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A Philosophy of the Unsayable A PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNSAYABLE WILLIAM FRANKE www.ebook3000.com A PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNSAYABLE www.ebook3000.com www.ebook3000.com A PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNSAYABLE WILLIAM FRANKE University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana www.ebook3000.com Copyright © 2014 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Franke, William. A philosophy of the unsayable / William Franke. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02894-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-02894-X (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-268-07977-2 (e-book) 1. Silence (Philosophy) 2. Negativity (Philosophy) I. Title. BD360.F73 2014 120—dc23 2013044534 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. www.ebook3000.com For Maddalena Cerqui “Oltre la spera che più larga gira . .” www.ebook3000.com www.ebook3000.com CONTENTS Pre-face 1 Part I. Philosophy and Literature O ne Invitatory: Varieties and Valences of Unsayability 13 in Literature Two In the Hollow of Pan’s Pipe: Unsayability and 23 the Experience of Truth and Totality T h r e e The Writing of Silence in the Post-Holocaust 80 Poetry of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan Part II. Philosophy and Theology Fo u r Apophasis and the Predicament of Philosophy 139 of Religion Today: From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negations of Theology Fi v e Radical Orthodoxy’s Critique of Transcendental 203 Philosophy and Its Mistaken Mistrust of Negative Theology S i x Apophatic Thought as the Missing Mean between 271 Radically Secular and Radically Orthodox Theology Inconclusion 326 Notes 330 Index 368 www.ebook3000.com www.ebook3000.com PRE-FACE The present volume sketches a distinctive philosophical outlook that emerges irrepressibly from the predicament of philosophy today. It inter- prets what are widespread intimations of thinking in the current milieu of critical reflection across disciplines in the arts and sciences and beyond into technical and professional fields and culture generally. We are in an age in which discourse becomes acutely conscious of its intrinsic limits and is dominated by what it cannot say. Especially the last two and a half centuries have abounded in new and radical currents of thinking about the limits of language and what may or may not lie beyond them. The pace of such thinking seems to have greatly accelerated in the initial de- cades of the twenty-first century. This thinking is rooted, however, in mil- lenary discourses of mysticism and negative theology that can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition. A kind of peren- nial counter-philosophy to the philosophy of Logos has resisted its claims throughout the history of Western thought. There is, in fact, an amorphous but immense sea of discourse con- cerned with the ways that discourse has of doubting and denying itself. This type of reflection arises when language runs up against the limits of what it is able to say. Certain discourses concentrate on these limits and on how language necessarily speaks from and out of them. This generates counter-discourses to every powerful explanatory paradigm that makes positive claims to comprehend reality, to say what really is. The counter- discourses typically emphasize that what is not and even cannot be said is actually the basis for all that is said. They shift attention away from what 1 www.ebook3000.com 2 A PhilosophY OF THE UNSAYABLE discourse is saying to what it is not saying and cannot say—even though this involves, paradoxically, an even more intense focus precisely on lan- guage, on its limited capabilities, its borders, its “beyond.” These counter-discourses can even take a more aggressive stance. They can position themselves not only at the limits and margins of nor- mative discourse but as infiltrating it through and through. All discourse in this perspective, which I call “apophatic,” shows up as necessarily pre- ceded by and predicated on what cannot be said. This entails a claim to a yet more powerful comprehensiveness, though one at first purely negative in nature, evoking a power beyond discourse, a potential that words re- lease but cannot master. Metaphysics, monotheisms, and mysticisms, as well as philosophies of existence and poetics of revelation, can be under- stood in their deeper, driving motivations only from this perspective, which nevertheless all too easily slips from view because it eludes logical articulation and defies discursive expression. Ineffability was once a leading theme of the Neoplatonists (particu- larly Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Iamblichus, and Damascius) and of their heirs in the monotheistic traditions of Christian mysticism (Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena), of the Kabbalah, of Sufism, and again of certain post-Scholastics (Meister Eckhart, Nicholas Cusanus). Baroque mystics such as John of the Cross, Jakob Böhme, and Silesius Angelus share this same obsession with Romantic thinkers like Kierkegaard and the late Schelling, as well as with imaginative writers such as Hölderlin, Emily Dickinson, Rilke, and Kafka. The expressiveness of silence, the void, nothingness has been explored equally in modern music (Schoen- berg, Cage), in painting (Malevich, Kandinsky), and in architecture (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind) in tandem with the apophatic philosophical reflections of ittgenstein,W Heidegger, and Franz Rosenzweig. These major monuments of modern apophatic culture were announced by apocalyptic prophecies of the collapse of language and civi- lization altogether, emblematically around the fin de siècle in the Vienna of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, and Freud. Similar accents and thematics were hauntingly echoed, furthermore, in assimilating the Holocaust and its aftermath, by philosophical critics such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as by poets like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès. And the unsayable has again become the keynote of innumerable expressions of contemporary culture. These range Pre-face 3 from the widely diffused use of deconstructive critique—inspired espe- cially by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Blanchot—in all sorts of theoretical discourses to the clamor of silence heard so fre- quently in fiction and poetry, influentially in the writings of Louis-René Des Forêts or Samuel Beckett or Yukio Mishima. These references are obviously far-flung and move across widely dis- parate spheres of culture. Still, in every case, they flag an attitude toward words that is at once skeptical and fideistic—unconvinced by the pre- tended adequacy of words, yet acutely attuned to what they must miss grasping and passionately open to what they cannot say. The unsayable is what repels language, yet it requires language of some kind in order to be descried, so as to register at all. Such discourse or counter-discourse, moreover, traverses a whole spectrum of different disciplines and can be surprised in the most diverse sorts of guises. However, these various mani- festations of unsayability all pivot on the fact that discourse has a self- reflexive, self-critical ability to call itself into question and towithdraw, leaving what it cannot say in its wake. This trajectory, which is produced by the movement of thought and speech vis-à-vis what it cannot compre- hend and therefore recoils from, constitutes the trace of the unsayable. The unsayable cannot be made manifest at all, except in terms of this trace that it leaves in the speech that fails to say it. As is inevitably the case with whatever philosophy, the significance and force of what it says depends to a high degree on how it refracts other philosophies—on how it funnels currents familiar from elsewhere, whether historical or contemporaneous ways of thinking, into forms of presentation that are efficacious and revealing. Hence these widespread allusions to what can be conceived of as a loosely coherent tradition of dis- course about (or from or out of ) what cannot be said. This perennial philosophy of the unsayable, moreover, has close affinities with literature— indeed, it is a philosophy in which philosophical and literary thinking coalesce inextricably. Accordingly, this philosophical vision hinging on unsayability can be illuminated—and is best complemented—by literary-critical and theo- retical reflection. Such reflection is proposed here in the form of an inter- pretive essay (chapter 3) that places in parallel two provocative contempo- rary poets as writers of the unsayable. Together they display how what can be learned especially from ancient and medieval rhetorics of silence 4 A PhilosophY OF THE UNSAYABLE translates into the currency of a contemporary language or anti-language of unsaying. The other main literary-critical excursus (chapter 1) is offered by way of introduction or “invitation” to the leading philosophical medi- tation on unsayability in my second essay (chapter 2). While I refer to my chapters as “essays,” this book is not a congeries of separate compositions. The “essays” interlock and fit together in an archi- tectonic that adumbrates (were it only possible) a critique of apophatic reason. More exactly, philosophical critique, as the rational examination of first principles, is overtaken and transforms itself into a literary herme- neutics or poetics and into religious reflection. The first I understand as elucidation of certain rhetorical conditions, such as figuration and nar- ration, that make meaningful discourse possible, while the second—the “tying-back” reflections of “re-ligion”—I understand as cultivated aware- ness of relation to an infinite, never exhaustively specifiable context of relations. Poetic and religious theory are thus deployed critically to illumi- nate the conditions of possibility of meaning—and therewith also of being—in the unsayable. Beyond describing the general logic of the unsayable—or rather its subversion of logical generalities—this book aspires to illustrate its work- ings and finds them perhaps most powerfully operative in literary texts.
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