PALGRAVE FRONTIERS IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy

Edited by Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons

Nahum Brown · J. Aaron Simmons Editors

Contemporary Debates in Negative

Theology and Philosophy

EditorsNahum BrownUniversity of MacauTaipa, Macao

J. Aaron SimmonsFurman UniversityGreenville, SC, USA

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of ReligionISBN 978-3-319-65899-5 ISBN 978-3-319-65900-8 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65900-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951527

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: H. Mark Weidman Photography/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

vii

Contents

1 Introduction: Old Questions and New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Religion 1J. Aaron Simmons

Part I A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Interpretations and Consequences

2 A Philosophy of the Unsayable 17Kevin Hart

3 Speaking About Silence (Sort of ): When Does a Philosophy of the Unsayable Just Stop Being Philosophy? 23J. Aaron Simmons

4 William Franke and the Unfinished Philosophical Revolution of the West 39William C. Hackett

viii Contents

5 To Be and Not to Know, That Is the Question: Reading William Franke’s A Philosophy of the Unsayable 57Sai Bhatawadekar

6 Is There a Logic of the Ineffable? Or, How Is it Possible to Talk About the Unsayable? 71Stephen Palmquist

7 Betwixt and Amidst: Mixed Genres of Sophia 81William Franke

Part II Thinking the Apophatic: Hegel and Postmodernity

8 Is Hegel an Apophatic Thinker? 107Nahum Brown

9 Hegel and the Negation of the Apophatic 131Andrew W. Hass

10 Infinite Reduplication: Kierkegaard’s Negative Concept of God 163Peter Kline

11 Heidegger’s Apophaticism: Unsaying the Said and the Silence of the Last God 185Elliot R. Wolfson

12 Irenic Ironic Unsayable: A Correlation of Franke and Wolfson 217Lissa McCullough

Contents ix

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 239David Chai

14 Apophatic Universalism East and West: Rethinking Universality Today in the Interstices Between Cultures 263William Franke

Part III The Vanishing Point of the Apophatic in Poetry and Literature

15 Apophasis as a Means of Expressing Ecological Indeterminacy: Reading Modernist Poetry with William Franke’s A Philosophy of the Unsayable 295Sabine Lenore Müller

16 The Astonished Silencing of Things: The Hypothesis of an Apophatic Tautology in the Poetry of Fernando Pessoa’s Heteronym Alberto Caeiro 321Bruno Béu

17 Unspeakable Trash: Heidegger, Philip K. Dick, and the Philosophy of Horror 339Anthony Curtis Adler

18 Concluding Essay: New Apophatic Paths in Current Critical Thinking 371William Franke

Index 389

Introduction

The modern world is dominated by words, by an incessant need to give voice to our every thought and deed. Humanity is no longer content to stand speechless, partaking in the silence that thereupon envelops us. To invoke the nameless name is hence no more an option than uttering the unsayable word; encountering the unsayability of negativity is to be plunged into profundities words cannot encapsulate. It is here, at the cusp of the unapproachable, that we uncover the truth of that which is beyond, a beyondness whose knowability is belied by the very thoughts used to envision it. The written word tempts us however, prodding us towards the abyss of absent-mindedness. In our desire to conquer the word we lose sight of that which lies beneath it; the beneath is not eas-ily revealed though. We must, therefore, cast aside words in such a way

13The Apophatic Trace of Derrida

and Zhuangzi

David Chai

© The Author(s) 2017 N. Brown and J.A. Simmons (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65900-8_13

239

D. Chai (*) Department of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 4/F, Fung King Hey Building, Shatin, NT, Hong Konge-mail: davidchai@cuhk.edu.hk

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that their hiddenness is not disturbed. We must recast them apophati-cally. In this way, words are reduced to but empty vestiges, traces if you will, of their former selves. Words do not instantiate this apophatic trace however; on the contrary, it is the trace that points the way to that which gives rise to words and yet, that which gives birth to words is itself traceless and unknowable.

To this end, we shall explore the concept of the trace as it appears in two very different contexts: the deconstructionist thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and the ancient Chinese philo-sophical tradition of Daoism as represented by Zhuangzi. For Derrida, the trace allows us to conceive what lies beyond the text; it is a residue of the event of apophasis insofar as it speaks to the name that names nothing. According to Derrida, the name must be lost if it is to save that which bears it, preserving its self-erasure in the process. Zhuangzi was also strongly interested in the failure of words to express the real-ity of what is ultimately unknowable (i.e., Dao) but more importantly, he employed the meontological notions of non-words and non-trace to symbolize the inherently hidden and mysterious nature of Dao. The purpose of this chapter is thus to show the connection between apo-phatic thought and the trace/non-trace, to elucidate how they can direct us to the truth of negativity, and to offer some general thoughts on how the modern world can benefit from engaging the unsayable.

Derrida and the Trace

When it comes to the notion of trace, Derrida has no shortage of things to say; however, his views of negativity, specifically negative theology, are confined to a smattering of passages in a single text: On the Name. He is rather hesitant to recognize negative theology as a formal institu-tion, claiming it “is not a genre, first of all because it is not an art, a literary art…is there, to take up again an expression of Mark Taylor’s, a “classic” negative theology? One can doubt this.”1 The reason for Derrida’s skepticism towards accepting any school of negativity has to do with how he characterizes apophatic thinking:

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 241

When one claims to speak about God according to what they call apophasis, in other words, according to the voiceless voice, the way of theology called or so-called negative. This voice multiplies itself, divid-ing within itself: it says one thing and its contrary, God that is without being or God that (is) beyond being. The apophasis is a declaration, an explanation, a response that, taking on the subject of God a negative or interrogative form (for that is also what apophasis means), at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it. All the more because the modality of apophasis, despite its negative or inter-rogative value, often recalls that of the sentence, verdict, or decision, of the statement.2

The last line of this passage is especially telling insofar as it is establishing a baseline for the trace. If apophasis requires giving voice to that which is itself voiceless, then the trace will come to serve as a portrayal of that which is itself traceless. The unknowable cannot use that which is knowable to make itself known; it must employ what is of the same kind. This is why, according to Franke, “the wholeness of what is not yet articulated is an undelimited, undefined whole-ness.”3 As we shall see later in our discussion, the idea of using nega-tivity to highlight the shortcomings of things was also a crucial aspect of Daoist apophasis. Returning to Derrida, when he writes that the “voice multiplies itself, dividing within itself,” to what is he referring? How is it that the voiceless voice multiplies and divides itself? Should it not instead be a holistically continuous utterance? If we were speak-ing in a strictly religious sense then, yes, this should be a holistically continuous utterance. But Derrida is not speaking in this way; rather, he is looking at the issue from the standpoint of critical thinking. If God is without being—beyond being—then is it actually feasible to consider God from a singular, albeit holistic, voice? If this is feasi-ble, we would be unable to transcend the limitations of voice so as to reach the realm of voicelessness. If this is not feasible, and this seems to be the case, the “apophasis [that] is a declaration, an explanation, a response” cannot but help to be a self-dividing multiplicity. There is no beyond-the-voice without this variegated richness, no becoming of negativity without the trace.

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The beyondness of any apophatic interrogative is, therefore, akin to the becoming of language. This, in turn, implies the genuineness of thinking the unsayable for that which is unutterable will always come back to the “sentence, verdict, or decision, of the [apophatic] state-ment.” And yet, as Derrida observes, making such a statement is to transcend it, to move beyond the confines of the word and into the world at large, “passing to the limit, then crossing a frontier, including that of a community, thus of a sociopolitical, institutional, ecclesial rea-son or raison d’etre.”4 Passing over, crossing into, negativity is not some-thing we become cognizant of after the event; it happens beforehand, at the moment of our exposure to that which is beyond words. We unknowingly are engaged in the nothingness of negativity, an engage-ment that occurs not via words or thoughts but through the trace. Upholding the ephemerality of being in the face of nothingness shows us the power of coming-into-being; as it is we beings who come to be, the perpetuity of that which is Ultimate enframes us therein. In other words, to speak of negative theology is not to speak of a theology of the negative; rather, it is to merely speak in an empty way of theologizing the unknowable. As Franke notes, what distinguishes apophatic thought is that its truth is not in what it affirms and articulates but in the unsay-able it-knows-not-what that its self-negation simply makes room for.5

Confounding in its profundity, apophaticism proves to be an ideal that is difficult for Derrida to come to grips with. On the need to think of negativity as the becoming of thought, he writes:

How is this becoming to be thought? Werden [to become]: at once birth and change, formation and transformation. This coming to being start-ing from nothing and as nothing, as God and as Nothing, as the Nothing itself, this birth that carries itself without premise, this becoming-self as becoming-God or Nothing-that is what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible, more impossible than the impos-sible if the impossible is the simple negative modality of the possible.6

Derrida is indicative of the resistance of the Western tradition when it comes to a willingness to consider negativity as anything other than pure negation. Indeed, negative theology, as the very embodiment of

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 243

apophasis, cannot but be the “most impossible possible” and yet, when we come to our examination of Daoism, we will see that precisely the opposite holds sway; being arises from nothingness and the impossibly fleeting nature of being owes its existence to the perpetual possibilities of nothingness. The question “what is negative theology?” is one that Derrida himself asks but we can preempt him with a further query, “what is the beginning of thought?” We can reply by declaring the beginning of thought to be the becoming of words. Words are forever in a state of becoming, forever in a state of unutterability. They lie at the threshold of thought in a state of suspense, waiting to be sent out into the world or vanish as the trace. In order to think of becoming we must ourselves dwell therein and such dwelling requires that we discard the being of thought. Said differently, the question “what is negative theol-ogy?” becomes “what is negative theology not?” No longer a theology of negativity, negative theology is transformed into a theology of pos-sibility, of becoming. Thus when Derrida asks “how is this becoming to be thought?” we can reply by using the language of Daoism: genuine thinking begins with non-words.

Thinking with non-words is to abandon words as conceptual-ized truths in favor of the openness and spontaneity of non-words. As Derrida points out, to become is to be born, to change, hence forma-tion and transformation of thought mark the illimitable creativity of that which is unsayable in that they transcend the confines of the con-crete. Once committed to paper, the written word cannot be altered, nor can its meaning be withdrawn. It is forever doomed to an inelastic existence, one wherein it cannot be ignored but must be made present. Unlike the unspoken, whose silence allows it to float carefree between each occurrence of thought, the word made known to the world is one whose fate is begotten by said world. Thus Derrida is correct to state that “coming to being started from nothing,” not in the Hegelian sense wherein nothingness is the Absolute Nothing but, rather, in the Daoist sense that holds negativity to be the fluid reality of all that comes into being. In this way, coming into being is not the Nothing but its potential in a state of birthing. To understand it in this way helps us to explain what Derrida means by the expression “birth that carries itself without premise.”

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Birth of the non-premised kind is a birth borne of that which is nei-ther born nor dies but persists as a mysterious profundity. The question “what is negative theology?” is, therefore, not simply one of language but goes to its very essence, an essence not to be found with the flourish of one’s pen but in the open expanse of possibility that is negativity. Is there, however, an exterior aspect to said negativity? If there is, Derrida at times appears unconvinced: “Isn’t it [negative theology] what, in essence, exceeds language, so that the ‘essence’ of negative theology would carry itself outside of language? Doubtless…” and again, “this protective moment [prayer, the hymn] remains structurally exterior to the purely apophatic instance…if there is any in the strict sense, which can at times be doubted.”7 A measure of doubt is to be expected at this point due to the empty folly of our endeavors to encapsulate the enigma of apophasis. In our desire to fashion the unsayable in language, we are like fish swimming in a great pool of water; what escapes us is not that we are a fish but that we are a fish confined to water. The reality of our own nature does not, therefore, translate into knowing the reality of all other things, including the unspeakable Ultimate.

We are hence wrong to speak of negativity as if in a void, in a vac-uum of our own creation, for the emptiness we ascribe to it is no more exclusive to it than it is to ourselves. In other words, we share a com-mon emptiness, a common vacuity that comes to light in the guise of the trace. This is why in Daoism there is the argument that we should use non-words instead of words when it comes to discussing the inef-fable; ordinary language simply fails to make any headway. What is more, non-words are akin to the nothingness of the unsayable, hence they conjoin us with it harmoniously. To be one with the negative is to cease to think of it as a form of otherness in that we pre-cognate it, or in Derrida’s words, we “pre-understand negative theology as a ‘cri-tique’ of the proposition of the verb ‘be’ in the third person indicative and of everything that, in the determination of the essence, depends on this mood, this time, and this person: briefly, a critique of ontology, of theology, and of language.”8 What Derrida is working towards in his attempt to answer the question we have repeatedly posed is an account of that which binds together language and thinking such that it can be dissected, deconstructed.

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 245

The essence of language, of our thinking through language, is the trace. However, seeing as the trace is not a substantial object on account of its emptiness, it is crucial to justify apophaticism’s declared program of via negativa. By making negativity the driving force of its intellectual endeavor, those who philosophize the scriptures of the unsayable not only test the limits of words and language but find themselves serving as archeologists of the beyond, a condition of such liminal presence that it outstrips ordinary understanding. Apophasis is hence a digging for the trace of the negatively unsayable word, “the negation of this negation that discourse intrinsically is.”9 In conversing with ourselves by recall-ing our thoughts back to their unutterable root, we create an interior discourse whereby what speaks our mind are not spoken words but the meaning behind the image of said words. Said differently,

Negative theology would be not only a language and a testing of lan-guage, but above all the most thinking, the most exacting, the most intractable experience of the ‘essence’ of language: a discourse on lan-guage, a ‘monologue’ in which language and tongue speak for themselves and record that the language speaks.10

We have monologues with ourselves and in doing so, have monologues with the Ultimate. So long as we do not verbalize the emptiness that renders words of the Ultimate into traces, we can partake in the ecstatic experience of conjoining with the impossible possibility of nothingness. And yet, Derrida writes, “the trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irre-mediable disappearance, of the disappearance of its disappearance. An unerasable trace is not a trace, it is a full presence, an immobile and incorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of parousia and not a seed, that is, a mortal germ.”11 This explains why Derrida elsewhere states:

As rigorously as possible we must permit to appear/disappear the trace of what exceeds the truth of being. The trace (of that) which can never be presented, the trace which itself can never be presented: that is, appear and manifest itself, as such, in its phenomenon. The trace beyond that which profoundly links fundamental ontology and phenomenology.

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Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presenta-tion of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonat-ing, like the a writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance.12

To ask “what is negative theology?” is not to ask about the ‘is’ of the Ultimate but to ask about the ‘how.’ Why is this so? It is so because to inquire about the ‘is’ is to exclude the ‘is not’ and if the ‘is not’ is excluded, we have no grounds to ask about the ‘how.’ Indeed, we must forget the question “what is?” as it concentrates on the givenness of being, and seek authentic thinking elsewhere. To clarify, wordlessly seeking the how of things is to carry language outside of itself such that it is transformed into an event of its own signification. In this way, the trace assumes a primordial position as the essence of language by testify-ing to its inherent limitations as the signified while the trace assumes the role of signifier.13

As we shall soon see, discarding the name of the Ultimate is not to disavow it; on the contrary, it is to revere it as it naturally stands. That which is named is pronounced as such but the act of naming does not determine its being; that befalls the mystery of the Ultimate. Though we believe words permit us to cross over to the realm of the other, the other that bears the name we bestow it, the fact of the matter is that any traversing to be had must take place wordlessly via the act of forget-ting. This is an essential component of Daoism and very much shapes the operation of the trace and how humanity is able to gain awareness of that which is unsayable. In letting-go of names, the original nature of things is restored and preserved and when things are returned to their original nameless condition, they coalesce into a unified collec-tive. Collective being thus balances the collective nothingness of the Ultimate’s negativity by reflecting its presence in the form of an imagi-nary image and yet, this image is but a trace of its true self:

Negative theology is everywhere but it is never by itself. In that way it also belongs, without fulfilling, to the space of the philosophical or onto-theological promise that it seems to break: …the referential transcend-ence of language: to say God such as he is, beyond his images, beyond this idol that being can still be, beyond what is said, seen, or known of

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him, to respond to the true name of God, to the name to which God responds and corresponds beyond the name that we know him by or hear. It is to this end that the negative procedure refuses, denies, rejects all the inadequate attributions. It does so in the name of a way of truth and in order to hear the name of a just voice.14

God qua the Ultimate is pure trace and as such, it is in its nature to forever remain traceless. It enters the realm of beings without being welcomed and takes its leave without being missed. To borrow a well-known analogy from the Zhuangzi, the Ultimate is like a penumbra to its own shadow, however, it is not the thing that produces said shadow. Its true name is nameless, its true form is formless, its true voice is silence, its true movement is stillness, and its true content is emptiness. Given these characteristics, Derrida is close to the mark when he says “the negative procedure [i.e., negative theology] refuses, denies, rejects all the inadequate attributions.” But rather than frame this description without a hint of optimism, we can rephrase it as involving the release-ment, setting-aside, and forgetting of categories, attributes, and descrip-tives ensuring the possibility of their return, reverting, and enfolding as the genuine experience of what is meant by negative theology.

Zhuangzi and the Non-Trace

The preceding pages have been a response to Derrida’s question “what is negative theology?” In the course of answering said question, the concept of trace was repeatedly referred to and it is time we gave a full account of this term, starting with Daoism. The Zhuangzi, named after its principal author Zhuang Zhou, is one of the preeminent philosoph-ical works of ancient China. During the formative period of Chinese philosophy (8th – 4th C. BCE), the word for trace—ji 跡, which can be translated as mark, remains, vestige, or footprint—was relatively commonplace. Although the character ji appears at least once in every known text from the period, none can match the Zhuangzi in terms of volume of usage. Be that as it may, the Zhuangzi did not dwell on the notion of the trace to the extant we see with Derrida. In order to

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present as comprehensive a picture as possible, we must, therefore, sup-plement what the Zhuangzi says of it with the insights gleaned via the text’s commentaries.

The first instance in which the Chinese character for trace appears in the Zhuangzi is in the fourth of its thirty-three chapters: “To stop leav-ing traces [i.e., walking] is easy; to move without touching the ground is difficult.” Merely recognizing the trace (ji 跡) is not Zhuangzi’s goal however; our ultimate aim is to become traceless (wuji 無跡) and we do so by conjoining with “that which leaves the trace” (suoyi ji 所以跡). We need to bear in mind there is no trace/non-trace dichotomy in Daoism. The trace/non-trace dialectic is rendered moot when seen from the perspective of that which leaves the trace. In other words, the authentic apophatic world is one of silent tracelessness, a world whereby Dao qua the Ultimate creatively creates the myriad things populating it and yet, none know how they came to be. However, apo-phatic Ultimacy can still be intuited by humanity and in Daoism it is the paradigmatic individual, or sage, who teaches the world what it is to be traceless. Ordinary people, however, are trapped by the traces they create and so the trace survives, never being completely extinguished. This is why the sage harmonizes the trace with non-trace, and their subsequent oneness with “that which leaves the trace.” We can see how these three layers of trace interlock with one another in the following passage:

That which leaves the trace is itself traceless. Who in the world can name it! Lacking a constant name, how can it overcome existence? Thus in being traceless it rides on collective change, walking through myri-ads of worlds—worlds that are smooth and rough—hence the trace is unattainable.15

There are four things we can say about this passage: first, “that which leaves the trace” is not merely a hermeneutic statement, but is ontologi-cal; second, given “that which leaves the trace” is speaking to Dao and given that Dao is Ultimate reality as such, the trace must, in some man-ner of speaking, reflect this fact; third, Dao is nameless and follows the transformation of things, which means that what Dao follows is not

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 249

things per se but their trace; fourth, as Dao goes along with the trans-formation of things without being effected as such, the trace remains trace-like while preserving the traceless mystery of the great unsayable. The Zhuangzi is more than willing to recognize the positive embrace of the trace, one that contrasts the hints of otherness seen in Derrida: “The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, prop-erly speaking, no place…effacement must always be able to overtake the trace otherwise it would not be a trace but an indestructible and mon-umental substance.”16 Thus when the Zhuangzi notes that the trace is unattainable, is it not foreshadowing what Derrida says, however histor-ically erroneous such a claim might be? Is said unattainability not unlike effacement and if so, what does this say about the unsayable reality of negative theology?

The reply to both questions is a resounding no. For Daoists such as Zhuangzi, the world is one of constant change and transformation, a world determined by human standards of right and wrong, this and that. Things wipe out other things, words twist and nullify other words, like overrides dislike, and so forth without end. Since Dao is the root of all things, it allows them to change of their own accord by acting as the pivot of actualization. In this way, though it is surrounded by the chaotic hubbub of endless words and actions, the still quietude of Dao remains unperturbed. Ultimate reality thus proves to be unconveyable, not because it is an unchanging permanence but because its nature is veiled by its own negativity. This is why Daoist cosmogony espouses that non-being gives birth to being, the formless to the formed, the dark to the light, and so forth: “The bright is born of the dark, the ordered is born of the formless, and spiritual essence is born of Dao…There is no trace of their coming and no outline of their leaving.”17 The trace and its traceless companion are not, however, cosmogonist in nature; only “that which leaves the trace” qualifies as such. And yet, we must employ the trace to learn of what is traceless and rely upon the traceless in order to embrace “that which leaves the trace.” It becomes an onto-herme-neutic loop whose beginning is self-propagating and whose ending is self-fulfilling. When framed in the context of the unsayable, the words comprising a text are trace-like remnants of the images from which they

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were derived, while the images constitute the traceless mirage of mean-ing that points us to the “that by which-ness” of the Ultimate.

There are three core passages in the Zhuangzi outlining the bond between the trace and non-trace and they offer a rather cynical assess-ment of the endearment humanity has with textual sources of knowl-edge, especially with the so-called six Classics that came to be associated with the Confucian tradition of learning and social etiquette. Bringing Confucius into conversation with Laozi was a special technique of the Zhuangzi to both humble the disciples of Confucius by having Laozi, a Daoist, serve as his teacher, and also to weaken the canonical author-ity of the six Classics by showing how they were no match for the wis-dom to be gained through Daoist naturalism. Said differently, while Confucius took the words and deeds of ancient figures as embodying moral value, Daoists such as Laozi and Zhuangzi eschewed historical models of moral and spiritual learnedness in favor of one that laid its roots in the interconnected holism of the universe itself. The trace, non-trace, and “that which leaves the trace” thus conjoin into a formula that values the world over humanity, and treasures the mystery of apophasis over all other modes of intellectual engagement.

The operative phrase here is intellectual engagement. To think about the unsayable is to embark on a journey of dark thought, not in the sense of anxiety towards the unknown, but of darkness as a route to inner-brightness. This is why in the second of the three trace-passages the Zhuangzi had Laozi scold Confucius in the following manner:

As for the six Classics, they are but the stale traces of the kings of old, much less those who leave the trace! Your words today are no different from such traces. As for the trace, it is like the imprint made by a shoe, it is not the shoe itself!18

As is the case with Derrida, for whom the trace is a manifestation of what lies beyond the written page, an extension of the unspoken word into the realm of the spoken, the call to abandon the six Classics is the Zhuangzi’s way of drawing our attention away from the visible word towards the unsaid image from whence it arose. The analogy of the shoe is a most fitting one in that when we happen upon a footprint, what we

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first notice and think about is not whom but what made said imprint. As a vestige of the wearer and that which adorns her feet, the trace qua footprint turns out to be a mirage of its own tracelessness; it both signi-fies and is the signifier for its own nothingness. The trace’s transience should not be taken as a measure of weakness; rather, Daoism recog-nizes, indeed welcomes, the fleetingness of things as a gauge of their authenticity. All things undergo change and transformation regardless of the timespan when held against the light of constancy that is Dao. For all the traces we leave behind whilst we go about our lives, none amount to anything more than ephemeral glimpses into our true selves; they are the meager chaff and dregs of our attempt to give shape and voice to the formless silence of ultimate reality.

For the Zhuangzi, what is essential for humanity to recognize is not the authority of the sages of old, nor the knowledge they left behind, but their oneness with Dao. Why should this be the case? It is so because the sages of old were able to glean insight into that which does not reveal itself and so were able to blend with that which neither retains anything for itself nor dispenses to others what they themselves might be lacking. In perfect equanimity, the sages of old dwelt with the oneness of things tracelessly and so were able to preserve their inborn nature as a whole. Though the six Classics were attributed to them, the ancient sages of China did not purposively create such bodies of knowl-edge. They lived and died without leaving so much as a trace; it was later generations that drew their traces in the sands of learning, wiping out their non-traces in the process. In other words, the six Classics were an attempt to redraw the already vanished imprints of those who have naturally and spontaneously returned to the unsayable nothingness in which Dao resides. If we are to rediscover the ancient sages, Zhuangzi implies, we are obliged to discard those artificial traces in the form of the six Classics and reimagine what the sages themselves would say if they were alive today. The knowledge contained in canonical works such as the six Classics cannot possibly encapsulate the fantastically original spirit of those who created them. Thus we need to transcend the text, find a way to somehow transpose the written word into its non-verbal-ized form, if we are to succeed in comprehending the incomprehensible silence of the unsayable. Thus for Zhuangzi and Derrida alike, the trace

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represents the non-representable absence of presence that exists beyond the reach of words and signifiers.

Thinking Through Apophatic Thoughts

Derrida holds that the trace is sheltered and dissimulated in the names given it by metaphysics; it does not appear in the text as the trace itself insofar as the trace can never appear as such.19 The trace must, there-fore, be placed under the erasure of selfhood,20 a statement that recalls what the Zhuangzi said about knowledge being nothing more than a stale trace. Derrida furthermore notes: “What the thought of the trace has taught us is that it could not be simply submitted to the onto-phe-nomenological question of essence. The trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question what is? and contingently makes it pos-sible.”21 In other words, the trace of that which transcends the truth of things is a trace of that which can never present itself, or be presented, for it is a trace that lies beyond what binds ontology and phenomenol-ogy.22 What lies between ontology and phenomenology is the realm of authentic thinking, a realm wherein things have yet to come into being and so exist only as imaginary happenstances. This is not necessar-ily a bad thing insofar as the imagination that imagines thought is the domain of origins. So strong is the need for philosophy to delimit the original nature of things, including thinking, that rarely is the invisible, unspeakable side of reality given proper consideration.

Apophaticism is not only an original approach to uncovering this veiled aspect of the world; it is without doubt the most creatively poetic approach at our disposal to do so. It is on this point that a marked dif-ference in opinion between Zhuangzi and Derrida surfaces. Whereas Zhuangzi holds that the non-trace, as a meontological extension of Dao’s negative creativity, holds greater sway over things than does the trace by letting them be true to themselves, and is hence their authentic beginning, Derrida argues that “the trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the différance which opens appearance and signification.”23

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The reason why the trace qua origin of sense cannot fulfill such a role is that, for Derrida, the trace does not exist24 and according to Parmenidean logic, what does not exist cannot be known or spoken of. This explains why, when we examined Derrida’s take on apophasis at the start of this chapter, we see his reluctance to openly embrace the tenets of negative theology. If we are to accept Derrida’s premise that the trace embodies the space between words and their images, and that space is the root of originary thought, it cannot belong to the trace as such but to “that which leaves the trace.” To put this Derridean notion of space into a more Daoist frame of mind, let us turn to the second key passage in the Zhuangzi in which the trace is expounded:

What the world treasures most about Dao is found in books, but books are merely words and words contain something to be treasured. What is treasurable in words is their ideas but ideas follow something else. What ideas follow cannot be conveyed by words and yet, because the world treasures words, it contains them in books. Even though the world treasures them, I am not satisfied they are worth treasuring because what they are treasuring is not what is truly treasurable.25

To value the lightness of being is to follow after its trace; the trace, however, cannot point the way to that which is traceless. Différance is hence to Derrida what mystery is to Zhuangzi; both purport to hold within their apophatic selves a higher truth, a means by which to enfold within oneself what is perpetually dark. For Derrida, this higher truth lies with the fact that “[différance] …is “older” than the onto-logical difference or than the truth of being. When it has this age it can be called the play of the trace. The play of a trace which no longer belongs to the horizon of being, but whose play transports and encloses the meaning of being: the play of the trace, or the différance, which has no meaning and is not. Which does not belong.”26 The inherent veiled-ness of the Ultimate not only protects it from being injured by the traces of the world constantly trying to uncloak it, it also ensures that the Ultimate’s capacity to imbue the world with its own traceless poten-tial remains undisturbed. Once the trace is integrated into our nor-mative system, however, it can no longer remain the darkly unsayable

254 D. Chai

perfection that it is, which is why any attempt to name it will immedi-ately relegate it to the class of inferior trace (i.e., names and attributes) that populates and divides the world into its many conflicting arenas. From this we may surmise that the unknowability of the non-trace does not arise from its wanting to be so but because, as the mutual compan-ion of manifest trace, it lies within its nature to be obscure and unfath-omable. Thus any attempt to track the trace to its source will result in misdirection and confusion, a fact made clear in the above-cited pas-sage from the Zhuangzi. We wish to seek the domain of the Ultimate creator and yet, paradoxically, such seeking can only be carried out indirectly. This is because when one only sees the trace, one becomes blind to “that which leaves the trace;” such blindness arises due to our failure to engage in genuine thought, a thinking about negativity that neither shies away from its alien perplexity nor attempts to illuminate its dark virtue with false platitudes and claims of insight. And so, the traceless is the praxis of the wise and enlightened; it is the movement of pure unsayability.

Humanity is surrounded by a multitude of beings but, from the per-spective of the unspeakable Ultimate, they are but shadowy imprints in the dust of the earth, mere vestiges of the marvelous creativity of that which remains silent and unwavering. The trace, in other words, is but an empty husk, an outline of thought forbidden from revealing the spirit of life. Derrida, in reading Levinas, puts it this way: “The infi-nitely-other cannot be bound by a concept, cannot be thought on the basis of a horizon…it is a question not only of thinking the opposite which is still in complicity with the classical alternatives, but of liberat-ing thought and its language for the encounter occurring beyond these alternatives.”27 What is otherness if not to be other to oneself? To be a trace in the sense spoken of by Levinas is to encounter the otherness of one’s own self, to stare into an erasure that has already succeeded in lib-erating oneself from one’s own subjectivity.

Talk of erasure and otherness is not emblematic of ancient Chinese philosophy however. If we want to use a close approximate, we need to think in terms of forgetfulness and letting-be. Thus when the Zhuangzi states in the passage quoted above that what “is treasurable in words is their ideas but ideas follow something else. What ideas

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 255

follow cannot be conveyed by words,” the implication is that words are the trace to their image’s non-trace and yet, the non-trace of the image is a forgotten one when seen from the vantage point of “that which leaves the trace.” What cannot be conveyed by words is the unsayable reality of the Ultimate, for to try and speak of the unsay-able using only trace-words is to disrupt the sequence of unfolding that begins with negativity and concludes with the absolution of traces via the traceless. It is the sequencing of negativity, the way in which things inherently place themselves under erasure, that is par-amount, not the event of said negation. To think through thought apophatically is hence to treasure the silent stillness of the encounter with nothingness, to stand before its marvelous vastness and realize that all life is but a trace and that it is best to leave what is unsayable unsaid.

As we value words themselves instead of their image, that which is conveyed in books ultimately misses the mark, a mark of otherness unconveyable through these very words. And yet, we try over and over again to put pen to paper with the hope that we will be understood, understood not by ourselves but by others who read our words. Books are thus a voiceless voice reaching into the minds of all who care to gaze upon their pages only to convert such traces into transient images of their own. Words are thus the meeting ground of the trace, which upon being collected, flee into the darkness of traceless negativity. Viewed in this manner, the traceless trace of apophasis—Daoist meon-tology as I call it—poses no existential threat to our well-being; rather, it conjoins us with the selfhood we forgot and abandoned in our pur-suit of knowledge by way of traces. Looking at the bond between the trace and non-trace from the vantage point of “that which leaves the trace,” we should not feel anxiety towards the trace’s inevitable disap-pearance, something Derrida felt compelled to convey: “The trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance, of the disap-pearance of its disappearance;” and yet, we find hope in that as “an unerasable trace is not a trace, it is a full presence, an immobile and uncorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of parousia and not a seed, that is, a mortal germ.”28

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This brings us to the third example in the Zhuangzi on the trace:

Duke Huan sat in his hall reading a book. Wheelwright Pian, who was in the courtyard below making a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel and walked into the hall, whereupon he said: “I would like to ask your Grace what you are reading?” The Duke replied, “I am reading the words of the sages,” to which Pian said‚ “Are these sages still alive?” The Duke answered: “They died a long time ago.” Pian responded, “In that case, you are merely reading the chaff and dregs of the men of old!” …When the men of old died, they took with them that which cannot be transmitted, hence what you are reading is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.”29

Chaff and dregs speak to both the literal disintegration of the sage’s cor-poreal self in death and to the trace that now represents his accumu-lated knowledge of the Ultimate. Since the words of the deceased can no longer be taken as living words, does this imply that they hold no merit? If, by extension, we say that all canonical works are no longer of repute due to the passing of their authors, is there a need for them at all? From the story of Duke Huan, this appears not to be the case, but is this really what Zhuangzi was saying? Was he calling for the abolish-ment of textual transmission or for the abandonment of the codification of knowledge, particularly knowledge taken to be of a higher order, in such a rigid format as the written text? It would seem that the Zhuangzi is not against the production of canonical works, nor against the desire to familiarize oneself with their content; what the text does object to is the practice of using said knowledge to lord over others—to wipe out their true trace in the name of an artificial one.

The true trace of things belies common models of knowing because it is an untraceable non-trace. The true trace belongs to the domain of apophasis and apophasis is the quest to leave unspoken the traceless truth of “that which leaves the trace.” Thus while the Zhuangzi speaks of the trace as the chaff and dregs of those who were traceless, Derrida’s description is less poetic:

…the trace of whatever goes beyond the truth of being…is itself a trace that can never be presented, that is, can never appear and manifest itself as such in its phenomenon. It is a trace that lies beyond what profoundly

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 257

ties fundamental ontology to phenomenology. Like différance, the trace is never presented as such. In presenting itself it becomes effaced; in being sounded it dies away…30

This trace of the beyond, the truly traceless trace, is none other than “that which leaves the trace.” In light of the ability of the non-trace to illuminate the nature of the trace, the traceless non-trace is bestowed as the gift of unsayability from “that which leaves the trace,” which draws upon its own immeasurability so as to remain darkly unknowable. Such being the case, “that which leaves the trace” owes no debt to the traces it gives birth to, nor is it drawn into their daily movements but remains loftily aloof and self-satisfied. Such must be the case if the pure trace is to avoid being thought of as one trace amongst myriad others. In other words, without the vulnerability of the trace, we would never encounter the non-trace, and having no knowledge of that which is traceless would preclude us from fathoming the negativity of the unsayable.

It is for this reason that the trace of Dao is indistinguishable from Dao itself; to take one as capable of existing independent of the other would authenticate neither in that both are identical and hence beyond authentication. If we recall the story in which Laozi chastises Confucius over the six Classics, one of the commentators to this passage (Guo Xiang)31 went so far as to deny an attainable trace even exists:

“That which leaves the trace” is itself traceless. Who in the world can name it! Lacking a constant name, how can it overcome existence! Thus in being traceless it rides on collective change, walking through myri-ads of worlds—worlds that are smooth and rough—hence the trace is unattainable.

Guo Xiang’s view of the trace is certainly more extreme than that found in the Zhuangzi proper but it has been cited because it nicely conveys the feeling of ineffability that both Zhuangzi and Derrida are trying to convey. What is ineffable is the beyondness of the truth of being in that said truth is none other than the obscure blending of the inner and outer realms of ontology and phenomenology. So long as we abandon our dependency on the trace, we can partake in the originally retentive tracelessness enjoyed by “that which leaves the trace.” Daoism’s scorn of

258 D. Chai

the six Classics and those who abide by them was thus a call to question whether or not they truly hold sway over the everlasting reality of the Ultimate. As Derrida remarked, “writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself.”32 Given the bond between the non-trace and “that which leaves the trace,” one can argue that they share the atemporal, aspatial framework of apophatic nothingness. This is why the Daoist sage is said to be a trace only in terms of his name; his true self is constantly traceless and thus unable to be affixed with labels. The sage, in Derridean language, symbolizes the space of pure différance, a space from which all arises and to which all returns.

Gayatri Spivak noticed the extent to which Derrida grappled with the question of trace qua origin, writing in her Introduction to Of Grammatology that “the trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent presence, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.”33 For Derrida, the arche-trace would assume the role of originary non-trace, what the Zhuangzi called “that which leaves the trace.” The problem for Derrida was how to name the arche-trace when its nature is precisely to resist such naming. The answer he would settle on was différance, which “presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity…[hence it is]…the originary trace…[and] the (pure) trace is différance.”34 But why is the arche-trace akin to différance, the unnameable original trace of all traces? Derrida writes:

The trace is not only the disappearance of origin-within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except recip-rocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the clas-sical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an origi-nary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace.35

Apophatically, the arche-trace is the irreducible negativity of the unsay-able. It is the first trait of things, surpassing the trace and non-trace and is for this reason why we cannot think of our progression from recognizing

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 259

the trace to valuing the non-trace as a means by which to conjoin with the Ultimate as two separate processes. In this way, the sagely person is recognizable via his trace whilst inwardly he remains concealed and pure. The name given him by the world is thus nothing but the trace of his ephemeral self, a selfhood that participates in the wandering of traces, and to joyfully play in the mystery of the unsayable is to vanish into the origin of things. As the origin of origins, the arche-trace or “that which leaves the trace” is also the origin of the word that remains unspoken, of the text that never leaves the mind of its author. To uncover it, to play within its halls of silence, is to engage in an apophatic form of herme-neutic archeology. It further requires us to destroy the name of the word so as to release its variegated and indivisible imports into the world. To only cling to the trace, to the spoken representation of its signification, is to ignore the unpaintable images lying within. A trace that is not a pure trace is a trace of deception; it deceives all who embolden it with their outspokenness such that the “that which leaves the trace” is drowned-out in the commotion. Heeding Daoism’s call for tranquility and stillness of mind can prevent this from occurring thereby guaranteeing that both non-trace and “that which leaves the trace” remain in harmonious equa-nimity and free to engage the lesser traces of the world as they see fit. We can hence let go of our fear of self-effacement and obsolescence in the face of the trace and take comfort knowing that the non-trace will always be there to secure our place in the world, even when the time comes for said place to become a non-trace in its own right.

Conclusion

In the early pages of this chapter we asked the question “what is nega-tive theology?” We can now, at long last, return to Franke’s A Philosophy of the Unsayable with an answer: “The philosophy of the unsayable is committed rather to raising the question and to keeping it open. Such is the openness in which transpires conscious human reflection that refuses to be cut off from the mystery of its ground—or its related-ness without limits—and from the infinity of its possibilities.”36 When posing this question, the answer was already at hand; however, as we

260 D. Chai

had yet to illuminate wherein the non-trace constructively contributes to mysterious unfolding and fertilization of the world via the negative potentiality of the Ultimate, our appreciation of the unsayable and its apophatic reality needed time to properly mature.

By bringing together two historically disparate philosophical figures—Zhuangzi and Derrida— the objective of this chapter was to lay forth how authentic thinking rooted in the meontological side of reality can be tran-scribed from the confines of language to the boundlessness of what can be colloquially called ultimate reality. It furthermore argued that the trace must be taken as an inherent quality of said Ultimacy, though as we saw, it had to answer to its apophatic boundedness to non-trace. And so, in turn-ing our gaze to the East, we not only acquired new methodological tools to evaluate these terms, we discovered their cultural universality in the process. Franke, in the Preface to volume one of his On What Cannot Be Said, was hence spot-on when he wrote: “For apophatic thinking, before and behind anything that language is saying, there is something that it is not saying and perhaps cannot say, something that nevertheless bears deci-sively on any possibilities whatsoever of saying and of making sense.”37

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida. On the Name, trans. David Wood, et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 41.

2. Derrida, On the Name, p. 35. 3. William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, (Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame, 2014), p. 34. 4. Derrida, On the Name, p. 36. 5. Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, p. 149. 6. Derrida, On the Name, p. 43. 7. Derrida, On the Name, pp. 48, 51. 8. Derrida, On the Name, pp. 49–50. 9. Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, p. 148. 10. Derrida, On the Name, p. 54. 11. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. (London:

Routledge, 2001), p. 289. 12. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 23.

13 The Apophatic Trace of Derrida and Zhuangzi 261

13. For more, see Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

14. Derrida, On the Name, p. 69. 15. Zhuangzi ch. 7. For the original Chinese see Qingfan Guo, ed.

Zhuangzi Jishi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1997), p. 288. All transla-tions are my own unless stated otherwise.

16. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 156. 17. Zhuangzi ch. 22; Guo, p. 741. 18. Zhuangzi ch. 14; Guo, p. 532. 19. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 158. 20. Derrida says: “The trace is not a presence but is rather the simula-

crum of a presence that dislocates, displaces and refers beyond itself ” (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 156).

21. Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 75.

22. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 154. 23. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 65. 24. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 167. 25. Zhuangzi ch. 13; Guo, pp. 488–489. 26. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 22. 27. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 118. 28. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 289. 29. Zhuangzi ch. 13; Guo, pp. 490–491. 30. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 154. 31. For an excellent analysis of Guo Xiang’s commentary to the Zhuangzi,

especially his unique development of the concept of trace, see Brook Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003).

32. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 167. 33. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xvii. 34. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 62. 35. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 61. 36. Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, p. 329. 37. William Franke, On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in

Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, 2 volumes (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2007), p. 2.