fourth as that which is conspicuously absent from the Timaean cosmos: eros, yet another metaxic role performed by Socrates in the Symposium. Eros also had trouble finding its place in the ideal city of the Republic. In politics no less than cosmosgenesis, it is schematization, excessive formalism and an overly rational approach that precludes eros. Plato is saying as much if not more by what is absent rather than present. But a merely passive reader may not notice this. The dialogues

400 Ibid., 17a.

401 Ibid.

177 demand our interpretive participation—demand that we imagine counter- arguments, that we compare them to other dialogues, and that we read between the lines. If Plato suggests that the forms of a rational logos are not enough to describe the city, much less the universe, he is certainly valuing the eros and passion that happen this side of the mystery, in the metaxy.

It seems worth noting that khora (not surprisingly) resists our mystery and metaxy schematic. It tends toward metaxy when participating in both, engendering and mitigating the binary; but it tends toward mystery in resisting to be taken up by other, always remaining beyond. And if khora gives rise to differentiated pairs like lover–beloved, of course it will not submit to description under such a variation (metaxy-mystery). My terms are one more instantiation of what arises in the place of khora, once more we

“rediscover the trace, still unique, in other languages, bodies, and negativities.”402 This is the “performative tracing” that can and must always be “invented” anew. This is my way of participating in the mystery of khora, the khora of mystery. And if such writing succeeds at all, the reader may have a moment when a participatory experience is evoked, transcending anything the text could say or negate—a moment when the text is heard as the prayer that it actually is: Writing is the desire of God.

* * *

402 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 108.

178 Derrida offers a compelling account of how khora is structurally performed in the Russian-doll structure of Critias’s narrative frames which precede Timaeus’s account403 (I heard this story from a friend, who heard it from his grandfather, who heard it from an Egyptian, etc.):

a mise en abyme regulates a certain order of the composition of the discourse… Mise en abyme of the discourse on khora… the structure of an overprinting without a base.404

This is similar to the history of discourse to which khora gives rise, the commentaries on commentaries that pile up in the literature on the Timaeus, all those commentaries being printed over the absent khora.

With this, we can now see how the three formerly problematic elements of our “natural beginning,” in fact fit “the following specifications: the accounts we give of things have the same character as the subjects they set forth.”405 Critias’s mythic tale spanning back through nested generations performs khora, as does the “absent friend” of the opening line, referring doubly to khora as marking an ontological absence and Socrates as the stand- in friend performing khora. Finally the component of faulty memory around the dialogue of the day before suggests khora’s inability to be pinned down, its constant re-translatability by other names, and its anachronism.

So it seems that in addition to the actual discussion of khora, Plato is performing the khora in these four ways. Thus it would seem wrong to

403 Derrida, “Khora,” 119.

404 Ibid., 104.

405 Plato, Timaeus, 29b.

179 suggest that Derrida highlights an unanticipated crack in the Platonic façade.

Plato intentionally and necessarily builds in the khora to mark a certain limit, to intimate a space outside of and anterior to Being/becoming, intelligible/sensible, logos/mythos.406 But it would also be wrong to say that deconstruction has done Plato a disservice, for it has thematized and shed some light on this feature about which it is particularly difficult to speak.

This is the thrust of my thesis on Derrida, which is really no different than what deconstruction has always claimed to be: an immanent critique.

What I want to bring to the fore is that Derrida, acknowledging the effects of différance and his inability to master them, purposely emphasizes a repressed side of the binary in order to make the text speak again. This wasn’t a repression performed by Plato, but by Platonism as a historical effect. As we noted as the outset,

Discourse on khora inevitably oscillates, so rather than feigning to master that oscillation, Derrida actually performs it by making his text the other pole of a binary with the dominant interpretation of Plato as Platonism. We will return to this idea in the conclusion.

406 Again, Plato makes a similar move at the end of the Phaedo, finally going beyond both logos and mythos and leaving us only with an “incantation” or prayer.

407 Derrida, Khora, 81–82, quoted in Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 239.

180 Performativity is clearly central to both thinkers. Plato seems to realize the limits of what can be said about khora, which is perhaps why he performs it, in the ways described. When Plato performs the khora he is able to intimate it without saying it, without naming it, and thus not to submit it to the metaphysics of presence. On a related note, Iamblichus’s concept of huparxis [ὕπαρξις], discussed earlier, bears a certain resemblance to khora:

“Huparxis is the simplicity anterior to all things… which pre-exists beyond all things and is the cause of every ousia but is not yet itself ousia.”408 It is the

“hypo” + “archein”, the origin below origins.409 And though there is a movement beyond involved, it is not a hyperousios; it is more a below than an above and Iamblichus is careful to deny it any ousia. One is reminded more of the abyssal khora than of the unified Neoplatonic One: “[huparxis is] the anterior and commanding principle which contains in and around itself otherness and multiplicity.”410 In these ways both Iamblichus and Plato prefigure Derrida’s notion of a structural nonpresence that cannot be expressed discursively but can be intimated performatively, and thus which can be participated in. When Derrida emphasizes that Timaeus says we must always call khora in the same way, he is highlighting the importance of speaking to, rather than speaking of. This speaking-to is always on the way,

408 Damascius, Dub. et Sol., quoted in Shaw, 119.

409 The prefix “hypo-” becomes “hyp-“ before a vowel, and is not a contraction of “hyper.”

410 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis Liber, quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 121.

181 taking up whatever is at hand—a provisional name such as khora—as a manner of performing the address.

Again we are reminded of Iamblichus’s “mnemonic prods” and the necessity of the realm of becoming in order to access true being. Timaeus states:

we must distinguish two forms of cause, the divine and the necessary… without the necessary, those other objects [i.e. the divine]… cannot on their own be discerned, and hence cannot be comprehended or partaken of in any other way.411

It is in and through the metaxy that one partakes of the mystery. But because the mystery is never made manifest, the work must always be begun anew.

We recall the importance that Glaucon put on repetition in the Republic

(“we’ll have to return to these things often in the future, rather than having to just hear them once now.”412) and that Socrates himself offers seven repetitions of the story of the cave. In like manner, just after the quotation above, Timaeus will begin his tale anew for a third time.413 “One, two, three… but where is number four Socrates?”

The fourth beginning lies outside the text and is always still to come.

The fourth beginning is the one we take up when we perform khora by participating in the work of cosmogenesis, by living in metaxic-becoming-

411 Plato, Timaeus, 69a.

412 Plato, Republic, 532d.

413 Plato, Timaeus, 69a. This third beginning is the quote with which Derrida concludes On the Name.

182 toward-mystery. Indeed at the end of the dialogue, Timaeus exhorts one not just to think khora, but to live it in an embodied fashion:

if he models himself after…the foster-mother and nurse of the universe…and continually agitates [his body] through its whole extent, he will keep in a state of natural equilibrium the internal and external motions.414

We are not simply to muse on khora from the comfort of an armchair, but to

“continually agitate” ourselves in the image of this “shaking machine” and

“winnowing sieve,” bringing “order and regularity” to our bodies, the same way that khora brought order to the material elements.

What does it look like to perform something so enigmatic as khora?

An analogy from Iamblichus and the Pythagoreans is instructive here. The latter had discovered that the diagonal of a square with a side of “1” has an irrational value and thus cannot be arithmetically defined. Shaw continues:

Nevertheless, it becomes defined when it is geometrically performed, which means that the irrational becomes rational when it functions as a generative power. In the same way, a corresponding irrational power was understood to exist in the soul, a power that remained ineffable until it was revealed in theurgic performance: the “ineffable acts.”… Like the irrational diagonal, the ineffable power of the gods was alogos with respect to discrete (arithmetic) reasoning yet became the source for a logos revealed in embodied (geometric) action.415

This last piece is what I am calling participatory epistemology. There is a way of knowing that has to do with a doing that exceeds saying. A mystery that cannot be discursively known can still be addressed, and thus known in

414 Plato, Timaeus, 88d.

415 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 211–12. For a detailed exploration of the presence of the irrational diagonal in the soul based on the Timaeus (36), see Gaiser, “Die Spiele als Begrenzung des Korpers,” 59–60.

183 relation rather than as an object. Khora gives space for generativity and plays a role in that agitation which puts things into place. In accord with these ideas, the theurgists referred to not only their ritual objects but also their own souls by one of khora’s epithets: receptacle (hupodoche [υποδοχη]). The soul “could become a proper receptacle of the gods and, like the pure matter of the Timaeus, transfer this order to the phenomenal world.”416 Khora, who appears so paradoxical from the point of view of the rational mind, becomes in participation a living model of integration: sensible and intelligible, mythos and logos, theory and practice (for participation of this kind must not oppose itself to theory either). And yet khora also resists the totalization of any of these systems of division, reminding us of the irreducible alterity and singularity of the other. Derrida says, “God at once permits and does not permit participation in Him.”417 And of course we know that, “one should say of no matter what or no matter whom what one says of God.”418 We must imagine a third way beyond participation and dualism, a kind of arche- participation. We will return to this idea in the conclusion.

* * *

416 Ibid., 57. In accordance with Aristotle, Iamblichus interprets khora as hule (thus Shaw says, “pure matter”), however by then translating his notion of hupodoche onto the human soul, he has clearly gone beyond Aristotle.

417 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 119.

418 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 73

184 To sum up, khora in the Timaeus gives rise to all the classic Platonic oppositions (being/becoming, sensible intelligible, etc.), thereby preceding them and leading toward a thinking outside of their dominance. For Derrida, khora is a surname of différance (which he would like to say is neither a name nor even a word) and helps us to think beyond Platonism. I have tried to bring out the ways in which Plato was already engaged in a thinking beyond

Platonism. Rather than reappropriating the khora for ontology, Plato dramatizes the transcendental shaking machine, setting it at the center of the

Timaean architecture, where it causes the edifice to tremble. It inhabits the very structure of the dialogue, replacing a “natural beginning,” with absence, garbled memories and telescoping narrative rings. It even inhabits Socrates, silencing his loquacious elenchus, and giving space for Timaeus’s tale of two worlds. But khora, set between being and becoming, also redeems the two- tiered world set up by Timaeus in the first portion of the dialogue: once the poles of Being and becoming have allowed a certain understanding of the world through logos, the introduction of khora makes that world strange again—bringing into dramatic relief the puzzle of interpenetration between the two worlds. This is also where metaphor comes on the scene to mark the limits of logos alone. To understand relation itself, more than the intellect is required; image, dream, bastard reasoning and the in-between are called for.

These hints perhaps alert us to the absence of eros, and the fact that his

“likely tale” is not the whole story. Although there is a real attempt here to give an account of cosmogenesis, Plato also seems to be highlighting the

185 impossibility of the total comprehensiveness of any such account. The reader is forced to grapple with this inner conflict of the text, leading to a participatory experience; the reader is shaken like the khora in being stretched to hold opposites at once. By engaging with the text in such a way, the reader is trained to see and hold such opposition in the world around him or her, becoming a living triton genos on the third way. We turn now to our third instance of a third species in the Sophist.

3.3: Sophist

Derrida connects his discussion of triton genos in the Republic to the

Timaeus via a transition paragraph on another schema of the “third” in the

Sophist. His mention of it acts as a kind of bridge between the other two dialogues, which represent “two movements or two tropics of negativity.” To which of the two movements does the Sophist belong? Does it belong to either? We will return to this question in the next section when we discuss

“How to Avoid Speaking” in more detail. As in Derrida’s text, this section will serve as a kind of interlude or bridge to the final section of our chapter.

Derrida summarizes the schema of the third in the Sophist:

Of all the paired oppositions, one may say that each term is. The being (einai) of this is figures as a third that is beyond the two others (triton para to duo ekeina). It is indispensable to the interweaving (symploke) or to the dialectical intersection of the forms or of the ideas in a logos capable of receiving the other.419

419 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 103.

186 One of the most important pairs of opposites under scrutiny is being and nonbeing, along with the crucial question of whether nonbeing is. Can one in any way say that that which is not, is? Or did Parmenides have it right?:

Never shall this force itself on us, that that which is not may be; While you search, keep your thought far away from this path.420

In fact the Eleatic Stranger, who is the principal speaker in this dialogue, finds himself compelled to disagree with Parmenides and thus commit parricide by striking out upon the second path. The occasion for this parricide is the hunt for the sophist, an attempt to define his nature as distinct from the statesman and the philosopher. In order to critique the double dealings of the sophist, the Stranger finds it necessary to say that error is, that falsehood is and can de identified, in short, that that which is not can present itself as the case in the mouth of the deceitful sophist. In order to launch such a critique successfully, it becomes necessary therefore to utter anathema: nonbeing is.

And while at first glance this admission seems to send the stable

Parmenidean world into flux, it is actually against the relativism of the sophists that the Stranger makes such claims. Only if there is a real world about which one can give a more or less faithful account, can the sophist be brought to task. “That those which are not are in a way, it has to be, if anyone is ever going to be even a little wrong.”421 With the ontological possibility of

420 Parmenides fragment 7, ll.1–2, quoted in Plato, Sophist, 237a.

421 Plato, Sophist, 240e.

187 his duplicity, the hunt for the Sophist proceeds, employing diaresis, or the method of division.

This method divides wholes into smaller and smaller halves until a definition is reached. Is the sophist a layman or an expert? An expert. Is he an expert in production or acquisition? Acquisition. Is this acquisition through possession-taking or through mutual exchange? Possession-taking… and so on. When finally an adequate description is reached, the path through the diaretic trees will fill out the definition.

In this manner, we come upon six different definitions of the sophist.

And though the dialogue triumphantly concludes with a single elaborate definition, it is not completely clear how it squares with the other definitions offered. Indeed, the triumphant tone of the definition, nailed down in words, sounds more like the self-satisfied knowledge of the sophists, than it does the humble wisdom-seeking of the philosopher. And as the Stranger notes earlier in the dialogue, it is often difficult to discern between the two, the one cropping up where the other was thought to be: “Maybe we’ve found the philosopher even though we were looking for the sophist?”422 This most important of divisions is made to tremble, casting tremors through the entire method of division, and by extension the binary structures of Platonism in general. Indeed, just after this aside on the difficulty of distinguishing philosopher and sophist, the Stranger sums up the three most important

422 Ibid., 253c.

188 kinds discussed so far: “that which is, rest and change.”423 Rest and change are said not to blend with one another but that which is permeates both: “We do have three of them.” This division into three basic principles, with being acting as intermediary, disrupts any simple Platonic dualism. The same and the different are then added to this group to hone in on five “super forms.”

The different will be said to permeate all five forms and to introduce relation between them and between things of the world: “the different is always said in relation to another.”424 Thus, that which is and the different end up performing metaxic roles in this relational ontology, a far cry from the caricatured two-story house of Platonism.

Even the famous division between being and becoming is subjected to the same mediation in the tale the Stranger offers about a “never-ending battle” between “gods and giants.”425 The former insist that what truly is are non-bodily forms that can be thought about, and deride bodies by verbally decomposing them into processes of becoming that possess no inherent being. The latter declare that only tangible things really are and attempt to drag everything invisible down from the heavenly regions. A naïve Platonism would side with the gods, but in a move away from this simpler position, the philosopher

423 Ibid., 254d.

424 Ibid., 255d.

425 Ibid., 246a–b.

189 must refuse to accept from the champions either of the One or of the many Forms the doctrine that all Being is changeless, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party that represent Being as everywhere changing. He has to be like a child begging for “both,” and say that that which is—everything—is both the unchanging and that which changes.426

Without taking one side or the other, nor by striking some mere compromise, the philosopher leaves the poles of transcendence and immanence intact, stretching his or her arms to embrace a seeming contradiction. The traditional Platonic devaluing of the realm of “becoming” seems to be tempered; both worlds are now attributed the dignity of being.

Through an analysis of rest and change, and the way that the same and different must permeate them both—depending on what they are being compared to—the conclusion is reached that, “when we say that which is not, we don’t say something contrary to that which is, but only something different from it.”427 Thus the different assumes high status as a form pervading all the others alongside that which is; and “it has to be possible for that which is not to be.”428 The different and that which is are intermediaries that weave together all the disparate forms even down to non-being: “To dissociate everything from everything else is to destroy totally everything there is to say. Form woven together into textures is what makes speech

426 Ibid., 249d.

427 Ibid., 257b, italics mine.

428 Ibid., 256d.

190 possible for us.”429 And now non-being, instead of being an empty negation or horrid void, contains the pregnant mystery of otherness and difference.

For “whenever there is speech [logos] it has to be about something. It’s impossible for it not to be about something.”430 Here we see that logos, like eros, is always intentional and thus acts as metaxy in our strivings toward knowledge. Yet logos too can fall prey to false infatuations and dissimulate through infelicitous combinations of verbs and names, as in the case of the sophist.431

The Sophist highlights the difference between a name and the thing it names, acknowledging this doubling that comes on the scene with language.432 This gives rise to a certain paradox, which Derrida seems to acknowledge in referring to this passage in “How to Avoid Speaking”: “This confirms that there cannot be an absolutely negative discourse: a logos necessarily speaks about something; it cannot avoid speaking of something.”433 A logos always speaks about something, and yet it never coincides with the things it names, giving rise to a metaxic structure toward mystery, rather than a metaphysics of presence.

429 Ibid., 259e.

430 Ibid., 262e.

431 Ibid., 263d.

432 Ibid., 244d.

433 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 103, emphasis mine.

191 The absence of the Parmenidean One allows erring, and thus sophistry. This is why dialectical activity must be assigned “only to someone who has a pure and just love of wisdom.”434 But as discussed in the section on the Republic, the ideal of what is just is far from guaranteed, further supporting Plato’s portrayal of the sophist and the philosopher as difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to distinguish. Can such a pure and just love be defined? Can its opposite be defined? Has its opposite been defined in the

Sophist? Or as we suggested earlier, would too sure a definition of such things be an act of sophistry itself? Is this perhaps why the Philosopher was never composed? The dialogue begins by asking if the sophist, statesmen and philosopher are one, or if they are two or three. The Stranger claims they are three, and then proceeds to define the sophist. In passing let us note that this choice of the three over the one or the two at the critical opening of the dialogue seems to foreshadow the surpassing of the Parmenidean One as well as the Two (be it Heraclitean polemos as Two, or a traditional Platonic dualism), in favor of a scheme that involves a third as mediator (that which is, and subsequently the different). The Statesman takes up the second of these three personages, but Plato did not leave us a dialogue on the third. Is the philosopher, always in pursuit of wisdom, always with unfinished business, a type even more elusive than the sophist? Does the structural absence of the

Philosopher in this would-be triptych speak louder by avoiding speaking? At the outset Theaetetus says of the Stranger: “He is divine—but then I call all

434 Plato, Sophist, 253e.

192 philosophers that.”435 Is the philosopher a stand-in for the mystery in this respect? And who is this mysterious Stranger who is never named? If a name necessarily errs from the thing it names, does the Stranger in his bold alterity remind us of this fact? Does he remind us of the forceful domesticating power of the logos? To presume who the Stranger is or what he needs is to undermine the mystery of his otherness. And here Plato seems to suggest a translatability between the other and God, similar to the one outlined in chapter two: “SOCRATES: Are you bringing a visitor, Theodorus? Or are you bringing a god without realizing it, instead?”436 The Stranger thus becomes a symbol for the wholly other, a manner of performing what will later be the subject of the dialogue.

The mystery of the other is further performed at the exact structural middle point of the Sophist. It is here that the “parricide” occurs, and that being (einai) is stated to be a “third thing [triton genos] alongside those two beings.”437 The parricide represents a structural absence at the center, a destruction of the Parmenidean One that gives way to a multiplicity of ways and voices. And only moments later being is also said to shine through all of these beings. In the first instance the unity of being withdraws in favor of the relationality of difference, and in the second, that which is is shown to

435 Ibid., 216c.

436 Ibid., 216a. The Greek for stranger, xenos [ξένος], meaning most simply “foreigner,” can also ambiguously signify “guest-friend,” “stranger-enemy,” and even “foreign-host.” In this regard, compare Derrida’s Politics of Friendship.

437 Ibid., 241–243.

193 permeate the multiplicity that participates in it. This double movement of withdrawal and participation is characteristic of another Platonic figure that we discovered at the center of another dialogue: khora.

Khora is both bottomless chasm and relational matrix. It gives rise to differences while its singularity resists being taken up by any of them

(neither/nor)—just as the Parmenidean One in its absence gives rise to the second way of nonbeing and thence to multiplicity; and khora participates in the opposites to which is gives rise by making place for them (both/and)— just as being, or that which is, can be said of any pair as a third thing, and indeed permeates all things which are, and which are not. While there is much that is different between the Sophist and the Timaeus, they both seem to address issues of difference and otherness, not merely as contrary to sameness, but as true alterity or mystery. Derrida says, “Passing through the parricide and the murder of Parmenides, this dialectic receives the thinking of nonbeing as other and not as absolute nothingness or simple opposite of

Being.”438

In the end, the hunt for the sophist is also the hunt for Sophia, that elusive muse, and thus resembles a process more than an object of knowledge. As in the other dialogues examined, the theme of participation manifests at multiple levels. This relational ontology presents being and difference as metaxic forms that fill the interstitial space between things, weaving the texture of a logos capable of receiving all things, even that which

438 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 103.

194 is not. Additionally, the method of division itself exemplifies the tissue of difference, the way it spreads its tendrils through all that is in trees of relation. The method of division brings the other of each category to the fore, but in doing so shows the connections that run through these fields of difference. Like all the Platonic dialogues, there is an activity in motion, a seeking for the sophist that has various degrees of success and failure, missteps, temporary victories and red herrings. The parricide itself suggests a need to go beyond the generation before, to defy tradition on the quest for truth. The placement of the parricide at the exact center of the dialogue acts as a structural performance of mystery: Only in relinquishing the surety of knowledge and passing through an absence do we step onto the path toward

Sophia. Furthermore, the character of the Stranger stands in as the divine other, embodying a certain unknowability on the quest that is also suggested by the absence of the Philosopher.

With these reflections in hand, a reader cannot help but question the dialogue’s ending definition of the sophist. Was it all for that? Can we forget the discussion now that we have arrived at the answer? Or does the poverty of the answer and the disappointment that might accompany its flimsiness, rather speak to the contrary? Was there something gained along the way that is not contained in the meager result? The reader is called to evaluate the relative worth of the definitions given and the exercises undertaken. By providing a weak ending, Plato ensures the participation of his reader,

195 leading that reader to ask if all that preceded was sophistry or true wisdom, because, by Plato’s own words, it is difficult to distinguish between the two.

We turn now to a closer reading of Derrida’s essay “How to Avoid

Speaking: Denials”, and to the triptych to which it gave birth, On the Name.

Therein we will try to show the relationship these three Platonic dialogues have for Derrida, and how he will speak of them, avoid speaking of them, and speak to them.

3.4: How to Avoid Speaking: Denials

Is one not compelled to speak of negative theology according to the modes of negative theology, in a way that is at once impotent [impuissant], exhausting [épuisant], and inexhaustible [inépuisable]? Is there ever anything other than a “negative theology” of “negative theology”?439 – Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”

How to avoid speaking of “How to Avoid Speaking”? A cheap shot, yes, but to the point. From the first words of this thesis I promised to address this essay, the centerpiece that has dictated both our content (e.g. triton genoa, certain tropics of negativity, specific dialogues of Plato, as well as On the

Name, which bears a special relation to the present work, and the connection to both Marion and Neoplatonism) and our form. Up until this point, the very last section before the conclusion, I have been able to refer to it in passing, obliquely, never approaching it head on. How to avoid speaking of what I have promised to speak of? I cannot: I must speak. So how to speak of it? If I

439 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 83.

196 must speak, then how to avoid speaking of it—in the wrong way? How to do justice to a text that precedes me and exceeds me? How to speak of a text whose subject is avoiding speaking? I must speak in order to keep my promise, but will I be able to keep my promise and speak adequately? Such are the questions that Derrida asks himself when considering how to speak of that tradition of avoidant speaking that “one calls, sometimes erroneously,

‘negative theology.’”440

Even before he wrote the essay, he tells us in the essay, he knew he wanted to speak of the relationship of the trace to “negative theology,” and he knew he would have to do it in Jerusalem—at the colloquium for which the essay was written. With this, Derrida’s text has already performed its essential content, which concerns the anteriority of a promise that structures discourse and being:

When I say I knew that I would have to do it even before the first word of this lecture, I already name a singular anteriority of the obligation—is an obligation before the first word possible?—which would be difficult to situate and which, perhaps, will be my theme today.441

In fact, Derrida has inscribed his very life in the performance of this content, or rather, as Derrida confirms, the work at hand is autobiographical.442 So no less has its form become its content. As we shall see, Derrida was obliged to speak on the topic at hand for several reasons, and as in “Passions,” his

440 Ibid., 73.

441 Ibid.

442 Ibid., 135n13.

197 discourse interrogates the formal structure and possibility of such an obligation and such a promise—that is, the anterior obligation his discourse is both fulfilling and deferring by speaking of that same obligation.

We can recognize a certain “family resemblance of negative theology” running through the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, through Dionysius, and through Wittgenstein. Derrida offers the following “provisional hypothesis”:

negative theology consists of considering that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence, in truth to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently, only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God.443

Such a formulation thus resembles other discourses that insist on negative determinations and apophatic warnings:

this, which is called X (for example, text, writing, the trace, différance, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the paregon, etc.) “is” neither this nor that… this X is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and structure of predicative discourse. It “is” not and does not say what “is.” It is written completely otherwise.444

Derrida admits the “family resemblance” between negative theology and his own work, but will also identify in detail the ways in which they diverge.

Indeed, we should not think that Derrida in any way fully rejects negative theology, for as he writes in “Sauf le nom,” “I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology.”445

443 Ibid., 74.

444 Ibid.

445 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 69.

198 Before differentiating himself from negative theology, he outlines three objections that are “brought against everything that resembles negative theology”:

1. You merely negate and affirm nothing. You are a nihilist.

2. You simply use the formula, “X is not-this, X is not-that,” which in the end amounts to saying nothing, or speaking only for speaking’s sake.

3. By equating God and negation, you break down the difference between the two to a point where they become indistinguishable.

However, as he presents this list of three objections, they begin to take an interesting turn. Already with the second, the objector identifies what turns out to be a positive trait: speaking for speaking’s sake. This turns out to resemble very closely the address of the third way, speaking to rather than speaking of. Furthermore, objection three, rather than being a detriment, leads us to consider “the becoming-theological of all discourse.”446 When any negative statement is pushed to its limit, it begins to resemble apophatic theology. In such moments we begin to speak of God under this hyperbolic name or another, God being anything that cannot be approached except through indirect discourse:

Every negative sentence would already be haunted by God or by the name of God, the distinction between God and God’s name opening the very space of this enigma… And those who would like to consider “deconstruction” a symptom of modern or postmodern nihilism could indeed, if they wished, recognize in it the last testimony—not to say martyrdom—of faith in the present fin de siècle.447

446 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 76.

447 Ibid., 76–77.

199

What Derrida is actually doing (without saying it) in enumerating these three objections, is performing a deconstructive reading of them. Objection one expresses a thesis: you only negate and are thus a nihilist. Objection two elaborates the negation, noting that it applies to both terms of a binary pair, producing discourse but still not saying anything, merely speaking for speaking’s sake. Here Derrida finds an opening, reversing the negative evaluation of speaking for speaking’s sake by equating it with the positive value of the address, or supplication of a prayer. With this “positive” value of negation in hand, objection three, rather than creating a vague playing field where God is confused with negativity, actually testifies to a sort of immanent divinity even in its nihilism. So the accusation of nihilism in objection one is shown to serve an opposite end than intended by the objector, effacing and reinscribing the binary nihilism/faith. But in characteristic fashion, Derrida doesn’t profess this reading, only notes that it is possible, and that it seems no one could prohibit it. For indeed to profess is to speak, to try to say what one means, to try to coincide with oneself. There is no doubt that such speaking is necessary, common and effective, but

Derrida, in view of the rigorous impossibility of such coincidence, is trying to write “otherwise” (autrement: literally, “otherly,” or according to the other).

How do we write according to the other, the other who exceeds presence, the other as God beyond being?

200 This is why Derrida states, “what I write is not ‘negative theology.’”448

As explained in section 2.2, Derrida feels that many examples of such apophaticism have not cleansed themselves of being, expressing in their hyperessentiality (hyperousios) a superlative form of being rather than a beyond-being. Derrida will not inscribe his work under such an “ontological wager,” for in fact, such thinking beyond being should “exceed the alternative of a theism or an atheism which would only set itself against what one calls, sometimes ingenuously, the existence of God.” This last remark helps clarify

Derrida’s glib remark, “I quite rightly pass for an atheist.”449 If he is rigorously involved in thinking God beyond being, then God certainly does not exist—if existence or being is what is at stake in one’s theism or lack thereof.

Derrida mentions two book titles in a footnote, Marion’s Dieu san l’être and Levinas’s Autrement qu’être. The first plays on an ambiguity in

French wherein the L’ can act as the definite article of être (God without being) or as a personal pronoun which is the direct object of the verb to be, referring to God himself (God without being God; God without being it). The second title most directly reads “otherwise than being” but also carries the idea of thinking “being otherwise.” Derrida says these two titles

lead the way to two major responses to the question I would like to raise: how not to say or speak? Otherwise, and implicitly: how not to

448 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 77.

449 Derrida, “Circumfession,” 155.

201 speak Being (how to avoid speaking—of Being?)? How to speak Being otherwise? How to speak otherwise (than) being?450

In both cases the grammatical equivocation makes a performative gesture that points beyond the presence of being. If God is “without being,” then God must be God without being it—that is, without being the kind of substantive thing that is implied by the word God. How do we speak of such a thing that is “otherwise than being”? How do we speak God’s “being otherwise,” if God’s existence is in a mode that does not partake of what we normally mean by being? And just as saying the word “God” implies a substantive thing, so does speaking in general imply such an ontology, whence the title: “How to Avoid

Speaking: Denials”. How does one speak without underwriting being? How does one speak otherwise? How does one speak with regard to the other, who transcends presence and being? All of Derrida’s work grapples with this question, gropes toward this mystery. And it can only stretch into this metaxy because the beyond being is structurally absent.

But this stretching itself is already “an effect” or a trace of the beyond being that is just as much before being, or “an obligation before the first word.” Speaking, like interpretation, is always trying to convey something that is no longer present, is always already moving toward something it cannot arrive at. The “always” gestures toward the mystery of a future that is just as much structurally absent as the mystery of the past indicated by the

“already.” “‘It is necessary that there have been a trace,’ a sentence that one

450 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 133n3.

202 must simultaneously turn toward a past and toward a future that are as yet unpresentable.”451 It is in this sense that discourse, as well as being taken together with its beyond, are both structured like an obligation, or a promise.

A promise is only a promise while it remains unfulfilled, while it is on the way. And yet it is never certain of its destination;452 it must be capable of not being kept in order to truly be a promise and not mere clockwork. It is in this sense that Derrida’s vision is messianic without being eschatological. It is open toward a future to come, but one that is never decided in advance. This is the basis for Derrida’s critiques of teleological views of history such as those of Hegel, Marx and even Heidegger.453

Such an open future also bears a family resemblance to negative theology, but is distant enough to clarify why Derrida resists his thinking being assimilated as such. He does concede, “I have always been fascinated by the supposed movements of negative theology (which, no doubt, are themselves never foreign to the experience of fascination in general).”454

This parenthetical nicely illustrates how the mystery with which negative theology is concerned gives rise to fascination as metaxy yearning toward it.

We are fascinated by things that we don’t quite understand, that are not

451 Ibid., 81.

452 This is why in The Postcard Derrida uses the figure of the postcard, which may or may not reach its intended destination. It may be read by someone else and have unanticipated consequences. 453 See Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme” and “The Pit and the Pyramid” in Margins of Philosophy.

454 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 82.

203 wholly transparent to us, that offer as yet unexplored venues of thought or action. But this example shows how fascination is not particular to negative theology as such but is a more general phenomena, and so Derrida says:

my response amounted to a promise: one day I would have to stop deferring, one day I would have to try to explain myself on this subject, and at last speak of “negative theology” itself, assuming that some such thing exists. Has the day come?455

Because his work has come under fire and been called merely another form of negative theology, Derrida can no longer avoid speaking of it. But if he is to speak of it, how must he avoid speaking of it—that is, in what ways must he not speak in order to avoid errors, confusion and inadequacies? And thus we return to the questions with which we began this section: How to avoid speaking? Which is a variety of the question with which we began chapter 2 in our examination of “Passions”: How to respond? And Derrida too at this point, in an echo perhaps not unmindful of the Timaeus, says: “I return to my opening words.”

* * *

How to avoid speaking of “How to Avoid Speaking”? A cheap shot, yes, but to the point. From the first words of this thesis I promised to address this essay on negative theology: “at the moment of promising to speak one day of negative theology, I already started to do it.”456 This is because negative

455 Ibid.

456 Ibid., 83.

204 theology has the structure of a promise, its object being absent. The moment of prayer in negative theology, like a promise, is an address to someone.

Negative theology, like a promise, is always on the way:

One can never decide whether deferring, as such, brings about precisely that which it defers and alters [diffère]. It is not certain that I am keeping my promise today; nor is it certain that in further delaying I have not, nevertheless, already kept it.457

Derrida will speak of negative theology, but he will speak of negative theology in the mode of negative theology—his form will mirror or perform his content. Because negative theology is structured as metaxy-toward- mystery, in speaking of it, it is not sure that Derrida will keep his promise; in following its form he will speak of it elliptically and thus perhaps never get to the core of the issue. But because such circumambulation reflects the operations of negative theology, Derrida can also be said to be keeping his promise in further delaying—that is, keeping his promise by not keeping his promise, its condition of impossibility.

Discourse on the promise is already a promise: in the promise. I will thus not speak of this or that promise, but of that which, as necessary as it is impossible, inscribes us by its trace in language—before language… This promise is older than I am.458

All along the way we are in the midst of Derrida trying to think being otherwise, trying to think otherwise than being. We need to understand the promise as one example of Derrida’s alternative to the metaphysics of presence. Despite appearances to the contrary, presence is not the best

457 Ibid.

458 Ibid., 84.

205 model to think reality. At first glance, objects and persons appear to just be there, simply present. But an analysis of the language we find ourselves in, that we wake up in so to speak, shows that meaning functions through a process of difference and deferment (différance). I speak to you to explain what you don’t already know, what is not present, and despite my best efforts will never be present. Whatever my speech tries to re-present will change (differ) through the very process of it passing through my speech

(defer). There is no simple presence when it comes to language. And as we saw in chapter two, the same holds true when we analyze persons (self or other). The other is never fully present to me because of the mystery of their transcendence. I can never fully re-present to myself their inner world, their needs, and their abilities. In light of these analyses, Derrida suggests that presence is a poor metaphysical model. Rather, something like a promise or a secret, which reflect the structures of mystery and futuricity present in language-speaking subjects, are better metaphysical models. Of course

Derrida would also say that as soon as we use the secret as a model, the very concept of a model and our ability to model is thrown into question too. If the structure of reality is withdrawn or always yet to come, then it necessarily would not submit to full modeling. Not to full modeling, of course, but if there is anything beyond pure play in Derrida’s writing, then there must be some intimation or performative tracing of such a model.

Indeed, if the metaphysics of presence is invalid, then I cannot simply say or present to you what reality is like. If reality is like a promise then I

206 need to make a promise to you instead, which is what Derrida is doing with regard to speaking about negative theology. If reality is like a secret then I need to keep it’s secret, to keep it for you and to keep it from you, to tell you without telling you. And so Derrida makes a digression on the secret, another moment of deferment, keeping his promise to speak on negative theology by avoiding speaking of it directly.

Because we discussed the secret at length in chapter two I will avoid speaking of it here, but will touch upon the related phenomena of the “secret society” with which everything resembling negative theology, including deconstruction, is “infortuitously associated,” Derrida says. “Those who lead the instruction or the trial say to themselves, successively or alternatively:”

1. They have a secret. They hide something since they always negate, saying it’s neither-this-nor-that.

2. They have no secret. Their secret cannot be determined and thus is nothing. It’s all a sham.

3. “If you know how to question them, they will finish by admitting: ‘The secret is that there is no secret, but there are at least two ways of thinking or proving this proposition,’ and so on.”459 They are experts in the art of evasion.

What appears here as a simple list of the indictments against the secret societies is secretly performing the code of those societies. With reference to that list, simply put, (1) is affirmative, (2) is negative, and (3) follows the third way, an affirming negation that opens onto paradox. But this is more than just a veiled performance of the structure that crops up in negative

459 Ibid., 89.

207 theology. The fact that Derrida does not mention the presence of this hidden

3-part structure, makes it a secret (thus, 1. They have a secret). But there is no content to his secret, nothing is being affirmed or denied except the formal possibility of the secret itself (2. They have no secret). Thus (3), the secret is that there is no secret. We recall “Passions”: “We testify to a secret that is without content, without a content separable from its performative experience, its performative tracing.”460

Because Derrida did not alert me to the hidden structure in his text, my interpretive participation was necessary. Derrida’s performative tracing of the secret evokes a performative experience in me, as reader. And if we recall that Derrida is saying that reality is structured like a secret, then the relationship between reader and text models a new relationship between reader and world, beyond the metaphysics of presence. In order to do this,

Derrida cannot speak in the manner of presence, cannot say, “hey, this is exactly what I mean!” His text has to do more than it says, because it is making a claim that the world is structured in terms of this performative excess rather than the one-to-one economy of “I mean exactly what I say.”

With the analysis of the gift in mind from chapter two, we might call this a metaphysics of presents. Cheap shot, yes, but to the point.

* * *

460 Derrida, “Passions,” 24.

208 “We are still on the threshold.” So Derrida begins the second and final section of “How to Avoid Speaking.” This has all been preamble, but what in negative theology is not preamble? Derrida finally comes to the “three stages” he will treat, “three paradigms” that bear the family resemblances of negative theology.

Why should I now proceed in three stages? I am certainly not bent on acquitting myself of some dialectical obligation. Despite appearances, here we are involved in a thinking that is essentially alien to dialectic… The three “stages” or the three “signs” that I will now link together, as in a fable, do not form the moments or signs of a history. They will not disclose the order of a teleology.461

Can we take Derrida at his word? Will his text do more than he says it will? If we recall the hidden structure contained in the indictments of the secret society, will we not also find something performed in this tripartite presentation? Derrida is not “bent on acquitting himself of a dialectical obligation,” but this thinking is “alien to dialectic.” Is Derrida thinking dialectic otherwise? Thinking otherwise than dialectic? We are given a clue just before he launches into the first stage:

Three stages or places in any case to avoid speaking of a question that I will be unable to treat… Jewish and Islamic thought in this regard… The three paradigms… will surround a resonant space of which nothing, almost nothing, will ever be said.462

So in fact this triple schema intimates an absent fourth. One, Two,

Three…Where’s number four, Derrida?

461 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 100.

462 Ibid.

209 Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me to interpret this lecture as the most “autobiographical” speech I have ever risked… But if one day I had to tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start to speak of the thing itself if I did not come up against this fact; for lack of capacity, competence, or self- authorization, I have never yet been able to speak of what my birth, as one says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab.463

Derrida himself is inscribed in the secret. With three metaxic paradigms bearing a resemblance to negative theology, he will circumambulate or performatively trace the space of a mystery. He is being most autobiographical by avoiding speaking of what might have been most personal. Derrida testifies to a lacuna in himself and becomes a living performance of the structural absence about which he writes—or equally, reveals all his writing as autobiographical. This becoming-performative of discourse breaks down the barrier between writing and being, a barrier that

Derrida (and the Kabbalists) would say was never there in the first place.

There is nothing outside the text because all of reality is textual, structured like a text, in need of interpretation, doing more than it says. Derrida writes in “Plato’s Pharmacy:” “writing (is) epekeina tes ousias.”464 Generalized writing, arche-writing or what gives rise to writing is beyond being. Both discourse and being are structured by a withdrawal or a mystery, which is in any case the same singularity.

This brings us to Derrida’s first stage, the Greek paradigm, and its two tropics of negativity in the Republic and the Timaeus. Derrida associates the

463 Ibid., 135n13.

464 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 168.

210 agathon of the Republic with the hyper- movement of the hyperousios, questioning whether the beyond being is not a veiled form of superlative being. But with khora in the Timaeus, Derrida finds a hypo- movement “back behind and below the elementary principles.”465 The singularity of khora and its foreignness to the order of presence and absence demand that it always be addressed the same way, “but this address is not a prayer, a celebration, or an encomium. It does not speak to You.”466

This marks the difference that occurs between the Greek paradigm and the Christian paradigm, which is Derrida’s second stage. While both the agathon and khora inspire awe and test the very limits of language and thought, they are not Thou. This difference comes about through what

Derrida calls,

the event of the event, the story, the thinking of an essential ‘having- taken-place,’ of a revelation, of an order and of a promise, of an anthropo-theologicalization which—despite the extreme rigor of the negative hyperbole—seems to dominate anew, even closer to the agathon than to the khora.467

This refers of course to the Incarnation, that singular event that defines

Christianity and historicizes time in a way unknown to the Greeks. The becoming-human of God resounds in an address to the mystery as You,468 rather than an impersonal good or even an enigmatic khora. And while this

465 Derrida, “Khora,” 125.

466 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 108.

467 Ibid., 109.

468 And though he avoids speaking of it, this address to the divine as You surely was not foreign to the Jews.

211 does seem to be a real difference, Derrida seems to devalue the Greek experience of prayer. Derrida glosses Glaucon’s invocation of Apollo after

Socrates recounts the analogy of the sun:

We should not assign too much weight to this invocation or address to God at the moment when one speaks of that which exceeds being. It seems to be made lightly, in a somewhat humorous manner, as if to punctuate the scene with a breathing. I emphasize it for reasons that will become clear in a moment, when the necessity for every discourse on apophatic theology to begin with an address to God will become something other than a theatrical rhetoric: it will have the seriousness of a prayer.469

And while there is certainly a comic element in this moment of the Republic, recall that it serves to undermine any would-be pretensions toward a full understanding of the Good.470 But we must also recall Timaeus’s prayer:

if we’re not to go completely astray we have no choice but to call upon the gods and goddesses, and pray that they above all will approve of all we have to say, and that in consequence we will, too.471

This does seem to be a supplication for guidance that humbly acknowledges the human’s dependence upon the divine. We can compare it to Derrida’s description of the Christian negative theology:

An experience must yet guide the apophasis toward excellence, not allow it to say just anything, and prevent it from manipulating its

469 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 103.

470 Furthermore, this is the only place in his oeuvre that Plato uses Apollo as an exclamation, as Giovanni Reale explains, arguing for the equivalence of the Good and the One: “Apollo was the symbolic name the Pythagoreans used for the One. From the etymological viewpoint, we note that A-pollo might be… understood as a privation of the multiple, playing upon the privative and πολλον = many (the not- many)” (Toward a New Interpretation, 205).

471 Plato, Timaeus, 27c.

212 negations like empty and purely mechanical phrases. This is experience is that of prayer.472

I will not dwell on this point but simply wish to assert that prayer and performative address do not begin with Christianity.

Derrida concludes “How to Avoid Speaking” with his third paradigm.

Heidegger too is found to be lacking in prayer:

there is never a prayer, not even an apostrophe, in Heidegger’s rhetoric. Unlike Dionysius, he never says “you”: neither to God nor to a disciple or reader. There is no place… for these “neither true nor false” utterances that prayers are.473

On the one hand, prayer may be rigorously excluded because Heidegger makes a strict division between faith and thinking. This absence in

Heidegger’s rhetoric

confirms the predominance of the theoretical, “constative,” even propositional form… of a text which yet forcefully questions the determination of truth linked to this theoreticism and to this judicative form.474

Because it is Heidegger that paved the way for what we have been calling a performative rather than constative determination of the truth, this exclusion of the prayer and the address seems peculiar. So on the other hand,

Derrida suggests that we can understand this absence as respecting prayer by not submitting it to the confines of thinking and proof. He avoids deciding between the two.

472 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 110.

473 Ibid., 129–30. 474 Ibid., 130.

213 What is sure however, is that Heidegger elaborates “the epekeina tes ousias as transcendence of Dasein,” and the “khorismos—the interval or the separation, the spacing—between beings (Seinendes) and Being (Sein).”475

The first moment recalls the connection of our discussion of the mystery of the good to the mystery of self and other. The second connects Heidegger to a certain thinking of khora, which will concern us in a moment.

* * *

Certainly, nothing would be worse than substituting for an inadequate response… a performative for all these questions, nonquestions and nonresponses. Such an operation… would suffer from a double failure, it would combine two apparently contradictory faults: first, the claim to mastery… and second, the becoming-work of art (literary performance or performative, fiction, work), the aestheticizing play of a discourse from which one expects a serious, thoughtful, or philosophic response.476 – Derrida, “Passions”

Let us return to the three triton genos moments, which we treated in the first three sections of this chapter. The first mention of the triton genos occurs at the exact center of “How to Avoid Speaking” (on the 29th of 58 pages) and from here it echoes outward. The third species is always a figure of mediation between opposites. It is light in the Republic that mediates between vision and the visible, or subject and object; it is being (einai) in the

Sophist that mediates and contains any pair of opposites; and it is khora in the Timaeus that gives place for being to impress its forms upon becoming. It does seem aesthetically fortuitous that Derrida identifies three instances of

475 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 123.

476 Derrida, “Passions,” 22.

214 third kinds, the triton genos repeating itself on a macro-level: The first exemplifies a hyper- movement (Republic) and the last a hypo- movement

(Timaeus). In between (Sophist) we learn of “the interweaving (symploke)… of the forms… in a logos capable of receiving the other.”477 Derrida follows the dialectic form he wishes to question. The triton genos continues to echo outward.

The Greek paradigm itself is also part of a group of three, followed by the Christian and Heideggerean moments, the last of which is “neither Greek nor Christian” but also “both the most audacious and most liberated repetition of [those] traditions.”478 You will notice the conspicuous

“neither…nor… both… and,” and recall the connection of Heidegger to khorismos mentioned above. Derrida follows the dialectic form he wishes to question. Catherine Zuckert’s claim captures this image nicely: “Derrida suggests that negative theology occurs at the intersection of Platonic philosophy with Christian revelation; it could be represented like

477 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 103.

478 Ibid., 122.

215 Heidegger’s understanding of Being with a ‘X’.”479 This “X” we can take as a chi, the first letter of khora. The triton genos continues to echo outward.

If we consider “How to Avoid Speaking” as a whole, it is divided into two sections, marked “I” and “II.” I contend we can find “III” in the triptych,

On the Name, for which “How to Avoid Speaking” laid the groundwork. And this latter of course reflects the triple structure in its sequence: “Passions,”

“Sauf le nom,” “Khora.” Derrida follows the dialectic form he wishes to question. The triton genos continues to echo outward.

We recall that “Passions” played on the passion of Christ, suggesting in its opening lines that one “can recognize in it the ritualized unfolding of a ceremony, or even a liturgy.”480 What we didn’t mention was that such an interpretation can be applied to the triptych as a whole: For while the Son is manifest (“Passions”), the Father is withdrawn (negative theology in “Sauf le nom”), but the relationship between opposites is mediated by the Spirit

(“Khora”). The triton genos continues to echo outward. “One, Two, Three…”

* * *

479 Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 243. Derrida plays on the “X” throughout. In “How to Avoid Speaking” (74), it collects under one sign the God of negative theology as well as Derridean terms such as différance, text, writing, trace etc. In On the Name it stands in for what is epekeina tes ousias (64), as well as khora (97, 99), and the reflective subject/object trope “X: A Critical Reader” (12, 13) discussed in section 2.1. Derrida also makes reference to Marion’s use of the “X” to cross out being: “…the cross which reveals Him only in the disappearance, His death and resurrection… because He crucifies himself” (Marion, Dieu san l’être, 152–54, quoted in “How to Avoid Speaking,” 140n29).

480 Derrida, “Passions,” 3.

216 Above all, this “third species” that the khora also is does not belong to a group of three. “Third species” is here only a philosophical way of naming an X that is not included in a group, a family, a triad or a trinity. – Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 108.

Let us imagine a scholar. A specialist in ritual analysis, he seizes upon this work… he makes quite a thing of it, believing can recognize in it the ritualized unfolding of a ceremony, or even a liturgy, and this becomes a theme, an object of analysis for him. – Derrida, “Passions,” 3

—[…] – Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 35

217

Conclusion

Is not to write, once more, to confuse ontology and grammar?481 – Jacques Derrida

This thesis has attempted to constatively and performatively trace the lines of a participatory epistemology through the concepts of mystery and metaxy. If knowing is somehow bound up in a doing that goes beyond what could simply be said, then discourse must become performative to adequately reflect reality. If reality could be described by the metaphysics of presence, then a straightforward treatise style of philosophical writing could hypothetically dictate its ontology. But if reality is best described by a metaphysics of participation, then being must be written otherwise.

Participation happens in a metaxy that is structured by the absence of a mystery. Ultimately this mystery exceeds the play of presence and absence, but at that moment also exceeds the ability of constative language to describe it. Performative language however, can intimate this transcendence, precisely because its own structure is self-transcending. While there are certainly crucial difference between Plato and Derrida, I have tried to bring out the ways that both transcend their own content through performative gestures. Furthermore I have tried to point to moments when their content discursively addresses the performance, as well as the interpretive participation such a performance can engender. By eliciting participation from the reader, I have argued that both authors’ texts performatively model

481 Derrida, “Question of the Book,” in Writing and Difference, 78.

218 what relating to the world may be like according to a metaphysics of participation. Such a vision would break down the barriers between being and discourse, and thus between ontology and epistemology. In such a case, presence is seen to be the correlate of apodicticity—both being replaced by the impossible ethics of an orientation toward mystery.

Chapter one approached Plato, with section 1.1 treating the

Symposium. There we saw Socrates’ depiction of daimonic eros as metaxy, shuttling between gods and mortals, wisdom and ignorance, and what’s beautiful and ugly. Furthermore eros is always intentional, it is always desire of something or someone.

Socrates performs eros, showing us that love must not be consummated less its yearning fire be extinguished. This is what makes

Socrates the classic exemplar of the philo-sopher: He is a lover of wisdom, rather than a wise one, knowing his own ignorance but constantly seeking and questioning. These are concrete illustrations of the way that the structural absence of the mystery gives rise to a dynamic stretching or striving in the metaxy. Additionally, the narrative structure of inset frames

(Glaucon is hearing the story from Apollodorus who heard it from

Aristodemus…) reflects the dialectic of desire as well, showing how a story liable to be forgotten stretches toward immortality by being retold. And yet upon closer examination, this same narrativity shows how the story can become garbled, mutated and untrue to its source. At first glance, the possibility of these conflicting interpretations seems to lead the text into

219 contradiction, pressing the engaged reader to stretch toward some sort of solution. And thus Plato’s oscillation in strategy ends up having erotic consequences upon reader, mimetically constructing their hermeneutic desire. The Symposium draws us into participation with it and elicits in us the very phenomena it is trying to describe as its subject matter and exemplify in its composition. The text speaks of participation in its content, performs it in its structure and form, and thereby draws it out from its reader. Desire, narrativity, knowledge and interpretation are all seen to operate according the concepts of mystery and metaxy.

In section 1.2 we turned to Iamblichus to help fill out the erotic ontology suggested by our treatment of the Symposium. By contrasting

Iamblichus and Plotinus, especially regarding the controversy of the descended soul, we brought out the Platonic tendencies toward participation and dualism, respectively. Iamblichus envisions an unbroken continuum of beings running from the Godhead through intermediate heroes and daimons all the way down to the fully descended human soul. By participating in acts of ritual theurgy, the human soul becomes a receptacle for the divine will—it co-enacts cosmogenesis with the Demiurge. The will of the Demiurge is revealed to be eros. In its alienated and self-divided state the descended soul is able to serve as a pivot through which the eros of the divine can flow and thus experience love for itself. Thus the soul plays an essential metaxic role in the hierarchy of being.

220 While discursive thought is a necessary corollary to theurgic rites, alone it never leads to union with the divine. As Iamblichus makes clear, one must not fail “to distinguish between the content of a discursive statement and its evocative and iconic power.”482 This evocation acknowledges the withdrawn nature of the mystery and its inability to be possessed by words or theory. In this way Iamblichus underlines the distinction between performative and constative discourse to which we have had recourse.

Furthermore, he insists upon embodied participation as a privileged mode of access to the workings of the cosmos.

Section 1.3 turned to the Phaedo to further argue for the value of embodiment despite appearances to the contrary. Disparagements of the body and matter were reinterpreted as propaedeutic correctives for aspiring novices. The sensible world was shown to be essential in coming to understand the intelligible, with both being metaxy tending toward higher mysteries. This reevaluation of the body is also performed by Socrates in moments of dramatic staging. He draws special positive attention to the body, prompting the reader to reinterpret statements to the contrary. This dissonance elicits the reader’s participation in way that is meant to model the philosophic life. The philosophic life was examined as a metaxic practice toward the mystery of death (melete thanatou). The structure of the dialogue also performs this idea, arguing but never proving the immortality of the soul, and finally launching into myth. The movement from argument to myth

482 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 109.

221 and the absence of confirmation regarding the soul mimics the striving of the philosopher in the metaxy in the face of mystery. Thus chapter one presented

Plato as a literary writer who is alive to the performative power of his discourse, and who uses it to exemplify his position as a thinker of participation, thereby engendering a similar engagement in others.

Chapter two read Derrida in a similar light, applying the concepts of mystery and metaxy, and examining performative moments that elicit the reader’s participation. Each section examined a different structural absence: other, God and self. Section 2.1 took up the question of “how to respond to the other,” asked in “Passions.” Responsiveness turns out to have an aporetic structure, as it is both necessary and impossible to respond to the other.

“Passions” is supposed to be a response to other author’s essays, but because of this double bind turns itself into a rumination on the very question of responding in general. Friendship and politeness turn out to have similar aporetic structures. What all of these aporias have in common is a relation to the other. Since the other is a mystery that we cannot know fully but in relation to whom we must act, we are pulled into the metaxy of these aporetic double binds. A true act of friendship is not done out of duty, but from pure altruism. It must exceed a ritual rule if it is not to be mechanical.

The general application of a rule to a unique person will always undermine their singularity. The true act of friendship must be invented anew each time.

What is paradoxical is that friendship and any other norm that relates to the other involves both consideration of a rule, as well as invention without a

222 rule. We must respond to the other to do right by them, but the inaccessibility of their alterity precludes any fully adequate response. The indecidability contained in these aporias evokes the reader’s participation in trying to decide them. Furthermore Derrida’s text performs this undecidability that oscillates in the metaxy before the mystery of the other.

Turning and turning through various aspects and effects of these double binds, the text finally shifts, saying “there is something secret” and proceeds in a rhythmic refrain to say all the things the secret is not. Like the mythical send off of the Phaedo, the text itself illustrates the metaxy (examination of aporias) before the mystery (litany on the secret).

Section 2.2 presented the debate between Derrida and Jean-Luc

Marion concerning the negative theology of Dionysius the Aeropagite, and whether it, along with the prayer that praises, are inscribed within the metaphysics of presence. Derrida worries that hyperessentialities like those of Dionysius’s God and Plato’s agathon, betray themselves by assigning these mysteries a superlative mode of being rather than leaving them truly beyond being. If so, they have been brought into the horizon of being and presence, for even “ontology itself is a subtle or perverse idolatry.”483 Marion insists otherwise, explicating the “third way” of Dionysius, which goes beyond affirmations and negations into a truly performative or “pragmatic” mode.

Prayer also falls into this third way, as its function is essentially an address to

God, rather than a statement about God. The address toward a God beyond

483 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 90.

223 being does not inscribe God within the horizon of presence. Both Derrida and

Marion also use self-annulling structures such as dénomination, which means at once to name and to un-name, to evoke this performative dimension beyond the binary of affirmation/negation. In regard to these issues, Marion and Derrida were shown to be in closer agreement than they may appear at first glance, though they both seem to misinterpret each other. We next turned to a close reading in the original French of the opening lines of “Sauf le nom” to show how the pragmatic function of language according to the third way is at work. In this sense Derrida is performing the subject matter of his text. “Sauf le nom” is a text about negative theology, but it also adopts in its form those very structures it describes in its content. It uses ambiguous and self-transgressive structures that demand a disambiguation from the reader, an interpretive participation. But eventually, as the reader becomes accustomed to such paradoxical language, a participatory experience is evoked where, in flashes, the reader does perhaps intuit or glimpse, though not understand or grasp, what is described by the third way: God, the wholly other, mystery. Thus the relationship between the reader and the text models a potential relationship with the wholly other in the world.

Section 2.3 inquired into the mystery of the self, first examining

Lacanian psychoanalysis and the co-constitution of subject and object, of self and other. Because of this co-arising, all the structural features of the wholly other appear closest to home in one’s non-coinciding self. The metaxic space opened up by this interval within the self is what sets the self in motion.

224 Later we discussed how this notion of the divided self is prefigured in

Iamblichus. We also turned to the Gift of Death to examine the related idea that subjectivity arises out of responsibility to the other. The interiorization of God was seen to be a poignant illustration of the constitution of subjectivity as a mystery. Finally, the relationship of the self to death was discussed with reference to and in terms similar to the melete thanatou of the

Phaedo. In “Circumfession” Derrida models to the reader how such a metaxic- being-toward-mystery might look. Thus chapter two showed how Derrida could also be analyzed according to the concepts of mystery and metaxy with consistent structures arising across a wide variety of content. As with Plato, we also saw how Derrida’s performative practices embody his content, and thereby evoke in kind a participatory experience in the reader.

Chapter three continued to analyze these same themes but now on the common playing field laid out by Derrida’s “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and his readings of Platonic dialogues therein. Section 3.1 examined the

Republic and especially the analogy of the sun (and it’s triton genos: light) in relation to the good beyond being (epekeina tes ousia). In contrast to

Derrida’s concern over hyperessentiality, I presented an agathon that was clearly marked in its epekeina by Plato’s form no less than his content. Rather than being a mock modesty, Socrates reticence and inability to speak thereof was shown to mark the limits of discourse upon a mystery. I suggested that we take the analogy of the sun as non-predicative discourse meant to intimate toward the good beyond being. The metaphor of debt and interest

225 (tokos) also underscored the withdrawn nature of the good, while helping to further intimate the relation between a mystery and the metaxic dynamisms that accrue in its absence. While Plato genuinely pursues what a just city and soul might look like, he also ironically shows the limits of rational discourse in defining them. Were only the rational faculty to make these decisions we might end up dispensing with a whole generation of people in order to start over from year-zero. While there are clearly affirmative moments in what

Plato presents, there are also conspicuous absences, such as that of eros. I argued that these affirmations and absences, along with the performative quality of the text, constitute a third way that elicits the participation of the reader. If what’s beyond being cannot be described adequately but only intimated analogically and thus experienced performatively, then such a textual approach is necessary to reflect a metaphysics of participation.

Section 3.2 turned to the Timaeus and its enigmatic triton genos: khora. In contrast to Derrida’s concern that khora is reappropriated by a

Platonist ontology, I showed how its abyssal structure inhabits the form of the dialogue and even the person of Socrates. Rather than a vision of the closure of metaphysics, Timaeus’ “likely tale” seems unnaturally misshapen with multiple beginnings and lacking in key elements such as eros. While containing real ontological hypotheses, the Timaeus also seems to illustrate the stumbling block of an overly rational account: the Straying Cause. There is something in the grain of the universe that resists any final rational analysis, something that is older even than the difference between rational

226 and irrational. Khora even seems to dissolve the difference between mystery and metaxy. In its giving rise to binaries and participating in both terms its is metaxy, but in its resistance to being described by either term it is withdrawn in mystery. Its paradoxical structure throws into question our ability to think or name it, as it has always already created the space between its name or concept and what it is (not). Beyond the edge of where thinking ends the reader is called to become like khora, shaking her or himself and the things of the world into place. Outside the end of the text the reader is called to return to a fourth beginning, always another beginning invented anew, likely tales that are metaxy toward the mystery of whence we come and toward what we tend.

In section 3.3 we examined the Sophist and the being (einai) which can be said of both terms in any pair of opposites. As it turns out, this being applies even to the pair being and non-being. In order for error to exist, one must be able to say what is not the case, and thus that non-being is. Such a thesis flies in the face of the Parmenidean One, forcing the Eleatic stranger to commit a conceptual parricide against Father Parmenides. But such turns out to be the price of catching the sophist, that speaker of convincing rhetoric that is not the case. But the sophist is an elusive fellow who is hard to distinguish from the philosopher. As soon as non-being is, the clear demarcations of forms and types become fuzzier. The philosopher walks a precarious line between wisdom and sophistry, not always sure where he ends and his nemesis begins. This dissolving of strict boundaries seems to be

227 the necessary concomitant of a relationality and interpenetration of the forms. But as in the Timaeus, such a relationality also entails the reality of non-being, otherness, and difference. In addition to being permeating all things, so does difference. Relations between forms, just as much as between people, require the reality of their difference. The nameless Stranger, who may as well be a god, dramatically portrays this difference. The philosopher is presented as a figure of mediation, a child begging for both opposites, holding them together within the metaxy and striving to distinguish their lines. And though the dialogue finishes with a clear definition of the sophist, the attentive reader will find him or herself unsure if such a definition is sophistry or sophia. Rather than arriving at a conclusion, the reader is prompted to question its value, thereby participating critically with the text.

Section 3.4 turned to Derrida’s essay “How to Avoid Speaking:

Denials.” In the first half of that essay Derrida differentiates himself from negative theology, casting the latter along with his own work into a more general sphere of negativity. Derrida illustrates this more general sphere through digressions on the promise and the secret. Throughout this section I showed how Derrida performs his content, inscribing his own essay within the structure of a promise, and hiding various secrets throughout. In the second half of the essay Derrida takes up the Greek tradition, Christianity and

Heidegger as three paradigms within which to consider the more general negative movement he has identified. Crucial differences in these paradigms show an unfolding but not a teleology. Derrida links them together in a

228 “fable.” Each intimates the mystery in a different way, creating a different metaxic milieu. Taken together they seem to constitute a macro-negative theology (Reality is not Plato, nor Christianity, nor Heidegger). These three paradigms are said to surround or intimate a silent fourth, that of Judaism and Islam. In this way the larger structure of “How to Avoid Speaking” also performs the tropics of negativity that is its content. These performative gestures must be interpreted by a reader, leading to a participatory experience of the mystery they evoke. In line with such an expressive strategy, I concluded section 3.4 with a series of performative gestures based on Derrida’s text.

Truly thinking participation seems to require that we think otherwise than a participation versus dualism binary. Dualism is not the enemy.

Binaries and the “either/or” allow us to think, to compare, to categorize and prioritize, to make decisions. Sometimes we need to be subjects and evaluate a world of objects around us. Sometimes we even become objects for other people, precisely because we love them and they are in need and they can count on us. But we need to hold our binaries lightly, to remember their contingency, and be vigilant against the systems of dominance and oppression they often conceal. We need to be wary of our dualisms becoming calcified and hyper-separated.484 But the logical aporia here is that we can’t simply apply a “both/and” logic to resolve the binary

484 For an excellent treatment of hyper-separation and monological forms of rationality from an ecofeminist angle, see Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason.

229 “participation/dualism,” without thereby privileging its first term. To remain open to the mystery, we must also embrace a khoric “neither/nor” here, resisting the tendency toward totalization and leaving our thinking structurally open toward that which exceeds conceptualization. It seems to me that this triple oscillation would be a characteristic of an arche- participation that operated by a third way without ruling out, synthesizing or collapsing the other ways: Either/or, both/and, neither/nor. And of course even saying so is already an attempt at mastery.

Derrida’s emphasis on khora in his work very much carries the double oscillation between “both/and” and “neither/nor.” He deploys this bastard logic against an entrenched dualist Platonism of the “either/or.” Though I intentionally chose texts where Derrida’s treatment of Plato is somewhat more neutral, the famous “Plato’s Pharmacy” contains more vitriol. I think we can read this face of Derrida as a performative persona that is trying to achieve a better balance between these three oscillations. If Derrida’s critique of metaphysics is that we cannot get outside of language or the world to somehow say how things really are apart from the terms of language or the world, then he knows that his own text is no exception. This is why one should always consider his text as performative rather than constative. Can we take Derrida, who insists on the author’s death as soon as he or she writes, at face value when he writes:

On the one hand Plato decides in favor of a logic that does not tolerate such passages between opposing senses of the same word… And yet, on the other hand, the pharmakon… constitutes the original medium

230 of that decision, the element that precedes it, comprehends it, goes beyond it, and can never be reduced to it.485

Is Derrida really pronouncing on what Plato decided? Or is there something performative happening here? Deconstruction seems to play the repressed term in a binary relation to the tradition of western metaphysics as presence; if it were simply to reverse that binary by destructing metaphysics, it would be betraying its own deepest insight. To achieve a deconstruction, Derrida’s text must engage with the western tradition, participate in its ongoing creation, blurring the lines of its internal structures and its relation to the outside in order to reinscribe those lines otherwise.486 So it seems simplistic to think Derrida simply wants to tear down the Platonic agathon to replace its rule by the Derridean pharmakon.487 Rather it seems that Derrida wants to bring renewed attention to the pharmakon (as he does with khora), but realizes that he must do this in a performative way. Plato’s performative gesture was to build the pharmakon and khora (with their “both/and,”

“neither/nor” logic) into his metaphysics along with the agathon. Plato achieves the triple oscillation by holding agathon and khora, or agathon and pharmakon, in generative metaxic tension. He doesn’t say this of course, but rather builds the secret into his text to evoke a participatory experience in

485 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 99.

486 In “White Mythology,” for instance, the issue is “to deconstruct the metaphysical and rhetorical schema at work… not in order to reject and discard them but to reinscribe them otherwise” (215).

487 Like khora, the play of the pharmakon does not seem unanticipated by Plato. Derrida seems to be bringing to light a polysemous theme of Plato’s that was repressed by the tradition of Platonism.

231 the reader. Now if Derrida is to follow suit, he cannot simply say the secret— rather he sets up a higher order oscillation between the “either/or” of the dominant tradition of Platonism, and his own perfomative championing of the “neither/nor” and “both/and” as khora and pharmakon. Derrida intentionally becomes the rebel child who commits parricide against father

Plato to perform and bring out the margins of Plato’s text—thereby reinstating the original Platonic triple oscillation. We mustn't take Plato or

Derrida’s words at face value—Derrida is being deeply faithful to the tradition, revealing “more completely the wellspring of Platonic wisdom,”488 by restaging the dialogic performance, by creating a dynamic dialectic out of

Plato’s text and his own—thereby modeling the dialectic of reader and text, which can be translated to human and world. Whereas Heidegger perhaps really meant what he said about Platonic metaphysics, Derrida knew that the only way to “avoid speaking” was to dance with Plato—that this participatory oscillation upon the third way was more faithful to reality than the presence of any negating-or-positing constative word. So we can read the seeming opposition between Derrida and Plato as evoking a participatory event in the reader, the same way that contradictions internal to the Platonic and Derridean texts evoked such events in chapters one and two. We can read these authors together like an apophatic statement that denies what it affirms, creating an oscillation that has erotic consequences upon the reader.

488 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 7.

232 Plato and Derrida model for us that philosophy is a way of life. They teach us by example to embrace aporia like a theurgist embraces matter—to look with wonder upon the mysteries of the world, remembering that the child of wonder is Iris, the rainbow bridge between heaven and earth.489 The mystery that we cannot comprehend discursively we can nevertheless enact in the lived metaxy. The pre-modern preoccupation with ontology and the modern concern with epistemology give way to a metaphysics of participation in which meaning arises in the place between self and world.

Every reading is a writing, and the book of nature and the book of scripture are one unfinished testament that is the writing of the soul.

* * *

If one were to discover that this text hid another text—and there will never be anything but texts—and hid it in a determined sense, the reading I have just proposed would not be invalidated, at least [not] for that particular reason. Quite the contrary…490 —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

489 Plato, Theaetetus, 155d.

490 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 329.

233

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