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An "Other" Negative Theology: On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"Author(s): Shira WoloskyReviewed work(s):Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 2, Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics ofCultural Influence and Exchange II (Summer, 1998), pp. 261-280Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773442 .Accessed: 11/06/2012 12:13

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An "Other" Negative Theology: On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"

Shira Wolosky English, Hebrew University

Abstract This article explores Derrida's relation to Hebraism and Hellenism in terms of negative theology. Derrida's work has recently been claimed by theologians attempting to reintegrate it into a Christian discourse by way of negative theology. This essay argues that Derrida's critique of the Greek tradition of metaphysics can- not be reappropriated by theology and in fact sets out to expose traditional negative theology as essentially metaphysical and open to its critique. At the same time, the essay questions and explores to what extent Derrida's work can be claimed as

Hebraic, as a distinct and nonmetaphysical tradition.

The impulse to schematize Hebraism and Hellenism as antonyms pos- sesses a kind of sirenlike appeal that is intensely seductive, yet filled with doom. The term Hellenism, as Jacques Derrida has noted, contains both

heterogeneity and rupture.' As to "Hebraism," this has, since ancient times, unfolded with "Hellenism" deeply embedded within it, and controversy continues with regard to the precise moments and extents with which the two currents interacted with each other, as well as the larger im-

plications of their interaction.2 Besides the obvious fact that Christianity

1. Later in this essay, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida suggests that the khora of the Timaeus represents a second "tropic of negativity" that is "heterogeneous" rather than "hyper-essential" (1989b: 31-32, 35-38). 2. See, for just one discussion of this enormous area, Moshe Idel, "Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance" (1992a), and also Scholem, "La Lutte" (1983), discussed later.

Poetics Today 19:2 (Summer 1998) Copyright ? 1998 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.

262 Poetics Today 19:2

itself is a mode of Hebreo-Hellenism, Judaism in its historical develop- ment adapted, transformed, polemicized, and apotropaically warded off Aristotelian, Platonist, Neoplatonist, and Gnostic movements within and from the Hellenistic world. Yet outside of historical discourse, the terms threaten to degenerate into an even emptier sloganism, becoming, to use Derrida's terms in Margins of Philosophy, a mere "displacement" rather than "a certain difference, a certain trembling, a certain decentering that is not the position of an other center" (1982: 38).

Despite this admission, and despite his own attempts to avoid using the

opposition, Hebraism and Hellenism continue to exert a powerful force in

configuring Derrida's work. This is most obviously evident in the case of Hellenism. For example, in his essay "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida specifically sets out to distinguish his discourse from the main Western tradition of negative theology. In this tradition, the transcendence of God is indicated by placing the Divine beyond all knowledge, beyond all description and predication, and, not least, beyond all language. In this

apophatic or negative tradition, God is approached not through positive description but by negating any attribute, any quality, indeed, anything that might be said of him.3 Derrida's essay is undertaken partly in response to an ongoing and aggressive effort on the part of contemporary theolo-

gians to save theology not from but, rather, for deconstruction. Indeed,

against Derrida's own rigorous and consistent critique of theological tradi-

tion, a number of recent writers have attempted to recuperate Derrida as a valuable contributor to theological doctrine. For this purpose, they have used negative theology to introduce and claim a saving denial in the very bosom of ontology, thus enabling Derrida's return to the theological fold.

Derrida's critique of theology revolves around the implicit links he sees between the Hellenist tradition of Greek ontotheology and its Christian

developments. This includes the Western elaboration of negative theology, whose diverse material Derrida nevertheless sees as remaining "within a certain Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition" (1989b: 4). Explicitly, then, Derrida represents himself as an antagonist of Hellenism. In the case of

Hebraism, the situation is more complicated. Some students of Derrida's work see his attempts at evading a Hellenist discourse as implying that his

grammatology is a kind of Hebraic alternative, as when Derrida's work is described as a "displaced Rabbinism" and "Jewish heretic hermeneutic."4

3. For an overview of negative theology within the Neoplatonist and Christian traditions, see, for example, the writings of A. Hilary Armstrong (1967, 1979) and Andrew Louth (1981). I have explored its implications for literary discourse in Language Mysticism (Wolosky 1995). 4. See Handelman 1983: 109. Just when displacement breaks away from, rather than re-

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 263

Yet Derrida avoids elaborating a Hebraist position no less than a Helle- nist one. Derrida is resolute in distinguishing himself from the tradition of

negative theology, which he associates with a Greek heritage, a "Platonism and Neoplatonism, which themselves remain so present at the heart of

Dionysius' negative theology" (ibid.: 20). He is, however, at least equally evasive with regard to some "other" negative discourse within which his own might reside. It is true that he once suggested in an interview that such an "other" might be akin to something Hebraic, as the "outskirts of the Greek philosophical traditions [which] have as their 'other' the model of the Jew, the Jew-as-other" (Kearney 1984: 107). Yet in a key text such as "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida assiduously avoids speak- ing about such a possible Hebraist alternative. His question-is there "a tradition of thought that is neither Greek nor Christian? In other words, what of Jewish and Islamic thought in this regard?" (i989b: 31)--elides Jewish with Islamic thought in one of many instances where Derrida de- clines to speak: for example, by not "speak[ing] of what my birth, as one

says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab" (66); "decid[ing] not to speak of negativity or of apophatic movements in, for example, the Jewish or Islamic traditions" (53); choosing "to say nothing, once again, of the mysticisms or theologies in the Jewish, Islamic, or other traditions" (55). What Derrida finally does is to "leave this immense place empty" (53) as "a certain void" (31) by avoiding speaking about it.

Because he chooses to leave it empty, this space remains vulnerable to

miscomprehension and misinterpretation. It is a curious fact that theolo-

gians who wish to reclaim deconstruction for theology not only refuse to

acknowledge the Hebraic dimension of this alternative space in his thought but also tend to dismiss Derrida's relation to Judaic or Hebraist traditions as no more than a "subgroup" among many "similar connections between Derrida and many cultural and political movements" (Hart 1989: 65, x). They even claim that any Derridean alignment with a "rabbinic interpre- tation" is possible "only if God is absent, if God is silent, if God is a stranger even to himself ... [reflecting] the indeterminate situation of a displaced people, a people who never have the certainties of Greek metaphysics ... Hegel's bad infinity" (Joy 1992: 274). Here, in a serious misappropriation of Derridean senses of otherness, the "strange" is condemned as a betrayal of the same, which must be redeemed through an incorporation back into Presence. But this line of thought utterly misinterprets Derridean notions

maining within the parameters of, a hermeneutical tradition, is a question Handelman's essay fails to address, but this question is central to considering Derrida's Hebraism. In- deed, it is peculiarly posed by him.

264 Poetics Today 19:2

of difference and the critique they launch against just such divinization of erasive Presence.

What these theologians tend to avoid in Derrida's critique is his repeated assertion regarding the continued force of Greek ontology within Christian

discourses, even negative ones. And even when they admit to the existence of this ontological tradition, they do so toward quite distinct ends, using it as a deconstructive moment within positive theology, a negative corrective to affirmative images of the Divine in which the two nevertheless remain

"systematically related." Such negation "check[s] that our discourse about God is, in fact, about God and not just about human images of God." In so doing, it "reveals a non-metaphysical theology at work within positive ideology" and indeed "prior" to it (Hart 1989: 104). While Derridean de- construction is in itself not declared to be a negative theology, (some of) its

practices are seen as consistent with negative theology: "as a strategy, as a

way that negative theologians have found to hold the claims of cataphatic [positive] theology at bay" (Caputo 1989: 24); as a "breach" that "drives to its limit" the hermeneutical experience but finally rejoins hermeneutics toward the "unity of the two senses of 'God"' (Klemm 1992: 20, 22). In

fact, such confirmation between negative and positive theologies is central to the thinking of Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings remain the

primary source for apophatic or negative discourse in the Christian tra- dition and who, with Meister Eckhart-a major, and extreme, medieval Christian mystic in the tradition of negative theology-serves as exem-

plary in Derrida's essay. Derrida himself cites Jean-Luc Marion's work on

Dionysius, stating that if Dionysius "speaks of 'negative theologies' ... he does not separate them from the 'affirmative theologies"' (1989b: 63).5

Derrida does not contest this mutual implication of negative and posi- tive theology. Indeed, he explores it, but in doing so he questions the

escape of negative theology from ontology. Negation does not in itself

guarantee such an escape, does not necessarily deontologize theological structures. The formulas that place the Divine as "beyond" or "without" do so, he insists, as superlatives that reconfirm ontological hierarchy and structure: "'Negative theology' seems to reserve, beyond all positive predi- cation, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being" (ibid.: 7-8). Derrida reiterates (in a footnote) an

5. Derrida presents Jean-Luc Marion's work as an instance of the attempt to recover de- construction for negative theology and vice versa. See Derrida's footnotes 1, 2, 9, 16-e.g., "I feel that Marion's thought is both very close and extremely distant; others might say opposed" (1989b: 65). Toby Foshay, in reviewing Derridean stances that distinguish decon- struction from the stance of negative theology, discusses the relation to Marion (1992: 2-4) but carries it into a discussion of authorial subjectivity.

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 265

earlier statement from Margins of Philosophy in which he insisted that "dif- ferance is not . . . irreducible to any ontological or theological-onto- theological -reappropriation" because it remains without ontology, un- like negative theology: "Those aspects of diff6rance which are [negatively] delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most nega- tive of negative theologies, which 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, incon- ceivable, and ineffable mode of being" (ibid.: 63n).6

Negative theology remains "concerned with disengaging a superessen- tiality" that Derrida here still considers a category of presence. Such an

"ontological wager of hyperessentiality" can be found in both Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, in passages that Derrida goes on to cite and study at length. Against all efforts within negative theology itself to release such

hyperessentiality from ontological structure, Derrida insists that what it

promises is still "the immediacy of a presence . . leading to union with God" and that it remains "a genuine vision and a genuine knowledge" (ibid.: 9-10). As in the Augustinian tradition to which Meister Eckhart

repeatedly refers, negative statements are simultaneously "hyperaffirma- tive," transmuting "into affirmation its purely phenomenal negativity" (8- 9). The hyper of hyperessentiality (hyperousias) indicates a "beyond" that essen-

tially means above and more: "God (is) beyond Being but as such is more

(being) than Being" (20). In this, Christian apophatics remains true to its antecedents in what Derrida calls a Greek "paradigm," to "Plato and the Neoplatonisms," or at least that element in Plato that treats the "beyond Being" as "not a non-being" (32) but rather as a "hyperbolism" in which "negativity serves the hyper movement." It "obeys the logic of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds all the hyperessentialisms of Chris- tian apophases and all the debates that develop around them" (ibid.).

Derrida thus contests the claim that negative theology itself escapes from ontology, or that it rescues positive theology from the ontological critique leveled against it from Nietzsche through Heidegger and into Der- rida's own work. What particularly disturbs negative theology's claim to exceed being is "the promise of the presence given to intuition or vision" (ibid.: 9), or, more specifically, the apophatic movement as an elevation "toward that contact or vision, that pure intuition of the ineffable, that

6. Derrida is citing from Margins of Philosophy (1982: 6). Writing and Diference returns to this theme a number of times, as when Derrida comments that in Meister Eckhart, "the nega- tive moment of the discourse on God is only a phase of positive ontotheology" (1978: 337 n. 37). See also pages 116, 146-49, 189, 271.

266 Poetics Today 19:2

silent union with that which remains inaccessible to speech" (lo); "where

profane vision ceases and where it is necessary to be silent" (22). Derrida here brings together different issues--contact, vision, intuition,

the ineffable, union, silence -that are crucial for situating his critique and in fact indicate its direction. Ontological critique has shifted to questions of

language; or, rather, a specific axiology of language is revealed as already implicit or entailed within structures of ontology. Derrida's critique goes beyond argument over the ontological status of the "beyond Being," over the question of whether the formulas of negation in fact escape ontology. It investigates how ontology implies stances toward language, stances that

apophatic discourse only intensifies and confirms. Indeed, Derrida begins by defining negative theology as an attitude toward language:

"Negative theology" has come to designate a certain typical attitude toward

language, and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, an attitude toward semantic or conceptual determination. Suppose ... that negative the-

ology consisted of considering that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence, in truth to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently, only a negative ("apophatic") attribution can claim to approach God, and to prepare us for a silent intuition of God. (4)

The interiority of "intuition," just like the immediacy of "vision" or "con-

tact," all militate for the silence that itself marks their attainment. To be

"beyond Being" is in fact the same as to be beyond language. The founda- tion of negative theology as a discourse- and this is how Derrida finally treats it-is its essentially negative attitude toward discourse: its commit- ment that "every predicative language is inadequate to the essence."

Such a negative attitude toward language becomes the ground for those who would claim a convergence between Derridean deconstruction and

negative theology.7 But this antilinguistic stance is the very reverse of Der- ridean deconstruction, which remains a grammatology, a "thinking of dif- ferance or the writing of writing" (18). Far from supporting the notion of a

position to be achieved beyond the faulty medium of language, it investi-

gates the impossibility of such a position. As Derrida remarked to Lucien

Goldmann, deconstruction "is simply a question of (and this is a necessity of criticism in the classical sense of the word) being alert to the implica- tions, to the historical sedimentation of the language which we use" (1970: 271). It is to take language absolutely at its indispensable word.

7. In this argument, negative theology is said to be, like deconstruction, "a salient example of this recognition that language is caught up in a self-defeating enterprise" (Caputo 1989: 29). Cf. Hart, "What then is negative about 'negative theology'? I have said that negative theology denies the adequacy of the language and concepts of positive theology" (1989: 176). Cf. Sells 1994: 12.

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 267

This impossibility of evading language lays the ground for Derrida's cri-

tique of negative theology. As language, as rhetoric, apophatics, far from

transcending ontology, is itself fundamentally structured by ontology. Its

language procedures bear the very mark of ontology, both in apophatic rhetoric and in the negative linguistic attitude that continues to direct

negative theology. Derrida makes this point by citing a text central to Dio-

nysius's Mystical Theology:

Now, however, that we are to enter the darkness beyond intellect, you will not find a brief [brakhylogian] discourse but a complete absence of discourse [alogian] and intelligibility [anoesian]. In affirmative theology the logos descends from what is above down to the last, and increases according to the measure of the descent toward an analogical multitude. But here, as we ascend from the high- est to what lies beyond, the logos is drawn inward according to the measure of the ascent. After all ascent it will be wholly without sound and wholly united to the unspeakable [aphthegkto]. (1989b: 11)

Dionysius here is discussing the relation between the negative theology of his Mystical Theology in reference to the positive theology he had explored in other works such as the Divine James, which was used as a textbook for analogical knowledge of God in the medieval West. But, as Derrida

points out, these two movements do not merely reverse each other, some-

thing Dionysius himself would confirm. The negative process, although for Dionysius ultimately prior, is no less determined by ontology than the affirmative one. Moreover, both negative and positive are functions of the rhetoric they employ; they are the descent and ascent up a ladder of

being that itself is also inescapably linguistic: "The apophatic movement of discourse would have to negatively retraverse all the stages of symbolic theology and positive predication. It would thus be coextensive with it, confined to the same quantity of discourse" (11).

Implicit here is not only the foundational role of language even in this discourse, which seeks to dispense with language, but a whole model of signification-in fact, a sign theory. Derrida remarks: "This ascent cor- responds to a rarefaction of signs, figures, symbols," which finally issues beyond signs altogether: "By the passage beyond the intelligible itself, the apophatikai theologai aim toward absolute rarefaction, toward silent union with the ineffable" (lo-11). As in the Saussurean sign theory that Derrida discusses as the first topic in Of Grammatology, the mystical ascent moves from an outward signifier to a transcendent signified beyond any of its representations, a signified that ideally dispenses with language and rep- resentation altogether. The Saussurean model, however, itself duplicates a sign theory deeply rooted in the discourse of theology, from Augustine's On

268 Poetics Today 19:2

the Trinity through Dionysius and into Meister Eckhart.8 To avoid speak- ing here means to be silent, according to Augustine according to Eckhart, within contemplation of "the unique one ... of the divine unity, which is the hyperessential Being resting unmoved in itself." As Eckhart com-

ments, "'Because of this, be silent.' Without that you lie and you commit sin" (51-52). As to signs, they undergo the "rarefaction" Derrida speaks of in relation to Dionysius, which Rene Roques further specifies in his analy- sis of Dionysian symbology: "The symbol must be purified to rejoin the hidden significance that it envelops .... For it is also a question of dis-

engaging in all its purity the element properly significative and anagogic of the symbol, and of rejecting all that can obscure that signification of the transcendent order, and all that can trouble it and pervert it in the intelli-

gence, which can compromise the entire symbolic process" (1962: 167-68, my translation). The ascent from symbol or signifier to signified it is in- tended to convey is a process of purgation or purification, of stripping away or negating the outward envelope, which obscures the "signification of the transcendent order." Such purification emerges in Meister Eckhart in the

figure of an "unveiling": what Derrida describes as "a certain signification of unveiling, of laying bare, of truth as what is beyond the covering of the

garment" (1989b: 45). This again confirms Derrida's claim that at issue in this theology, despite its negativity, is in fact an ontology: "Is it arbitrary to still call truth or hyper-truth this unveiling which is perhaps no longer an

unveiling of Being? ... I do not believe so" (45). The signs, even the nega- tive signs, presuppose, depend upon, and signify "what is beyond Being in

being," in the language of Dionysius. And this ontology presumes an axi-

ology of language in which what is negated is not the divine superiority but language itself: "In brief, we learn to read, to decipher the rhetoric without rhetoric of God- and finally to be silent" (50).

It is here that the relevance of deconstructive grammatology to negative theology emerges, but in an obverse way to those who would enlist Der- rida within the orders of theology. Instead of confirming the apophatic intuition against language, Derrida's analysis implies that apophasis itself takes place within language and can never be disengaged from it. The

beyond-Being that is cited as what transcends language instead is exposed as being produced by the particular linguistic procedures of mystical the-

ology. "Figuration and the so-called places (topoi) of rhetoric constitute the

very concern of apophatic procedures" (27). The very language this the-

ology would dispense with, in contrast, makes it possible and defines it.

8. For further discussion of the theological structure of sign theory, see Wolosky, "Derrida,

Jabes, Levinas" (1982) and Language Mysticism (1995).

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 269

Thus, in his "Post-Scriptum" to a volume titled Derrida and Negative The-

ology Derrida remarks: "The modality of apophasis, despite its negative or

interrogative value, is often that of the sentence, verdict or decision, of the statement" (1992: 283). Paul Ricoeur, commenting on an effort by Dominic Crossan to incorporate Derridean deconstruction into theologi- cal discourse, responds: "I doubt that a negative theology can be based on Derrida's deconstructive program" (1979: 74). Negative theology can indeed not be assimilated to deconstruction, except as a self-critique that would no longer be recuperable to ontotheology, one where the negations of negative theology would interrupt (hyper)essentialism rather than con-

firming it. It is this grammatological critique of negative theology that "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" offers.

Two questions nonetheless remain: If Derridean grammatology precludes a negative theological discourse that continues Greek ontological tradi- tion, does it thereby commit itself to a discourse in which negation and lan-

guage are no longer mutually subversive but are, rather, mutually affirm-

ing? And could such a discourse be called "Hebraic"? In "How to Avoid

Speaking," Derrida does gesture toward an "other" apophatics: "The ex-

perience of negative theology," he writes, "perhaps holds to a promise, that of the other, which I must keep because it commits me to speak where negativity ought to absolutely rarefy discourse" (1989b: 14). Der- rida's "other" apophatics registers at once a first difference: in the stance toward language, even before ontology. The negativity that should "rarefy" discourse, as Dionysius's purgational apophatics does, here instead "com- mits me to speak." This linguistic difference is directly tied, however, to ontological questioning. Traditional apophatics--that is, a negative or

mystical theology of negation-claims to go beyond being, to break free of ontological determination through progressive negations. Indeed, this is the basis for modern attempts to see traditional negative theology as deconstructive. But Derrida distinguishes this traditional negativity from ontological rupture. A controlling unity remains between negative and af- firmative theology and within the "hyperessentiality" itself. The discourse of negative theology may be "in itself interminable," but "the apophatic movement cannot contain within itself the principle of its interruption. It can only indefinitely defer the encounter with its own limit" (11). Against this, Derrida contrasts a "thinking of difference" that is "alien, heteroge- neous, in any case irreducible to the intuitive telos--to the experience of the ineffable and of the mute vision which seems to orient all of this apo- phatics" (ibid.).

It is this "thinking of difference" as "heterogeneous" and irreducible to

270 Poetics Today 19:2

"mute vision" that authorizes Derrida's own discourse; that marks a break with Greek ontology; and, not least, that undoes the negation of language entailed and embraced within the (Greek) apophatic "experience of the ineffable." Derridean difference marks a genuine shift in language values, indeed, marks a commitment to language as what distinguishes his own

negative discourse from the Greek apophatic tradition. His "other" apo- phatics, one that may "contain within itself the principle of its interrup- tion," has peculiar implications for, or within, a positive linguistic com-

mitment, such that language is no longer the sign of betrayal of a true

(hyperessential) being experienced in its ultimacy as hyperlinguistic, that is, as silence, but rather is recognized as the very condition for facing an

ultimacy that resists reappropriation. The line of demarcation between a Hellenist and an "other" apophatics is language itself. Language itself is the boundary of the negative theology that Derrida traces in "How to Avoid Speaking."

To what extent Derrida's encounter across that border of language may be called Hebraism remains, however, far from clear. On the one hand, Derrida's engagement with Jewish writers certainly confutes those who wish to dissociate him from Judaic affiliation. From biographical hints such as those in Glas (1989a), to references in the Grammatology (1976) and then

essays on Emmanuel Levinas and Edmond Jabes in Writing and Difference (1978), to what amounts to a meditation on midrash and Walter Benjamin in the essay "Des Tours de Babel" (1985), Derrida's writing evidences countless intercrossings with Jewish culture and thinkers. "Des Tours de Babel" is particularly suggestive as to where Derridean and Judaic dis- courses may be mutually illuminating regarding, for example, the limits of negative theology that "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" explores. There Derrida is concerned with the divine, Hebrew "unpronounceable name" (170), as further interpreted through a Benjaminian "discourse on the proper name and on translation" (175). Such a (divine) notion of "the

origin of language" is posed also as its disruption, an "origin of tongues" in the sense of founding "the multiplicity of idioms" (167). Indeed, disrup- tion erupts not only within human discourse but also within the divine: "The war that [God] declares has first raged within his name: divided, bifid, ambivalent, polysemic: God deconstructing" (170). But this divine

dispersion, rather than imposing violence as loss of unity, instead opposes violence as itself the imposition of unity. At the Tower, humankind wished "to make a name for themselves" as a "unity of place" (169). This unity, if also the emblem of a fantasized "peaceful transparency of the human

community," is equally "a colonial violence." Against such violence, God

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 271

"imposes and opposes his name, he ruptures the rational transparency but

interrupts also the colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism" (174). Derrida places such originary, divine, linguistic disruption in the terms

that Walter Benjamin set in speaking through the figure of translation:

In giving his name, God also appealed to translation, not only because between the tongues that had suddenly become multiple and confused, but first of his name, of the name he had proclaimed, given, and which should be translated as confusion to be understood, hence to let it be understood that it is difficult to translate and so to understand ... he pleads for a translator.... The law does not command without demanding to be read, deciphered, translated. It demands transference .... Even in God, and it is necessary to follow rigorously the consequence: in his name. (184, emphasis in original)

The divine name, ruptured rather than unitary, inaugurates linguistic mul-

tiplicity, mediation, and the injunction to (and not to) translate. Its appeal to translation, founded in its inner interruption, is both a "giving his name" and a withholding of it. This in turn founds language as the multiplicity of

tongues, marking a difference not to be elided, or suppressed, in the name of unity but rather to be linguistically negotiated.

Edith Wyschogrod, linking Derrida to Levinas, argues that Derrida's is a critique of ontological thinking as a mode of "transcendental oppres- sion, that of the Same and the One," where "metaphysical oppression is a source of 'oppression in the world' as war and violence" (1992: 50). Her

argument rightly opposes those theologizing readers who wish to measure this originary disruption by the standard of ontological unity, as its loss. Rather, Derrida, like Levinas, here sets out to critique ontological unity as violence. Yet what remains striking about Derrida's account is how it

suggests at once both a close proximity and a restrained distance from a Judaic negative discourse. Derrida, in "Des Tours de Babel," refers in fact to Benjamin rather than Levinas. These two figures are not commensu- rate; indeed, they point toward distinct and not entirely congruent Hebra- ist genealogies for Derridean thinking. Perhaps more telling still is a figure who is oddly missing from the Derridean discourse, in what seems like another apotropaic gesture: that is, Gershom Scholem. While the lines of influence and interchange between Scholem and Benjamin may remain in

many ways obscure, the one seems inevitably to conjure up the other, even if also by way of divergences.9 It is this very inevitability of association that

9. Scholem claims that Benjamin undertook his own language philosophy in conjunction with Scholem's, as for example in "The Task of the Translator" (1981: 34, 121), but his may not be a full or adequate account of the matter. For the complexity of the relationship be-

272 Poetics Today 19:2

Derrida's writing intringuingly circumvents. For Scholem's work on lan-

guage mysticism develops features central to Derrida's linguistic critique, but in the specifically Hebraic matrix that Derrida elides.

At issue in Scholem, as in Benjamin and Derrida, is the status and value of language as central and primary, rather than as secondary and ulti-

mately dispensable if not compromised, within negative theological dis- course.10 Scholem distinguishes a "metaphysically positive attitude towards

language as God's own instrument" as singular to Jewish tradition, even in its mysticism: "Kabbalism is distinguished by an attitude towards lan-

guage which is quite unusually positive. Kabbalists who differ in almost

everything else are at one in regarding language as something more pre- cious than an inadequate instrument.... Language in its purest form, that

is, Hebrew . . . reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in other words, it has a mystical value. Speech reaches God because it comes from God" (1961: 15).

This "superabundantly positive delineation of language" (1972: 62) as "the medium in which the spiritual life of man is accomplished, or con- summated" (ibid.: 60) serves as the opening topic of Scholem's essay de- voted to language theory, "The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah," which Scholem first conceived for his dissertation but only completed fifty years later. Such assertion of language, however, by no means eliminates negation. Scholem's language theory pursues negativity as both fundamental and initiatory. Not unlike the apophatics Derrida ex-

plores in "How to Avoid Speaking," the divine in its ultimacy is designated as ineffable. In rabbinic tradition the great Name of God had already been "withdrawn from the acoustic sphere" and had thus become unpronounce- able (ibid.: 67). In this, however, the Name institutes language and world

("the alphabet is the original source of language and at the same time the original source of being" [75]), even as it stands beyond them, "com-

pletely withdrawn into the realm of the ineffable" (67). In mystical writ-

ings this transcendent ultimacy comes to be designated in negative terms, as "En-Sof" (without-end), a Name that is "nameless" (175). Although it is the ultimate source of all creative process, "this name has no 'meaning' in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete significa- tion. The meaninglessness of the name of God indicates its situation in the

very central point of the revelation, at the basis of which it lies" (194).

tween Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, see David Stern, "The Man with Qualities" (1995). See also Biale 1982: 120-21. On differences between Scholem and Derrida, see Alter

1991: 86-87. o1. Benjamin writes: "Revelation lies in the metaphysically acoustic sphere" (Biale 1982: 193).

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 273

Yet even in this absoluteness of beyond language, the ultimate does not negate language but rather is committed to language as among its most penetrating figures. "The coming into being of the linguistic movement," writes Scholem, "has its original source in the infinite being of God him- self" (181). The letters of the divine Name(s) are not only "condensations of the energy" that radiates forth in creation; they also "represent the linguis- tic innerness of the cosmic process" (175). Linguistic differentiation, that is, originates and penetrates the divine itself, made possible by (as) a complex of inner disjunctions within divinity: "When En-Sof entwined itself within itself this texture of the original Torah folded up and remained as the origi- nal force of all linguistic movement in En-Sof" (182). Linguistic differen- tiation, then, is not opposed against divine ultimacy but rather manifests it, both as creation and as figure, as the letters of a linguistic movement "which ramifies and is differentiated in the infinite, but then returns once again in dialectical change into its focus and its original source" (170).

Scholem's discourse has complex links with the Neoplatonist tradition that Derrida critiques. This is a topic Scholem himself explores. In his essay "La Lutte entre le Dieu de Plotin et le Dieu de la Bible dans la Kab- bale Ancienne," for example, Scholem traces the very term En-Sofas an "absence of name" to Neoplatonist negations (1983: 26-28). Nevertheless, within Judaic discourse this term common to negative theologies comes to be inseparable "from the traditional Name of God" and its revelatory, creative expression (ibid.: 29, my translation). Indeed, under the aegis of language figures, the "En-Sof" itself becomes associated with lettristic ac- tivity, as the "point of departure which effects all articulation"; or, in the words of a twelfth-century Kabbalist: "The alef [first letter of the alpha- bet] corresponds to an essence the most intimate and the most hidden ... which unites with infinity and unlimitedness" (ibid.: 47, my translation). What this linguistic commitment distinguishes within Hebraist discourse is a sense of negativity interior to the utmost divinity itself: not as a loss of coherence but as what generates all creation. This notion is developed in Scholem's "Unhistorical Aphorisms," where he insists on distinguishing Kabbalah from Neoplatonist continuities of being (Biale 1987: 116) and, in contrast, describes a passageway through Nothingness as within the cre- ative act itself (ibid.: 111).11 The divine Nothingness emerges more fully still in Scholem's essay "Creation out of Nothing and the Self-Limitation of God" (Schopfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschrankung Gottes) in asso-

11. Nathan Rotenstreich discusses Scholem's contrast in the "Aphorisms" between Neo- platonist emanation and Kabbalistic creation, which he calls an "interruption within the procedures of being" (1977: 609). See also Biale, who speaks of "a differentiation within the divine itself" (1982: 59) and the contrast with Neoplatonism (1987: 111-12, 115-17).

274 Poetics Today 19:2

ciation with the Lurianic image of Zimzum, the self-contraction of God.'2 This process Scholem describes as a "double movement" both "within God himself" and also from God into world, such that divine nothingness not only empties space for the coming into being of creation but continu-

ally penetrates it. "In every living process, the Nothing breaks out through its transformations. It is an abyss, which accompanies every Something. No being is complete, but always fractional and incomplete. Out of an ever renewed contact with the Nothing stems the ever occurring creation"

(Scholem 1956: 117-19, my translation). The differentiations of language, penetrating divinity itself, thus imply

a negativity that is both ultimate and generative. This in turn implies an

axiology of language with distinctive features. Where traditional apopha- tics sees language, despite the essential role it in fact plays, as a mere instrument of ascent, as secondary, and finally as the object of negation, Scholem proposes language as essential, not only within creation but also for the Divine. This point is remarked by Moshe Idel, who distinguishes "the positive attitude of Jewish mysticism toward language and the nega- tive conception of language in Christian mysticism. It is language, or lan-

guages, that are to be surpassed in order to reach the acme of mysticism . . . [whereas] conceiving Hebrew as the perfect and the divine language, there was no reason [for Kabbalists] to attempt to transcend, attenuate, or obliterate its use" (1992b: 55).13 This difference emerges most dramatically

through the trope of writing Scholem delineates, where writing constitutes the founding divine activity, as an act of differentiation at once divine and creative: "From this innermost movement the original texture is woven in the substance of the En-sof itself. This is the actual original Torah, in

which, in an extremely remarkable way, the writing-the hidden signa- ture of God-precedes the act of speaking. With the result that, in the final analysis, speech comes into being from the sound-evolution of writ-

ing, and not vice versa" (1972: 181). In Scholem, the world as the letters of the divine Name is one in which that Name "has left its mark behind," where the letters are "the hidden, secret signs of the divine in all spheres and stages which the process of the creation passes through" (ibid.: 165- 66). In this sense, "linguistic mysticism is at the same time a mysticism of

12. It is impossible here to review the Lurianic Kabbalah and its notion of Zimzum as di- vine "self-negation," as Biale calls it (1982: 60). See, for example, Scholem's Major Trends in

Jewish Mysticism (1961) and Novak 1992. 13. Cf. Kabbalah, where Idel notes that the Kabbalist generally "felt his language was ade-

quate to convey his mystical feeling" (1988: 219); "even the spiritual world is adequately projected onto the structure of linguistic material" (ibid.: 235-36). I have also discussed this

positive Hebraist linguistic commitment in "Pharisaic" (Wolosky 1993).

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 275

writing. ... Writing ... is the real centre of the mysteries of speech... The creative word of God is legitimately and distinctly marked precisely in these holy lines" (ibid.: 167). This grants priority not only to language, now raised into the highest "metaphysical sphere" (ibid.: 176), but also to

writing: "The letters, which are configurations of the divine creative force, thus represent the highest forms" (ibid.: 168).

This elevation of writing represents a dramatic contrast to the attitude toward writing, as the extreme of language, in the Dionysian tradition. As Rene Roques observes:

Discourse in effect is composed of sensible elements to which a unique signi- fication no doubt attaches, but which the voice, and even more, writing, must dissociate: "It must be acknowledged ... that we use the elements, the syllables and the words, of writing and of discourse for the necessity of the senses" (Di- vine Names 708 D). But these senses . . . can only perceive the idea by way of the succession of elements of discourse and in the reciprocal exteriority of their diverse parts. In other words, no intelligible object can be delivered to the senses in its totality and simultaneity; and that constitutes their incurable

poverty. (1983: 203, my translation)

The ultimate object of Dionysian devotion cannot tolerate the intrusion of language, with its succession of elements and the "reciprocal exteriority of their diverse parts." Its totality and simultaneity are finally opposed to

language, and especially to writing, which it can tolerate only as a means "for the necessity of the senses" and beyond which the spirit must ascend.

Derrida, in "How to Avoid Speaking," notes that "in the register of

'negative theology' . . . onto-theological reappropriation always remains

possible. . . . One can always say: hyperessentiality is precisely that, a

supreme Being who remains incommensurate to the being of all that is, which is nothing, neither present nor absent, and so on. ... I concede this

question remains at the heart of a thinking of differance or of the writ-

ing of writing" (1989b: 9). Negative discourses reside at an unstable bor- der, which ever holds open the possibility of each crossing into the other:

Neoplatonist, Christian, and Jewish. Yet Derrida poses his grammatology against negative theology: "What diferance, the trace, and so on 'mean'- which hence does not mean anything-is 'before' the concept, the name, the word, 'something' that would be nothing, that no longer arises from Being, from presence or from the presence of the present, nor even from absence, and even less from some hyperessentiality" (9, emphasis in origi- nal). A difference that penetrates into, rather than reassembling within, the very sources of being, in Derrida emerges as a discourse of writing, of the "trace." Founded neither in presence nor in hyperessentiality, it in-

276 Poetics Today 19:2

stead pursues a movement through negativity, a movement that emerges as language.

Geoffrey Hartman, observing that the Hebrew tradition's prohibition against graven images "obliged a channeling into the written word of its

imaginal energies," remarks that "Derrida in this is Hebrew rather than Hellene: aniconic yet intensely graphic" (1981: 17). What Derrida's work does show is how a positive linguistic commitment entails values and pri- orities, which cannot be reabsorbed into, for example, traditional Chris- tian negative theology. To regard negative theology from the viewpoint of its language, against its own resignation as a "speech that knew itself failed and finite, inferior to logos as God's understanding" (1978: 116), is to cross outside the boundaries of the ontological tradition. As Derrida writes in

Writing and Difference, "The difference between metaphysical ontotheology on the one hand and the thought of Being (of difference) on the other sig- nifies the essential importance of the letter" (ibid.: 146). Derrida, then,

engages in what I would call a Hebraist critique of ontotheological tradi- tion in its Hellenist resources, and, centrally to this critique, he announces a revolution of language values. If, as Derrida suggests, the "strange dia-

logue between the Jew and the Greek [takes] the form of infinite separa- tion and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other" (ibid.: 153), it is language that marks this separation, that situates them otherwise in facing transcendence.

Yet while Derrida's writings may be Hebraic in theory, Derrida declines to commit himself to a Hebraic position that would require a commitment to history. Derrida's work may indeed take place on what he calls the "out-

skirts of the Greek philosophical tradition ... as their 'other"' (Kearney 1984: 107), but he hesitates to investigate the "other" negative discourse he

launches. Or, rather, he retains it as an "outskirts" that remains crucially tied to the orders it critiques. What seems oddly elided is the very tempo-

rality by which Derrida distinguishes between his own negative discourse as against theo-ontological unities of Being, whether figured as negative or affirmative. Both speaking and not speaking take place within the struc-

ture of the Derridean trace, and in this they are temporal events made

possible through an already instituted discourse--a discourse instituted as

the trace of the other, as a movement

toward the other (other than Being) who calls or to whom this speech is ad- dressed-even if it speaks only in order to speak, or to say nothing. This call of the other, having always already preceded the speech to which it has never been

present a first time, announces itself in advance as a recall. Such a reference to the other will always have taken place. Prior to every proposition and even be- fore all discourse in general-discourse even beyond all nihilisms and negative

Wolosky * On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" 277

dialectics, preserves a trace of the other. A trace of an event older than it or of a "taking-place" to come, both of them: here there is neither an alternative nor a contradiction. (1989b: 28, emphasis in original)

Here negation plays a crucial role, not against language but as a sustain-

ing difference without which discourse itself collapses. The very negations of negative theology, far from abnegating discourse, become inscribed within it, where the other neither is possessed at the expense of language nor is incorporated within language but rather institutes, as its "trace," the

"taking-place" of address itself, of call and recall. Yet this temporality of structure, which language radically asserts and

which Derrida opposes against Greek ontologies of Being, does not emerge in Derrida as specific historical commitment. Here Derrida differs not

only from Scholem, for whom history is the fundamental provenance of all discourse, but also from Benjamin, at least as Derrida represents him within the "Tours de Babel." In this essay, Derrida's Benjaminian figure of translation explores what might be called the oxymoron of historical iden-

tity: where identity itself is displaced as a foundational ontological notion to become a term of temporalized transformation. The very notion of "ori-

gin" itself then takes shape through its historical transformations, "living on," and indeed truly living, only "in mutation": "The original gives itself in modifying itself; this gift is not an object given; it lives and lives on in mutation" (1985: 183). Yet such temporalization is neither arbitrary nor

unregulated. "Growth does not give rise to just any form" (188). There re- mains a principle "authorizing, making possible or guaranteeing the corre- spondence" (182); a "transcendental contract" that "renders possible every contract" (185); a structure of "promise" in which a "commitment" takes place, "bequeathing its record" (191).

This sense of historical definition as retaining authenticity through all its modifications challenges the ontological formulas of Hellenism. Dem- onstrating this difference and finding alternative modes for describing it are central to Derrida's own philosophical and rhetorical tasks. Yet Der- rida's appeal here to religious language remains ambiguous. On the one hand, Derrida openly acknowledges Benjamin's as a kind of religious dis- course: "This religious code is essential here. The sacred text marks the limit, the pure even if inaccessible model, of pure transferability" (202). Yet its status remains obscure, at least in the case of Derrida. Benjamin may be offering his discussion as commentary on the Judaic sacred text, but Derrida's invocations seem more figural, displacing any historical course into theoretical structure.

The evasion of historicity, however, finally poses questions of theory. The "Tours de Babel" concludes in a play of words that remains telling:

278 Poetics Today 19:2

"the sacred text is the occurence of a pas de sens," a "no meaning" that

thereby renders the text "absolute ... because in its event it communicates

nothing" (204). Here the rhetoric of negation returns in force. But it re- mains unclear whether the force of negation, while clearly not ontological, is indeed regulative, within the sort of particular commitment of historical

generation that Hebraism traces. At issue may be not necessarily a par- ticular line of occurrences but that very structure of event that Derrida theorizes: that call of the other which is addressed in return, as an absolute

point (rather than topic) of reference, and whose discourse takes place tem-

porally, as history. The transcendent "Nothing" that calls from beyond lan-

guage not only affirms but situates it, as a discourse of history in ongoing definition-what Derrida himself describes in terms of a "promise ... an

event, and the decisive signature of a contract" (191). That "structure of survival" through which texts are historically translated is conducted, as Derrida insists, by one who is "committed by the other" and in response to the question "in the name of whom or what" (183). But while Derrida in one sense eloquently addresses this question, his own response seems almost one of avoidance: as though he wishes neither to speak nor to deny.

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