Derrida, Deconstruction and Mystical 'Languages of Unsaying'

SUSAN STEPHENSON

DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’

INTRODUCTION

This paper explores the relation between two very different ‘languages of unsaying’: the apophatic tradition of Christian mystical theology and the philosophy of deconstruction. Although they are produced within very different contexts, both discourses share a concern with the limits of language. Christian apophatic theologians begin from an awareness of the paradoxes involved in trying to speak of the transcendent and develop a complex form of writing which, in its very structure, preserves the intuition that God is unnameable and unknowable. Deconstruction begins from an awareness of an aporia between language and being and develops techniques for affirming this différance. Both discourses therefore perform a kind of ‘unsaying’. In recent years the links between classical and contemporary forms of apophasis have received increasing attention across a range of academic disciplines.1 However, claims regarding the affinity of discourses which arise out of such different historical contexts need to be treated with caution. This paper begins by examining the similarities between apophasis and deconstruction in terms of their logical and semantic structure – similarities which are indeed striking. The second section of the paper then questions whether these similarities are as significant as they first seem when we consider the context within which Chris- tian apophatic writing is produced. The final section of the paper suggests that despite the crucial differences in the motivations that give rise to Christian apophasis and deconstruction, it is possible to detect continuities in the ethical force of these very different languages of unsaying. In the work of Jacques Der- rida, there is a response to the mystical which gives rise to an ethics of listening

1 Richard E. Webb & Michael Sells, ‘Lacan and Bion: Psychoanalysis and the mystical language of “unsaying”’, in: Theory and Psychology 5 (1995) no.2, 195-215; A.M. Priest, ‘“In-the-mys- tic-circle”: The space of the unspeakable in Henry James’s “The Sacred Fount”’, in: Style 34 (2000) no.3, 421-443; Ilse N. Bulhof & Laurens ten Kate (Eds.), Flight of the Gods: Philosoph- ical perspectives on negative theology, New York 2000. 246 SUSAN STEPHENSON to the other and which offers the possibility of fruitful exploration across disciplinary boundaries.

DECONSTRUCTION AS A ‘LANGUAGE OF UNSAYING’

Deconstruction is the name Jacques Derrida gave his approach to philosophical enquiry. This approach is highly critical of some of the central tenets of the modern Western philosophical canon: the Cartesian view of the self, the scientific model of knowledge, and the idea that language represents or mirrors an unchanging, external reality. Derrida proceeds by means of an immanent critique of Western philosophy, exploring and questioning case by case the conditions of particular philosophical positions. Deconstruction, then, is not a scientific method of uncovering the ‘truth’ but a critical analysis which reveals and interrogates the philosophical, political and historical meanings within particular texts; meanings through which we read and understand the world. One of the key terms that Derrida coined and which lies at the heart of all his work is the term différance. He draws here on Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist understanding of language. For Derrida, as for Saussure, linguistic signs derive their meanings not from their correspondence to things in the world but from their difference from other signs within the linguistic system. God, being, essence, identity, consciousness, meaning, presence, etc. have meaning only in relation to a whole system of other signs. In contrast to Saus- sure’s idea of an apparently static system, Derrida’s term différance introduces the element of time. The French verb ‘différer’ means both to differ and to defer and the term différance points to the radical temporality and instability of meaning. The present meaning of a word does not dictate its past or future meaning. So the meaning of a word is always relational – dependent on its relation to other words; and always provisional – its meaning may change over time. Derrida’s influence on contemporary European and American thought dates from the publication in 1967 of three major works: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference. In these works Derrida develops the notion of différance, criticising what he terms the ‘logocentrism’ of the Western philosophical tradition – the tendency to conflate truth or being with the voice or the word (logos). Logocentrism relies on a ‘metaphysics of presence’; that is, it assumes that words give us immediate access to reality; or, to put it another way, that there is an order of being that is fundamental, immutable and available to human consciousness. Derrida insists that we have no unmediated access to a neutral, objective reality; rather, we see and understand the world through our words. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 247

Pressing his critique of Western metaphysics further, Derrida seeks to show that Western philosophy is also ‘phonocentric’ – it privileges the spoken word. In comparison with the deceptive immediacy of speech, writing detaches the text from its context. Whilst writing makes it possible to transmit meaning over time, it also opens the possibility of reading and understanding what is written differently in different contexts. The meaning of a text is not guaranteed or con- trolled by the author. Once we recognise this fluidity of meaning in relation to writing we realise that it applies to meaning and language as such. Derrida therefore refers to all language as writing or text. So the aim of deconstruction is to challenge or complicate our common assumptions about meaning; to show that in any text there are both explicit meanings and concealed assumptions. Derrida’s philosophical works take the form of a close reading of those philosophers who lay claim to purity, trans- parency or universality, showing the implicit assumptions that undermine their claims. Derrida insists that writing cannot be tied to any single source. The inter- pretation of texts depends on an array of possible contexts and interpreters which leads to a potentially endless dispersal and multiplication of meaning. This is not to say that any text can be interpreted with complete license. When we seek to deconstruct a text, to go from an obvious to a latent meaning, we must be rigorously sure of the obvious meaning. Deconstruction targets binary oppositions and hierarchies of meaning – for example, mind/body; reason/emotion; masculine/feminine; self/other; sameness/difference – but without assuming that there is a resolution to the tensions between them. Derrida rejects the idea of a truth that can be known and written with certainty. In this much, at least, his work shares certain characteristics with that of Christian apophatic writing.

In The Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael Sells examines five writers from separate religious traditions which share an intellectual and symbolic world influ- enced by the writings of Denys the Areopagite. In the works of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, Sells finds a common concern with the problem of how to use human language to convey knowledge of the divine which surpasses descriptive and analytic categories. He also finds a common response which enables him to characterise the implicit logic and conventions of apophatic discourse in seven key principles.2 If we look at Derrida’s work in the light of Sells’ analysis, we see that many of the logical and semantic strategies used by mystical writers are echoed in deconstruction. Apophasis begins, Sells argues, with the aporia of transcendence. The subject of apophatic discourse transcends all names and referential delimitation. In order

2 Michael Sells, The mystical languages of unsaying, Chicago-London 1994. 248 SUSAN STEPHENSON to state that it is beyond names, however, it must be given a name. Rather than falling back into silence or making a distinction between two kinds of naming (God as he is in himself and God as he is in his creatures, for example), apophatic writers refuse to solve the dilemma, leaving it as a genuine aporia. But this accept- ance leads to a new mode of discourse in which the original assertion continu- ously turns back critically upon itself. In the opening section of his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida speaks of ‘the overwhelming questions of the name’ in relation to God and the religious.3 He draws attention both to the capacity of names to designate particular enti- ties and the inherent problems of naming. Does ‘God’ belong to the system of language as such? Once we name God within a particular language we name properties and characteristics which confer identity. When we speak about God in English, Hebrew, Arabic; within the discourses of Christianity, Judaism, Islam; in the West or in the East; as men or as women, our language is not only theological but also historical and political. It names, identifies and also creates ‘others’. For Derrida, the acknowledgement of différance points to the impossibility of a stable meaning. The word ‘God’ both names and rests on the possibility of un-naming. Apophasis is sometimes taken to simply mean negation. However, the etymol- ogy of the Greek word suggests ‘un-saying’ or ‘speaking-away’. In order to unsay, something must have already been said. The act of unsaying is motivated by a desire to avoid reifiying a proposition. But if reification is to be avoided, apophatic discourse cannot reach closure. This is the second characteristic of apophasis that Sells identifies – the use of ephemeral, double propositions. It is in the momentary tension between statements that pull in different directions that the unstable meaning of the apophatic moment resides. Derrida’s insistence on questioning or refusing the stability of the name is linked to his insistence on the impossibility of closure in language. In response to the question ‘what is the religious?’ Derrida suggests that there are two sources or two logics of religion that operate side by side: the experience of trust, the performance of a promise; and a sense of the unscathed, the holy, the immune. Each of these sources reflects and presupposes the other. Each creates the possibility of an institution, dogmas, articles of faith that are inseparable from a historical society – a Church, clergy, socially legitimated authority, a people, shared idiom, community of the faithful. But, Derrida writes that there is a gap between the opening of this ‘possibility’ (as an universal structure) and the ‘determinate necessit’ of this or that religion that will always remain irreducible: ‘It seems impossible to deny the possibility in whose name – thanks to which – the derived necessity (the authority or determinate belief) would be put in question,

3 Jacques Derrida, Acts of religion, London 2002, 46. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 249 suspended, rejected or criticized, even deconstructed’.4 Thus one can always criticize, reject or combat this or that form of sacredness or of belief, even of religious authority, in the name of the most originary possibility. Any ‘saying’ of the meaning of the religious can always be ‘unsaid’ and this double structure which denies closure emerges from the very nature of the religious as that which is both a horizon of possibility and a historical enactment. Sells writes that because apophatic discourse seeks to avoid positing a transcendent being or entity it employs disontological and nonsubstantialist modes of speaking of Deity. The transcendent is not a being or substance. It is no-thing. Yet any naming will inevitably lead to an object reified in temporal, spatial and ontological categories. Thus the language of unsaying continually turns back on the spatial, temporal and ontological categories it has posed. In Derrida’s work there is also an apophatic force operating against such categories. Philosophical attempts to know an object ultimately fail in relation to the religious precisely because they reify a ‘thing’ under the name of religion. ‘“The thing” tends […] to drop out of sight as soon as one believes oneself able to master it under the title of a discipline, a knowledge or a philosophy’.5 The determinate shape, the being of a religion is always called into question by what is not present, what resists any determination. Another characteristic Sells identifies as key to apophatic writing is the use of metaphors of emanation. These seem at first to work as causal explanations but are then displaced through the creation of paradox. Meister Eckhart’s metaphors of bullitio and self-birth, for example, employ a set of grammatical transformations to ‘un-say’ spatial categories since God is no ‘thing’. Rather than using classical or mediaeval metaphors of abundance – overflow- ing water or emanating rays of the sun – Derrida prefers the much used apophatic metaphor of the desert. Deconstruction cannot speak about a source or cause or telos. And yet Derrida needs to appeal at least at the level of metaphor to something outside language – something that cannot be named. The desert is used as a metaphor of that which makes possible, opens, hollows or infinitises the other. It stands for a radical emptying, an abstraction from the particular manifestations of the religious. It is both anarchic and unarchivable, prior even to the opposition between the sacred and the profane. The desert is not habit- able, speakable, but is the condition for speaking as such.6 Sells analyzes the set of radical semantic transformations employed by apophatic writers which undo the distinctions between self-other, before-after, here-there. The pronouns ‘his’, ‘her’ or ‘its’ are sometimes fused so that the

4 Ibid., 93-94. 5 Ibid., 76. 6 Ibid., 55. 250 SUSAN STEPHENSON pronoun refers to both human and divine. The grammatical distinction between reflexive and non-reflexive can be undone so that the action is reflexive and non- reflexive at the same time. Prepositions such as ‘in’ and ‘before’ are brought through a series of transformations which destabilise the temporal and spatial dualisms upon which they are based. In the work of Marguerite Porete, for example, the deity is figured in both male and female terms; and in making the divine lover dependent on the annihilated soul, she disturbs an essentialist notion of deity, unsays distinctions between the human and divine and breaks through prescribed gender relations.

Deconstruction seeks to decentre forms of discourse that place the knowing subject at the centre of knowledge. Derrida’s strategy is to show how particular modes of philosophical discourse, such as phenomenology or structuralism, secure and confirm the identity of the subject whilst at the same time repress- ing and silencing difference or otherness. Différance interrupts every attempt at self-identity and exposes the contingency of metaphysical claims to transcendence. So Derrida, in a sense, undoes any stable distinction between self and other, before and after, subject and object. Every constitution of the subject in language is always accompanied by what it excludes. There is, here, an apophasis of subjectivity that parallels that of the classical and mediaeval writers in making the subject ec-centric. Apophasis is, then, a mode of discourse which denies mastery, resists reification, refuses to name, preserves aporia and evokes mystery. Denys Turner suggests that certain contemporary developments in Western thought signal not something completely new, but ‘a revival of that awareness of the “deconstructive” potential of human thought and language which so characterised classical mediaeval apophaticism’.7 Reading Derrida’s work in the light of Sells’ analysis supports this suggestion and lends a prima facie plausibility to attempts to link apophasis and deconstruction as modes of unsaying which share certain logical and semantic characteristics. Derrida concedes that his strategies often resemble those of negative theology to the point of being indistinguishable from them. However, this is not to say that any straightforward assimilation of deconstruction and negative theology is tenable. Derrida distinguishes between a negative theology that posits an originary moment in which human and divine belong together and deconstruction which denies any chronological or teleological reference. Two of the principles that Sells identifies as characteristic of apophatic writing do not seem to have a deconstructive counterpart. These have to do with the idea of mystical union – a moment in which transcendence and imma- nence seem to fuse. The culmination of apophasis in mystical union and the

7 Denys Turner, The darkness of God, Cambridge 1995, 8. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 251 culmination of deconstruction in radical alterity cannot be reduced to the same thing. Here, we have to move beyond the logical and semantic structures of the writing to the context within which the writing is produced. Sells points out that without a consideration of context the ‘nothingness’ of the deity is indistinguishable from ‘mere nothingness’.8 The full spiritual and ethical import of apophatic writing can only be gleaned through a reading which situates such texts within the context in which they were produced. It is to such a reading that we now turn.

THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION OF UNSAYING

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton describes contemplation as the highest expression of our intellectual and spiritual life. For Merton contemplation is beyond philosophy and speculative theology since it is always ‘beyond our own knowledge, beyond our own light, beyond systems, beyond explanations, beyond discourse, beyond dialogue, beyond our own self’.9 Reading Merton’s work, we may be struck by the resonances between his apophaticism and certain aspects of deconstruction particularly with regard to the impossibility of referential delimitation; the limits of conceptual knowledge; the breakdown of human constructions of the subject; and his use of metaphors of the desert, the abyss, and emptying. Merton’s writing is not, however, primarily a philosophical exploration of epistemological limits – it is a description of the maturing of faith in the absence of known landmarks. For the Christian contemplative, God is both beyond the reach of human knowing and yet revealed in Christ and met in the heart. This paradox cannot be reduced to a philosophical or epistemological problem. Merton’s comments in Contemplative Prayer about the limits of intellectual knowledge and the need to break open the boundaries of selfhood are addressed to those who are already committed to living a life in the pattern of Christ. Merton emphasises that the nothingness we encounter in prayer is not the effect of an interplay of human faculties but the experiential ground of a relation to God who is not reducible to the human. Meditation implies the capacity to receive rather than to produce. It is also important to remember that the ‘unknowing’ and ‘self-emptying’ of contemplative prayer takes place, for Merton, only within the context of a spiritual journey that begins with entry into the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church. The realisation that God is beyond images, symbols and ideas dawns, according to Merton, only on some- one who has made use of them and has come to know their limits.

8 Sells, Mystical languages, 8. 9 Thomas Merton, New seeds of contemplation, London 1999, 13 (orig. publ. 1964). 252 SUSAN STEPHENSON

In the introduction to his book The Darkness of God, Denys Turner makes the same point. He acknowledges that the deconstructive potential of human thought and language is a common concern of both contemporary postmodern philosophers and of classical and mediaeval apophatic writers. However, he is also at pains to point out that if there are ‘points of conversion between mediaeval and contemporary apophaticisms’, there is also an important respect in which the two cultures differ: ‘that in the Middle Ages, apophaticism was no mere intellectual critique of discourse, but was in addition a practice which was expected to be embodied in a life’.10 Turner seeks to situate Christian apophatic discourse within a broader historical and religious tradition which has its origins in both the Old Testament and Greek philosophy. The metaphors of ‘interiority’, ‘ascent’, ‘light and darkness’, and ‘oneness with God’ which are so characteristic of Christian apophatic writing develop out of the twin sources of Plato’s allegory of the Cave which describes the philosopher’s ascent from ignorance to wisdom and the Exodus narratives of Moses’ encounters with Yahweh on Mount Sinai. Classical and mediaeval Chris- tian theologians read both as accounts of an ascent towards God; towards a light so excessive that it causes darkness. Apophatic theology, according to Turner, is not a refusal to speak about the divine but a deliberate strategy which acknowledges how far speech falls short of the mark in our attempts to speak about God. As such, it exists only in relation to the cataphatic or ‘verbose’ element in theology. In attempting to speak about God, Christian theology draws on as many voices as possible, borrowing metaphors from other discourses; creating liturgy and sacramental practices; expressing God in music, architecture, dance and gesture. This ‘verbal riot’, as Turner calls it, exists in an intimate relation to the ‘astringency’ of apophatic theology. Examining the works of Christian apophatic writers from Denys the Areopagite to John of the Cross, Turner seeks to show how each understands the relation between the cataphatic and apophatic as a dialectical process. Theology is subject to the pressures of both affirmation and negation. As the cause of all, all things can be said of God; as the cause of all God is nameless. The apophatic is a linguistic strategy of showing by means of language that which lies beyond language. ‘For there is a very great difference between the strategy of negative propositions and the strategy of negating the propositional; between that of the negative image and that of the negation of imagery’.11 Although the theologians whose work Turner considers are writing at different points within the Christian tradition and therefore draw on different

10 Turner, The darkness of God, 35. 11 Turner, The darkness of God, 35. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 253 philosophical and theological frameworks, he argues that a common pattern can be discerned in the ascending dialectical movement towards unknowing mapped by each thinker. In his Divine Names, for example, Denys proceeds by exploring first all the perceptual names we give God and then moves on to investigate all the conceptual names of God, showing that ultimately all names must fall short of naming the transcendent. It is on the other side of both our affirma- tions and denials, when language reaches its limits that the mind ascends into the darkness of unknowing. Augustine offers a somewhat different account of this ascent in his Confessions, describing a three-stage progression through sensual knowledge of exterior, material things; to reflexive knowledge of the mind’s powers; to an awareness of that which transcends both, which is the work of God within the soul. We also encounter a pattern of ascent in the work of the sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite John of the Cross. The organising theme of John’s work is that God is not the same as anything else. All creatures are hints and reflections of the divine. Growth in spiritual maturity is growth in detachment from the creaturely. The soul must first be liberated from the desire for external objects and worldly goods and then must undergo the loss of any kind of knowledge of God leaving only faith and love. The final stage of John’s ascent is described as God’s work in the soul which is hidden from both human sense and intellect and hence beyond experience. The work of grace is known only indirectly through what it deprives us of. What emerges, then, in apophatic discourse is a dialectic which proceeds through stages of affirmation and denial towards a transcendence only darkly apprehended in the failure of human sense and intellect.

Turner argues that of equal importance and often intertwined with metaphors of ascent are metaphors of interiority. The question of interiority from Augus- tine to John of the Cross is a question of identity and, for apophatic writers in the Christian tradition, language ultimately falls short of articulating the difference between God and self. Thus the metaphor of interiority is linked to that of union. For Augustine, for example, the experiential and the conceptual belong together. The question of ‘who’ the self is, is also a question of ‘what’ the self is and ultimately, Augustine’s Confessions charts a search for self which turns out to be a search for God. Self-knowledge, for Augustine is of two kinds: a pre- reflexive self-awareness which is intrinsic to human experience as such; and a reflexive self-knowledge in which the mind reflects on its own activities to discern an inexplicit self-awareness within them. This, Turner argues, is an epistemological rather than a psychological enterprise. What is discerned in this reflective action is not what the self is. There is no direct object of experience to be found here. Self-knowledge is a subtle reflection on loving, judging, seeking, knowing – the activities which constitute human subjectivity. The distinction 254 SUSAN STEPHENSON between the inner and the outer, for Augustine, is a distinction between imagi- nation whose objects are the natural objects of the external world and reason or the conscious reflexive capacity of human beings to discern themselves as more than material beings. In the deepest, most interior sense of ourselves, we have the capacity to discern that we are an image of God – that in contrast with the changeable operations of the mind, there is something unchanging, necessary and true. One thing that Turner’s reading of Augustine makes clear is that this Chris- tian understanding of identity rests on a dynamic which seems unavailable to post-structuralist epistemology. Deconstruction, as we have seen, overturns the modern conception of the subject as the ground of knowledge and insists on dis- closing the ways in which conceptual schemes structure subjectivity. In this respect both deconstruction and apophatic theology share an ec-centric conception of the self. However, the subject in Derrida’s thought comes to no resting place. What is so different about Augustine’s search is that whilst, in the beginning, he perceives it as a search conducted by the self for its own true identity; in the end, he sees the whole trajectory of his seeking as being moved by God. Something is operating beyond the limits of the conceptual – something we are able to recognise as that towards which we are drawn but which is not able to be articulated in language. Augustine confesses the absolute priority of the divine initiative. And when Augustine comes, at the moment of conversion, to recognise God as that which he has been seeking, he recognises the immutable Truth within. This Truth, he realises retrospectively, has been arrived at through an ascent through various levels of knowing – knowledge of material things, of his own mind – towards that which is beyond change and beyond the limits of our knowledge. Epistemology and autobiography belong together in this account of knowing as recognition. The language of Christian theology allows Augustine to make sense of the various crises and discontinuous moments in his life as stages in the process of discovering his true identity. From the perspective of post-structuralist philosophy, there is no reason why we should not be sceptical of a discourse that provides such coherence. In comparing it with other possible accounts, there is no way of judging its validity over others when the criteria are philosophical. However, in Augustine’s writing, philosophy, theology and autobiography are richly interwoven so that to judge on epistemological criteria alone would make no sense. Thus, Turner argues, the metaphors of interiority and ascent in Augus- tine’s work embody the unity and coherence of his theory of knowledge and his spirituality; theory and practice.

For the mediaeval mind, the visible world is to be understood as a symbol, representation or image of the invisible. Turner argues that this is not simply true DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 255 of theological discourse but is a general epistemological constraint. The world’s character of being created means that it is symbol, representation, image. ‘In essence, all the visible world is sacrament of the invisible. And that sacramentality of the Book of Nature and of the Book of Scripture is resumed in the human nature of Christ, the Book of Life, who is at the same time the hermeneutical key by means of which the Books of nature and of Scripture may be understood’.12 Turner makes the point that here we encounter a world view that was consciously and deliberately rejected by modern thinkers. So in one respect, as Turner notes, postmodern thought is closer to mediaeval thought since here too the world is a ‘text’ to be ‘read’. But the crucial difference is in the question of how we read it. For the postmodernist there is no author/creator but structures and agents producing a variety of overlapping and sometimes conflicting texts that can be read in different ways. For mediaeval Christians, Christ is the key to how the text should be read. In Bonaventure’s Christocentric vision, it is through the assumption of the human in Christ, that the book of creation becomes the Book of Life. This is not to say that the Book of Life is easily read. As Turner puts it: ‘If all creation leads to Christ and finds in Christ the perfect image of God, then Christ leads us to the Father, who is the Deus absconditus, hidden in the divine darkness of unknowing.13 For Bonaventure it is Christ who is the juncture of the cataphatic and apophatic. On the one hand, Christ is the only perfect image of God. On the other, he is our only access to the unknowability of God. Furthermore, Bonaven- ture locates the ascent from knowing to unknowing in the paradoxical intensity of the crucifixion. It is here that the brokenness and failure of all our language and knowledge of God is located. Thus, Turner concludes, dialectical epistemology is fused with Christological anthropocentrism in Bonaventure’s work. So for Christians, the attention to the breakdown of language in its attempts to speak of God does not arise simply as a reflection on the limits of human knowing in respect of the absolute. It is a response to the cross. As Rowan Williams puts it: ‘The Word is rejected and crucified by the world; only when we see that there is no place for the Word in the world do we see that he is God’s Word, the Word of the hidden, transcendent creator’.14

Whilst contemporary writers tend to think of the mystical in terms of experiences, Turner argues, the mediaeval mind thought of the mystical as precisely that

12 Turner, The darkness of God, 107. 13 Ibid., 131. 14 Rowan Williams, The wound of knowledge, London 1999, 181. 256 SUSAN STEPHENSON which is hidden from experience.15 It is not surprising, then, that Turner finds at work within the apophatic tradition a conception of the self radically different from that of the modern subject whose identity is secured through the operations of its own reason. In the work of John of the Cross we are presented with a mystical theology as a way of identity-loss, discontinuities and breaks. The encounter of the self with its true centre is hard won through the displacement of all that the person was pre- viously able to call a self. John assumes that a person, in some sense, becomes what he or she loves. When desire and knowledge are turned towards creatures, the human self is imprisoned. To realise its true identity desire must be turned towards God. The Ascent of Mount Carmel is about how we can clear the path of God’s activity and keep space open for God by the exercise of radical detachment. John offers a programmatic scheme for the purifying of mental and spiritual life: the understanding must be reduced to faith; memory to hope; and will to love. In his discussion of John’s work, Turner points out that at this point the conceptual issue arises of what sense of selfhood remains after the passive dark night. If every constructed sense of self is deconstructed in order for the soul to arrive in its own ground which is ‘nothing’, then who experiences this breakthrough? Turner writes that for Eckhart and John, as for the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing, language arrives here at its limits. We do not have the language to describe this transformation of the self. Neither do we have a direct experience of the work of grace in the soul – it is beyond our conceptual reach and beyond our capacity of experience. ‘I know myself in my not-knowing my difference from God. And “contemplation” is the power to rest in that not-knowing’.16 Faith, for John is the apophatic moment within religious experience in which the craving for a distinct identity and way to approach God must be lost in order that the soul’s identity with God be found. Because John is so good at describing the psychological dimensions of the self’s journey, Turner argues, he can easily be misread as describing religious experiences. But when we read John within the apophatic tradition, we can see that, like the other writers we have looked at, he performs a second-order apophatic critique of religious language. We need to distinguish between the negative experiences of the dark night and faith, which is the negativity of experience as such. Faith, the darkness of unknowing, is the conviction – but also the practice of the Christian life as organized in terms of that conviction – that ‘our deepest centre is God’. It is the conviction that our deepest centre, the most intimate source from which our actions flow, our freedom to love, is in us but not of us, is not ‘ours’

15 Turner, The darkness of God, 4. 16 Ibid, 245. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 257

to possess, but ours only to be possessed by. And so faith at once ‘decentres’ us, for it disintegrates the experiential structures of selfhood on which, in experience, we centre ourselves, and at the same time draws us into the divine love where we are ‘recentred’ upon a ground beyond any possibility of experience.17 The apophatic in Christian theology is not therefore only an epistemological discipline but is also a practice of detachment. It is important to remember that for John, it is only within the pattern of Christian observance that the void of meaning could be discovered. Without the practices of worship, prayer, sacramental or liturgical action, there could be no apophatic moment.

We have seen then that within the apophatic tradition of Christian theology there is no stable knowing subject that can act as the ground of knowledge. This much is shared by Christian apophatic discourse and deconstruction. For neither discourse is there an absolute which can be known and named. However, we have also seen that the context within which Christian apophatic discourse is produced is very different from that in which deconstruction arises. Apophatic theology is not merely a question of epistemology but is an integral part of Chris- tian spirituality. Knowledge is a question of being in relation to rather than possessing a conceptual grasp of God. Whilst much contemporary philosophical enquiry focuses purely on the discursive intellect, the strand of Christian theology we have been discussing fuses knowing with being and loving. Under- standing begins because of a willed search for an adequate object, a desire to be completed by an other. Contemplation is seen as the understanding purified to a point of pure receptivity. Christian negation is therefore not mere emptyness but a moment in the life of the Spirit.

DECONSTRUCTION AND NEGATIVE THEOLOGY – A CONVERSATION

Do the connections between Christian apophatic writing and deconstruction go any deeper than the sharing of certain similarities in logical and semantic structure? The link between deconstruction and negative theology was noted early on by Derrida’s critics. In the discussion that followed Derrida’s original presenta- tion of ‘La Différance’ in 1968, one participant remarked that since différance is the source of everything and one cannot know it; it is the God of negative theology. Derrida notes that he was ‘accused of rather than congratulated for’ resift- ing the procedures of negative theology.18 And, indeed, some of his early

17 Ibid, 251. 18 Jacques Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking: Denials’, in: Harold Coward & Toby Foshay (Eds.), Derrida and negative theology, New York 1992, 74. 258 SUSAN STEPHENSON responses to such lines of criticism are constructed to distance his own project from that of the negative theologians. And yet those aspects of différance which are thereby delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies which as one knows are always concerned with disengaging a 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.19 However, John Caputo insists that this denial is the beginning rather than the end of the story of Derrida’s encounter with negative theology. Whilst différance insists on the indeterminacy of meaning; deconstruction shares with negative theology a desire for the impossible, the wholly other which ‘goes under the name of God’.20 Caputo argues that over the years Derrida’s relationship with negative theology has become more and more affirmative. Guy Collins has also noted that over time ‘[t]he relationship between Derrida and theology deepens from an initial sharing of forms to a commitment to common interests, including both faith and justice’.21 Derrida acknowledges that whilst we can look for a textual practice which exhibits certain rhetorical, grammatical and logical characteristics, the unity of negative theology is difficult to delimit. There is no negative theology that exists independently of a positive theology. We can search for resonances in classical and in contemporary philosophy and create an archive that includes Plato at one end and Wittgenstein at the other and indeed this has been the approach taken by many contemporary thinkers interested in apophasis. Negative theology, Derrida writes, has come to designate a certain attitude towards semantic or conceptual determination. Suppose, by a provisional hypothesis, that negative theology consists of consider- ing 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, and to prepare us for a silent intuition of God. By a more or less tenable analogy, one would thus recognise some traits, the family resemblance of negative theology, in every discourse that seems to return in a regular and insistent manner to this rhetoric of negative determination, endlessly multiplying the defenses and the apophatic warnings: this, which is called X (for example, text, writing, the trace, difference, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, etc.) ‘is’ neither this or that, neither

19 Jacques Derrida, Margins of philosophy, London 1982, 6. 20 John Caputo, Deconstruction in a nutshell, New York 1997, 3. 21 Guy Collins, ‘Thinking the impossible: Derrida and the divine’, in: Literature and Theology 14 (1999) no.3, 313-334, citation on p. 313. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 259

sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent […] Despite appearances, then, this X is neither a concept nor even a name, 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.22 Derrida concedes here the connections between his own work and negative theology. However, the existence of ‘traits’ or ‘family resemblances’ does not make the two equivalent. Derrida’s discomfort with negative theology arises from two sources. The first is connected to the question of presence. As we have seen, deconstruction calls into question the idea of presence. There is no single meaning that we can attach to any word including the word ‘God’. There is no one reality that the word ‘God’ can designate. Derrida therefore refuses what he calls the ‘ontological wager of hyperessentiality’ that he finds at work in Denys or Eck- hart if God is the self-present absolute beyond being. Différance is ‘before’ the concept, the word, the name. It is nothing present or absent. However, we have also seen that for negative theologians, God is not present to sense or intellect; God is not an object of experience. So the negative theologian could argue that the hyperessentiality of which he or she speaks is incom- mensurate to the being of all that is, and is therefore nothing. Arthur Bradley points out that much hinges on how Denys’ term hyperousious is understood.23 Derrida acknowledges two distinct possibilities which he relates to the two distinct and radically heterogeneous structures of negativity whose origin he locates in the Platonic tradition. In the Republic, the idea of the Good has its place beyond Being or essence. From what is beyond the presence of all that is, the Good gives birth to Being. Negativity here obeys a logic of the hyper which Der- rida claims inaugurates the hyperessentialisms of Christian apophasis. This Good is the transcendent origin of Being and of knowledge. Derrida argues that here, negative discourse, which apparently no longer tolerates ontological predicates, is still guided by an analogical continuity. The intelligible sun is analogical to the visible sun. The forms can be received in a logos through a dialectical process. There is, though, another structure of negativity to be found in Plato’s Timaeus. This is the khora. The khora is neither the intelligible nor the sensible but the place which receives the work of the demiurge. It is neither sensible nor intelligible yet seems to mysteriously participate in both. Derrida writes that Plato avoids speaking of the khora. It is radically other and atheological; it is not a dispensation of God. Plato insists on its necessary indifference; to receive all

22 Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking’, 74. 23 Arthur Bradley, ‘God sans Being: Derrida, Marion and “A Paradoxical Writing of the Word Without”’, in: Literature and Theology 14 (2000) no.3, 299-312, esp. 300. 260 SUSAN STEPHENSON and allow itself to be marked or affected by what is inscribed in it, it must remain without form and proper determination. Even if the God of negative theology could be understood not as a hyperessen- tial Being but as the radical ‘other’, Derrida’s unease is then directed to the promise of presence given to intuition or vision in negative theology. The thinking of différance is alien, heterogenous to the intuitive telos. However, we have seen that for apophatic Christian writers God is neither ‘present’ to sense or to the knowing or discursive mind. There can be no ‘experience’ of the ineffable. Faith dis- rupts and decentres all knowing and all experience. Perhaps then Derrida’s critique of presence is not so far from negative theology’s critique of experience.

Despite his reservations about negative theology, Derrida has returned again and again to texts within this tradition. His fascination seems to stem from two sources. The first is an epistemological concern with how we speak of the boundaries or limits of knowing. The second is an ethical concern with what calls us to speak. We shall consider these two themes in turn. In an essay entitled ‘Of An Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’, Derrida interrogates Kant’s distinction between philosophy and mystical knowing.24 The targets of Kant’s attack are ‘self-styled’ philosophers whose tone threat- ens philosophy. The death of philosophy looms, Kant argues, when the tone is mystical – when philosophy is no longer regulated by reason or science. The mystagogein say they are in immediate and intuitive relation with a mystery and they wish to initiate others into it. The elevation of gift over work, intuition over concept, and the genius over the scholar is homologous to the preference of demagogic oligarchy over authentic rational democracy. When the voice of reason is mixed with the voice of the oracle it is perverted. Reason is available to all and its limits can be marked; the oracular voice is private, speaking through idiomatic feeling or desire – it can say anything. The mystagogues also fail to distinguish between speculative and practical reason. The voice of the moral law dictates, prescribes, orders, but it does not describe anything. The moral law cannot be seen or touched – it is both transcendental and intimate; not to be confused with enigmatic vision and contact. Kant writes that the goddess before whom both philosophers and mystagogues bend the knee is the moral law in its inviolable majesty. There is no doubt about her command but we doubt whether it is our human reason that speaks or another voice whose nature is unknown. Kant writes that the didactic procedure of bringing the moral law into clear con- cepts is the only authentically philosophical one. The law may be personified

24 Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone newly adopted in philosophy’, in: Harold Coward & Toby Foshay (Eds.), Derrida and negative theology, New York 1992, 25-71. The title of Der- rida’s paper plays on title of Kant’s essay ‘On a Newly Raised Superior Tone in Philosophy’. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 261 through an aesthetic mode of representation but then there is a danger of falling into an exalting vision which is the death of all philosophy.25 Derrida’s interest in Kant’s argument centres on the question of eschatology. Kant denounces those who proclaim the end or limit of philosophy but he himself attempts to mark its limit and, in doing so, creates an alternative eschatology.26 The eschatologies of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, as different as they are, similarly pronounce on the ends of history and philosophy. Derrida asks: Haven’t all the differences [différands] taken the form of a going-one better in eschatological eloquence, each newcomer more lucid than the other, more vigilant and more prodigal too, coming to add more to it: I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals […] the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalyse Now, I tell you […] and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phall- ogocentrism, and I don’t know what else?27 We cannot but have become heirs of the Enlightenment. We desire vigilance, elu- cidation, critique and truth, clarity, revelation, demystification. We want to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse. And yet deconstruction gives in to the ‘finest diversity of apocalyptic ruses’ itself.28 Derrida here points to the ambiguity of his own work. In attempting to mark the limits of language, does it not become apocalyptic after the model of Biblical writing? Are not all our attempts to mark out the limits of language, in danger of claiming more than can be said? Der- rida suggests that we Aufklärer of modern times continue to denounce the imposter apostles, false apocalypses in the best apocalyptic tradition. Derrida has certainly been accused of employing an apocalyptic tone – announcing the end of metaphysics, logocentrism, presence etc. Themes from the writings of John of Patmos have been woven into several of Derrida’s works but when trying to articulate the root of his fascination with Revelation, Derrida focuses on the word and motif ‘Come’, quoting the closing chapter: The breath and the bride (numphe, sponsa, the promised) say [together]: ‘Come’. Let the hearer say: ‘Come’. Let the thirsty come. […]

25 Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone’, 47. 26 Ibid., 48. 27 Ibidem. 28 Ibid., 52. 262 SUSAN STEPHENSON

The witness to these things says: ‘Yes I come quickly’. Amen. Come, Adôn Yéshoua’. Dilection of the Adôn Yéshoua’ to all. Derrida writes: ‘This “Come”, I do not know what it is, not because I yield to obscurantism, but because the question “what is” belongs to a space (ontology, and from it the knowledge of grammar, linguistics, semantics and so on) opened by a “come” come from the other’.29 This imperative is a gesture that does not let itself be recovered by the analysis of speaking. It is not at the disposal of philosophical demonstration.

Derrida, then, uses familiar deconstructive techniques to show how Kant’s distinction between philosophy and mystagogy itself seems to break down in his announcement of the limits of reason. Such limits cannot be contained within the grammar of philosophy. Kant’s tone itself becomes apocalyptic at this point, blurring the distinctions he wants to make. Derrida’s deconstruction of the apocalyptic tone is itself apocalyptic – it announces that there is no closure in language; that there is no end – and this is itself an announcement of another kind of limit. This is the negative moment. But Derrida’s denial of closure is at the same time an affirmation of what cannot be said; of what calls language into being. Something breaks in that is of an ‘other’ order, an enigma not contain- able in language. Here we come to the second source of Derrida’s engagement with the apophatic tradition. That which calls language into being cannot itself be contained within language. There is an ethical notion of otherness operating in Derrida’s work which he traces within religious texts. Within the Christian apophatics of Denys, for example, the apophatic impulse procedes from the desire to speak well of God even if speaking well or speaking rightly requires avoiding speaking. Yet this desire already proceeds from God. Between the theological movement that speaks and is inspired by the Good beyond Being or by light and the apophatic path that exceeds the Good, there is neces- sarily a passage, a transfer, a translation. An experience must yet guide the apophasis toward excellence, not allow it to say just anything, and prevent it from manip- ulating its negations like empty and purely mechanical phrases. This experience is that of prayer.30 Derrida distinguishes two traits in the experiences of ‘what one calls prayer’. First, in every prayer there must be an address to the other as other – to God. This first trait characterizes a discourse which is not predicative, theoretical (the-

29 Ibid., 65. 30 Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking’, 110. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 263 ological), or constative. Even if prayer is silent it demands that the other hear, receive, be present to it; be a gift, call and even cause of prayer. For Denys, prayer precedes discourse about God. It is the address that turns us towards so that we are drawn to God. The second trait is the encomium or the celebration. These two traits are often associated. But Derrida argues that there is no necessary connection. The latter speaks of where the former speaks to.31 The encomium says something about the Good and the analogy – it makes the prayer in the case of Denys distinctly Christian. But not all prayer is Christian. What interests Derrida is the initial call to which prayer is a response. Derrida distinguishes deconstruction and Christian prayer at the level of performance or address where a particular designation or name is invoked. At the same time, Derrida suggests that the historical understanding of God which varies between, for example, Jews, Christians and Muslims is accompanied, within the apophatic moments of these traditions, by an understanding of God as the other, encountered in silence, who calls us to speak. And it is here that the connection between deconstruction and negative theology is again established for Derrida’s writing is also a response to a call; an address to the other.

Derrida’s essay ‘Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways, Voices’ is written in response to a set of essays exploring the question of negative theology from both Western and Eastern perspectives. He begins by noting that when we attempt to speak of God, we need this multiplicity of voices. It is not possible to make definitive statements about God. Such statements must be said and unsaid in an endless proliferation. Quoting Heidegger citing Leibniz, Derrida (adding his own voice to theirs) draws attention to the ‘almost godlessness’ and beauty of the mystical writing of Angelus Silesius. ‘The apophatic is a declaration, an explanation, a response, that taking on the subject of God a negative or interrogative form […] at times resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it’.32 Since Der- rida does not deny that deconstruction is an apophatic discourse, this discussion may be read as saying as much about his own work as about that of Angelus Sile- sius. Derrida raises the question of why the theologian writes. Why does Augus- tine confess when God knows everything? Confession does not consist in making known – the transmission of positive knowledge is not essential. Rather it is a question of public testimony in writing. ‘As act of charity, love, and friendship in Christ, the avowal is destined to God and to creatures, to the Father and to the brothers in order to “stir up” love, to augment an effect, love among them,

31 Ibid., 111. 32 Jacques Derrida, ‘Post-scriptum: Aporias, ways and voices’, in: Harold Coward & Toby Foshay (Eds.), Derrida and negative theology, New York 1992, 283-323, citation on p. 283. 264 SUSAN STEPHENSON among us’.33 In other words the writing is done ‘after the event’ (the conversion already having taken place) and ‘for afterwards’ (as an address to brothers in Christ) – a post-scriptum. The writing is at once a trace of the event of confession and conversion and essential to it. Derrida moves on to ask whether all writing, all scripting has this character of an envoi. Linking deconstruction to other apophatic writing, Derrida writes: Far from being a methodical technique, a possible or necessary procedure, unrolling the law of a program and applying rules, that is, unfolding possibilities, deconstruction has often been defined as the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible, of the most impossible, a condition that deconstruction shares with the gift, the ‘yes’, the ‘come’, decision, etc.34 Deconstruction is a response to a call from the other. An attempt to bring into language what exceeds language, what is beyond language. Derrida speaks of a ‘gratitude’ to negative theology which is not a return. He thus acknowledges a debt. His own apophasis is dependent on that of other writers for all that it is carried out in a different context. What occurs between negative theology and deconstruction is a kind of translation. Derrida writes that the ethical import of what comes to us under the term of negative theology or apophatic discourse, whether Greek, Christian, European or other is ‘the chance of incomparable translatability in principle without limit’.35 Translation shares with the post-scriptum that character of coming after – in this case after the text. But to translate is to enter into a relationship with the text – there must be some kind of affinity, friendship, desire for the translation to take place. Apophatic language is language at its limits, its edge, its boundary. It cannot reach its mark; cannot refer but rather aims towards something other. In historical terms, negative theology signifies language found within the Greek and Christian traditions. Derrida refers to it as a ‘paradoxical hyperbole’ to use Greek and philosophical language. It is language that announces, opens up a possibility for something to come. In the most apophatic moment, even when one says: God is not, or is not either this or that, not this or its contrary; or again, being is not, etc.; even then, it is still a matter of saying the entity [étant] such as it is, in its truth, even were it meta- metaphysical, meta-ontological. It is a matter of holding the promise of saying the truth at any price, of rendering oneself to the truth of the name, to the thing itself such as it must be named by the name, that is, beyond the name.36

33 Ibid., 287. 34 Ibid., 290. 35 Ibid., 293. 36 Ibid., 309. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 265

Derrida writes that he trusts no texts which are not contaminated with negative theology, even those texts which do not have, want or believe they have any relation to theology in general. The apophatic voice always speaks in relation to a philosophical or ontotheological promise and breaks that promise by recording the referential transcendence of language. And it does this ‘in the name of a way of truth and in order to hear the name of a just voice’.37 It is here that we get to the crux of why the apophatic voice is so important for Derrida. It opens a ‘way’ between closed discourses. At the point where philosophy or ontotheological metaphysics ‘passes over the edge of itself’ we arrive at the condition of translatability. And here Derrida is at his most mystical, for what calls language out of itself, what brings language to pass over its own border, comes from outside language. At the very interior of the history of Chris- tianity, Derrida argues, is the apophatic design which seeks to render itself independent of all revelation, literal language, dogma etc.: ‘An immediate but intuitionless mysticism, a sort of abstract kenosis, frees this language from all authority, all narrative, all dogma, all belief – and at the limit from all faith’.38 Now, this is not to say that Derrida is entirely comfortable with Christian negative theology or that he elides any distinction between deconstruction and other apophatic discourses. There remains for him a double possibility when thinking about the ‘ways’ that traverse the aporias of language. …on one side, on one way, a profound and abyssal eternity, fundamental but acces- sible to the teleo-eschatological narrative and to a certain experience or historical (or historial) revelation; on the other side, on the other way, the nontemporality of an abyss without bottom or surface, an absolute impassiblity (neither life nor death) that gives rise to everything that is not. In fact, two abysses.39 This distinguishes the inside from the outside of the Christian idiom and yet at the same time, the fact that no total determination is possible produces the ‘horizon of translatability’ that makes an interdisciplinary colloquium on negative theology possible. This possibility of translation is the ground of friendship – the letting be of the other – without having to subsume the other under the terms of a particular discourse. What moves us to speak and to unsay what we have said, Derrida argues, is a certain desire of universal community. The movement towards the universal tongue oscillates between formalism and a sort of ‘universal hive of inviolable secrets’ that are never translated. Negative theology is caught in this oscillation. This impossible possibility which cannot be put into language is what obliges us to go beyond what we can say or even think in the name of a promise; in the name of justice.

37 Ibid., 310. 38 Ibid., 312. 39 Ibid., 315. 266 SUSAN STEPHENSON

In October 1994, Derrida took part in a roundtable discussion at Villanova University. In the published version of his responses to questions, he refers frequently to his deep respect and love for Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and others. Such Greek and Christian writers are the origin of our identity and these are voices with which he was in constant conversation, both affirming and inter- rogating them in his deconstructive readings. So there is no question of a rejec- tion of the ‘canon’ in Derrida’s work; it is how we read it that is important. These rich works need to be read in ways which open the horizon of our own experience. Difference is essential for there to be any relation. ‘The privilege granted to unity, to totality, to organic ensembles, to community as a homoge- nized whole – this is a danger for responsibility, for decision, for ethics, for politics. That is why I insisted on what prevents unity from closing upon itself, from being closed up’.40 Derrida is clear about the limits of deconstruction. For example, he distinguishes justice and law. Law is a system. There is a history of rights and positive laws, institutions and constitutions which can and do change and develop over time. Law can therefore be traced, interrogated, deconstructed. On the nature of justice, Derrida writes: ‘But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive, or the movement to improve the law, that is to deconstruct the law. Without a call for justice we would not have any interest in decon- structing the law’.41 Justice, for Derrida, is not a matter of knowledge, of theoretical determination. He writes: ‘You cannot calculate justice. Levinas says somewhere that the definition of justice – which is very minimal but which I love, which I think is really rigourous – is that justice is the relation to the other’.42 Justice, like faith, is outside the economy of exchange, knowledge, language. It is this attention to the transcendent in Derrida’s work which brings it into a deeper relation with negative theology. Responding to John Caputo’s question of whether biblical religion and deconstruction can communicate with each other or do each other any good, Derrida makes a distinction between religion and faith which is closely connected to his distinction between law and justice. In so far as religion is taken to be a set of dogmas, beliefs or institutions it can be mapped, interrogated and deconstructed. This deconstruction of religion may be carried out in the name of faith. Nowhere does Derrida suggest that particular traditions of religious discourse should be abandoned. Deconstruction cannot operate except on such discourses or texts.

40 Jacques Derrida in John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a nutshell, New York 1997, 13. 41 Ibid., 17. 42 Ibid., 18. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 267

In this respect Derrida preserves the dynamic between apophatic and cataphatic modes of unsaying and saying. What Derrida objects to is the metaphysical presuppositions of philosophical and theological discourses that effect an unethical closure of meaning. Derrida argues that faith is universal, not conditioned by a particular tradition. Whenever we address the other, we act in faith. This is not to say that one cannot speak as a Christian, as a Jew, as a Mus- lim. But such testimony is not a claim to knowledge; it is an address to another – an act of faith. Bearing witness exceeds, through its structure, all intuition and all proof, all knowledge. Testimony will often include knowledge claims and metaphysical presuppositions. Disenchantment is a reactive and passing effect which occurs when the testimonially miraculous takes on a historical determination. It is precisely the historical determination which deconstruction examines. But it does not seek to undermine faith. In fact disenchantment becomes on this view the very resource of the religious, the preservation of the sacred. In an interview in Critical Exchange, Derrida writes of the possibility of uncovering an ‘authenticity’ of the ‘gospel’. [F]rom the perspective of faith, deconstruction can at least be a very useful technique when Aristotelianism or Thomism are to be criticized, or even from an institutional perspective, when what needs to be criticized is a whole theological institution which supposedly has covered over, dissimulated an authentic Christian message. And [the point would also seem to be] a real possibility for faith both at the margins and very close to Scripture, a faith lived in a venturous, dangerous, free way.43 In line with deconstruction’s central insights, Derrida makes clear from the out- set that any attempt to master the ‘question of religion’ will fall prey to dif- férance. The identity of the speakers is shaped by a particular set of historical, cultural and religious circumstances that create ‘others’ and particular acts of religion that manifest the name of religion in the world today (what we read in the newspapers, see on television and so on) effect a closure of the meaning of the religious which masks the radical otherness of the sacred – that which cannot be said. The evocation of what is outside language, radically other, unscathed does not negate religion but keeps open a horizon of possibility by refusing to name or define the religious once and for all. Finally, Derrida turns to the question of the messianic which he sees as a universal structure inherent in every act of address. When we address the other we promise to tell the truth. Every speech act has the character of a promise – that something is to come. The messianic is then interpreted as the opening to the

43 James Creech, Peggy Kamuf & Jane Todd, ‘Deconstruction in America: An interview with Jacques Derrida’, in: Critical Exchange 17 (1985), 12. 268 SUSAN STEPHENSON future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice. To wait for this coming is an act of faith which Derrida argues cannot be reduced to religion as such. However, Derrida is at his most equivocal on the question of the messianic. The enigma is whether particular traditions such as the religions of the Book are spe- cific examples of this general structure of messianicity – this would produce a Heideggerian movement from particular religions to more fundamental ontological conditions – or whether the revelations of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions have been absolute, irreducible events which have unveiled the universal possibility of the messianic. Derrida writes that neither hypothesis seems adequate and that perhaps a different scheme has to be constructed which can incorporate both possibilities. But he draws on the Judaeo-Christian tradition with its reference to the Messiah in order to speak of the responsibility that is imposed on us now in relation to the coming of justice.44

In his exploration of the structures of language and the limits of meaning Derrida encounters paradoxes and aporias that take him into theological ter- ritory. His attention to the question of what transcends language; to the question of the call of the other; to prayer; testimony; faith and the messianic, place his work in a relation of love and gratitude to the tradition of negative theology.

CONCLUSION

The similarities in the logical and semantic structures of deconstruction and mystical languages of unsaying establish a prima facie connection between the two. However, as we have seen, Christian apophatic writing appears within the overall pattern of Christian life and needs to be read in relation to its cataphatic counterpart. The motivation of Christian apophatic writers and contemporary philosophers such as Derrida, who echo the structures of such writing, seem to be very different. Neverthless, the encounter between these two different ‘languages of unsaying’ may create a fruitful dialogue. It is an encounter which exerts pressure from both sides, challenging the boundaries between disciplines; between the sacred and secular; between negation and affirmation; and between love and knowledge. In an interview with Richard Kearney, Derrida says that every culture and society requires an internal critique or deconstruction as an essential part of its development.45 Even those theologians who voice reservations about the value

44 Ibidem. 45 Richard Kearney, Dialogues with contemporary continental thinkers: The phenomenological heritage, Manchester 1984, 116. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 269 of deconstruction for theology also acknowledge that its concern with totality, exclusion and violence needs to be taken seriously.46 The cataphatic element of Christian theology has not always been balanced with the apophatic. Binary oppositions between reason and emotion; mind and body; male and female, for example, have been embedded within Christian doctrine in ways which create social and political inequalities. Jane Shaw demonstrates how deconstruction as a radical reading strategy may provide critical insights with liberatory potential. Shaw notes that the adoption of poststructuralist thought by feminist theorists has been phenomenal in the last decade.47 She also draws attention to the note of caution sounded by feminists who see in the announcement of the ‘death of God’ and ‘death of self’ in the work of ‘a/theologians’ such as Mark Taylor a less than happy prospect for those selves already marginalised and excluded. However, a deconstruction of the ‘Enlightenment self’ – which challenges the idea that identity is either universal or natural – allows us to see how our identities are shaped by culture and language. Shaw argues that deconstructive critique lays bare the ways in which human beings have been constructed as ‘female’ and ‘male’, embodied and dis- embodied, as feelers and thinkers, as those who experience God in an emotional way and those who can think and write about God in a systematic way. She writes: I persist in using the term deconstruction because I think that the production of multiple readings of the Christian tradition is a way forward into the rethinking of our identities, such as I see called forth by the gospel message of justice for all humanity. And I believe that one of the most remarkable things about Christianity is that it can not only bear the contradictions and complexities of multiple understandings of what it means to be fully human, but that it embraces such multiplicity.48 If deconstruction can act as a corrective movement within Christian theology, the apophatic strand of Christian theology may also act as a corrective within secular philosophy. Peter Dews points out that the dominant paradigm of hos- tility to meaning in recent European philosophy has undoubtedly been deconstruction. Yet at the same time as Derrida demonstrates the impossibility of inhabiting the conceptual framework of Western metaphysics, he also asserts the

46 Rowan Williams, ‘Postmodern theology and the judgement of the world’, in: J. Webster & George P. Schner (Eds.), Theology after liberalism, Oxford 2000; John Millbank, Catherine Pickstock & Graham Ward (Eds.), Radical orthodoxy, New York-London 1999, 321-334. 47 Jane Shaw, ‘Women, rationality and theology’, in: Daphne Hampson (Ed.), Swallowing a fish- bone? Feminist theologians debate Christianity, London 1996, 50-65, esp. 62. 48 Ibid., 64-65. 270 SUSAN STEPHENSON impossibility of leaving it behind.49 Derrida explores what is concealed, hidden beneath the universal claims and rationalistic vocabulary of modernity – its shadow side. Deconstruction opens a liminal space which challenges established boundaries and oppositions – a space which, Derrida acknowledges, has been explored before him within the apophatic tradition. Derrida’s deconstructive readings push philosophical enquiry to its limits and it is precisely here, at the limits of what we can know or say, that deconstruction finds itself in conversation with negative theology. Derrida is not surprised to find the seeds of deconstruction in theological discourse: ‘And one can argue that these original, heterogeneous elements of Judaism and Christianity were never completely eradicated by Western metaphysics. They perdure throughout the centuries, threatening and unsettling the assured ‘identities’ of Western philosophy’.50

Deconstruction and negative theology share a concern with the finitude of the human subject; with the desire of the human subject for an object that will sat- isfy its longing. Both recognise the restless, moving, developmental, unstable character of the human subject in relation to the other. Derrida, in his encounter with negative theology, finds at every turn that negative theology has been there before him. Deconstruction cannot police the boundary between the sacred and the secular; it is itself apocalyptic, messianic, seeks justice; responds to a call from the other; bears witness to a promise and so on. The structures of theology are those of language itself. At the limits of our conceptual grasp we open to faith. What is currently being discussed under the rubric of post-secularism is precisely the way we have drawn our conceptual boundaries between the sacred and the secular; heart and mind; faith and knowledge. Acknowledging that the same concerns with human finitude and human desire drive both theological and philosophical texts might facilitate constructive dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and between faith traditions. Derrida’s engagement with negative theology brings the alterity of theology back into focus in a way that is crucial for the twenty-first century in the face of entrenched fundamentalisms. At the same time, revisiting classical and mediaeval apophatic texts reminds us of the limits of secular enquiry which itself may foreshorten our vision by excluding the sacred.

SUMMARY

This paper explores the relation between two very different ‘languages of unsaying’: Christian apophatic theology and deconstruction. The first section of the paper draws

49 Peter Dews, The limits of disenchantment, London 1995, 1. 50 Kearney, Dialogues with contemporary continental thinkers, 117. DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ 271 on the work of Michael Sells to show that the linguistic and discursive strategies employed in Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive writing bear a striking resemblance to those employed by writers in the Christian mystical tradition. Both discourses deny mastery, resist reification, preserve aporia, and evoke mystery. However, Christian apophatic writing is produced not only as a response to the encounter with the limits of human knowing but as a loving response to the encounter with a God who calls the believer into the darkness of faith. The place of apophatic discourse within Christian spirituality is con- sidered in the second section of the paper. The third section offers a closer reading of some of Derrida’s essays on negative theology in order to show the extent of his debt to and engagement with that tradition. Whilst deconstruction cannot simply be read as negative theology, there is an ethical impulse in Derrida’s work that opens the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between these two apophatic discourses both of which seek to dis- rupt our attempts to know God in order to preserve an openness to the sacred.

Susan Stephenson (born 1965, Reading, England) is lecturer in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College. Address: 19 The Close, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP1 2EE, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]