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Derrida, Deconstruction and Mystical 'Languages of Unsaying'

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Derrida, Deconstruction and Mystical 'Languages of Unsaying' Studies in Spirituality 16, 245-271 doi: 10.2143/SIS.16.0.2017801 © 2006 by Studies in Spirituality. All rights reserved. SUSAN STEPHENSON DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION AND MYSTICAL ‘LANGUAGES OF UNSAYING’ INTRODUCTION This paper explores the relation between two very different ‘languages of unsay- ing’: 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 there- fore perform a kind of ‘unsaying’. In recent years the links between classical and contemporary forms of apopha- sis have received increasing attention across a range of academic disciplines.1 However, claims regarding the affinity of discourses which arise out of such dif- ferent 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 scien- tific 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 inter- rogates 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, linguis- tic 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 avail- able 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 there- fore 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 opposi- tions 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 the- ological but also historical and political. It names, identifies and also creates ‘oth- ers’. 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 un- say, 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.
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