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Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature Edited by Philip Leonard

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-25

Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature

10.1057/9780230596597 - Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, Philip Leonard

Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture

The study of theology and religion nowadays calls upon a wide range of inter disciplinary skills and cultural perspectives to illuminate the concerns at the

heart of religious faith. Books in this new series will variously explore the con tributions made by literature, philosophy and science in forming our historical

and contemporary understanding of religious issues and theological perspec tives.

Published titles: Harold Fisch

NEW STORIES FOR OLD

Biblical Patterns in the Novel

Susan VanZanten Gallagher and M. D. Walhout (editors)

LITERATURE AND THE RENEWAL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Philip Leonard (editor)

TRAJECTORIES OF MYSTICISM IN THEORY AND LITERATURE

Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (editors)

THE ARTS, COMMUNITY AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Forthcoming titles: Carolyn Jones THE FICTION AND CRITICISM OF TONI MORRISON: Making Myths Elizabeth Clarke REWRITING THE BRIDE: Authorship, Gender and ‘The Song of Songs’ in the Seventeenth Century Stephen Happel GOD’S JOURNEYS IN TIME: Co-operation between the Divine and Creation

Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–79469–9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



General Editors:

Elisabeth Jay, Senior Research Fellow, Westminster College, Oxford

David Jasper, Professor in Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow

Edited by Philip Leonard Nottingham Trent University



Trajectories of Mysticism

in Theory and Literature

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 0–333–72290–6 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22492–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trajectories of mysticism in theory and literature / edited by Philip Leonard. p. cm. — (Cross-currents in religion and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–312–22492–3 (cloth)

1. Mysticism and literature. 2. Literature—History and

criticism. 3. Mysticism in literature. 4. Religion and literature.

5. Mysticism. I. Leonard, Philip, 1967– . II. Series.

PN49.T625 1999

809'.9338291422—dc21 99–39494

CIP Selection and editorial matter © Philip Leonard 2000 Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Notes on contributors

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

x

Part I

1

1

2

3

Trajectories of Mysticism in Literature and Theory

Language and Mysticism in the `Spiritual Canticle' by St John of the Cross Ana Barro

3

The Metaphysics of Language in Emily Dickinson (As Translated by Paul Celan) Shira Wolosky

25

On the Trajectory of Gnosis: Pierre Reverdy via (obscura) St John of the Cross Bernard McGuirk

46

4

Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil James Winchell

5

The Fertile Mystical Maze: from Derrida's Dry Theological Gorge to Cixous's Dialogic Disgorging Elena Carrera

72

94

Part II Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature

113

6

`Black Fire on White Fire': Kabbalah and Modernity HeÂleÁne Domon

115

7

Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion David L. Clark

133

8

`The Emptiness of Intelligent Questions': Georges Bataille and the Mystical Tradition Peter Connor

177

v



Contents

vi Contents

Through the Eyes of an Artificial Angel: Secular Theology in Theodor W. Adorno's Freudo-Marxist Reading of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin Matt F. Connell

198

10 Divine Horizons: Levinas, Derrida, Transcendence Philip Leonard

219

Index

239



9

Ana Barro teaches Romance Literatures at the University of Passau in Germany. She recently completed a Ph.D. on San Juan de la Cruz, and her current research is concerned with intercultural communication, ethnographic research methods and Spain's relationship with `the foreign'. Elena Carrera teaches Spanish Golden Age Literature at Birkbeck College, London. She has published on Teresa of Avila, HeÂleÁne Cixous and Clarice Lispector, and is currently completing a D.Phil. on questions of authority and censorship in the writings of Teresa of Avila. David L. Clark is Associate Professor in the Department of English at McMaster University, and has been Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. He is co-editor (with Donald Goellnicht) of New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice and (with Tilottama Rajan) Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory. In addition to publishing essays in diacritics, Studies in Romanticism, and Literature and Medicine, he has contributed to a number of recent volumes, including Visibility and Expressivity, Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, Monster Theory, Reading Culture. He is co-author (with Catherine Myser) of Spectacular Bodies: On the Subjection of Conjoined Twins (Routledge, forthcoming). Matt F. Connell teaches Critical Theory at Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. His Ph.D. thesis (Nottingham Trent University, 1997) examines The Psychoanalytic Dimension of Adorno's Critical Theory. Peter Connor is Assistant Professor of French at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has translated Georges Bataille's The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989) and is author of The Mysticism of Sin: Georges Bataille and the Experience of Writing (forthcoming, The Johns Hopkins University Press). HeÂleÁne Domon is Associate Professor of French Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She has a Ph.D. in French Literature from vii



Notes on Contributors

viii Notes on Contributors

Philip Leonard is a lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University where he teaches critical theory and twentieth-century literature. He has published articles on Levinas, Derrida, Spivak, Bhabha, Joyce and Rushdie. Bernard McGuirk holds the Chair of Romance Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Nottingham where he is also Head of the Postgraduate School of Critical Theory. He is currently President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. He has published widely on French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literatures. His recent books include Reconceptions: Reading Modern French Poetry (1996, with Russell King), Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Post-Structuralist Criticism (1997) and Retranslating Latin America: Dimensions of the Third Term (in press, edited with Else Vieira). James Winchell teaches French at The Northwest Academy in Portland, Oregon. He has published articles on Oscar Wilde and J.-K. Huysmans, Borges, Flaubert and Eric Rohmer. He recently published `Holocaust Memorials in France: a Walking Tour for the Body-at-Rish' in Contemporary French Civilization. He also serves as Associate Editor for the journal Para*doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. Shira Wolosky received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, and was an Associate Professor of English at Yale University before moving to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her publications include Emily Dickinson: a Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) and Language Mysticism: the Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett and Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) as well as articles on topics in American poetry and literary theory. She is currently working on American poetry 1855±1900 for the Cambridge History of American Literature.



Rice University, Texas and previously studied at the University of Strasbourg. She has published articles on Rabelais, MallarmeÂ, ValeÂry, and classical to post-modern theories of the book, and is currently preparing a book provisionally entitled Writing the Book.

I would like to thank David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay for their helpful comments during the preparation of this volume. Elizabeth Clarke provided invaluable help by suggesting `Crosscurrents in Religion and Culture' as a potential home for Trajectories of Mysticism. For their suggestions and assistance I would like to thank Dave Woods and Sam Haigh. Above all, I would like to thank Bernard McGuirk for organizing the conference panel out of which this collection of essays grew. Phlip Leonard

ix



Acknowledgements

Ineffable, inscrutable, incomprehensible; unsayable, unseeable, unknowable; obscure, inaccessible, unavowed; sublime, transcendent, hidden reality. Terms such as these are at the core of many theological traditions and form the basis for designating a supreme authority or divine essence. Yet this chain of signifiers also foregrounds crucial ambivalences at the centre of theological conceptions of sacred exteriority, since these terms stress both the failure of perception and the dereliction of language that occur when knowledge and representation of supernatural alterity are sought. Organized around disruptive equivocations, religious systems assume that a deified subject can be revealed while also exceeding human knowledge, and presuppose that references to divine characteristics are possible even though any divine subject must lie beyond discursive structures. Both fetishizing and disavowing an absolute Other, religious forms of belief are therefore torn between disclosure and concealment. It is this productive and problematic tension ± this generative contradiction and anxiety ± which is the focus of mysticism, and which forms the point of departure for the essays in Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature.

Mysticism: some definitions Identifying the constitutive features of mysticism is by no means a straightforward task, and this problem is only partly due to the fact that mystical theology is concerned with unrepresentable and unknowable identities. Other problems arise when the complex histories or the numerous practices associated with mysticism are simplified in a single and over-arching description of mystical theology. Mysticism's multivalent history eludes simple classification and cannot be charted with a linear genealogy: any simple typology of mysticism could only, as many commentators are eager to point out, produce spurious and illconceived definitions. At the most general level, the term `mysticism' denotes those religious traditions which strive for a direct and personal awareness of a transcendent authority (such as God, Providence, the Creator, Brahman, Nirvana, mana, the Infinite, arche or telos); occasionally this union is sought by way of contemplative activities (such as prayer), though less x



Introduction

rational means (such as dreams, visions, dance, drugs, intuition, ecstatic inspiration or madness) are more frequently thought to provide the route to mystical experience. Crucial to mysticism is the emphasis on the inadequacy of reason and representation; communion with God (or other versions of divine immanence) is not only sought but must ultimately take place beyond established forms of consciousness, outside of ordered language and at the expense of rational knowledge. In less general terms, elements of mysticism can be traced through a range of religious traditions, and can be attributed to a variety of events, experiences, forms of behaviour and modes of expression. For example, among the earliest of Indian religious and philosophical texts, the Upanishads affirm the singularity of spirit: mystical transcendence can take place through the disavowal of material objects, and this transcendence is possible because the human soul and divine essence (or Brahman) are identical. A more secularized mysticism can be found in the Bhagavad Gita, where material nature is thought to be permeated by divine power (Maya) and it is through worldly actions that the follower can attain knowledge of and unity with Krishna. Other religious traditions with marked emphases on mysticism include Buddhism, Taoism and Shamanism. For Buddhism, the ideal state of Nirvana is achieved by retreating from the material domain and can be attained only when physical desires have been dissipated. The Buddhist devotee can reach the perfect condition of peace and tranquillity by heightening Karma during successive incarnations, and this augmentation can only occur with a withdrawal from human knowledge. Taoism also stresses a departure from conventional forms of understanding and seeks a level of consciousness which transcends finite existence. As with other kinds of mysticism, Taoism not only rejects orthodox knowledge but also holds that the Way (Tao) can be followed by a silence and serenity which surpasses speech and language. In contrast with these affirmations of communion through tranquillity, some Shamanic practices have promoted transcendence through ecstasy. Seeking harmony with supernatural forces, the Shaman is à leader of souls, who is a master of experiences of ecstasy which are held to be supreme expressions of religion.'1 Important though these forms of mysticism are, the essays in this book will focus on Christian and Jewish versions of mystical theology. While some significant work has been carried out on the relationship between contemporary critical theory and other religious systems,2 the theoretical arguments explored in Trajectories of Mysticism largely respond to (and at times emerge out of) issues in Jewish and Christian



Introduction xi

mysticism. As with other mystical traditions, Jewish mysticism includes diverse beliefs and different practices. In the Merkabah tradition, for example, mystical experience is an essential basis for religious feeling; this experience, however, does not generate a sense of unity with God but rather exposes differences between the human soul and divine essence, and accentuates God's inscrutability. An alternative is offered by Abraham Abulafia, the leading Kabbalistic mystic who calls for the fetters which bind the soul to be broken, so that spiritual inspiration may occur. This, for Abulafia, is brought about through a form of meditation which predominantly takes the form of linguistic and grammatical study: it is by scrutinizing the combination and configuration of letters that God's name (and the secrets of Creation) may be discovered. As Gershom Scholem explains: There is a language which expresses the pure thought of God and the letters of this spiritual language are the elements both of the most fundamental spiritual reality and of the profoundest understanding and knowledge. Abulafia's mysticism is a course in this divine language.3 Language is also a key constituent in the tradition of Zohar mysticism, where the Torah is treated as a text which provides the key to revealing God's hidden nature. For the Zohar, the symbolic value of Biblical words are of paramount importance, and it is through Scriptural interpretation that divine secrets may be revealed. A textual basis for mystical experience also figures in certain elements of Christian mysticism, with the words of Scripture symbolically referencing the ultimate reality of God. Other versions of Christian mysticism take Christ's reality as the ground for experiencing the hyperreality of God. Rather than emphasizing the loss of subjectivity or the dissipation of desire which characterize some mystical traditions, Christian mysticism finds in Christ a model for living under God and a concrete foundation for personal union with the Creator. Negative theology (often referred to as àpophatic theology' or `via negativa') is another important tradition in Christian mysticism, and Trajectories of Mysticism will consider some of the ways in which negative theology has both influenced and been interrogated by recent critical theory. Generally associated with Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart and Nicolas of Cusa (though occasionally identified with Eastern mystical traditions such as Taoism or Hinduism), negative theology rejects the notion that God can be conceptually comprehended and



xii Introduction

disputes any attempt to delineate God's characteristics. Whereas positive, affirmative, cataphatic theology is grounded in the assumption that God's attributes can be revealed through denotative structures of signification, apophatic approaches contend that God transcends images, names and concepts. Negative theology avoids descriptions of divine identity, and instead uses terms such as `nothingness', `darkness' and èmptiness' to allude to God's inscrutability. Shared by mystical and negative theologies is the notion that divine essence is ultimately unfathomable and ineffable. Common to these forms of faith is the idea that premises and propositions are structured ± human ± forms of consciousness and communication, and can therefore play no part in any experience of God. If this is the case ± if God is indeed beyond orthodox knowledge and transcends traditional systems of signification ± then other forms of understanding become necessary; it is to this demand for other forms of religious understanding that mystical and negative theologies respond. Refusing to subject divine essence to the limits of logic or to the inadequacies of discursive conventions, mysticism maintains that God can only be unveiled through intimate experience and is visible only through direct intuition. In a similar sense, negative theology rejects the claim that intellectual judgement or predicative language can reveal the real nature of an alterity which supposedly lies beyond the horizons of epistemology, insisting instead that an (alternative) understanding of God can be possible only via negative characterizations.

Mysticism: issues and controversies Any volume on the intersections between theory and theology must take into consideration critiques of religion and theology which have gathered momentum in the twentieth century. Among the most celebrated of these critiques are the onslaughts against religious thought associated with the hermeneuticists of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud ± onslaughts which have continued to find support in the second half of the twentieth century. Marx's contention that religion is `the sigh of the oppressed creature',4 veiling the underlying causes of social conflict and legitimating the prevailing order, has been developed by, among others, Althusser (for whom the constitution of the subject through ideological interpellation is primarily a religious process5). Nietzsche's charge that Christian morality is rooted in violence inscribed on the body (with pain, punishment, control and discipline at its core) is given a discursive slant in The History of Sexuality, where Foucault argues



Introduction xiii

that Àn imperative was established' for every good Christian: `Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse'.6 This claim, that the overriding function of religion is to regulate and restrict the subject's position in culture, is also stressed in psychoanalytic theory. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud maintains that the `technique' of religion, `consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner'.7 Freud here argues that religion both constitutes the foundation for ethical and moral systems, and intrusively mediates the subject's perception of itself and its others. Lacan extends this argument by claiming that God acts as an authoritative Other who undoubtedly acts as the foundation for identification in general, but more specifically masks the phallocentric organization of masculinity, femininity and sexual difference.8 Not all critiques of theology and religion have explicitly developed out of and as a response to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud; prominent figures in critical theory such as Kate Millet, Roland Barthes and Edward Said have each made nuanced challenges to theology in the later decades of the twentieth century. For Millett, as for Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, religion's primary purpose is to consolidate and give cohesion to social formations. In particular, for Millet, religion has been instrumental in the subjugation of women by patriarchal societies: patriarchal religion construes its God or gods as male, and this entails, `demoting, discrediting, or eliminating goddesses and constructing a theology whose basic postulates are male supremacist, and one of whose central functions is to uphold and validate the patriarchal structure'.9 In `The Death of the Author' Barthes adopts a similar position on the relationship between culture, ideology and theology. This essay notoriously takes literary criticism to task for equating authorship with authority, but less remarked upon is Barthes' argument that this equation is categorically grounded in theological concepts. For Barthes, prevailing forms of literary criticism assume that a text contains a `single ``theological'' meaning' which is `the ``message'' of the Author-God',10 and it is this sanctioning of cultural processes (such as authorship or textual production) by religious abstractions (such as creation, transcendence or divine knowledge) that `The Death of the Author' rails against. Said, focusing on more recent approaches to literature and culture (especially deconstructive theory), argues that an ùncritical religiosity'11 constitutes the new hegemony, and he maintains that this predilection for religion perpetuates discursive classifications which are rooted in imperialism and colonialism. For Said:



xiv Introduction

a dramatic increase in the number of appeals to the extrahuman, the vague abstraction, the divine, the esoteric and secret . . . . impossibly huge generalizations like the Orient, Islam, Communism, or Terrorism play a significantly increased role in the contemporary Manichean theologizing of `the Other', and this increase is a sign of how strongly religious discourse has affected discourse pertaining to the secular, historical world.12 Occasionally, critiques such as these have been levelled directly against mysticism. In one of his early writings on the press, Marx criticizes those who `regard freedom as the supernatural gift of a specially favourable constellation of the stars', those who try to comprehend the incomprehensible and those who imagine order where only accident exists, since they `necessarily have recourse to the miraculous and the mystical'.13 For È rgen Habermas, Bataille's work is to be challenged not only for its Ju critique of reason. Bataille's mysticism also needs to be be questioned, Habermas maintains: Èroticism led him to the insight that knowledge of what is essential is reserved for mystical experience, for silence with eyes closed.'14 From these positions mysticism is inseparable from mystification, with cultural reality being clouded by a theological regime of truth and order. If these critiques of religion foreground crucial socio-political issues and attempt to overturn the dominant positions that have been occupied by many theological systems, it is nonetheless possible to claim that resistance to prevailing structures of thought and culture in the west need not be entirely anti-theological. Indeed, certain theorists in the second half of the twentieth century have attempted to show that marginalized theologies can play a significant role in challenging cultural and conceptual structures. Homi Bhabha, for example, implicitly responds to Said's call for critical secularism (as opposed to uncritical religiosity) by pointing out that èthical' approaches to cultural difference must respect diverse forms of religious belief. `We need to ``secularise'' the public sphere,' Bhabha argues, `so that, paradoxically, we may be free to follow our strange gods or pursue our much-aligned monsters, as part of a collective and collaborative `èthics'' of choice.'15 The possibility that orthodox forms of identity and knowledge are disturbed by concepts and practices at the margins of western theology is highlighted by the way that some theorists in the twentieth century have explicitly (if, at times, ephemerally) drawn upon mystical and negative theologies in their work. Kabbalistic motifs repeatedly surface,



Introduction xv

xvi Introduction

there seem to be definite parallels between his conception of literary works of art as hieroglyphs of redeemed life and the Kabbalistic idea of a state of redemption whose nature can be intuited through a linguistic analysis of sacred texts.16 Harold Bloom also extensively draws upon Kabbalistic traditions in his work on poetic agonism. In A Map of Misreading, for instance, Bloom highlights what he sees as the overriding significance of Lurianic Kabbalism: `The Lurianic story of creation', he claims, `now seems to me the best paradigm available for a study of the way poets war against one another in the strife of Eternity that is poetic influence.'17 Teresa of Avila's encounters with God through raptures and bodily experiences are echoed in Luce Irigaray's claim that God and woman are both a `Mystery, me-hysteria, without determinable end or beginning',18 with this mystery being experienced through ecstasy: Ecstasy is there in that glorious slit where she curls up as if in her nest, where she rests as if she had found her home ± and He is also in her. She bathes in a blood that flows over her, hot and purifying. And what she discovers in this divine passion, she neither can nor will translate.19 Julia Kristeva's post-Freudian description of melancholia as an alternating condition of despondency and exaltation is partly derived from `mystical ascesis' in medieval monasticism, where sadness, `became essential as a means towards paradoxical knowledge of divine truth and constituted a major touchstone for faith'.20

Trajectories of mysticism This book takes as its starting point such intersections between mysticism, negative theology and recent theoretical work on literature and culture, and in this respect Trajectories of Mysticism traverses issues and ideas which have, to an extent, been explored elsewhere.21 Specifically, the essays collected in this book consider the possibility that mystical and negative theologies challenge the primacy that has been given to the way that self and other are conceptualized by western theology. Indeed, some of the essays in this volume not only claim that mysticism



for example, in Walter Benjamin's writings on language and literature, and,

and apophaticism disturb the foundations of religious belief in the west but further argue that these counter-hegemonic theologies follow a radical trajectory away from rationalism and throw into crisis the violently repressive structures of knowledge and identity which prevail in western culture. The essays in Trajectories of Mysticism are fairly diverse in their concerns, discussing different periods, cultures, issues, theorists, forms of representation and religious paradigms. This collection is divided into two sections, the first dealing more explicitly with literary and linguistic issues, the second focusing on matters which relate to particular theorists or theoretical arguments. The essays in both sections follow a loose chronology, and these essays explore a wide range of material, including Biblical texts, autobiographical, confessional and fictional writing from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, divinity in English, German, Spanish and French traditions, work on God and metaphysics by Schelling, Weil, Levinas, Derrida, de Man, Irigaray and Cixous as well as representations of God in both Christianity and Judaism. Central to each essay is a preoccupation with the problematic intersection of language, knowledge and transcendence in mystical theologies, and each essay considers how recent literary, critical and cultural theory can lead to different conclusions about mysticism.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

Geoffrey Parrinder (1976), Mysticism in the World's Religions, London: The Sheldon Press, p. 77. See, for example, Akbar S. Ahmed (1992), Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise, London: Routledge; Harold Coward (1992), À Hindu Response to Derrida's View of Negative Theology', in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds, Derrida and Negative Theology, New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 199±226; Harvey Cox (1984), Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology, New York: Simon & Schuster. Gershom G. Scholem (1961), Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, p. 133. Karl Marx (1963), `Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. and trans. T.B. Bottomore, London: G.A. Watts & Co., p. 43. Louis Althusser (1971), Ìdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso, pp. 123±73. Michel Foucault (1984), The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin, p. 20.



Introduction xvii

7 Sigmund Freud (1961), Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XXI, trans. and ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, p. 84. 8 See especially Jacques Lacan (1982), `God and the Jouissance of Woman', trans. Jacqueline Rose in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the eÂcole freudienne, London: Macmillan, pp. 138±149. 9 Kate Millett (1977), Sexual Politics, London: Virago, p. 28. 10 Roland Barthes (1977), `The Death of the Author', in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, p. 146. 11 Edward W. Said (1991), `Religious Criticism', in The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Vintage, p. 292. 12 Said, `Religious Criticism', p. 291. 13 Karl Marx (1975), `Debates on the Freedom of the Press', in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Collected Works vol I, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p. 152. È rgen Habermas (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve 14 Ju Lectures, trans. Frederic Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 236. 15 Homi K. Bhabha (1996), Ùnpacking My Library . . . Again', in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds, The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, London: Routledge, p. 211. A more direct response to Said's critique of `religious criticism' is offered by Wlad Godzich, who claims that Said, `has not sufficiently examined the ground of the present return to religion', Wlad Godzich (1986), `Foreword: The Further Possibility of Knowledge', in Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. xvii. 16 Richard Wolin (1994), Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 40. 17 Harold Bloom (1975), A Map of Misreading, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 5. 18 Luce Irigaray (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 201. 19 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 200. 20 Julia Kristeva (1989), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 8. 21 See, for example, Harold Bloom (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Mark Taylor (1984), Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, Chicago: Chicago University Press; Sanford Budick and Geoffrey Hartman, eds, (1986), Midrash and Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press; Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds, (1989), Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, New York: Columbia University Press; Daniel Fischlin, ed., (1994), Negation, Critical Theory and Postmodern Textuality, Dordrecht: Kluwer; Shira Wolosky (1995) Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett and Celan, Stanford: Stanford University Press.



xviii Introduction

Trajectories of Mysticism in Literature and Theory



Part I


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Language and Mysticism in the `Spiritual Canticle' by St John of the Cross Ana Barro

St John of the Cross, along with Santa Teresa, represents a major philosophical tradition in Western mysticism. Unlike Santa Teresa, he is usually included in the broad tradition of negative theology. He is also one of Spain's major poets, who has been co-opted into an orthodox Catholic canon by Spanish and foreign scholars alike. Despite the force of this orthodox tradition in Hispanic studies, both of these writers on mysticism have more recently been (re)claimed by those who want to highlight the òther' Spain, imbued with heterodox Jewish and/or Islamic cultural elements.1 Michel de Certeau's observations in his essay on mystical writing regarding the `strange alliance [that] linked ``mystic'' speech and `ìmpure'' blood'2 can be applied to St John of the Cross as a cultural outsider, given his Jewish converso background. His cultural context, and the `strange alliance' involved, is indeed important for an understanding of St John of the Cross's treatment of texts, his particular approach to mysticism, and his status as an outsider in the Spanish Golden Age. In several ways St John of the Cross represents the òther', marginal Spain and his otherness has often been overlooked for cultural and historical reasons. I will argue here that this is a determining element in his particular approach to communication and language. In his texts, from which I have selected for this discussion the most well known one, the `Spiritual Canticle', we can see a variety of features which are inexplicable from an orthodox Catholic perspective and which suggest both theological and stylistic heterodoxy. Amongst these are a sense of ontological uncertainty and an attitude to textuality which prefigures more contemporary theory, and post-structuralist approaches to transcendence.3 St John of the Cross's writing will then be analysed with reference to processes of signification that are openended and question textual authority and interpretation. 3



1

In a broad sense, St John of the Cross belongs to a Neoplatonic tradition of negative theology. St John of the Cross's own position within negative theology, however, has elements that are unique, at least in a Spanish context. Negation is taken much further than was conventional in Golden Age texts, in which the lyrical expression of presenceas-absence was a commonplace motif, but there was no implied engagement with the absence of a transcendental signified. I will then discuss one of St John of the Cross's unique contributions to Spanish mystical writing: the creation of an intellectually demanding and sophisticated genre which is, as far as I know, unprecedented in Spanish mystical literature. This genre, which we can call the `poemplus-commentary', is structured in the following way: a short lyrical poem is accompanied by a lengthy prose treatise which comments on the content of the poem and its possible interpretations. By discussing the poem's possible meanings, the commentary emphasises the unstable nature of signification. It thus calls into question the status of representation of experience in an uncommononly reflexive way and undermines orthodox notions of textual, writerly and divine authority. The `Spiritual Canticle' (poem and commentary together) is treated as an instance of a highly reflexive, intellectually challenging and adventurous form of linguistic mysticism. In addition there are interesting parallels to be drawn with the mystical tradition of Midrash with its particular stance on textual authority and the role of interpretation. St John of the Cross is an author who is eminently concerned with using language as a tool for empowering, rather than as something to be fought against, deploying a textual and reflexive awareness, a preoccupation with the open-ended nature of meaning, which has often gone unrecognised in Sanjuanista studies. His work can thus be related with the heterodox, in this case with elements of culturally suppressed Judaic mystical practices. Although the fascinating parallels with the Jewish tradition of Midrash cannot be treated here, St John of the Cross's treatment of mystical experience reveals a distinctive attitude towards language and interpretation that has much in common with Midrashic tradition.This distances his writings from Neoplatonic and more mainstream Christian mysticism in some significant ways. The texts reveal an overarching preoccupation with the ambiguities of language. Conservative Catholic dogma tends to repudiate language ± written language in particular ± as somehow contaminated and a distraction from pure perception, from the essence of spirit. In contrast, St John of the Cross treats language as contradictory and unstable, but not ultimately as an obstacle to gnosis. Writing itself



4 Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature

becomes both instrumental in the mystical experience and an interpretive vehicle for his reflections on the nature of textuality, meaning, and the divine. To conclude, I will draw on Victor Turner's anthropological concept of liminality as a structuring principle to describe one of St John of the Cross's most original ways of teaching and redefining mystical experience. The `Spiritual Canticle' draws a conceptual map of the path towards gnosis as a passage through various liminal and transitional states. Liminality is also a characteristic of St John of the Cross's situation in his cultural context: the liminal person, marked by marginality, by eccentricity, can constitute a threat to the established order and is often treated as the symbolic embodiment of dangerous, morally polluting forces. Perhaps one reason why St John of the Cross's work has been so strenuously appropriated ± and in a sense neutralised ± by the guardians of academic and religious orthodoxy, is precisely because of his liminal position with respect to his religious and cultural environment.

The `Spiritual Canticle': a trajectory of love and absence The `Spiritual Canticle' consists of one lyrical poem and one prose commentary. The poem is referred to here as the `Spiritual Canticle' (1577),4 and the prose commentary as the Spiritual Canticle.5 The poem is the longest of the three that make up St John of the Cross's major trilogy, the other two being `The Dark Night'and `The Flame of Living Love'. The prose commentaries that St John of the Cross wrote as accompaniments to his poems are by contrast rather long; the Spiritual Canticle alone is about 200 pages long. This poem is generally interpreted as a poetic formulation of the standard three-fold path to mystical union, namely purgation, illumination and union. This involves the search by the soul, who in one of the manuscript versions is named either the `Bride' or the `Soul', for the absent `Beloved' or `Bridegroom'. It is generally accepted that the poems, which do not explicitly refer to a religious context, and do not mention God, are written according to the sixteenth-century convention in Spanish poetry of glosses a lo divino. The corresponding prose commentary informs us in the Prologue that the poem is written ìn strange figures and similitudes' but with the proviso that these are open to (mis)interpretation. At the same time, the reader is invited in the Prologue to read into them mystical meanings, which are left open to interpretation, a move, as we shall later see, that is a significant departure from literary and theological tradition:



Language and Mysticism 5

Since these Stanzas, then, have been composed under the influence of a love which comes from abounding mystical knowledge, they cannot be fairly expounded, nor shall I attempt to expound them, but only to throw upon them some light of a general kind . . . . And I think this to be the best, for the sayings of love are better left in their fullness, so that everyone may pluck advantage from them according to his manner and to the measure of his spirit, than abbreviated to make sense to which not every taste can accommodate itself. And thus, although they are expounded after a certain manner, there is no reason why anyone should be bound to this exposition.6 The poem traces an impassioned search, marked by alternating apprehension and absence. The first stanza begins with a cry of anguish following the disappearance of the Beloved: BRIDE Where can your hiding be, Beloved, that you left me thus to moan While like the stag you flee Leaving the wound with me? I followed calling you loud, but you had flown.7 The experience of thirsting for an absent lover which is treated in the subsequent stanzas is underpinned by orthodox Catholic doctrine throughout the prose commentary, with frequent quotations of St Augustine and other Biblical authorities. The Bride goes through various phases of darkness and torment, including the `Dark night of the soul' for which St John of the Cross is well known. The anguish felt at the start of the poem is transformed into a quiet sense of victory by the end. But desire has not led to an actual encounter with God's presence, as is often assumed. Instead the end marks a point of departure. The path towards gnosis has been embarked upon but not completed. We can then consider the poem to map a learning process, to act as a metaphor for the shifting relations between the object and the subject of the search, or in more modern terms, to focus on the shifting relations of signifer and signified. So, although the poem may seem at first sight to begin with a search and end with mystical union, a closer examination reveals that a focus on the hiatuses of absence points not to a realisation of union with God but to a pedagogical system, based on a discursive consciousness of God's absence. The conventions of the quest are used as signposts




towards a destination that can never be reached. There is a bias towards process rather than teleology. A glimpse of possible gnosis appears only after the originating desire for the other has been transformed through an awareness of fundamental otherness. According to this conception, desire and love are motivating forces that engender an awareness of the limits of knowledge: Up there, to me you'll show What my own soul has longed for all the way: And there, my love, bestow The secret [aquello] which you know And only spoke about the other day.8 What this secret is however can never be fully apprehended except as `not this'. There seems to be a denial of the possibility of experiencing direct presence here and now, and an implied statement about the limitations of representation. And what will be that which He will give her there? Eye has not seen it, neither has ear heard it, neither has it entered into the heart of man, as the Apostle says . . . . Here, since it has no name the soul calls it `that'. This in short, is to see God, but what it is for the soul to see God has no other name than `that'.9 A parallel may be drawn with more recent work on representation that challenges empirical models, whereby the poet, and the critic, are concerned with mimesis, with the transposal of subjective experience into language that is considered a more or less transparent medium which allows direct access to the poet's mind, or in this case, to the divine. The code stressed throughout St John of the Cross's writings is rather one that resists classification as mimesis. In the second stanza there is a striking tension between the appellations to the shepherds as intermediaries or messengers, and the Bride, who searches for her beloved. Desire is transmitted through third parties, emphasising the `trace' nature of desire as it is disseminated in the second stanza of the poem where she appeals to the shepherds: Ìf, you, as there you wander,/Should chance my love to spy,/Then tell him that I suffer, grieve and die'.10 The ambiguity of St John of the Cross's stance towards the divine is underpinned by a dynamics of desire and a recognition of the impossibility of attaining gnosis by efforts of the will alone. Desire refers to past, future and present, and is related to thus to




absence, denial and obstacles. In the `Spiritual Canticle' all these common motifs are subsumed into a sense of never-ending exile and distance from the object of desire, God. The attempts to see God are characterized by a necessary longing and suffering, necessary because a real contact would lead to death and madness, as stated often in the commentary:11 And this dying of love is effected in the soul by means of a touch of highest knowledge of the Divinity, which thing is the `something' whereof, as is said in this stanza, they are stammering'. This touch is neither continuous nor long, for were it so the soul would loose itself from the body; but it passes quickly, and thus the soul remains dying of love, and dies the more seeing that it cannot die of love.12 The phrase ìt cannot die of love' is a potent expression of the unending quality of the quest for contact with a transcendent other, and of the creative dissolution of the self necessary for communication and learning to take place. This dissolution or disjunction of the self, marks each stage of the trajectory in which the self is emptied and pluralised. The Ì' is not in a fixed position with regard to the other, and a recognition of the other's difference must be achieved. One of the most prevalent metaphors for this process in St John of the Cross's writing is indeed death. This is variously expressed as a living death, a libidinal release, the death of love. But this does not prevent the subject, hungry for reassurance, from seeking tangible proofs of union, and an identification with the other on the level of sameness as well as of difference. The audacious and impatient desire to see God in full presence is sometimes metonymically related to death: Reveal your presence clearly And kill me with the beauty you discover, For pains acquired so dearly From Love, cannot recover Save only through the presence of the lover.13 God can be partially reached through language but as language cannot convey this fully, fulfillment must be sought between the lines, in silences, in the loss of ordinary knowledge. Deep-cellared is the canvern Of my love's heart, I drank of him alive:





Other parts of the commentary convey a sense of estranged longing and subjunctive meaning in a reiterated às though'. For example in the following passage: As though she had said: At the time when I desired to possess Thy presence I found Thee not, and for Thy sake I remained empty and detached from all things, and yet I bound not myself to Thee; I was buffeted woefully by the gales of love and found support neither in myself not in Thee.15 This às though' acts as a distancing device, emphasising continually the gaps between desire and the object of desire, between apprehension and understanding, and using language to further emphasise the gap between desire and its object. The elusive nature of perception is used metonymically to illustrate how consciousness is altered rather than focussing on the outcomes of the this process in an a posteriori account as is the case in most mystical writing. Rather, the opacity and incommensurability of language becomes the sharpest metaphorical expression of ineffability in and beyond discourse. Desire and discourse are uniquely combined in St John of the Cross's reiterated recognition of their interrelatedness and in turn as the primary vehicle for attaining gnosis. Ònly language', as Steiner suggests, `knows no conceptual, no projective finality'.16 It is language itself, in all its oscillating referentiality, that forms the basis of St John of the Cross's sui generis mode of explaining a mystical trajectory. Functioning at the level of both metaphor and metonymy throughout the poem, and reinforced by the innumerable references to language in the prose commentary, the actual act of writing becomes a metaphor for the deferred nature of transcendent knowledge. The lover can never actually meet the beloved directly, just as language cannot lead to full presence. Here we can refer back to de Certeau's analysis of mystical writing to further elucidate a perhaps shared notion of alterity and discourse. Both writers reiterate the fundamental inability of language to lead to full presence. But neither see this as a failure of communication, a trope which characterizes many mystical texts that treat writing or speaking in opposition to transcendence, and see negation as a means of cancelling out the materiality of language. As Wolosky states in



Now stumbling from the tavern,

No thoughts of mine survive,

And I have lost the flock I used to drive.14

Language Mysticism: 'Within mystical discourse, it is typically silence, not language, that is granted higher figural status'.17 De Certeau considers mystical textuality in terms of a `dialogic discourse' wherein the subject and the object ± in his terms Ì' and `Thou' ± correspond to `two terms whose difference, regained and maintained, will be lost in the relation that posits them', while `seeking one another in the thickness of the same language'.18 This expresses a form of union based not on silence but on communication, on networks of allocutions that rely on a recognition of alterity. De Certeau highlights `the agency of discourse' as being situated in a new, utopian `free space', a `no-place in which to . . . create a world as text, a mystic space . . . outside the fields of knowledge. It is there that the labour of writing which is given birth through the animation of language by the other takes place'.19 The idea of a free space, where the world is text (reminiscent of the Jewish concept of text as homeland) is also interesting in relation to the historical context of St John of the Cross's mysticism, in which persecution for heterodoxy was a life-threatening reality. St John of the Cross's writings posit a form of communication with the divine whereby the divine is unreachable and, as we shall see in the next section, whereby the divine is given a `voice' in his texts and takes part in a dialogue of equals. Both ideas would have been equally shocking in his time. We can understand the `Spiritual Canticle' (the poem and prose considered here as one semiotic unit) as the articulation or mapping of a process, motivated by a desire for fulfilled communication, which leads to a fundamental transformation of that desire for total communication. I use the word `map' cautiously here, since it may suggest a direct system of correspondences between signs and signifers that I do not believe is implied in St John of the Cross's texts. Rather there is more in common with post-structuralism in a certain attitude to signs and what they refer to, an attitude that emphasizes the lack of a fixed relation between sign and signified or in mystical terms, between the word and a transcendent reality beyond the written word. In particular there is an affinity with the contemporary notion in post-structuralist thinking of the `subject in process', situated within discursive formations. These positions challenge empiricist models of the subject as the source of all authority. At this point in our argument, we begin to understand that, since with this kind of faith there are no guarantees, a valuable source of both understanding and comfort might be found in textual communication, in commentary.





Why did St John of the Cross choose the genre of the short lyrical poem accompanied by the lengthy prose commentary? What of his interpretative stance? And how do they work together as both teaching device and mystical text? To answer these questions one could begin by challenging the traditional view in Sanjuanista scholarship on this combination of rhetorical modes, according to which the poems are a creative, spontaneous outpouring of mystical passion rather than part of an elaborated or systematically reflexive process. The commentaries meanwhile are often dismissed as an a posteriori adjunct in the service of theological orthodoxy. From a literary point of view, they are not usually considered to be particularly interesting, except as glosses on the highly elliptical poems designed to offset inquisitorial interest and to clarify difficult concepts for the Carmelite nuns for whose spiritual education St John of the Cross was partially responsible. While this may be true, I would propose a fuller and more rewarding exploration of the relationships between `primary' and `secondary' mystical texts. If we accept the basic structuralist view of texts as systems of meanings, to be uncovered through semantic and contextual analysis of their internal relations, the issues of interpretation raised by the `Spiritual Canticle' are particularly unusual in a mystical context. There is in the first place an issue relating to the semantic problems of expressing an ineffable experience through language. The originality of St John of the Cross's idea here is to account for the trajectory from a felt experience to a poetic articulation through the interplay of poem and commentary. Their apparent separateness, upon closer examination, cannot be taken for granted. Within Western mystical traditions of religious and philosophical discourse, the mystical experience is commonly presented as antithetical to analytical or reflexive forms of expression. However, St John of the Cross shows that they can be combined, by highlighting intellectual processes which are as as important as affective processes in the perception and articulation of mystical experience. In the second place, the combination of poem and commentary undermines the unity of representation we might expect from mystical writing. A further parallel can be drawn here with the theory of intertextuality. Neither readers nor writers, according to this position, are able to step outside discourse. From a theoretical position which rejects humanist notions of the author as the ultimate authority, texts are treated as sites of meaning where networks of always already



Writing as a sacred act: the poem-plus-commentary as a new genre in Spanish mysticism

pre-existing texts interact freely with each other, thereby inviting interpretation. This is first acknowledged in the Prologue. Here St John of the Cross challenges the reader to connect figural language to primary experience. The author here is identified as someone other whose ability to represent the experience, to speak directly, is denied: For who can write down that which He reveals to loving should wherein He dwells? And who can set forth in words that which He makes them to feel? And lastly, who can express that which he makes them to desire? Of a surety, none; nay, indeed, not the very souls through whom He passes. And it is for this reason that, by means of figures, comparisons and similitudes, they allow something of that which they feel to overflow and utter secret mysteries from the abundance of the Spirit, rather than explain these things rationally.20 The interaction of two very different modes of discourse leads to a blurring of boundaries between categories of text. These boundaries themselves become crucial sites of meaning, revealing in the process an interesting stance towards reading and writing supposedly divine texts. The raising of exegesis to a point at which the whole status of the text is thrown open leads St John of the Cross to a reflexive awareness of the ambiguities of language in the relation of experience to text. For St John of the Cross language is a cognitive as well as an affective tool in his construction of a path towards gnosis. The lack of established precedents for this genre in Spanish mystical writing leads one to question the semiotics of poem and commentary without taking at face value a mere explicatory function. By disregarding the commentary as an adjunct in the service of theological correctness, the interplay of the two modes is compromised. There is a strong connection in St John of the Cross's system between the textual experience of writing as a sacred act in itself, and a conceptualised emptiness, an emptiness which can be analysed, categorized and symbolized. This emptiness is not therefore the rejection of flawed language characteristic of Christian apophatic tradition, but an important element of communication. The focus on emptiness continually undermines the idea of a presence, either of the writer or of God. Since the tension between what is sought and what can be found is never fully resolved in the trajectory of the poem, an awareness of ambiguity and multivalency is created. The combination of the specific and the general is channeled in the poem through a `syntagmatic




consciousness' to use Barthes' terms.21 In terms of the predominant code, I would suggest a correspondence with Barthes's early structuralist description of different `semiological consciousnessness', the symbolic, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. The sign is related not to its `virtual' associations but to àctual neighbours'22 thus creating a shifting association within words in a sentence at the level of syntagm which is temporary and changeable. One of the most original features of all of St John of the Cross's texts is that throughout the commentaries, he quotes extensively from Scripture, but also quotes himself ± his poems ± with no perceptible change in the degree of reverence. The authoritative stance towards his own words, is a long way from the accepted view that the poem is somehow a humble offering which must inevitably fall short of fulfilling the aim of communicating an experience of God. According to his view there is a clear sequence in most mystical writing from direct perception towards articulation. Usually this happens a posteriori and is normally but a shadowy substitute for the original `reality'. This attitude of equal reverence towards his own words and Biblical texts is strikingly evident. In a sense, we could argue that for St John of the Cross the poem is fundamentally sacred, `given' to him. There is no possessive or authoritative Ì' in the prose, while in the poems there are many instances of a first person voice. It is not necessary to believe that God directed St John of the Cross's pen, in a Blakeian form of automatic writing, but possibly the poem represents for St John of the Cross a residue or trace of an experience which was not willed but of which writing was an essential part. (Perhaps an appropriate simile for this process would be the Biblical image of the Burning Bush?) If this is so, then the status accorded to the poem is on a footing level with that of the Biblical host texts. The status of the experience as a pre-text leads St John of the Cross to treat his poem much as a Biblical text is treated, as a sacred and authoritative generator of meaning. The classical hierarchies of mystical texts are radically reversed. The commentary becomes much more than mere exposition. de Certeau alludes to this peculiarity in his suggestion that poetry ìs not what mystics say they write' and that mystical poems, in a sense, `write themselves', given that the other speaks through the àgency of discourse'.23 The commentaries, according to this view, could in fact be regarded as the more important mode as regards the interpretation of mystical experience, while relying to a considerable degree on both the experience and the poem for their articulation. If this is so, for St John of the Cross the mystical experience itself is like a `text' that contains infinite meanings. Writing becomes a process




homologous to the mystical paradox that God's presence is experienced as absence. Although the poem is also self-standing, the poem and the commentary together can operate together to balance affective and cognitive approaches in charting the relationship between self and other. For example, the verse `No thoughts of mine survive' expresses in a poetic form the feelings of not-knowing which read alongside the commentary leads one to reflect upon the nature of cognition. The use of the Spanish verb saber (in English translateable as both `to know' and `to taste of') plays on the ambivalence and the interrelatedness of cognitive and sensual knowledge: Wherefore the soul that is led into this highest knowledge knows thereby that all that other knowledge which has naught to do with this is not knowledge but ignorance; and that it is needless to have any of it; and the soul declares the truth of the saying of the Apostle, namely, that that which is greatest wisdom in the sight of man is foolishness in God's sight.24 It is clear that for St John of the Cross, mystical experience and writing are inextricably bound up in a semiotic relationship. Thought, language and raw experience are seen as equally important in a mystical system. If writing and interpreting are themselves a mystical activity, the commentaries function as metatexts, a commentary on texts, that includes God as a text. Put another way, the experience itself is apprehended as a primary `text', filtered and glossed through culturally shaped symbols. We can argue then that it is through language and texts that St John of the Cross experiences the divine. The marked blurring of the divisions between primary and secondary texts emphasises the notion of writing as a mystical activity in itself. If the poem is accorded a semi-divine status, the same could be said of the interpreter's commentaries, whereby writing and interpreting constitute a means of partaking in the divine.25 What then might St John of the Cross's purpose be? And what is his interpretative stance? Here there are two main points to be made. First, the inherent open-endedness of this genre, the refusal to fix meanings, works well as a teaching device that concentrates attention on the contingencies of language, while at the same time inviting interpretation. Second, the lack of single referents, the deliberate creation of a structured network of multiple references and poetic `voices' is a very appropriate form with which to focus on emptiness. Thus, St John of the Cross leads us to discover that it is precisely in the interstices between





For even as the night at the time of such rising [of dawn] is neither wholly light nor wholly day, but as men say `between two lights', so this Divine tranquillity and solitude.26 The commentary does not explain the poem, but encodes it in such a way that it allows for a reorientation of textual and psychic space that encourages and structures interpretation on emptiness, absence and the impossibility of an appehension of God in full view. This invites us to recognise in St John of the Cross's choice of genre and his semiotics of mystical experience, a striking prefiguring of contemporary attitudes to the unstable nature of signification and the sources of textual authority. Bearing this in mind, the combined rhetorics of the poem and commentary reveal a striking similarity to the Jewish concept of a God who inhabits text, a concept which may have been absorbed by St John of the Cross consciously or unconsciously from his cultural context. I think it doubtful that it would have been adopted for purely apologetic purposes, as Swietlicki suggests,27 or because St John of the Cross may have been a crypto-Jew. It seems more likely that St John of the Cross was to some extent acquainted with this tradition and deliberately chose to adopt it because it served well both a spiritual and a pedagogic purpose. It seems plausible then that St John of the Cross's cultural heritage and environment would simply have facilitated this style of exposition. It would also have been natural for St John of the Cross, given the unstable nature of attempts to render the ineffable through language, to have based his texts on such a high level of semiotic and textual awareness as could best be found in the Jewish rather than the Christian exegetical traditions. Nonetheless the profoundly heterodoxical nature of this position ± expansive rather than reductive ± cannot be denied. As Steiner comments `Heresy refuses exegetic finality . . . secondary discourse is schismatic'.28 It is clear then, that in the Spiritual Canticle, interaction between man and God occurs through a spiritual and a textual trajectory. St John of the Cross's texts bridge the gap between orthodox Catholicism and Judaism through his interpretive stance, which recasts ambiguity as a positive methodology for teaching a mystical trajectory. St John of the Cross's attitude of hermeneutic open-endedness and the peculiar



categories, in the disconcerting gaps between language and experience, that the transcendental nature of the divine may be apprehended. This is communicated in the prose commentaries through images of twilight for example, when things are neither one thing nor another:

relation of poem and commentary also suggest the heretical if we accept Steiner's definition of the heretic as the `discourser without end'. St John of the Cross `reads' the mystical trajectory like a divine text, which is restructured as a `free space' and thereby invites a more open style of interpretation. This notion of text as a `home' in exile must have been a particularly potent source of metaphorical thinking for those who must be seen to adhere to the orthodox while being deeply heterodox.

St John of the Cross and negative theology Simply on the basis of the sheer number of `negative' references, the lack of direct references to God and the prevalence of a language of nothingness, one could reasonably claim that St John of the Cross belongs to a tradition of negative theology. However, his treatment of the nature of desire for God are unique within Spanish tradition. The confrontation with silence and nothingness that lies at the heart of the Spiritual Canticle shows absence to be a mask of God, much as writing can be said to mask, but also to facilitate, communication. This involves in turn, a fundamental recognition of the epistemological difficulties involved in communicating an experience and a process that lies outside ordinary logic and language and in which the experience, as it were, `writes' itself. The absent God of Jewish mysticism and the present God of Christian metaphysics are both present in the focus on the unknowable nature of God and in the language of displacement whereby the lover can never actually meet the beloved: Furthermore, it possesses not truly that which it loves . . . the soul is like an empty vessel waiting to be filled, like to the hungry man that desires food, like to the sick man sighing for health, and like to one that is suspended in the air and has no place whereon to find a foothold . . . empty, hungry, lonely, wounded, sick of love, suspended in the air.29 Negative theology implies analyzing and symbolizing the empty to draw a conceptual map of nowhere. St John of the Cross uses a distinctively negative discourse in numerous passages such as the following: The reason that the soul suffers so much at this time is that, the nearer it comes to union with God, the more keenly it feels within itself its emptiness of God, and the direst darkness, together with spiritual fire which dries and purges it, so that, when it is purified, it





Through this negative discourse, in which the poet finds himself in a metaphysical and linguistic exile, characterized by perceptions of `nothing' (nada), a textual non-place, or free place, is created where language and desire meet and ultimately implode in the key verses of `Babbling I know not what strange rapture . . . Which leaves me stretched and dying where I fall'.31 The emptiness at the core of the `Spiritual Canticle' is the origin not only of this key verse but of all the structures in the poem which involve a transition or passage from one `place' to another, through an abyss of nothingness which at the same time is made dynamic through desire, towards somewhere or someone other, the `there' (allõÂ ) or the `that' (aquello) where plenitude, the dialectic opposite of nothingness, may be apprehended but never trapped into substance, or full presence: Tracking your sandal-mark The maidens search the roadway for your sign, Yearning to catch the spark And taste the scented wine Which emanates a balm that is divine.32 The traditions of negative theology within both Jewish and Christian mysticism are often based on the disappearance of the object of desire whose value is transformed into a positive experience. Thus in Jewish mysticism, the key concept of Ein Sof symbolically represents both total absence and total presence. For St John of the Cross, the task of writing the mystical experience is also predicated upon the disappearance of all previously known points of reference. His deep negativity is evident in the nihilistic tone throughout the commentary. St John of the Cross creates the impression of a series of contingent locations where the poetic voice must admit defeat in order for a divinely inspired `voice' to appear, a voice which eludes the more fixed semantics of ordinary language. Language and experience are both points of departure for touching what is irreducibly other. Language must depart from the self in order to allow expression to the non-self, or the other, which then can be conceived as God. For St John of the Cross then, it is in the mystical relationship with



may be united with God. For inasmuch as God sends not into it any ray of supernatural light from Himself, God is intolerable darkness to it, when He is near it according to the spirit, since supernatural light darkens natural light with its excess.30

a God who is never reached that writing comes into its own. It is only then that the unknown becomes known, to become a `dialogic discourse'. One of the primary strategies used to alert the reader to this form of understanding is the constant shifting of substantive categories of meaning in the poem and the commentary, forcing the reader away from a `centre' in a process of displacement and deliberately pursued disequilibrium which, in the spiritual system proposed here, is a necessary pre-requisite for learning to take place. The reader is assumed to be at a stage of awareness where the ambivalences of language are recognised as well as the importance of the thresholds or moments of crisis that occur on the path towards gnosis. This leads us to one of the key structures in the `Spiritual Canticle', which illustrates St John of the Cross's conception of an important aspect of the mystical trajectory, the `limit situation' of the soul, and, in turn, his creation of a liminal space for the encounter with God.

The liminality of the mystic Liminality as a stage of consciousness, and as the basis for a pedagogic system is characteristic of St John of the Cross's particular brand of mystical teaching. In particular, the notion that danger as well as enlightenment, or power, are located in the interstices or gaps in meaning, is crucial. At the beginning of the `Spiritual Canticle' we are presented with a succinct picture of the mystical path: To fetch my loves more near,

Amongst these mountains and ravines I'll stray,

Nor pluck flowers, nor for fear

Of prowling beasts delay,

But pass through forts and frontiers on my way.33

The `forts and frontiers' refer to a threshold, and mark the passage from one substantive stage of consciousness to another. The above verse is a key to St John of the Cross's system. It is the first of many references to boundaries and suggests the transformative power of crossing them. Spiritual rites of passage are crucial elements in the system in which the focus is not the teleological but rather the trajectory, and this is particularly important if we consider the teaching function of the `Spiritual Canticle'. The loss of innocence is the first step, expressed in the commentary as a kind of initiatic death:





The pedagogic message contained in this description of a process of disintegration leading to reaggregation following a liminal phase or transition stage (limen/threshold), can be compared to that described by anthropologist Victor Turner.35 According to Turner, in rites of passage from one stage in (social) life to another, the participating individual becomes momentarily divested of all his previous characteristics and identities. He becomes ambiguous ± and therefore dangerous ± because he eludes accepted and normative social or symbolic classifications. Turner applies this concept to an analysis of the importance of ritual in social life, but we can also describe the mystic, particularly an outsider such as St John of the Cross, as resisting classification. Following this logic, God too resists classification. Liminality can function as a very telling metaphor for the trajectory traced by St John of the Cross: liminality, for Turner, involves a period of progression through a period of limbo, towards communitas. This is substantively of the same nature as the mystical union and is impossible without a prior dismantling of the pre-liminal stage of being. The various stages of the liminal process as described by Turner are characterized by a profound statelessness, a process marked by transition, whereby all the components of prior experience and knowledge are dismantled and reassembled. According to his interpretation: `Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edge of structure, in marginality . . . and its importance derives precisely from its ambiguous status'.36 By applying Turner's concept of liminality, we can understand that it is precisely in the interstices or gaps in meaning where the difficulties of attaining union with God are most keenly experienced. This is why a focus on the liminal phases of the mystical trajectory serves to (a) direct the reader to the importance of points of transition between perception and realisation, or between oneself and the other, and (b) to draw attention away from teleology towards the more ambigous and therefore dangerous negotiation of passage and process. This danger is already present in the tortuous pre-liminal stages as presented in the following example from the commentaries: In these lines the Bride speaks of the three enemies of the soul, which are world, devil and flesh, and these are they that war upon her and



The soul finds itself burning in the fire and flame of love, so much so that it appears to be consumed in that flame, which causes it to issue forth from itself and be wholly renewed and enter upon another mode of being; like the phoenix, that is burned up and afterwards reborn.34


But the real dangers come from the loss of self and the encounter with the other, in a transitional state. This is frequently expressed in terms of death. A number of possible deaths have already been alluded to: initiatic death, death in love, death of prior knowledge, the death of the self. All of them act as metaphors for the desire for the other, which is simultaneously cause and effect of the search for gnosis. Also inherent in the experience of liminality is the sense of a fundamental exile from oneself and from God which leads to a self-marginalization. The resulting feelings of displacement, loss, negation, and despair are described as part of a learning process in which all language and experience is shaken up and dispersed. This is experienced as blindness, dazzlement, emptiness and so on, all terms which are typical of mystical discourse and which are recognised as necessary obstacles to the unitive vision, since unmediated contact or vision is not possible. It is striking how many symbols throughout the poem and the commentary express the importance of boundaries and obstacles (mountains, forts, frontiers, wounds, pain) and serve to reclassify the experience. Through extensive metonymic linking of the various elements such as the `thresholds' and `walls' which symbolize obstacles to gnosis, a circular rather than a linear process maps the territory. In traversing this no-man's land the reader is challenged, but also provided with a conceptual framework that encourages reflection on the fine borderline between absence and presence. Thus we no longer see described a traditional three-fold mystical path, but are exposed instead to an erotics of distance, a blurring of categories of understanding, with the emphasis clearly on their unstable and contingent nature. As in Turner's framework, this is a dialectical process, ìnvolving successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, passage from lower to higher stages through a limbo of ambiguity, or statelessness',38 at the end of which lies the beginning of gnosis. The concept of liminality is further discussed by Turner in The Ritual Process.39 Here, Turner applies the structure of liminality as an analytical and semantic frame for understanding the rituals of social life in an African community. The analytical value of Turner's discussion for our purposes resides in the focus on a centre-periphery dichotomy that



make her way difficult . . . . These things are wont to prejudice certain souls in such a way that it becomes supremely difficult for them, not only to persevere against these wild beasts, but even to be able to set out on the road at all.37

defines the location of the liminal person or experience as de-centred, or ex-centric. Although a `centre' is implicit as a structuring element, insofar as liminality describes a state that is not attached to an existing classification, the emphasis is indeed on de-spatialisation and detemporalisation. Liminality implies an abnormal positioning in relation to cultural positions defined by law, custom or tradition.40 As Turner suggests, `liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between . . . . Thus liminality is frequently likened to death . . . liminal entities may be symbolized as possessing nothing'.41 The value attached to `the stripping off of preliminal and postliminal attributes' in order to embark upon a period of meditation marked by an absence of fixed points of reference is similar to that urged by St John of the Cross. The poem and commentary focus upon these points of transition as sites of freedom from the closed codes that determine how texts should be read and written, while remaining always related to a network of established texts and discourses. The passage over critical thresholds creates a limit situation for the soul. As in social life, the crossing of significant thresholds is marked by ritual which helps the participants to symbolically classify the unknown. In a mystical system characterized by liminality, the points of passage from one stage to another, earlier referred to as empty or free spaces, are particularly fraught with the danger of psychic instability and spiritual contamination by delusions. These dangers and ambiguities are variously expressed in symbols of intoxication, madness or illness: Ànd as the spirit passed before my presence' ± that is to say, when He made my spirit pass beyond its limits and natural ways by means of the rapture whereof we have spoken ± the skin of my flesh shrank . . . which in this transit is [the body] frozen so that the flesh shrinks like that of a dead man.42 The reader is urged to proceed with caution in order to avoid spiritual annihilation while perservering through estrangement and exile from a comforting presence. Intimations of grace are rare and the object of desire remains essentially hidden and unknowable. The poem and commentary together reveal a system based on liminal transitions, on the interstices between substantive categories such as human and divine, or subject and object, desire and differentiation, communication and silence. In Bataille's terms `There is no longer subject-object, but the ``yawning gap'' between the one and the other, and in the gap, the





subject and the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate essence'.43

Taking into account St John of the Cross's unorthodox approach to the genre of mystical writing and the importance of liminality in his conception of the mystical process, we can see the pedagogic value of a semiotic map traced to help negotiate the risks and dangers involved in the mystical adventure. In itself, desire for God is insufficient. A series of points of passage must be negotiated for that desire to be transformed into non-desire and passivity. The teleological, finally, is not the primary aim of the `Spiritual Canticle'. It functions rather as a guide to the negotiation of the difficult interstices of perception and experience. There is a consistent focus on the arbitrariness of language as a metaphor for the encounter with God, and the fundamental liminality of the poetic and mystical endeavour. In his transitions from poem to commentary and back again, St John of the Cross empowers language as a metaphor for the mystical path in a reflexive recognition of both its possibilities as a vehicle for understanding the mystical quest and its inherent multivalency. It is in the limitlessness of language and desire that consummation and death are deferred, making `passage' and `process' of paramount importance. Language is seen not as restrictive but as an instrument that facilitates the relationship with the other, linking understanding and experience. The whole issue of mystical ineffability is turned upside down to become part of an affirmative approach ± within a framework of negativity ± in a return to the potentialities of language rather than to remain with a futile search for a transcendent vision beyond language. The act of writing and interpretation charts the mystical path, which is actualised as one moves through it; understanding leads to articulation, and writing becomes, paradoxically, both a means of attaining to God and a route towards the unknown. We can suggest, finally, that St John of the Cross's reflections upon the limitations and contingencies of mystical discourse, as well as its endless possibilities of signification, are an integral and positive part of the trajectory towards gnosis. By the end of the `Spiritual Canticle', the map is still unfinished, but in the process the participant has been led to a very different point of departure.



Conclusions


1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

See for example, Luce LoÂpez-Baralt (1985), St John of the Cross and Islam, Puerto Rico: publisher not known. Michel de Certeau (1986), `Mystic Speech', in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 84. As discussed for instance by Jonathan Culler (1982), On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. There are two main manuscript versions of the poem, which differ in the number and order of stanzas. I use the 40 stanza text with the subtitle `Songs between the soul and the bridegroom', from the following edition: St John of the Cross (1951), The Poems of St John of the Cross, trans. Roy Campbell, London: Fount, pp. 15±27. Subsequent references in the footnotes are abbreviated as `Songs' followed by the number of the stanza. In the main text the poem is referred to in quotation marks. Quotations from the Spiritual Canticle used throughout the essay are from the following edition: St John of the Cross (1934), The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, vol. 2, trans. Edgar Allison Peers, London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, pp. 185±407. Complete Works, p. 185. Subsequent references in the footnotes to sections of the commentary other than the Prologue, appear as Spiritual Canticle followed by numbered sections and paragraphs. `Songs', stanza 1.

`Songs', stanza 38.

Spiritual Canticle, XXVII, 5.

`Songs', stanza 2. This can also be related to Emmanuel Levinas' analysis of Jewish spirituality. He suggests that to love the Torah more than God is a protection against the madness of direct contact: Emmanuel Levinas (1990), Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans by SeaÂn Hand, Athlone Press: London. Spiritual Canticle, XXXVII, 5. `Songs', stanza 11. `Songs', stanza 18. Spiritual Canticle, I, 21. George Steiner (1989), Real Presences, Faber: London, p. 34. Shira Wolosky (1995), Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett and Celan, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 219. de Certeau, `Mystic Speech', p. 90. de Certeau, `Mystic Speech', pp. 89±90. St John of the Cross, Complete Works, p. 185. Roland Barthes (1983), `The Imagination of the Sign', in Susan Sontag, ed., Barthes: Selected Writings, Oxford: Fontana, pp. 211±17. Barthes, `The Imagination of the Sign', p. 212. de Certeau, `Mystic Speech', p. 97. Spiritual Canticle, XXXVI, 7. For a detailed discussion of Judaic and Christian attitudes towards language and interpretation see: Susan A. Handelman (1982), The Slayers of Moses: the Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, New York: State



Notes

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

University of New York Press. Also Geoffrey A. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds, (1986), Midrash and Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press. Spiritual Canticle, XV, 2. Catherine Swietlicki (1986), Spanish Christian Cabala, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 45. Spiritual Canticle, IX, 3. Spiritual Canticle, XII, 8. `Songs', stanza 7. `Songs', stanza 17. `Songs', stanza 3. Spiritual Canticle, I, 11. Victor Turner (1990), `Liminality and Community', in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, eds, Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 147±54. Turner, `Liminality and Community', p. 151. Spiritual Canticle, III, 5. Turner, `Liminality and Community', p. 154. Victor Turner (1969), The Ritual process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: de Gruyter, p. 94. For a critique of Turner's concept from a contemporary anthropological perspective that questions amongst other things the atemporal and static bias of Turner's approach to social structures, see Brian Morris (1987), Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 246±263. Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95. Spiritual Canticle, XV, 15. Georges Bataille (1988), Inner Experience, trans. Lesley Ann Boldt, New York: State University of New York Press, p. xiii.




The Metaphysics of Language in Emily Dickinson (As Translated by Paul Celan) Shira Wolosky

I.

Theo-Linguistics Let down the Bars, Oh Death ±

The tired Flocks come in

Whose bleating ceases to repeat

Whose wandering is done ±

Thine is the stillest night

Thine the securest Fold

Too near Thou art for seeking Thee

Too tender, to be told.1

[Fort mit der Schranke, Tod!

Die Herde kommt, es kommt,

Èkte und nun nimmer blo Èkt,

wer blo wer nicht mehr wandert, kommt. Dein ist die stillste Nacht, der sichre Pferch ist dein. Zu nah bist du, um noch gesucht, zu sanft, genannt zu sein.2]

This poem by Emily Dickinson clearly falls within the traditions of mystical discourse. Its eschatological focus, its transcendent yearning, its vision of arrival after long wandering, of union after separation, are all distinctively mystical. Within the context of the translation of the poem by Paul Celan, the mystical discourse of the text emerges even more forcefully, and does so especially in terms of the linguistic assertion and 25



2

implications deeply inscribed within mystical tradition ± something Celan's work persistently probes. Thus, the `stillest night' (stillste Nacht) evokes both silence and immobility: that is, atemporality, as cessation of all sound and temporal motion. `Too near' (zu nah) invokes that absolute inwardness invariably inscribed in western mystical experience as a crucial marker. And `Too tender, to be told' (zu sanft, genannt zu sein) announces that inexpressibility which has through centuries served as ultimate signifier for transcendence. In a persistent mystical paradox, negating language serves as ultimate assertion. Language at this point is more than another trope for surpassing temporal reality; rather, transcendence fundamentally is conceived as the transcendence of language as such. The potential ambiguity in such negation also emerges forcefully here. For the poem is addressed not to divine fullness but to Death, in the dialogical form so characteristic of Celan. It is therefore unclear whether the stillness the poem seeks is a final fulfilment, or a final annihilation. The poem may either assert or defeat its mystical promise, in a borderline with blasphemy that mystical discourse, especially in its modern manifestations, seems often to risk. In terms of mystical language-imagery, the unnaming of the end (strengthened in Celan's version) hovers in unstable fashion between a silence that transcends the limits of language, or utter linguistic collapse and denial. What were Emily Dickinson's contacts with a tradition of mystical language, to substantiate the claim that a text such as `Let down the bars, Oh Death' is embedded within it? Celan's situation as a twentiethcentury poet places him within a period of heightened linguistic selfconsciousness and interest, while his sources within mystical tradition (first cited by himself) are specifically rooted in linguistic concerns.3 Celan's translations of Dickinson, however, suggest they both share the terrains of mystical discourse (as it is specifically concerned with the status of language) and language (conversely, as itself metaphysically structured and commanding a central metaphysical function or role). All of the Dickinson texts chosen by Celan for translation centre in metaphysical concerns: death, teleology, theodicy, redemption.4 These metaphysical subjects, however, are not treated as inseparable from linguistic interests, but rather are presented by Celan as exactly as inscribed, enacted, and addressed through them. The treatment of Dickinson's poetics as separate from the religious dimension of her work is thus contested by Celan.5 Celan's translations instead implicitly present his own interpretive understanding of Dickinson: as a poet within a tradition of metaphysical discourse, for whom questions of language are




inextricable from theological concerns and are profoundly shaped by them. When thus viewed through the prism of Celan, Dickinson's acute linguistic self-reflection becomes visible, as is the case in this poem. And, as here, reflections on language take place in modes that are overtly theological, even if these may then seem variously to point towards linguistic or poetic issues. In fact, in Dickinson's historical context just such a convergence between theological and linguistic issues is prominent, characteristic, and pervasive. Nineteenth-century America develops a tradition of theo-linguistic thought, which serves as a matrix out of which not only Dickinson's poetry emerges, but which also points forward to the twentieth-century's linguistically interested poetics. Work on Dickinson's theological contexts has remained on the whole impressionistic, and has been largely conducted through the prior assumption that Dickinson's work subsumes religion into art. But while Dickinson's exact exposure to systematic theology may be unrecoverable, the persistent claims (repeated from commentator to commentator) that Dickinson's exposure to, for example, Jonathan Edwards was minimal, are mystifying. Thus Albert Gelpi states that `there is no indication that Emily Dickinson was acquainted with the writings of Jonathan Edwards'.6 Richard Sewell, in his two-volume biography, mentions Jonathan Edwards once in passing as a background figure to recurrent revivals in the Connecticut Valley, where both Edwards and Dickinson lived.7 Jack Capps asserts `There is no evidence of her having been exposed to the writings of such authors as Nathaniel Ward, Cotton Mather, or Jonathan Edwards'.8 Even Karl Keller, who devotes a chapter to Èmily Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards', does so in general reference to `the Puritanism he came to represent in rural Massachusetts', and reiterates that Èdwards himself she never knew very well'.9 Yet full weight should be given to a quotation Keller brings from Millicent Todd Bingham in her memoir, Emily Dickinson's Home: The long shadow of Jonathan Edwards, distant from 1850 in years but not in influence, still lay dark over Amherst. His ministry had begun in Northampton only seven miles away, and from that town his frightening message, instilling in many a sinner the fear of an angry God, had inspired the Great Awakening of the 1730's . . . . A century later the orthodox New Englander was still weighed down by his awareness of evil . . . . In his inaugural address President Heman Humphrey of Amherst College summed it up in these words: `Without the fear of God nothing can be secure for one moment'.10



Metaphysics of Language in Dickinson 27

The continued, live influence of Jonathan Edwards not only, but certainly also, in Amherst has been reaffirmed by recent scholarship. The New Divinity and New England Theology movements, whose clergy were settled over churches in Connecticut and the Connecticut River Valley, specifically identified with Edwards and based themselves in his writings.11 Edwards's presence was especially felt within popular culture, affecting common thought and experience through sermons and discussion.12 His works were frequently republished, circulated, and discussed up through the last quarter of the nineteenth-century ± a publishing effort spearheaded by Edwards Amasa Park of Andover, a committed Edwardsian whose preaching Emily Dickinson particularly commends, at least regarding style (Ì never heard anything like it, and don't expect to again, till we stand at the great white throne', and `he reads from the book, the Lamb's book'13). Sereno Dwight, Edwards's grandson, brought out in 1829 a ten volume Works which included many previously unpublished manuscript writings as well as a long biographical memoir. Not least, Mary Lyon, headmistress of Mount Holyoke College which Emily Dickinson attended, was a devoted Edwardsian who often preached and taught Edwards's texts in the college, notably `Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' and Edwards's History of Redemption.14 The Amherst College Library did have (and still has) the edition of The Works of President Edwards with a Memoir of his Life edited by Sereno E. Dwight, acquired during the year of its publication by G. & C. & H. Carvill. Edwards was taught as well in the Amherst College Curriculum of the 1840s.15 Dickinson herself refers to Edwards a number of times in letters and poems (as well as mentioning visits to the Edwards Church in Northampton).16 She includes a poem on the religion of bees (Òf Industry and Morals/And every righteous thing/For the divine Perdition/Of Idleness and Spring'17) in a letter that then adds: ` `Àll Liars shall have their part'' ± Jonathan Edwards ±'.18 This text appears once again in Poem 1598: ` `Àll'' Rogues ``Shall have their part in'' what ±/ The Phosphorous of God'.19 A poem such as À Pit ± but Heaven over it ±'20 almost inevitably echoes Edwards's most famous sermon on `Sinners', which Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Dickinson's sister-in-law and dearest friend, for example, also cites.21 Other traces may be surmised ± Dickinson's use of the word `consent', for example, in her important poem on the incarnation of language, where she compares À Word made flesh' to `this consent of Language, This loved Philology'.22 `Consent' is a central term in Edwards's theology and specifically in his aesthetic statement on `The Beauty of the World' published in the 1829 Dwight Works:




The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the supreme being. As to the corporeal world, though there are many other sorts of consents, yet the sweetest and most charming beauty of it is its resemblance of spiritual beauties. The reason is that spiritual beauties are infinitely the greatest, and bodies being but the shadows of beings, they must be so much the more charming as they shadow forth spiritual beauties.23 At issue, however, is more than specific traces of Edwards in Dickinson's work; even as Edwards's interest for Dickinson studies does not reside in the revivalist impulse (which Dickinson resisted), or doctrines of sin and the will for which Edwards is most known. Edwards participates in an enduring Christian discourse on metaphysics and language, which also marks other texts read by Dickinson, and which had become of special and central importance in the religious discussion taking place during Dickinson's life. The passage from `The Beauty of the World' assumes and presents a structure in which corporeal things are `shadows' or, as he also calls it, images of spiritual ones. In his treatise on `The Mind', also published in Dwight's 1829 edition, Edwards develops his terms: The reason why the names of spiritual things are all, or most of them, derived from the names of sensible or corporeal ones ± as imagination, conception, apprehend, etc. ± is because there was no other way of making others readily understand men's meaning, when they first signified these things by sound, than by giving them the names of things sensible, to which they had an analogy. They could thus point out with the finger and so explain themselves, as in sensible things.24 In the schema of modern linguistics, Edwards's `spiritual' idea as the `meaning' is what he also calls the `signified;' while the `names' that are `derived from sensible or corporeal' things are signifiers, conveyed through `sound'.25 The signifier is sensible both in its own body, as sound, and as derived in the material world, which can nonetheless act as an ànalogy' and thus represent immaterial, spiritual signifieds. However, this representation of the signified in the signifier remains partial or faulty or risky. In another note for `The Mind', Edwards considers: Words. We are sued to apply the same words a hundred different ways; and ideas being so much tied and associated with the words,





Edwards's meditations on language are closely tied to his response to Lockean epistemology, its complex negotiations of simple and mixed ideas (see, for example, sections 41 and 42 of `The Mind'), and its implications for language. Locke's work on his theory of sensations led him to argue that language is conventional, such that there is no `natural connexion' between a particular sound and a specific thing and no essential likeness between `the names that stand for them [and] our ideas'.27 In this way he `stumbled', as Perry Miller comments, ùpon the discovery that the problem of language is one with the problem of knowledge'.28 Edwards pursues this, focusing on the need, as he put it, to èxtricate all questions from least confusion or ambiguity of words, so that the ideas shall be left naked'. For the ìdea' must be distinguished from its signifiers, which as `sounds and letters are external things'.29 Edwards's own turn to experiential religion, with its emphasis on the affections, reflected his attitudes towards language, albeit in complex ways. Edwards asserted the need to experience the ideas themselves, rather than mere words, which remain inadequate substitutes.30 But he also recognized, and masterfully exploited, the role of words as rhetorical tools in arousing the affections. His notes on `The Mind' include as topics to be considered `How the affections will suggest words and expressions and thoughts, and make eloquent', and `How words came to have such a mighty influence on thought and judgement, by virtue of the association of ideas, or from ideas being habitually tied to words'.31 These two inconsistent, if not conflicting, attitudes towards language can be felt in a work such as the highly influential sermon À Divine and Supernatural Light'. There, Edwards insists that true conversion occurs only when the divine spirit ùnites himself with the mind of the saint', and distinguishes this true spiritual union from both sensation and imagination: This spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made upon the imagination. It is no impression upon the mind, as though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes; it is no imagination or idea of an outward light or glory or any beauty of form or countenance, or a visible lustre or brightness of any object. The imagination



they lead us into a thousand real mistakes. For where we find that the words may be connected, the ideas being by custom tied with them, we think that the ideas may be connected likewise, and applied everywhere and in every way as word.26

may be strongly impressed by such things; but this is not spiritual light. Indeed, when the mind has a lively discovery of spiritual things, and is greatly affected by the power of divine light, it may and probably very commonly doth, much affect the imagination; so that impressions of an outward beauty or brightness may accompany those spiritual discoveries. But spiritual light is not that impression upon the imagination, but an exceeding different thing from it. Natural men may have lively impressions on their imagination; and we cannot determine but the devil, who transforms himself into an angel of light, may cause imaginations of an outward beauty, or visible glory, and of sounds and speeches, and other such things; but these are things of vastly inferior nature to spiritual light.32 There's the rub. Mere òutward beauty', `visible glory', `sounds and speeches' may be the work of the devil, not least perhaps in the attention they attract away from the `spiritual light' to which they are `vastly inferior'. And yet, while spiritual light must be distinguished from the ìmpression upon the mind' made through `bodily eyes', the power of divine light `probably very commonly doth, much affect the imagination; so that impressions of an outward beauty or brightness may accompany those spiritual discoveries'. The sermon itself, in fact, in its rhetorical `sounds and speeches' and vivid words, is an inextricable part of that movement of the affections which Edwards would enlist in his preaching, and which is requisite to true spiritual union. Edwards seems to stand both for and against an affective language and its imaginative power; for and against the priority of the signified, as against the power of the signifier intimately and inextricably connected with it. Edwards still assumes a traditional theo-linguistic scheme, inherited from the Church Fathers through the Christian ages, whereby spiritual experience as signified precedes and exceeds its material embodiment, with language itself considered such an embodiment as a signifier in sound or writing. And yet, Edwards also begins to assign a positive role to imagination and to rhetoric, which he, as was also traditional, associates with material impressions, às though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes', and with the material world generally.33 This dual linguistic legacy takes its place within a general duality in Puritan commitments, which shifted emphasis in an attempt to embrace this-worldly historical community no less than other-worldly transcendence. Edwards's double direction, not least in language, leaves its strong mark on followers in the Second Great Awakening and on nineteenth-century American literary culture. The Puritan imagination




is generally cited as background to the extraordinary developments of symbolism in nineteenth-century American letters, with Edwards often seen as the godfather of Emerson's `symbolic consciousness' in his refusal, for example, to confine types to Scripture, making `nature as well as the Bible radically figurative'.34 Edwards, of course, carefully hedged any such claims with doctrinal limits on human nature and power.35 Emerson, however, remains consistently unclear about whether nature, language, or mind has priority; or what guarantees their correspondence; or whether the priest is a poet or the poet a priest.36 And Emerson is only one case. Discussions of language were widespread in nineteenth-century New England, and were often caught, in ways more or less unstable, between an older privileging of intellectual or spiritual `signified' experience and a newer emphasis on material `signifiers' in nature and language. In Amherst proper, for example, William Tyler preached and soon after published a funeral sermon for Edward Hitchcock, a staunch Edwardsian and President of Amherst College (which Dickinson's grandfather founded, and where her father and brother served as treasurers): Figurative language is not a mere play of the imagination. It is not by some accidental discovery or human invention that all words in all languages originally and properly signify objects, actions, and events in the outward world. The material world was made for this purpose. It is a universal language. The elements of nature are a universal alphabet . . . There is a language of flowers. There is also a language of plants and animals, and it is the language of God.37 Such discussions of language gained wide currency through Horace Bushnell's Dissertation on The Nature of Language as Related to Thought and Spirit. This work on the one hand insists on the importance of òbjects and acts in the sensible world . . . as signs of thought:' It is only as there is a Logos in the outward world, answering to the logos or internal reason of the parties, that they can come into a mutual understanding in regard to any thought or spiritual state whatever. To use a more familiar expression, there is a vast analogy in things, which prepares them as forms, to be signs or figures of thoughts, and thus, bases or types of words. Our bodily mechanism and the sensible world we live in are, in fact, made up of words, to represent our thoughts and internal states. They only want naming, and then, passing into sound, to be re-produced or have their images





The signifier as sensible world and words serves a positive function, as types or `words to represent our thoughts and internal states'. And yet, even this positive function is secondary. It still only subserves the `thought or spiritual state' as `signs or figures of thoughts', that is, signifiers serving a prior and superior signified. What is more, this service is at best temporary. The role of the signifier is to erase itself, to `drop out, so to speak, [its] gross material quality' in order to release pure signified `words of spirit'. At the worst, the material body of the signifying words compromises, if it does not indeed block, the signified spirit it is meant to deliver: Words of thought or spirit are not only inexact in their significance, never measuring the truth or giving its precise equivalent, but they always affirm something which is false, or contrary to the truth intended. They impute form to that which really is out of form . . . . In one view they are all false; for there are not shapes in the truths they represent, and therefore we are to separate continually . . . between the husks of the forms and the pure truths of thought presented in them.39 Language as signifying means competes with, or impedes, the signified idea it is supposed to convey. Words as signifiers never fully convey the truth. Indeed, they are `not only inexact', they are `false' and `contrary to the truth intended', in the very fact that they are material forms or shapes, which truth must essentially exceed. Bushnell finally arrives at that transcendence of time, of body, and of language which is deeply inscribed within Christian tradition as its mystical core. To truly approach the truth of spirit it is best `to clear ourselves of time and the law it weaves into words and predicates . . . . To see God all formulas, inferences, degrees, [are] out of the question . . . . Language under the laws of logic or speculation does not seem to be adequate to any such use or purpose'.40 Just how traditional Bushnell remains, and how close the contexts for his theo-linguistic thought would be to Dickinson's, is attested by his citations to Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These are texts which Dickinson, which everyone, knew familiarly, and which she owned in her personal library. In support of his own language claims, Bushnell quotes Sir Thomas Browne's



called up by sounds, they drop out, so to speak, their gross material quality and become words of spirit.38

appeal to the Hermetic and Platonic traditions, to `the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are seen, not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible fabric'.41 When Bushnell asserts that words àre related to truth, only as form to spirit ± earthen vessels in which the truth is borne, yet always offering their mere pottery as being the truth itself', he goes on to quote Bunyan's Àpology for his Book': `My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold,/The truth, as cabinets inclose the gold'.42 (It is worth noting that, in the Pilgrim's Progress narrative, Bunyan makes `Talkative' one of his foulest villains). Dickinson's library contains as well Thomas aÁ Kempis's classic of mystical writing, The Imitation of Christ. Language is there only a tangential topic, but the structure which makes words an inferior vessel for a spiritual truth that exceeds it is assumed, and is radicalized into mystical yearning for a silence that transcends language altogether: `Happy the man who is instructed by Truth itself, not by signs and passing words, but as It is in itself . . . . Therefore let all teachers keep silence, and let all creation be still before You'.43

II.

From Dickinson to Celan

Dickinson's theo-linguistic background, with all its ambiguities and ambivalences, strongly informs her poetry and her attitudes towards language. As a poet, she is deeply committed to language. But the conservative Christianity of the Connecticut River Valley where she grew up (with Amherst College an orthodox stronghold against Unitarian Harvard) continues in many ways to frame her attitudes and her efforts. And the ambivalence towards language that characterized the Edwardsian tradition further complicates Dickinson's position, at once forming part of her inheritance and yet challenging its established metaphysical orders. Her texts, and especially her many poems on poetry or language, often serve as scenes of struggle towards and against linguistic utterance within an overarching metaphysical frame of heaven and earth, time and eternity, soul and body. But this very metaphysical structure is in itself problematic. For it carries with it a suspicion against linguistic signifiers, while it elevates the signified as a transcendence ultimately conceived as silence. For a poet, a hierarchy which places silence over language is severely compromising. This predicament is re-enacted by Dickinson in text after text. Dickinson's grounding in a traditional metaphysics of language is attested in




many poems. Persistently she aligns interiority against exteriority, as spirit against flesh, eternity against time, and silence against language. `To tell the Beauty would decrease', she writes, `To state the Spell demean,' and she goes on to prefer to these signifiers in language a signified `syllable-less Sea/Of which it is the sign'.44 The poem itself becomes at once a failed `[endeavour] for its word' and a `Rapture'.45 `To own the Art within the Soul' locates the art of language inward, where, however, it merges with `Silence'.46 In Poem 1681, if `Speech is one symptom of Affection/and Silence one-', the poem endorses the one `within': `The perfectest communication/Is heard of none'.47 And it helpfully cites I Peter 1:8 as its authority: `Behold, said the Apostle,/Yet had not seen'.48 In Poem 976, `The Spirit and the Dust' have a `Dialogue' in Death, in which the dust dissolves but the spirit merely lays off its Òvercoat of Clay'.49 Poem 664 reiterates, tracing the dissolution of `Sense from Spirit', when `this brief Drama in the flesh ± is shifted' and the Àtom' is released from `lists of Clay'.50 This is also a linguistic movement: `Figures' dissolve as well. These poems in many ways reproduce ± even intend to reproduce ± the structure of a metaphysics of language. But if Dickinson pursues this metaphysics, she also complicates it. Her poems characteristically equivocate as to just which functions of language she is committed to ± in terms of sign-theory, whether it is the signified or the signifier, and in just what relationship, that she holds dear. Poem 1651 may evoke the transcendent Word as Signified that was `Made Flesh and dwelt among us', but it concludes with a moving tribute to her own `loved philology'.51 When she bids the poet in Poem 1129 to `Tell all the Truth but tell it slant', her allegiance is given not only to the Truth in its abstract light but also to its figural representations: `Success in Circuit lies'.52 These cross-currents are especially severe in Poem 451, which pursues a traditional hierarchy and model of signification, but does so with strong counter-intentions: The Outer ± from the Inner Derives its Magnitude ± `Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according As is the Central Mood ± The fine ± unvarying Axis That regulates the Wheel ± Though Spokes ± spin ± more conspicuous And fling a Dust ± the while.





On fine ± Arterial Canvas ±

A Cheek ± perchance a Brow ±

The Star's whole Secret ± in the Lake ±

Eyes were not meant to know.53

In this poem, as in the norms of western metaphysical tradition, inner determines outer, while the outer serves and points back to the inner. In terms of sign-theory, the outer as signifier subserves the inner as signified, while the signified determines the signifier's `Magnitude' and meaning, Duke or Dwarf. Dickinson in this poem follows a whole series of traditional allocations. The signified is Ìnner', `Central', and ùnvarying Axis' ± interior, unchanging, singular; while the signifier is Òuter', a `Wheel' spinning in the `Dust'. The association of dust with body, recurrent through Dickinson's work, is picked up in the final stanza's imagery of the `Cheek' as a `Canvas' on which is painted the ìnner Brand'. Throughout this figural series, the ideal role of the signifier is not only to be secondary, but ultimately to disappear. The ideal signifier should become transparent as it refers to the signified, a reference which it is the true function of the signifier, through self-erasure, to convey. And yet, in this poem, the priorities between Outer and Inner are not quite absolutely established. The only way of seeing the ìnner Brand' is, after all, through the published `Picture', which achieves in the poem something like parity with its interior, bodiless (`without the Hand') origin: `precise ± As is the inner Brand'. The poem's ending is equivocal as well. What is reflected in the `Lake' ± an image of this world as a copy of the supernal one as old as Plato ± is the `Star's whole Secret'. This conclusion verges into a mystical language of occult revelation and penetration, even transgression. Eyes achieve a knowledge beyond knowledge they `were not meant to know'. Within the image-structures of the poem, the reflection of the Ìnner' and the `Star' in language and world seems almost a betrayal of transcendent secrets into material body, language, and time. Yet it is also there that knowledge, realization, and the poem are achieved. Paul Celan did not select one of Dickinson's explicitly articulated theo-linguistic texts for translation. His choices, while implicitly linguistic, remain more overtly metaphysical. One additional translation,



The Inner ± paints the Outer ±

The Brush without the Hand ±

Its Picture publishes ± precise ±

As is the inner Brand ±


At Half past Three, a single Bird Unto a silent Sky Propounded but a single term Of cautious melody. At Half past Four, Experiment Had subjugated test, And lo, Her silver Principle Supplanted all the rest. At Half past Seven, Element Nor Implement, be seen ± And Place was where the Presence was Circumference between.54 [Ein Vogel, einer, um halb vier: dem Himmel, der da schwieg, den einen Laut trug er ihm an sparsamster Melodie. Das war die Probe. Um halb fnf gings ber sie hinaus, und sieh: ihr silbernes Zuerst stach alles andre aus. Halb sieben: weder Element noch Werkzeug weit und breit. Ein Ort hier, dort die Gegenwart, mit einem Zwischenkreis.] This poem traces the course of song across markers in clock-time, from a tenuous initiation, through an aesthetic fullness, to a final and abrupt disappearance.55 Dickinson's language of almost formal philosophical or scientific investigation is retained by Celan: Propounded (trug an), Experiment, test (die Probe), (first) Principle (Zuerst), Element, Implement (Element, Werkzeug). Celan's syntax is, however, rather more discontinuous even than Dickinson's, chopping up the text into more



however ± the last he undertook (published in 1963) ± projects, at a very high level of complexity (not to say obscurity), linguistic-metaphysical issues, especially when read through Celan's own poetics.

truncated sentences and phrases. For the final `Circumference', a persistently crucial word in Dickinson's lexicon, Celan resorts to neologism: `Zwischenkreis'. From a Celanian point of view, this is a text of erasure. What it radicalizes is the temporality of signifiers, through the terms of the bird's song tenuously proposed, achieved, and then vanishing. The clock-time unmistakably and dramatically sets temporality as this poem's frame. The focus remains on the course of its signs or signifiers exactly as they etch themselves through time in a chain or sequence that is transient ± a transiency that is enacted in both the bird's song, whose course is pursued, and the language of the poem which pursues it. The poem in fact moves emphasis or attention away from a supposed `signified' that would be defined as stable in some supra-temporal realm, and to which the signifiers would refer or which they would represent; to the temporal signifiers through which the poem's experience takes shape. Instead of a supra-temporal signified, the poem asserts or assumes blank space: à silent Sky' (`der Himmel, der da schwieg') at the outset, an empty `Place' where `the Presence was' (Èin Ort hier, dort die Gegenwart') at the end. What traditionally is represented as signified here appears as silence, displacement, absence. Absence here is not an ontological signified reference, even paradoxically. It is not a mystical nothing as metaphysical realm, in negative transcendence of the physical world. Rather, it is a stage, or frame, upon which the signifier traces its course, and makes its claims. The poem does not found the claims of the signifier by trying to invest them with eternal presence, or by making them refer to eternal signifieds. The signifier ± the bird's `term', a choice of words that reinforces the trope of song as linguistic, and which Celan translates as `Laut', sound, suggesting as well the language sound of the poem's own words ± is specifically mutable and in motion. The poem insists on driven temporal force, from a single term to a supplanting principle, to final disappearance. But in this poem, the shape of this chain of signifiers in time is exactly the shape of meaning ± not as representing, in more or less inferior terms, a fixed signified existing fully outside of the process of signifying, but as a course through time thus given a significant order. And yet, the poem retains a metaphysical dimension and relationship as the stage for its venture into meaning. A `Place' continues to stand as scene or arena for the poem's linguistic course (and Celan certainly knew, as Dickinson may also have done, that `Place' (Òrt') translates the Hebrew `Makom', a standard name for the divine). Its venture into sound takes shape within a space of absence which here serves to




intensify the significance of its utterance. The final image, `Circumference', in Dickinson consistently intends an overarching connection between realms of experience, especially as these verge into transcendence.56 Celan's `Zwischenkreis' ± literally between-circle or intervalcircle ± makes this sense of connection explicit. The world of time, of sound, of language, remains the space of significant activity, but it does so within, and in continuing relation to a metaphysical frame that precedes, exceeds, and endures after it. And it is the course of song which, in this poem, specifically forges or enacts that connection ± a linguistic sense of `circumference' which Celan further realizes in this text by the introduction of a dialogical moment: ùnd sieh', a direct address to see. Dialogue itself emerges as a linguistic tie bringing separate experiences into meaningful relationship, recalling Celan's own peculiar term for linguistic order, `Meridian', as `something ± like language ± immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, crossing the two poles back into itself and thus ± cheerfully ± even crossing over the tropics/tropes'.57 But absence can have a more threatening sense, a more unstable meaning. It may serve as a stage for temporal, linguistic signification; or it may indicate a genuine erasure into meaninglessness. The poem then would emphasize tenuousness and cancellation. Absence, that is, may serve here as a metaphysical frame in which events meaningfully occur, where the metaphysical is not constituted as a separate ontological realm in which signified meanings reside outside or beyond temporal experience. But absence may instead signal metaphysical collapse. This would leave nothing more than a pure temporality `without', as Dickinson put it in the poem `Four Trees', `Design' or Òrder' or `Plan'. What Àt Half past Three' registers in either case is a different status for temporality or historicity, of history itself as the realm of significance. Instead of measuring or determining the value of temporal experience, the metaphysical dimension comes to be measured by it. There is a sense of the incursion of time into the realm and processes of meaning, which is no longer conceived as constituted before or outside temporal experience. Meaning, rather than being defined as an eternal, immutable, supra-historical order, instead takes place as ordered signifiers within the world and language. Àt Half past Three' may be said in this sense to point towards the revision of metaphysics, with its implications for language, which has emerged since Dickinson's writing, and which so marks Celan's own poetic. In Celan's case, the incursion of historicity, of history, into any metaphysical claim for order is inevitable and imperative. Celan's status as a




German speaking Rumanian-Jewish poet who lived through the Holocaust, but who continued to write in German, at once opens his texts towards questions of historical meaning that at once implicate divine intention, power, and/or goodness. In the context of World War II, the silences of God lose their merely mystical meanings and emerge, frighteningly, as the collapse of metaphysics altogether. This penetration of metaphysics by history, with its implications for mystical discourse itself, is suggested in another Celan translation of Dickinson: My life closed twice before its close ± It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven And all we need of hell.58 [Mein Leben, zweimal fiels in Schloss eh's zufllt; nun ich will jetzt sehn, ob die Unsterblichkeit ein Drittes mir enthllt, so ohne Hoffnung und so gross. Abschied, das ist, was uns, du Himmel, an dir wissbar ist, ± und Hlle ists genug.] It is impossible to know what biographical events Emily Dickinson intended to depict in this poem.59 But whatever Dickinson had in mind, the poem's terms explode when translated into Celan's German. The double closure of the poem opens for Celan towards the genocide of a people and the destruction of culture (although the historicity of Celan's translation suddenly brings into strong light the fact that Dickinson, as the dates plainly show, wrote the bulk of her verse in the context of her own culture's cataclysmic Civil War60). The metaphysical split that ruptures this poem takes shape within historical trauma. The only certain knowledge is that of parting, death or absence ± knowledge which, if it asserts a metaphysical power, does so in ways that only indict it.




`My life closed twice' insists on the place of historicity within metaphysical structure, as implicating ± indeed penetrating ± supposedly supra-historical realms. No longer do immutable realms stand beyond events as their measure. History is the test of God. As characteristically occurs in both Dickinson and Celan, an accusation against the divine comes to border on blasphemy. This, however, does not entail a secularist rejection of the metaphysical. To rebuke God is not to dismiss him. It is rather to attempt a strong, perhaps a violent reaching. Celan's dialogical recasting of the poem with `du Himmel, an dir wissbar ist' (you heaven, what is known of you) directs his anger, and his anguish, towards the divine, in a linguistic effort to structure some possible, positive relationship framing meaning within human experience. The effort towards meaning in this remains within language, even if ± or exactly as ± taking place in terms of a realm beyond language, an absence which would denote the metaphysical as ground for temporal, earthly meaning: or, as Dickinson calls it in what could be her translation of Celan, a Nothing: By homely gift and hindered Words The human heart is told Of Nothing ± `Nothing' is the force That renovates the World ±61 Redemptive power, the possibility of renewal, is in this poem at once asserted and denied. The `Nothing', perhaps the most radical, as also the most ancient term for mystical devotion, here may be positive or negative. The poem thus balances at an edge peculiar to negative mystical language, at once claiming and disclaiming a metaphysical dimension as directing experience in the world. Yet the metaphysical is not abandoned ± or rather, the consequences of metaphysical abandonment remain dire. And the poem in its way performs what is its own acutest hope. It realizes its metaphysical yearning (as also its metaphysical despair) within the familiar realm of the temporal and the linguistic. Renovation, if it will come, will come within the immanence of `homely gift' in our immediate, ordinary world; and through `hindered Words', the imperfection which Wallace Stevens calls paradise, where delight `lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds'.62 The metaphysical is experienced, if at all, within the mutable, through an endless and ongoing effort to frame value in language, as the articulation of meaning.





1 Emily Dickinson (1970), Poem 1065, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, London: Faber & Faber, p. 485. This paper follows Johnson's numbering. 2 This text, along with the other Celan translations of Dickinson (there are ten in all) have been reprinted in Paul Celan (1983), Paul Celan Gesammelte Werke in fnf Banden vol. 5, ed. Beda Allemann, Frankfurt Am Main; Suhrkamp Verlag, pp. 382±401. `Let down the bars, O death' first appeared in Neue Rundschau vol. 72 (1961), pp. 36±9. The publication history of this, along with other Dickinson poems, appear on p. 631 of Gesammelte Werke. Evidence internal to the translations show that Celan relied on the edition of Dickinson poems compiled in (1955) The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson, 3 vols, Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press. For Celan's relationship to mystical discourses, see below. 3 The linguistic orientation of Jewish mysticism is most thoroughly explored in Gershom Scholem (1972), `The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah', Diogenes vol. 79, pp. 59±80 and Diogenes vol. 80, pp. 164±94. I have discussed the linguistic nature of Jewish mysticism in its relation to Celan in (1995), Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 4 The other poems translated by Celan are: `Der Tod', (`Because I could not stop for Death') in Almanach S. Fischer vol. 73 (1959), p. 59; `My life closed twice', `To my quick ears;' Òne blessing had I;' `Father, I bring thee;' Ì never saw a moor;' Ì reason, earth is short;' `Four Trees' (and `Let down the bars, O death') in Neue Rundschau vol. 72 (1961), pp. 36±39; and Ùm halb vier' in Insel-Almanach (1963), p. 65. 5 Such aestheticist readings are characteristic in Dickinson Studies. See, for one example, Margaret Dickie (1991), Lyric Contingencies, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 6 Albert Gelpi (1971), Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet, New York: Norton, p. 90. Gelpi later recognized a loose and general association, and affirms Dickinson's place within a New England `literary tradition' of typological readings of nature, which also includes Edwards (pp. 107 and 154). 7 Richard Sewell (1974), The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, p. 24. 8 Jack L. Capps (1966), Emily Dickinson's Reading, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 102. 9 Karl Keller (1979), The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 67±8. Keller does concede that Dickinson `may have read about Edwards in local history books', such as her friend Josiah Holland's History of Western Massachusetts (1855). 10 Cited in Keller, The Only Kangaroo, p. 69 n. 5. 11 Sydney Ahlstrom (1972), A Religious History of the American People, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 404. 12 Jonathan Edwards (1989), A History of the Work of Redemption in Works of Jonathan Edwards 9 vols, ed. John F. Wilson, New Haven: Yale University Press, vol. 9, p. 88.



Notes

13 Emily Dickinson, Letter 142, in (1958), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols, ed. Thomas Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, vol. 1, p. 272. Joseph A. Conforti in (1995), Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, retraces these Edwardsian influences through nineteenth-century culture, devoting a chapter to Park ± as well as to Mary Lyon (p. 55). Park taught at Amherst 1836±7, and was invited to be President of Amherst College in 1844, but declined in order to stay on at Andover. Barton Levi St Armand (1984), Emily Dickinson and her Culture, New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 121, identifies the Park sermon as one Dickinson refers to again twenty years later as `the loveliest sermon I ever heard' (Dickinson, Letter 385). Jay Leyda in (1960) The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press, records a letter that gives some sense of the intimate ties between Andover and Amherst (vol. 2, p. 26). 14 Fidlia Fisk, a teacher at the college, recalls how Mary Lyon preached `with Edwards's History of Redemption in her hand' and regularly read it aloud to her students `between the morning and afternoon service of the Sabbath', Fidlia Fisk (1866), Recollections of Mary Lyon, Boston; American Tract Society, pp. 103±4; see Conforti Jonathan Edwards, p. 95, and Edwards, Works vol. 9, p. 88. 15 This information was kindly provided to me by Avihu Zakai, who has been most generous in providing me with information and materials concerning Jonathan Edwards, and John Lancaster, Curator of Special Collections, Amherst College Library. 16 Dickinson, Letter 46, in Johnson, Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1, p. 121. 17 Dickinson, Poem 1522, in The Complete Poems, p. 637. 18 Dickinson, Letter 712, in Johnson, Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 3, p. 701. 19 Dickinson, Poem 1598, in The Complete Poems, p. 661. 20 Dickinson, Poem 1712, in The Complete Poems, p. 696. 21 Susan Gilbert Dickinson describes a Bible class as one in which the Deacon `weighed down our youthful spirits every Sunday morning with his pictures of ourselves as rebellious sinners in the hands of an avenging God', quoted in St Armand, Emily Dickinson, p. 84. 22 Dickinson, Poem 1651, in The Complete Poems, p. 675. 23 Papers on `Natural Philosophy' in (1980), Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6, ed. Wallace Anderson, New Haven; Yale University Press, pp. 305±6. See Sang Hyun Lee (1988), The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton: Princeton University Press, for a discussion of Edwards's use of the term `consent'. 24 Edwards, Works, vol. 6, p. 349. 25 Just how traditional these modern linguistic terms are, is underscored in a book such as Kenneth Burke (1970), The Rhetoric of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press, where Burke's discussion of signified and signifier is expressly Augustinian. My own discussion is based in the critique of this traditional sign-theory initiated by Jacques Derrida in, for example, (1974), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. See my own essay (1982), `Derrida, JabeÁs, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse', Prooftexts vol. 2, pp. 283±302. 26 Edwards, Works, vol. 6, p. 349.




27 Perry Miller discusses this Lockean context for Edwards's language theory in (1949), Jonathan Edwards, New York: William Sloane Associates, p. 149, where he quotes from Edwards's early resolutions. 28 Miller Jonathan Edwards, p. 149.

29 Miller Jonathan Edwards, pp. 156±8.

30 Perry Miller (1956), Errand into the Wilderness, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, p. 178. 31 Edwards, Works, vol. 6, pp. 391±3. 32 Jonathan Edwards, À Divine and Supernatural Light', in Clarence Faust and Thomas Johnson, eds (1962), Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections, New York; Hill and Wang, pp. 104±5. This sermon was first published in 1734, after being delivered at Northampton. 33 Sang Hyun Lee, Philosophical Theology, discusses this association in Edwards between imagination and the passions, noting Edwards departure from the traditional Christian view of imagination and passion as `negative elements disturbing clear ideas', pp. 115±17. Stephen Daniel, in (1994), The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, argues that Edwards's work represents a shift from traditional `predicative' metaphysics to a `model of discourse of communicative exchange', p. 2, but this seems to me too thoroughly to resolve what remains for Edwards a conflict. 34 Charles Feidelson (1953), Symbolism and American Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 99±101. 35 Miller, Errand, pp. 195, 202±3. 36 Obviously, it is impossible to develop this immense topic here. But to cite only the `Language' section of Emerson's essay on `Nature', a text Dickinson knew, when Emerson says: `The use of the outer creation [is] to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation', he seems to place priority on inward activity, with nature a symbolic language for ideas. This seems also the case when he speaks of man's `power over nature as an interpreter'. Yet when he soon also calls `man an analogist' who `studies relation in all objects', he seems to claim the relation is already there, external to man, which he then reads Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, pp. 31±3. 37 Cited in Sewell, Life, vol. 2, p. 355. 38 Horace Bushnell (1967), Preliminary Dissertation on The Nature of Language as Related to Thought and Spirit in Theology in America, ed. Sydney Ahlstrom, New York: Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., p. 324. Ahlstrom calls the `Dissertation on Language' à milestone in American thought', p. 318. For discussions on Bushnell and language, see for example Michael Kramer (1992), Imagining Language in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 156. 39 Bushnell, Dissertation, pp. 332±3. Cf. `Words are legitimately used as the signs of thoughts to be expressed. [Yet] they do not literally convey, or pass over a thought out of one mind into another. . . . They are only hints or images', p. 330. 40 Bushnell, Dissertation, pp. 340±1, 350. Cf. Àll seeming contradictions are in fact only successive presentations of single sides of a truth, which, by their union, manifest completely to us its existence', p. 342.




41 Bushnell quotes Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici Part I, Section 12, in Ahlstrom, Dissertation, p. 350. 42 Bushnell, Dissertation, p. 333. 43 Thomas aÁ Kempis (1952), The Imitation of Christ, Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 30. 44 Dickinson, Poem 1700, in The Complete Poems, p. 692. 45 Dickinson, Poem 1700, in The Complete Poems, p. 692. 46 Dickinson, Poem 855, in The Complete Poems, p. 410. 47 Dickinson, Poem 1681, in The Complete Poems, p. 686. 48 Dickinson, Poem 1681, in The Complete Poems, p. 686. 49 Dickinson, Poem 976, in The Complete Poems, p. 456. 50 Dickinson, Poem 664, in The Complete Poems, p. 330. 51 Dickinson, Poem 1651, in The Complete Poems, p. 676. 52 Dickinson, Poem 1129, in The Complete Poems, p. 506. 53 Dickinson, Poem 451, in The Complete Poems, pp. 216±17. 54 Dickinson, Poem 1084, in The Complete Poems, p. 491. 55 The `plot' of the poem is clarified through an earlier version of it, Dickinson, Poem 783, in The Complete Poems, p. 381. 56 `Circumference' recurs throughout Dickinson's work as a term of mediation between different realms, such as heaven and earth, time and eternity. See for example Dickinson, Poem 378, in The Complete Poems, p. 180, where the poet, somehow caught between heaven and earth goes òut upon Circumference'. The term is a staple of Dickinson criticism, and almost every commentator discusses it. 57 Celan concludes his speech accepting the Georg Buchner Prize in literature with this image of Meridan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, p. 202. 58 Dickinson, Poem 1732, in The Complete Poems, pp. 702±3. 59 Suppositions have ranged from unhappy love affairs to nervous breakdowns. But, as Thomas Johnson observes, àny speculation about its autobiographical import is vain'. 60 See Shira Wolosky (1984), Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, New Haven: Yale University Press. 61 Dickinson, Poem 1563, in The Complete Poems, p. 650. 62 Wallace Stevens (1955), `Poems of Our Climate', in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, London: Faber & Faber, p. 194.




On the Trajectory of Gnosis: Pierre Reverdy via (obscura) St John of the Cross Bernard McGuirk

. . . poetic intuition . . . alone provides the thread that can put us back on the road of Gnosis as knowledge of the suprasensible Reality, ìnvisibly visible in an eternal mystery'. AndreÂ Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

Invisibly visible, an oxymoron drawn from the association of the sacred with the written; for in scripture is the holy at once, purportedly, hidden and revealed. Writing in its most distilled form is often, and across cultures, identified as a poetic discourse and the purest poetry runs the risk of being regarded as exclusively formal, as removed as possible from any material reality or even the representation of such. The albeit important reputation of Pierre Reverdy as theoretician of Cubism and as one of the principal aestheticians of the avant-garde period appears less and less to hamper assessments of his writing ± prose and poetry alike ± in an ever-richer and broader spectrum of critical contexts. At the same time, a clear shift in methodologies is in evidence. No longer are readings so predictably tied to the juxtaposition and matching of Reverdy's poetic practice, say, with his aesthetic principles. Adherence to a view of Reverdy as the impersonal poet par excellence ± quintessential forger of a pure poetry ± is increasingly outmoded. Without diminishing awareness of his crucial role in the artistic moment of the post-First World War, critics are addressing the plural and varied output of a career hardly confined by those experimental years of contact with Apollinaire, Piccaso, Braque, Breton, Soupault and the rest. Reverdy the polemicist, Reverdy the metaphysical but ± no less ± the physical poet, is constantly able to resist and break free from any imposition of critical enclosure. 46



3

In the general context of contemporary critical theories and the particular perspective of situating Reverdy's writing against the multiple trajectories of twentieth-century French literature, I wish to explore the propensity of writing, and specifically poetry, to control a (reader's) desire but, at the same time, to desire a (reader's) control. The function of desire will be situated with reference to a short sequence of Reverdy poems, in two contexts of mysticism. Firstly, the intertext chosen to highlight Reverdy's performance of a Judaeo-Christian poetic heritage is that of European literature's most renowned mystic, St John of the Cross, (re)visited in the present volume by Ana Barro. Secondly, taking up Jacques Derrida's suggestion, with regard to Emmanuel Levinas, that just as there is a negative theology so there is a negative atheology, my meditation on Reverdy's poetry of desire will situate a discourse of nonfulfillment as part of that gnostic trajectory so often suppressed in Western literature yet constantly prone to re-emergence in an unorthodox mysticism. Contrary to the standard perception of Pierre Reverdy as a poet of impersonality, it is the basic assumption of this analysis that his poetry divulges a continuum of ever-changing and very different voices. Within a theoretical framework of the poetics of influence, not only does Reverdy's writing embody a complex network of citation and recitation ± of his own `preceding' texts as much as of other `precedent' writers ± but these citations also take place within a psychological dimension of considerable anxiety. In accordance with the notions of Harold Bloom, Reverdy addresses his `precursor' text(s) both with the need to displace and supplant and with the apprehension that such misprision may prove unsuccessful. Already established, then, psychologically speaking, is the double rhythm or tension so often associated with Reverdy's poetic trajectory, namely àspireÂ en haut/attireÂ en bas'. Paradoxically, this double movement, or potential momentum, is not to be defined as exclusively theological, despite the connotations of my title. While a theocentric discourse operates in Reverdy's poetry no less than in the literary/poetic discourse of Western writing in general, it is not my aim to fix attention on the religious momentum alone. For the psychological drama played out in the Reverdy text is inseparable from an inherited form, a teleological style, or rhythm, which is best compared to the breath slowly inhaled, retained, pent up, even to the point of anguished tension, before release. Pneuma, then, far from associable merely with the breath of inspiration of the romantically exaggerated poetic muse, assumes more sinister proportion. For the inspiration is all



On the Trajectory of Gnosis 47


`Psyche' is ultimately from the Indo-European root bhes, meaning `to breath', and possibly was imitative in its origins. `Text' goes back to the root teks, meaning `to weave', and also `to fabricate' . . . a breath is at once a word, and a stance for uttering that word, a word and a stance of one's own. In this context, a weaving or a fabrication is what we call a poem, and its function is to represent, to bring back into being again, as individual stance and word. The poem, as text, is represented or seconded by what psychoanalysis calls the psyche . . . A poetic `text', as I interpret it, is not a gathering of signs on a page, but is a psychic battlefield upon which authentic forces struggle for the only victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over oblivion . . . Few notions are more difficult to dispel than the `commonsensical' one that a poetic text is self-contained, that it has an ascertainable meaning or meaning without reference to other poetic texts. Something in nearly every reader wants to say: `Here is a poem and there is a meaning, and I am reasonably certain that the two can be brought together'. Unfortunately, poems are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on, into the densely overpopulated world of literary language. Any poem is an inter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading. A poem is not writing, but rewriting.1 Harold Bloom's version of intertextuality may serve as an eloquent critical context in which to situate the present reading of Reverdy, emphasizing as it does an interpellation to and with an Otherness itself structured, in Lacanian terms, both like a text and like a psyche. For the purposes of my argument here I have chosen to concentrate on five poems which not only constitute interpellations but might also be regarded as love-poetry, were it not for the (supposed) notorious lack of such in Reverdy's text, in Reverdy's psyche.2 But to the presence or absence of Eros, I shall return. TOI OU MOI Endormi dans cette chambre Il n'ose plus se reÂveiller La peur ferme son reÃve noir



too often uncontainable; all too often a sure prelude to failure. Failure of a text, failure of a psyche. But `failure' only in the sense of impossible unity; necessary dependence on and interaction with other text(s), other psyche(s).

Et ses membres Ne peuvent plus le soutenir Je t'abandonne il faut partir Si l'on n'aime bien que soi-meÃme Je te laisse parce que je t'aime Et qu'il faut encore marcher Un jour nous nous retrouverons peut-eÃtre OuÁ se croisent les souvenirs OuÁ repassent les histoires d'autrefois Alors tu reviendras vers moi Nous pourrons rire Un espoir aÁ peine indiqueÂ Sous le vent une plainte ameÁre La voix qui pourrait me guider Á mon approche va se taire A Dans la rue bordeÂe de chansons Qui jaillissaient par les feneÃtres Au coin des dernieÁres maisons Nous nous regardions disparaõÃtre [YOU OR ME Asleep in this bedroom He no longer dares to wake up Fear shuts his black dream And his limbs Cannot support him any more I abandon you it is necessary to leave If one only likes oneself I am leaving you because I love you And because one must still walk on One day we shall meet again perhaps Where memories cross Where stories of the past are relived Then you will come back towards me We shall be able to laugh A hope hardly shown In the wind a bitter lament The voice which could guide me At my approach is going to fall silent In the street lined with songs Which poured out of the windows





My use of `Toi ou moi' may be limited, in the first instance, to the most cursory èxtra-textual' observation regarding the change of title from `Soi et soi'. The long-standing disguise or veil drawn over the splitting of self or `deÂdoublement de personnage' is suddenly dropped. A Cubist painter would find nothing strange in the suggestion that a change of title forces the viewer to `see' the painting differently. Concomitantly, here, the change from the double `soi' shifts attention from a mere grammatical play of separate personae, occurring in the long-established and heart- (as well as personality-) rending pain of self-contemplation, to a more situational or social splitting. Addresser and addressee are now visualizable in terms of a love-tryst in a poem already noteworthy for the careful development of temporal perspectives, from present reticence and then decisiveness, to hope in the future and, finally, to the `street-level' release ± in the past ± of the emotional tensions built up along a thoroughly familiar Reverdyan trajectory. The elements I wish to stress, however, are the initial phase of sleep, the retreat ± albeit fearful ± into the darkness of dream, the imperative nature of a thoroughly physical separation, the function of the past and of memory and of the putative importance given to the guiding voice which, however, on being approached, falls silent, giving way to more recognizably social, but already faded, song-snippets. It will readily be perceived that my choosing of certain elements of construction from within the poem deliberately resists any full or interpretative reading. For I am concerned, in elaborating my argument over a series of poems, to point out the consistent interplay of repeated tropes. Whereas `Toi ou moi' ends on a suspended note of `jaillissaient' [poured] and `regardions' [watch], the imperfect, never fully completed dissolution or fade-out, `Chemin tournant' discloses, finally, a wholly different tone. Here `s'est passeÂ' [happened] and `j'ai perdu' [I have wasted] bring the poem to a close and an experience, recently evoked, to closure. CHEMIN TOURNANT Il y a un terrible gris de poussieÁre dans le temps Un vent du sud avec de fortes ailes Les eÂchos sourds de l'eau dans le soir chavirant Et dans la nuit mouilleÂe qui jaillit du tournant des voix rugueuses qui se plaignent



At the corner of the last houses We would watch each other disappear]

Ã t de cendre sur la langue Un gou Un bruit d'orgue dans les sentiers Le navire du coeur qui tangue Tous les deÂsastres du meÂtier Quand les feux du deÂsert s'eÂteignent un aÁ un Quand les yeux sont mouilleÂs comme des brins d'herbe Quand la roseÂe descend les pieds nus sur les feuilles Le matin aÁ peine leveÂ Il y a quelqu'un qui cherche Une adresse perdue dans le chemin cacheÂ Les astres deÂrouilleÂs et les fleurs deÂgringolent Á travers les branches casseÂes A Et le ruisseau obscur essuie ses leÁvres molles aÁ peine deÂcolleÂes Quand le pas du marcheur sur le cadran qui compte reÂgle le mouvement et pousse l'horizon Tous les cris sont passeÂs tous les temps se rencontrent Et moi je marche au ciel les yeux dans les rayons Il y a du bruit pour rien et des noms dans ma teÃte Des visages vivants Tout ce qui s'est passeÂ au monde Et cette feÃte OuÁ j'ai perdu mon temps [ROAD TURNING There is a terrible greyness of dust in the weather A south wind with strong wings The deaf echoes of water in the capsizing evening And in the wet night jutting out from the turning rough voices which complain A taste of ash on the tongue A noise of organ on the footpaths The ship of the heart listing All the disasters of the trade When the lights of the desert go out one by one When eyes are damp like blades of grass When the dew drops barefoot on the leaves Morning scarcely risen There is someone searching




An address lost on the hidden road Stars derusted and flowers tumbling Over the broken branches And the dark stream wipes its soft lips hardly prised apart When the step of the marcher on the counting clock-face regulates movement and pushes back the horizon All cries are past all times meet And I march heavenwards my eyes in the rays There is noise for nothing and in my head Living faces Everything that has happened in the world

And this feÃte

Where I have wasted my time] The `rue bordeÂe de chansons' (of the `banquet years'?) is but a prelude to the re-siting ± and, of course, re-citing ± of Apollinaire's earlier disenchantment `J'ai veÂcu comme un fou et j'ai perdu mon temps'.3 The `zone' of Reverdy's disillusionment is, however, notably different. In contrast to the precursor's sharp taste of alcohol, the swallowing of a burning, vital truth (`cette eau-de-vie que tu bois comme ta vie'4), Ã t de cendre sur la langue' [a Reverdy's bad taste in the mouth, (ùn gou taste of ash on the tongue]) forms part of a recognizably liturgical set of ciphers. Here, the `retreat' into darkness, while echoing the trajectory of `Toi ou moi', constitutes virtually a retreat in the sense of withdrawal from the world for a period of self-accusation, mortification of the senses, repentance and devotional exercise. The crucial turning `dans la nuit mouilleÂe qui jaillit du tournant' [in the wet night jutting out from the turning] occurs amidst `des voix rugueuses qui se plaignent' [rough voices which complain] of fellow penitents, compatible with T.S. Eliot's Àsh Wednesday' (1930) dependence on a Lenten preparation for re-awakening. Against all-pervasive organ tones, the ecclesiastical clicheÂ of a storm-tossed Church becomes, via a transferred epithet, the swelling, troubled heart . . . as yet not uplifted, in prayer, to `les astres', but burdened by `les deÂsastres' of the craft of writing. `Quand les feux . . . , Quand les yeux . . . , Quand la roseÂe . . . ' [When the lights . . . When eyes . . . When the dew drops . . . ] initiate an echoing litany; not only evoking a Whitmanian re-enactment of the Leaves of Grass (`brins d'herbe') adventure (later to be taken up in Grande nature) but also re-writing The New Testament `scripture' of self mortification ± desert, weeping, bare-footedness and all-night vigil. Breaking with the





dawn, this sequence reveals a typically Reverdyan unidentified but questing persona:

The keynote of progression, however, is the uncertainty of directionless wandering in a deepening darkness: Une adresse perdue dans le chemin cacheÂ [An address lost on the hidden road] Notably, sky and earth are brought together when àstres' and `fleurs' are perceived through broken branches ± a conjunction of two horizontal planes which permits the momentary, mouth-watering possibility of movement through horizon ± however, regulated ± for `[le] marcheur sur le cadran' [the marcher on the clock-face]. It is precisely at this point ± in a suspended moment when `tous les temps se rencontrent' [all times meet] ± that the poem divulges a `moi'. Hidden until now by carefully constructed modes of indirection, this `moi' is suddenly released from the burden of memory (from names and faces) and from those `deÂsastres du meÂtier' [disasters of the trade] of a failed, embittering involvement in a futile merry-go-round such as that evoked in Les Jockeys camoufleÂs. For the moment, it would appear, the imperfect, unfinished symphony of avant-gardism, evoked in `Toi ou moi', is laid to rest in `Chemin tournant' ± very firmly a passeÂ composeÂ. A poem does not simply end. It is, rather, a link in that chain ± progressive yet imprisoning ± of (self-)citation which is writing. Thus, `Chemin tournant' is inseparable from Èncore l'amour' and `Toujours l'amour'. But just what is this love? What, who, is its object? And what is the nature of that link in the chain of love which constantly re-engages with a circle closed but never separate? The key-note of the enchaining process is temporal. The repetitive reorganizability, the deÂjaÁ vu of multiple, unbreakable encores. ENCORE L'AMOUR Je ne veux plus partir vers ces grands bols du soir Serrer les mains glaceÂes des ombres les plus proches Je ne peux plus quitter ces airs de deÂsespoir Ni gagner les grands ronds qui m'attendent au large C'est pourtant vers ces visages sans forme que je vais



Il y a quelqu'un qui cherche [There is someone searching]

Vers ces lignes mouvantes qui toujours m'emprisonnent

Ces lignes que mes yeux tracent dans l'incertain

Ces paysages confus ces jours mysteÂrieux

Sous le couvert du temps griseÂ quand l'amour passe

Ãle nuit et jour

Un amour sans objet qui bru

Et qui use sa lampe ma poitrine si lasse

D'attacher les soupirs qui meurent dans leur tour

Les lointains bleus les pays chauds les sables blancs

Á germe la paresse

La greÁve ouÁ roule l'or ou

Ãle tieÁde ou

Á le marin s'endort

Le mo L'eau perfide qui vient flatter la pierre dure

Sous le soleil gourmand qui broute la verdure

La penseÂe assoupie lourde clignant des yeux

Les souvenirs leÂgers en boucles sur le front

Les repos sans reÂveil dans un lit trop profond

La pente des efforts remis au lendemain

Le sourire du ciel qui glisse dans la main

Mais surtout les regrets de cette solitude

Ã coeur fermeÂ o Ã coeur profond

Ã coeur pesant o

O Jamais de la douleur prendras-tu l'habitude

[LOVE AGAIN I no longer want to set off towards those great bowls of evening To shake the icy hands of the nearest shadows I can no longer leave those looks of despair Nor reach the great circles which await me at large Yet it is towards those formless faces that I am going Towards those moving lines which always imprison me Those lines that my eyes trace in the uncertain Those vague landscapes those mysterious days Under the cover of greyish weather when love passes by A love without object which uses up its lamp my breast so weary Of holding on to sighs which die in their turn Distant blues hot countries white sands Gravel-shore where gold ripples or laziness sprouts Warm jetty where the sailor falls asleep Treacherous water which comes to caress the hard stone Under the greedy sun which grazes on the greenery Heavy drowsy thought blinking its eyes Light memories in curls on the forehead Rest without waking in a bed too deep





That Èncore l'amour' may be read theologically, whatever the plurivalency of its suggestivity as love-poetry, is all too obvious. What then of the nature of that theology? The negativity of will (`je ne veux plus') with which the poem opens is irrefutable. Endless rendez-vous, empty of all but a ghostly chill, the vestigial, shadowy pointers to an unperceived love-object, bring the wooer to an initial statement of despair, convinced of the futility of promises of aperture, of union, of embrace, of enchainment with otherness. The conceptual premise of the poem's opening four lines is entirely in keeping with a specific form of mystic attitude, in short, the negative theology of St John of the Cross. Before embarking on an analysis of such a gnostic trajectory, however, it is necessary to re-situate the precursor-poet, reading against the grain of accepted interpretations of the Spanish saint. A standard reading of St John's mystic trajectory is divided into three stages, the Purgative way, the Illuminative way, and the Unitive way, culminating in the spiritual marriage of the (female) soul with its (male) bride-groom. According to such a reading, the teleological principle of mystic aspiration is paramount, each stage representing a moment of rejection ± of worldliness, of darkness and of solitude/alienation respectively. And the end-in-view of such a teleology is the positive euphoric union with the beloved. That a fundamental dualism bedevils such a mystic theology ± and traditional readings of it ± must by now be apparent. For what if the mystic started out in the firm conviction of, and resignation to, the unknowability of other? That is, in the assumption that any form of èxperience' of God constitutes an obstacle to union, rather than a bridge or access to it? For this is precisely what St John of the Cross claims: `Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved'.5 As Timothy Jenkins has pointed out, `John is concerned with the particular problems that are presented to knowledge by something that (a) is not a thing and (b) is unknowable'.6 The implications of such a reading of St John would place Reverdy's initial response here firmly in a tradition which dismantles the metaphor of the journey as grail-seeking quest for union. A positive theology cannot accommodate or accept the scandalous absent term (`God') as



Slope of efforts put off til tomorrow Smile of heaven slipping through the hand But above all the regrets of that solitude Oh closed heart oh heavy heart oh deep heart will you never get used to pain]

being truly absent. A positive mysticism constructs, lives out and, ultimately, depends on a metaphysics of ± albeit delayed ± presence. A positive theology purports to know the absent term, even to be at one with it, in contrast with St John's position, namely, believing in, and only in, the unknown, the un-knowable. Not so clear-cut, however, is Reverdy's theological trajectory, at least, not at this stage. For the moment, a more traditional, positive association between seeing and believing is always liable to intrude: C'est pourtant vers ces visages sans forme que je vais Vers ces lignes mouvantes qui toujours m'emprisonnent Ces lignes que mes yeux tracent dans l'incertain Ces paysages confus ces jours mysteÂrieux Sous le couvert du temps griseÂ quand l'amour passe [Yet it is towards those formless faces that I am going Towards those moving lines which always imprison me These lines that my eyes trace in the uncertain Those vague landscapes those mysterious days Under the cover of greyish weather when love passes by] If, indeed, Reverdy's `mystic way' is to be compared to St John's progress towards the `Dark Night of the Soul', then, for the moment, the halflight of `le temps griseÂ [greyish weather] (reminiscent of the `terrible gris de poussieÁre' [terrible greyness of dust] of `Chemin tournant') still affords the possibility of picking out `ces visages sans formes' [those formless faces]. At play here is the positive recogniton implied by that construction of God as having made man in his own image. To see, to trace the lines of Deity in others' faces, still emphasizes a positive theology, namely, the possibility of seeing ± and of therefore knowing ± God. In this respect, Reverdy's poem already concedes, the tracing of the lines of potential recognition is, in fact, an act of self-imprisonment. Paradoxically, the ever-moving lines towards which the aspirant proceeds form but a tauntingly mobile version of the traditionally fixed and rigid bars of the mystic's cell. Freedom of movement, then, is but an illusory gain. For love still fails to reach its target: . . . quand l'amour passe Ã le nuit et jour Un amour sans objet qui bru Et qui use sa lampe ma poitrine si lasse D'attacher les soupirs qui meurent dans leur tour





What is more, and poignantly, the attachment to light conveyed in the striking image-fusion `sa lampe ma poitrine' [its lamp my breast] merely serves to fatigue the pursuant devotee, whose weary sighs die both ìn turn' and ìn their tower' (`dans leur tour'). Myriad associations of the imprisoning tower as temporary or permanent obstacle to the Grail-seeking purpose are evoked. In this instance, however, the construction (conceivably the erection) which follows on from this situating of the self, of desire, and of a love which, while ardent, knows no direct object, takes the form of memory. And, as so often in Reverdy's poetry, the memories evoked are of a warm and indolent far-off land, plunging the poem into a sequence of restless sensuality. To pursue an exclusively spiritual reading here would be perverse, given the blatant psycho-sexual dimension of Ã le tieÁde' [warm jetty], `flatter la pierre dure' [caress the hard `le mo stone] and, not least, the juxtaposition of `le sourire du ciel qui glisse dans la main' [smile of heaven slipping through the hand] with `les regrets de la solitude' [the regrets of that solitude]. For, let it not be forgotten, the physical excitement of mystic trance is always potentially orgasmic (with or without the flagellant's scourge). As Èncore l'amour' closes, deep exhaustion and disillusionment, equivalent of the post coitum triste but without a memory of consummation, exacerbate the lover's sense of loss. The paradox of the mystic experience is embodied within `l'amour passe'/ùn amour sans objet'; love exists only as a consciously cultivated parasite, feeding on the soul's aspiration, but coming to rest (or not to rest) in what slips from the hand ± `le sourire du ciel' ± heaven's mockery at the repeated (Èncore . . . ') failure to grasp love. Anti-climax, then, has brought about the extinction of the `lampe'/ `poitrine' image: Ã coeur fermeÂ o Ã coeur profond Ã coeur pesant o O Jamais de la douleur prendras-tu l'habitude [Oh closed heart oh heavy heart oh deep heart will you never get used to pain] The haunting final verses, far from a raising up of the heart and mind to God, form a self-directed, desperate prayer.



[ . . . when love passes by A love without object which uses up its lamp my breast so weary Of holding on to sighs which die in their turn]

For St John of the Cross, there is a crucial distinction between seeing and believing. To see is to know; consequently, to half-see is but to halfknow, to encounter but the frustration of attachment to the rhythms and trajectory of love, never to `know' in the plenitude of consummation. What the contemplative half-sees, then, paradoxically, weaves a `veil' between the self and the putative love-object. For St John, only God can rend this veil: If it be Your will:

Tear thro' the veil of this sweet encounter!7

Timothy Jenkins, in tellingly succinct fashion, captures the paradox here: But the veil cannot be broken, and consummation cannot be achieved in this life, for the direct vision of God would cause the death of the believer. The believer has to live in faith, and in the hope of seeing God. Hence participation in the life of the Trinity always takes place in darkness: we cannot `know' God with the intellect, but rather through faith, until the next life `when the clear vision of God dawns upon the soul'.8 Let us suppose, therefore, not that vision but rather that faith ± even blind faith ± determines the possibility of access to the Beloved. Thus, the believer might rush through the day (of life, of light) towards the night (of death, of darkness) in order to embrace the Other in a moment of liberation from imprisoning vision: TOUJOURS L'AMOUR Sous les lueurs des plantes rares les joues roses des cerisiers les diamants de la distance Et les perles dont elle se pare Sous les lustres des flaques tieÁdes Á travers la campagne hacheÂe A Á travers les sommeils trancheÂs A Á travers l'eau et les ornieÁres A les pelouses des cimetieÁres Á travers toi A Au bout du monde Le monde couru pas aÁ pas




Ton amour sous la roue du soir

Á peine la force de ce geste de deÂsespoir

A

Á peine l'eau rideÂe sur le cours de ton sein A

Contre le parapet fragile du destin J'aime ces flocons blancs de la penseÂe perdue dans le vent de l'hiver et le printemps mordu Mon esprit deÂlivreÂ de ces chaõÃnes anciennes Et que la rouille a deÂnoueÂes Pour me serrer plus fort aujourd'hui dans les tiennes [ALWAYS LOVE Beneath the glow of rare plants pink cheeks of cherry trees diamonds of distance And the pearls with which it bedecks itself Beneath the shining of warm pools Across cut countryside Across sliced sleep Across water and tracks The lawns of cemeteries Towards you To the end of the world The world covered step by step Your love beneath the wheel of evening Scarcely the strength of that gesture of despair Scarcely the water rippled on the flow of your breast Against the fragile parapet of fate I love those white flakes of lost thought in the winter wind and the bitter spring My spirit delivered from those ancient chains And which rust has undone To squeeze me more strongly today in yours] `Toujours l'amour' opens with a proliferation of light. Yet the striking images of the first five lines, each constructed from sources of potential brightness, divulge not the possibility of vision but of revelation. The crescendo of àÁ travers . . . ', àÁ travers . . . ', àÁ travers . . . ' conveys flight not through nature alone but through a fusion of landscape and dream, conjoined in the intermingling of their fragmented parts, `hacheÂe'/ `trancheÂs' [cut/sliced]. This flight, linear and horizontal, breaks the rhythm of circularity of `le pas du marcheur sur le cadran' [the marcher




on the the clock-face] in the headlong rush beyond `les pelouses des cimetieÁres' [the lawns of cemeteries], beyond death, to the site of encounter with a love-object explicitly stated ± àÁ travers toi' [towards you]. At the very limit of terrestrial experience (àu bout du monde'), in a world painstakingly explored (`pas aÁ pas'), comes yet another taunting complication. For `Ton amour sous la roue du soir' [Your love beneath the wheel of evening] combines a perception of the via veritas, attainable through faith in love, with a reminder of the circularity of earthly time as evening falls. `La roue du soir' at once bodes the longed for darkness but conceals, too, the now detested promise of light, next day, as cyclical temporality threatens to deprive the seeker of all-embracing night . . . the final, consummate `Noche oscura del alma'. Although fatigued by effort, the as yet unidentified pursuer is barely strong enough to make the `geste de deÂsespoir' [gesture of despair] constituted by this poem, by each poem, by each expression of love. The crucial `geste', albeit linked with `deÂsespoir', at least signifies a flicker of persistence. What is sustained as no more than a ripple in Á peine l'eau rideÂe' [Scarcely the water rippled]) becalmed Nature (À derives its slender force from the identification of life's flow with the life-blood of the Sacred Heart (`le cours de ton sein' [the flow of your breast]). What I wish to emphasize at this point, however, is the site of the event which is the poem. An initial trajectory of horizontality (via the multiple àÁ travers') runs ever towards an attainable `toi' but is suddenly caught up in crepuscular circularity (`la roue du soir'). Only when the vertical obstacle of `le parapet' literally counters (`contre') forward movement ± towards the ever-separate object of a dualistic quest ± is the key word of `Toujours l'amour' pronounced. `J'aime', first full disclosure of the lover's identity, re-initiates but amplifies the rapid release of pent-up tension which still characterizes the Reverdy poem. `J'aime ces flocons blancs de la penseÂe perdue' [I love those white flakes of lost thought] replaces the pain of Èncore l'amour', transforming its regretful memory of habitual solitude into the willed oblivion induced by the biting chill of winter's passage into spring. It is not that suffering ceases; for, now, mortification of the body looms in the pain of the seasons, `le vent d'hiver et le printemps mordu' [the winter wind and the bitter spring]. Shedding the chains of `la penseÂe perdue', broken by age and overuse as surely as the rationalist tradition of `seeing and believing' which has bedevilled Reverdy's mystic trajectory thus far, involves acceptance of the greater agony, the tighter bondage of an archetypally passive enchainment.




St John of the Cross, too, stresses the necessary suffering of the soul at the moment of its yielding up its illusory sense of separateness, of freedom, of unity. And it is no coincidence that the self-same image of enchainment occurs in his description of the soul's casting off the fetters of active `seeing'; for the obscure night of the soul is passivity itself, sightlessness, and enchainment in and with Otherness. The achievement of passivity, however, permits the manifestation of another ± another's ± activity; the replacement of human by divine desire. And it is on this note of desire that I turn to my final example of Reverdy's mystic trajectory. LE COEUR TOURNANT Il ne faut pas aller plus loin Les bijoux sont pris dans la lyre Les papillons noirs du deÂlire Remuent sans y penser la cendre du couchant Á peine revenu des voyages amers A Autour des coeurs jeteÂs au fond des devantures Sur l'avant-sceÁne des prairies et des paÃtures Comme des coquillages nus devant la mer Á peine remueÂ par l'amour de la vie A Des regards qui se nouent aux miens Des visages sans nom des souvenirs anciens Diamants de l'amour qui flottent sur la lie Pour aller chercher au fond dans la vase Le secret eÂmouvant du sang de mon malheur Il faut plonger la main aux racines du coeur Et mes doigts maladroits brisent les bords du vase Le sang qui jette sur tes yeux ce lourd rideau L'eÂmotion inconnue qui fait trembler ta leÁvre Et ce froid trop cruel qui emporte ta fieÁvre Froisse dans tous les coins le linon de ta peau Je t'aime sans jamais t'avoir vue que dans l'ombre Dans la nuit de mon reÃve ouÁ seul je peux y voir Je t'aime et tu n'es pas encore sortie du nombre Forme mysteÂrieuse qui bouge dans le soir Car ce que j'aime au fond c'est ce qui passe Une fois seulement sur ce miroir sans tain Qui deÂchire mon coeur et meurt aÁ la surface Du ciel fermeÂ devant mon deÂsir qui s'eÂteint




[TURNING HEART One must go no further Jewels are caught in the lyre Black butterflies of delirium stir unthinkingly the cinders of sunset Scarcely returned from bitter journeys Around hearts cast to the back of shop-windows On the forefront of prairies and of pastures Like shellfish naked before the sea Scarcely stirred by the love of life Looks which are tied to mine Nameless faces ancient memories Diamonds of love floating on the dregs To go searching in the depths of the vase For the moving secret of the blood of my sadness One must plunge one's hand to the roots of the heart And my clumsy fingers break the rim of the vase Blood casting over your eyes that heavy curtain Unknown emotion making the lip tremble And that too cruel cold which bears your fever away Tears at every corner the lines of your skin I love you without ever having seen you except in the shadows In the night of my dream where alone I can see I love you and you have not yet emerged from the number [many] Mysterious forms moving in the evening For what I love in the end is what passes Only once across that unsilvered mirror Shredding my heart and dying on the surface Of the heaven closed before my dimming desire] The negative trajectory of the poem's opening imperative is, however paradoxical, crucial to any understanding of mystic desire. For, purged of any sense of direction, of any illusion that love has an object (recall `l'amour passe/Un amour sans objet' of Èncore l'amour'), the believer, for St John, can adopt only passivity. My analysis of `Le Coeur tournant' will emphasize precisely what its title evokes, namely, a practice which turns the heart's desire away from futile horizontal pursuit and downto-earth after failed vertical aspiration; towards change without movement, towards passive receptivity to the active Other. At the same time, of course, a mystic reading cannot afford to lose sight of the many other features of Reverdy's art which make `Le Coeur tournant' one of his most beautiful poems.




Reminiscent of his own definition of the image is the opening cluster of `rapprochements de (deux) realiteÂs plus ou moins eÂloigneÂes'.9 The image of `les bijoux . . . pris dans la lyre' [jewels . . . caught in the lyre], while re-evoking, for instance `les diamants de la distance/Et les perles dont elle se pare' [diamonds of distance/And the pearls with which it bedecks itself] of `Toujours l'amour', juxtaposes not a concrete noun with an abstraction (`distance') but two separate though equally concrete terms. Thus, it becomes difficult to think of `lyre' metaphorically (for example as `lyricism' or `music'). Rather does the relationship function as a metonymic enchaining of two mutually unassimilable terms. I shall argue that this `togetherness in separation' is a prelude, at the level of style, to the construction of a similar relationship between self and other at the level of content. The key-word èÂloignement' [distance], then, takes on a special significance in the mystic trajectory; for the elements which jointly make up the relationship (or the image) remain the distinguishably different `cristaux deÂposeÂs apreÁs l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la reÂaliteÂ' ± the discrete deposits of a process of differentiation, not the deposit (singular) of an exercise in integration, to use the terms of the Calculus. In order to clarify my excursion into mathematics, I shall again enlist Timothy Jenkins on St John of the Cross: As the lover changes, so does the object of his love: someone who is loved is not the same person that he was before he was loved. This double change is true of `becoming' as a general principle; Deleuze calls the phenomenon `double capture', whereby both terms in the relation of love take on qualities of the other (though each maintains its independent identity) . . . This then is double-capture: there is an asymmetrical taking-on of new properties, without any sort of fusion, for both are caught in a single process of becoming . . . `Becoming' is not therefore a relation of opposition, of either x or y, but rather a matter of encounter, of capture, of x and y.10 I would only add that the terms of `becoming' are as construably interdependent as dx and dy. But to this process of difference and differentiation I shall return by way of conclusion. In the context of the relatively tight organization of rhythm and rhyme of `Le Coeur tournant', the subtle exploitation of each and every syllable of construction, by Reverdy, comes as no surprise. Thus, if `lyre' invites concentration on sound, initially, it develops too, not the obvious homonym of `lyre'/`lire' but rather its de-constructed,




scandalously absent term, the very contrary of the rational, the visual, the deductive, namely, `deÂ-lire', the last word in non-reading, of noncogitation (`sans y penser'). In short, entry into night, the transition from grey to black, is achieved not rationally, nor even visually, but archetypally. Paradoxically, Reverdy the ever-anxious polemicist, the restless theorist, constructs perhaps without the anxiety of reading but certainly with theoretical exactness an image of transition into night based on a transferred epithet (`papillons noirs' [black butterflies]) and on an elliptical synecdoche (`la cendre du couchant' [the cinders of sunset] being the part left over after the setting sun has burned its way into the horizon). The first stanza of `Le Coeur tournant', as I have shown, performs in complex but consistently Reverdyan terms the mystic drama of an initial embracing of the Dark Night of the Soul. The stanzas which follow are considerably more accessible, beginning with the analepsis of reference back to multiple previous `voyages amers' [bitter journeys]. Horizontal journeys over `prairies' and `paÃtures' have rendered the exposed emotions vulnerable, shorn of protection, but falsely so, since `coquille' and `coquillage' are as inseparable as the x and y of lover and beloved. The repeated `remue' now functions barely, for love of life ± based on bitter experience ± throws up attachments to merely anonymous, long-past memories. Such `cristaux', far from effervescently born, are but the glitter on the dregs of human love. It will be obvious at this stage that, as with St John of the Cross, there is a strongly materialist dimension to Reverdy's mysticism. This world teaches St John that we believe in what we do not see. Furthermore, when our physical faculties come to grips with the `secret' nature of faith, they are at once found wanting, clumsy, unfitted to the task in hand. For Reverdy, the encounter with the moving but secret òther', similarly, produces both gaucheness and anguish: Pour aller chercher au fond dans la vase Le secret eÂmouvant du sang de mon malheur Il faut plonger la main aux racines du coeur Et mes doigts maladroits brisent les bords du vase [To go searching in the depths of the vase For the moving secret of the blood of my sadness One must plunge one's hand to the roots of the heart And my clumsy fingers break the rim of the vase]




And yet . . . Careful scrutiny of the immediate effects of that `breaking of the vessels' ± to evoke Harold Bloom's terminology ± of vase and heart, reveals consistent but double-edged negatives. For the `lourd rideau [du] sang' [heavy curtain (of) blood], the `tremblement de la leÁvre' [trembling lips], the `froid trop cruel' [too cruel cold] and the `froissement de la peau' [tearing of the skin], in turn and cumulatively, constitute the positive steps of the via negativa; that is, necessarily provide the obstacle to vision, the fearful strangeness, the chilling antidote to fever and the pervasive physical discomfort which are but the prelude to Reverdy's divulgence of that negative theology which has been the sum and subject of this analysis. In the light of my juxtaposition of five Reverdy poems with the negative theology of St John of the Cross, the darkness which pervades the final two stanzas of `Le Coeur tournant' is the only logical setting for an exemplary statement of faith. As in `Toujours l'amour', the poem's finale is signalled by the simplest outburst of personal passion, `je t'aime'. The attachment, it must be stressed, is not to the inconnu but rather to the jamais vu. For knowledge derives from that special form of non-seeing of the dark night of the soul (`la nuit de mon reÃve ouÁ seul je peux y voir' [the night of my dream where alone I can see]); the visionary blindness of solitary reverie. Perception thus depends on the invisibility of the other, and the paradox is strengthened by the present terms of normal recognition, `nombre' and `forme', operating here as guarantors of absence . . . or, at least, of mystery, for in negative theology, God's identity and presence are only conceivable inasmuch as He differs from anything else. The image chosen by Reverdy to end `Le Coeur tournant' is doubly laden with mystic resonance. Firstly, St John himself writes that the soul ìs aware that it has (the effects of divine love) within itself as an image in a mirror'. Secondly, and not drawing directly on St John, Reverdy exploits the belief that the Divine presence, even when perceived, may pass without trace of reflection before the mirror. The failure of the lover to see even a second-hand image of the Beloved can produce suffering (`deÂchire mon coeur' [shredding my heart]) only because, even at this late stage, subjective desire is, minimally, still operative. For old habits die hard. The upward gaze, even in darkness, still anticipates a heavensent revelation. Just as the horizontal gaze finds in the vertical mirror no image, however, the vertical gaze finds in the horizontal heaven nothing but a superficial, dying awareness of Other. The climax of anti-climax which is the goal of the mystic way is held back by Reverdy until the last hemistiche of the poem. `Mon deÂsir qui




s'eÂteint' [my dimming desire], the final extinction of objective desire, is the very consummation of passivity by which `Le Coeur tournant' comes to rest ìn darkness and secure'. This formula, St John of the Cross's own expression of the pinnacle of passivity whereby the activity of the Beloved is guaranteed, returns the lover not to the former state but into the `double-capture' and the process of `becoming' outlined, by Jenkins, above. Only a rigid dualism could construct a paradox from the present subject's relation to its own (now) absent desire. If the `context' of desire has been, all along, total otherness, then, in the (presumed) absence of the Other, desire becomes an empty sign. As such, its very èmptiness', or aperture, qualifies desire ± always and already ± for potential fulfilment. It must already (and perhaps always) have become apparent that the discourses of St John's `dark' mysticism and of Derrida's negative theology have much in common. Arguably, the very formula `mon deÂsir qui s'eÂteint' is desire put under erasure. I have already suggested that the dimension of the Calculus which takes x and y out of a simple relationship of discrete difference is the process of differentiation whereby dx and dy are (always and already) considerably interdependent. Thereby, difference is replaced by diffeÂrance, a praxis of risk and strategy, not of mere calculation. The mystic way, or the so-called via negativa, has itself risked the way of heterodoxy. Calculating ± or taking for granted ± Divine presence, the orthodox way of Christian faith, is replaced by a strategy constructed on the other's absence. Hence the theory of desire elaborated in this treatment of Reverdy. By way of conclusion, I simply offer some thoughts on the question of orthodoxy and heterodoxy ± though it should by now be clear that I am not in the least concerned to relate such a discussion to the supposed reality of Pierre Reverdy's lived religious experience. As in the case of St John of the Cross, the issues I have raised derive from and inform the poetic rather than any (auto)biographical trajectory. In a brilliant, recent re-working of her 1982 The Slayers of Moses, Susan Handelman addresses the `Heretic Hermeneutic'. Beginning with JeanFrancËois Lyotard's emphasis on non-fulfilment as not a Christian but a characteristically Jewish mode, she explains that `the difference between [the subject] and the Other remains; it does not collapse in an erotic drive to bring the Other back to the Same'. Further, `the Jewish son will attempt his displacements through interpretation; the Christian son will become God, resolve the tensions through the abolition of the metonymic discourse'. Whereas




pious Rabbinic interpretation means the succession of links on the chain of metonymic signification . . . Heretic Rabbinic interpretation, as in Christianity, for example, is the breakage of the successive links, and replacement via metaphoric substitution, a union of signifier and signified, same and other, desire and fulfilment, the word become flesh.11 In `Chemin tournant' the metonymic, luminous enchainment of `les astres deÂrouilleÂs' [derusted stars] was ever at risk of transformation, ever threatened by the hermeneutic enterprise ± metaphorically `les deÂsastres du meÂtier' [disasters of the trade] ± of writing God. In the shift from `Chemin tournant' (quest) to `Le Coeur tournant' (love), I would suggest, Reverdy is not writing God but writing difference. Writing . . . or writhing? The `word become flesh', desire become fulfillment, signifier become signified (and viceversa). Thus might an erotics of Same and Other operate, vertical axis of figurative union, an axis of metaphor, of fusion, of abolished difference . . . Eros. Writ(h)ing in agony? Agony . . . death. The word not `become' . . . but the word enchained, the signifier linked (only with signifier), a horizontal axis of literal non-union, an axis of metonymy, of displacement of Same towards Other, of difference not abolished, merely masked . . . by Thanatos. Agony . . . Agon? A struggle to revise the Eros±Thanatos binary, a process, a rite, a writing of the difference between (not of the separation of) the erotology and the thanatology. The terms, of course, are Freud's. As Harold Bloom reminds us in The Breaking of the Vessels (1982): Freud has usurped the role of the mind of our age . . . The unconscious turns out, alas, not to be structured like a language, but to be structured like Freud's language . . . We have become Freud's texts, and the Imitatio Freudi is the necessary pattern for the spiritual life in our time.12 The structure of the Agonic trajectory may thus be represented as in Figure 1. What am I to do in order to speak of this trajectory? What am I to do in order to speak of the a of diffeÂrance? It goes without saying that it cannot be exposed. One can expose only that which at a certain moment can become present, manifest, that which can be shown, presented as something present, a being-present





Object

Eros

G

pleasure

no

sis

principle

mysticism

materialism

Ag

Subject

on

reality principle

metonym

Thanatos

Figure 1

in its truth, in the truth of a present or in the presence of the present . . . In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as much as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing. So much so that the detours, locutions and syntax in which I will often have to take recourse will resemble those of negative theology.13 Deliberately do I echo Derrida. In the final chapter of Writing and Difference, Èllipsis', devoted to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida argues for a negative atheology, a writing that transcends the closure of the book for the openness of the text.14 One of the passages of Levinas from which Susan Handelman quotes reads as follows: It is precisely a discourse, not embodied in God, that assures us of a living God among us . . . [To love the Torah more than God is] protection against the madness of direct contact with the Sacred without the mediation of reason . . . The spiritual does not present itself as a



metaphor


The case of Reverdy might be said to show up, or to throw up, critical practices too given to literal readings of Buffon's `le style c'est l'homme meÃme'. Impossible though it ought to be to separate formal preoccupations from ethico-political or even theological ramifications, Reverdy's perceived status and reputation as both the poet and theorist of Cubism has tended to over-focus critical responses. `Le rapprochement de (deux) reÂaliteÂs plus ou moins eÂloigneÂes', far from referring exclusively (and famously) to the written components of the literary image, might be read, too, as a (pre)figuration of that process of diffeÂrance upon which, above, Derrida meditates. The effectiveness (`la justesse') of Reverdy's metaphor/image depends on a similar shuttle-movement between exposition and disparition . . . but not at the level of form alone. Yet how does the ethico-political, or the ethico-religious intrude? Rather than operating on the basis of theoretical assertion, this essay has attempted to show Reverdy's engagement not only with but also as the `deux reÂaliteÂs plus ou moins eÂloigneÂes'. And a key to an understanding of the inseparability of the aesthetic from the ethical is provided by Levinas: `how can the I, born of egotism, relate to another without immediately divesting it of its alterity?'16 Levinas offers to readers of Reverdy but a more recent instance of a discourse which counters the restricting dualism of material versus transcendental. In a reversal of that trajectory which I have outlined as a shift from public and private towards the particular, Levinas ponders the construction of Self in Other/Other in Self as an identity which begins with the `particular': The not-yet-being is precisely not a possible that would only be more remote than other possibles. The caress does not act, does not grasp possibles. The secret it forces does not inform it as an experience; it overwhelms the relation of the I with itself and the non-I. (An amorphous future where it escapes itself and loses its position as a subject).17 And what of the risk of over-eroticizing Reverdy's I±you encounter(s)? Shocking, perhaps, to those who have not yet become accustomed to the meeting of other in self, and vice-versa? Does it seem erotic because it is exciting? Strange without being brutal? Another, distant, echo, too, of `Nothing is further from Eros than possession'.18 I concede that there will be those who will still suggest that I, along with Levinas, for



tenable substance but, rather, through its absence; God is made real, not through incarnation, but, rather, through the Law.15

example, am dangerously eroticizing the encounter with other, the space of self in other/other in self. They might feel, too, uncomfortable with that discourse of the third term, my text of juxtaposed quotations, the always repeated but already altered (Mosaic) mosaics, my chosen (embraced?) mosaic.19 It is not my purpose here to speculate on the heterodoxy which might have brought St John of the Cross to the prison-cell in Toledo where, in 1572, he is thought to have composed his masterpiece, El CaÂntico Espiritual. Nor shall I speculate on Pierre Reverdy's later orthodoxy to, or departure from, a Solesmes Catholicism. If, for Levinas, `Judaism is defined as this trust in an absent God',20 then, I would suggest, the anxious rhythms of the poetry of Pierre Reverdy perform ± and bear witness to a comparable devotion to ± the differential `Law' of writing, a trajectory of gnosis. . . . God is refused the predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being.21

Notes 1 Harold Bloom (1976), Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 1±26. 2 The five poems, with respective dates of first publication, are as follows: `Toi ou moi' (July 1929) originally published under the title `Soi et soi' (April 1924); Èncore l'amour' and `Toujours l'amour' (both Jan.±Feb. 1927); `Chemin Tournant' (March 1927) and `Le Coeur tournant' (March±April 1931). See Etienne-Alain Hubert (1927), Bibliographie des EÂcrits de Pierre Reverdy, Paris (MD 133, 205±6, 207, 81±2, 327±8). On the assumption that many Reverdy poems of this period were, in fact, written much earlier, it is not my intention here to evoke any chronological progression between poems, much less to link them with the events of the poet's life. The bracketed translations of the five poems are given as a guide to the literal meaning of the French. I have deliberately avoided any attempt at poetic translation. 3 Guillaume Apollinaire (1920), `Zone', in Alcools, Paris: Gallimard, p. 12.

4 Apollinaire, `Zone', p. 14.

5 St John of the Cross (1979), The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans.

K. Kavanagh and O. Rodriguez, Washington: ICS, p. 676. 6 I wish to acknowledge here a debt of gratitude to Timothy Jenkins of the University of Nottingham, whose unpublished work on St John of the Cross I consulted in the preparation of this essay. The three papers referred to here are Ì: A Preliminary Reconnoitre of St John of the Cross'; ÌI: The Idea of ``Becoming'' in St John of the Cross'; ÌII: The Ethical Teaching of St John of the Cross: A Theory of Desire'. These form the basis of a monograph in preparation. 7 St John of the Cross, Collected Works, p. 717.




8 Jenkins, unpublished work. 9 `L'image est une creÂation pure de l'esprit. Elle ne peut naõÃtre d une comparison, mais du rapprochement de deux reÂaliteÂs plus on moins eÂloigneÂes' [The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be born from a comparison, but from the rapprochement of two more or less distant realities]. Pierre Reverdy (1926), Le Gant de crin, Paris: Plon, p. 32. 10 Jenkins, unpublished work. 11 Susan Handelman (1987), `Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic', in Mark Krupnik, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 108±11. 12 Harold Bloom (1982), The Breaking of the Vessels, Chicago: Universtity of Chicago Press, pp. 63±4. 13 Jacques Derrida (1982), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, p. 6. 14 Jacques Derrida (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 294±300. 15 Handelman, `Jacques Derrida', p. 115. She goes on to situate the LeÂvinas insight in the context of `The schism between Jews and Greeks, between Derrida and the history of philosophy': absence does not equal nonexistence. Absence, otherness, the `trace', all of Derrida's prime terms, are part of a vocabulary that seeks to evade the trap of Being or Nonbeing of Greek philosophy. Derrida's reality is not Being, but Absence; not the One, but the Other; not Unity, but plurality, dissemination, writing, and difference. Reb Derissa, too, claims that `the spiritual does not present itself as a tenable substance but, rather, through its absence', and he is the new High Priest of the religion of absence (p. 116). 16 Emmanuel Levinas (1969), Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 27. 17 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 259. 18 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 265. 19 See Bernard McGuirk (1997), `Post-postscript: space, self, other. Latin America and the ``Third Term'' ', in Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Poststructuralist Criticism, London: Routledge, pp. 233±57. 20 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 6. For a full discussion of Derrida's debt to Levinas, see Robert Bernasconi (1988), `The Trace of Levinas in Derrida', in David Woods and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and DiffeÂrance, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 13±29. 21 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 6.




Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil James Winchell

I.

The mystic's language marks a boundary

The problem of mysticism in our time, especially after the `linguistic turn' of philosophy, would seem to be the language used to express it. Are the mystic's claims to insight or illumination reducible somehow to a mere manipulation of words, attributable ultimately to the arbitrariness of language itself? Clearly, the experience of reading shows that the answer is no. The relation between the mystic's meaning and the reader's cognition cannot be reduced to a function of language, nor to the maddeningly indeterminate `contingency of the sign'. Instead of focusing on a supposedly self-referential system of signs, or upon some mystically unique or psychologically isolated individual, a critical approach to mysticism poses the differential problem of limits. How does the mystic represent to others the liminal phenomena she perceives or imagines, whether linguistic or psychological, semantic or ontological, human or divine?1 Different levels of existence, different types of knowledge and different perspectives upon their intersubjective boundaries: these are at once the signs and the referents of mystical language. As a former pupil once told the mystic's biographer, Simone Weil refused to mention God in her lectures because òne does not speak of a subject about which one knows nothing.'2 The absolute difference of God thereby sets a limit upon the philosophy teacher's language, even as this permeable membrane of signs constrains the student's understanding and informs the mystic's desire to use any language at all. However cosmological the mystic's topic, the reader begins with a phrase. I risk beginning the present essay both anecdotally and theoretically in order to explore relations between Simone Weil's language of 72



4

Semantics of the Unspeakable 73

1 `Purity is the ability to contemplate filth.' (`La pureteÂ est le pouvoir de contempler la souillure.') 2 `Beauty is experimental [experiential] proof that the incarnation is possible.' (`Le beau est la preuve expeÂrimentale que l'incarnation est possible.') 3 `God can only be present in creation in the form of absence.' (`Dieu ne peut eÃtre preÂsent dans la creÂation que sous la forme de l'absence.') 4 `Charity and injustice can be defined only in terms of readings ± and thus escape any possible definition.' (`La chariteÂ et l'injustice ne se deÂfinissent que par des lectures ± et ainsi eÂchappent aÁ toute deÂfinition.') 5 `We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not apprehend is more real than what it does apprehend'. (`Nous savons au moyen de l'intelligence que ce que l'intelligence n'appreÂhende pas est plus reÂel que ce qu'elle appreÂhende'.) 6 `The only good that be not subject to chance is the one outside the world'. (`Le seul bien qui ne soit pas sujet au hasard est celui qui est hors du monde'.)3 Sentences one and two use the intransitive verb `to be' (Ãetre) in order to state a semantics of boundaries: first, that radically different or dissimilar ideas may exist together on the level of the phrase, even if only for the brief moment of enunciation; and second, that these two different ideas fuse and become indistinguishable in the power of the mystic's perceptive ability, which she enunciates by sheer predication. The use of the verb `to be' in these two phrases is not based on the mystic's being (eÃtre), therefore, but rather on a sense of her becoming (devenir) enacted by the movement of the phrase. Consequently, this dynamic might be said to occur in at least three dimensions at once: first, it cycles meaning reflexively between the subject and the predicate nominative of the sentence; second, it connects the mystic's first-order logic with the background language she would use to explain her ontological commitments; and third, it shuttles between the translation-manual the reader brings to the phrase and the mystic's criteria for its truth or coherence.4



difference, her mysticism and the kind of understanding the reader finds in the act of reading. Consider these six sentences ± selected among many equally powerful ± from the posthumous collection of aphorisms by Simone Weil known as La Pesanteur et la graÃce (Gravity and Grace, 1947):

For example, sentence one states that purity exists to the degree that the mystic is able to focus her contemplation upon what the reader might take as its opposite, filth (la souillure).5 The ontology of both concepts here (`purity' and `filth') depends first upon their predication, as signs of the stated relation between them. According to the phrase itself, their identical existence emerges first as a result of the mystic's power of contemplation (le pouvoir) , and only secondly in her enunciation of its existence in relation to the background language she would use to explain the sentence in context. Thirdly, upon reading such a phrase the reader must then translate the self-referential loop it represents into a language comprehensible to her or his own ontological commitments and horizons. I stop to re-read sentence one: it seems to arrest the flow of language by its own ontological claim (the power of contemplation), which hovers over my own act of reading and re-reading. This claim for the àbility to contemplate filth' sparks my perception that these startling, impossible or even nonsensical conjunctions signify a different kind of existence, a kinetic curve freed from conceptual stasis. The conventional difference between `purity' and `filth' is effaced, and a new difference established. This emerging difference is enacted for me as the one existing between the mystic's powerful contemplation and my own lesspowerful contemplation. If I feel unable to contemplate filth sufficiently unto purity, I may not merit this difficult understanding and the commitment it seems to suggest. Witnessing the movement of the phrase, I also feel the urge to attain a purer, more powerful contemplation. The words placed together in this way thereby imitate the mystic's embodiment of such contemplative power more so than they refer to such fixed abstractions as `purity' or `filth' logically. Simone Weil's language finds its peculiar force therefore in the mimetic enactment by the reader of the drama of the mystic's own ontological commitment. Likewise, in sentence two the mystic does not seem to presume her own identity with the `possible incarnation' she would name, again using the verb `to be.' Instead, her perception of a beauty radically different from herself constitutes èxperimental proof' that spirit ± represented and imitated in the eye and mind of the mystic ± is possible. This is hardly an extravagant claim, given the first-level existence the reader might readily attribute to such canonical notations as `beauty' and èxperimental proof'. Yet the modesty of the mystic's language, once the phrase is translated from her ontological commitment to the reader's, only serves to enhance the speculative enormity of her predication. Paradoxically, the simplicity of the phrase proves its complexity.




Unfortunately, my English translation renders the original French adjective (èxpeÂrimentale') unduly less ambivalent: the related French word èxpeÂrience' means both a personal experience (in the sense of a lived encounter) and a scientific experiment. This nuance in French implies a secondary experiential presence, the one embodied within the scientist/observer who stands beside the laboratory apparatus; this is lost in English, yet proves nonetheless crucial for the mystic's linguistic reenactment of the living scene of her experience of beauty, over which hovers the model of any possible incarnation. In either language, this conceptual statement (`beauty is experimental proof that the incarnation of spirit is possible') is based upon her own non-identity with beauty, just as the scientist maintains a de facto methodological distance ± however philosophically tenuous or methodologically contrived ± in order to construct the laboratory experiment that would test the boundaries of phenomena even as it respects them. The reader's willingness to imitate the mystic's role in this scene might be compared to the heightened concentration of a student watching the yoga teacher's asana (posture), or hearing a koan (riddle) posed by the roshi or master of Chan (Zen) Buddhism.6 Because the semantic ontology of such notions as beauty, purity, filth and spirit is complex, the affirmative predications based on `to be' in sentences one and two are deceptively simple. Like them, phrases three and four create dynamic trajectories between radically different ideas. They articulate more complex sentence-structures than sentences one and two, however, by means of a simple enunciatory tactic: multiple negations. In sentence three, for example, the ùncreated' God (that is, the potential outside creation) can be present in creation only in the form of absence. The reader has a right to ask: Where might the divine form `be present' if it can only be present in absence?7 I would propose that the mystic's meaning emerges most importantly on the third of the three dimensions of semantic ontology described above: the reader's personal translation of the mystic's commitment, which is conveyed not only by the phrase, but more crucially within the physical experience of reading the phrase itself. Its startling sense arrests my attention; instead of continuing to the next aphorism, I read sentence three and then read it again. Meditatively focused within this semantic enormity, the reader finds in the sentence a gesture, a demonstrated feeling, or even the trace of a step in a dance. Speech act theory names the mode of such a sentence the `performative' because it acts to do something in the world; this is famously opposed to the `constative' mode, which designates a kind of statement




designed not to change reality, but instead to characterize it as true or false. These terms, however helpful, do not exhaust or explain the semantic trajectory of sentence three. The mystic's apprehension of the uncreated totality of God both performs and characterizes such a totalizing difference for the reader by its proliferation of negations and categorical exclusions within the phrase. The result ± let us call it a `performative characterization' ± is thereby incorporated within the mystic's boundary-crossings by the attentive reader. This represents one of the uncanny and most difficult aspects of any highly-charged, poetic or prophetic language. Ultimately, such mimesis ± which may represent the gestural component of both performative and constative speech ± breaks down conceptual difference and opens a yawning chasm of logical (non-)sense. In this way, the mystic ± like the poet ± often seems to subvert conventionally background language in the name of feelings forgotten or inaccessible to language as a whole: the unspeakable. The semantic dynamism of her phrases, however, embodies a repetitive or incantatory effect no more original than ritual, prayer or the via negativa of Francis of Assisi. Like Francis's, Simone Weil's mysticism climaxes in the utter negation of all imagery ìn order to plunge into divine darkness' of a self undivided.8 If she asserts that `God can be present in creation only in the form of absence,' then how might the reader possibly confront this presence except by a doubly-negated dialectic of disbelief, by attending to and willingly incorporating the mystic's negatively-shadowed gesture, observable now only in the trace left by its disappearance? Similarly, in sentence four the mystic's act of reading ± itself the scene of what I am calling the `semantic ontology' most thoroughly explored by Simone Weil ± begins by balancing two abstract notions (charity and injustice). The phrase then states their lack of fixed definitions as a limitterm not of their value as signifiers, nor of some absent or uncreated God, but rather of our `readings'. After the dash, however (`± and thus escape any possible definition'), she steps through the flames of undifferentiation to reveal the ultimate resistance of `charity' and ìnjustice' to any conceptual self-identity. Because these notions resist or refuse (literally, èscape') the form of any possible definition that might limit their existence, they may not be fixed outside the act of the reader's contemplation, even in the first-order notation of their names. Just writing this sentence (not to mention reading it, I fear) challenges my ability to conceptualize such an act of reading in abstract terms. But please bear with me, because the pragmatic reward of these difficulties is not far away: In the mystic's syllogism of such radical otherness




± words that flee their own definitions, like sub-atomic particles under Heisenberg's flashlight ± the coloured and distorting lenses of language fall away in the name of our responsibility to perform clearer and more self-aware `readings'. The direct consequence of such readings, it is implied, entails the enactment of charity and justice by the reader's body in the world of people and things, not just in words. Thus, the embodied mind of the reader gains access to èxperimental proof' that the ontological commitments of the mystic are possible. In sentences five and six Simone Weil exploits even more complex negative predicates in order to accede to such an unspeakable positivity. In sentence five it is a matter of knowing, by means of intelligence, that what intelligence itself does not grasp is `more real' than what it does. The mystic traces this fleeting edge, this evanescence of intelligence in terms of its previously unapprehended existence: a reality greater than the most acute faculty we have to grasp it. The boundary between cognition and consciousness, body and space, or what we can and cannot grasp, has once again been effaced from the external, a priori world of Cartesian philosophy and retraced in the embodied intelligence of ± whom? The mystic, as a singular being? No, for here she uses the first-person pronoun `we' (nous) to include the reader's translationmanual within the text of her own ontological commitment. For the reader, therefore, her apprehension and the language in which it emerges seem to function not through faith, ecstasy or delirium, but instead by means of the subtlety and extreme concentration of òur' shared powers of contemplation. The reader perceives the mystic, perceiving. Nonetheless, the subjunctive mode of the verb èÃtre' in sentence six (literally, `The only good that be not subject to chance . . .') marks the mystic's volition to avoid facile or sentimental identifications; her will to respect the boundary of ontological difference affirms the good that exists only outside the world we may know together, both despite and because of our differences. The mystic's language here seems not far removed from symbolist poet SteÂphane MallarmeÂ's overarching claim, which retrospectively frames his entire oeuvre: À throw of the dice will never abolish chance'.9 For both the poet and for Simone Weil, the world in this case is one where a single, experiential throw of the dice will never abolish categorical chance: a world where the only good not subject to chance is not contained in the world. This world is therefore not identical to the world stated by Wittgenstein in the oft-cited opening sentence of the Tractatus: `The world is all that is the case.'10 Or is it?





The mystic's body marks the limits of detachment

To answer this question, I would follow the lead of recent critics with a variation on early Wittgenstein: the world of language conventions is not all that is the case, even for language strictly considered. As I have attempted to show above, the labyrinthine semantics of Simone Weil's difficult language, like the conundrum of an absent or uncreated God, do not represent the most troubling difficulties confronting our understanding of the mystic. Nor does a flying island represent the most compelling obstacle to understanding Jonathan Swift's language, nor his logic nor his belief. Instead, I propose that Simone Weil's language, like Swift's incidentally, traces an existentially-bounded description of a human state of affairs in words that test and re-locate the difference between a priori and a posteriori conditions of knowability. Therefore, the primary site of these dynamic inscriptions is found neither in her firstorder logic, nor in her background language, nor in the reader's translation of it, but rather in the differential link between the mystic's suffering body and the reader's. The body of the reader becomes therefore the bearer, in living language and memory, of the mystic's words. In this way, the social life of mysticism ± its actions and embodiments, whether in medieval or modern settings ± assumes primary importance for understanding. The seemingly clear theoretical boundaries we take for granted between teacher and pupil, text and reader, mystic and seeker, informant and biographer, sense-object and subject, all are shaped by the violence and renunciation that characterize that most difficult and evanescent of bonds, the social. The mystic's sentences reflect not just paradoxical insight nor mystical ecstasies, but more crucially her own experience of obscurity, effacement, forgetting ± and death.11 My thesis, then, is this: when the limits of linguistic rationality are blurred and redrawn at the level of the mystic's phrase, a corresponding boundary between the mystic's language and her body ± and by mimetic association, the reader's body as well ± is similarly tested and re-written. This is especially true when the sufferer performs such acts of blurring in extremis.12 Any theoretical or foundational statement about the origin or the intent of the mystic's language literally cannot be made ± except, of course, in the anecdote of her writing and our reading. Thus, the mystic's ontological commitment escapes all linguistic theory along the border of lived experience. In this way, the semantic field we call `mysticism' in Simone Weil might be said to accede mimetically ± most importantly by means of



II.

imitation, not representationalist signification ± to the realm of bodily gesture: if the reader will permit me, `mimysticism.' This kind of recombinant, counter-intuitive trespass against conventional semantics moves through the body of the mystic not in order to convince the reader logically, but rather to initiate the reader by means of gestural imitation of both the mystic's concentration and her expression. In this way, the traditional bodily eruptions and excruciations of mystics and saints ± the boils and buboes of medieval mystical lore, the Gnostic anorexia of Simone Weil ± find linguistic means to experiential manifestation: to (re)connect with words the consciousness of suffering necessarily shared between model and copy, mystic and seeker, language and body. The knowledge implicit in such a `speech act' becomes explicit in the reader's willingness to confront her or his own metaphysical desire, which far more powerfully than mere appetitive desire can move the individual body toward difficult and even dangerous social objectives.13 Such extraordinary semantic gestures in the late writing of Simone Weil constitute a recursive, para-linguistic incarnation of the unspeakable. Contemporary epistemologist Francisco Varela refers to the enactment of such messages as èmbodied cognition'.14 In these six sentences and many others like them, Simone Weil's strategies for sense-making rely heavily on showing the unspeakable, in gestural imitation of its evanescent manifestations, rather than by actually `speaking' or writing it. Reading the modern mystic becomes therefore a delicate feat of balance: even as we maintain critical perspective, we must also recognize the mimetic, even touching gesture that her writing evokes in us. Varela states: The central insight of this nonobjectivist orientation is the view that knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history. They enable us to make sense of our world; or in more phenomenological language, they are the structures by which we exist in the manner of `having a world'.15 To read the mystic otherwise, as I shall show in concluding remarks on some current writing about Simone Weil, is wilfully to misunderstand her: what might such a failure of sympathy imply concerning the living critic's own position?




The anecdote told by Simone Weil's pupil tells us that the mystic is not entitled to speak about things about which she knows nothing. By taking this restraint as a boundary-limit for her own ignorance, how better might she evoke an unknowable God than to enact in words the trace of her corporeal experience of God's absence? If the reader doubts that the body is necessarily a component of such knowledge, she ought to look around her as she reads this line. Where are you seated? What are the conditions of your (dis)comfort and your (in)attention? In Simone Weil's phenomenology of writing, such contextual significations connect the trajectories of incarnation, even as her necessarily limited knowledge of God and her difficult language collide with the boundaries of common-sense and meaning: it is this imitated movement that first engages the reader's response, not the metaphysics of impossibility or the language of belief. If we consider the mystic's writing as a part of literary history from Gilgamesh to Cervantes to Swift to Borges, we realize that such mimesis, or the imitated representation of reality, has served the poetic tradition continually as a strategy for the elaboration of both contingent `reality' and of its mystical, hermetic, initiatory or ineffable experience. I would argue that this articulated mimesis emerges in Simone Weil's sentences not as a message, but rather as a motion. Indeed, as a teacher she was adamant that her role was to show her students not what to think, but how to think: how to perform the act of thinking. By means of the dynamically `post-rational' or `non-objectivist' language she would use, Simone Weil locates upon her own body the limit-terms and boundaries of both God's and the reader's detachment. The problem confronting this kind of claim for the sense-making capacity of the mystic's language, however, has emerged as a crucial issue for twentieth-century theory and philosophy. As a pioneer of modern semantics, Wittgenstein asserted the boundary condition between mimesis (as a gesture) and language (as a symbol) at several points in the Tractatus. Here, the body and the word would seem to be mutually exclusive: `What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. . . . What can be shown,' he states categorically, `cannot be said.'16 But the mimetic character of Simone Weil's sentences ± based on a series of her mystical experiences felt and sensed along the nerves and fibres of her body ± reveals in my opinion a moment of undifferentiation in which Wittgenstein's clearly differentiated categories of the showable (or gesture) and the speakable (or language) break down. In




the act of her writing and our reading, however, they recombine to form semantic impossibilities that oscillate between two activities not necessarily `mystical' at all, but rather theatrical: poetry and gesture, storytelling and dance. The theatre of the mystic's gestural writing, therefore, is merely one without a proscenium arch, in which the spectator is invited to incorporate the affective gesture ± not the logocentric `presence' so thoroughly demystified by recent theory ± being (re-)imitated even as she or he engages the act of concentration. To find a starting-point, then, I would again seek counsel in Wittgenstein. In the late Philosophical Investigations, for example, we read: `Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.'17 In the concluding paragraphs of the earlier Tractatus, he had already stated this boundary condition in terms of mysticism: Ìt is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. . . . There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical'.18 Taken together, these passages show Wittgenstein treating the unspeakable (and by extension, the gesture or Being of God) as a category of experience, if not one we may express in language. Consequently, it remains the task of the philosopher to battle against any linguistic `bewitchment' that might seduce her or him into believing that mystical manifestations (or even a foundationalist philosophy for that matter) may be stated in language. The self-reflexive consciousness of Wittgenstein's thought stems from such sentences as these. Like Simone Weil's, his struggle with meaning and manifestation emerges most clearly in a paradox: philosophy must simultaneously battle against and accept the limitations of its own language. He thereby shares a concern with his near-contemporary about a crucial boundary-distinction between mystical manifestations of experience ± i.e., that which is by definition higher, or unspeakable, or categorically unattainable ± and the inadequate representation of that experience in conceptual language. This apparently clear dichotomy breaks down in both writers, however, when they confront the generative capacity of language both to critique in concept and to caricature in imitation what Theodor Adorno has called the `conceptual fetishism' of philosophy. Traditional, grandiose foundationalism and philosophical system-building have been categorically based on the identification of the same and a simultaneous exclusion of the non-identical; the anti-foundational impulse in modern philosophy, from Wittgenstein to Rorty and their heirs, proves none the less philosophical for its critique of philosophy. As Adorno states it,




`The freedom of philosophy is nothing but the capacity to lend a voice to its unfreedom.'19 Similarly, in the writing of Simone Weil, the free experience of mystical things ± which `make themselves manifest' according to Wittgenstein ± stakes its claim to linguistic sense-making by exploiting mimesis conceptually ± that is, philosophically. Thus, the body and the language of the modern mystic acknowledge the self-consciousness of her own instrumentality even as she reaches out to God and to the reader. Thus, her language finds a kinetic referent: the unknowable, manifested in its imprint upon the mystic's body and in its mediated reimpression upon the body of the reader. For if a concept states an identity, such mimesis by definition enacts a difference even as it respects its own inability to express it. The mystic's theatricalization, or mise-en-sceÁne of mimesis, represents a concept a priori for the undifferentiating act of imitation itself. Paradoxically, then, mimesis becomes a concept for the nonconceptual, an embodied shape assumed by something forever disembodied about which we can know nothing. At certain moments in Wittgenstein's thought, any philosophical rejection of the mystical or `bewitched' spells cast upon our intelligence by language seems possible only in language-games, where semantic conventions are followed by rational beings. These delineated arenas are only accessible by means of language itself, of course. These kinds of self-referential semantics, coupled with the problems related to what W. V. Quine has called the ìndeterminacy of translation' and the ìnscrutability of reference', continue to play a role in contemporary debates concerning mysticism, philosophy and science, as well as epistemology, writing and language generally.20 Mysticism therefore might be said to oppose foundationalist philosophy and to present it with a range of semantic impossibilities, or even `non-sense'. For mysticism's bewitching challenge to our intelligence emerges in its structural relation not only to the unspeakable, but also to radical alterity, or the unknowable: Michel de Certeau describes it as `the silence within us that speaks about absolute difference'.21 This boundary condition itself is inevitably represented in `bewitched' language, and at the moment of expression the inescapably mediated nature of the mystic's affective experience suddenly confronts the ìnfinite Other whose certainties, in the dark nights of the body, have no further refuge in signifiers.'22 De Certeau's claim here ± that the strategic moments of mystical discourse move inevitably away from the signifier and toward the body ± provides a flexible tool for locating in experience the disem-





First, that the signifier precedes the signified;

second, that meaning consequently arises out of non-meaning;

and third, that the speaking subject therefore submits to the law of

the signifier as a given condition of speech.23 According to the first hypothesis, the language of mysticism would not originate in some lived-through experience, but would exist rather only to the degree that it test the boundaries of the semiotic code (`background language') informing and anterior to its very expression. If the mystic's language failed to challenge or surpass the code enabling this pre-existing signifier, logically, it could not accede to a representation of poetic or mystical experience. Does this hypothesis thereby render the communication of the incommunicable impossible a priori, effectively limiting the subject's freedom even as it would critique the conditions of unfreedom? The second hypothesis of structuralist semiotics cited above ± i.e., that meaning arises out of non-meaning ± provides an immediate response to this question. Vincent Descombes writes: `the only way for the speaker to generate meaning [in a situation enslaved by pre-ordained codes, as in hypothesis one], is to produce a message bereft of meaning, that the code had not foreseen (a message that could be called ``poetic'' or ``mystical'')'24. The mystic or poet, in this case, is she who enunciates the very significations unforeseen, uncoded or deemed impossible by the background language she would use to express them. I have already proposed a terminology that builds upon yet differs from this structuralist approach in order to articulate what I am calling Simone Weil's semantic ontology. The difference here emerges in a focus on the mimetic dynamism that links the materiality of language to the intersubjective body: the one mediated by, but not physically equivalent to, the non-meaning that pre-exists the articulation of the phrase. This locus of signification exists outside the body, yet leaves its trace upon all parties sensitive to its movement, especially in the reader's willingness to grant affective validity to the mystic's historical, yet nonetheless unspeakable experience. What are the warrants that contemporary readers ± including philosophers and critics ± might use to support this shift away from the aura of scientificity projected by semiotic theory and the linguistic turn?



bodied tenets of semiological structuralism, according to which three procedural hypotheses on this problem have been posed:


The mystic's body is a form of verbal excess

The modern mystic's language might be said to trace the contour of her corporeal experience just as an exposed photographic plate may capture the imitative gesture of a dancer holding a flashlight in a darkened room. In this context, the third hypothesis of semiotic structuralism ± i.e., that the speaker necessarily submits to the law of the pre-existing signifier as a condition of speech, even as she might break that very law ± elaborates the most crucial aspect of the mystic's relation to the signifiers she uses. Semiotics states that the individual subject is decidedly not the àbsolute origin of meaning, but literally ``subjected to the signifier'' (just as in an absolute monarchy one is ``the king's subject'')'.25 In other words, as the famous dictum of structuralism would have it, the subject does not speak the language, but is instead spoken by it. The mystic's body, nevertheless, becomes the site of this subjection even as it would struggle to enunciate in language the always-already mediated experience of ontological difference. This idea might serve as a prelude to Michel de Certeau's claim that `woman's experience has better resisted the ruin of the symbolic codes, theological and masculine, that considered presence as the coming of the Logos'; he goes on to state that the oppressed, subjective presence of women-mystics actually `detaches itself from the Word.'26 In the sentences examined above and in may others, Simone Weil delineates a trajectory for desire to shuttle between the problems of reference posed by phenomenology (here, the mystic's body as an intermediate term between subject and object) and the problems of indication posed by structuralist semiology (here, the mystic's language as combinatory sign joining the signifier and the signified).27 This tension between the mystic's body and language participates in a dilemma, moreover, with immense repercussions and pitfalls for cultural understanding and conflict. In writing by Georges Bataille, for example, the all-too-familiar association between mysticism and eroticism seems to collapse into a sacrificial interpretation of Christianity, as Philippe Sollers has pointed out. `The erotization of mystical experience,' he writes, ùnderlines the anguish in which the sexed, speaking body finds itself [confronted] . . . with a loss of body and has no other way to defend himself than to imagine that it is erotic'. In the painfully desacralized cultural context haunting Bataille, Sollers finds that humanity `conspires to reject a word and the [mystic's] body speaks only on this condition [of its own physical abjection]'.28



III.

For Simone Weil, likewise, the suffering of incarnation and the dilemma of renunciation remained problematically linked to myths of sacrifice. In writing about her own conversion to Christianity, she states explicitly that the impossibility of communion was not contravened by the necessity of confession; consequently, her mystical word reiterates the necessary presence of the impossible when confronted by the institution of the church: `There is an insurmountable obstacle to the incarnation of Christianity,' she writes in Waiting on God, `which is the use of two little words: anathema sit. Not their existence, but the use they have been put to until now. That is what keeps me from crossing the threshold of the Church.'29 In order consequently to speak the unauthorized and fully liberating meaning of her metaphysical desire, therefore, the mystic avails herself of the very codes she inherits from a philosophical tradition based on her own suppression: Ontology, as in sentences one and two (above); Negative syllogism and the via negativa, as in three and four; and the idea of ambivalent intelligence and its perception (as in five and six). The mystic simultaneously exploits, opposes and extends these philosophical concepts and antinomies based on language and knowledge. Like the playwright, however, she also offers the reader a gestural kind of escape from philosophy's original sin: the fetishism of the concept and the exclusion of mimesis.30 In La Pesanteur et la graÃce [Gravity and Grace], each of the codes attendant to these concepts is refashioned in the mode of difference rather than identity: Simone Weil's semantic morphology works phrase by phrase to effect a scene of reconciliation mimetically, through mutual recognition, in order `to heal the concept ``Being'' of the wound of its conceptuality, of the split between thoughts and their content'.31 She effects this semantic production by imitating, at the morphological level of sentences, the movement of a mind confronted with absolute difference. Ontological difference becomes therefore the extramural (or `profane') incarnation of the non-identical subject. As I just noted, the six sentences discussed above exploit not just the figure, but the drama of semantic strategies: 1. the existential experience of becoming, based on the misleadingly static verb `to be'; 2. the negative syllogism ± often constructed as a tri-partite, multiply-negated syntactic figure in one sentence ± which becomes for Simone Weil a sort of dialectical Other, or even (if the reader will excuse the expression) a sort of `constructivist alterity'; and 3. the conjunction of rarity and ambivalent absence (`here but not here'), to imitate both the content and the gestural modelling of the mystic's contemplation.




All three of these semantic strategies replicate a lived act of mimesis, based on a dynamic structure of semantic movement within each sentence, which originates in the sensuous moment of the mystic's contemplation. In this way, the radically philosophical nature of Simone Weil's mystical texts may be seen in the same light emitted by her earlier, more technically philosophical and politically engaged social and progressivist writing. In all three areas, the mystic writes against the most dangerous `bewitchment' of all for philosophical language: its unself-reflective complicity with domination. The symbolic site linking her social critique, her public notoriety and historical moment becomes the body of the mystic herself, as has been noted by Pierre Mabille in his psycho-biography of another, very different saint: TheÂreÁse de Lisieux. Ì would note', he writes, `that a being becomes a myth only to the degree that she incarnates collective desires and socially emotional powers.'32 For Simone Weil, both the mystic-writer and her reader must merit by force of love and attention the privilege of such constraints.33 Only the power of the reader's attention, moreover, enacts the living gesture of an imitation that has become productively engaged in the world without having to renounce mimesis in the name of some disenchanted or unbewitched logic of foundationalist philosophy or fundamental truth. In this moment, all readers become mystics, or they refuse. What then are the stakes behind such a refusal?

IV.

Conclusion: the reader's body reinvents the referent

In her biography of Simone Weil, long-time friend Simone PeÂtrement cites several of the mystic's notes on Descartes, prepared while still a student of the philosopher Alain at the Ecole Normale SupeÂrieure. In these notes, Simone Weil reasons as follows: If God is a belief, that is so because there is indeed something here that is impenetrable to reason: the union of the soul and body. If I understood how the moral law excites an interest in me, I would know God. Yet this is a fact. A fact of a strange kind, a fact that one must create. Hence a new kind of proof. Causality was proven by the impossibility of believing in it. God is proven in some way by the extreme difficulty of believing in him.34 What I find astonishing in this passage is not the claim for the importance of the body in the self-creating `fact' of God, even though the biographer's theme of the corporeal materiality of Simone Weil's




mysticism might support my argument for the mimetic function of her writing. No, what is truly surprising in this passage is the biographer's asterisk placed after the sentence `Causality was proven by the impossibility of believing in it*'. At the asterisked footnote, the biographer states: À slip no doubt for ``not believing in it'' '.35 Is it not rather more likely, given the semantics of the unspeakable that will emerge in Simone Weil's later writing, that the mystic has not made a slip here? This impossible yet necessary belief in logical causality parallels the logic of ontological difference that she goes on to state explicitly in the succeeding sentences: God is proven in some way by the extreme difficulty of believing in him. One does not believe what one wishes; or rather one believes what one wishes, but it is necessary to will it. To will it ± not to desire it. Since the idea of God can only express this incomprehensible accord between the realm of mind and the realm of nature, I have only one way of proving this accord ± it is to compel the world, by my actions, not to oppose my law.36 Just as God can be present in creation only in the form of absence, as we saw in sentence three, causality might be proven by the impossibility of believing in it, and there is no slip in this formulation at all. The continuity of causality might only exist in relation to ontological discontinuity, which begins and ends with the body and its permeable membrane of language, memory and mortality. The mystic's only means of proof, she states, is to `compel' the world by her actions. As if to support the mystic's statement to her philosophy student about the unspeakable, Wittgenstein's concluding sentence in the Tractatus states that `What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence'. Radically opposed to this kind of silence after her corporeal experience of mystical presence, Simone Weil's strategy would show the reader how to feel divine absence precisely where language has failed understanding, by means of speaking the unspeakable. This moment emerges, as in the six sentences discussed above, by means of mimesis; this conceptual use of the non-conceptual extends even into the style and form of her sentences.37 Therefore, the modern mystic's strategy takes as its model the `conversion' scene of the reader reading, as a moment of sensuous apparition. In phrases that imitate this moment, Simone Weil undermines the false dichotomy of concept and mimesis by imitating the reader's gesture of difference, her or his separation from the absolute, that pre-exists




within oppressively conceptual or `philosophical' language, which compels itself to silence when confronted by absolute difference. Simone Weil's semantics of the unspeakable, on the other hand, shuttles between the pre-existing signifier (to which the speaker is subjected) and the transgressive or `bewitched' signified (re)produced by warrant of mimesis. Like some kind of uncreated divinity, the modern mystic's semantic ontology exists without Being, tracing the dimension between the name and the unnameable, inscribing its boundary-signs upon the reader's body just as they had been traced upon her own. To the degree that Simone Weil's language finds (or claims) an unspeakable referent outside itself, it participates in the most crucial and controversial philosophical writing of the twentieth century.38 On the conceptual level, her characteristic difficulty ± due in large part to her no-less-characteristic fragmentariness and refusal of systems ± continually tests the boundaries inherent in experience, comprehension and symbolic representation. The old debate concerning whether sacred or revealed texts might also be read às literature' seems merely a tautology in the dynamism of her complex eÂcriture and the reader's reception of it. The problem of metaphysical presence in Simone Weil's phrases such as the ones I have discussed above, especially as posed throughout the writing of Jacques Derrida, remains an open question for me. In his famous essay on violence and metaphysics, he writes: For the meanings which radiate from Inside-Outside or Day-Night, etc., do not only inhabit the proscribed words; they are embedded, in person or vicariously, at the very heart of conceptuality itself. This is because they do not signify an immersion in space. The structure Inside-Outside or Day-Night has no meaning in a pure space given over to itself and disoriented. It emerges on the basis of an included origin, an inscribed eastern horizon which is neither within nor without space. This text of the glance is also the text of speech. Therefore it can be called Face. But one must not expect, henceforth, to separate language and space, to empty language of space, to snatch speech away from light, to speak while a Hand hides Glory. In vain would one exile any given word . . . and in vain would one burn or emprison the letters of light, for language in its entirety already has awakened as a fall into light.39 Although paraphrasing and arguing with Emmanuel Levinas here, Derrida's prose resounds with sympathy and clarity. He demonstrates these




qualities further when he writes, a few pages later in the same essay: `Peace, like silence, is the strange vocation of a language called outside itself by itself'.40 For Simone Weil, our true dignity lies within the strangeness of that very language by which the peace and silence of absolute alterity might be incorporated within the individual, as face or body. Her semantics of the unspeakable triggers, by means of `mimysticism', a recognition of the peace and silence already incarnate in her receptive reader. The six phrases discussed above ± `Beauty is experimental proof that the incarnation is possible', for example ± demonstrate just a few of the perceptual steps one might attempt to imitate so that the dance of one's own life might begin again. Proponents of the `Linguistic Turn' in language and philosophy have been accused, perhaps falsely, of pretending that the truth-content of the world originates solely in language. If this claim be valid, however, its proponents must be prepared to inhabit a place where, as Donald Davidson has stated, `Nothing, however, no thing, makes sentences or theories true: not experience, not surface, irritations, not the world, can make a sentence true.'41 For the mystic Simone Weil, such a world would ignore at its peril the articulated body of the living witness: she who continues to profess and to perform the embodied truth of her experience, even after the dance has ended.

Notes 1 Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, p. 134: À growing number of researchers in all areas of cognitive science have expressed dissatisfaction with the varieties of cognitive realism. This dissatisfaction derives from a deeper source than the search for alternatives to symbol processing or even mixed ``society of mind'' theories: it is a dissatisfaction with the very notion of a representational system'. Varela argues that the widely-held and often-unexamined idea that language forms a pre-existing structure whose combinations might only mirror the system's material `conditions of satisfaction' proves itself unsatisfying to contemporary philosophers `because it need not carry any strong epistemological or ontological commitments' (p. 135). Notions excluded by this kind of representational realism include the cognitive science of information processing às well as the study of evolution and life itself' (p. 134). 2 J.M. Perrin and Gustave Thibon (1953), Simone Weil as we knew her, trans. Emma Craufurd, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 28. 3 Simone Weil (1988), La Pesanteur et la graÃce, Paris: Plon, passim. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. These six sentences have been grouped in three pairs for purposes of comparison and contrast, according to terms I will develop throughout this essay: Ontology, as in sentences one and two;




4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12

13

negative syllogism and the via negativa, as in three and four; and the idea of ambivalent intelligence and its perceptive powers of distinction and selfreference (as in five and six). Christopher Hookway (1992), Òntological commitment' and Òntological relativity', in Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds, A Companion to Epistemology, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 314±15. Alternate translations of la souillure include `stain', `waste', `corruption', ìnfection' and òrdure'; more figuratively, `flaw', `defilement'. The down-to-earth mysticism of enacted, corporeal perception and physical activity has been noted by critics of Simone Weil as a central theme of her entire oeuvre. Her use of simple yet paradoxical language to express it finds an uncanny echo in the sutra of the sixth patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism (Huineng, d. 713 c e ): `For ordinary man is Buddha, and klesa (defilement) is Bodhi (enlightenment). A foolish passing thought makes one an ordinary man, while an enlightened second throught makes on a Buddha. A passing throught that clings to sense-objects is klesa, while a second thought that frees one from attachment is Bodhi'. The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng (1969), trans. A.F. Prince and Wong Mou-Lam, Berkeley: Shambala, Book Two, p. 28. For an excellent elaboration of the strategies of representation in Zen, see Bernard Faure (1991), The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (1982), trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 2: `We attempt to meditate on what F.W. Schelling called ``the freedom of God with regard to his own existence.'' Put a different way, we attempt to render problematic that which seems obvious, about which the philosophers descending from metaphysics agree with the theologians descending from Neo-Thomism: God, before all else, has to be. Which means at one and the same time that before other beings, he would have to be, and that before every other initiative, he would have also to take that of being. But does Being relate, more than anything, to God? Does God have anything to gain by being?' Ewert H. Cousins (1983), `Francis of Assisi: Christian Mysticism at the Crossroads', in Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Religious Traditions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 165. SteÂphane MallarmeÂ (1945), in Oeuvres compleÁtes, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 444±7. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. For an excellent current overview of the historical differences reflected in these issues, see Caroline Bynum (1995), `Why All the Fuss About the Body?,' Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 1., pp. 1±33. The issue of `the body' has been so widely pursued that any larger overview remains outside the scope of this paper. Elaine Scarry (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 4: `Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.' ReneÂ Girard, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort (1987), Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael




14 15

16 17 18 19

20

Metteer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 297: Ìn our own world, we end up with an `ìnfinite'' measure of desire ± with what I have called ontological or metaphysical desire. The ``metaphysical'' threshold or, if we put it a different way, the point at which we reach desire properly speaking, is the threshold of the unreal. It can also be seen as the threshold of psychopathology. Yet we should insist upon the continuity, even the identity, between such a level of desire and everything that passes as completely normal because it is defined in terms sanctioned by society, such as the love of risk, thirst for the infinite, stirrings of a poetic soul, amour fou, and so on.' As if to agree with Girard's critique of sacrificial logic, Simone Weil theorized the deleterious role of fetishized language in the abuse of power; cf. (1970), `The Power of Words', in Selected Essays, trans. Richard Rees, London: Oxford University Press. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind, pp. 147±84. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind, pp. 149±50. If Varela's idea here resembles the tenets of classical phenomenology, it is no mistake; the authors of The Embodied Mind build primarily upon the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The latter's approach to literature and art has been described in terms that resonate here, even if Merleau-Ponty rejects mysticism per se: `But expression as moment of behaviour, as movement of the subject, as realisation of the being outside the self, as being in the world and for others, shows us but one aspect of the phenomenon. . . . This is not mysticism or poetry. Expression is possible [For Merleau-Ponty] because its extra-linguistic correlate belongs to the world; if the referents were not connected, there could be no connection among the signifiers of language.' Cornelius Castoriadis (1984), Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle, Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 124. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, sections 4.121 and 4.1212, p. 26. Wittgenstein (1968), Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, New York: Macmillan, p. 50e. Wittgenstein Tractatus, sections 6.44 & 6.522, p. 73. Theodor W. Adorno (1983), Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, pp. 11±18. The citation in the same paragraph is taken also from this passage. On Richard Rorty, see his Ìntroduction: Antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism' in (1991), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1±17. See W.V. Quine (1960), Word and Object, Cambridge: MIT Press, and the more recent (1990) Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Another, very different yet related version of this issue is referred to in recent criticism as the `mimesis-production' debate. It focuses on Jacques Derrida's claim that mimicry, while it may be said to exist, imitates in fact no determinate or originary model, which means that there is no production possible in mimetic representation, but only re-production of an empty, phantasmatic `presence' or illusory myth. `We recognize here,' writes Jean-Pierre Dupuy in response to Derrida, `the ``deconstruction'' of the ontology of the sign ± the Heideggerian strategy of the ``destruction'' of the concept of truth' as elaborated by Western metaphysics'. See Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1989), `Self-Reference in Literature,`` Poetics 18, p. 502.




21 Michel de Certeau (1974), Le Christianisme eÂclateÂ (en collaboration avec J.-M. Domenach), Paris: Seuil, p. 26: `le silence qui parle en nous d'une diffeÂrence absolue'. 22 Michel de Certeau (1982), La Fable mystique, I: XVIe±XVIIe sieÁcle, Paris: Gallimard, p. 15: ìn-fini d'Autre dont les certitudes, nuits du corps, n'ont plus de repeÁres dans les signifiants'. 23 Vincent Descombes (1980), Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 95. 24 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 95. 25 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 98. 26 De Certeau, La Fable mystique, I, p. 15: `l'expeÂrience feÂminine a mieux reÂsisteÂ aÁ la ruine des symboliques, theÂologiennes et masculines, qui tenaient la preÂsence pour une venue du Logos. Mais preÂciseÂment la preÂsence qu'attestent ces MeÁres et ces Dames se deÂtache du Verbe'. 27 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 99. For another account of the history of semiotics in relation to post-war French thought, see Thomas G. Pavel (1990), The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought, English version by Linda Jordan and Thomas G. Pavel, Oxford: Blackwell. 28 Philippe Sollers (1986), Ìs God Dead? ``The Purloined Letter'' of the Gospel,' trans. Robert Postawko, in To Honor ReneÂ Girard, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 191±6. 29 Simone Weil (1966), Attente de Dieu. Paris: Fayard, p. 55: `C'est qu'il y a un obstacle infranchissable aÁ l'incarnation du christianisme. C'est l'usage des deux petits mots anathema sit. Non pas leur existence, mais l'usage qu'on en a fait jusqu'ici. C'est cela qui m'empeÃche de franchir le seuil de l'Eglise'. 30 Adorno Negative Dialectics, p. 12.

31 Adorno Negative Dialectics, p. 70.

32 Pierre Mabille (1975), TheÂreÁse de Lisieux, Paris: Gallimard, p. 14.

33 Weil Attente de Dieu, p. 54.

34 Simone PeÂtrement, Simone Weil: A Life (1976), trans. Raymond Rosenthal,

New York: Schocken, p. 68. 35 Cited in PeÂtrement Simone Weil, p. 68. 36 Cited in PeÂtrement Simone Weil, p. 68. 37 Simone Weil's `conversion' is said to have happened during her reading aloud, in November 1938, of George Herbert's poem `Love'. Another incident that transformed her physically occurred in the Basilica of Santa Chiara at Assisi, where Simone Weil was forced to her knees by an unseen presence. This event might be read as a continuator of the Franciscan tradition of mystical-corporeal experience, comparable to Francis's vision at LaVerna of the six-winged Seraph, which in its turn seems to take as a model Isaiah's vision in the temple. The via negativa in this tradition of bodily suffering seems to be not primarily transcendental, but instead to reflect the immanent `mysticism of the historical event'. 38 Cf. Walter Benjamin's famous essays on this topic, translated as Òn Language as Such and on the Language of Man', and Òn the Mimetic Faculty', in (1978) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 314±36.






39 Jacques Derrida (1978), `Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas', in Writing and Difference. trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 113. 40 Derrida, `Violence and Metaphysics', p. 117. 41 Donald Davidson (1984), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 194.


The Fertile Mystical Maze: from Derrida's Dry Theological Gorge to Cixous's Dialogic Disgorging Elena Carrera

Despite the many attempts of twentieth-century thinkers to declare (echoing the cry of Nietzsche's madman) that `God is dead', or to demystify any form of discourse which may support God's existence, their intellectual tools have taken them no further than to the very point where all signification stops: the `transcendental signified', the name which deconstruction uses to refer to the God of Christianity.1 Jacques Derrida has announced the `historical closure' of the theological era in which the notion of God has been merged with the notion of the sign.2 But he still cannot rid his readers, once and for all, of the cumbersome notions of the `sensible' and the ìntelligible', God and the sign, since, without them, `nothing is conceivable for us'.3 The deconstructive intellectual games reach there a point of absolute stasis, a point of meaninglessness from which one can only return empty-handed. Alternatively, one may decide to suspend the tiresome strategy of disbelief and then be prepared to be caught red-handed, illuminated by the red light of desire. HeÂleÁne Cixous, a French writer, critic and theorist, and one of Derrida's interlocutors at academic conferences, has confessed to having sometimes caught herself red-handed in resorting to religious discourse: `sometimes reproaching myself for having religious writing'.4 Amongst the many provocative claims which she began to make in the revolutionary intellectual context of Paris in the late 1960s, she wrote: I can adore a voice: I am a woman: the love of the voice: nothing is more powerful than the intimate touch of a veiled voice, profound but reserved coming to awaken my blood; the first ray of a voice that comes to meet the newly-born heart. My heart is in the belonging94



5

The Fertile Mystical Maze 95

Perhaps tired of reading about intellectual games like Derrida's, which, without providing any consolation for the heart, attempt to deconstruct the discourses based on faith which have for centuries held us up, Cixous confesses how, in her search for a belief that was lost, she had given the last tear ìn answer to the question of grace',6 and had even sent short sad unaddressed letters of this kind: Ì've wandered ten years in the desert of books ± without encountering an answer'.7 She then describes her encounter with the writings of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (to whom she always refers by her first name) as an affirmation of a spiritual need to believe, and to love, as a form of knowledge that goes beyond the obvious, the visible. In this essay I will attempt to illustrate how, in reclaiming a feminine space, HeÂleÁne Cixous uses mystical discourse, following an age-long, but long-forgotten, tradition characterized by its search of the beyond and its inscription of love as the way to know the ùnknown', the ineffable. The term `mystic' in its etymological sense, which was clearly perceptible in the early days of Christian mysticism in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500), is inseparable from the notion of mystery: it is about revelation, the unveiling of the hidden through ùnknowing'.8 In her own search for the `feminine Unknown (queÃte vers l'Inconnue)',9 Cixous looks for that which our culture has relegated to the domain of the mysterious. She is aware that she might be scorned or misunderstood: ònce more you'll say that all this smacks of ìdealism', or what's worse, you'll splutter that I'm a ``mystic'''.10 The label `mystic', traditionally used to name various trends within religion which have been kept marginal, at bay and even `repressed', may not be what Cixous wants for herself. However, despite her allegations, what she calls `feminine economy' and `feminine writing' have a lot in common with the mystics' way of knowing through love and through desire, and with their way of writing through metaphors, through displacement.

Cixous's search for eÂcriture feÂminine The name of Cixous tends to be associated in the Anglo-Saxon world with the notion of eÂcriture feÂminine (`feminine writing') put forward in the book-length manifesto The Newly Born Woman, which she published with CatheÂrine de CleÂment in 1975. This book appeared in France at a



ness with a voice fashioned out of shining darkness, a nearness infinitely tender and reserved.5

time when other writers, like Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras, and theorists, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, were also involved in philosophical and literary explorations of the relations between writing and sexuality. All those writers were part of an intellectual avant-garde which, since the 1960s, proclaimed their faith in the subversive potential of language and in the efficaciousness of writing as an instrument for questioning and transforming social structures. Sharing the view held by the French `women's movement' of the 1970s Psych et Po (`Psychanalyse et Politique') that our culture has repressed the `feminine' and pushed it into the space of the unknown and the mysterious, Cixous evokes the mysterious `feminine' in terms of physiological (and already symbolic, cultural) differences. In her exploration of sexual difference and `feminine writing' she rewrites maternal images in a provocative way, challenging women to break the silence imposed on them and to write (and be written) by themselves, with their own body, their own blood and milk, as a way of freeing the female body from its cultural boundaries.11 For Cixous, writing acts as an instrument for self-analysis, since it makes her confront the linguistic choices through which she constitutes herself as a subject, and through which she represents herself in her dialogue with readers. She continued this enterprise of re-presenting her self as a mirror for others well into the 1980s, in a number of writings which, crossing genre and language boundaries, reflect on her personal experience as the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish father and an Ashkenazi mother, brought up in German in Algeria: àll the reasons for which I believed that I did not have the right to write . . . I had no place from which to write. No legitimate place, no land, no homeland, no history of my own'.12 Cixous has also challenged women with her visions and dreams about what it means to be a woman, through which she explores and exploits the unconscious patterns of some kind of shared identity: Ì feel women writing in my writing, giving birth, giving milk'.13 She proposes a nonlogical form of writing, as a way of challenging the `men'-made laws and the `masculine' logic that equates desire with appropriation and possession. The alternative she suggests is the `feminine' economy of loss and expenditure, which, she stresses, is not linked to biological sex and can therefore be present in male writers.14 Cixous's most provocative challenge in that sense is found in a text from 1976, in which the `feminine text' is presented as a `body that overflows, disgorges, vomiting as opposed to masculine incorporation'




and that throws itself up all over the place instead of following a linear logic.15 In the face of the contemporary critical discourses which, by challenging the voice, seem to dry up the throat, Cixous provocatively suggests `disgorging'. I cannot help reading into that disgorging a challenge to the very dryness of `gorge-ous' discourses like Derrida's, which might not do more than that, run to and fro (discurrere), in between the dead ends of the man-made theological ruts which they try to wipe out.

A female interlocutor: `Clarice-voix/voie' In 1979 Cixous claimed to have found in her reading of Clarice Lispector not only an amazing feminine voice (the first example of `feminine writing' by a female author) but also a remarkable way of writing, of naming, of letting things come, an àpproach that opens and leaves space for the other'.16 In To Live the Orange, published in French that same year, Cixous's encounter with the work of Lispector is recounted as a religious experience: à writing came with an angel's footsteps, ±when I was so far from myself, alone at the extremity of my finite being'.17 The old biblical discourse of revelation seems to be an appropriate way of describing the experience of a writing which she associates with the voice and with the birth of life: `there are those women whose voice notes the signs of life in its minute beginnings. If they write, it is to surround the birth of life with the most delicate care'.18 Cixous's reappropriation of the experience of the demiurgic voice can be read as one more piece of evidence for the very `desire for the phoneÁ', which, in Derrida's view, underlies `logocentrism'. As he puts it: In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense (thought or lived) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself (whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner . . . or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God).19 The phonocentrism and logocentrism with which Derrida charges the whole of the Western civilisation may be traced back to the early Biblical traditions and has certainly dominated the Western discourses of rationalism and scientific positivism, but it does not seem so crucial when it




comes to the mystical discourses which shaped much of medieval and early-modern Christian theology.20 The theology which Derrida attacks is only `scholastic theology', based to a great extent on St Thomas's version of Aristotle. Furthermore, Saussure's distinction of signifier and signified, which Derrida attempts to deconstruct, is based on the medieval distinction between signans and signatum, which, drawing on the Aristotelian binary of form and matter, was meant to convey the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible. However, these scholastic distinctions had, for centuries, been supplemented and challenged with the methods and findings of `mystical theology' (also known as ìnfused science' and `hidden or secret knowledge'), which sought knowledge beyond the senses and the intellect.21 To the uncertainty of intellectual knowledge, the defenders of mystical theology opposed the `via affectiva', the `strength of the will' or, as we would probably put it today, the `strength of desire'. For them, it was simply a question of being determined to know God, and using the `strength of the will', to move beyond the senses and the intellect.22 God could not be reduced to either category of the sensible or the intelligible, but could be experienced by the individual who surrendered his or her intellect to the will, and who persevered until God's will was met and his grace obtained. In the view of Christian mystics, it is through this ìntentional' two-way movement toward the other that knowledge is possible. As the Spanish Franciscan Bernardino de Laredo (1482±540) puts it, èach time the soul is touched by uncreated love the understanding is illuminated so marvellously, that it comprehends and penetrates the most secret things and the true meaning of the Scripture';23 ìt is to be noted that, in this union, in this rise towards God, the soul contributes no more than its free will, since it is God who acts'.24 It is this idea of the free will and the possibility of using one's desire as a way of moving towards the will of the Other which, in my view, supplements and challenges the compulsiveness of the Law, the Logos, the Word. Derrida emphasizes this compulsiveness: `the beginning word is understood, in the intimacy of self-presence, as the voice of the other and as a commandment'.25 The compulsiveness and phonocentricity of the Scripture as commandment has also been emphasized in recent discussions of early Christianity such as that by Brian Stock, who asserts that: `[Christianity and Judaism] are both scriptural, and yet they both envisage themselves as obeying the word of God'.26 It seems, indeed, that in the earliest books of the Old Testament the Word of God requires an immediate response: called by God Àbraham!',




Abraham answers `Behold, here I am';27 called by an angel of God (later to be recognized to be God himself), `Jacob', Jacob answers, `Here I am'.28 But one could also agree with Pascal that the Word of God is not simply a command, but an attempt to establish communication and to bring about knowledge of the self and of the other.29 One does not know the other without knowing the self and does not know the self without the other's existence in conjunction, in communication, or (why not put it this way) in dialogue. There is, therefore, no knowledge, and no sense of the (cogitational) self, without intersubjectivity. In mystical theology, as Laredo sees it, the soul is united through love to a `divine conversation'.30 The next step in my argument is that the Word with which God was equated in the Judaeo-Christian tradition may be no more identifiable with the `presence' of the voice than it is with the existence of `text'. Text, in turn, is to be understood not as a pre-existing oral or written text, but as a text which is constantly being shaped through dialogue. One could read Genesis as placing the emphasis on the sound of God's voice calling Abraham, and then assume that any form of knowledge amongst the Judaeo-Christian sons of Abraham can only be a derivation from this original phoneÁ. But one could also argue that it is not so much the sound of God's Word that matters, but the communication established when Abraham heard it. Equally, for Abraham the voice was not the primal signifier from which all meaning was to be derived, but only an instrument that granted him self-knowledge and consciousness of his existence in the here and now. Thus sound, the phoneÁ, may be indicative of the here-and-now presence which, in Derrida's view, underlies Western metaphysics (`the metaphysics of presence'), but the words `Here I am' pronounced by Abraham, simply indicators, are not identifiable with presence itself. Presence, which etymologically means `to be in front of', implies intersubjectivity, an interlocutor in front of whom one can exist. The voice is thus not the original cause but the instrument of the call and the response whereby one can bring one's consciousness to the `here and now', the location in time which is always a prerequisite of speech. As Dionysius puts it, in the Old Testament man could not attain to the Presence of God himself, but only be aware of the location, the `here and now' of his own interlocutions with him.31 Thus, since the God of Judaism cannot be seen, it is not surprising that òrality' is the principal metaphor used in the Old Testament to describe the interchanges between God and Man. These interchanges are not limited to verbal communication (either privately or through the




prophets), but extend to those utterances by God which, as perlocutions, had had the effect of creating the world: `by the word of the Lord were the heavens made'.32 The Word of God in the Old Testament is not only a manifestation but also the instrument for implementation of his will: `for he spake, and it was done'.33 In one of such efficacious transformations, the Word becomes writing, a book communicated to Ezekiel through his oral orifice, rather than through his aural channel.34 Cixous writes ìn the feminine', against the grain of the `received' accounts of Man in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Her account in To Live the Orange can be read as an attempt to counteract the cruelty with which the Word continues to impose itself, as it did for Ezekiel, in the form of writing and books which we still feel compelled to devour. Cixous suggests that it is possible to read differently, particularly since there are writings which àre like voices changed into hands to come very gently to meet our souls, when we are searching, we have needed to leave to search for what in our being is most secret. Because a woman's voice has awakened our heart'.35 In her account of how she read Lispector's writing Cixous re-inscribes the voice of Woman, a voice which has traditionally been negated, or, at least, absent: `from far away, from outside of my history, a voice came to collect the last tear. To save the orange. She put the word in my ear'.36 This voice is compassionate, speaks to the heart and responds to the emotions of the `reader/listener'. It does not demand to be devoured, but comes to place the word gently in one's ear. It also appears to be as efficacious as the Word of God: `Clarice is the name of a woman capable of calling life by all of its warm and cool names. And life comes. She says: I am. And in the instant Clarice is. Clarice is entirely in the instant when she gives herself to being, alive, infinite, unlimited in her being'.37 In her mystical reading of Lispector's text, her `toile', Cixous hears its interior vibration, which tells her how the writer also closed her eyes to be able to hear the interiority of the orange, its secret song: `by a fine vibration in the toile, I sensed that Clarice closed her eyes to touch the orange better, to hold it more lightly, let it weigh more freely upon her text, she noted eyes closed to hear more internally the secret song of the orange'.38 For Hegel, sound is indeed the privileged medium for idealization; the interior vibration of the object, `the first, more ideal activity' of the object's soul, rather than its static material form, is what matters in auditory perception.39 In the mystical discourse described by Dionysius there is a progression which involves restriction of speech and becoming voiceless until one can experience that which is beyond words, and be àbsorbed in him who




is totally ineffable'.40 Cixous's description of her experience of absorption of Lispector's writing also involves a progression from hearing its voice (as I have described above), to seeing its `gleaming hands', to voicelessness: à writing came, with gleaming hands in the darkness . . . for ever asking me forgiveness, I forgave it, I asked its forgiveness, neither food, nor ravens. I spoke no more, I feared my voice'.41 Cixous, who qualifies herself as à Jew, and suspicious of anything related to the Church and to its ideological role',42 does not repress the desire which leads her to a mystical experience and which has more to do with Christianity's emphasis on forgiveness and on the visual, than with the emphasis of Judaism on orality and obedience to the Law. The visual form of communication with the divine is made possible in the history of Judeo-Christianity at the point when God makes himself manifest to Israel by sending his Son and making the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove and abode him.43 From then on, the expression of God's will through the word only44 gives way to a broader range of possibilities of dialogue, not only between God and his creation but also between the three Persons of God and between God and man in the name of Christ, the second person, the Thou position. Christianity offers the possibility of raising oneself above the fallen flesh by entering (by choice, exercising one's free will) a new kind of dialogue with God in which, as the Church prayer `per Ipsum et cum Ipso et in Ipso' exhorts, the individual approaches the Father in the name of Christ.45 Christ, the incarnated Word, does not only offer the Christian a position as a speaker from which to address God through ìnner speech', but also offers the possibility of encountering the divinity through ìnner sight', through contemplation. There is thus a change of emphasis from considering the Word in terms of sound to considering the Word in terms of knowledge-by-vision. Instead of obeying the ìntelligible', oral, words of God's commandments, the Christian is offered the alternative of imitating the `sensible', visual, actions of Christ. Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila (1515±82) reports to have been encouraged, in her dialogues with Christ, to look at him and to act according to what she sees, rather than to simply obey, copy and preserve the Word: `look at Me so that what you do might be done in conformity with what I did'.46 Experience, living, and identifying with Christ's life and love, is suggested as an alternative to the intellectual pursuit of the dead letter. However, the knowledge which mystics derive from experience, from visions, can only be conveyed through imprecise words or through faulty visual replicas:




To us ignorant people it appears that all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity are ± as represented in paintings ± in one Person, as when three faces are painted on one body. And thus we are so scared away that it seems the mystery is impossible and that no one should dare think about it. For the intellect feels hindered and fears lest it might have doubts about this truth, and it thereby loses something very beneficial. What was represented to me were three distinct Persons, for we can behold and speak to each one. Afterward I reflected that only the Son took human flesh, through which this truth of the Trinity was seen. These Persons love, communicate with, and know each other.47 The model of communication offered to and by Christian mystics, that of the three Persons of the Trinity, involves the dialogue of beholding, through love, beyond words and signs. While the word of God is eternal and `shall stand for ever' (Isaiah 40: 7±8), human words are fleeting; they flow in time and even depend on time, vanishing successively with each instance in which it comes into existence. As an alternative form of knowledge to words and verbal thoughts, the visual offers some sort of liberation from the constrains of temporality (syntax) and contiguity (semantics) to which words are subject. Dreams and visions offer the possibility of transgressing the laws of contiguity in communication, bringing the individual closer to the knowledge of God. Rewriting the (hi)story of Christian revelation, Cixous offers her experience of reading as a testimony which may inspire others to seek and find the Woman as she did, first listening to a `feminine' writing such as Lispector's, then by being taken, through her voice, to the revelation of the hands and face of a `feminine' God: I saw her face, My God. She showed me her face. I had my vision. It was a matter of the face. The face of the Vision. . . . Revealed to me. It was the revelation. The skin of an opaque complexion, of a fixed bronzed orange, the skin imposing, restrained. The eyebrow thick, a sculpted curve, dark brown, the eyebrow dense, in reality, I didn't look at it, it manifested itself, for me48 But for Cixous to experience Lispector's dark brown face as the face of a feminine God a mystic-like àct of the will' is required. In the post-Freudian context in which Cixous writes, the `will' can easily be equated with desire. Cixous's will, her desire to know




through love, like the mystics' desire, takes her further than rationality could have taken her. As she confesses, she lets her desires, which become apparent to her through dreams, influence her writing.49 In her explorations of the mysteries of the `hyster', the woman's womb, which has been excluded and repressed, Cixous might have succumbed in the face of the aura of mystery with which woman has been surrounded, or in the face of her own desire. But as it happens, she is held by her desire in the infinite arms she attributes to this Woman. She claims: `to have the fortune ± little sister of joy ± to have encountered the joy clarice, or the joy g h or l or anna, and since then to live in joy, in her infinitely great arms, her cosmic arms, dry and warm, tender, slim ± The too great fortune?'50 In one of the few direct quotations provided by Cixous, Lispector had also expressed her need to be held by others in her meditative attempts to communicate without words: This I who is you, for I can't bear to be simply me, I need the others to hold me up, giddy and awkward as I am, for after all what is there to do except meditate in order to fall into this full emptiness that can only be attained through meditation. . . . I meditate without words and on nothingness.51 It seems that the infinite cosmic arms which Cixous attributes to the Woman in Lispector's writing cannot exist without dialogue, communication, and an interlocutor as attentive as Cixous, who can also put her arms around her. At this stage one could perhaps steal Pascal's argument in defence of the mysteries of Christian doctrine and re-write it in the feminine, as a strategic way to bring back the repressed: (Wo)man is more inconceivable without this `m(h)ystery' than this `m(h)ystery' is inconceivable to (Wo)man.52

Mystic-like `jouis-science' In The Newly Born Woman Cixous had resorted to the old conceptions of woman as òverflowing' and `never holding still' to encourage other women to write, to wander, to fly/steal,53 and referred to the example of a woman writer who everyone can be, just as she has been: Ì was Saint Teresa of Avila, that madwoman who knew a lot more than all the men. And who knew how to become a bird on the strength of loving'.54 It might seem, however, that Cixous's personal experience of being the woman whom she wants to be, and whom she sees in the sixteenth-




century Spanish Carmelite reformer and mystic, amounts to no more than an àct of the will'. Soon after dreaming of being Teresa of Avila, Cixous continues to impersonate the mystic who has experience of letting go of herself and wants to encourage others to do so. Thus, in `La venue aÁ l'eÂcriture', she invites women to give up absolutely everything in order to gain their freedom: Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters. Listen: nothing is found. Nothing is lost. Everything remains to be sought. Go, fly, swim, bound, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don't dare, it is there that you will take pleasure, never make your here anywhere but there, and rejoice, in the terror, follow where you're afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you're on the right trail! Listen: you owe nothing to the past, you owe nothing to the law. Gain your freedom: get rid of everything, vomit up everything, give up everything. Give up absolutely everything, do you hear me? All of it! Give up your goods. Done? Don't keep anything; whatever you value, give it up. Are you with me? Search yourself, seek out the shattered, the multiple I, that you will be still further on, and emerge from one self, shed the old body, shake off the Law. Let it fall with all its weight, and you, take off, don't turn back: it's not worth it, there's nothing behind you, everything is yet to come. One can emerge from death, I believe, only with an irrepressible burst of laughter.55 Shedding the old body and emerging from death just happens to be the desire underlying Teresa's most famous verses: I live without living in myself and hope for a life so high that I die from not dying. I already live outside myself, having died of love.56 These verses are usually seen as Teresa's testimony to an extreme form of living and loving.




Like Teresa, Cixous uses her writing to defend the `knowledge of how to live', in contrast to a `scholarly knowledge'.57 She insists on calling the former kind of knowledge `feminine,' opposing it to the `ready-made knowledge' that has traditionally been acquired, possessed and passed on from man to man. Her decision is justified with the vague claim: ìt just happens that, culturally, women have more of a chance of gaining access to pleasure'.58 It is true that traditionally women have been more encouraged to think of bodily pleasure and pain than men. But there have always been domains, such as monastic writing, in which men have been allowed a certain degree of freedom from gender roles. There was, indeed, a trend of `feminization' in monastic writing, linked to the rise of affective spirituality, of which Cistercian mystic writer Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) is one of the earliest representatives.59 In writing about `mystical union' in the erotic terms provided by the Song of Songs, some monks chose to inscribe themselves or, rather, their souls (the Latin ànima' being a feminine word) as the brides of Christ. There was also a tendency to describe Christ as a maternal figure, attributing him `breasts' (ùbera' being the term used in the Vulgate to translate the Hebrew word `love' from Song 1:1). The idea of Christ as a nursing figure was also connected in the writings of twelfth-century Clairvaux (and in those of sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan preachers) with the Pauline image of Christians as babes who still need Christ's milk, not being strong enough spiritually to take solid food.60 Maternal metaphors had already been used in the Old Testament but it is only with the development of àffective' Christian spirituality that they began to be used to refer to the presence of the divinity. With the Church's increasing institutionalization Christian spirituality also developed in a markedly different direction by placing greater emphasis on affective experience. This shift began in the late eleventh century, when the predominant image of a victorious warrior God who was to be feared and obeyed began to be replaced by that of a humanized Saviour whose life and Passion were supposed to arouse feelings of grief, compassion and love. The new practice of meditation on Christ's Passion was encouraged by a series of publications, first in Latin (as, for instance, the twelfth-century Orationes sive Meditationes of Anselm or the Sermones of Bernard), and then, from the late fourteenth century on, in the vernacular. Affective spirituality reached its climax in the fifteenth century, when the idea put forward by Dionysius that there was an inward way to God accessible to all men began to be taught and put into practice outside the walls of religious houses. In Spain in the 1520s




and 1530s a series of devotional books by Franciscans were published in the vernacular encouraging the idea that God, the greatest Unknown, was not to be known through the intellect but could be addressed and experienced directly in mental prayer by all Christians, independently of their gender, marital status, racial origin and degree of education. Drawing on the late-medieval distinction between scientia or intellective knowledge and sapientia or affective knowledge, Bonaventura (1221± 74) had remarked, as the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscans were quick to point out, that the tree of science is what usually stops us from eating from the tree of life.61 This was emphasized in the `suspicious' method of prayer and àffective' practices taught by the Franciscans, which encouraged people to place their souls in a permanent state of rising to God through love, without any prior intellectual considerations. In the Third Spiritual Abecedary, the book from which Teresa of Avila learned her method of prayer, the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna (1492±1541) speaks of the will and the understanding as the two wings of a bird, and tries to persuade his readers not to assume that they can attain the repose they desire through the understanding (the left wing), but to realise that they must use their capacity for loving and tasting (the right wing).62 As opposed to the purportedly technical and precise terminology used by professors of scholastic theology in their teaching and their writings, the terms used by the defenders of mystical theology ± quietude, darkness, annihilation, silence of the understanding ± are more evidently highly charged terms. Osuna coined as many as nineteen names to refer to `mystical theology'; amongst those we find àrt of love', òracioÂn de sabidurõÂa' ± meaning both prayer of knowledge and of taste- and `sabroso saber' -`tasty knowledge'.63 He reminded his readers that, according to the Scripture, the really wise are those who know the taste ± `saben a queÂ sabe' ± of the spirit of devotion.64 Among the many other elaborations on the theme of sapientia, the Franciscan Francisco Laredo, for instance, claimed that Christ teaches each of us `mouth to mouth' (`boca a boca').65 Cixous uses the term `feminine' to allude to the kind of experiential knowledge which starts from the body, the senses, and moves beyond it through desire, the will, rather than through the intellect. She even coins her own term, `jouis-science' (based on the French jouissance, a slang word for òrgasm') to refer to experiential knowledge, which, in her view, is inseparable from pleasure.66 The notion of `jouis-science' is perhaps not very different from the medieval sapientia or from Osuna's `tasty knowledge', which can, in turn, be linked to the Old Testament's metaphors of orality and of learning through the mouth: Ò taste and




see that the Lord is good';67 `how sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!'68 Cixous, nonetheless, claims the form of knowledge that begins with the mouth, that is connected with taste, as being specifically feminine since it was Eve who tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge.69 Teresa of Avila is seen by Cixous as an example of a `feminine' attitude towards knowledge, even though, as we have seen, she had learned this attitude from her reading of books by Franciscan friars. Being a woman, Teresa was excluded from the knowledge which her contemporaries most valued: the knowledge of the Scriptures and tradition, patristic exegesis and scholastic theology, which was contained in texts carefully custodied by a few male hierarchs, mostly from the Dominican Order. But, quite pragmatically, she saw in this exclusion a degree of freedom from the limitations of `learned' knowledge. In her first book, The Book of her Life we find a remarkable defence of the kind of knowledge that differs from the knowledge of scholars. She reports that, when many vernacular books with mystical undertones were banned (she is referring to the Index of Forbidden Books published in Spain in 1559), she was in great dispair since she could not read Latin, until the Lord appeared to her and told her: `Don't be sad, for I shall give you a living book'.70 She could subsequently free herself from the authority of books and tradition, and trust more the knowledge she obtained through her emotional (and to a great extent, visual) experience of prayer. Teresa's use of a `feminine' rhetoric of ignorance was thus not so much a strategy but a necessity. Since she could not claim any learning, she was forced to declare that the things she knew did not come from her intellect but were given to her `to eat'.71 Nonetheless, what Cixous finds significant is Teresa's confidence that the knowledge which she obtained by loving was greater than that of all the men around her who were trained to used their intellects. This confidence becomes particularly clear in her Way of Perfection of 1565: I know that I am lacking neither in love nor in desire to do all I can to help the souls of my sisters to make great progress in the service of the Lord. It may be that this love, together with my years and the experience which I have of a number of convents, will make me more successful in writing about small matters than learned men can be. For these, being themselves strong and having other and more important occupations, do not always pay such heed to things which in themselves seem of no importance.72




In her Meditations on the Song of Songs, Teresa also suggests to her nuns that, when dealing with the mysteries of sacred faith, they should not tire themselves or waste their thoughts in subtle reasoning, and unlike the theologians whose job is to do that, they could simply rejoice in whatever the Lord might give them.73 Similarly, in her search for knowledge, Cixous dismisses the position of the expert, the one who knows, in order to become more `receptive': One really has to make a big effort, and particularly one has to overrule the ego and the pretence of mastering things and knowing things. Then we reach the point when we can say as she says: it is only because I don't know anything in an appropriating way, `because I don't know anything and because I remember nothing'.74 Cixous thus seems to be proclaiming the passive attitude of mystics who, as Dionysius put it, were to be only concerned with the notknowing which comes with the desire to know.75

Post-scriptum? In Spanish sixteenth-century readings of Dionysius, that which was above mind, and which was united to the divine, was the will.76 It is, indeed, through her will, her desire, that Teresa could come to know, be united with, and enjoy the divine. To describe her experience of mystical union she resorts, like many mystics had done before her, to the sensual image of Christ's breasts: Just as a person is caused to swoon from great pleasure and happiness, it seems to the soul it is left suspended in those divine arms, leaning on that sacred side and those divine breasts. It doesn't know how to do anything more than rejoice, sustained by the divine milk with which its Spouse is nourishing it and making it better so that He might favor it, and it might merit more each day. When it awakens from that sleep and that heavenly inebriation, it remains as though stupefied and dazed and with a holy madness. It seems to me it can say these words: Your breasts are better than wine (Song 1.1).77 Like Cixous in her experience of reading Lispector, Teresa is held up in the arms of her divine interlocutor and only awakens from that experience of intimate union to feel stupefied, à-maze-d'.





I read this and I tell myself how terrible it is that we spend precious months of our existence trying to give `proofs', falling into the trap of critical interpellation, allowing ourselves to be led before the tribunal where we are told: give us proof, explain to us what feminine writing or sexual difference is. And if we were more courageous than I am, we would say: a flute for your proof, I am alive. I am not serene enough, except when I write. And when I write, I tell myself that it is not enough, we need to do something else. However, it is true that the truest is like this: either you know without knowing, and this knowledge which doesn't know is a flash of joy which the other shares with you, or else there is nothing. We cannot convert someone who is not already converted. We will never touch the heart that lives on another planet.78 Like those who, before her, had abandoned the `pre-scribed' paths of the Logos, the logical, to inscribe themselves into the `dia-logical' maze of the `post-scriptum' (that behind and beyond writing), Cixous will live on, through her writing, with all those others who come together to eat, speak, disgorge, wait, expect and listen to her text, and thus come to knowledge, to `jouis-science', unknowingly.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

See Jacques Derrida (1974), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 20. Derrida chooses the word `closure' since he is aware that `perhaps it will never end'. His equation of God and sign can be narrowed down to his idea that both share the same place and time of birth; Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 14. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 13. HeÂleÁne Cixous (1989), Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange, bilingual edn, trans Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell, in L'heure de Clarice Lispector. PreÂcedeÂ de Vivre l'orange, Paris: Des femmes, p. 12. Cixous, To Live, p. 8. Cixous, To Live, p. 16. Cixous, To Live, p. 10. The strategy of unknowing, or agnosia, which Dionysius proposes, does not imply ignorance, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, who can only be approached by that which is beyond



Similarly à-maze-d' when awakened from her rejoicing, her `jouisscience' of reading in Lispector's cosmic arms, Cixous, as Teresa had done before her, also refuses to fall into the narrow and dry gorge of critical discourse:

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25

and above knowledge. Dionysius's via negativa is based on an up-drawing and in-drawing of the consciousness in order to arrive at the superessential darkness which outshines and obliterates the light of all sensible thing; Dionysius the Areopagite (1949), Mystical Theology, London: Unwin Bros, p. 7. HeÂleÁne Cixous (1976), LaÁ, Paris: Gallimard, p. 80. HeÂleÁne Cixous (1980), `The Laugh of the Medusa', trans. K. and P. Cohen, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, Brighton: Harvester, p. 262. HeÂleÁne Cixous and CatheÂrine CleÂment (1986), The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 93. In another text published in French in 1975 Cixous also encourages women to take up writing as a way of `returning' to the female `body which has been more than confiscated'; Cixous, `The Laugh of the Medusa', p. 250. HeÂleÁne Cixous (1986), Entre l'eÂcriture, Paris: Des femmes, p. 24.

Cixous, To Live, p. 34.

The examples she gives are Shakespeare, Joyce, Genet, Hoffman and

Kleist; Cixous, PreÂnoms de personne, pp. 3±5. Cixous has expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional binary opposition `masculine/feminine', but claimed that it has been operational `for historical reasons'; interview in Verena Conley (1984), HeÂleÁne Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 133. She has insisted that it needs to be used for the time being, until other terms, such as colour adjectives, can be used instead; HeÂleÁne Cixous (1984), Àpproaches', Boundary 2, vol. 12, pp. 1±7. HeÂleÁne Cixous, (1981), `Castration or Decapitation', trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs, vol. 7, p. 54. HeÂleÁne Cixous (1991), `Clarice Lispector: the Approach', trans. Deborah Jenson, in 'Coming to Writing' and other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 60. With expressions like `Clarice-voice/way (voix/voie)' Cixous tries to convey the fertility of Lispector's way of thinking; Cixous, `Clarice Lispector', p. 62. Cixous, To Live, p. 10.

Cixous, To Live, p. 10.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 11.

As Mary Carruthers observes, Derrida's `logocentrism' has more to do with

the `rationalist enterprise of modern scientific positivism' than with early and medieval Christianity; Mary Carruthers (1989), `Review of Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schichtman', Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 11, p. 223. Dionysius, Mystical Theology, p. 9. An overview of the various definitions of mystical theology since Dionysius to the sixteenth century is provided, for instance, in Bernardino de Laredo (1948), Subida del Monte SioÂn (1538), in Ä oles, Madrid: BAC, Juan Bautista Gomis, ed., MõÂsticos Franciscanos Espan pp. 325±330. Michel de Certeau (1982), La fable mystique, Paris: Gallimard, p. 277. Laredo, Subida, p. 327 Laredo, Subida, p. 325 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 17.




26 Brian Stock Listening for the Text: on the Uses of the Past, Cited in Larry Scanlon (1994), Narrative, Authority, and Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 49. 27 Genesis 22:1.

28 Genesis 31:11.

29 Blaise Pascal (1995), PenseÂes and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, p. 15. 30 Laredo, Subida, p. 329. 31 Dionysius, Mystical Theology, p. 11. 32 Psalm 33:6. 33 Psalm 33:9. 34 Ezekiel was made to eat a roll of a book written within and without with lamentations, mourning, and woe, which tasted to him as sweet as honey, filled his bowels and returned to his mouth as words meant for the people of Israel; Ezekiel 2:8±10; 3:1±5. A figural reading of the New Testament would not fail to note the parallel between this episode and the one described in the Book of Revelation 10:10. 35 Cixous, To Live, p. 10.

36 Cixous, To Live, p. 14.



39 G.W.F. Hegel (1920), The Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. 3, trans. F.P. Osmaston,

London: G. Bell, pp. 15±16, 341. 40 Dionysius, Mystical Theology, p. 16 41 Cixous, To Live, p. 12. 42 Cixous, Newly Born Woman, p. 77. 43 John 1:31±2. 44 John 1:1. 45 John 16:13, Ephesians 5:20, Colossians 3:17. 46 St Teresa (1980), Spiritual Testimonies, in The Collected Works, vol. 1, trans. Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh, Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, p. 388. 47 St Teresa, Spiritual Testimonies, p. 400. 48 Cixous, To Live, p. 48. 49 Conley, HeÂleÁne Cixous, p. 155. 50 Cixous, To Live, p. 54. 51 Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, cited in HeÂleÁne Cixous (1988), Èxtreme Fidelity', in Susan Sellers, ed., Writing Differences, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, p. 20. 52 Blaise Pascal, (1963), Oeuvres CompleÁtes, ed. L. Lafuma, Paris: Seuil, p. 131. 53 In French, `voler'; Cixous, Newly Born Woman, p. 91. 54 Cixous, Newly Born Woman, p. 99. For a specific study of connections between Cixous's notion of eÂcriture feminine and the writings of Teresa of Avila, see Elena Carrera (1993),' Teresa of Avila and HeÂleÁne Cixous: corps-aÁcorps with the mother', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, vol. 2, pp. 409±18. 55 HeÂleÁne Cixous (1991), `Coming to Writing', trans. Deborah Jenson, in 'Coming to Writing', p. 6.




56 Santa Teresa de JesuÂs (1986), `Muero porque no muero', in Obras completas, ed. EfreÂn de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink, Madrid: BAC, p. 654. 57 Cixous, Èxtreme Fidelity', p. 20 58 Cixous, Èxtreme Fidelity', p. 18 59 Caroline W. Bynum (1982), Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley: University of California Press. 60 I Corinthians 3:2. 61 Cited in Francisco de Osuna (1972), Tercer Abecedario espiritual, ed. AndreÂs MartõÂn, Madrid: BAC, p. 581. 62 Osuna, Tercer Abecedario, pp. 374±5. 63 Osuna, Tercer Abecedario, p. 236. 64 Osuna, Tercer Abecedario, p. 302. 65 Laredo, Subida, p. 39. 66 HeÂleÁne Cixous (1981), With ou l'art de l'innocence, Paris: Des femmes, p. 214. 67 Psalm 34:8. 68 Psalm 119:103. 69 Cixous, Èxtreme Fidelity', p. 16. 70 St Teresa of Avila, The Book of her Life, in The Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 226. 71 St Teresa, The Book of her Life, p. 239. 72 St Teresa of Avila (1980), Way of Perfection, in The Collected Works, vol. 2, trans. Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh, Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, p. 40. 73 St Teresa of Avila, Meditations on the Song of Songs, in The Collected Works, vol. 2, pp. 216±17. 74 HeÂleÁne Cixous (1987), `Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman', New Literary History, vol. 19, p. 20. 75 Dionysius (1897), On Divine Names, trans. John Parker, London: James Parker, p. 91. 76 Laredo, Subida, p. 329. 77 St Teresa, Meditations on the Song of Songs, p. 244. 78 Cixous, Èxtreme Fidelity', p. 20.




Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature



Part II


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`Black Fire on White Fire': Kabbalah and Modernity HeÂleÁne Domon

`Yx' and òr': in 1868, SteÂphane MallarmeÂ spent several months writing a poem that contained only those two rhymes, with Nothingness as its central theme and `Sonnet Allegorical Of Itself' as a first title.1 He sent the poem to his friend Henri Cazalis with this curious letter: I'm extracting this sonnet, which I thought about once, from a projected study on the word: it is inverted, by which I mean that its meaning, if there is one (but I'd draw consolation for its lack of meaning from the dose of poetry it contains, at least in my view) is evoked by an internal mirage of the words themselves. If you murmur it to yourself a couple of times, you get a fairly cabbalistic sensation. That amounts to a confession that it is not very `plastic', as you requested, but at least it's as `black and white' as possible . . . 2 This letter, among others, reveals that MallarmeÂ was at least somewhat familiar with the literature of Jewish Kabbalah, from which he borrowed several elements: a belief in the inner power of the murmured word; a `project on speech'; a `black and white' theme used to describe writing; a mystical approach to poetry which was to provide a physical, `kabbalistic sensation'; and above all, a reflection on the possibility of pure, total, `self-allegorical' writing, and a life-long quest for `the Book'. MallarmeÂ's contact with Jewish Kabbalah was problably minimal; it certainly was not of religious or theological order, but rather of literary order.3 This element, however, poses the question of a possible post-theological relation of modern eÂcriture, whose origin French critics often associate with MallarmeÂ, with Jewish Kabbalah. How did certain forms and concepts of Jewish Kabbalah influence, whether directly or indirectly, not just MallarmeÂ's writings, but an 115



6

essential aspect of modern French thought? To what extent has the Kabbalistic formulation of the fundamental concepts of speech and writing influenced the modern definition of parole and eÂcriture by offering a counterpart to the more traditional logocentric formulation of Platonism and Christianity? Medieval texts such as the Zohar and ProvencËal Kabbalah do present a metaphysical conception of the speech/writing dyad that seems to reverse the conception underlying logocentric metaphysics. I shall argue that this very opposition, this tension between a major logocentric text inherited from Christian and Platonic metaphysics, and a latent grammatocentric text whose basic structure was theorized in Kabbalah by way of midrashic writing, and recycled much later by Jewish or non-Jewish writers such as MallarmeÂ, has propelled a modern rhetoric of literature, while decentering traditional metaphysical and verbal systems and bringing about the end of a unified theological era. My aim is not to demonstrate a religious descent of French modernity from Judaism, but to suggest that the recycling of Kabbalah as text and its juxtaposition to opposite theories of logos as revived by the Romantics in the nineteenth century4 have played an important role in the elaboration of modern theories of writing from MallarmeÂ to contemporary French philosophy. First I shall emphasize the paradox at stake in the Kabbalistic conceptualization of writing by referring to one biblical passage which Kabbalists considered as a key point in the Torah, the episode of Exodus in which Moses speaks privately to the chiefs of Israel before he delivers the Tables of the Law. From the perspective of textuality, how can we reformulate the paradoxical relation of Oral and Written Torah? This question implies that we set aside historical considerations about the actual passage from orality to script and that we concentrate our attention on the ever contemporary textual interrelations of oral and written viewed as concurrent themes within a specific corpus of writings, the Bible, which we, as the community of the Book, are reading today as though in parenthesis from orality.5 In this strict literary context, speech ( parole) can only be considered to be one aspect of the written, a principle which readily suggests an affinity between Kabbalistic theory and contemporary literary theory. I shall illustrate the difficult conflict which Kabbalists had to resolve between the traditional rabbinic hypothesis of Primordial Speech according to which the first Word of God was non-written and identifiable with Biblical Wisdom, and their own mystical hypothesis of primordial writing according to which the Oral Torah itself was primarily written,




èngraved in the right side of God',6 which post-structuralist theory might describe as as latent `grammatocentric' text. Finally, I shall demonstrate that the Kabbalistic defense of writing that attempts to resolve this conflict has been more or less consciously recycled by modern French writers after MallarmeÂ (JabeÁs, BeÂneÂzet, Derrida, Blanchot, Ponge among others) towards a new, post-theological formulation of speech and writing.

I.

Moses' (speech)

Exodus 34±40: after Moses breaks the first tables of the Law, he ascends Mount Sinai again, speaks to God, rewrites the Decalogue on new stone tablets, walks back to his people to teach them the renewed covenant, and has them build a tabernacle in which to house the tablets, covered by an ark, a veil, and a cloud brought down by God. At first glance, this episode can be read as the closing scene of a great story of the Book. The final engraving of the Law in new stone tablets seems to represent the end of writing. The covenant is concluded, the Law is written out, the tabernacle is closed, Exodus is ending. Closure as theme seems to be itself enclosed in the narration of Exodus whose text form represents, so to speak, the most durable container and the ultimate writing envelope of the sacred Law. By identifying the recording of the Law with total representation of writing (Moses writing the Law, the narration writing the story of the writing of the Law) Exodus could have possibly sheltered the entire people of Israel, the entire odyssey of Judaism into the `dwelling' (demeure, JabeÁs would say7) of a perfect writing, under the protection of a total inscription of the Law. If indeed the Law had been totally inscribed by Moses upon the tablets, and if indeed this total inscription had been totally re-inscribed in the narration of Exodus and writing perfectly closed. Only one small detail delays the perfect closure of writing and opens it infinitely to its outside. A detail which, I shall argue, is not trivial, but as necessary and as inevitable a structuring principle of a theology of speech as is the resort to writing. If we examine the end of Exodus carefully, we notice that before Moses covers the tablets, he takes aside Aaron and the chiefs of the tribe and `spoke' to them alone: Moses called out to them and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke to them. Then all the Israelites came near and he instructed them concerning all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai.8



`Black Fire on White Fire' 117

The text admits, or rather implies, discreetly yet necessarily, that not one, but two revelations occured this time (after the first tables were broken). One was written and exoteric: Moses wrote down the Law on stone tablets and laid them in a tabernacle for collective memory. The other one was oral and esoteric: Moses confided it only orally to a few chosen ones, Aaron and the chiefs, before he talked to the Israelites. This particular speech (or set of speeches) was never reproduced in the narration of Exodus which merely hints at its existence by these mysterious words: Ànd Moses spoke to them'. What did Moses confide to Aaron and the chiefs of Israel, and then to the Israelites? Why was there, in addition to the tabular inscription of the divine commandments (an inscription within which the Jewish scene, in its very nomadism, could have come to a rest), the necessity of this oral dialogue, hardly suggested by the narration, of Moses with a few chosen ones? Why did he speak to them, and not to us simple readers? Were we ever to wander beyond writing in quest for a lost speech that explained it? Why had there to be, within this massive transcription of speeches which is Exodus, one speech that was not to be transcribed, but confided orally only to a few, one speech that was to remain forever odd, unknown, unwritten, and barred from writing ± one speech, which however is not radically absent from the book, since it is suggested in the narration by the phrase Ànd Moses spoke to them'? Furthermore, why does this singular barred speech, whose absence from the book is neverthless signaled to us readers by the enigmatic phrase Ànd Moses spoke to them', readily present itself to us as the only possible key to the Law, a key that would reveal the true origin, the true end, the true center, the true meaning of the Law, and all the missing truths which still separate us from God? This crucial question, the supplementary relation of speech and writing, lies at the basis of biblical metaphysics. Yet the very form of this question implies that the letter, the gramma of the written Law may have never been fully sufficient to deliver meaning; that meaning ± original meaning ìf there were one' to echo MallarmeÂ ± had always been exiled outside writing in an unwritten speech; that the Law was fundamentally incomplete; that the veil covering the tablets was not a glorious curtain closing a perfect play, but a hermetic mask that would render the Law forever illegible; that the unveiling of the Law could never be achieved without the mysterious, esoteric speech confided by Moses to the chiefs; and that in the absence of it, anyone who read the Law was doomed to find it incomplete and to write




about this incompletion, and write and write tirelessly, in order to make up for Moses' absent speech. In the absence of this speech, anyone who read was doomed to write. The absent, missing, elided speech opened within the tabular book (yet at its outside) the irreducible endlessness of writing. Absent speech, whose absence was nevertheless marked in the book by these overly simple words: Ànd Moses spoke to them'. Absent speech, whose illegibility was nevertheless inscribed in the book as trace, just as a crack in a wall sketches at its opening the imprint of a sign, touching the stone with its emptiness and delineating there ± at the precarious and ambiguous junction between totality and nothingness, legibility and illegibility, inside and outside ± the uncertain image of what Jean-Luc Nancy would call an èxcription'.9 Speech and writing come to overlap at the precise point where they each failed as totalities, speech failing to be totally absent from writing, and writing failing to totally enclose speech. The phrase Ànd Moses spoke to them' signals the impossibility of a perfect equation between speech and writing. It suddenly reveals the insufficiency of writing and renders impossible the definition of book as pure writing and of speech as pure unwritten. What was revealed from this was the ongoing connection, the infinite circulation of meaning between the written and the unwritten. In terms of textuality, we may argue that this non-equation was, from the outset, the very condition of meaning. The fact that Moses' speech was neither totally transcribed in Exodus nor totally barred from it, but only marked in it as trace, also means that the actual, paradoxical, nonoriginary circulation of meaning could only be grasped through some form of extreme, irregular opening in the text. The marking of the trace, as writing of a domain which exceeds writing, is the extraordinary textual gesture by which Exodus attempts to accredit the existence of an originary writing. By saying: `This writing is incomplete', the text primarily attempts to convince us that there is a complete writing, a complete Book which curiously would consist of a writing, and of a speech (the one that is not transcribed). This gesture, the creation of a gap in writing, can be viewed as the central textual operation of metaphysics. The gap left in writing by Moses' missing speech alters the text and installs the locus of divine presence within that alteration. The gap in writing is where the reader becomes `thirsty'10 for an origin. The gap in writing is the possibility of a thirst for origin. The gap in writing is the possibility of metaphysics. This is how the mysterious Ànd Moses spoke to them', opening beyond the excision of speech an altered space of thirst and demand,




will call for a new kind of writing: a mystical, exegetic writing that will try to make up for lost speech, to fill in the origin, to quench the thirst for the divine, to challenge the limits of metaphysics. A writing which nevertheless will only accumulate words and sentences and will turn out to be what Blanchot calls l'entretien infini: an endless interrogation. Writing becomes infinite. In the contradiction between desire for closure and acknowledgment of infinity, in the gap opened in the text between the idea of writing and the idea of speech, in the very tension between speech and writing, we can reach a new understanding of writing that will survive the end of metaphysics and the death of God, and extend into our modernity. Modernity: an inexhaustible game of excision and expansion, of tension and accumulation, of the search for what will fill in the gap of the book ± a gap which was itself written in the book as if to guarantee the possibility of more writing. I will approach modern literature by way of Kabbalah. This tactic will not surprise since several critics have paved the way, such as Harold Bloom in his brilliant Kabbalah and Criticism11 or the various contributors to the collection Midrash and Literature.12 Is not Jewish Kabbalah essentially preoccupied by the same question that haunts contemporary post-modern philosophy, the paradox of writing? Despite thousands of manuscripts and books (4,000 titles indexed by Bartolucci in 1692), despite also its odd grammatocentric model, did not Kabbalah paradoxically invoke the name of orality and Moses' mysterious unwritten speech? If I present Kabbalah as a possible approach to modernity, it is because Kabbalah relates to the Mosaic Law according to a specific structure or tension which modern French literature after MallarmeÂ has reinvested ± energetically and even sometimes thematically, consciously or not ± into the post-theological relationship of speech and writing.

II.

`Writing precedes everything'

According to Kabbalists, after Moses received the Law on Sinai he wrote down the laws, but not their explanations. These explanations were confided only orally to his brother Aaron, to Aaron's two sons, Eleazar and Ithamar, and to the seventy Ancients of the Sanhedrin of Israel.13 The Ancients heard the explanations once, Eleazar and Ithamar heard them twice, and Aaron, thereafter considered as the most faithful source of Kabbalah, heard them three times. According to Kabbalists, Moses' speech ± the one hinted at in Exodus by the phrase Ànd Moses spoke to




them' ± was not lost, but perpetuated orally. That is one meaning of the Hebrew word `Kabbalah': òral tradition'. Paradoxically, from the outset, Kabbalists did not just speak: mostly, they wrote. Thousands and thousands of books. Even more paradoxically, they focused their writings on the subject of writing, trying to prove that writing precedes everything. What was their reasoning? Moses' speech, they said, had to be a theory of writing, because only a theory of writing could reveal the right, mystical, arithmologic meaning of the written Torah and explain the power of the `Thirty-two Ways to Wisdom', the ten numbers and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Since the Hebrew alphabet includes only consonants and no vowels, a reader of the Torah must know the vocalization of each word to supply meaning. Knowing the correct `vowels' (mammaroth) or èmanations' (sephiroth) represented the Kabbalist's highest task, the right pronunciation of the divine Tetragrammaton, `YHWH', being considered as supreme knowledge. So again, vowels are straightaway excised from writing, just as Moses' speech was excised from the written Torah. A missing voice had to be supplied in order to fill in the gap of a writing system which was radically incomplete. If Jacques Derrida has demonstrated that the idea of writing as `supplement' was the condition necessary to the constitution of logocentric metaphysics, we may furthermore observe that `suppleÂance' is also at stake in the grammatocentric mysticism of Kabbalah. Just as a metaphysical definition of logos (Platonic or Christian) may be achieved solely by supplying ± and also demoting ± a theory of writing, the Hebraic notion of originary writing may attain its mystical form solely by supplying a theory of supplementary voice. This is why one of the tasks of Kabbalah was to remark on Moses' missing speech in Exodus, to certify its own descent from the esoteric, oral Torah, and to theorize the supplementary relation of the oral and the written ± of speech and writing ± while defending the metaphysical precedence of writing. An originary all-written Torah formed the basis of Kabbalistic hermeneutics. Maurice Blanchot judiciously notes that the Kabbalistic proposition of originary writing, according to which `nothing precedes writing', was in itself ènigmatic': It is very striking that within a certain tradition of the book (as it is brought to us through the Cabalists' formulation, and even if it is a matter of sanctioninf with this usage the mystical signification of literal presence), what is called `written Torah' preceded the òral Torah' the latter then giving rise to an edited version that alone





The Kabbalists' defense of originary writing was complicated by the fact that the Talmud did not identify originary Torah with writing nor with the alphabet, but rather with Wisdom (hokhmah). Wisdom, according to Proverbs, existed even before the earth was created (Ì, Wisdom, was by God's side as His architect [AMON] . . . ', 8:30). How could Kabbalists conform literally to the Talmudic axiom of a Torah-Wisdom without compromising their belief in a Torah-Writing? Evidently, they had to prove that Wisdom was itself a form of writing. Rabbi Isaac the Blind, the great ProvencËal master of the thirteenth century, writes: It is written, `God by wisdom founded the earth' (Proverbs 3:19). Wisdom (hokhmah) is nothing other than Torah.15 A similar statement in the Zohar acknowledges the primacy of TorahWisdom: Torah derives from Wisdom on high, and those who engage in Torah enter the source of her roots.16 To preserve the Talmudic identification of Torah with Wisdom, Rabbi Isaac then assigned a written origin to Wisdom by interpreting the word AMON (àrchitect') used in the Proverbs as the proper name of Wisdom. If Wisdom already had a proper name, a word made of the letters AMON even when it was `by God's side' before the Creation, one had to conclude that the name AMON itself was `by God's side', not as spirit or voice, but as literal inscription, as written engraving. Henceforth Isaac infers that the entire Torah was potentially inscribed ìn God's side,' just like the word AMON: Wisdom (hokhmah) is nothing other than Torah. It is called Torah due to the number of its commandments. Also, its name was AMON before the world was created, as it is written, Ì was by him, as an architect (AMON)' (Proverbs 8:30). And if you were to say that Torah is written on something or other: on a tree? ± it had not yet been created; or parchment? ± it had not yet been created; or silver or gold? ± they had not been created. If this be the case, then on what was the Torah inscribed? The Sages, may their memory be blessed, said: The world was created in the right side of the Holy One, blessed be He . . .



constitutes the Book. Thought is here confronted with an enigmatic proposition. Nothing precedes writing.14

IN THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE HE, were engraved all the inscriptions which were destined to change from potentiality to actuality, due to the emanation of all the crowns which are inscribed, pressed and formed in the degree of Lovingkindness (hesed ). Its image is inward and esoteric, beyond all scrutiny. Thus it is called the beginning of the thought of the Torah . . . Prior to any action there existed this Torah ± which is the right arm [of God] ± encompassing all the impressed inscriptions hidden therein.17 What Isaac argues is that Torah-Wisdom had always been written, inscribed, engraved in the side of God as writing, even before there existed writing materials such as trees, parchment or metals. He resolves the inherent difficulty of combining in Wisdom both the origin of writing and the origin of the world: Torah-Wisdom, engraved as AMON in the right side of God, was the `potential' engraving of the world and would become àctual' through genesis ± wood, parchment, and gold representing both the actualization of the world and the actualization of writing. Kabbalah's defense of primordial writing goes firmly against the logocentric interpretation of metaphysics present in other trends of Judaism, and even more radically in Platonism and Christianism (less so in Islam, which probably had a greater influence on Kabbalah than is usually recognized). Countering the belief in a God who spoke and created the world through speech, Jewish Kabbalah offers the foundations of a grammatocentrism that will partly nourish modern theories of writing. Nothing precedes writing. Is that not what MallarmeÂ affirmed in his own way, claiming the precedence of literature over everything else? `Yes, literature does exist and, I may add, exists alone, with the exception of everything'.18 Edmond JabeÁs, more literally faithful to the writings of Jewish Kabbalah, yet from a literary rather than a religious perspective, repeats again and again that the writer's home, his `habitat,' is primarily ìnside the book': To be in the book. To figure in the book of questions, to be part of it. To be responsible for a word or a sentence, a stanza or chapter. To be able to say: Ì am in the book. The book is my world, my country, my roof, and my riddle. The book is my breath and my rest'. 19 More desperately than JabeÁs, Mathieu BeÂneÂzet bewails the impossibility of ever `getting out of the book': `To exit from the book: no exit possible,




as he drew again and again in the page, as he dug again and again for the book in the book'.20 To many critics, Derrida has also seemed to defend writing in an unconditional, almost `rabbinic' fashion as some mentioned (for example Nancy: `Derrida is a drunken rabbi'21). Indeed, Derrida has demonstrated a clear predilection for the great defenders of writing such as MallarmeÂ or JabeÁs, or the Kabbalists for that matter, and additionally has consistently proven that the greatest affirmations of logocentrism still implied a logical precedence of writing. For instance, in Of Grammatology: I wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the òriginal', `natural', etc. language, has never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An archi-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because if essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing . . . 22 The idea of primordial writing is repeated in Dissemination: If there is no extratext, it is because the graphic ± graphicity in general ± has always already begun, is always implanted in `prior' writing . . . . There is nothing before the text; there is no pretext that is not already a text.23 However, in Writing and Difference, Derrida defends himself from having any particular bias in favour of writing, and to the contrary suggests that an unmitigated discourse on the priority of writing, such as it is found in JabeÁs' work, is liable to become a `non-question' subject to deconstruction: The nonquestion of which we are speaking is the unpenetrated certainty that Being is a Grammar; and that the world is in all its parts a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering; that the book is original, that everything belongs to the book before being and in order to come into the world; that any thing can be born only by approaching the book, can die only by failing in sight of the book; and that always the impassible shore of the book is first.24




This is why one must be cautious in associating Derrida strictly with a grammatocentrism of the kind exposed in Kabbalah, as some did for instance by reducing MallarmeÂ's theory to that of `pure writing'. We may rather argue that Derrida's post-modernity finds its shape in the tension between a logocentric and a grammatocentric interpretation of language, by performing a simultaneous, reciprocal decentering of both tendencies. The power of modern eÂcriture (from which post-modernity can hardly be dissociated) is that it remains between two metaphysical depths, exploring the surface of both in an oscillating movement that shakes the entire area of language. The grammatocentric model offered by Kabbalah was recycled by the Moderns and affixed to the philosophy of speech, as if to obtain the friction necessary to trigger the decentering process. One particular image struck modern French writers as the embodiment of the philosophy of language proposed by Kabbalah: the image of Torah as `black fire on white fire'.

III.

`Black fire on white fire'

As I mentioned earlier, Kabbalists vigorously demonstrated that the nature of Torah-Wisdom is written. Still, if they wanted to relegate the entire Torah to a theoretical `primordial' writing, they had to prove that the nature of the Oral Torah itself, given by God to Moses and confided by Moses orally to the chosen ones, was written. To clarify the idea of primordial writing, Rabbi Isaac the Blind explains that the potential engravings were of two sorts. The engravings of the Written Torah were written with `white fire', the engravings of the Oral Torah were written with `black fire'. These engravings could be read only if they were superimposed as `black fire on white fire': `[The Oral Torah] is the hue of a black fire on white fire, which is the Written Torah'.25 In order to understand the crucial image of `black fire on white fire' which will constitute for MallarmeÂ, Blanchot, Derrida, JabeÁs, Sollers, and other writers an archetypical metaphor of writing, one must note that according to the Kabbalistic interpretation, the `white fire' of the Written Torah consisted solely of the primordial consonants, vocalized through the power of the Oral Torah's `black fire', which consisted of primordial vowels. Isaac the Blind compares those black-fire vowels with ink: Now the forms of the letters are not vowelized nor are they shaped except through the power of black, which is like ink. So too the





The logic of supplementarity is clear: the Oral and Written Torah complete each other as closely and as inextricably as ink completes word, or vowels complete consonants. However, the relationship between oral and written in the Kabbalistic hierarchy is slightly skewed to fit the theory of primordial writing. The Oral Torah, even as voice and vowels, fully pertains to the scriptural model, as if the entire Torah, written and oral, were a generalized scripture whose consonants were a white page and whose vowels were black ink. What a superb metaphor for the Book, six centuries before MallarmeÂ's `Livre'! Nothing precedes writing, for even speech is a kind of writing. MallarmeÂ often refers to black and white in his poetry, and the influence of Kabbalah in that matter is obvious from the letter to Cazalis quoted earlier, the sonnet being simultaneously described as `Kabbalistic' and às black and white as possible'. Jean-Pierre Richard and Jacques ScheÂrer demonstrated in their respective works on MallarmeÂ the importance of black and white themes in Mallarmean imagery.27 Indeed, writing is often defined by the poet as an inverse black-and-white constellation or lacework, whereas stars or lace inscribe white on black, and writing inscribes black on white. For instance MallarmeÂ writes in As for the Book: `You notice, one does not write luminously on a dark field; the alphabet of stars alone, is thus indicated, sketched out or interrupted; man pursues black on white'.28 Both critics, however, failed to recognize the Kabbalistic origin of the black and white theme; generally, MallarmeÂ's reading of Kabbalah, as superficial as it may have been, and his implicit (perhaps even subconscious) recycling of some of its themes, have been seriously overlooked by critics. Furthermore, it is quite possible that writers such as Blanchot, Derrida, Sollers or JabeÁs found in MallarmeÂ's gentile reading of Kabbalah and indirect poetic use of its themes, an essential kinship between modernity and a certain literary form of Judaism (rabbinic-midrashic-kabbalistic). This hypothesis is particularly true in the case of Edmond JabeÁs, who read the Talmud after he read MallarmeÂ and linked both of them a posteriori, as noted in his interview with Marcel Cohen, Du DeÂsert au Livre. Keeping in mind that MallarmeÂ may have served as an intermediary, we can only marvel at the passion with which contemporary French philosophers revived Kabbalistic writings, with particular insistance on the `black fire on white fire' image:



Written Torah is unformed in a physical image, except through the power of the Oral Torah. That is to say, one cannot be explained fully without the other.26

Maurice Blanchot: There are two kinds of writing, one white, the other black: one that renders invisible the invisibility of a colorless flame; the other that is made accessible in the form of letters, characters, and articulations by the power of the black fire. Between the two there is the oral, which however, is not independant, it being always involved with the second kind of writing inasmuch as it is this black fire itself, the measured obscurity that limits and delimits all light and makes all light visible.29 Jacques Derrida: . . . the fires of the Torah, the black fire over the white fire: the white fire, a text written in letters that are still invisible, becomes readable in the black fire of Oral Torah, which comes along afterwards to draw in the consonants and point the vowels.30 Philippe Sollers: The path of the black fire where I burned myself on the white fire.31 Edmond JabeÁs: What is the book? I came across the answer poposed by a Kabbalistic rabbi to this most pertinent and pressing question. (A rabbi who, I assure you, knew more about what we now call writing than you imagine, or perhaps knew nothing about it, being more preoccupied with symbolism, but what matters?) An answer that I would divert from its original mystical sense and submit to your literal reflection: that the Book is `what the black of fire carves into the white of fire'. Black fire on white fire. Endless consuming of sacred parchment and profane page given over to signs, as if what is consigned ± co-signed ± to writing were only a play of flames, fire of fire, `word-fires'. We are bound by the white of the sign's whiteness and black of the sign, becoming legible at its whitest.32 The echoing of these quotations and many others is not a mere coincidence. What is at stake here, beyond the subtle linking of Medieval Jewish thought to contemporary French writers, is a novel reflection on writing and a paradoxical conceptualization of speech and writing. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for which various contemporary philosophers have been fascinated by the metaphor of `black fire on white fire' is that it strikingly and beautifully embodies the Kabbalistic concept of primordial writing, a concept they found puzzling and appealing, albeit partially, for the construction of their own theories of language. There is not one image of writing, but two, and perhaps more,




simultaneously superimposed one over the other. Simultaneity and superimposition of representations are essential notions in post-modern literary criticism as well as architecture. These notions helped bring about the end of various philosophical monisms. Yet beyond the black-on-white contrast, contemporary philosophers also saw in the metaphor of fire one of the finest figurations of writing. If writing is defined neither as a mere technical activity derived from speech, itself derived from the truth of things and ideas (as theorized by Plato), nor as a divine, mystical activity founding the world out of a primordial, absolute writing (as theorized by Kabbalah), but rather as what oscillates infinitely between two models of representation, speech and writing, and produces their antagonistic inscription; in other words, if writing is neither defined as a task ascribable to a perfect logos nor to a perfect gramma, but rather as a process that engages the friction of all terms, creates the possibility of a collision of interpretations, and explores what Deleuze would call the `surface effects'33 of paradoxical, overlapping representions of the world, then writing must be redefined as essentially divisive, decisive, abrasive, erasing, just like fire. This is a key concept in Derrida's philosophy. Writing is fire, because it consumes absolutes as it lights them. Every time, writing appears as disappearance, recoil, erasure, retreat, curling-up, consumption . . . . Throughout, consumption is, like dissemination, textual through and through . . . . The fact that, cut off from any ultimate, `real' referent ± which would keep the fire at a reassuring distance ± this sort of consumption seems to consume only traces, ashes, and to shed light on nothing that would be present, in no way prevents it from burning.34 The equation of writing with fire, very present in contemporary French thought, brings about the conclusion that the purest site of writing, ìf there were one', would reside in the ever-present event of consuming words and lying in their ashes. Thus at the end of Igitur, MallarmeÂ's great prose poem, the character `closes the book, stifles the candle with his chance-possessed breath and crossing his arms, lies down on the ashes of his ancestors'.35 Of these ashes Derrida writes again in Dissemination: Ì hope this one won't get lost. Quick, a duplicate . . . graphite . . . carbon . . . reread this letter . . . burn it. Il y a laÁ cendre'.36 Ash is what remains from writing, once speech has flown away and the book has burned, once opposite absolutes have burned from each other's fire, which still provides us with a place to rest.





Writing blindly

Writing never dies, being always reborn from its own ashes. And finally, what remains from Kabbalah today is the proliferation of another kind of writing out of its ashes, not the repetition of a perfect, absolute, lost Book that would have encompassed the totality of the world in its alphabet, but an illegible, infinite kind of writing that struggles to represent Moses' absent speech; a burning, blazing, arduous, obsessive writing that gluttonously produces book after book and engages speech into a generalized script; a widespread, endless writing which multiplies and disseminates, produces and reproduces itself to the point of offering nothing else to read, out of its inextricable graphic mass, than its own proliferation, its own desire, its pleasure, its passion . . . Such is Rabbi Isaac the Blind's writing: it is the blind writing of a blind man, the endless groping of one who keeps on writing without ever being able to read, the blind writing of blind writers, Rabbi Isaac, Homer, Milton, Joyce or Borges, and the blind writing of all writers because àll writers become blind' (Mathieu BeÂneÂzet)37 and because all writers wander and grope towards the book in the pain and pleasure of an everproliferating text. `The book multiplies the book' ( JabeÁs):38 this is what Kabbalah represents by introducing us to this side of the book, where a text secretes itself tautologically, here and now, obsessed by its other side. Òbsession has always been textual' (Derrida).39 The deep-rootedness of this textual obsession in the basic, èrotic' desire of the body is what Serge Bourjea illustrates in his superb study of ValeÂry's rough manuscripts: We must define writing as Desire springing up (troubling, whirling, violent) in words. We must consider the `deÂsir de l'eÂcrire' [desire for writing or desire to write it] (in the very ambiguity of the formula) the essential force, the delirious thrust that leads to the Coming, in climax and anguish, of `something else.' Our genetic criticism can truly be conceived as an Erotic of writing . . . 40 This Èrotics of writing', the pure pleasure of keeping oneself burning in the fire of writing, aligning tautological words, endlessly, between speech and writing, enlivens the works of many writers like Francis Ponge, `You have to develop this tautology, which is merely contained in the name, in joy and jubilation',41 or Roland Barthes:



IV.


This is what is left today of Kabbalah: an obsessive and tautological text that proliferates between speech and writing and maintains a radically scriptural metaphorical practice at the threshold of modernity. Such a text gives us the pleasure, `joy and jubilation', of naming after it, again and again, even in the absence of a total Book, our writing.

Notes 1 The original version of this sonnet is: SONNET ALLEGORIQUE DE LUI-MEME

La nuit approbatrice allume les onyx,

De ses ongles au pur Crime lampadophore,

Du soir aboli par le vespeÂral Phúnix

De qui la cendre n'a de cineÂraire amphore

Sur des consoles, au noir salon: nul ptyx,

Insolite vaisseau d'inaniteÂ sonore,

Car le MaõÃtre est alleÂ puiser l'eau du Styx

Avec tous ses objets dont le reÃve s'honore.

Et selon la croiseÂe au nord vacante, un or

NeÂfaste incite pour son beau cadre une rixe

Faite d'un dieu que croit emporter une nixe

En l'obscurcissement de la glace, DeÂcor

De l'absence, sinon que sur la glace encor

De scintillations le septuor se fixe.

The revised version of the sonnet, `Ses purs ongles treÁs haut . . . ', published in 1887 without a title, is commonly known today as `Le Sonnet en X' and considered one of MallarmeÂ's greatest poems. SteÂphane MallarmeÂ (1983), Oeuvres CompleÁtes, Paris: Flammarion, p. 68. 2 SteÂphane MallarmeÂ (1988), Selected Letters of SteÂphane MallarmeÂ, trans. Rosemary Lloyd, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 86±87. 3 Neither Bertrand Marchal in (1988) La Religion de MallarmeÂ, Paris: Corti, nor Paul BeÂnichou in his analysis of the sonnet `La nuit approbatrice . . . ' in (1995) Selon MallarmeÂ, Paris: Gallimard, p. 145 take this influence of Kabbalah into consideration. 4 The Romantic equivalence between `parole propheÂtique' and `parole poeÂtique' is illustrated in Paul BeÂnichou (1977), Le Temps des PropheÁtes, Doctrines de l'aÃge romantique, Paris: Gallimard.



In writing, what is too present in speech (in a hysterical fashion) and too absent from transcription (in a castratory fashion), namely the body, returns, but along a path which is indirect, musical, and, in a word, right, returning through pleasure.42

5 This concept relates to Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of myth interruption in the modern community as developed in Jean-Luc Nancy (1991), The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, and in Maurice Blanchot (1988), The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris, Barrytown, NJ: Station Hill Press. 6 Rabbi Isaac, quoted in Joseph Dan, ed. (1986), The Early Kabbalah, trans. Ronald C. Kiener, New York: Paulist Press, p. 73. Rabbi Isaac's text, contained in a manuscript at the Library of Jerusalem, had not been published in its original version prior to this English translation by Joseph Dan. 7 Edmond JabeÁs (1976), The Book of Questions, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop, Middletown, Conn.: Weslayan University Press, p. 124. 8 Exodus 34: 31±32. 9 Jean-Luc Nancy (1990), `L'excrit', in Une PenseÂe finie, Paris: GalileÂe, pp. 55±64. 10 Nancy, Une PenseÂe finie, p. 270. 11 Harold Bloom (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism, New York: Continuum. 12 Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds, (1986), Midrash and Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press. 13 Cf. LeÂon Gorny (1977), La Kabbale, Kabbale juive et cabale chreÂtienne, Paris: Belfond, Foreword. 14 Maurice Blanchot (1993), The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 430. 15 Early Kabbalah, p. 73. 16 Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment, trans. Daniel Chanan Matt (1983), New York: Paulist Press, p. 115. 17 Early Kabbalah, p. 73. 18 SteÂphane MallarmeÂ (1956), Selected Prose Poems, Letters, and Essays, trans. Bradford Cook, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, p. 47. 19 JabeÁs, The Book of Questions, p. 31. 20 `Sortir du livre: impossible sortie, quand il redessinait dans la page, quand il creusait le livre dans le livre . . . ' Mathieu BeÂneÂzet (1979), Ceci est mon corps, Paris: Flammarion, p. 112. 21 `Derrida est un rabbin ivre,' Nancy, Une penseÂe finie, p. 276. 22 Jacques Derrida (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, p. 56. 23 Jacques Derrida (1981), Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, p. 328. 24 Jacques Derrida (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 76±77. 25 Early Kabbalah, p. 75. 26 Early Kabbalah, p. 76. 27 Jean-Pierre Richard (1961), L'Univers imaginaire de MallarmeÂ, Paris: Seuil, p. 317ff. And Jacques ScheÂrer (1968), Le Livre de MallarmeÂ, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 51±53. 28 SteÂphane MallarmeÂ (1982), Selected Poetry and Prose, trans. Mary Ann Caws, New York: New Directions, p. 77. 29 Blanchot, L'Entretien infini, p. 631. 30 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 343. 31 Philippe Sollers (1968), Nombres, Paris: Seuil, cited in Derrida, Dissemination, p. 343.




32 Edmond JabeÁs (1993), The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 43, 79. 33 Gilles Deleuze (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 4±11. 34 Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 339, 343. 35 SteÂphane MallarmeÂ (1974), Igitur, trans. Jack Hirschman, Los Angeles: Pegacycle Lady, p. 20. 36 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 171. 37 `Tous les eÂcrivains deviennent aveugles', BeÂneÂzet, Ceci est mon corps, p. 184. 38 JabeÁs, The Book of Questions, p. 32. 39 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 374. 40 Serge Bourjea et al. (1991), Cahiers de Critique geÂneÂtique, I, Paris: L'Harmattan, pp. 72±3. 41 Ìl ne s'agit que de deÂvelopper cela, cette tautologie, qui est, au fond, contenue seulement dans le nom; il s'agit de deÂvelopper cela dans la joie, dans la jubilatio', Francis Ponge (1970), Entretiens avec Philippe Sollers, Paris: Gallimard, p. 190. 42 Roland Barthes (1985), The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962±80, trans. Linda Coverdale, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 7, translation modified.




Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion David L. Clark

I hear well, I hear it, for I still have an ear for the flame even if a cinder is silent, as if he burned paper at a distance, with a lens, a concentration of light as a result of seeing in order not to see, writing in the passion of non-knowledge rather than of the secret. Jacques Derrida, Cinders

I.

Marion after Schelling

When Jean-Luc Marion published Dieu sans l'eÃtre: Hors-texte in 1982, it was mistaken by some as another apocalyptic pronouncement on the death of God, one more in a series of obituaries characterizing postmodernity ± the end of `Man', the end of history, the end of metaphysics. Decisively answering these critics in the preface to the English translation, Marion argues instead that Ùnder the title God Without Being we do not mean to insinuate that God is not, or that God is not truly God. We attempt to meditate on what F.W. Schelling called `the freedom of God with regard to his own existence' (2).1 That Marion turns first to the German philosopher to speak on behalf of his work is telling, for Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809) ± the text that Marion cites and the primary object of my analysis here ± informs his argument in complex and pervasive ways that I will only be able to address briefly.2 Freedom for Marion, as for Schelling, begins with the liberation of God ± a task whose outcome can never be guaranteed ± from the lifeless Kantian and Cartesian abstractions or ìdols' with which European philosophical modernity has, in the name of the Enlightenment, peremptorily replaced the divine: ` ``God'' as ultimate 133



7

foundation, with Leibnitz; ``God'' as ``God of morality'', with Kant, Fichte . . . ``God'' finally and above all as causa sui with Descartes, Spinoza, and in the end all of metaphysics' (64). Schelling will devote the first part of the treatise on freedom to parsing the same list of the divine names of God, rejecting each for saying too much or too little about him. Where God is concerned, especially where the philosopher's and the theologian's God is concerned, one always says too much or too little. Whatever and wherever God is, he is always otherwise and elsewhere, fundamentally in excess of our figures and places for him, otherwise even than the subtlest of idolatries: namely, `the basic condition that renders all other conditions possible and even necessary ± for us, humans ± the fact of Being' (xx). But how can we designate that which is radically indifferent to Being, not only to the ontic differences between what is and what is not, but also, more fundamentally, to the unthought ontological difference that constitutes the opening of that `between'? A very Schellingian question to ask, as it turns out. If God can be said to be dead, Marion argues, that death èxclusively concerns the failure of the metaphysical concepts of `God'' (xxi). Setting his distance from the murderous names that the philosophical sciences so readily impose on the divine, Schelling similarly insists that `God is not a God of the dead but of the living' (7:346/19). He ìs more of a reality than is a mere formal world-order, and he has in him quite other and more vital activating powers than the barren subtlety of abstract idealists ascribes to him' (7:356/30). The radical alterity of these ganz andere und lebendigere BewegungskraÈfte sometimes seems to exceed the philosophical tolerances of the treatise on freedom, as perhaps befits a text that Heidegger characterizes as both the epitome of German idealism and the moment of its maximal self-destitution. What is remarkable is Schelling's willingness to evoke an otherness that haunts and contaminates the very ground of God, making the Absolute heterogeneous even to itself; where God is, there too is an originary difference, one of whose names is das Regellose ± the unruly (7:359/34) ± that no act of reason can tame or contain. God's alterity in fact has many other names in the treatise, not only `longing' [die Sehnsucht] and àddiction' [die Sucht], but also names drawn from Plato's analogy for the an-analogical, the khora, the utterly unsayable about which Derrida has so many interesting things to say. It is as if in shifting warily from provisional name to name, Schelling is aware of how his attempt to open what Marion calls `the space of an advent of the divine other than the moral figure' (32) can, in the twinkling of an eye, fall back into idolatry.3 This is the constitutive risk and the passion of Schelling's and Marion's




work, the unavoidable possibility that theo-logy will become theo-logy, that the wonderful exorbitance of God's life will be confused with something more mundanely familiar to rational thought.4 Among the spectres, idols, and conceptual detritus of enlightened modernity, Marion argues, God is the wholly other who ìs still to be encountered' (xxi). But if God is arrivant, if he is yet to come, that is not because we await his punctual arrival as such. Without being-there, God escapes precisely the as such, and thus the cataphatic discourses ± for example, the discourses of the Enlightenment, or at least of a certain Enlightenment (for who can say there is but one, or that Schelling or Marion are not always also AufklaÈrers?) ± by which he might positively be named and comprehended. No, the vital powers that constitute God's heterogeneity will only be encountered apophatically, that is, through the indirections and disavowals for which a complex tradition of negative theology extending from Marion back to Plato prepares us. This, too, Marion sees in Schelling, who, in his last major published work, turned scandalously to È hme, not to retreat into the theosophy, to the mysticism of Jacob Bo pious silence of private intuitions ± as Hegel famously assumed ± but to find a language from outside the affirmative and deathly discourse of philosophy with which to speak more responsibly both of God's excessive life and of how human beings are convoked by that life. For it is a question of responsibility, of being answerable to the wholly other, of registering without reserve the irreducible distance between what we still confusedly call `Man' and `God', and of frankly confronting ± as Marion says ± `the extreme difficulty of the experience in keeping silent before that about which, nevertheless, we simply cannot speak' (54). Schelling therefore occupies a strange place in the history of philosophies of finitude: on the one hand, he could be described as pre-modern, unabashedly weaving elements of theosophical mysticism into the language and tactics of German idealistic philosophy; on the other hand, he is presciently, if sometimes ambivalently post-metaphysical, a thinker of trace and of the non-originary origin whose reflection on the groundlessness of existence seems to have made even Heidegger flinch.5 And so he is deeply attractive to Marion, whom David Tracy has similarly positioned.6 È hme, Schelling argues that human freedom has its origin in a After Bo more primordial act of freedom ± God's self-originating struggle to become a determinate being out of his dark, elemental ground. Schelling emphatically points to the calamity and irreality of `modern European philosophy', which èmasculates' itself (7:357/31) ± we will return to this curiously lurid figure of cutting and crisis ± by failing to



Otherwise than God 135

take into account this agonism at the heart of things, the `lively power and fullness of reality' (7:356/31). What I want to argue, however, is that in Schelling's treatise we have what Paul de Man would call à text that pretends to designate a crisis when it is, in fact, itself the crisis to which it refers'.7 The German philosopher seeks to circumvent one predicament, namely philosophy's nullification of God as a question, but rapidly finds himself incurring another: in David Farrell Krell's terms, a `crisis of reason, crisis of divinity, crisis of ontotheology'.8 It may even be the case that criticizing one disaster is the only way that Schelling can allow himself to suffer and to acknowledge the other: a case, exactly, of blindness enabling insight. I want to pursue the fault lines of these multiple crises as they (dis)organize the Freedom essay, especially as they are disclosed by the apophatic behaviour of Schelling's argument about the nature of God. Schelling's text moves inexorably from considering the primal ground (or Urgrund) to the abyss of the nonground (or Ungrund ). The `tropics of negativity'9 that characterize each stage of this regressive movement, the figural turns that determine the exotic place of the wholly other in the narrative of Schelling's argument, will henceforth orient my remarks. By way of preparing for a close reading Schelling's text, let me first say a few words about some specific traces of the treatise on freedom in Marion. Three words, to be exact: 1) Love: In conversation with Levinas, Marion observes that in contemporary thinking `love' had become `the most prostituted word'.10 But God Without Being sets out to recover that word, so important to the New Testament, arguing that agape is what God is without Being. Àgainst Heidegger and the primacy of the Seinsfrage', Marion writes, Ì shoot for God according to his most theological name ± charity' (xxi). To be sure, the trajectory of this `mysticism' passes through as much as against Heidegger, especially the late work in which Being is reconsidered in terms of the gift. As Marion concedes, love is the `second impenseÂ de la meÂtaphysique', the first being the es gibt.11 But whatever else can be said of God and `Man', Marion argues, there is love, the pure giving of the absolutely given. Whether agape constitutes a superabundant or subtilized mode of Being, not so much without Being as beyond Being, and thus an excess that is always open to reappropriation by (fundamental) ontology, cannot concern us here. (But what discourse on the wholly other could escape such a fate? Doesn't that possibility necessarily haunt all discourse on the wholly other as the becoming-philosophical of theo-logy ± even as the becoming-theological of philosophy marks philosophy's irreducible exposure to the advent of the other?)




Here it is important to point out that Marion will have found in Schelling's treatise an analogous radicalization of agape. Indeed, as Schelling suggests, love represents `the highest point of [his] . . . entire investigation' (as it does in Marion's) since it is the name for the primordial condition out of which the opposition of ground and existence spontaneously and unprecedentedly emerges. Since the ground/existence fold forms the basis for all differentiation and articulation ± including God's! ± it has always already retreated from all names or concepts. For Marion, love registers the advent of the other for which all predicates must necessarily prove inadequate. One crucial way in which Schelling's reflection on love differs from Marion's, however, is that in the German philosopher's hands it is God's most theological name, but only for a moment, before being not so much replaced as overwritten by another exceedingly inchoate name, the ungrund. Schelling's apophatic approach to agape is thus characterized by a certain strategic indecision that deserves commentary. If spirit is the end of creation, he suggests, its beginning lies elsewhere: For even spirit is not yet the Most High; it is only spirit, that is the breath [Hauch] of love. But it is love which is Most High. It is what was present [da war] before ground and existence were (as separate), all the same it was not yet present as love, but ± how can we designate [bezeichen] it? (7:405±6/86) Before the pneuma, there is that of which spirit is but a breath, love; before any entity exists, stands out in creation as distinct, agape gives itself as the gift of divine exhalation. And yet no sooner is this love declared to be originary than it is curiously qualified or distracted; it is . . . and is not the highest, both before the fold of ground/existence and somehow before itself, `not yet present as love'. This self-qualifying motion in Schelling's thought prepares us for the possibility that agape is not a deeper and more profound ground, not something that punctually is, present, at or in the beginning ± but not for that any less real or primordial. Under these extraordinary conditions, words fail. Schelling pauses, takes a breath, and asks: `how can we designate it?' Already partly rescinded as a term for the highest, `love' suffices only briefly as the first of divine names; and, out of the opening to thought that he creates by his question, Schelling soon substitutes another, experimental name, the name of an absolute other: the groundless. What is revealing is that Schelling will not therefore say nothing about ìt'. What he cannot speak about he cannot pass over in silence, for, as I will argue, a




wholly other, otherwise even than that which is not yet love, beckons irresistibly to him and orients the most radical features of the treatise of freedom like a black sun. The absolutely first in the order of things is not so much without being as without ground. 2) Melancholy: The pure excess of agape offers itself up to thought in what Marion names `vanity' and `melancholy'. Marion's text attempts to distract us from the differences, both ontic and ontico-ontological, that preoccupy Western metaphysics, in order to encourage the thought of another difference, which he christens `distance' in order to distinguish the utterly asymmetrical, non-relational encounter between the human and the divine from all other relations. Distance is not to be measured or brought within the purview of thinking ± for then it would be the determinate distance between this and that ± and yet its operation is everywhere palpable in creation as the feeling or mood of an absent presence. Melancholy is the strange light of an eclipse which defamiliarizes creation, as if momentarily illuminated by àn absolutely extraworldly Orient' (128): `the black sun [that] . . . dazzles the light of the world', Marion tells us, àlready constitutes a transgression of the world, a sketch of an excess, the outline of distance' (131). Many pretexts inform Marion's thought of ubiquitous melancholy: Freud's groundbreaking work on the subject; Kristeva's Soleil Noir: DeÂpression et meÂlancolie; Derrida's sustained reflection on `the work of mourning that would be coextensive with all work in general';12 and, of course, Schelling, for whom melancholy names the irreducible gap that both adjoins and separates existent creatures from the inchoate fund that sets them on their mortal way: `Thence the pall of despondency which is spread over the whole of nature', Schelling concludes, `the profound and indestructible melancholy of all life' (7:399/79). This fantastically solemn image proves irresistible to Marion, so that when he writes about `the vanity that melancholy pours over the world of beings' his phrasing and thinking is almost literally Schellingian. In the treatise on freedom, the pervasiveness of melancholy throws into relief the arrogance of philosophical idealism's anthropocentric belief that `Being is Being-at-one'sdisposal, i.e., [a] . . . graspable presence'.13 But Schelling raises the stakes considerably by insisting that this is a sadness from which God himself cannot be spared. Even if Marion will not follow Schelling to that dark place, the two thinkers agree that melancholy evokes an indelible loss for which their can be no absolute consolation. The totalizing fantasy of a completely `successful' work of mourning is for both Marion and Schelling the sign of failure ± a human, all-too-human illusion at best, and, at worst, a forgery that is indistinguishable from radical evil itself.




3) Evil: In contradistinction to a tradition of neo-platonic Christianity, and as a response to Kant's curious account in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, both Schelling and Marion argue that evil is radical in nature. That is to say, in its essence evil is not the privation of good but an ontological distortion constituted by the rageful human attempt to posit its own ground, and thus to disavow the irreducible distance that separates existent creatures from that which conditions them from afar. `Man never gains control over the condition', Schelling argues, èven though in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him independent of him' (7:399/79). In their vanity, Marion will say, human beings renege on that `loan', and instead attempt to live on the credit they establish and give themselves. This Nietzschean pretence Marion describes as `the world's attempt to become its own foundation, to be founded on itself, against God' (96).14 But `that which believes itself able to found itself on its own funding' (95) seals itself off to the wholly other: `Men deny, by thoughts that are idolatrous and bent back upon themselves as invisible mirrors, the distance where the world is set in motion as creation' (130). `[T]he arrogant closure of the world on itself closes to it access not only to distance but to the very suspicion of its own vanity' (131). Only the black sun of melancholy can arouse this suspicion once more, making felt what has otherwise become mostly invisible in a world that `dissimulates its funding' (94). In its most farreaching moments, Schelling's treatise further suggests that evil is at root the panicked disavowal of the abyss of the non-ground, a denial of freedom and finitude. It may be, as Peter Fenves suggests, that Heidegger's 1936 lectures on Schelling deliberately swerved from his modelling of the positivity of evil, an avoidance that could only have horrific consequences at the very moment in European history in which the actuality of wickedness ± its totalitarian pretensions to mastering the ground ± needed most to be thought about and acted upon. Much of Marion's reading of Schelling is mediated through Heidegger; but on the question of evil's positivity, he remains remarkably faithful to the treatise on freedom. Evil, that voracious and rapacious accumulation of funds against agape, nullifies God as a question. In Schelling and Marion alike, this turn is never merely a matter of blasphemy but is instead the forging of the un-ethical itself, or what God Without Being calls, precisely, `the refusal of the other' (130). Love, melancholy, and evil: three words, then (one could discuss others, for example, indifference), each making their mark in Marion's work. Although my focus here is on Schelling, it seems important to bring both thinkers together, not only to outline Marion's indebtedness




to a certain strain of German idealism, but also to establish Schelling's contemporaneity. It is a contemporaneity through which we might begin the task ± again, this must await another discussion ± of re-reading Marion, and of bringing out what goes unsaid in God Without Being. Marion after Schelling: a daunting project, to be sure, and one requiring the slowest of slow readings. But it might be conducted around the following possibility: the tout autre that Marion identifies with God as the sign of his ìnadmissible and unthinkable privilege' (128), Schelling more readily attributes to all existents, whether divine, human, or animal. In the treatise on freedom, irreducible alterity preoccupies these entities as the mark of their singularity, particularity, and finitude. (Here, `pre-occupation' means that the other both originarily distracts entities and always already inhabits them.) This dispossession extends to God, and we might say that it begins with God if it were not for the fact that it keeps him from punctually being the `there' from which things could be said simply to begin. For it is among the most daring theses of Schelling's essay that God is not himself: In order to be separated from God, they [all existent things] must come to be in a ground that is different from him. But since nothing can be outside God, this contradiction can be resolved only by things having their ground in whatever in God is not He himself [daû die Dinge ihren Grund in dem haben, was in Gott selbst nicht Er Selbst ist]. (7:359/33) Insofar as God is not himself, he is without . . . God. Derrida has indeed suggested that we translate Marion's title as `God without God',15 and if he were to find an authority in Marion's text to do so it would presumably be in part by reading it through the traces of Schelling found everywhere there. To displace `God without Being' with `God without God' is to glimpse a Schellingian possibility in Marion of extraordinary importance. For Schelling's bizarre claim that God is, as it were, not all there, something less than himself ± how can we designate it? ± puts to us that God is not the wholly other but rather `himself' wholly othered by an other. That desertification of the divine, that destitution of God (perhaps an impossible èmasculation' [Selbstentmannung (7:357/31)] of the Logos about which Schelling barely imagines) is not so much a privation, a mere sans, as it is the opening outwards towards an other, otherwise even than God. Such an advent throws into question the tendency in Marion to make God the exemplary alterity, the highest form and name of otherness, when, strictly speaking, the tout autre





Tout autre est tout autre: this formula . . . implies that God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something of the wholly other. And since each of us, everyone else, each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity . . . then what can be said about Abraham's relation to God [which in Kierkegaard is analogous to the human distance from and non-relation to God in Marion] can be said about my relation without relation to tout autre comme tout autre, in particular my relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh.16

II.

Schelling: melancholy terminable and interminable

In the treatise on freedom, Schelling most often treats the composite, self-divided nature of à humanly suffering God' (7:403/84) affirmatively as the primal source of his everlasting `personality' and `life'. Life is the fundamental ontological structure of existent beings, whose pattern lies in God. If it were not for their agonistic and, in a sense, contingent struggle with the dark ground, these beings ± divine and human alike ± would instantly fade into the bloodless abstractions for which Schelling castigates European philosophy. Without the contrasting medium of the ground, without being conditioned by the ground's otherness, nothing could ex-ist or stand-out, not even God. Animated and actualized beings are dependent beings: this is the lively equation that Schelling's essay on freedom writes and rewrites. But it is an equation that brings attendant risks, threatening as it does to collapse all fundamental distinctions between divine life and the life of the created. Schelling is quick to claim that the crucial ontological difference lies in the proximity of `the unruly' to the force of `love' that would subordinate it; in God `the conditioning factor' is more intimately accessible to the rule of reason because it is `within himself and not outside of himself' (7:399/79). When Schelling writes that God ìs not a system but a life' (7:399/78), Leben names the immanence of his purposiveness in the churning process of his self-realization: like an organism, he is indistinguishably agent, medium, and product of himself. This self-immanence is clearly not available to the human individual, for whom `the condition' is ònly



cannot remain utterly singular if it is called upon to play the role of an exemplar. In its singularity, each thing as tout autre cannot be an example, much less an exemplary example, of anything, not even of itself, not if it is to remain radically other. Tout autre est tout autre: every other is wholly other, Derrida insists, as if reading Marion after Schelling:

loaned [nur geliehene] to him independent of him'. That is, humankind can never wholly possess itself or live entirely within itself, because it is always in arrears vis-aÁ-vis its determining grounds. Much remains to be said about Schelling's curious metaphor of the `loaned' source of human existence, and about the indeterminate propriety and supplemental nature of this strange `property', never owned outright yet self-evidently human life's single most important possession. If the ground of existence is always otherwise than humankind and lies elsewhere, as Schelling indeed claims, it is also strangely near to hand. According to the logic of the loan figure, humankind has `possessory rights' over the ground ± the rights to use and enjoy the ground but the `proprietary rights' (that is, of ownership) are reserved for God.17 Behind Schelling's faintly bourgeois rhetoric lies a more familiar and less humane theological language of indebtedness, that of the `forensic theory of the atonement' for which we have Nietzsche's sarcastic description: `God himself sacrifices himself for the guilt of mankind, God himself makes payment to himself, God as the only being that can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself'.18 Details of this theodicy only survive in residual form in the treatise on È hme. As one might expect, freedom, reconfigured as they are through Bo something is lost and gained in the translation; whereas the debtor/ creditor trope is useful as a way of describing the nature of the negotiation between existence and its ground, it proves unstable in helping Schelling draw a line between the ontological structure of the human and the divine. For example, we know from elsewhere in the treatise on freedom, at those points where the pressure to differentiate divine animation from its human equivalent is not so keenly felt, that the conditioning ground is never simply `within' (or, for that matter, `without') God, but more complexly the excluded outside encrypted inside him. As I have already argued, the problematical consequences of this contradictory topology are most evident in the case of the ìrreducible remainder', the ontological abject whose radical resistance to God's grasp guarantees that divine liveliness goes right down to the core, as it were, but only at a certain price: preceded and exceeded by the surplus of this perdurable ground, God always already incurs a debt for which he cannot by definition atone. Because Schelling does nothing at this point to clarify precisely how divine obligation differs from its human counterpart, the distinction operates more at the level of desire than philosophically argued fact. What is much more evident is that this debt is not of the sort that can be discharged, either by God or humankind, since that would only mean the end of life as Schelling describes it.




`[W]herever there is no conflict', the philosopher insists, `there is no life' (7:400/80). In other words, the ontological difference, crucial to Schelling's attempt to develop a way of reconciling `divine understanding' to the brute reality of human freedom (and of the evil that freedom necessarily entails), proves almost impossible to preserve in the face of his parallel insistence that both God and human are alive, and thus inescapably dependent upon the alterity of the ground. The implication is hard to resist: the human and the divine realms are not divided as between finite and infinite powers of apprehension, but as differing types of finitude. Does God's finitude conflict with Schelling's claim that the ground is proximate and at God's disposal? As if responding to the pressure of this question, Schelling's argument suddenly takes on an affecting quality, as if opening itself up to a sea of sorrow that threatens to engulf God and human alike: Man never gains control over the condition . . . . This is the sadness which adheres to all finite life, and inasmuch as there is even in God himself a condition at least relatively independent, there is in him, too, a source of sadness [ein Quell der Traurigkeit] . . . . From it comes the veil of sadness [der Schleier der Schwermut] which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life [die tiefe unzerstoÈrliche Melancholie alles Lebens]. (7:399/79; translation modified) What is the nature of this ineradicable pall of despondency that is draped over everything that is, a sadness too deep for tears? What is indestructibility [UnzerstoÈrbarkeit], and what must melancholy be if it can be characterized as indestructible? So much of what is disquieting about this passage, and that could be said to open the way of Schelling's path of thinking from idealism to deconstruction, lies in how seriously we take his description of this sadness as unappeasable. All life, as life, is originarily dispossessed insofar as it mourns a loss ± this, even though Schelling has just claimed that it is human, not divine, existence that mostly feels the burden of indebtedness to the ground. There is a great loss, Schelling now concedes, one so great that even God feels it, sadly. As is the case at so many moments in his work, Schelling here anticipates Freud, who writes importantly on the question of Trauer und Melancholia.19 For Freud, mourning springs from the anguish caused by the libido's disengagement from the lost object. In his earliest formulations of the problem, the work of mourning is properly undertaken to overcome and to survive this loss, the eventual goal being the renunciation




of the libido's attachments to the loved one. The melancholic mourner, on the other hand, negotiates with the loss by refusing it, choosing instead to incorporate the forsaken object directly into the structure of the ego. Neither able to accept or deny the loss, nor in a position to resolve the intensely ambivalent feelings invested in the forsaken one, the melancholic ego sets itself against itself, and in this self-division becomes the site of an interior fold for which there can be no simple unraveling. In short, the melancholic becomes pre-occupied with and by the lost loved one. (As Freud will eventually come to see, melancholia describes an activity that is not only necessary to the work of mourning, but also fundamental to the birth of the consciencized ego.) The connections between Freud's Trauerarbeit and Schelling's gloomy vision of a universal melancholy are instructive. What in Freud's hands, at least in 1917, is still considered to be a morbid affliction of the psyche is for Schelling the general condition of life, all life. If melancholy àdheres' to life, it is not because it belongs to life but because life in some way clings to its forsaken object. (Freud: `We see only that libido clings [klammert] to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost'.20) Is this melancholia then evidence of a failed or refused work of mourning, as Freud would use these terms? As Schelling describes it, the loss that is the source of pervasive despondency is deep, so deep as to be insurmountable even by God. Conceived this way, a radically unappeasable sadness in fact disables the distinction between successful or unsuccessful mourning, and instead re-values melancholia as the name for (or symptom of ) an impossible mourning. Impossible, because in this instance the lost object (as the irreducibly dark ground against which the living stand out) is always already absent, and thus utterly unsalvageable. God himself cannot renounce this loss, ending his interminable `clinging' to his own ground so as to become all in all. In other words, this work of mourning is profoundly melancholic because life, as life, must negotiate interminably with a loss for which there can be no complete recompense, no eventual renunciation, not if the living are to remain alive. And arguably nothing is more imperative for the purposes of Schelling's positive philosophy than preserving the life of the living, even and especially if this means introducing a certain deathliness and finitude into the heart of God. Not unlike Freud's melancholic, all life ± God's and humankind's ± `fails' to overcome its loss because it cannot get entirely behind that which determines and conditions its liveliness. Instead, life in effect divides itself from itself; or, more accurately, it is divided from itself from the beginning: life is this division. Life is no more and no less than the originary incorporation of its ground, the




binding of itself to the absent alterity that sets existent beings on their perilous, mortal way. Ineradicable melancholy names the absolute conditionality of life, the subjectless, structural `recognition' that life has from the start `lost control' over its condition. Thirty years after the publication of the treatise on freedom, Schelling continues to identify this loss with a constitutive sadness: `But the subject can never possess itself as what it is, for precisely as it addressees itself it becomes another, this is the basic contradiction, the misfortune in all being'.21 To forfeit all possibility of working through the basic contradiction of being, and to learn, so to speak, to live with it: that is melancholy. Tarrying with the negative: for life. As the unthought blankness that conditions and preoccupies knowing as well as being, this tropic of negativity escapes comprehension. Neither humans nor God can know their condition, Schelling suggests, a condition that is not so much possessed by existent beings as they are possessed by it. The fact that this lack unavoidably adheres to God puts to us that absolute knowledge would be indistinguishable from life degree zero. Under the pall of melancholy, Schelling's God is in and of time, and, as Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, `To exist historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete'.22 But as Schelling's choice of such a conspicuously affective trope as melancholia implies, existent beings might at least `sense' this incompleteness, which is to say, `know' it in their belatedness; here we might recall Schleiermacher's description of the noncognitive awareness of human finitude as the `feeling of absolute dependence'.23 Melancholia (as an impossible mourning) describes the lack that casts life into the fullness of time. Heidegger would say that existent beings are thereby thrown. Ineradicable melancholy is Schelling's name for the underlying rapport that beings share with what conditions them, but which also forever eludes them. It is the mood of finitude, as it were, that sweeps over idealism, with its disembodied dreams of freedom from natural life, and that compels life to recognize that it lives for death, with death. What then lies beneath or beyond that universal veil of sadness? One could certainly call the question naive, since Schelling's most radical point is precisely that beyond the veil there is nothing ± certainly nothing that exists. The veil does not obscure a happier place where the universe is freed from the pangs of loss; it is not a veil that can be lifted. If God himself is unable to recall his origin, but is more accurately called or summoned into finite existence by it, like all other things, then the loss is absolute, a privation from which there is no recovery. Finitude characterizes every thing that is, through and through; needless to say, this is difficult to think, perhaps the most




difficult thing to think. What Manfred Frank calls the `metaphysical interpretation of Being as Being-at-one's-disposal, i.e., as graspable presence',24 proves almost impossible to resist. Kant's God, his head full of the babble of the theologians and the scholastics, feels the tug of it: `But from where, then, am I?', he asks, believing that there is an origin that is punctually there to unconceal. Ùnconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss', Kant warns in the First Critique: The thought is as unbearable as it is unavoidable: that of the being that we represent to ourselves as the highest of all possible beings saying to itself, Ì am from eternity to eternity, outside of me is nothing except that which is something through my will; but from where, then, am I?' Here, everything sinks beneath us, and the greatest perfection, like the least, wavers unsupported for speculative reason which can, without losing anything, allow the one as well as the other, without the least hindrance, to disappear.25 The context for this complexly ironic passage is Kant's impatience with the theologians and metaphysicians who seek to mount a `cosmological proof' of the existence of God. Since such proof involves extending knowledge quite beyond the finitude of reason, Kant will have none of it, at least not officially. As he says in another, though related context, Àt bottom we would perhaps do better to rise above and thus spare ourselves research into this matter; since such research is only speculation and since what obliges us (objectively) to act remains the same'.26 And we know from the Critique of Reason that what he sees there, in that tropic of negativity, is in fact a terrible oblivion. `Beyond' the Urgrund that he had for good reason thought himself to be, God glimpses the irrational obscurity of the primal scene ± or Ungrund, as Schelling will designate it ± not without recoiling from its utter senselessness. Perhaps this is the oblivion that Heidegger evokes in the next century, looking back at Schelling: The beginning of Western thought is not the same as its origin. The beginning is, rather, the veil that conceals the origin ± indeed an unavoidable veil. If that is the situation, then oblivion shows itself in a different light. The origin keeps itself concealed in the beginning.27 What is it about the origin that interminably resists being assimilated to thought? In Schelling's terms, what is the nature of the `remainder'




whose irreducibility makes mourning melancholic, interminably and abnormally caught up in the process of detaching from the lost object of metaphysics? If there is always something left over, a residue left unresolved and unassimilated, then Schelling's text could be characterized as `half-mourning' (demi-deuil), which is Derrida's evocative nineteenth-century phrase for the condition of being in the midst of Ã ture of metaphysics.28 This origin that is not a metaphysics and the clo beginning, this trace of the (always already) forsaken object, obliges metaphysics to mourn to the precise extent that it prevents this mourning from ever being fulfilled or completed. By characterizing finitude as melancholic, Schelling appears to register a certain regret and a certain clinging attachment to the notion of a work of mourning, in which existent beings would be able to renounce, once and for all, their belatedness, and to gather themselves up in their own grounds. Is Schelling then the one who is the melancholic? Does the treatise on freedom designate a universal melancholy, when it is, if fact, the melancholy to which it refers? If melancholy is radically pervasive, then Schelling's text is bound to be both a work on mourning and a work of mourning. Is the philosopher saddened by his inability (or unwillingness) to write a metaphysics that absolves life from finitude? Does he wish it were otherwise? It might be more fair to the conflicting strata of awareness that characterize Schelling's text, and to the melancholic ambivalence that the philosopher in turn seems to feel for the forsaken ground, to say that he is caught between the question of mourning and melancholia, as between idealism and deconstruction. As Ned Lukacher describes it, this is `the dilemma of the modern world, and of the postmodern world as well: to recognize that ``mourning is in error'' but be nevertheless condemned to mourn'.29 Working through and working with the destabilizing consequences of an unappeasable melancholy, the treatise on freedom is emotionally idealistic but theoretically deconstructive about the fate of the lost object of metaphysics: it is, in other words, simultaneously `the work of mourning and the work about mourning'.30

III.

Il y a laÁ cendre

Àfter all this', Schelling observes, `the question ever remains: does evil end, and how? Has creation a final purpose at all . . . ? (7:403/84). What is the end of life, its objective and its conclusion? Schelling makes clear in the opening movement of the treatise that the end cannot reside in the beginning, at least not in any determinate way, for this would render the subsequent agonistic struggle of God and of all existent beings all too




intelligible, and therefore fatalistic. It would drain the liveliness out of life. As Schelling says, `Being is only aware of itself in becoming' (7:403/ 84): the becoming-God of God and the becoming-creation of creation happen in `real time', as it were, so that whatever conclusion awaits them emerges only gradually and in the labour of their self-realization. This makes Schelling's questions less rhetorical and more genuinely interrogative than he would appear to realize, for nothing could be more obscure than the `final purpose' of a universe whose melancholy is frankly described as indestructible ± that is, without finality. Under these conditions of infinite finitude, I have suggested, God's absolute realization could only mean the absolute cessation of his self-constitutive activity ± sudden death. Divine life rather lies in the indeterminate zone between the ongoing resistance and compliance of the dark ground, or, in Freud's terms, between absolute binding (the goal of the secondary processes) and absolute discharge (the goal of the primary processes). As if shrinking from this complex prospect ± it is the fundamental diffeÂrance of life that Freud evokes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle ± Schelling imagines the end of God's existence not as death but as another form of life, although he does this initially by taking someone else's Word for it: `Scripture', he offers, `puts that time in a distant future when God will be all in all, that is, when he will be completely realized' (7:404/84). Of course, scripture says no such thing, unless one is reading È hme. Later in the treatise, Schelling will it through the dark glass of Bo risk more details about the nature of this far-flung apocalypse, life beyond divine life, but these details raise more questions than they answer, and obey a contradictory logic that is now familiar to us from Derrida's analyses of the supplement. As Schelling contends, the dark ground resists and fuels the light of God's `life-process' [Lebenprozesses] (7:408/89) until nothing remains to burn. Would this state of pure enlightenment mean absolute life (and would this life mean absolute death)? At the moment of God's complete realization, would the universe be fully irradiated (which is to say, emptied of any contrasting medium and thus effectively in a state of undifferentiated illumination), and under these unthinkable conditions, what eye could distinguish between total darkness and total light, or between life or death? Caught between embracing and evading a philosophy of radical finitude, Schelling cannot answer these questions, or answer them in a straightforward way. He is half-mourning, if you will. On the one hand, at the end of the world, àll truth and goodness within longing is raised to luminous consciousness'. `Then', Schelling announces, recalling his earlier reference to what his hallucinated scripture had




promised, àll is subjugated to spirit', and `love . . . is all in all' (7:408/90; emphasis mine). On the other hand, not quite everything is found to be worthy of this transfiguration. At the end of the world, all forms of darkness are equal, but certain forms are more equal than others: something always remains, and because of its impertinent resistance to the light it must be cut off and cast away. But it is not discarded anywhere: `[T]he false and impure . . . is eternally locked in darkness, in order to remain back-behind as the eternally dark ground of selfhood, as the Caput mortuum of its life-process, as potential which can never proceed to act' (7:408/89; trans. modified). Apocalypse is this act of ultimate selflaceration, `the final, total division [endlichen gaÈnzlichen Scheidung]' (7:408/89), as Schelling emphatically puts it, making it seem as if the jointure of being had prepared existent life not for the reconciliation of its elemental principles (since only something that has been rent can be repaired), but their utter sundering, one from the other. The radical resistance of the impure remainder is the `cause' of its expulsion, but we should also note that in being expelled this perdurability is not annihilated, but, quite to the contrary, preserved forever beyond the point of apocalypse; repudiation is never a simple act: it is always, also, a kind of saving. What is the nature of this excluded other, relegated to an intra-ontological leper colony? What is its place, its role in the nexus of God's existence and its location in the order of things? Schelling is explicit: it is the by-product of the engines of life and it must be hidden from the light of God's `luminous consciousness'. It is the telltale signature that God is (was) alive, for which the philosopher perhaps feels a certain embarrassment, even disgust. Knowing that absolute illumination signals the death of God (and of the life of existent beings), however, Schelling retains a residue of the darkness and smuggles it back into his account of apocalypse in the form of pure excrescence. What is indispensable to God's existence is thereby conserved, albeit it in the demonized form of an unnecessary addition whose violent exclusion is the means by which God constitutes and recognizes himself as àll in all'. A supplementary logic is at work: the impure remainder is maximally real and composed of material so resistant that it endures even the fires of the apocalypse; at the same time, it is sheer rubbish, nothing, or nearly nothing, and, as such, it is so insignificant that God can confidently declare his complete realization and not contradict himself. It is as if the panoptic eye of God's `luminous consciousness' sees and does not see the gloom into which he has chased the remainder. He is blind to this supplement, but unseeing in the special way in which




seeing is blind to the origin of sight. Out of sight, out of mind: `Blindness to the supplement is the law', Derrida writes.31 Put most economically, God's `Caput mortuum' is (un)necessary: 1) It is utterly expendable, not just dead but `kaputt mortuum', resoundingly dead dead.32 2) It is resolutely non-expendable, precisely what cannot be expended, the fallout that remains behind; in that survival, it reminds Schelling that no fire burns hot enough, and that no life-process functions at a level of sufficient efficiency, that it can consume its fuel without remainder. Something always remains, and Derrida has a name for this stranger and a phrase that describes both its resistant alterity and its profound indifference to metaphysics: Il y a laÁ cendre. Cinders there are.33 The inefficiency about the life-process is structural in nature; it is the necessarily incombustible condition of possibility of combustion, the trace of the inorganic within life, whose perdurability keeps apocalypse, in the decisively totalizing manner that Schelling describes, from actually happening. The cinder says: No Apocalypse, no `final, total Scheidung'. Not Now. Naturally, God must hide this disgraceful residue, even from himself, in order to claim his plenitude. Where will he put this dross? `Back behind' [zuruÈckbleibt] God's essence, Schelling says ± describing and unearthing a cache so secluded that both major English translations of the treatise forget to mention it altogether. God's cinders are driven into an outer darkness. But outer where? Like the dead, the Caput mortuum is hidden; but for that reason, it is everywhere. This tropic of negativity is as indeterminately located as its contents are impure. Presumably there is nothing outside of God ± Il n'y a pas de hors-Dieu ± especially a `completely realized' God, yet such a space exists and Schelling fills it with waste. To pursue this involuted topography one step further: if God is àll in all', then there is strictly speaking no room for the zuruÈckbleibt except in the form of an outside folded inside, where the alterity of the remainder can be simultaneously conserved and excluded. Like the melancholic who ìncorporates' rather than ìntrojects' the lost love, God creates a crypt within himself, a dead-zone of exclusionary inclusion, that enables him simultaneously to prohibit and admit the supplemental object. Schelling, or a certain side of Schelling, would have us think this reserve as simple exteriority, pure addition, or pure absence; yet the very fact that God realizes himself only through its violent exclusion/inclusion suggests that he was contaminated by a general impurity at the origin: an originary infection and violence, whose effacement is, as Derrida says of the trace, `the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relation of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing'.34





God without Grund

Between posing his question about the `final purpose' of creation and answering it with his vivid account of the expulsion of God's `Caput mortuum', Schelling must traverse stranger territory. Whatever its fate, and whatever evil befalls humankind as the contingent part of that fate, creation as a whole progressively realizes the power of goodness: of that Schelling is confident, although not so confident that he does not feel the need to sketch ± for the second time in the treatise ± the historical stages of its evolving triumph. With each stage in history, God's spirit informs the process by which the powers of darkness are resolved by the powers of light, a process that culminates in the form of Christ's love. To speculate on the nature of this love, however, proves to be very difficult, not least because, in Schelling's mind, creation's complex end always points back to its enigmatic beginning. The philosopher hesitates, as if unsure of himself: For even spirit is not yet the Most High; it is only spirit, that is the breath [Hauch] of love. But it is love which is Most High. It is what was present before ground and existence were (as separate), all the same it was not yet present as love, but ± how can we designate it?' [Die ist das, was da war, ehe denn der Grund un ehe das Existierende (als getrennte) waren, aber noch nicht war als Liebe, sondern ± wie sollen wir es bezeichen?] (7:405±6/86; translation modified) `Here at last we reach the highest point of the whole inquiry', he adds, making the oddly unstable and obscure introduction of that point all the more conspicuous. What is the nature of this unprecedented `before'? What is this `being [Wesen] before all ground and before all existence, that is, before any duality at all?' (7:406/87) Schelling has the answer, an answer, a name at least, die Liebe, and then loses it, abandoning his first choice in the same breath, so to speak, that he declares it to be `the Most High [das HoÈchste]'. Before the sentence that attempts to `place' the name ± locating it somewhere prior to the jointure of Being ± is completed, Schelling renders it provisional, because insufficiently primordial: it is `Love'; no, at the origin, it is what `was not yet present as love'. What is it, then, for which die Liebe forms a kind of natural alibi? What Schelling wants to evoke is clearly very ancient, perhaps terrifyingly so. The philosopher must speak of this arche, of which `Love' is the telling erasure, in the form of a short sequence of strenuously escalating hyperboles, which is to say, in terms not of what



IV.

it is but of what it lies before or beyond: before spirit, before the breath of love, before the ground/existent distinction, before the time when living beings were divided from themselves as separate entities (not only human from human, human from animal, human from God, but also, more radically, God from himself ), before all of this . . . what? A primordial ground or Urgrund? Schelling does not say, not just yet, but it is very hard not to fill in that answer on the philosopher's behalf and on behalf of philosophy and theo-logy. Within the context of classical rationalism, what else could occupy this primordial space, prior to àll ground' and àll existence'? Whatever it is, it resists positive predication, triggering a rhetoric of negative determination that characterizes and organizes Schelling's argument, both here, in these hesitant sentences, and in the next two crucial paragraphs, both of which will need to be read very slowly. `± [H]ow can we designate it?' Schelling's hyperbolic gesturing is pulled up short with this question. Perhaps not surprisingly, he will have recourse to ask the question again in a moment, on a second and more detailed approach to the arche, but let us pause with the philosopher and consider what this crisis of designation means. Schelling's inquiry is redoubled, I would argue, and posed with two different answers in mind, or rather, one in mind, the other ± how shall I say it? ± out of mind: 1) On the one hand, the question is quasi-rhetorical. Rhetorical, because Schelling has in fact already made significant inroads precisely in designating ìt', insofar as he is humanly able, given its fundamentally archaic nature. In a sense, he has been doing nothing but designating [bezeichnen, to indicate, to name], signing, or gesturing, linguistically marking and remarking the arche, and in this motion frankly acknowledging its absent presence. We could say, then, that what he asks is en route to being answered, even if the answer itself, as the arche's proper name, is something about which Schelling can only speculate, hazard a guess. In other words, Schelling answers, is answering, his own question: obliquely, to be sure, not unlike a curve asymptotically approaching its axis, but in a manner that is entirely consonant with the rhetorical strategies and hyperessentializing gestures of apophatic thought, especially so-called negative theologies, Christian and Greek, extending through Meister Eckhart and Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius), back to a certain Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition and ahead into modernity, in Wittgenstein and, as we have seen, in Marion. As Derrida has recently argued, the common discursive feature of these negative theologies consists in how they `reserve, beyond all positive




predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being'.35 `[T]hat ontological wager of hyperessentiality', Derrida remarks,36 is what distinguishes negative theology (which no doubt shares both more and less with deconstructive discourse than is sometimes suggested) from the thought of diffeÂrance. Schelling could be said to make such a gamble, committing himself at this late point in the treatise to voyaging upon strange seas of thought. Driven by what Derrida calls `the passion of the origin',37 he deliberately risks the mysticism for which Hegel had dismissed his work. There is the promise of the absolutely prior as the ground of the ground: it is a promise, in truth, that has oriented Schelling's entire protean philosophical career. There is the desire ± or `passion' ± to evoke it, if only apophatically and derivatively: these coordinates orient Schelling's thinking as its primary means and ends, elevating and directing it toward the regulating ideal of the nameless in a manner that is irreducibly metaphysical and ontotheological. Whatever Schelling says by way of naming the nameless, it is more than that; yet even in its apparent ineffability and exorbitance, its evocation is worth chancing in the form of a philosophical essay on the nature of freedom. The origin of freedom remains his primary target, and, as an origin, this foundation fixes Schelling's hyperboles and negations within the orbit of ontology, even if he strains its limits (as he undoubtedly does in the ensuing paragraphs). What the arche is, is something about which Schelling is willing to commit all the considerable resources of speculative idealism: that it is, must go without saying, must be said by not saying. Like the negative theology of the inexpressible whose discourse he partly mimes here, Schelling does not so much òvercome' ontology (whatever that could mean) as attempt to reinscribe the `real and actual' (7:357/31) nature of God's absolute substance in surreal or hyperreal terms. Schelling, whose entanglement with the philosophical text of the Enlightenment is undeniable, is not suddenly transformed into a negative theologian, although this switching, with its attendant interference effects, is always possible in a text in which the theosophic mysticism of È hme is so tightly woven into the fabric of German idealism. But the Bo fact remains that beyond Schelling's ken, something `real and actual' `positively' exists and steers his thinking, even if, for the time being, this absolute substance can only be determined in a negative fashion, as a kind of after image of that which is more immediately available to positive predication. Considerable conceptual labour is here invested in an attempt to express the sheer preeminence of this absolute, whose singular anteriority compels him to adopt what Derrida calls the `logic




of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds all the hyperessentialisms', including those òf Christian apophases'.38 Apophatically outlining what he cannot yet know or name, Schelling posits and then gestures across a boundary between what is ('love') and what lies before; but he does so in order that what exceeds this boundary may be compared to `love' and to everything else ± the list of positive predicates is theoretically unlimited ± that comes àfter'. The nameless entity negatively determined to be anterior to `love' is therefore not unlike the idea of the `Good' `beyond Being or essence' that one finds in the Republic. As Derrida describes it, the surreal èxcellence' of Plato's `Good' ìs not so alien to Being . . . that the excess itself cannot be described in terms of what it exceeds'.39 Schelling's hyperbole similarly ensures that some measure of ontological continuity is maintained between what is familiarly known (or treated as if known) and the unknown exorbitance that lies somewhere `before'. Under these conditions, what lies beforeessence is not unequivocally nonessence (Schelling will emphasize this point in the treatise's next paragraph; I will come back to this); nor, to get slightly ahead of myself, can one say that it is unequivocally otherthan-essence, as diffeÂrance more or less ìs' for Derrida, or the `positional power of language' ìs' for de Man. Schelling's apophatic thought rather thinks this before-being as a form of being-before, an archaic or potential form of what is ('love'). In the next paragraph, indeed, the philosopher will designate, but only provisionally, the absolutely prior as such, as a `being before all ground and before all existence'. Something like a ground of the ground, then, or Urgrund, the very name that will intrude upon Schelling's text in a moment, problematically. `[H]ow can we designate it?' In designating the nameless as that which lies out of the reach of designation, Schelling's denials operate, in a manner analogous to negative theology, as superaffirmations, effectively positing a reality beyond the ground and beyond existence. 2) On the other hand, the question Schelling asks himself is not rhetorical, or not entirely, but contains within itself the trace of a query, an opening of thought, that is genuinely and disturbingly interrogative. ` ± [H]ow shall we designate it?' What if we are to read this question as one whose ànswer' lies in the asking of it? That is: precisely in resisting, insofar as this is possible within `the element of logic and of ontotheological grammar',40 a definitive answer, whether couched in negative or positive terms? As: The undesignated is radically nameless; I am telling you that neither can it nor will it be named, not even apophatically according to the logic of the sur. Questionable designations and descriptions are all that the philosopher has and can hope to





[A] proposition to be read in its platitude. This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names . . . .41 This unnameable triggers a crisis of adequation: if everything that is is articulated in the form of the Seynsfuge, if the distinctness of existent beings comes from the activity of the ground/existence nexus, as Schelling has insisted throughout the treatise, than what lies `before' must necessarily be profoundly obscure, indistinct, even abyssal. `God' ± or some elemental ground of God ± may or may not be the already-there that orients these strained sentences that either cannot say enough or say too much. Perhaps Schelling's negations do not (only) affirm and reaffirm an underlying essence that the philosopher wagers philosophy could name, given sufficient conceptual power, but evoke, as in a dream, quite another tropic of negativity, about which nothing, or hardly anything, can be said. The unnameable may not be freestanding and selfnamed, the perdurable that that remains once all positive and negative predications have been exhausted, after all the answers to the question `What is . . . ?' have been answered. Not spirit, not love, not Wesen, neither the grounded nor the Grund: `[I]t is written completely otherwise'.42 Ineradicable namelessness or illegibility, like unappeasable melancholy, evokes an absence that may be of an altogether different order than either the hyperessences of negative theology, or the Urgrund or `primordial ground' of classical cataphatic ontotheology. Perhaps a placeless place or primal scene so obscure as to never have been as such, without having already withdrawn, like Heidegger's origin, at the beginning. Whatever Schelling thinks or says about this surreal, it always come too late, after the fact. Does this simply make the unnameable in Schelling a new name of God? `This reading will always be possible. Who could prohibit it? In the name of what?'43 Ùnless', as Geoffrey Bennington proffers, `we displace the philosophical (onto-theological) position of God ± which (nothing excludes this a priori) can also be done by theologians'.44 And by philosophers who sometimes speak in the voice of (negative) theologians. It is that side of Schelling ± let us call it the `postmetaphysical' shadow of his `hypermetaphysical' philosophical self ± that I want to pursue for a moment here.



have in the face of its sheer priority. `There is no name for it', writes Derrida:

If not a more primordial ground, then, what is the nature of the absolutely first in the order of things? The regressive momentum of Schelling's philosophical narrative, which moves, as Alan White observes, `from phenomena to their grounds, and then to the grounds of those grounds, leads . . . [Schelling] unerringly' to this primal scene.45 Ùnerringly' may not be a precise enough term, for the narrative of the treatise on freedom could also be viewed as a complex series of detours that after all leaves the most critical and potentially destructive matter ± from the perspective of idealist metaphysics ± to the last, until it is too late in the argument to pursue it in any detail. One could almost say that Schelling is avoiding speaking about it. In any case, what had been treated as the fundamental ontological distinction throughout the treatise is now preempted by something òlder', and this shifting ground leaves Schelling with no choice but to reflect upon his working hypothesis about the nature of essence: `What is to be gained by that initial distinction between being insofar as it is ground, and being insofar as it exists' (7:406/86)? Schelling wants to know not only what kind of conceptual leverage the ground-existent nexus obtains on the nature of this hidden anteriority, but also, self-critically, whether it is possible that all this talk about the jointure of being has deflected his gaze from a more fundamental object. How is it that the light and the dark can come to be opposed in the first place? What is the nature of essence `before' God's emergence as an articulated being that struggles with its own elemental ground? If not God, then what atheological or pretheological `structuring' as such enables God's self-determining struggle to be? Two answers immediately present themselves to Schelling. Either the light and the dark are to be understood as entirely discrete realms, sharing no `middle point'; or the founding principles are resolvable in a common identity. Schelling had summarily dismissed the former hypothesis earlier in the treatise on the basis of its gross hazard to intelligibility. Because it inevitably leads to the claim that evil constitutes a wholly separate reality, and thus an irrational limit to God's power, absolute dualism instantly results in à system of the self-tearing [or selflaceration] and despair of understanding [ein System der Selbstzerreiûung und Verzweiflung der Vernunft]' (7:354/28). This is a strangely visceral response, a kind of flinching reflex where we might more readily expect a dialectical engagement with the problem at hand, especially since a radical dualism is precisely what Schelling's system veers towards when it evokes the spectre of a remainder that is irreducible even to God's reasoning power, a source of melancholy that no work of mourning will palliate. Schelling shudders at the monstrous prospect of having to




account systematically for a truly radical alterity, and moves quickly on; it is as if pausing to consider, even in hypothetical terms, how deeply otherness might cleave into the heart of God's being, risked the disjointing of thinking itself.46 This is not the only instance in which Schelling resorts to tropes of self-mutilation. Two paragraphs later, he rails against `modern European philosophy as a whole' for its inability to account positively for the otherness of `the real' and for its constitutive role in the production of the ìdeal': such indifference to the potency of the ground, Schelling declares, produces à turbid, wild enthusiasm that irrupts in self-mutilation [Selbstzerfleischung] or ± as with the priests of the Phrygian goddess ± self-emasculation [Selbstentmannung]' (7:356±7/ 31). The anxious, even hysterical, tonality of these cutting passages hints that more is at stake than is immediately apparent: on the one hand, rational system castrates itself by succumbing to the ancient prejudice against the otherness of the real; on the other hand, rational system lacerates itself by embracing that otherness radically in the form of an absolute dualism. The shifting valuations attached to the spectacle of self-inflicted mutilation intimates that, on the question of advancing the cause of the otherness of the ground while keeping the body of reason intact, the philosopher finds himself walking on a razor's edge, or, to change metaphors, finds that he wants to wield a magic scalpel that dissects idealist metaphysics in order to reveal its reliance on the dark ground, but to do so without wounding it fatally, or at least without cutting it to the quick. But is not the absurd prospect of a self-lacerated system exactly the immanent peril facing the treatise as it draws towards its enigmatic conclusion, as Schelling prepares to consider the exorbitant otherness of `that which was before the ground and before existing beings'? Schelling's earlier horror of being dismembered at the hands of an absolute dualism now reads like a premonition of what was to come of his regressive search for the nature of the origin. Given the complex depths that he has probed, Schelling cannot avoid asking himself: does this mean that am I in fact working with an absolute dualism? Strictly speaking, the answer is `no'. Even to pose the question in this radicalized context, however, produces revealing resonances with the treatment of that same question earlier in the essay, when it was regarded as `merely' theodical ± rather than ontological ± in nature. By evoking absolute dualism, only to dismiss it outright, Schelling attempts to preempt and palliate the spectre of an irrationalism and of an originary doubling that rises to haunt his text yet once more; in other words, it is as though Schelling were trying to inoculate his system from irrationalism by




attaching to it a hypothesis that he has already safely rejected on theodical grounds. This time, however, it is not the otherness of evil or even of the real that threatens systematic thinking with dismemberment, but an absolute alterity, an otherness beyond good and evil and beyond even the real and the ideal, as Schelling readily concedes in the next paragraph. Under these conditions, the moment that Schelling asks himself whether àbsolute dualism' describes his philosophy amounts to a recoil on the threshold of suffering a tear for which there is no healing touch. Considering and rejecting absolute dualism becomes an alibi for turning away from this primal laceration. To the question `What is to be gained by that initial distinction between being insofar as it is basis and being insofar as it exists?', Schelling suggests another answer: the duality of the founding principles is an illusion, the terms of that duality being the outward expressions of an inner singularity. To fall back, however, upon the security of òne being in all opposites, an absolute identity of light and darkness, good and evil', Schelling immediately counters, would only reinstate the errors of idealism `that befall every rational system' (7:406/87) ± errors, Schelling readily confesses, that troubled his own earlier philosophical programme. The place to which Schelling now wants ± belatedly ± to turn his critical gaze is unusual enough to warrant a certain disengagement from the insights into the nature of the Absolute that his previous work has afforded him. This sort of frankly self-critical concession is quite rare in Schelling's work and rarer still in the treatise, which begins with the philosopher insisting that his argument will be an extension and clarification of his system of identity rather than its critique. We already know the chief symptom of what it means to rationalize the fundamental ontological distinction, in the sense of èxplaining' it àway' in the name of a disembodied identity and in the manner of `modern European philosophy': self-mutilation and self- castration. As it turns out, the grim fate of the philosopher of absolute identity is exactly the same as the fate of the philosopher of absolute dualism: in a move that could only be described as both overdetermined and preemptively defensive, Schelling dismisses both possibilities, and in effect announces that nothing, not the slashing of idealism nor the cuts of irrationalism, will unman him now. Beginning this critically revisionary moment in his essay by twice telling his readers what the Absolute is not, then, Schelling quickly returns to a rhetoric of negative determination whose incrementally accumulating weight demands clause-by-clause attention. To continue: no primal ground in the form of eine absolute IdentitaÈt can be said to lie




prior to God's founding distinction, since that would neuter this distinction, leaving it conceptually sterile. Nevertheless, `there must be an essence [Wesen] before all ground and before all existence, that is, before any duality at all' (7:406;87; emphasis mine). Three times Schelling points to the logical priority of this (still) unnamed essence; three times we must puzzle over the nature of this Vor. A being before the jointure of being? What would that be? The phrase seems to confirm that Schelling is indeed committed to the `wager of hyperessentiality' with which Derrida identifies negative theology. How then does God figure in this primal scene? Dieu sans l'eÃtre? Does Schelling here question the efficacy of naming God by being, in a manner that brings to mind the work of Jean-Luc Marion? God, before all else, has to be. Which means at once and the same time that before other beings, he would have to be, and that before every other initiative, he would have also to take that of being. But does Being relate, more than anything, to God? Does God have anything to gain by being? Can Being ± which whatever is, provided that it is, manifests ± even accommodate any(thing of ) God?47 In the case of Schelling, the question is whether a God otherwise than the jointure of being is still God. Schelling has said repeatedly that God is a life. To be means to be alive. Before that life, beyond the `nexus of forces' that constitute that life, then, what ìs' God? Even to cast the question in this form is to beg the most important question, namely the question of (God's) being. Ìt' will be without life, to be sure, lying as it does beyond the veil of tears. But perhaps not therefore dead. What is it? Neither God denominated by (living) being, nor not-God. This being before any duality that is not absolute identity could be either: either God before (without) being, or a `being' (without) God. If the former, Schelling flirts with negative theology, not the only time in this text, as I È hme, not to say his have suggested, which so often ventriloquizes Bo eighteenth-century interpreters, including Franz von Baader and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. If the latter, something else: not so much other than negative philosophy (and certainly not a positive philosophy of the kind that has always named God by Being), as the evocation of the trace of an alterity within negative philosophy. To think ± in Heidegger's terms ± the origin `beyond' the beginning, Schelling will need once È hme in order to twist away from the consolations of again to evoke Bo philosophy, evoking his obscure notion of the Ungrund or nonground: `how can we designate it except as ``primal ground'' [Urgrund]', Schelling




asks; òr, rather, as the ``nonground'' [Ungrund ]?' (7:406/87). The philosopher's self-correction, performed in mid-sentence, calls for pause, coming as it does so quickly after he insists that the Ungrund is not to be confused with the primal ground of an àbsolute identity'. In the instant before naming the Ungrund as such, in the semantic opening created by the query ± `How can we designate it. . . ?' ± another name rushes in, and not just any name but, so to speak, the `wrong' name, the name that belongs to the near side, the reassuringly familiar side, of the ontological divide that Schelling is attempting to cross. We could paraphrase and explicate the self-contradictory impulses of Schelling's syntax thus: `The origin is not the primal ground. How can I name the origin? Strangely, I find that have no choice but to name it the primal ground. No; it is the nonground'. As Krell astutely points out: In Schelling's text . . . the primal, primordial, incipient, or original ground and the nonground are brought as close together as possible: only a single letter distinguishes them, and not even an entire letter inasmuch as it is here merely a matter of prolonging a single stroke of one, of one letter extending the arc of the r in Urgrund to the n of Ungrund. The one stroke alters origins to nihilations.48 Schelling: `The essence of the ground [Wesen des Grundes], as that of the existent, can be only that which precedes all ground, thus the absolute viewed purely and simply, the nonground' (7407±8/88±9; trans. modified). Scandal of reason, crisis of speculative idealism, this laceration of primal Wesen shows that the ground is not grounded, but cleft and supplementally inhabited by a nonground, held to be antecedent to the ground: a perdurable an-arche haunts and violates the integrity of the arche. The nonground is not only the sub-version of the primal ground; its sheer priority suggests that the ground was never punctually there to be subverted, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonground, which thus, impossibly, becomes the origin of the origin.49 We might be tempted to disregard the play of the letter in Schelling's prefixes ± Urgrund for Ungrund ± as a contingency of German spelling, if it were not for the linguistic (or rather, `graphological') metaphorics that surface at critical points elsewhere in the essay: for example, when he speaks of the diacritical play of vowels and consonants making up the Logos; and when he compares the primal ground's inexplicable emergence from the nullity of the nonground to puzzling a word out of the scattered letters of a logogriph, or riddle. Ungrund and Urgrund:




Schelling's terms are so close, separated only by the stroke of one small letter, as Krell says. Yet so far, too: between Ungrund and Urgrund falls a rift that no synthesis or work of mourning can resolve, an original difference that is the condition of possibility of all existent beings ± `Reality and ideality, darkness and light', as Schelling subsequently writes (7:407/88) ± and of all thinking about existent beings, and is therefore not a difference that can be explained in terms of what is. But how else to explain it except in those terms? In point of fact, the Àbsolute' can never be `viewed purely and simply', as Schelling imagines; the Ungrund rules the homogeneity of the arche, and thus the Augenschein50 or indifferent gaze that it would take to see it and grasp it, is out of bounds. This can be otherwise: the Ungrund is contaminated from the start by the universe it subtends, making the impulse to misrecognize the groundless as the primal ground, and thereby firmly reappropriate it to ontotheology, quite irresistible. The articulated life of existent beings, instantly displacing the Ungrund, never allows it to exist as such. Schelling's stuttering mispronunciation ± Ùrgrund, Ungrund' ± registers that imperative. In the caesura that divides `r' from `n', the world of existent beings as we know it happens. Schelling proceeds: Às it [the Ungrund] precedes all antitheses, these cannot be distinguishable in it or be present in it in any way at all. It cannot then be called the identity of both, but only the absolute indifference as to both' (7:406/87). Once again, the philosopher guards against confusing the `groundless' with the essence of an absolute identity ± and well he might, for this is a confusion that his own text has just shown to be harboured very nearby. The Ungrund is not the sum of its antitheses, Schelling adds; neither does it contain them. It is unattached to them in every way, a ùnique essence' [ geschiedenes Wesen] and a subontological reef ùpon which all distinctions break (up)' [an dem alle GegensaÈtze sich brechen] (7:407/88; trans. modified). Its profoundly indifferent character renders it alien to every dialectic and to every antithesis; from the point of view of all distinctions and differends ± and, we might well ask, for the thinker, even a Denker as profound as Schelling, what other point of view is there? ± it is pure nullity, an absolute blankness. Ìt is nothing else than just their non-being [Nichtseyn], and therefore has no predicates except lack of predicates, without its being nothingness [Nichts, or simple emptiness] or an absurdity [nonentity; literally, non-thing] [ein Nichts oder ein Unding waÈre]' (7:406/87). About the Ungrund, Schelling's densely apophatic rhetoric suggests, nothing can be said. Or next to nothing, since, remarkably, he strains in the same sentence to make shades of negative discrimination where,




strictly speaking, none should be possible. To grasp this Àbsolute, purely and simply', one really would need a mind of winter, a mind that `beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is'.51 A chill falls over Schelling's text: the Ungrund's non-being is neither the void of nothingness nor the nonsense of non-entity, but it is almost impossible to discern the differences between these shadings of absence in a night of negation in which all distinctions dissolve and break up. Schelling comes perilously close to speaking in a form of apophatic babble: the Ungrund is nothing but nothing, about which nothing can be predicated except nothing, neither nothing nor no-thing. One can imagine Hegel wincing at the thought of these dark shapes melting into a dark background. But Schelling presses on, and, as if engaged in a game of brinkmanship with the discursive asceticism of negative theology, he carefully negotiates between the desire to speak correctly about the nonground and thus to respect its singular anteriority, and the knowledge that whatever he says will be imperfect. Utterly careless of every predication, the obscure object of Schelling's denegating rhetoric recalls what Meister Eckhart says about God: `[W]hatever you say God is, that is not true; but whatever you do not say God is, that is true'.52 The question is, then: how to avoid speaking (of the Ungrund)? Or: Comment ne pas dire? Which means, as Derrida observes, both `how not to speak?' and, how, in speaking, not to say this or that, in this or that manner? In other words: how, in saying and speaking, to avoid this or that discursive, logical, rhetorical mode? How to avoid an inexact, erroneous, aberrant, improper form? How to avoid such a predicate, and even predication itself?53 Faced with the absolute anonymity of the Ungrund, Schelling is thoroughly caught up in the double bind of these questions, questions that would seem to be confined to the relatively specialized realm of (negative) theology's attempt to name an ineffable God, but which Derrida has shown generally to share something with the asymmetrical relationship that ontotheology ± including its `deconstruction' ± has with the trace of diffeÂrance. Like diffeÂrance, the Ungrund cannot be denied; it is absolutely nearby and irrepressible, neither a transcendental signified nor a `real field elsewhere, another assignable site',54 but the truly irreducible and inescapable remainder that imbues every time and space like so much background radiation, the imprint of an originary `Big Bang' whose traces are discernible only after the fact; or rather, they are discernible




in facticity, even though, strictly speaking, they are not of it. But at the same time it must be said that the Ungrund cannot not be denied; it must be denied and avoided, because it is absolutely distant, indifferent especially to the èssence and dignity' of the Seynsfuge called `man' and to the power of rational speech that is conventionally accorded him.55 The result is that every predicate that is made of the nonground and every name that is given to it always says too little, or too much; in any case, it will be radically untrue, wholly unlike what was there, always and already, `before all ground and before all existence, that is, before any duality at all' (7:406/87). `Concerning that about which one cannot speak, one must remain silent':56 yet at the instant that one says the Ungrund is that which is predicateless, indifferent to speaking, one has already misspoken, said more than enough. How (not) to speak? One cannot avoid speaking, any more than existent beings can avoid being, and that is the double necessity that flows from the Ungrund's sheer priority ± as if it were a vacuum that language and life abhorred and attempted instantly to fill. Like diffeÂrance, the nonground's absolute reserve or withdrawal [retrait] paradoxically obligates humankind: [A]t the moment when the question `How to avoid speaking?' arises it is already too late. There was no longer any question of not speaking. Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is what theology calls God, and it is necessary, it will have been necessary, to speak. This ìt is necessary' (il faut) is both the trace of undeniable necessity ± which is another way of saying that one cannot avoid denying it, one can only deny it ± and of a past injunction. Always already past, hence without a past present. Having come from the past, language before language, a past that was never present and yet remains unforgettable ± this ìt is necessary' thus seems to beckon toward the event of an order or of a promise that does not belong to what once currently calls history, the discourse of history or the history of discourse.57 The Ungrund has no particular design on creation, in the way that certain theologies imagine God to have. Schelling has all along insisted that, whatever the nature of the Absolute, it cannot abrogate human freedom. The Ungrund does not tell us what it wants, and it does not care what we make of it. Yet in its radical indifference, the nonground is uncannily God-like (it is what `theology calls God') because its alreadythereness makes it both unforgettable and unspeakable. No matter what




we say or do not say, we are subject to what Derrida describes as `the unavoidable denial of the undeniable provocation'.58 The already-there provokes and obliges: what does it provoke? To whom is this obligation directed? In the name of what? As long as the Ungrund withdraws into its indifference, these questions resist definitive answers, though of course theological and philosophical history proffer many suggestions: `Being, Spirit, History, Man', as John Caputo argues: òusia or eidos, Bewuûtsein or Wille zur Macht, God or the gods, abba or Jahweh, the logos of the Dialectic or the all-gathering prophets'.59 Theological and philosophical history may be nothing but these fabulous and irresistible attempts to predicate the predicateless, to refashion the primal an-arche into a primal arche, to mispronounce Urgrund as Ungrund, and thus to make sense of its obligatory hold on humankind. Schelling asks: `How can we designate it?' Caputo: `We must be prepared, precisely in virtue of its cognitive density, to concede that, when it comes to obligation, we do not know what we are talking about'.60 Schelling is ready to make this concession, at least in theory: this is the stern and almost unthinkable price of the Ungrund's sheer, unmitigated indifference to thought and talk. It calls, so to speak, but asks nothing. We automatically answer, but cannot reply directly. Out of the blue, perhaps even out of a night in which all cows are black, comes a disembodied voice, to which we instantly respond, without thinking: Abraham! Here am I. Admittedly, this Old Testament parable of a radically disruptive summoning by the absolute other risks saying too much.61 As a luridly overdetermined representation of the undeniable provocation it may not be scandalous enough. The nonground's indifference, its wholly ± I do not say holy ± nonhuman character demands that we be scrupulously careful not to speak, or to speak too quickly, of its incitement in terms that familiarize it and draw it back into the lighted clearing of the human. We must look upon this primal scene with what de Man calls, after Kant, Augenschein, the impossibly stony gaze of noncomprehension.62 For de Man, this work of `true ``mourning'' ' ± a mourning that refuses closure, i.e., a melancholia ± can only be described in apophatic terms: it is `non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, nonlyrical, non-poetic', and `prosaic[ally]' indifferent to the inhuman spectacle of indifference.63 How to avoid speaking? Perhaps Schelling says it best, which is to say, says it in the most minimal, prosaic, in-significant





terms possible ± merely a matter of shortening a single stroke of one letter:

Krell writes of the stroke that àlters origins to nihilations'.64 But the reverse is also true: the same stroke positively transforms nihilations to origins, marking the instantaneous passage from the an-archy of the other to ground/existence distinction. The primordial ground, as the basis of the jointure of being that articulates life, automatically `responds' to the absent presence of the Ungrund by denying it. In the `simultaneously negative and hyperaffirmative'65 language of negative theology, never far from Schelling's lips, the nonground obliges without obligation, provokes without provocation. The Ungrund demands assent, a kind of eternal `Yea-saying', in spite of ourselves. Whatever one says, by virtue of being-articulated one has already concurred, countersigned the order of the other. One assents to being without ever having assented as such; one speaks without ever having agreed to speak as such. Does living in or as this structural passivity ± which precedes the distinction between passive and active, as with all other distinctions ± abrogate our responsibility? This is of course the most important question to ask in the context of an essay that seeks to unearth the `nature' or the origin of `human freedom'. For Derrida, Order or promise, this injunction commits (me), in a rigorously asymmetrical manner, even before I have been able to say I, to sign such a provocation in order to reappropriate it for myself and restore the symmetry. That in no way mitigates my responsibility; on the contrary. There would be no responsibility without this prior coming ( preÂvenance) of the trace, or if autonomy were first or absolute.66 In answering the question, `How can we designate it [the Ungrund]?' Schelling attempts, always too late, to sign the provocation of the nonground, to give it a name and reappropriate it for himself, if only by way of acknowledging the indebtedness of all existent beings to it. Does this absolute indebtedness mean the dissolution of obligation to others? The imperative of the Ungrund's preÂvenance only `feels' like an oppressive law, until we recognize that this law legislates nothing ± except, perhaps, the twin imperatives, Be! and Speak! Before freedom or àutonomy', but also, importantly, before necessity and irresponsibility, there is an òlder'



Ungrund! Urgrund.

responsibility, the very opening of responsibility, the fundamental ability or originary competence to answer. The Ungrund creates a deficit in us, and we respond by being and saying; but having always withdrawn, the nonground also prevents us from ever paying this debt, absolutely, in a total, final settling of accounts of the sort that Schelling hallucinates when he imagines God being àll in all'. (And, as we saw, this is not nearly as total as it is made out to be.) And in the infinitesimal space, as large as creation, between the provocation and the response, between Àbraham' and `Here am I', between Urgrund and Ungrund, lies the source of human freedom. The nonground is a nondialectical middle point, the jointure of the jointure of being, as of every other opposition that it articulates and distributes: real and ideal, light and dark, inside and outside, mourning and melancholy, freedom and necessity, responsibility, and carelessness. Neither conscious nor unconscious, being or nonbeing, the Ungrund is the inchoate dimension that presides over the constitution of the identity and difference, but is not itself concerned with or answerable to the È hme's description apparent. Schelling's enigmatic account draws on Bo of the Ungrund as an inert and profoundly insouciant null-space in which God comes, instantly, to deploy himself: the `Nothing', as he writes, which is `nothing but a stillness without stirring, where there is neither darkness nor light, neither life nor death'.67 How then to explain the fact of creation, including the creation of God, when the universe might well have remained an undifferentiated and unidentified stillness? Or, to recall Schelling's infamous query, which looks back to Leibnitz and ahead to Heidegger, `that ultimate question posed by the vertiginous intellect hovering at the abyss of infinity: ``Why [is] something rather than nothing?'' '68 To this question, understandably enough, Schelling cannot provide a definitive answer. The asking of it must suffice, summoning the thinker as it does to a radical astonishment at the fact that creation, replete with existent beings who are entirely made up of the melancholic stirring of light and darkness, exists at all. Of this universe, all that one can say, as Schelling does, is: Ìt happens'. Schelling: Òut of this neither-nor [Weder-Noch], or out of indifference, duality immediately breaks forth' [Unmittelbar aus dem Weder-Noch oder der Indifferenz bricht also die DualitaÈt hervor] (7:407/88). Beings ± as the principal èffect' of the primary duality, the ground/ existence distinction ± there are. There are beings. Certainly, here I am. Question: Why something rather than nothing? Answer: Something there is. The anonymous and perfunctorily tautological logic of that account of the primordial breaking forth preserves the indifference




of the Ungrund, shelters it from being too easily reappropriated by metaphysics, in the name, for example, of `Being, Spirit, History, Man'. Concerning the Ungrund, we could merely say that es gibt: it gives. In the context of discussing the startling indifference similarly exhibited by Plato's khora, Derrida warns that even to say that it gives risks saying too much. `The es gibt, thus translated, too vividly announces or recalls the dispensation of God, of man, or even that of the Being of which certain texts by Heidegger speak (es gibt Sein)'.69 The nonground, to which we are promised, gives no promises: it gives nothing. Because Derrida's description of the khora's exorbitant retentiveness vividly remembers all that we have said of Schelling's Ungrund, it is worth quoting at length: Khora is not even that [cËa], the es or id of giving, before all subjectivity. It does not give place as one would give something, whatever it may be; it neither creates nor produces anything, not even an event insofar as it takes place. It gives no order and makes no promise. It is radically ahistorical, because nothing happens through it and nothing happens to it. Plato insists on its necessary indifference; to receive all and allow itself to be marked or affected by what is in it, the khora must remain without form and without proper determination. But if it is amorphous . . . this signifies neither lack nor privation. Khora is nothing positive or negative. It is impassive, but it is neither passive nor active.70 The reverse view of the Ungrund's sheer restraint and impassivity is the instantaneousness of the irruption of what is (given) `by' it. This suddenness ± here, we must make the most of what Schelling means by `duality immediately breaks forth' ± is crucial to understanding the nonground's radically hidden and atheological nature. The Ungrund is effaced by the dualisms it makes possible. It is instantly omitted, which is to say, not contingently overlooked; it is an event that happened, and then was lost, but lost from the start. Another way of saying this is that the Ungrund's recollection in the world's dualisms is inseparable from its being forgotten. Because difference happens right away, because it has always already happened, the nonground never punctually exists, as such, nor is it a past that was ever present. It cannot be recalled; but as the perdurable absence in what is present ± like the impure remainder back-behind God's `luminous consciousness' ± neither can it be forgotten. At the moment of the emergence of difference ± of original difference ± the Ungrund withdraws; more




accurately, it is always withdrawn, so that difference might come into being, and creation be set on its perilous way. In a memorable, and, one might say, strategically careless translation of the philosophical meaning of indifference, Schelling characterizes the groundless as àpathetic' or ìmpassive' [gleichguÈltig] (7:407/88) towards our human, all too human, attempts at bringing it within the orbit of dialectical thinking. Here the quality of apathy functions in strangely contradictory ways. In the first instance, it is an intensifier, underlining and amplifying the Ungrund's alterity and resistance to theory. To say that the nonground is conceptually indifferent is not enough; to say that it is `more' indifferent even than that, Schelling resorts to the extraordinary measure of attributing to the nonground a `psychological' disengagement from the world it also obliges. In gleichguÈltig we can almost read an impassivity and a thoughtlessness that is òlder' than the active/passive or solicitude/insolicitude distinctions. Almost. By attributing this emotional detachment to the nonground, Schelling also brings it firmly back into a somewhat less than wholly indifferent relationship with the world, if only in the negative form of a certain carelessness [gleichguÈltigkeit]. In other words, the primal scene is made all the more pathetic by its insouciant renunciation of pathos. Does Schelling thereby covertly reproach the Ungrund for its disengagement from the nature of things? Perhaps in psychologizing the Ungrund's indifference he projects upon the nonground the eerie impassivity that he cannot bring himself to feel both about it and about what it means for it to `give' duality in an absolutely indifferent fashion ± a radical carelessness that, for example, Derrida struggles to describe in the case of the Platonic khora. It is a question, once more, of how (not) to speak. To think the Ungrund in its radical a-pathos, beyond all humanisms, would be the most difficult thing to do: we cannot be sure that Schelling ever accomplishes it as such. What is certain is that the nonground's extreme insouciance triggers a certain strategic carelessness in Schelling. `Reality and ideality, darkness and light, or however else we wish to designate the two principles', Schelling argues, `can never be predicated of the nonground as antitheses' (7:407/88). To do so would be to identify the Ungrund as the absolute identity of these principles, a conclusion that Schelling again insists cannot be the case since the nonground precedes identity and difference. How then to characterize the nature of the (non)relationship between, on the one hand, the Ungrund, and, on the other, all the differends that undoubtedly exist and bear its trace? It is a question with which Schelling and German idealism had been concerned all along: how does





But nothing prevents their being predicated as non-antitheses, that is, in disjunction and each for itself; wherein, however, this duality (the real twofold of principles) is established. There is in the nonground itself nothing to prevent this. For just because its relation towards both is a relation of total indifference, it is careless [ gleichguÈltig] towards both . . . . [W]ithout indifference, that is, without the nonground, there would be no twofold of principles. (7:407/88) If the nonground cannot be said to contain opposed terms as antitheses, neither does it preclude them from being posited independently of each other, as sheer disjunctions. Because the Ungrund is indifferent to this position, nothing [nichts] can stop us from saying this. So Schelling says, twice, in a conspicuous sleight of hand that makes it seem as if he had suddenly grown indifferent to the demands of philosophical thinking and careless of the need to argue a case dialectically. To think the root of difference, Schelling seems to suggest, we must consider the originary emergence of (what Krell calls) `pure duality',71 a general, primal `twofoldedness' that subtends all identifiable and specific cases of antitheses: darkness and light, reality and ideality, etc. Schelling argues that thinking twofoldedness requires us to distinguish, for the first time, and perhaps only provisionally, between `duality' and antithetical òpposition'. ('We may have used the two as meaning the same thing up to the present' [7:407/88], he observes, somewhat coyly, smoothing over the scandal of trying to discern the trace of an originary duality in the midst of empirical oppositions.) `Before' antithetical terms come into relation, there must be something like pure relationality, never allowed to exist as such. We can at least posit this òf' the Ungrund, we can hypothesize that it is the site or opening of this twofoldedness. Es gibt (Zweiheit). But this is not something we can grasp explicitly, since knowers can know only knowledge and what Schelling here evokes is the un-thought infrastructure, or `structural unconsciousness' of knowledge. Like Keats' Grecian urn, the Ungrund's steadfast silence teases Schelling out of thought. I can posit this prearchaic donation of the twofold by the Ungrund because there is nothing to prevent me; but in making that claim, which amounts, finally, to saying that there is nothing to substantiate such a claim either, I also concede that I cannot know it. There seems to be no other way of saying this except, as it were, simply by saying it: `[W]ithout



difference begin? What Schelling offers by way of an answer is very strange:

indifference, that is, without a nonground, there would be no twofold of principles' (7:407/88; trans. modified). Without one, not the other; only with one comes the other: so much depends upon how it is that twofoldedness follows so naturally and spontaneously from the nonground, yet this association, the mechanism by which twofoldedness emerges from indifference, and is profoundly indebted to it, is exactly what Schelling does not explain. How could he? This event, as such, is precisely what goes without saying, and must go without saying: the concept that would explain how it is that with the nonground, there is also, immediately, twofoldness, discretely withdraws from knowledge, precisely to facilitate it. To repeat: while the nonground is indifferent to difference, its indifference is what accounts for its coming into existence in the first place. The nonground is completely oblivious to such positing. It does not prevent us from saying such things. Curious and outrageous move, this, with at least three overlapping implications that I can only list quickly here: 1) The lack of an interdiction is a negative way of saying something positive, albeit in an absolutely minimal manner, about the Ungrund: the groundless permits the philosopher to posit what he wants, not because he can derive this justification or find grounds for his argument in it, but because it could (not) care less. 2) However, this licence ± by default ± in turn bears the burden of a troublesome negation, whose abyssal consequences reach ahead to Nietzsche and beyond: the nonground does not prevent the philosopher from making his hypotheses, but, as I have suggested, neither does it authorize him in any way. What is treated positively as an opening to thought also promises that no position on the nonground can ever be wholly certain. And if, at the highest point of Schelling's argument, the nonground refuses to yield any confirmation for the hypotheses made about it, then what is the fate and the surety of the myriad positions, perhaps philosophy in its totality, that flow from it as naturally as the Urgrund follows the Ungrund? That which makes knowledge possible also makes it absolutely impossible. A liberating prospect, in its own way, perhaps even a sign of the very freedom that is the titular subject of Schelling's essay, but also threatening, since it abandons the philosopher to a kind of epistemological free fall. In its indifference, the nonground declines especially to orient Schelling's thinking, exposing him to the vertiginous prospect of making a series of groundless hypotheses about the groundless, as if stuttering a series of philosophical performatives, pronounced without the consolation of a constative ground and




without any definitive sense of where to begin or end. For a moment, Schelling comes very close to Derrida: `We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace . . . has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be'.72 We could say, after Thomas Pfau, that the ` ``subject'' of Schelling's philosophy may thus be characterized as a rethinking of philosophy once the latter . . . has come face to face, so to speak, with the crisis of its own discursive authority'.73 We could say this, except for the fact that Schelling's text here betrays no outward sign of being in crisis. About the impassivity of the nonground, he is curiously impassive. Indeed, he concludes his tortuous and consistently surprising account of the Ungrund by pointing to how its putative clarity brings out the profundity of the entire treatise on freedom: `Far from it being the case that the distinction between ground and existence proves itself at the end to have been merely logical, or to have been summoned as an aid that at the end would prove itself to be nongenuine, it has rather shown itself to be a very real distinction, which was confirmed and fully grasped only from the highest standpoint' (7:407/88).74 3) `Nothing can prevent us' also means that the philosopher cannot be stopped, that this positing and positioning proceeds as if in a compulsive fashion, as if he were commanded to speak even before he had said anything at all. Whatever he says in particular ± the Ungrund is utterly deaf to these details ± the one thing that he cannot stop doing is saying something. `How to avoid speaking of it? In this context, the singularity that interests [Schelling] . . . is that the impossibility of speak of it and of giving it a proper name, far from reducing it to silence, yet dictates an obligation, by its very impossibility: it is necessary to speak of it and there is a rule for that'.75

Notes Portions of this essay previously appeared in `The Necessary Heritage of Darkness: Tropics of Negativity in Schelling, Derrida, and de Man', in Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark, eds, (1995), Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 79±146. I am grateful to State University of New York Press for permission to reproduce parts of that essay. For listening to and commenting upon this essay, I thank Ian Balfour, Stephen Barber, Stanley Corngold, Thomas Pfau, Tilottama Rajan, and Marc Redfield. This essay was prepared with the able assistance of Haley Bordo. 1 Pagination refers to Jean-Luc Marion (1991), God Without Being: Hors-texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.




2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Pagination for Philosophische Untersuchungen uÈber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhaÈngenden GegenstaÈnde [Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom] refers first to F.W.J. Schelling (1856±61), SaÈmmtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling Stuttgart: Cotta, 14 vols; and second to F.W.J. Schelling (1936), Of Human Freedom, trans. J. Gutmann Chicago: Open Court Press. All subsequent references to the Freedom essay in English will principally be to this translation. Where necessary, I have modified Gutmann's translation, in consultation with the somewhat more precise translation by Priscilla Hayden-Roy, in Ernst Behler, ed. (1987), Philosophy of German Idealism, The German Library, Vol. 23, New York: Continuum, pp. 217±84. I have also consulted the translations that David Farrell Krell provides in `The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century: Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom (1809)', in John C. Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta, and Jacques Taminiaux, eds, (1988), The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years, Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, pp. 13±32. I discuss these names and other, related matters, in `The Necessary Heritage of Darkness: Tropics of Negativity in Schelling, Derrida, and de Man'. Marion makes the distinction between `theo-logy' and `theo-logy' at several points in God Without Being. See especially, pp. 156±8. Reproducing elements of an argument Jean-Luc Nancy makes in The Experience of Freedom, Peter Fenves suggests that Heidegger `never arrive[d] at the abyssal foundation of Schelling's treatise'. See his `Foreword' to Jean-Luc Nancy (1993), The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. xxviii. For another discussion of Heidegger's vexed relationship to Schelling, see my (1997) `Heidegger's Craving: Beingon-Schelling', diacritics 27.3, pp. 8±33. David Tracy characterizes Marion as pre-modern and post-modern in his `Foreword' to God Without Being (pp. xii±xiii). Paul de Man (1983), Blindness and Insight: Essays on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Theory, 2nd ed., rev., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 7. Krell, `The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century', p. 17. I should say from the outset that my own essay is wholly indebted to Krell's groundbreaking study of Schelling's ground-breaking. I cite Jacques Derrida's phrase from `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', trans. Ken Frieden, in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds (1992), Derrida and Negative Theology, Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 101. Cited by Simon Critchley (1993), The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 247 n. 64. Cited by Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 102 n. 44. Jacques Derrida (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, p. 178 n.3. I cite Manfred Frank's description of idealism in (1989), What is Neostructuralism? trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 89. Nietzsche begins Ecce Homo by claiming that Ì live on my own credit' [Ich lebe auf meinen eigenen Kredit hin]. See Friedrich Nietzsche (1989), On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, p. 217.




15 John Caputo cites this suggestion in (1997), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 67. 16 Jacques Derrida (1995), The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 77±8. 17 I am grateful to Tracy Wynne for providing me with this legal rhetoric. 18 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo, p. 92. 19 Sigmund Freud (1957), `Mourning and Melancholia', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, vol. 14, pp. 243±258. 20 Freud, `Mourning and Melancholia', p. 256. 21 This passage from Schelling's Munich lectures (1833±4) is cited and translated by Andrew Bowie in (1990), Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 87. 22 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975), Truth and Method, trans. William Glen-Doepel, New York: Crossroads, p. 269. 23 Friedrich Schleiermacher (1928), The Christian Faith, trans. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, p. 17. 24 Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, p. 89. 25 Immanuel Kant (1965), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 513. 26 Immanuel Kant (1993), Òn a Newly Raised Superior Tone in Philosophy,' trans. Peter Fenves, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 71. Like a man drawn to a dangerous precipice, however, the naive theologian ignores this warning, and moves, as if driven by an inner compulsion, from the ground to the grounds of that ground, beyond which even God cannot see. God asks: from where am I? Such a childish question: Kant infantilizes God, goes so far as to ventriloquize and belittle him, making him ask this anxious question as a way of mocking the pretensions of the theologians, who will only make the same impertinent and unreasonable inquiry on his behalf. The fact that God raises the question in the first place means that his origins are invisible to his panoptic eye, which claims to see everything ± `from eternity to eternity' ± but this primal abyss. God asks what circumscribes him, but in the asking, he is necessarily after the fact, belated with regard to the already there of this mysterious, inchoate place from which he has come. One might even say that, insofar as God is delayed, deferred by the Ungrund or nonground to which he is answerable, he is historical. Preposterous! And if God suffers from a blind-spot vis-aÁvis his determining grounds (so the logic of Kant's playful irony goes), how much more blind can the theologians and metaphysicians be? 27 Martin Heidegger (1968), What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck, New York: Harper & Row, p. 153. 28 Jacques Derrida (1977), `Ja, ou le faux-bond', Diagraphe 11, p. 98. 29 Ned Lukacher (1986), Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 11. 30 Jacques Derrida, `Ja, ou le faux-bond', p. 98. What Geoffrey Bennington has recently said of Derrida would then apply to Schelling: `[T]here would be a




31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

certain truth in saying that Derrida has not accomplished his mourning for metaphysics, that he is keen not to do so. Half-mourning, rather'. See Geoffrey Bennington (1993), Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 147±8. Jacques Derrida (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 149. For this point, I have my colleague Howard Jones to thank. Jacques Derrida (1991), Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida's Feu la cendre could be described as an extended meditation on this phrase. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 70. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 77. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 78. Derrida: `To write is to have the passion of the origin'. See Èllipsis', in (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 295. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 102. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 102. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 79. Jacques Derrida (1982), `DiffeÂrence', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 26. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 74. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 77. Bennington, Jacques Derrida, p. 80. Alan White (1983), Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 144. Here we might recall the similarly lurid system of Selbstzerreiûung developed in de Man's later work. In these essays, scrupulous attention to what could be called the àbsolute dualism' between the `materiality' and `phenomenality' of language threatens to trigger `the undoing of cognition' and `the dismemberment of the aesthetic whole into the unpredictable play of the letter as inscription'. See, for example, de Man's remarks in his introduction to Hans Robert Jauss (1982), Towards an Aesthetics of Reception, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. xxv. On the rhetoric of this dismemberment, see David Clark (1996), `Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism', in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory, Reading Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 40±71. Marion, God Without Being, p. 2. Krell, `The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century' pp. 25±6. The `deeper disclosure' (7:334/4) that Schelling cryptically promises at the beginning of the treatise on freedom is finally revealed to be literally true: beyond the beginning lie unfathomable depths, a `bottomless fund [ fonds sans fond ]' or `store of deep background' that Derrida calls `the pharmacy'. Jacques Derrida (1981), `Plato's Pharmacy', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 127, 128. In a moment, Schelling will look into this abyss, and look away: on the next page, he evokes a mysterious place described as `back-behind' [zuruÈckbleibt] God's essence, where a certain excess is èternally sealed in darkness' at the end of




50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67

68

69 70

time. Is the Ungrund not precisely such a background, the unruly parerga that supplements the ground but is not of the ground? Schelling has just said that the nonground is beyond good and evil. But here, it is an embarrassing surplus to God, the `Caput mortuum [or industrial waste] of his life-process'. No longer a pharmacy dispensing existent beings, then, the Ungrund is quickly reconfigured as a slag-heap to capture the waste of becoming. See note 62. I of course recall Wallace Stevens (1982), `The Snow Man', in The Collected Poems, New York: Vintage, p. 10. Cited in John Caputo (1993), Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 33. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 85.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 60.

Derrida, `The Ends of Man,' in Margins of Philosophy, p. 128.

So Ludwig Wittgenstein commands in the well-known last line of his

(1922), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 189. Derrida recalls Wittgenstein in `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 81. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 99.

Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 86.

Caputo, Against Ethics, pp. 70, 122.

Caputo, Against Ethics, p. 84.

Here I recall Caputo's provocative use of the same moment from the Old

Testament narrative. Caputo retells the story of Abraham and Isaac as a way of probing the fate of ethics in a postmodern world. See Against Ethics, pp. 70, 9±16. Paul de Man (1984), `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant', in Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica, eds, Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, p. 144. Paul de Man (1984), Ànthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric,' in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 262. As Rodolphe GascheÂ notes, de Man is one of a cluster of thinkers of radical indifference that also includes Levinas, Derrida, and Marion. See Rodolph GascheÂ (1994), Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 94. Krell, `The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century', pp. 25±6.



Èhme's (1977) The High and Deep Searching Out of the Robert Brown cites Bo

Threefold Life of Man in The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influence of Boehme on the Works of 1809±1815, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, p. 48 n. 41. I cite Thomas Pfau's translation of Schelling's System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere (1804). See Pfau (1994, `Critical Introduction,' Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 40. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 106. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 107.




71 Krell, `The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century: Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom (1809)', p. 26. 72 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 162. 73 Thomas Pfau, `Critical Introduction', p. 5. 74 Alan White similarly points to the fact that `Schelling does not acknowledge that his account of the Ungrund as indifference is either unclear, incomplete, or incoherent.' See his Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, p. 133. 75 Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 107.




`The Emptiness of Intelligent Questions': Georges Bataille and the Mystical Tradition Peter Connor

Who among us does not dream of storming the gates of the mystical realm ± who does not imagine himself `dying from not dying'? Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

Mysticism, Cardinal Newman is said to have said, begins in `mist' and ends in `schism'. The schism I will try to describe here is between mystical and philosophical modes of knowing; specifically, I will consider the ways in which a schism between a rigorously methodical approach to knowledge, consistent with the philosophical tradition since Decsartes, and a broadly intuitive or suprasensible approach, has conditioned the reception of the work of Georges Bataille (1897±1962), French novelist, ethnographer and ± in the eyes of some ± philosopher. Since Jean-Paul Sartre published À New Mystic' (1943), his influential review of Inner Experience, Bataille's fate as an intellectual has been caught up in and compromised by the perceived mystical and religious elements in his thinking. My intention in revisiting this issue is not to prove that Bataille is indeed the mystic that Sartre claimed him to be, nor is it to provide support for Derrida's contention, in `From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve', that Bataille ìs not a new mystic'.1 A full understanding of the complex place of mysticism in Bataille's thought would require analysis of the totality of his oeuvre, including and especially his political output. All I can hope to achieve here is to contextualize his interest in mysticism, and to indicate how it caused and continues to cause turbulence in the reception of his ideas. For it is Bataille's `mysticism' ± or what is perceived as such, or denied as such ± that lies at the heart of his double or split identity: as an 177



8

intellectual who has contributed to our understanding of significant philosophical and political issues ± issues pertaining to science and knowledge, social organizations, community ± and as a kind of free, anarchic spirit, a `saint' or `madman' (his own terms) who prescribes a life lived àt the level of intensity of death',2 sovereignly free from `the responsibility of the world'.3

Inner Experience (1943) opens with the following words: `By inner experience I understand what one usually calls mystical experience: states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion'.4 Although Bataille in the same book goes on to differentiate between the ìnner' and the `mystical' experience, his notion of an ecstasy that interrupts the flow of thought ± that brings about, in the words of Dionysius the Areopagite, `the intimate cessation of intellectual functioning'5 ± remains intimately connected to the themes, the vocabulary and the concepts he discovered in the writings of the mystics. In spite of certain reservations about their conclusions, Bataille does not conceal his admiration for the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, Jakob Boehme, Nicolas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, as well as other, mostly Western mystics. Had he been a contemporary of Plotinus, say, or Dionysius the Areopagite, the commingling in Bataille's writings of what have come to be seen as markedly distinct, indeed opposed ways of discoursing about existence might not have appeared quite so problematic. But since the Enlightenment, when Kant declared that `mystical illumination' leads to `the death of all philosophy', philosophy has with few exceptions sought to formulate its visions of existence in terms immune to the charge of nebulous thinking that the word `mystical' implies.6 By the end of the nineteenth century, the word had lost the dignity and specificity of connotation that the concept of the intuitus mysticus once enjoyed. Thus William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), laments that `the words ``mysticism'' and ``mystical'' are often used as terms of mere reproach, to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic'.7 No doubt such a sweeping view of the exclusion of the mystical from modern philosophical discourse can be challenged. One could debate the exceptions: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger after the Kehre. Or, like Bataille, one could argue in a more seditious manner that mysticism, as the repressed other of philosophy, lies buried at the




heart of philosophical logic, unsettling in subtle ways philosophy's march toward a rational and ordered view of the universe. Bataille makes such an argument on more than one occasion. In `The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic' (1932), for example, he sets out to unearth the `mystical ancestors' of the dialectic, the `philosophical phantoms such as Meister Eckhart, the Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, and Jakob Boehme'8 to whom Hegel's thought is secretly indebted. It need hardly be pointed out that Bataille's philosopher contemporaries bristled at the suggestion that philosophical labor might be in any way endebted to the musings of a Dominican Friar, a Papal Legate, or a visionary shoemaker. In raising these spirits from within the catacomb of Hegel's great edifice, Bataille has two purposes. The first is to create mayhem. Bataille was something of a professional emmerdeur. Ì would willingly say', he told Madeleine Chapsal late in his life, `that what I am most proud of is having re-shuffled the deck'.9 This reshuffling is really a mixing-up and disordering (in French: brouiller les cartes) by means of which Bataille aims to disorient first and foremost the most unruffled, the puffed-up philosophers, whose complacency Bataille abhorred. Secondly, Bataille wants to suggest that in positing knowledge as its sole end, philosophy is based on a sacrifice: worshipping rationalism, it sacrifices the peculiar pleasures offered in the experience of not knowing, the joys of non-knowledge or ùnknowing', as we shall often translate Bataille's key word, le non-savoir. What Claude Bernard called, `with a rare exactitude, ``the pleasure of non knowing'' ',10 is the essence of the inner experience; it is its precondition and its end. It is also, according to Bataille, philosophy's blind spot. Hegel, for example, `know[ing] no other end than knowledge', excludes from `the ``system'' . . . all unknown elements',11 which explains, Bataille believes, the omission from the Phenomenology of desire, poetry, laughter, ecstasy. So Bataille, independently of any properly `mystical' experience or feeling he may have had, used mysticism as a weapon against what he saw as the confining and reductive positivism of philosophy, the dominant discursive field of his times. That his critique of philosophy had any purchase at all with the group of supremely self-confident intellectuals at which it was aimed is testimony to his skill at `re-shuffling the deck'. But what exactly were Bataille's foes reacting to when they denounced in his work a tendency to mysticism? They were reacting, I would argue, not just to Bataille, but to a tradition of mystical thinking, which in France, as elsewhere, had come to be viewed not only as the enemy of Reason, but as an enemy of the people as well.



`The Emptiness of Intelligent Questions' 179

Bataille was born in 1897, the year after Bergson published his Matter and Memory; he came of age, under the tutelage of `the great Russian mystic' Lev Shestov12, in the decade l'AbbeÂ Bremond's eleven volume, unfinished study of mysticism in French literature, Histoire litteÂraire du sentiment religieux en France (1916±33), started to appear. This is not to suggest that Bataille's preoccupation with mysticism has its origin in Bergson's intuitionist philosophy, nor in the mystically inflected expressions of Bergsonism that flourished in literature and the other arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hostile toward Bergson (whom he once met: `that careful little man, philosopher!'13), Bataille remained fairly indifferent to those amongst his immediate predecessors ± Charles PeÂguy, Romain Rolland, Jacques RivieÁre, l'AbbeÂ Bremond, Paul Claudel ± whose writings most explicitly engage mystical themes. What is indeed remarkable about Bataille's interest in mysticism is its untimeliness; as I have suggested, when he published Inner Experience, in 1943, rationalism, in the form of Sartrean Existentialism (Being and Nothingness appeared in the same year as Inner Experience) set the agenda for philosophical and moral debate, while Bataille's mystical adventures seemed entirely out of step with `what the times expected' (to borrow a phrase from Jules Monnerot). Yet Bataille's mystical proclivity is not entirely unrelated to the works of his literary forebears; it was cradled, I would suggest, in his sustained intellectual engagement with Symbolist aesthetics and the fin-de-sieÁcle spiritualism that informed this aesthetics. The figure whose mysticism most influenced Bataille's thinking on literary and philosophical questions, for example, was undoubtedly Rimbaud. Rimbaud, whose poetry Bataille read as the expression of a `mystical experience', fascinated Bataille as much for his renunciation of poetry as for his figurations of `The Impossible' ± a word that Bataille made his own in The Hatred of Poetry (1947), later re-titled The Impossible14 ± in A Season in Hell. Embarking upon a voyage into the innermost regions of the self, rejecting both the scientific positivism of the Naturalists and the rigid formalism of the Parnassians, Rimbaud, along with other poets associated with the Symbolist movement, evoked in language marked by its allusiveness and `fluidity' a world of interior impressions beyond the phenomenal appearance of things and beneath the level of everyday consciousness. The impressions, intuitions, and latent affinities ± `correspondences', to use Baudelaire's term ± Rimbaud brought to the page were the result of a descent into hidden depths; the stuff of poetry was not at-hand, but, in Rimbaud's phrase, had to be `[brought] back from down there (laÁ-bas)'.15 Going `down there' and bringing back what one




found required unprecedented poetic capabilities: the poet had to become a visionary, equipped with the receptive sensibility of a medium and the prophetic gifts of the seer. To be a poet, according to Symbolist aesthetics, was to be able to see what cannot be seen, to be gifted with a second sight. Following Baudelaire's path àu fond de l'inconnu' ± ìnto the unknown' ± the Symbolists found new freedoms in the mystical, the occult and the numinous. The association between Symbolism and the occult led Arthur Symons to conclude his study of the French poets, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), with a discussion of `the doctrine of Mysticism, with which all this symbolical literature has so much to do, of which it is all so much the expression'.16 The esoteric writings of MallarmeÂ, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Maeterlink and Huysmans offer, Symons suggests, not àn explanation of mystery, but . . . a theory of life which makes us familiar with mystery'. Bataille's theory of literature likewise insists upon its proximity to mysticism: `Literature, connected since romanticism with the decadence of religion in that it tends to lay a discreet claim to the heritage of religion, is not so much cognate with the content of religion as it is with the content of mysticism'.17 Symons, writing in the shadow of Yeats, understands the term `mysticism' in its most elementary sense, that is, as an expression of the mystery of existence. The opposition he draws between èxplanation' and `mystery' corresponds to the crucial divide between reason and revelation that for him characterized the literary scene at the close of the nineteenth-century. This opposition informs Bataille's acute sense of the reductiveness of philosophical discourse, and underlies the tension throughout his writings between `sensible experience' and `logical explanation'.18 In his explorations of ìnner experience' (the term he reluctantly chooses to name the interior space that Rimbaud calls `laÁ-bas'), in his valuation of states of being inaccessible to scientific forms of knowing, and in his pursuit of extreme, ecstatic experiences, Bataille can be seen as one of the `horrible workers' Rimbaud evokes in his famous letter to Demeny, one who takes up and furthers the `long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses'19 that leads the poet to `the unknown (l'inconnu)'.20 Inner experience, Bataille writes, is à voyage to the end of the possible of man (un voyage au bout du possible de I'homme)';21 like Rimbaud's quest, it involves èvery form of love, of suffering, of madness', as well as ìneffable torture' (`The Torture', the second and in Bataille's view most important section of Inner Experience, is an extended dialogue with Rimbaud, and with his silence).




But Bataille was drawn to Rimbaud, whose life and works he associated with a `will to the extreme (la volonteÂ d'extreÃme)',22 precisely on account of the poet's intellectual rigor in his `communication with the darkened world'.23 What is crucial and singular about Bataille's reading of Rimbaud, and of the mystical literature in general, is the emphasis he places on reason as integral to the mystical quest to attain `the extreme': the `disordering of all the senses', for Bataille as for Rimbaud, would count for little if it were not `rational' (raisonneÂ ).24 Bataille was convinced that Rimbaud experienced more profoundly than any other poet the tension between reason and revelation. This tension plays itself out in the question of representation, in the inner struggle of Rimbaud's verse with itself and against the everencroaching silence that for Rimbaud, as read by Bataille, the experience of the extreme announces. Yet by giving à poetic outlet' to his ` ``mystical experience'' ',25 Rimbaud in Bataille's mind `gave up': he made of the unknown a knowable object. `The last known poem of Rimbaud is not the extreme', Bataille writes. Ìf Rimbaud reached the extreme, he only attained the communication of it by means of his despair: he suppressed possible communication, he no longer wrote poems'.26 Bataille wants to `go farther': `The will to the extreme', he writes, `stops at nothing'.27 Inner experience, as opposed to mystical experience, offers no knowledge of the ùnknown' to which it exposes the subject. Thus whereas Rimbaud's spiritual journey led him to discover, retrieve, and represent the unknown, Bataille's voyage leads only to à place of bewilderment, of non-sense'.28 `Born of nonknowledge', inner experience `remains there, decidedly'.29 Of the four identities that Rimbaud associates with the poet-seer ± `the great malade, the great criminal, the great accursed' and `the supreme Learned one (le supreÃme Savant)' ± Bataille accordingly cannot recognize himself in the last. Rimbaud, like other mystics before him, succumbed in other words to the fallacy of the `vision'; he does not go so far as to `contest', as does Saint John of the Cross, `the seductive image'.30 Bataille suspects that Rimbaud was aware of this contradiction; having attained the èxtreme limit of the possible', Rimbaud doubted that ìt should have a meaning', and, further, he `could not bear'31 this doubt. He knew that in presenting the extreme as poetry he aestheticized the experience, and gave in to what Bataille calls `poetic facility'. `The extreme is elsewhere', writes Bataille. Ìt is never literature. If poetry expresses it, it is distinct from it: to the point of not being poetic, for if poetry has it as its object, it does not attain it'.32 This is why, Bataille believes, Rimbaud eventually `turned his back on' communication. Inner Experience is Bataille's attempt to continue the




work carried so far by Rimbaud ± as well as by other writers of extremity: Sade, Blake, Baudelaire, LautreÂamont ± in the exploration of `the unknown'. Close to the Symbolists in his desire to explore the most intimate recesses of consciousness, and particularly close to Rimbaud in his belief that extreme experiences awaken an òther' Ì' behind the socially constituted self, Bataille differs markedly from Symbolist practice in that he refuses to recognize the efficacy of symbols as a means to evoke an experience that exceeds the faculty of the intellect. His notion of non-knowledge, the endpoint of inner experience, represents a more radical ignorance than Rimbaud's inconnu. Since the extreme experience brings with it no revelation, Bataille in a sense has nothing to say; he lacks an illumination to symbolize, as it were. To live `pinned to the extreme limit of the possible'33 ± the only way he could imagine living ± meant for him resisting the temptations and consolations of linguistic expression. The mystical tradition in modern France, of course, is not confined to the figure of the poet. Nationalist, Catholic and pagan currents of mysticism run uninterrupted from PeÂguy's mystique reÂpublicaine, to Maurras' mysticism of the patrie and BarreÁs' blood and soil, to the mystical lyricism of Claudel and the supernaturalism of Bernanos. Bataille shares something with each of these highly divergent writers, even as he differs from all of them in fundamental ways. Their writings, as I have suggested, seem to have held little interest for him; I evoke their names in order to stress the extent to which various expressions of mysticism ± largely banished from the intellectual scene in France by the agents of a Germanicized form of rationalism in the late twenties and thirties ± held sway in the first two decades of the century. For better or for worse, Charles PeÂguy (1873±1914) remains the representative figure of mysticism in twentieth-century France. His journal Cahiers de la Quinzaine (1900±14), founded in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, reflects its editor's mystical version of Bergsonism. More Bergsonist than Bergson (as Lanson says), PeÂguy is all eÂlan. His passionate convictions, his obsession with saints (French saints: GenevieÁve, Louis, and especially Jeanne d'Arc), his fervent patriotism, his sense of France's history and its mission in Europe, and his heroic death at the battle of the Marne contribute to a modern myth of the mystic as crusader. PeÂguy represents an old-fashioned mystic in new times: like Jeanne d'Arc, he understood his mission to lie in the protection of his nation; in his lifetime, however, the enemy was not a foreign force, but France's own War Office, the Ligue de la patrie francËaise. His mysticism was primarily a demand for truth and justice which extended to the political sphere:




òur Dreyfusism was a religion', he wrote in 1910, `taking the word in its most literally exact sense'.34 Aside from his own contributions, PeÂguy published the work of Romain Rolland, the pacifist mystic and author of Essai sur la mystique et l'action de l'Inde (1915) (whose òceanic feeling' was to become widely known by way of Freud's discussion of it in Civilization and its Discontents), and of AndreÂ SuareÁs, Catholic convert, Bergsonian intuitionist and, like PeÂguy, idolater of saints (`Cette chose unique et formidable: un saint!'). The combination of socialist philosophy and deeply spiritual beliefs that PeÂguy promoted in the Cahiers marked a generation of intellectuals whose influence on the moral and social climate of the nation lasted well into the thirties. PeÂguy is remembered also, and today almost exclusively, for one line from Notre Jeunesse: `Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique'.35 These words, which in May `68 entered popular culture as graffiti scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne, express PeÂguy's disgust with the political maneuvering of his contemporaries, so many of whom had in his view abandoned the high ideals of the Republic. Notre Jeunesse is a polemical work attacking, among others, Charles Maurras, editor of the monarchist, Catholic and anti-Semitic journal L'Action francËaise (1899±1940). Taken in context, PeÂguy's maxim is curiously prophetic: he seems to have understood that the destiny of mysticism in his time was to become embroiled in politics. L'Action francËaise, which over its long tenure brought together Maurice BarreÁs and Bernanos, espoused its own form of mysticism, deeply rooted in xenophobic nationalism. It fell to an author PeÂguy had published in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, the arch-rationalist Julien Benda, to denounce in 1927 the role of `lyrical philosophy' (that is, BarreÁs) in fostering a ` ``mysticism'' of bourgeois passion', the prerequisite for the ìntellectual organization of political hatreds'36 that according to Benda characterized his age. The Treason of the Intellectuals affirms the truth of PeÂguy's remark that mysticism ends in politics (while implicating PeÂguy in the movement that produced the politicization of mysticism). If political passions had again àcquired a mystic character which had disappeared for centuries', Benda argues, it was in large part because PeÂguy, and many others with him, had abandoned the clerk's traditional and legitimate objective of disinterested knowledge in order to preach in the `market place'. What the clerks preached, according to Benda, was `passion' as supreme value. `Today', writes Benda, ìf we mention Mommsen, Treitschke, Ostwald, BrunetieÁre, BarreÁs, LemaõÃtre, PeÂguy, Maurras, d'Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the clerks now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion ± the tendency to action, the exclusive




preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas'.37 As regards PeÂguy, it is above all his èxtolling of courage' that troubles Benda, the èxhortation to make Man's aptitude to face death the supreme virtue'.38 When the mystic descends to the market place, Benda argues, the result is war, and the `cult of the warlike instinct'.39 Benda has no doubts about where such values originate. The Treason of the Intellectuals is in large part the story of the seduction of the French by Nietzsche, by his cult of `the warrior aristocracy' and by the doctrine of moral particularism his philosophy implies. By `prais[ing] the military life apart from any political aim', Benda argues, Nietzsche suggested, or at least the his admirers inferred, `that war implies a morality in itself and should be exercised even apart from any utility'.40 Behind the rightwing mysticism of Nationalist thinkers such as BarreÁs lies Nietzsche's mysticism of `the great war'. It need hardly be added that the National Socialists in Germany also recognized in Nietzsche's glorifying of overcoming, struggle, and the will to power the seeds of an ideology adaptable to their own ends. Nietzsche's profound challenge to rationality and the new `moralities' based upon it proved for many French intellectuals, including Bataille, highly attractive. `The new feeling of power', Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power, ìs the state of mysticism; and the clearest, boldest rationalism is only a help and a means toward it'.41 Bataille's ìnner experience' is deeply indebted to his conception of `the ``Nietzschean experience'' ',42 with its emphasis on inner strength, violence and the elevated states to which selfovercoming leads. War and violence figure prominently in the articulation of inner experience, and often appear to be valued for the extreme experiences they offer. The virtue of practicing `joy before death' is Bataille's thesis in an essay from 1939, in which the author's grim imaginings of an àpotheosis of all that is perishable', specifically an àpotheosis of the flesh', seem reminiscent of the glorification of war and warlike values that Benda had denounced.43 In an abandoned version of The Accursed Share, written during the Second World War and published in the Oeuvres compleÁtes under the title La È nger limite de l'utile, Bataille quotes several gruesome pages from Ernst Ju describing the carnage of the battlefield, in order to illustrate Nietzsche's `lucid judgment' that `wars are now the only stimulants to the imagination, now that the terrors and the ecstasies of Christianity have disÈ nger the soldier, battle was inner experience ('Battle appeared'.44 For Ju È nger from 1922); for as Inner Experience' is the title of an essay by Ju È nger in Bataille, inner experience is figured as war. All that remains of Ju




the volumes of the Somme atheÂologique is a remark in Guilty, where Bataille compares `waking up underneath the table amidst the debris' È nger says about war'.45 It is however precisely after an orgy to `what Ju the status of such an analogy that came under scrutiny in 1943. It would be inaccurate to suggest that Bataille, like those whom Benda attacked, proposed `war as a morality in itself'. Yet he proposed mysticism as a morality in itself; he preached `the apotheosis' of the trances of mysticism and of ecstasy in general, of which war represented a privileged avenue.

What this brief outline of mysticism in France suggests is the extent to which `mysticism' as a term and a concept had become, by the time Bataille began to publish or before, a contentious notion to which dubious political connotations had accrued. Although an early section of Inner Experience is intended as a `Critique of Dogmatic Servitude (and of Mysticism)',46 and although Bataille repeatedly, in Inner Experience and elsewhere, tries to mark the differences between his own understanding of mysticism and the transports of the mystics he evokes, few contemporary readers found his critique to be very satisfactory. Not only was Bataille a mystic, he was, in the eyes of many, a Christian mystic. Sartre saw in Bataille's `taste for abjection' the ineradicable trace of his `Christian humility';47 Gabriel Marcel viewed Inner Experience as a textbook illustration of la miseÁre de l'homme sans Dieu, and regretted Bataille's stubborn `Refusal of Salvation' (the title of his essay on Bataille's book);48 while Artaud could see even from Rodez that the author of Inner Experience `needed to convert', to `return to God'.49 What few readers were willing to countenance was Bataille's demand in Inner Experience that philosophy and mysticism be brought together. This might well be an unreasonable demand, and in part it is meant to be so: it is `beyond reason', exorbitant, impossible. In 1943, moreover, philosophy in France was attempting to play the role of spiritual advisor to a nation in turmoil, and mysticism seemed at antipodes to the kind of down-to-earth counsel that responsible thinkers ought to provide. The values Existentialism sought to promote were ethical ones: commitment, decision, responsibility etc. The passivity of the mystic, his or her surrender to a higher force, ran counter to the critical tradition, which presupposed that a good dose of scepticism is more likely to deliver us from evil than a blind embrace of extreme experiences. Indeed, the need to distinguish mysticism and philosophy is the driving force behind Sartre's two-part review of Inner Experience, À New Mystic',




which appeared in the same year as the book it labors to condemn (1943). Bataille stands accused of many sins in this review, but the most grievous of all is theft: Bataille has looted the philosophical lexicon, and perverted its terms to supra-philosophical, mystical ends. `Dasein', `Mitsein', `transcendence', ìmmanence', ècstasis', and (above all) `nothingness' ± these words, Sartre complains, which ìn the works of Hegel and Heidegger [had] precise significations', are put to use in Inner Experience in the interests of presenting àn adventure that is beyond philosophy'.50 Sartre is anxious lest Bataille, who ìnserts' so many philosophical words, be mistaken for a philosopher; worse, readers might take this `rosary of remarks', this `mystical Discourse on Method', to be a sanctioned form of Existentialism itself. The situation turns out to be less dire than it appears, however, since on Sartre's view the purloined terms, part of a technical apparatus ill-suited to any other than properly philosophical ends, resist Bataille's every attempt to pervert their use. Even under duress these words remain faithful to the spirit of philosophy: `[Bataille's] work is a little holocaust of philosophical words. What happens when he uses one of them? Its meaning curdles and turns like milk in the heat'. The war of words is thus easily won: `this technical material, indiscriminately used, driven by polemical or dramatic passion, made to serve the pantings and the spasms of our author, turns against him'. Thus `philosophy avenges itself'; all Sartre has to do is announce the victory, and lament by way of a pun that Bataille should have engaged so lightly in this `battle lost in advance (bataille perdue d'avance)'.51 It is in its sensitivity to the issue of contemplation that Sartre's review gets to the heart of the animosity between philosopher and mystic. `Bataille's error', Sartre writes, ìs to believe that modern philosophy has remained contemplative. He has evidently not understood Heidegger, of whom he speaks often and inappropriately'.52 Sartre had to distance himself and his school quickly and unequivocally from Bataille's mystical approximation of philosophy: he could not risk association with any form of `contemplative' thought, for contemplative philosophy is philosophy divorced from the political, as well as from any notion of the ethical other than a dubious form of personal salvation. Bataille's mysticism seemed to Sartre to advocate a retreat from the world into interiority, a rejection of reason as the basis for moral action, and an embrace of ± even the apotheosis of ± experience irrespective of ethical consequences. In 1943, such a position seemed dubious, if not treacherous.53 Testifying to the truly ambiguous, unassimilable nature of Bataille's úuvre, the split opened up by the publication of Inner Experience




continues to surface in discussions of Bataille's significance today. Let us say that since his death two ways of reading Bataille have emerged. There are those who see Bataille as a critic of systems of knowledge, whose significance as a thinker lies in his relation to the philosophical tradition, especially to Hegel and to Nietzsche. These critics are interested primarily in the discursive and textual dilemma occasioned by Bataille's dismantling of metaphysical concepts and especially by his critique of the Subject of knowledge. A second contingent argues, on Bataillean grounds, that any approach to Bataille's writing that emphasizes textuality is academic and misguided; it violates the spirit of Bataille's entire endeavor, which insists dramatically on the priority of experience, or, as he sometimes puts it, living, and points precisely to the need to escape from the `prison' of `discursive existence'54 that the academic approach only perpetuates. A word about the scholarship in question might be helpful here. Much of the scholarship of the first kind is identified with poststructuralist thought conducted in the wake of several influential essays on Bataille by French writers.55 The writers in question, though hardly a homogeneous ensemble, found or sought in Bataille new ways to think about a Subject that differed fundamentally from the Subject presupposed in the formalist and structuralist criticism that preceded them. The importance of Bataille's project is explained by these intellectuals in broadly philosophical terms. Michel Foucault is not unrepresentative in this respect: Bataille's writings, according to Foucault, represent a `desperate and relentless attack on the preeminence of the philosophical subject'.56 The `shattering of the philosophical subject' that Foucault saw taking place in Bataille's text, if it does not spell `the end of philosophy', signals nonetheless `the end of the philosopher as the sovereign and primary form of philosophical language'. Bataille's contribution is to have suggested ways we might continue to speak about whatever is left in the wake of this attack, ways to recognize `the faltering of the speaking subject'57 while saving it from falling silent. Bataille, who died in 1962, emerges from these readings as a postmodern thinker avant la lettre to the extent that his text repudiates almost every claim to certainty, authenticity and origin. In his critique of Hegel's system, of the Ì', of `project' etc., as well as in his radical affirmation of what philosophy has traditionally excluded (ecstasy, laughter, drunkenness), Bataille challenged philosophy to reinvent itself, to an extent, the responses to his work, the new ways of thinking that have emerged from the crisis he experienced and knew how to describe, define what post-structuralism is.58




Most of the authors approaching Bataille from a philosophical angle are or have been university teachers. Opposing the reading of Bataille as a figure in the history of ideas, some critics have recently urged a non-, supra- and sometimes even anti-academic reading of his work. They see an irony in the hyper-intellectualization of the founder of a group called AceÂphale. They see Bataille's books as representing less a discursive or textual dilemma than a social, erotic and religious one. Nick Land, for example, is concerned that Bataille's works, which call for limitless expenditure and liberation from the constraints of instituted knowledge, have been `snarled up in the deconstructivist pulp industry of endless commentary on Logocentrism'.59 Michael Richardson recommends turning Bataille's critique of knowledge against those `postmodern admirers' who àdvance their deconstruction from within secure university posts'.60 These authors are mindful of the fact that Bataille never held a job at the university, and was suspicious of anyone whose ìntelligence has been formed at the University'.61 Accordingly, rather than simply analyze Bataille's text, which would mean reproducing the error it denounces, they propose to discover a way to respond actively to the exigencies it lays before us. Land for example narrates, along with heady and often very suggestive commentary, on Bataille's place in the history of philosophy, the circumstances in which he wrote his own book. Mimicking Bataille, he intersperses philosophical speculation with passages of poetry. Richardson for his part stresses the renegade Bataille: he likes J.G. Merquior's characterization of Bataille, intended to be pejorative, as àn incendiary in slippers'. He argues that Bataille `was always keen to maintain a distance from a vehement verbalism',62 that `he considered textual authority to be a very feeble thing having little vitality in itself',63 and that `nothing was more foreign to his temperament that the ``pleasure of the text'' so beloved by post-modernists'.64 `To see [Bataille] through Foucault, Derrida or Baudrillard', writes Richardson, ìs to emasculate what is original in his work'.65 Land and Richardson have an important point to make. Bataille indeed wrote in MeÂthode de meÂditation: `What I teach . . . is a drunkenness: I am not a philosopher, but a saint, perhaps a madman'.66 We are free to interpret the remark Ì am not a philosopher' as a philosophical statement; nothing prohibits and much mandates a philosophical reading of Bataille. But the issue is rather, as it was for Bataille, how to give expression to all three at the same time. This means recognizing and responding to Bataille's most daring statements, such as the small but indeed ìncendiary' phrase, `the emptiness of intelligent questions',67 or




again, his little reference to `the foolishness of every sentence'.68 Such sentiments struck Gabriel Marcel as expressions of a `radical nihilism'. If `writing is powerless',69 what then are the reasons for writing a book? What kind of a limit do such phrases suggest? What occurs at that limit, and how would we describe it? This limit is perhaps the unthinkable and untheorizable moment of mysticism. To encounter it, as Bataille forces us to do, is to experience frustration, not because reason is here abandoned ± which would be a liberation ± but because mysticism in Bataille's work must be thought according to the most rigorous protocols of philosophical logic. This is at least what Bataille wants to ask of his readers. Mysticism is, or would be, a coincidentia oppositorum, a point of perfect coincidence between reason and revelation. Faced with accepting this possibility, one can È rgen Habermas, understand the incomprehension of a critic such as Ju for example, whose work on Bataille has the merit of recognizing the fundamental contradictoriness of Bataille's project. Habermas sees Bataille's aim as similar to Martin Heidegger's, in that `the one, like the other, is concerned to break out of the prison of modernity, out of the closed universe of an Occidental rationalism that has become victorious on the scale of world history', and further in that `both want to overcome subjectivism, which covers the world with its reifying violence and lets it harden into a totality of technically manipulable and economically realizable goods'.70 Having depicted a Bataille who led a `double life', one as the àrchivist of the BibliotheÁque Nationale', the other as a `bohemian author in the midst of the Parisian intellectual scene', Habermas goes on to argue that in his writings, too, Bataille òscillates between an incoherent reattachment to the Hegelian project of a dialectic of enlightenment, on the one hand, and an unmediated juxtaposition of scholarly analysis and mysticism, on the other'.71 This ìncoherent reattachment', as might be expected, leads to the failure of Bataille's enterprise; the librarian cannot resist making a claim to òbjectivity of knowledge' even in relation to the bohemian experience (the ìnner experience') that is presented as a critique of objectifying knowledge. Habermas no doubt simplifies Bataille when he argues that `[Bataille] did not get into an immanent critique of metaphysics at all'.72 Too attached to the dialectic of the enlightenment, he has little tolerance for the ìnconclusive to-and-fro' of Bataille's argument. In the end, he argues, Bataille was led beyond philosophy into a mysticism that alone could accommodate the incoherence of `the possibility opened up to him as a writer and a theoretician'.73 On one level, Habermas' essay can




be read as a document that affirms and performs the limits of philosophy: up to a point, Bataille makes sense, then he becomes incoherent (by falling into mysticism). What this indicates is that Bataille must be situated in another lineage. Since Bataille does not turn to philosophy for what it traditionally offers ± knowledge, understanding, a conceptual framework that makes some aspect of experience intelligible ± but looks instead for the `non-sense' or `non-knowledge' that unsettles philosophical discourse at its limit, it would be naive to expect from him a systematic assessment of the works he consulted. We must look elsewhere, less towards KojeÁve and Hegel than towards Alexandre KoyreÂ, who taught Bataille Nicolas of Cusa, and Lev Shestov, whom Bataille met in 1922 when Shestov emigrated to Paris and whose The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Bataille helped translate into French.74 It is known that Bataille did not study philosophy formally, and that he came to it relatively late, which is to say in his mid- to late-twenties. It is not without consequence, as I have suggested, that his introduction to philosophy came via Shestov. Shestov, who `philosophized on the basis of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche', initiated Bataille into the study of philosophy in general, beginning with the works of Plato. Ìt is to him that I owe the bases of my philosophical knowledge',75 writes Bataille. Michel Surya, relying partly on the testimony of Alfred MeÂtraux and Michel Leiris, has documented well the influence Shestov had on Bataille in the years 1922±25, and has further shown how Bataille's virulent anti-idealism is infused with ideas drawn from Shestov's works.76 To Surya's evidence we would add that Bataille's thinking on the crucial question of non-knowledge owes a great deal to Shestov's distinction between knowing and understanding. `The effort to understand people, life, the universe', writes Shestov in All Things are Possible, `prevents us from getting to know them at all. Since ``to know'' and ``to understand'' are two concepts which are not only non-identical, but just the opposite of one another in meaning, in spite of their being in constant use as synonyms. We think we have understood a phenomenon if we have included it in a list of others, previously known to us. And, since all our mental aspiration reduces itself to understanding the universe, we refuse to know a great deal which will not adapt itself to the plane surface of the contemporary world-conceptions'. The next step in Shestov's argument is of a boldness that must have impressed Bataille: `To us, it seems . . . that in the interests of knowing we should sacrifice, and gladly, understanding, since understanding in any case is a secondary affair'.77 The idea of a sacrifice of the understanding, of a knowing that goes beyond understanding, will become a tenet of




Bataille's thinking and communicates with that part of his work that he himself situates ìn the line of mystics of all times'.78 Shestov's depreciation of scientific knowledge surfaces unchanged in Inner Experience: `To know means: to relate to the known, to grasp that an unknown thing is the same as another, known thing'.79 But Bataille will take the idea further than Shestov, all the way into the night of `non-knowledge', in which he sees an ecstasy that Shestov perhaps glimpsed but did not name: `NONKNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTASY'.80

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida (1978), `From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 272. For a more detailed treatment of the subject, see my The Mysticism of Sin: Georges Bataille and the Experience of Writing (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press). 2 Georges Bataille (1976), La Limite de l'utile, in Oeuvres Completes, 12 vols, Paris: Gallimard, vol. 7, p. 246. 3 Marguerite Duras (1981) `Bataille, Feydeau et Dieu' (interview with Bataille), in Outside: Papiers d'un jour Paris: Albin Michel, p. 32. 4 Georges Bataille (1988), Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Ann Boldt, Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 3. 5 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 16. 6 On philosophy's campaign to evict mysticism from its premises, see Kevin Hart (1989), The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: `From Descartes to Russell, mysticism has often been represented as philosophy's `òther'', as that which must at all costs be excluded from philosophical discourse' (p. xi). Kant's phrase `the death of all philosophy' is cited in Hart, Trespass of the Sign, p. 210. 7 William James (1929), The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Modern Library, p. 370. 8 Georges Bataille (1985), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927±1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jnr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 109. In a similar vein, in Inner Experience, Bataille cites a letter from 1647 in which Descartes alludes to the ìntuitive knowledge of intellectual nature in general', in order to argue that the entire ùniversal science' that Descartes went on to construct depends upon the forgetting of this ìnitial intuition', Bataille, Inner Experience, pp. 105±6. 9 Georges Bataille (1963), Èntretien avec Madeleine Chapsal', in Madeleine Chapsal, Les Ecrivains en personne, Paris: Julliard, p. 18. 10 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 107. 11 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 111. 12 Cited in Benjamin Fondane (1982), Rencontres avec LeÂon Chestov, Paris: Plasma, p. 95. Shestov's response to being so acclaimed is revealing with regard to the schism between philosophy and mysticism: `They write ``mystic'' in order to dismiss me, and they add ``great'' to settle the matter. Then




13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

there's nothing left to say . . . . Mystic: that explains everything, since it doesn't mean anything. By mystic, one understands clearly that the questions one is asking are outside of philosophy, and that there's no need to go to the trouble of understanding them', Fondane, Rencontres, pp. 95±6. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 66. Georges Bataille (1991), The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Arthur Rimbaud (1986), Collected Poems, trans. Oliver Bernard, London: Penguin, p. 12. Arthur Symons (1958), The Symbolist Movement in Literature, New York: Dutton, p. 95. Georges Bataille (1985), Literature and Evil, trans. Alistair Hamilton, New York: Marion Boyers, p. 25. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 33. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, p. 10. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, p. 6. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 7. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 40. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 51. In `The Sacred', Bataille equates ecstasy with the `grandeur' and the `reality' of life, and opposes it to a way of thinking that reduces life to analysis and reflection: `Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love. He who tries to ignore or misunderstand ecstasy is an incomplete being, whose thought is reduced to analysis. Existence is not only an agitated void, it is a dance that forces one to dance with fanaticism. Thought that does not have a dead fragment as its object exists inwardly (inteÂrieurement) in the same way as flames', Bataille (1985), `The Sacred', in Visions of Excess, p. 179. To an extent, the ecstasy of inner experience issues directly from the great conflagration of thought it occasions, an obsequy symbolized in AndreÂ Masson's drawing of the acephalic man by the names he holds in his right hand. Yet if the ecstatic experience is at times associated with the interruption of thought ± with `the intimate cessation of all intellectual functioning' (Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 4) of which the sixth-century Syrian monk Dionysius the Areopagite speaks in the Divine Names ± Bataille will also repeatedly maintain that reason and discourse are not unrelated to its occurrence: thought continues to èxist', but otherwise, ìn the same way as flames'. The opposition between the cold processes of intellection and the ecstatic frenzy that Bataille likens to a Dionysian dance runs through his entire work, and conditions the form of his writings, for to think about ecstasy ± to gain access to a thought that èxists inwardly' ± involves writing in a manner other than that of the expository philosophical methods with which Bataille was nonetheless familiar. At this juncture Bataille runs up against a limit. In trying to describe the ecstatic, inner experience, he will have recourse to two apparently irreconcilable models of thought: the philosophical and the mystical. I have already stressed that Bataille emphasizes the inadequacies of each these models. In fact, in order to write about this inward thought, a `new way of thinking' is required, a thinking `heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God', a thinking in which, Bataille




25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53

claims, `philosophy properly speaking dissolves', Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 9. Needless to say, from a philosophical perspective, this `new way of thinking' is a mystical fancy. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 40. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 50. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 50. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 3. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 3. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 50. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 50. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 38. Charles PeÂguy (1968), Notre Jeunesse, in Oeuvres en prose 1909±1914, Paris: PleÂiade, p. 580. PeÂguy, Notre Jeunesse, p. 518. Julien Benda (1969), The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington, New York: Norton, pp. 13, 27. Benda, Treason of the Intellectuals, p. 46. Benda, Treason of the Intellectuals, p. 134. Benda, Treason of the Intellectuals, p. 129. Benda, Treason of the Intellectuals, p. 131. Cited in Georges Bataille (1992), On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, New York: Paragon House, p. 175. Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. 174. Georges Bataille (1985), `The Practice of Joy Before Death', in Visions of Excess, p. 237. Bataille, La Limite de l'utiliteÂ, pp. 251±4. Georges Bataille (1988), Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone, San Francisco: The Lapis Press, p. 13, translation modified. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre (1971), Ùn nouveau mystique', in Situations 1, Paris: Gallimard, p. 173. Gabriel Marcel (1978), Homo Viator, trans. Emma Craufurd, Glouster, Mass: Peter Smith, passim. Georges Bataille (1994), The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael Richardson, London: Verso, p. 44. Sartre, Ùn nouveau mystique', p. 156. Sartre, Ùn nouveau mystique', p. 167. On Sartre's reading of Bataille, see Jean-FrancËois Fourny (1988), `La communication impossible: Georges Bataille et Jean-Paul Sartre', Stanford French Review, vol. 12, and Rebecca Comay (1990), `Gifts without Presents: Economies of `Èxperience'' in Bataille and Heidegger', Yale French Studies vol. 78. For a consideration of the theoretical problems attending any strictly philosophical reading of Bataille, see Geoffrey Bennington (1995), `Lecture: de Georges Bataille', in Georges Bataille apreÁs tout, ed. Hollier, Paris: Editions Belin. Sartre, Ùn nouveau mystique', pp. 155±6. The scare that Existentialist philosophy, which in France stood largely on the platform of commitment and responsibility, might be tainted with even trace elements of mysticism alarmed Sartre, but evidently did not entirely




54 55

56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

surprise him: he immediately understood that Heidegger was the root of the problem, and that a defense of Existentialism meant, at the same time, exculpating Heidegger of the charge of contemplation and of mysticism, and of the politics associated with it. Three years later, in Existentialism is a Humanism (1947), Sartre made refuting the accusation that Existentialism was a `contemplative philosophy' the first matter on the agenda: his review of Bataille's book is in a sense a rehearsal for that defense. See Jean-Paul Sartre (1956), Èxistentialism is a Humanism', in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York: Meridian Books, p. 287. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 59. I am thinking particularly of the essays published in the issue of Critique devoted to Bataille after his death (no. 195±6, Aug.±Sept. 1963), especially those by Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, and Philippe Sollers. A good selection of what might loosely be termed the post-structuralist Bataille is Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons ed. (1995), On Bataille: Critical Essays, New York, State University of New York Press, for which the editor has provided an introduction surveying the successive waves of critical interpretation Bataille's work has weathered since the 1940s. Michel Foucault (1977), À Preface to Transgression', in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 42. Foucault, `Preface to Transgression', p. 51. Derrida's essay `From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve', published in Writing and Difference but appearing originally in an issue of L'Arc devoted to Bataille in 1967, is to be noted as an important moment in the emergence of a post-structuralist Bataille, since it not only offers a rigorous philosophical reading of Bataille's work, but also constitutes a key document in the history of `deconstruction'. The influence of Bataille's writings on post-structuralism and deconstruction is sometimes neglected, even though it can hardly be overestimated. He is absent or given scant treatment in the various histories of these movements. Derrida has nevertheless stressed his importance to the articulation of deconstruction in its earliest and in some respects most crucial texts. `The Double Session', `Plato's Pharmacy', `White Mythology', as well as `several other [texts]' are, in Derrida's words, situated explicitly in relation to Bataille, and also propose a reading of Bataille', Jacques Derrida (1981), Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: Universtity of Chicago Press, pp. 105±106n. Nick Land (1992), Georges Bataille: the Thirst for Annihilation, London: Routledge, p. xiii. Michael Richardson (1994), Georges Bataille, London: Routledge, p. 16. Bataille (1973), Oeuvres compleÁtes, vol. 5, p. 43. Richardson, Georges Bataille, p. 15. Richardson, Georges Bataille, p. 10. Richardson, Georges Bataille, p. 14. Richardson, Georges Bataille, p. 11. Such partitioning of Bataille's thinking into component parts and phases can and has been challenged. Jean-Michel Besnier, recalling that Bataille's object of inquiry was never anything less than `total existence', argues that Inner Experience continues to reflect on the same politically driven debates that had animated Bataille in the 1930s.




What Sartre failed to recognized, he claims, was that Bataille was pursuing in this work àn asceticism whose stakes can be described in the same vocabulary used before the war to talk about revolutionary mobilization', JeanMichel Besnier (1995), `Bataille, the emotive intellectual', in Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Bataille: Writing the Sacred, London: Routledge, p. 14). Besnier's neologism èmotive intellectual' (intellectuel patheÂtique) is intended to describe a new type of intellectual that emerged with Bataille, one who `doesn't hesitate sometimes to celebrate the cult of irresponsibility as an antidote to the rationalism he is supposed to represent in the eyes of the world', Besnier, `Bataille, the emotive intellectual, p. 17. `These intellectuals', writes Besnier, `do not baulk at the idea that they could slip [deÂraper], because the essential thing for them seems to be to let themselves be taken over by emotions, by inspiration and by the sublime ± in short, by the irrational which fuses together the supercharged masses'. Clearly, we are at a considerable remove from the Sartrean model of the èngaged' intellectual, a model Bataille consciously resisted in Besnier's view. Besnier's attempt to account for the apparent tension in Bataille's writings between a rigorous and highly intellectual confrontation with political and philosophical questions and `the emotion (pathos) to which Bataille dedicated himself' ± a tension he attributes to `the collision of influences of Hegel and Nietzsche' ± illustrates the difficulty of situating Bataille coherently in relation to the intellectual tradition. To do so, one needs to be able to reconcile two tendencies, the rational and the mystical, which Besnier can conceive only in terms of strict opposition, the one being the àntidote' of the other. The phrase èmotive intellectual', willfully and inevitably oxymoronic, reinforces rather than erases the perceived split between contrary impulses, and possibly disqualifies Bataille from consideration as the intellectual that Besnier wants him to be. Allan Stoekl is similarly interested in `the conflict between Nietzsche and Hegel' in Bataille's writings, which he interprets as a conflict `between textual and political (or post-political) communities in Bataille', Allan Stoekl (1992), Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity and the Performative in 20th Century French Tradition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 19. Stoekl draws upon Barthes' distinction (which as Stoekl points out was hypothetical) between the writer (eÂcrivain), the `transitive man' for whom language is a means to communicate thought, and the author (eÂcrivant), whose action is ìmmanent in its object', and whose subjectivity, self-groundedness and whose very `structure' are lost to the `structure of language' itself, in order to argue that author and the writer àre always caught in a sort of mutual interference', Stoekl, Agonies of the Intellectual, p. 8. We can recognize here once again the distinction between a writing that is essentially linked to the communication of knowledge for some political end, and writing whose subject appears to be language itself (Stoekl evokes Zola and Flaubert, respectively). This theoretical framework allows Stoekl to situate Bataille as a figure whose work inscribes `the doubleness of author and writer', Stoekl, Agonies of the Intellectual, p. 18. `The Nietzschean and Hegelian writers in Bataille contain, co-exist with, and obliterate each other', writes Stoekl. `Bataille is the only `àuthor/writer'' who does not attempt to subordinate one function, one figure, one community to the other; his works are the crossing point between two mutually exclusive but necessary and mutually




66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

implicated intellectuals', Stoekl, Agonies of the Intellectual, p. 19. Thus Stoekl seeks to do justice to the `distinct social function' implied by `the figure of the Bataillean intellectual', while at the same time acknowledging that aspect of Bataille's thought that espouses expenditure, destruction and, though Stoekl does not say the word, the ecstatic. Both Besnier and Stoekl are attempting to reconcile what has appeared to many, beginning with Sartre, as a contradiction in Bataille's works, to come to terms, in MicheÁle Richman's understated phrase, with `the uncomfortable meeting of subjective and objective understanding' that his work stages, MicheÁle Richman (1982), Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 113. Georges Bataille (1973), MeÂthode de meÂditation, in Oeuvres compleÁtes, vol. 5, p. 218. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 8. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 36. Bataille, Absence of Myth, p. 97. È rgen Habermas (1991), `Between Eroticism and General Economics: Ju Georges Bataille', in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 213. Habermas, `Between Eroticism and General Economics', p. 216.

Habermas, `Between Eroticism and General Economics', p. 212.

Habermas, `Between Eroticism and General Economics', p. 236.

LeÂon Chestov (1925), L'ldeÂe du bien chez Tolstoi et Nietzsche, trans. Georges

Bataille, Paris: Editions du SieÁcle. Bataille (1976), Oeuvres compleÁtes, vol. 8, p. 563. Michel Surya (1987), Georges Bataille: La mort aÁ l'oeuvre, Paris: Seguier, pp. 67±74. Lev Shestov (1977), All Things are Possible, Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 61±2. Georges Bataille (1976), Consumption, in Oeuvres compleÁtes, p. 197n. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 108. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52.




Through the Eyes of an Artificial Angel: Secular Theology in Theodor W. Adorno's Freudo-Marxist Reading of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin Matt F. Connell

I.

Secularizing theology

A theological moment, secularized to varying degrees, persists in the work of the key Frankfurt School theorists. From their point of view, human history has not yet begun; what Hegel would have as the end could be a beginning. The political-messianic element of the Frankfurt reading of Judaeo-Christian thought appropriates the scriptural promise of the redemption of historical suffering in heaven, and turns it into a trope for an earthly revolution in social conditions. This would allow a psychological revolution: the development of a new style of subjectivity, the birth of a new humanity. This doubly hybridized theory (by FreudoMarxism out of Judaeo-Christianity) of psycho-social transformation will be explored in this essay using the deliberate oxymoron `secular theology'.1 In the 1930s Max Horkheimer was concerned to rescue the critical potential of religious and metaphysical thought from positivism: `The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation'.2 Now, however, theology should be mediated by a strictly secular materialism: `The productive kind of criticism of the status quo which found expression in earlier times as a belief in a heavenly judge today takes the form of a struggle for more rational forms of societal life'.3 The connection between theology and critique remained important È wenthal to the Frankfurt School. As late as 1989, for example, Leo Lo talked of `the heritage of Jewish messianism with which we have been 198



9

entrusted'.4 But this retrospective viewpoint perhaps exaggerates the extent of their initial interest in religious matters. The early Frankfurt School duplicated Marx's emphasis on the need for a thorough-going capitalist modernization of traditional national or religious identity in the direction of class differentiation. The belated interest of the Frankfurters in their Jewish heritage was prompted by the most urgent, and most unforeseen, of political developments: the rise of the Nazis and the perpetration of the Holocaust.5 Theodor W. Adorno's relationship with his Jewish identity was famously ambivalent, despite his early fascination with (and promotion of) his friend Walter Benjamin's theological work. Adorno's ambivalence towards the original religion of his protestantized Jewish father is clear both in Adorno's flirtation with his mother's Catholic faith,6 and in his later abandonment of the paternal half of his double-barrelled surname (Wiesengrund) in favour of the maternal (Adorno). This later prompted accusations of near-collaboration from Hannah Arendt.7 Adorno was distanced from his Jewish background to the extent that he did what he could to remain in Nazi Germany, producing in 1934 a È ntzel, a composer with Nazi review of a piece of music by Herbert Mu leanings. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe provides a few incriminating extracts from the review. For example, Adorno writes ± apparently È ntzel's cycle is `consciously National Socialist'.8 approvingly ± that Mu Rolf Wiggershaus suggests that at the very least, Adorno was here guilty of `political opportunism'.9 However, Adorno's eventual realization that to stay in Germany was to be rounded up as a Jew (regardless of his personal identity), his subsequent experience as an exile in the UK and USA, the suicide of Benjamin and the eventual revelation of the Holocaust all forced him to grapple anew with his status as a surviving Jew.10 Adorno bitterly regretted his naive and `crudely tactical' attempts to help the new music through `the winter of the Third Reich'.11 Evidence of the brutal shattering of Adorno's naivety emerges in his work from the 1940s onwards. Adorno could not in the end wholly expunge his religious identity and became, in a highly qualified theoretical sense, a Jew. This becoming, although forced by political circumstance, is mostly a conscious theoretical strategy which provides a series of rich tensions in Adorno's work between tradition and critique, between messianism and Marxism, and between Jewish and Christian themes. But this strategy also enacts itself in unconscious ways, revealing a less productive tension. His use of messianic tropes can be read as a screen for a judgmental absolutism of the type he attacks as



Through the Eyes of an Artificial Angel 199

authoritarian in others. History renders such judgements ironic. For example, Adorno referred to Erich Fromm, who was always explicitly engaged with Judaism, as a `professional Jew',12 yet in the end it was Adorno who received a professorship under the Third Amendment of the Law on Compensation for National Socialist Injustice in post-War Germany.13 In addition, given Adorno's various compromises, one is led to at least consider the possibility that his relentless assault on Heidegger involved a measure of displaced guilt. But questions of guilt are discussed too glibly by those who have never been tested in comparable situations. Whatever the reasons, Adorno's reflection on his experience of exile seemingly involved a renewed sense of engagement with elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition he had tentatively explored before the war, even as he politically distanced himself from it. This manifested itself in a sympathetic, even evangelical, approach to the theological elements of Benjamin's work, which Adorno had been using in his teaching since 1929.14 Shierry Weber Nicholsen notes that thoughts about Kafka were one important forum for the philosophical debates between the two. A letter from Adorno to Benjamin is seemingly the only record of Adorno's earliest interpretation of Kafka. In the letter, [Adorno] cites his own earlier attempt to interpret Kafka's work as à photograph of earthly life from the perspective of the redeemed life, nothing of the latter appearing in the photograph but a corner of the photographer's black cloth, while the horribly distorted optic of the picture is none other than that of the obliquely placed camera itself' (Dec. 17, 1934).15 This correspondence (in both senses of the word) with Benjamin became increasingly important for the development of Adorno's philosophy. Benjamin's death must have been an excruciating watershed for Adorno, who responded by trying to keep their correspondence on messianism alive in theory. The most famous messianic element in Adorno is at the end of Minima Moralia, in the section written in 1946±7. It universalizes the particular interpretation of Kafka from the 1934 letter: `Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light'.16 This motif went on to play an increasingly important part in Adorno's mature philosophy. His essay `Notes on Kafka',17 from the 1955 collection Prisms, may be taken as a re-particularized model of the estranging




perspective recommended in Minima Moralia. It is no surprise that in Prisms Adorno develops the quasi-messianic motif of an illumination which later becomes yet more sophisticated in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Kafka can be seen as one of the `black' writers of modernity,18 and his illuminations are accordingly dark ones. A prism should be able to combine fragmented wavelengths of light to produce a pure white radiance, but if that prism is a theoretical one, working with the muddied hues of modernity, then mixing them together can only yield degrees of darkness (as every artist working with paint, not light, knows). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno develops his optical metaphor, characterising philosophy as a prism for capturing colours that cannot yet appear in their true light: The colour that cannot fade comes from the nonexistent. Thought is its servant, a piece of existence extending ± however, negatively ± to that which is not. The utmost distance alone would be proximity; philosophy is the prism in which its colour is caught.19 Of course, the notion of illumination has biblical origins. God's statement `Let there be light'20 could be an allegory of clarification, not just a literal description of illumination: what emerges from the darkness is not simply light, but is also a self-conscious understanding of what is already there. This ideal of transparency underpins the philosophical Enlightenment, despite its critique of transcendental revelation and conventional forms of faith. However, Adorno believes that, in our age, enlightened demands for clarity usually serve to hide the truth, and he prefers critically to invert them, such as when he defends Kafka's darkly obscure portrayal of a fallen world. A long footnote to one of Adorno's essays on Hegel relates mystic experiences of light to his critique of enlightenment: A philosophical history of clarity would need to reflect on the fact that originally clarity was both an attribute of the divine when contemplated and its mode of manifestation, the radiant aura of Christian and Jewish mysticism. With the ongoing process of secularization clarity becomes something methodological, a mode of knowledge made absolute . . . . It becomes a fetish for consciousness. Its adequacy to its objects suppresses the objects themselves and ultimately transcendent meaning as well; at that point philosophy is to be only a `striving for ultimate clarity'. The word enlightenment





In the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, composed during the late 1950s and 1960s, Adorno pushes this darkening all the way, putting it in the service of colour: The black and grey of recent art, its asceticism against color, is the negative apotheosis of color . . . because for art, utopia ± the yetto-exist ± is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not ± and may not ever ± come to pass.22 Adorno of course dialectically qualifies the axiom of dark art, which might be sublated: perhaps art will one day be able to abolish this axiom without selfbetrayal, which is what Brecht may have sensed when he wrote: `What times are these, when/to speak of trees is almost a crime/ because it passes in silence over such infamy!'23 A sublation of darkness would for Adorno have to follow historical change ± À liberated humanity would be able to inherit its historical legacy free of guilt'24 ± but Adorno does not predict such a liberation. This refusal to guarantee freedom separates Adorno from theodicy, and he is careful to break with the idea that the presence of the negative ensures the eventual triumph of the positive. Adorno witheringly notes the tendency of theology to heave, à sigh of relief whenever its concerns are treated in any way, no matter what the verdict, as if at the end of the tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness ± the presentation of the world as hell ± a light glimmers'.25 The paradox is that since this immanent critique of theological meaning is itself meaningful and enlightening, it covertly owes a debt to the tradition of negative theology it eschews. It is not possible to talk of darkness without hinting at something else. Willi Hayum Goetschel confirms that `Both Kafka and Adorno are grounded in the tradition of Negative Theology'.26 Adorno's development of this tradition, using the



probably marks the height of this development. Its depotentiation is no doubt connected with the fact that memory of the prototype of clarity, light, which the pathos of clarity continues to presuppose, has since died out.21


II.

Artificial angels

The motif of illumination is obvious in Benjamin's famous essay on surrealism, where he talks of à dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday'.27 Such passages in Benjamin confirm Adorno's claim that Benjamin's work is intimately connected with Kafka's,28 for no one sheds light on everyday impenetrability as well as Kafka. For Adorno, their melancholically dark illuminations are artistic instantiations of a yearning for an enlightened enlightenment and the secular redemption it could bring to the future: Kafka's remark, that there is infinite hope except for us, could have served as the motto of Benjamin's metaphysics, had he ever deigned to write one, and it is no accident that at the centre of his most elaborate theoretical work, The Origins of German Tragic Drama . . . , there is the construction of `sorrow' . . . as the last self-negating, selftranscending allegory, that of Redemption.29 Developing Benjamin's sorrowful dialectical optics through a hybridization of secular and theological images, Adorno says that Kafka looks through the eye of an àrtificial angel'.30 My reading of this is that Kafka is no angel, but he does wrest from the fragments of his experience the material to construct an angelic simulacrum ± his work. One might cautiously ask whether Kafka's work is a golem, a magical construct produced to defend the Jews, but it would take a student of the cabbala to answer. Benjamin was such a student, working on the cabbala with Gershom Scholem (with whom Adorno later edited Benjamin's work), and he does draw attention to the make-believe angels who welcome people to `The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma', which offers jobs to the unemployed in Kafka's redemptive sketch for a possible end to his unfinished novel, America: Before the entrance to the race-course a long low platform had been set up, on which hundreds of women dressed as angels in white robes



paradoxical notion of a dark or profane illumination, is derived from Benjamin's work (where the influence of Brecht's talk of dark times can also be detected). If the light has gone from the world, perhaps the time has come for the profane illuminations whose shocks may spark the memory of it, or, rather, the memory of its possibility.


Angels may not exist, but to the unemployed even the prospect of a job takes on the light of redemption: `But for the fact that their wings are tied on, these angels might be real'.32 In a paper on Benjamin and Kafka, Giles Peaker draws attention to an unfinished story of Kafka's which further develops the artificiality of the angels in his work, by removing the living element altogether. A man is surprised when what he at first takes as an angel falls through the roof of his room, but it was `no living angel, only a painted wooden figurehead off the prow of some ship'.33 The light in the room has been destroyed, so the man places his last candle into the statue's sword-hilt, ànd then sat late into the night under the angel's faint flame'.34 Peaker provides the following interpretation: Here, the image is of the revelatory rendered prosaic, a rendering which hides its obverse, the prosaic as revelatory. Wooden this angel may be, and incapable of revelation, yet it appears, and still carries a `faint flame'.35 Adorno's reference to an artificial angel also calls to mind Benjamin's description of Klee's work Àngelus Novus'.36 For Benjamin, this angel is the angel of history, and his description of the picture in 1940 seems to serve equally well as a description of Adorno's portrait of Kafka's work. Benjamin's description draws on some earlier remarks of Adorno's in a letter sent from the latter to the former in 1935. Adorno says in this letter that `the recent past always presents itself as though it has been destroyed by catastrophes',37 as well as defending the dialectical link between theology and Marxist critique: À restoration of theology, or better yet, a radicalization of the dialectic into the glowing centre of theology, would at the same time have to mean the utmost intensification of the social-dialectical, indeed economic, motifs'.38 Five years later, and soon to become a victim of social catastrophe himself, Benjamin says this of Klee's angel: His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings



with great wings on their shoulders were blowing on long trumpets that glittered like gold.31


In Adorno's reading of Kafka, the possibility of a redemptive illumination of the rubbish-strewn and fallen world becomes an interpretative touchstone, even if at present only the gloomy first step towards such a redemption can be made ± recognising the ubiquity of suffering. This gnostic recognition involves learning to see the repressed rubbish of history through the eyes of the artificial angel, a view which can recollect the horrors of history through an artistic identification with its human victims. These possess an estranged perspective on the world which persecutes them. Adorno makes reference to the inverted crucifixion of Jews in the Middle Ages: [Kafka's] writing feigns a standpoint from which the creation appears as lacerated and mutilated as it itself conceives hell to be . . . . Kafka, the land surveyor, photographs the earth's surface just as it must have appeared to these victims during the endless hours of their dying.40 Kafka lights up the possibility of something different only through unshrinking attention to the dark side of what is: `The light-source which shows the world's crevices to be infernal is the optimal one'.41 These days, it is the concentration camp which is infernal after the manner of an inverse crucifixion. Jay notes: Ìt was, of course, a reverse messianism, that of the devil rather than God, which allowed [Adorno] to speak of `àfter Auschwitz'' with almost the same portentousness that a Christian would speak of ad '.42 But if sudden negative breaks in history are possible, perhaps their opposite is too: `messianic incursion could have its benign side, the redemptive moment that Benjamin had cherished and Adorno never fully abandoned'.43 The angel's eyes therefore force reflection on the fate of a world suspended between heaven and hell: `The machine angel's enigmatic eyes force the onlooker to try to decide whether he is announcing the culmination of disaster or salvation hidden within it'.44 Adorno relates his quasi-messianic reading of Kafka to certain Freudian insights, perhaps because hope for a different life is immanent to Freud's unattainable utopia of the reconciliation of warring mental currents. The disastrous war in the mind is revealed and alleviated through paying proper attention to the painful psychological detritus



with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.39

which betrays it, not by phantasizing about what salvation might be. This refusal to phantasize about psychological utopia keeps the power of its possibility, by leaving a space empty of premature speculation in which the possibility might freely develop. According to Adorno, Marx also makes room for the truly transforming possibility of a new life born of eternal peace through his resistance towards `positive blue-prints of socialism'.45 Such blue-prints usually reduce utopia to current ideas of pleasure; ideas stained by current social pressures. These bans on producing images of a psychological or social utopia are in some sense a secular equivalent of the Jewish ban on naming or depicting God, and in Adorno this prohibition becomes a way of understanding the subject± object dichotomy itself: A body of ideas would substitute for the object of cognition, and the subjective arbitrariness of such ideas is that of the authorities. The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured.46 For all their secularism, Freud, Marx and Adorno therefore continue in their own manner an investigation into some of the great problematics of Jewish thought. The implication of Adorno's idiosyncratically Freudo-Marxist philosophy is that Kafka's ghastly representation of the everlasting repetition of myth-become-nightmare shows up the hidden side of a frozen history. Blocked from maturation, history regresses, repeating its problems at new levels of complexity, just as the personal horrors of neurosis or psychosis involve immature fixations which determine an eternal and dominating return of the repressed. This can be read as a secularized version of the originally religious theme of a sinful fall, and a concomitant hope of redemption. Themes of guilt, alienation and redemption dominate Kafka's work. According to George Steiner (who identifies Benjamin's reading of Kafka as one exception to the rule that commentary on Kafka always falls short of the mark) Kafka inherited the àrcane wit, the delicacy of probing, the finesse of Talmudic, of Midrashic and Mishnaic commentaries'.47 Steiner goes further than this, and further than Benjamin, with the daring assertion that Kafka's parable `Before the Law' is practically an addition to the Jewish sacred canon, ìnformed by revelation'.48




The parable, which stands alone as well as being part of The Trial, tells of a man forbidden access to the Law by a doorkeeper. The doorkeeper dissuades the man from entering, talking of a series of doorkeepers, each worst than the last: `The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him'.49 But the doorkeeper offers no physical resistance to the man, who is nevertheless intimidated, waiting all his life outside the door. As he dies, he becomes aware with his fading vision of the radiant light streaming from it: The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: `No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it'.50 Steiner provides a theological interpretation which helps flesh out the questions raised in the parable about the relation between the blinding angelic optic used by Kafka and our mundane vision: The Trial is translucent, it stands open to our apprehension as do biblical parables and narrations. If we remain baffled and rebellious to the light of meaning ± a light which may well be inhuman in its indifferent purity ± if we do not enter a door open and intended for each and every one of us, the guilt, the consequences are ours. Or to put it simply: it is not so much we who read Kafka's words, it is they who read us. And find us blank.51 Whereas Steiner has to take refuge in the notion of revelation to support his contention that Kafka's parable is translucent, Adorno follows a different track, a more materialist one, interpreting the opaque power illustrated by the story as an equivalent of Freud's theory of hierarchical taboo.52 Nevertheless Adorno, like Steiner, adopts Benjamin's qualified definition of Kafka's writing as parable, and when Adorno remarks that `Kafka's prose sides with the outcasts'53 (those at the bottom of the hierarchy) it is hard to avoid the inference that there is something Christ-like about Kafka's personal and artistic reproduction of alienated suffering. As a Jew in Christendom, Kafka is like a Christian in Israel. However, just as the young Adorno gave up his flirtation with his mother's Catholicism (but behaved like a martyr all his life), Kafka in the end refused to play the Messiah (but sacrificed his happiness anyway). `Kafka was a writer of parables, but he did not found a religion',54




and Adorno takes this refusal as a critique of interpretations of Kafka which simply seek to turn him into a prophet (as Steiner almost does). Kafka's angel is described by Adorno as artificial, confirming that Adorno's messianism remains firmly secularized. The idea of the light of God's Law is used to criticize earthly conditions, but those conditions are also used as a critique of God Himself. On Adorno's reading, Kafka, the master of myth, works for the Enlightenment by daring to criticize its sublimations of God's Law. Kafka's mythic critique of the hidden God of the Enlightenment makes Kafka `not a proponent of dialectical theology, as is often asserted, but its accuser'.55 Adorno is making it clear that his own interest in the Jewish tradition is not devotional (or even expert). Following Benjamin's interest in the rational telos of Judaism, Adorno seeks to place both that tradition and Kafka in the service of an enlightened enlightenment, not to lose himself in mysticism: Kafka reacts in the spirit of the enlightenment to its reversion to mythology. He has often been compared to the cabbala. Whether justifiably or not can be decided only by those who know that text. If, however, it is true that, in its late phase, Jewish mysticism vanishes and becomes rational, then this fact affords insight into the affinity of Kafka, a product of the late enlightenment, with antinomian mysticism.56 Nevertheless, as in the antinomian mystical tradition which puts faith over Law and which is sublated in Kafka's work, and as in Benjamin's search for the power of the profane, the production of transgressive new experiences is still part of Adorno's process of pursuing artistic extremities. In the same way that Schoenberg's once shocking music `requires the listener spontaneously to compose its inner movement and demands of him not mere contemplation but praxis',57 Kafka's prose forces critical engagement by refusing to unlock its negative allegory for the reader ± Kafka's is à parabolic system the key to which has been stolen'.58 The Greek root of the notion of parable is paraboleÅ, à placing alongside'. The usual idea of parabolic analogy is for the allegorical significance to be obvious, allowing the transposition of insight from a surface truism to a parallel, yet supposedly deeper, moral and spiritual level. For example, Christ's parable of the grain that fell on stony ground, when set alongside the experience of his brethren, could be easily recognized as a theory of the subjective dimension involved in the reception of




religious truth. To continue the theme of illumination, as the term `parabolic' itself invites, we could say that the parable puts familiar terrain in a new, transparent and highly focused light. Steiner pushes this notion to its limit by suggesting that Kafka's parables are transparent, but seem obscure because our eyes are lacking. An aphorism of Kafka's confirms Steiner's interpretation: `With the strongest of lights one can dissolve the world. For weak eyes it becomes solid, for weaker eyes it acquires fists, for eyes still weaker it becomes shamefaced and smashes him who dares to look upon it'.59 Adorno's reading is similar to Steiner's, but more closely follows Benjamin's observation that Kafka `took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings'.60 Adorno maintains that Kafka does generate a parabolic sense of recognition, referring to his famously everyday style, but simultaneously undermines the possibility of identifying its meaning, referring to the mounting feeling of unreality forced on the reader by the content of what is so matter-of-factly described. Kafka lays his allegory alongside the everyday world, but does not himself provide the link between the two. No theological key unlocks Kafka's parables ± they are `damaged'.61 Kafka's wavelength remains opaque to our eyes, despite the fact that we recognize something in it, yielding a tension that may provoke in the reader an uncanny shift of perspective. The reader has to try and make sense of the shadows cast by the dream-filters Kafka places in the way of the sunlight of reason: Èach sentence says `ìnterpret me'', and none will permit it. Each compels the reaction, ``that's the way it is'', and with it the question, ``where have I seen that before?''; the deÂjaÁ vu is declared permanent'.62 Part of the deÂjaÁ vu is like the dazzlement produced by the unnaturally bright glare of the parallel waves of a light beam ordered by a parabolic reflector. Caught in Kafka's headlights, time stands still and we feel plunged into darkness as our spiritual photoreceptors burn out. Paralysing spots swim before our eyes ± from which visions could come. Exposing the stigmatic wounds of modernity, the dark writer reflects the blinding possibility of a different future, daring to hold onto the vision of a utopia in which no wounds are inflicted. This vision is a negative transgression of the ban on images, an after-image. But the ban is maintained as it is broken, in that the hesitant notion of a beyond is only generated by dwelling on the negative. Remaining true to Benjamin's desire to wed theology and materialism, Adorno overcomes the theological sublimation of suffering using a social dialectic which conserves the messianic promise through a strict attention to the social repression of the body: Àt its most materialistic, materialism




comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh'.63 This Freudo-Marxist and Romantic notion of a life that really lives hopes for a new type of subjectivity, born from the satisfaction of libidinal-material needs.64 This is how Adorno absorbs the notion of messianic change through a cunning transgression of his own ban on directly invoking it. Apparently profane matters of the body carry what is left of the holy, hence Adorno's suggestion that `Religious art today is nothing but blasphemy'.65 This paradoxical deployment of a religious concept against theological art can be better appreciated by bearing in mind Adorno's account of a dialectical persistence of secularized revelation within enlightened enlightenment: The theological heritage of art is the secularization of revelation, which defines the ideal and limit of every work. The contamination of art with revelation would amount to the unreflective repetition of its fetish character on the level of theory. The eradication of every trace of revelation from art would, however, degrade it to the undifferentiated repetition of the status quo.66 The atheist carries the hopes of theology, and should not forget it.

III.

Limits of Adorno's quasi-messianic Freudo-Marxism

Adorno's secular theology runs the same risk as his disillusioned, yet orthodox, Marxism: the risk of creating a critical posture oriented on an absent subject. Adorno's Marxism became an increasingly negative affair, once the quiescent proletariat seemingly confirmed Nietzsche's diagnosis of the stunted mentality of the herd, rather than Marx's faith in the working class. In this sense, Adorno talks of, the subjectless beings whom historical wrong has robbed of the strength to right it, adapted to technology and unemployment, conforming and squalid, hard to distinguish from the wind-jackets of fascism: their actual state disclaims the idea that puts its trust in them.67 These remarks show that Adorno's Marxist modification of Nietzsche does not dispute his negative characterization of the herd mentality (which also influences Kafka's accounts of crowds and bystanders, especially in The Trial), but simply recognizes the role capitalism plays





Materialism comes to be the very relapse into barbarism which it was supposed to prevent. To work against this is not the most irrelevant among the tasks of critical theory; otherwise the old untruth will continue with a diminished coefficient of friction and a more baneful effect. Subalternity increases, once the revolution has suffered the same fate as the Second Coming.68 Of course, Adorno's intention is to provoke better ways of allowing the subaltern to speak against its betrayal, but the strict negativity of Adorno's method allows no positive enactment of this. Adorno's appropriation of psychoanalysis conforms to this pattern. Adorno's Freud exposes the brittle rigidity of the crumbling bourgeois subject, rather than offering any programme for repairing it. All these negative figures emerge in Adorno's reading of Kafka: the melancholy presence of the absence of God, the utter sclerosis of social structures and the death of individuality. Adorno senses that Kafka's plunge into the depths of darkness humbles the enlightened pretensions of those modes of thought which idealistically posit subjects portrayed by Kafka as vanished: God, the individual and social revolution. This idealism still weighs down materialism, and Adorno points out the baggage: Ìdealistic majesty is the apocryphal imprint, a relationship which the texts of Kafka and Beckett glaringly illuminate'.69 Such patterns in Adorno's interpretations invite certain questions. These questions can be initiated by speculatively applying one of Kafka's aphorisms to Adorno: `Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery'.70 If the originally postulated subject-objects of theology, psychology and historical materialism have vanished, why keep the theoretical constructs built around them, even negatively? It may not be enough ironically to record the slow dissolution of the possibility of emancipatory concepts, never mind actions, hoping the negative record might spur some contingently postulated future subject into a proper praxis. On this hopeful model, Adorno's fragments of critical theory can be taken as a set of messages in a bottle awaiting a reader. The same could



in its creation. Adorno accordingly finds himself without a revolutionary subject: there is no concrete Messiah in prospect. Adorno couples the two themes, using a parody of messianism to discredit the faith of those Marxists of the Cold War period who were still waiting for rescuers to emerge from the Stalinist ruins of the Russian experiment:

be said for Kafka's blinding parables. The difference between us and this future reader is the difference between the ideal subject-objects of theology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and their actuality. Kafka shows how an explicit search for God always drives one up against the limits of man, how a grasping desire for a state of sanity provokes madness, and how subjective impotence prevents social change even when the objective need for it is present. Reflection on the gap between concept and actuality, the core of Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of enlightened enlightenment, is meant to pave the way towards closing it. Kafka's contribution is to turn the gap into an abyss in order to foster self-reflection through a sublation of the vertigo produced by looking over the edge. A problem with Adorno's theory, as with Kafka's prose, is that by relying on the abyss left by the vanishing subject, the problem of bridge-building is of necessity relegated to the future. Kafka's bridge falls into the ravine, unable to bear the weight of the first wayfarer to jump upon it.71 Gazing into the abyss can be dangerously hypnotic, becoming a substitute for the conformist gratifications it was supposed to negate. LukaÂcs once testily implied that the Frankfurt School had taken up residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss.72 Although the ethic of praxis guiding LukaÂcs had its own problematics, his acerbic comment undoubtedly carries a certain force. The problem is captured in the dictum of Kafka's crucial to Benjamin and Adorno's interpretation of his work: `there is infinite hope except for us'.73 For them, this dialectical irony tries to keep the historical horizon open to the promise of messianic Marxism despite the depressing horrors of the present. However, the self-sacrificial posture of the dictum, whilst perhaps authentic in the cases of Kafka and Benjamin, emerges as megalomaniac in its repetition by Adorno. A simple psychoanalytic reversal ± perhaps justified by certain `difficult' aspects of Adorno's character, as well as by his covert contempt for the herd ± suggests that what it may mean from his mouth is that there is no hope for them, the actually existing proletariat, and that we critical theorists are the ones lucky enough to see it, conserving the possibility of something else on their behalf. `Criticizing privilege becomes a privilege ± the world's course is as dialectical as that.'74 Unpacking this reveals a kind of `Messiah complex' in Adorno. In Adorno's eyes the conservation of the dialectic through the production of polished texts was his world-historical task. Of course, any professional intellectual is vulnerable to attacks based on their privileges or esoteric subject matter, but not all intellectuals adopt stances of semisacred isolation.




Adorno's work too often `condemned the victims of the social structure it criticized; and it passed sentence on those victims without making any attempt to address them'.75 This coldness jars with Adorno's insistence that the negative dialectician must love his objects.76 Adorno does his best to turn his ambivalence into a dialectical insight ± `Wrong life cannot be lived rightly'77 ± but a glib residue remains. Perhaps this psychological ambivalence has something to do with the tension between Jewish and Christian themes in Adorno's quasi-messianism, since Adorno identifies with both the wrathful judge and the loving redeemer. Adorno's tough love seeks to help the subaltern by rubbing its nose in the mess oppression has made of it, a tactic with an authoritarian component. He follows to the bitter end the quotation which begins part two of Minima Moralia: `Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst'.78 Meant as a dialectically provoking over-corrective to the ubiquitous cultural discourses which seek to convince the mediocre that they are special, the unforgiving nature of Adorno's critique is at times an over-over-correction. Nevertheless, one convincing defence of Adorno is to show how his own fragments of theoretical self-analysis lucidly grasp the contradictions under which he worked: Elitist pride would be the last thing to befit the philosophical experience. He who has it must admit to himself how much, according to his possibilities in existence, his experience has been contaminated by existence, and ultimately by the class relationship.79 So while Adorno savages the masses, his caustic eye turns its baleful glare onto the cold academic, too. His damning passages about mass consciousness are immediately counterbalanced by condemnations of intellectual hubris. But one is nevertheless tempted to ask whether this sort of material in Adorno's life and work is a partly unconscious screen for his survivor's guilt, or perhaps a form of displaced regret for his political opportunism in pre-War Germany? The absolute nature of messianic standards ± even negative and secular ones ± leads to exactly the type of projective rigidity Adorno aims dialectics against, and on occasion this absolute turns against him. Psychobiography of this sort is always a dangerous pursuit, and Freud himself claimed, quoting Schiller, that ```To blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust'' is no part of its purpose'.80 Yet Adorno's acute self-analysis blackens himself to blacken the world, working through his




Messiah complex as well as acting it out. Adorno believes he has seen how horrid the world has made him, an insight which sometimes becomes a rationalization for channelling his authoritarian aggression into even less forgiving judgements of others. Nevertheless, Adorno's exacting standards half rescue him by illuminating his own failure ± which is what Negative Dialectics sets out to do, waiting around the corner for its critics. So, conscious of his limits ± and probably conscious of his own megalomaniac streak ± Adorno is careful to avoid messianic claims about his own work, in the end aware that he could be no-one's rescuer. He prefers to bring out these themes by championing other writers: Kafka is credited with the construction of the eye of the artificial angel and Benjamin intertwines theology and materialism to illuminate a fallen world. Adorno's work absorbs the pregnant aura produced by these other writers, whilst appearing as a more enlightened development.81 Outside of his published writings, Adorno is more candid about admitting he feels his own gaze on the world to be special. Robert Hullot-Kentor quotes an interesting theoretical conversation between Horkheimer and Adorno. Horkheimer here tries to pin down Adorno's metaphysics: Horkheimer: . . . You never say anything about the positive object of negative theology, yet you leave no doubt that such a theology exists . . . Adorno: . . . I have no secret doctrine. I believe, however, that I have an eye for picking up from things the reflection of a source of light that could not be the object of intentions and thoughts.82 Adorno obviously feels an affinity for Kafka's enigmatic status as a psychological outsider, picking up spiritual wavelengths missed by others. For Adorno, the source of the reflected light is a future redemption of humanity, not God. The contingency of this source rules out its direct apprehension, so we are left with the speculative idea of imagining what our world might look like from the other side of it, in the light of it. Ultimately, despite his adoption of these quasi-messianic tropes, which invite sceptical judgement and encourage a Manichean perspective, the depth of Adorno's reflections means that productive criticism must give up the urge to classify Adorno according to the tempting




psychobiographical either/or logic of saint versus sinner. The critic's own hidden desire for saints breeds resentment for the all too human, and saints are actually those who perceive their own limits ± not exactly what believers wish them to be. Authentic literature, including Kafka's and Adorno's, cannot be perfect and therefore lives on the connections it forges between the work, things past and those yet to come. Critical theory is meant dialectically to sublate the messianic promises of immortality and redemption, but one is haunted by the feeling that to keep these promises hovering Adorno has to pass a death sentence on everything living. In this, Negative Dialectics perhaps shares the fate of the theological impulse whose sublation it so nobly attempted: insistence on the fall, whether secular or theological, can be taken as a hatred of life.83 A covert sensation ± mordant satisfaction secured through the beautiful presentation of a closure of possibility which tries ironically to insist on openness ± gratifies a hidden dark side to one central critical method of Adorno's work: the mimicry of death. By coupling the perspective of Kafka's animal stories with Adorno's own theory of mimesis, we could say that Adorno's negative collages of reality are meant as defensive reactions dedicated to the preservation of life. The animal which freezes, like a rabbit caught in glaring headlights, is playing dead, hoping to spring to life again when the danger is past. But the omnipresent dangers of our age forced Adorno's theory to mimic death for so long its joints now risk habituation to this immobilization: `Protection as fear is a form of mimicry. The reflexes of stiffening and numbness in humans are archaic schemata of the urge to survive: by adaptation to death, life pays the toll of its continued existence'.84 The fragile hope of Adorno criticism is for a transfiguration of the future, aided by a reception of Adorno's work capable of unfreezing the burning presence of its thwarted desire to run free. But such a reception may well depend on the hoped-for transfiguration.

Notes 1

`Form secularizes the theological model of the world as an image made in God's likeness', Theodor W. Adorno (1997), Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone Press, p. 143. Adorno is influenced by Ernst Bloch: `Bloch is a mystic in his paradoxical unity of theology and atheism'. Theodor W. Adorno (1991), Notes to Literature vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 209. 2 Max Horkheimer (1982), `Thoughts on Religion', in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O' Connell et al., New York: Continuum, p. 129. 3 Horkheimer, `Thoughts on Religion', p. 129.




È wenthal (1991), Àddress upon Accepting the Theodor W. Adorno 4 Leo Lo Prize on 1/10/1989', trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, New German Critique, no. 54, p. 182. 5 For more on the Frankfurt approach to the specificities of the so-called `Jewish question', see Martin Jay (1980), `The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory's Analysis of Anti-Semitism', in New German Critique, no. 19, pp. 137±49. Also see Jamie Owen Daniel (1992), `Temporary Shelter: Adorno's Exile and the Language of Home', in new formations, no. 17, pp. 26±35; Richard H. King (1997), `Modernity and racism', in Tim Youngs (ed.), Writing and Race, London: Longman, pp. 267±92. 6 Martin Jay (1984), Adorno, London: Fontana, p. 19. 7 Jay, Adorno, p. 34. 8 Cited in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1990), Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 117n. 9 Rolf Wiggershaus (1994), The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 157. 10 Jay, Adorno, pp. 19±20. 11 Cited in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 118n. 12 Cited in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 266. 13 Adorno was understandably ambivalent about this, and it did lead to resentment towards him from other members of the university. Wiggershaus calls this `the old Jewish experience of being simultaneously privileged and nevertheless stigmatized and vulnerable'. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 467. 14 It has been suggested that Benjamin's materialist turn was too Marxist for Adorno, who preferred the theology. See Julian Roberts (1982), Walter Benjamin, London: Macmillan. 15 Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1997), Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p. 183. On the chronology of Adorno's interpretations of Kafka, see Willi Hayum Goetschel (1985), `Kafka's Negative Dialectics', in Journal of the Kafka Society of America, vol. 9, nos. 1±2, esp. pp. 86±7. 16 Theodor W. Adorno (1974), Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, London: Verso, p. 247. 17 Theodor W. Adorno (1981), `Notes on Kafka', in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 18 This is not a reference to race, but a play on the notion of enlightenment. See `Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality', in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1979), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London: Verso. 19 Theodor W. Adorno (1990), Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, p. 57. Translation amended in line with David Held (1990), Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, Cambridge: Polity, p. 222. Also see Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 404±5. 20 Genesis 1:3. Thanks to Peter Curtis for discussions on this. 21 Theodor W. Adorno (1993), `Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel', in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 96±7n. Skoteinos means òbscure'. 22 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 135. 23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 40.




24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 40. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 153. Goetschel, `Kafka's Negative Dialectics', p. 85. Walter Benjamin (1986), `Surrealism', in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Schocken, p. 190. Theodor W. Adorno (1981), À Portrait of Walter Benjamin', in Prisms, p. 230. Adorno, À Portrait', pp. 230±1. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 269. Franz Kafka (1967), America, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 247±8. Walter Benjamin (1969), `Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death', in Illuminations, trans. anon., New York: Schocken, p. 125. Franz Kafka (1972), The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910±1923, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg, with Hannah Arendt, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 292. Kafka, Diaries, p. 292. Giles Peaker (1996), Òn Losing the Books' (unpublished essay, University of Derby). O.K. Werckmeister links Kafka's story of the fallen angel with Klee's picture in his (1996), `Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian', Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, pp. 237±67. Theodor W. Adorno (1980), `Letters to Walter Benjamin', trans. Harry Zohn, in Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg LukaÂcs, Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, p. 112. Adorno, `Letters to Walter Benjamin', p. 114. Walter Benjamin (1969), `Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, p. 249. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 269. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 269. Jay, Adorno, p. 108. Jay, Adorno, p. 108. Theodor W. Adorno (1980), `Commitment', trans. Francis McDonagh, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, pp. 194±5. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 156. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 207. George Steiner (1996), À Note on Kafka's ``Trial''', in No Passion Spent: Essays 1978±1996, London: Faber and Faber, p. 240. Steiner, Òn Kafka's ``Trial''', p. 250. Franz Kafka (1988), `Before the Law', trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Collected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 3. Kafka, `Before the Law', p. 4. Steiner, Òn Kafka's ``Trial''', p. 251. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 250. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 246. Benjamin, `Franz Kafka', p. 126. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 268. Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 268. Adorno, Prisms, pp. 149±50.




58 Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 246. 59 Franz Kafka (1994), The Collected Aphorisms, trans. Malcolm Pasley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 13. 60 Benjamin, `Franz Kafka', p. 124. 61 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 126. 62 Adorno, `Notes on Kafka', p. 246. 63 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 207. 64 On Romanticism, see Andrew Bowie (1997), From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory, London: Routledge. 65 Theodor W. Adorno (1992), `Theses Upon Art and Religion Today', in Notes to Literature vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 294. This seems Lutheran. On a Lutheran moment in Adorno, see Robert Hullot-Kentor (1992), `Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment: Translating the Odysseus Essay', in New German Critique, no. 56, pp. 105±6. 66 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 106. 67 Theodor W. Adorno (1993), `Messages in a Bottle', trans. Edmund Jephcott, in New Left Review, no. 200, p. 13. 68 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 205. 69 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 204. 70 Kafka, Collected Aphorisms, p. 35. 71 Franz Kafka (1988), `The Bridge', trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Collected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, pp. 411±12. 72 Vincent P. Pecora (1991), `Nietzsche, Genealogy, Critical Theory', in New German Critique, no. 53, p. 126. See also Simon Jarvis (1998), Adorno: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 188. 73 Kafka, cited in Adorno, À Portrait', pp. 230±1 and in Walter Benjamin (1969), `Some Reflections on Kafka', in Illuminations, p. 144. 74 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 41. 75 Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 245. 76 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 191. 77 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 39. 78 F.H. Bradley, cited in Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 83. 79 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 42. 80 Sigmund Freud (1990), `Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood', in Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 151. Adorno was not impressed by Freud's analysis of Leonardo, nor by psychobiographical aesthetics in general. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 8. 81 A tactic now adopted by criticism of Adorno? 82 Adorno and Horkheimer, cited in Robert Hullot-Kentor (1989), `Back to Adorno', in Telos, no. 81, pp. 11±12. 83 See Friedrich Nietzsche (1990), Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, but also see Adorno's critique of Nietzsche's affirmation in Minima Moralia. 84 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 180.




Divine Horizons: Levinas, Derrida, Transcendence Philip Leonard

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered? Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Both a trajectory of mysticism and a mystification of trajectories. A path towards the divine but also a questioning of any discursive representation, naming and classification of the transcendental. A trajectory of mysticism that moves towards God. But also an eclipsing of the path that would lead to God. Between the two poles of this formulation it is possible to situate the work of Emmanuel Levinas. A post-Husserlian phenomenologist, theorist of ethics, and commentator on Judaism, Levinas develops throughout his work a confrontation of subjectivity, signification and metaphysics in western thought and culture. In recent years Levinas has achieved wide acclaim as a major precursor to post-modern and post-structuralist theories of difference. Following his assertion that an ethical responsibility between same and other precedes metaphysics, and following his uncompromising attack on `the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy',1 Levinas has increasingly been recognized as a key figure in the emerging canon of critical continental thinkers. Constantly seeking a passage out of the violences of rationality, Levinas has developed a transgressive and transcendental criticism which attempts to escape from the notion of `being' pervading Western thought, and he uses various terms and concepts to signify a nonpresent and unrepresentable transcendence. Time, dia-chrony, Infinity, 219



10

other, alterity, illeity, otherwise, beyond, ethics, an-archy, there is, exteriority and the feminine are introduced at different points of Levinas's work to express excess. Since his philosophical writings, his Judaic commentaries and his Talmudic exegeses are also concerned with the knowledge of and contact with the divine, we can locate within this chain of signification his use of the term `God'. Similar at some points to mystical and negative theology, Levinas argues that the divine is `beyond essence', is òtherwise than being', and unsettles the relativizing and representational assumptions of positive theology. This proximity to mysticism and negative theology notwithstanding, it is also crucial to remember that Levinas's work anticipates the critique of theology underpinning post-structuralism, and that he remains profoundly suspicious of the remnants of orthodox religious thinking that are ingrained in mystical and negative forms of faith.

`Nietzsche's Word: God is Dead'? To understand the particular nuances that distinguish Levinas's contribution to the question of divine transcendence, it is first necessary to consider the work of others who also contest the validity of metaphysical characterizations of God. Given its virulence and intensity, combined with its resurgence in post-War France, perhaps the most important counter-theological development can be found in Friedrich Nietzsche's atheistic antihumanism. The argument that an apocalyptic moment occurred during the nineteenth century, that at some point God died, is one that recurs throughout Nietzsche's texts, and is a theme most readily associated with his work. In The Gay Science, for instance, we read: The greatest recent event ± that `God is dead', that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable ± is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes ± the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, older . . . how much must collapse now that the faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it . . . . This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin and cataclysm that is now impending.2




Decadent, apocalyptic, prophetic, dramatic, brutal: we discover here Nietzsche's virulently atheistic voice proclaiming the end of one eÂpisteÁme and the beginning of another. Gone is the faith in the highest of all values, God, and with this loss there follows the decline of all other certainties, such as consciousness, reason, progress and man. For Nietzsche, then, the re- or trans-valuation of theological value results in the rethinking of the human; the devaluation of God directly results in the devaluation of man. Elements of post-War French thought embrace this radically excessive feature of Nietzsche's writing, and maintain that his work breaches the confines set down by the Enlightenment and Idealist philosophical traditions. Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-FrancËois Lyotard each draw upon Nietzsche's atheism when developing their distinctive approaches to transgression. For example, in his 1963 `Preface to Transgression' Foucault unambiguously declares the merits of Nietzsche's thought: `To awaken from the confused sleep of dialectics and anthropology, we required the Nietzschean figures of tragedy, of Dionysus, of the death of God'.3 Foucault further argues that the legacy of this awakening is evident in Bataille's transgressive and excessive writings, where `The death of God does not restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it'.4 Klossowski, in his 1963 Un si funeste deÂsir and his 1969 Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, adds his voice to those, such as Foucault, who maintain that Nietzsche radically violates metaphysical and theological principles. Once the fall of God has been announced, Klossowski claims, the dissolution of identity and the loss of self is unavoidable and inevitable. With Klossowski, Allen Weiss points out, we discover `the disappearance of God as the ontological guarantor of identity', following which `the self becomes the scene of an indefinite series of identities and transformations'.5 In a manner similar to Foucault, Klossowski's atheological and atheistic onslaught is antihumanist in orientation: overturning the tradition of man and the human, Klossowski demythologizes the notion of coherent and stable subjectivity, in its place locating a polymorphous and multiply divided (non-)self. A defiant rebuttal of prevailing theological convictions therefore emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in France. In the idea that an organizing and overarching principle legitimates the events of the secular and social, French Nietzschean thought finds a comical anachronism. Rather than shore up the redundant and outmoded legacy of metaphysical theology, this intellectual trend offers the ominous and



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apocalyptic prophecy that the West has to come to terms with the fact that religious faith relies on untenable and obsolete notions of transcendence. This position has not, however, been left uncontended by other commentators on Nietzsche in the latter part of the twentieth-century. Indeed, just as Nietzschean tendencies emerged and solidified in postWar French theory, so various problematizations of this transgressive and excessive impulse arose on the continent. For example, in `Nietzsche's Word: God is Dead', Heidegger insists that `Despite all his overturnings and revaluations of metaphysics, Nietzsche remains in the unbroken line of the metaphysical tradition'.6 Heidegger is not alone in questioning the vertiginous anarchy and disruptive nihilism of Nietzsche's work; Maurice Blanchot responds to the idea that God is dead by claiming that `Nietzsche has given a sort of tiresome celebrity to this event',7 and he further argues that atheistic nihilism rests on a reductive and inaccurate reading of Nietzsche. The nihilistic catastrophe so applauded by some who follow Nietzsche is complicated, Blanchot points out, by a crucial (though unrecognized) ambivalence: writing in a style that is unsystematic, fragmented, contradictory, and discontinuous, Nietzsche continually undermines his monumental atheistic thesis. This is most evident immediately after the proclamation of God's extinction in The Gay Science, where Nietzsche adds the caveat that only the few (`the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for the spectacle') can perceive God's demise: he writes, `The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived yet'.8 Rather than rashly conclude that there is a profound and irreducible negativity in Nietzsche's work, Blanchot consequently argues that this equivocally atheistic nihilism restitutes rationality: Nihilism is the impossibility of coming to an end and finding an outcome in this end. It tells of the impotence of nothingness, the false renown of its victories, it tells us that when we think nothingness, we are still thinking being. Nothing ends; all begins again, the other is still the same, midnight is only a covered over moon . . . . Nihilism here tells us its final and rather grim truth: it tells of the impossibility of nihilism.9 For both Heidegger and Blanchot, then, paradigm shift in religious thinking has yet to occur. Despite the profound and far-reaching onslaught by nihilistic atheism, metaphysical theology has retained its




Divine Horizons 223

dominance, with both God and man remaining at the centre of western thought and culture.

This site of contestation about the demise of God, the collapse of theology and the ruin of man has a direct bearing on Levinas's work. Given Levinas's philosophical and textual affiliations with Blanchot it is unsurprising that both share a similar perspective on the false apocalypse announced by some theorists with a propensity towards Nietzschean ideas. Levinas certainly develops an onslaught on metaphysical, rationalist and positive theology. Like Blanchot, however, he also recognizes that the overturning of transcendental theology must take its initiative from the points of instability within metaphysical notions of God. Levinas's strategy consists not of nihilistic negation; his challenge to orthodox delimitations of divine essence instead promotes a form of immanent critique. Three principal modes of critique can be discerned in this return to the divine. The first of these can be detected in Levinas's 1963 essay `The Trace of the Other', where he reiterates a central theme in his work: `Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity'.10 But in addition to restaging this general thesis, Levinas argues that a specific instance of this appropriation and destitution of difference is to be found in theology. He writes: The God of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Leibniz, by way of the scholastics, is a god adequate to reason, a comprehended god who could not trouble the autonomy of consciousness, which finds itself again in all adventures, returning home like Ulysses.11 Drawing on a recurring motif of his work, Levinas here claims that conventional theology is marked by the home-bound peregrinations of Ulysses (rather than treading the path away from the domicile in the exilic trajectory of Abraham) because it refuses to acknowledge the linguistic and conceptual crisis brought about by various oppositional differentiations (such as totality and infinity, same and other, and humanity and God). This claim resurfaces in Levinas's 1974 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, where he warns of `the dangerous way in which a pious thought . . . hastily deduces the existence of God'.12 Both `The Trace of the Other' and Otherwise than Being (texts which are among



Adieu aÁ-Dieu

the most important of Levinas's writings) therefore challenge some religious orthodoxies; both contend the àdequation', `comprehension', and `deduction' of God in pious thinking, in devotional worship and in rational sanctification. In addition to this critical direction in Levinas's response to theological conventions, it is also possible to discern a more apocalyptic tone in his work on divine transcendence. Otherwise than Being, for example, poses the question `would not the bankruptcy of transcendence be but that of a theology that thematizes the transcending in the logos, assigns a term to the passing of transcendence, congeals it into a ``world behind the scenes''?'.13 Here Levinas identifies the `bankruptcy' of a certain kind of transcendental thinking and suggests that any attempt to thematize, hypostatize, essentialize, or signify `beyond being' must result in a meÂconnaisance which must, ultimately, immolate theology. By trying to designate the undesignatable metaphysical theology introduces an irreducible excess which leaves the idea of God as presence impossible to maintain. Resembling Nietzsche, Foucault and Klossowski, we discover here a decadent and disintegrative element in Levinas work. In the portentous assertion that the extremity of onto-theology has been reached and that its end is imminent, Levinas exhibits a (limited) disposition towards the end of both man and God announced by Nietzsche. Finally, this argument ± that metaphysics is at an end or that theology immolates itself ± is not entirely representative of Levinas's work. Nietzsche's critique of religious thinking is complicated in The Gay Science by the recognition that the event of God's demise `has not yet reached the ears of men', and a similar ambivalence is apparent in Levinas. While he certainly proposes that the veracity of transcendental and representational theology has died, Levinas nonetheless recognizes that conventional ideas about God remain firmly in place. Even though the notion of an unmediated contact with God has been rendered untenable, Levinas points out that as long as the West continues to cling to the principals of civilization (such as reason, order, economy, totality), then legitimation by a super-essential and sublime being will always follow. In Levinas's work, then, there are diverse (and seemingly contradictory) approaches to the notion of divine transcendence since God is described at once impossible and necessary. Permeating his work is a notion of divine transcendence which simultaneously critiques cataphatic theology, proclaims the end of metaphysics, yet remains within the realm of onto-theology. It is this polymorphic and polyvalent relationship with divine transcendence that accounts for Levinas's




preoccupation with God and with notions of divine exteriority. At the same time as claiming that `the God of the Bible does not have meaning, that is, not properly speaking thinkable',14 Levinas also argues that this God disrupts `the consciousness which aims at ideas' and whose àbsolute remoteness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility . . . for the other'.15 In a sense, then, Levinas characterizes God apophatically or negatively: in contrast with the appropriative violences of positive or cataphatic theology, he argues for an ethical or `responsible' conception of God as a transcendence which escapes all nomination, all sanctification, for à God not contaminated by Being'.16 In Levinas's work there is an urgent confrontation with metaphysics and theology which leaves the idea of God as substance and presence in ruins. Instead of shoring up the cataphatic features of Graeco-Christian religion, Levinas's `holy sociology'17 is a form of apophatic theology which resembles the transcendence and infinity of the Èn-Sof' of the Kabbalah. Levinas continually returns to God and onto-theological structures of interpretation and identification. But this return is marked by a destabilizing and dissimulating kenosis which renounces any notion of divine essence: God, for Levinas, is òtherwise than being', is òther otherwise',18 is a God who `shows himself only by his trace.'19 In contrast, for example, with Hegel's formulation of divine infinity (in which `Divine Law' ratifies and governs `the community'20) the Ìnfinity' of God for Levinas `cannot be assembled into a present.'21

Via Negativa Levinas's allusion to a hidden God who is neither present nor representable opens itself to a number of possible critiques. Complicity with androcentrism is one ramification of Levinas's notion of divine infinity which is identified by Luce Irigaray. While sharing with Levinas the idea of a sublime transcendence exceeding the horizons of conventional theology, Irigaray nonetheless claims that Levinas's reinterpretation of God does not in fact escape the thematizing violences of metaphysicality. Rather, she argues, Levinas's notion of a God `not contaminated by Being' is itself caught up in the gender-specific tradition of metaphysical theology, and that he `scarcely unveils the disfigurements brought about by onto-theology'.22 One of Irigaray's principal objections to the ontotheological tradition in the west is that it has rested upon a paternalistic conception of God, and she claims that Levinas does not sufficiently distance his own notion of transcendent divinity from this paternalistic history. Levinas's proximity to gendered onto-theology is perhaps



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nowhere more evident than in De Dieu qui vient aÁ l'ideÂe, where he states that ethical responsibility is a (non-)relation which has more in common with agape than eros. Characterizing the encounter between self and other as À relation without correlation or a love of the neighbour which is a love without eros. For the other man and from there to God',23 Levinas fails to acknowledge that this description of alterity as `the other man' once more connects the divine and the carnal, agape and eros. It would appear, then, that Levinas reinforces the highly conventional equation of God with male and masculine traits and once again leaves women with neither transcendence nor a God. To remedy this condition, Irigaray argues that it is necessary to extend the discursive and conceptual horizons within which identity and the divine are defined; for women to have a bodily and a transcendental identity, she maintains that à God is needed . . . . To become it is necessary to have an essence or a genre/gender (genre) . . . as a horizon'.24 A more general, though equally insistent, problematization of apophaticism in Levinas's work emerges from the engagement with mystical and negative theology in post-structuralist criticism. In The Trespass of the Sign Kevin Hart argues that, following the post-structuralist problematization of extra-textual and meta-discursive referentiality, it is possible to point out that negative theology perpetuates the same mistakes as affirmative theology. Hart (following Derrida) points out that negative theology is unable to break free from allegorical and hermeneutic structures of signification, since negation must carry within it some form of affirmation and can never break free from the differential dyad assertion/refutation. Although questioning the ontological status that has been ascribed to God, negative theology still retains a principal characteristic of affirmative theology, namely the supposition of a divinity exceeding the secular, of a super-essentiality beyond essence. With negative theology there is what Hart calls an èconomy of mysticism',25 ± an economy in which God at once surpasses conceptuality and discursivity and yet the same time is reinstalled as a finite and ultimately knowable entity. `Negative theology is still a theology', Derrida observes, ànd, in its literality at least, is concerned with liberating and acknowledging the infinite transcendence of an ineffable existent'.26 Evidence of this economy of mysticism is readily available throughout the history of mystical and apophatic theology from St Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross, to Friedrich È lderlin, Karl Barth and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Dionysius, for Ho example, there is both the denial of an adequate knowledge and repre-




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Guide us to that topmost height of mystic love which exceedeth light and more exceedeth knowledge, where the simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence.27 Here Dionysius invokes the uncontainable, the unsayable, that which lies beyond all representation. But he does so by locating the `heavenly' sublime by means of a finite, singularized and hypostatized notion of `Truth'. Dionysius brings the extopic templum sanctum of the `Trinity' back into the secular topology of being by positively affirming and representing the `beyond'. Similarly, the writings of St John of the Cross can be described as an economical form of mysticism. By claiming that knowledge of God is shrouded in darkness and that celestial light is incomprehensible, St John questions the supposed enlightenment that issues from the rational contemplation of God. In Àscent of Mount Carmel' he introduces us to the `dark night, through which the soul passes in order to attain to the Divine light of the perfect union of the love of God'.28 It might be argued, however, that this mystical thesis is marked by a Platonic heliopolitics or oculocentrism which continues to think the divine by a scopic adequation of sight with knowledge.29 Hart's principal intertexts for identifying the economy of mysticism are two volumes from the trinity of Derrida's 1967 publications. In the first of these, Of Grammatology, Derrida remarks that `Between rationalism and mysticism there is . . . a certain complicity'30 ± a claim which simultaneously divests Enlightenment thought of its claim to pure reason and questions the step beyond reason in apophatic theology. `From Restricted to General Economy' (anthologized in Writing and Difference) similarly notes that Bataille's àtheology' sidesteps the key problem of negative theology, namely that it reserves, `beyond all the rejected predicates and even ``beyond being,'' a ``superessentiality'': beyond all the categories of being, a supreme being and an indestructible meaning'.31 In Derrida's early writings, then, negative theology is thus indicted of reinforcing the restricted economy of meaning which reduces incommensurable topoi to the ontological site of theology. Further reference to negative theology arises in what has become one of the cornerstones of Derrida's work, `DiffeÂrance'. With the neologism



sentation of God as well as a delineated depiction of divine essence. In The Mystical Theology Dionysius appeals to the `Trinity, which exceedeth all Being, Deity, Goodness':

`diffeÂrance' Derrida attempts to signify the interstice between discourse and undesignatable otherness, the moment when constituted ontology encounters unconstitutable alterities. `DiffeÂrance', he writes, ìs the nonfull, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences'.32 In the early part of this essay, however, Derrida suspends his discussion of Saussure, Freud, Hegel and Heidegger and begins an excursus on the implications of his work for negative theology, recognizing that the term diffeÂrance (a term which seeks while also erasing referentiality) triggers connotations with apophatic forms of representation. `So much so', he states, `that the detours, locutions and syntax in which I will often have to take recourse will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology'.33 In spite of this resemblance, Derrida resolutely argues that diffeÂrance cannot be treated as yet another version of negative theology, since it lies beyond (while also generating) all theologies of presence and transcendence: DiffeÂrance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological ± ontotheological ± reappropriation, but as the very opening of this space in which ontotheology ± philosophy ± produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.34 Derrida certainly acknowledges a proximity between his own work and negative theology, but this acknowledgement also carries within it a distancing from the economical, foundational, ontotheological orientations of apophaticism.35

Anapocalypse Subsequent essays by Derrida adopt a more rigorous and sustained interrogation of mysticism and negative theology. Òf an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy', for example, follows Kant in his satirical attack on the trance-inducing and seductive èschatological mystagogy'36 which announces the death of philosophy, and Derrida questions the long history of sur- or meta-apocalyptic thought that has characterized Western culture: Haven't all the differences [diffeÂrends] taken the form of a going-one better in eschatological eloquence, each newcomer more lucid than




Divine Horizons 229

In this act of parricide Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche are implicitly condemned as `mystagogues' who naively announce the end of metaphysics, capitalism, theology and humanism. But, as with Levinas's challenge to atheistic antihumanism, Derrida's critique of apocalyptic thought does not leave the Enlightenment tendencies of Kant's work intact. Rather, his knife cuts both ways ± he questions both the messianic eschatology of apocalyptic, mystical and negative theology and the problematically sublime hypotheses of Kant's `reasonable' and `transcendental' religion.38 Towards the end of Òf an Apocalyptic Tone' this double-edged critique is directed at apocalyptic writing in Christian theology, in particular the moment in `The Book of Revelations' when Christ's angel says to John ` ``Come up here: I will show you what is to come in the future.'' '39 The implications of this statement for metaphysical theology are, for Derrida, monumental, though not because of its apocalyptic prophecy. Focusing on the intransitive verb `Come', Derrida highlights a crucial aporia in John's prophetic vision of heaven.40 Both a performative and an imperative, `Come' signals an èvent' which oscillates ambivalently between `determinable identity' and `beyond being'. A diffeÂrance before `DiffeÂrance', the `Come' of Revelation seems to signal what Levinas calls òtherwise than being', while at the same time failing to represent this òtherwise' in predicative terms. Just as `diffeÂrance' is neither a term nor a concept, so the content of `Come' eludes inscription and comprehension: `Come' appeared to me to appeal to the `place' (but here the word place becomes too enigmatic), let us say to the place, the time, and to the advent of what in the apocalyptic in general no longer lets itself be contained simply by philosophy, metaphysics, onto-eschatotheology, and by all the readings they have proposed of the apocalyptic.41 `Come' and diffeÂrance, then, simultaneously move towards and away from the traditions of mystical and negative theology. As with Levinas's critique of and return to notions of divine transcendence, Derrida's



the other, more vigilant and more prodigal too, coming to add more to it . . . the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals (that was the most serious naiveteÂ), the end of the subject, the end of man.37

`Come' and diffeÂrance displace the assumptions of presence and translatability underpinning both apophatic and cataphatic thought while also reinstating an unrepresentable and unknowable difference. Derrida's second substantial exploration of mystical and negative theology, `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', further highlights his debt to Levinas. This essay also, however, rearticulates and underlines some of Derrida's earliest objections to issues and ideas (such as infinity, exteriority, otherwise than Being) which are central to Levinas's work on identity and difference. Derrida's debt to Levinas can be traced even through the title of this essay, which attempts to capture the spirit of negative theology and the discourse of mysticism; the phrase `how to avoid speaking' sets language in motion, but only at the expense of representation. As with the problematization of predication posed by apophaticism, the title of this essay constitutes a fractured text which defers and suspends the possibility of referentiality and, Derrida claims, allows `the call of the other'42 to be heard. In a passage that has unacknowledged resonances with Levinas's notion of `the trace', Derrida writes: The most negative discourse, even beyond all nihilisms and negative 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.43 At two other points this essay crosses into Levinasian terrain. What is significant about these points of convergence, however, is that they not only signal the fulcrum of the (what Levinas calls a `contact at the heart of the chiasmus'44) linking Levinas with Derrida but that they also demonstrate the asymmetries between them. The first of these encounters with Levinas in `How to Avoid Speaking' is an explicit one, made in a footnote on the apophatic trajectory of Jean-Luc Marion's Dieu sans l'eÃtre: Let us not forget these fairly recent, thought-provoking titles ± Dieu sans l'eÃtre and Autrement que l'eÃtre ou au-delaÁ de l'essence ± which seek, in two very different ways, to avoid what Levinas calls the contamination by Being . . . . The two cited titles lead the way to two major responses to the question I would like to raise: how not to say or speak? Otherwise, and implicitly: how not to speak Being (how to avoid speaking of Being?)? How to speak otherwise? How to speak otherwise (than) Being? And so on.45




In this footnote Derrida's affiliations with Levinas's interrogation of ontological and essentialist structures are clear; Derrida here locates Levinas as a significant precursor to deconstructive work on discourses of identity and difference. More than this, Derrida further aligns his essay with Levinas's work by actively and unequivocally ventriloquizing Levinas's phraseology ('How to speak otherwise?', `How to speak otherwise (than) Being?'). After raising this issue of reference and representation, Levinas is more or less discarded as an explicit intertext of `How to Avoid Speaking'. Derrida proceeds, after employing Levinas's notion of òtherwise than being', with a closer reading of negative theology (or, more precisely for Derrida, negative theologies) in the work of Eckhart, Dionysius and Heidegger. Nevertheless, one other section of `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials' does contain a tacit response to Levinas's work and develops a latent critique of his ideas. While describing Plato's notion of epekeina tes ousias (`Good beyond Being' ± a notion that Levinas draws attention to at the beginning of Otherwise than Being) as a `tropic of negativity',46 Derrida then employs the same `detours, locutions and syntax' that are used in his first exegesis of Levinas, `Violence and Metaphysics'. In this earlier essay Derrida writes: As soon as one attempts to think Infinity as a positive plenitude (one pole of Levinas's nonnegative transcendence), the other becomes unthinkable, impossible, unutterable. Perhaps Levinas calls us toward this unthinkable-impossible-unutterable beyond (tradition's) Being and Logos. But it must not be possible either to think or state this call.47 A similar syntagmatic and paradigmatic organization occurs in `How to Avoid Speaking' when Derrida claims that the non-being described in Plato's Sophist is ìn itself unthinkable (adienoeton), ineffable (arreton), unpronounceable (aphtegkton), foreign to all discourse and to reason (alogon)'.48 As with Levinas's discourse of alterity and infinity, Plato's discourse of negativity is, Derrida claims, inadequate to the task of divesting language of predication and the copula. The Sophist, for Derrida, demonstrates the irreducible return of dialectical thinking: this dialectic receives the thinking of nonbeing as other and not as absolute nothingness or simple opposite of Being . . . . This confirms that there cannot be an absolutely negative discourse: a logos necessarily speaks about something; it cannot avoid speaking of something.49



Divine Horizons 231

Plato and Levinas, Derrida therefore argues, unwittingly exhibit the unacceptable tendencies of negative theology, insofar as they both attempt to exceed the structural ground of discourse and conceptuality while also holding certain features of that structure in reserve and proving that a simple step beyond metaphysics is impossible. Following Derrida's essays on mysticism and negative theology it is possible to identify in Levinas's writings what Hart calls `the economy of mysticism'. As Toby Foshay remarks, `Derrida challenges Levinas's thought precisely on the grounds of its residual negative theology, of an apophaticism that remains analogically and metaphorically implicated in the ontology which it claims to transcend'.50 Derrida at times (for example, in `DiffeÂrance', `From Restricted to General Economy', and Òf an Apocalyptic Tone') develops a quasi-Levinasian approach to difference and transcendence, and in places he even adopts Levinas's terminology (such as `beyond Being' or òtherwise'). Elsewhere (especially in `Violence and Metaphysics' and `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials'), however, Derrida insists that Levinas perpetuates a common misconception of language since his description of God as otherwise than Being provides only a simulacrum and apotheosis of alterity. Levinas invokes a difference, transcendence, transgression or excess which is limited, according to Derrida, since it continues to employ the term `God'. In spite of his `deconstructive turn', Levinas appears to be condemned for inadvertently bolstering the metaphysical tradition in the west.51

`Mystery is the excuse used for many a crime'52 The problem of an economical return to mystical and negative theology is not ignored by Levinas. Indeed, it could be argued that he recognizes the problem of residual apophaticism as early as 1963 (crucially predating the initial publication of Derrida's `Violence and Metaphysics' in 1964), in the essays on Judaism in Difficult Freedom. In this volume Levinas distances himself from the tendency of Jewish mysticism to seek union with God. For Gershem Scholem: mystical experiences were able to unfold their explosive force, their power of liquefying institutions and dogma, in Jewish and Christian traditions, because they remained related in these contexts to a hidden, world-transcendent God,53 But for Levinas these kinds of claims about mysticism need to be carefully scrutinized, and in Difficult Freedom he repeatedly questions the




articulation of transcendence in both Christian and Jewish mystical theology. At several points in Difficult Freedom this questioning of apophatic theology becomes explicit. For example, in the 1949 essay `The Diary of LeÂon Brunschvicq', Levinas claims that Brunschvicq's enlightenment quest for ìnner life' consists of an àtheism' which ìs much closer to the One God than the mystical experiences and horrors of the Sacred to be found in the supposed religious revival of our contemporaries'.54 Èthics and Spirit' (an essay of 1952 also republished in Difficult Freedom) proclaims `let mystics be reassured: nothing can shock reason. It collaborates with what it hears'.55 Rather than a brutal interruption of prevailing theological structures, Levinas argues in these essays that a regulative and recuperative rationalism suffuses the oppositional, antimetaphysical claims of apophaticism. In addition to distancing himself from Jewish mysticism, Levinas also resists accusations that he restitutes metaphysics through mysticism, and indeed he constantly highlights the violences intrinsic to the symbolic hermeneutics of negative theology. Levinas apparently repeats some of the errors of negative theology by reinscribing God as a sublime and unthinkable entity. However, this apparent consonance with negative theology inevitably falls apart with Levinas's unceasing critique of the `hasty deduction' of divine essence. Levinas's trajectory follows a kenotic transcendence: he moves towards God as òtherwise than being' but does so by reappropriating and transforming the status of the signifier `God'. No longer does this term refer to a divine being; rather, `God' is emptied of essentialist and anthropomorphic categories and becomes instead a process of transcendence without subject or object. Both a trajectory of mysticism and a mystification of the trajectory beyond are therefore apparent in Levinas's work ± a complex double movement which is similar to what Mark Taylor calls the passage `from the deconstruction of theology to the threshold of deconstructive a/ theology'.56 It is necessary, on the one hand, to note the concessions that he makes to discursive constraints which render signifiers of the beyond redundant. By claiming, for example, that an ineradicable scission separates knowledge of the divine and the actuality of the divine (`The path that leads to the one God must be walked in part without God'57) Levinas's critique of metaphysical theology does not attempt mystically to step beyond the horizons imposed by conceptual order. It is equally urgent, on the other hand, to treat Levinas's work as an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls àffirmative deconstruction'.58 Despite his grammatological caution, Levinas constantly maintains



Divine Horizons 233

that a disjunctive dialectic exists between identifiable totality and extopic otherness. Indeed, it is the very inadequacy of transcendental signification which highlights the horizons which both contain and exceed knowledge, horizons where the inside and the outside converge and diverge in a mutual supplementarity. Levinas recognizes that his language of ethics and difference (which rests on a `proximity to' and `responsibility for' God) is permeated by an unavoidable positivity. But he also maintains that this language carries within it the trace of an ineffable beyond: Infinity . . . cannot be assembled into a present, and refuses being recollected. This negation of the present and of representation finds its positive form in proximity, responsibility and substitution. This makes it different from the presuppositions of negative theology . . . . It retains in its statement the trace of the excession of transcendence, of the beyond.59 Levinas begins to avoid the problems of conventional metaphysics and theology by showing that totality, the same, the inside are identified only by means of a differential relationship with an infinity or alterity beyond knowledge and language. In other words, his kenotic transcendence not only empties God of significant properties. It also empties the secular and the worldly ± man ± of any coherence and stability, with God becoming the trace of an irrecuperable ìlleity' or ìt-ness' which disperses the assumptions of metaphysics and leaves positive theology in ruins. Throughout his work, Levinas continually attacks what is variously known as `metaphysical', `positive', or `cataphatic' theology ± the kind of theology that relies on the copula ìs' (God is light, love, truth, justice, reason, perfection), the kind of theology that conflates a wholly transcendent God with a God represented in an anthropomorphic and ontotheological dialectic of identification. But in spite of his onslaught against metaphysical, rationalist, and positive theology, we also discover in Levinas's writings a return to the divine. In contrast with the background of atheistic antihumanism in continental theory during the 1950s and 1960s, Levinas argues that counter-metaphysical thought needs to engage with, rather than react against, the structural continuum which continues to interpellate subjects on the basis of a residual theology. In the course of developing an ethics and politics of difference (calling for a `non-allergic relation of the same with the other'60) and while calling into question the essentialist and foundationalist assump-




tions of Western thought, Levinas locates an unsettling exteriority in the irreducible, ineffable and infinitely interpretable otherness of God. One consequence of the inscription of the divine as unthinkable and unspeakable is that Levinas's work appears to subscribe to apophatic forms of theology. However, it is equally apparent that this trajectory of mysticism, this trajectory towards an obscure God, is supplemented in Levinas's work by a textualism which mystifies the trajectory beyond metaphysics. Since his representation of God is a fabulation, is a representation of a simulacrum, of a signifier without a referent, strictly heuristic readings of his work become impossible to sustain. Levinas's God is situated in a chain of signifiers (time, diachrony, Infinity, other, alterity, illeity, otherwise, beyond, ethics, an-archy, there is and exteriority), each separated from their putative object and each constituting a metaphorical substitution for unsignifiable difference. As with the Judaic tetragrammaton which is endlessly open to exegesis, the abyssal reflexivity of YHWH which erases referentiality (paradoxically given `to translate and not to translate',61 Derrida observes), divinity for Levinas is knowable only through the textual interpretation of irremediable alterity. Declaring that he is not `caught up in ``mystical slumbers'' '62 Levinas unremittingly disputes the intuitive and hermeneutic trajectories which seek mystically to map a path towards God. Embedded in Levinas's critique of the essentialist and metaphysical errors sustaining both cataphatic and apophatic theology, however, the remains of God's transcendence remain.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Emmanuel Levinas (1969), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche (1974), The Gay Science trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, p. 279. Michel Foucault (1977), `Preface to Transgression', in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard & Sherry Simon, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 38. Foucault, `Preface to Transgression', p. 32. Allen S. Weiss (1989), The Aesthetics of Excess, New York: State University of New York Press, p. 19. Martin Heidegger (1977), `Nietzsche's Word: God is Dead', in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, p. 84. Maurice Blanchot (1985), `The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', trans. John P. Leavey in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation ed. David B. Allison, London: MIT Press, p. 121.



Divine Horizons 235

8 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 279. 9 Blanchot, `The Limits of Experience', p. 126. 10 Emmanuel Levinas (1986), `The Trace of the Other', trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor, Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 346. 11 Levinas, `Trace of the Other', p. 346. 12 Emmanuel Levinas (1981), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 93. 13 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 5. 14 Emmanuel Levinas (1987), `God and Philosophy', trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Collected Philosophical Papers, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 154. 15 Levinas, `God and Philosophy', p. 165. 16 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. xlii. 17 Gillian Rose (1992), The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 261. 18 Levinas, `God and Philosophy', p. 166. 19 Levinas, `Trace of the Other', p. 359. 20 G.W.F. Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 273. 21 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 151. 22 Luce Irigaray (1991), `Questions to Emmanuel Levinas', trans. Margaret Whitford, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 184. 23 Emmanuel Levinas (1986), De Dieu qui vient aÁ l'ideÂe , Paris: Vrin, p. 13. 24 Luce Irigaray (1986), Divine Women, trans. Stephen Muecke, Sydney: Local Consumption Occasional Papers, no. 8, pp. 3±4, trans. mod. 25 Kevin Hart (1989), The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 177. 26 Jacques Derrida (1978), `Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 146. 27 C.E. Rolt (1951), Dionysius the Areopagite on the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, London: Macmillan, p. 191. 28 St John of the Cross (1943), Àscent of Mount Carmel', in The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, trans. E. Allison Peers, London: Burns Oates, p. 97. 29 Jean-Pierre Vernant points out that rather than resisting the assumptions of predicative theology, this scopophilic equation of sight with knowledge of God has become a canonized form with which to represent (and erase) the comprehension of the divine: `The body of the gods shines with such an intense brilliance that no human eye can bear it. Its splendour is blinding . . . . Looking away, lowering one's eyes to the ground, covering one's head: mortals have no other way to acknowledge their unworthiness and avoid the risk of confronting the unequalled, unbearable splendour of the divine countenance'. Jean-Pierre Vernant (1989), `Dim Body, Dazzling Body', trans. Anne M. Wilson, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part I, Zone 3, pp. 37±8. C.R.A Morray-Jones points out that this heliopolitical mysticism also exists in Judaism: Ìt seems that the mystic, by combining recitation of these liturgical passages (Herkhalot) with visualization of the images described . . . produced in himself a state of intense emotion which




30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

could, and apparently sometimes did, bring about an ecstatic, transformational experience . . . . That such experience can involve extreme bodily sensations of fire and light is widely attested in the annals of devotional mysticism'. C.R.A. Morray-Jones (1992), `Transformational Mysticism in the Apocalyptic-Merkabah Tradition', Journal for Jewish Studies, Vol. XLIII, no. 1 p. 26. Jacques Derrida (1974 and 1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 80. Jacques Derrida (1978), `From Restricted to General Economy: Hegelianism Without Reserve', in Writing and Difference, p. 271. Jacques Derrida (1982), `DiffeÂrance', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, p. 11. Derrida, `DiffeÂrance', p. 6. Derrida, `DiffeÂrance', p. 6. For a further discussion of these issues, see Derrida (1988), `Letter to a Japanese Friend', trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in Derrida and DiffeÂrance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 3, and `The Original Discussion of DiffeÂrance', in Derrida and DiffeÂrance, p. 85. Jacques Derrida (1992), Òf an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy', trans. John P. Leavey, in Derrida and Negative Theology ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, New York: State University of New York Press, p. 31. Derrida, Òf an Apocalyptic Tone', p. 48. See Immanuel Kant (1960), Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Grene and Hoyt H. Hudson, New York: Harper & Row, and Immanuel Kant (1978), Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Revelation 4:1. For other discussions of `Come', by Derrida, see (1986), `Pas' in Parages, Paris: GalileÂe, and (1992), Àt This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am', trans. Ruben Berezdivin, in Re-Reading Levinas, eds Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, London: Athlone. Derrida, Òf an Apocalyptic Tone', p. 64. Jacques Derrida (1992), `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', in Derrida and Negative Theology, p. 97. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 97. See Emmanuel Levinas (1992), `Wholly Otherwise', trans. Simon Critchley, in Re-Reading Levinas, p. 8. On the chiasmic relationship between Derrida and Levinas, also see Simon Critchley (1992), The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Blackwell, passim. Derrida, `How to Avoid Speaking', p. 133.


Derrida, `Violence and Metaphysics', p. 114.



Toby Foshay (1992), `Resentment and Apophasis: the Trace of the Other in

Levinas, Derrida and Gans', in Shadow of Spirit: Post-Modernism and Religion, ed. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, London: Routledge, p. 84. A similar



Divine Horizons 237

51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

accusation is made by Jean-Luc Nancy: `Levinas may well say, in an admirable text, that God is Ìnfinite', in the sense of ùnthematizable', but `the very term `Ìnfinite'' thematizes him'. Jean-Luc Nancy (1986), Òf Divine Places', trans. Michael Holland, Paragraph vol. 7, p. 7. È rgen Habermas levels the same accusation against In is noteworthy that Ju Derrida: `Derrida, all denials notwithstanding, remains close to Jewish mystiÈ rgen Habermas (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: cism'. Ju Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 182. Emmanuel Levinas (1990), Èthics and Spirit', in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. SeaÁn Hand, London: Athlone, p. 7. Gershem Scholem (1965), On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, New York: Schocken Books, p. 183. Elsewhere, Scholem reiterates this claim by stating, for example, that `the relation between mystical contemplation and the basic facts of human life and thought is highly paradoxical'. Gershem Scholem (1954), Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken Books, p. 14. Emmanuel Levinas (1990), `The Diary of LeÂon Brunschvicq', in Difficult Freedom, pp. 44±5. Levinas, Èthics and Spirit', p. 7. Mark C. Taylor (1984), Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, London: Chicago, p. 98. Emmanuel Levinas (1990), `Loving the Torah', in Difficult Freedom, p. 143. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1984), `Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle', Diacritics vol. 14, no. 4, p. 24. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 151. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 21. Derrida, Òf an Apocalyptic Tone', p. 26. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 21.




Aaron, 117±18, 120

Abulafia, Abraham, xii

Abraham, 98±99, 175n.61

and F.W. Schelling, 164, 166

and Emmanuel Levinas, 223

Adorno, Theodor W., 198±218

Aesthetic Theory, 202

Minima Moralia, 200, 213

Negative Dialectics, 81±2, 201, 213,

214, 215

Prisms, 200±201

and Walter Benjamin, 199±200, 203,

205, 206, 207, 208, 214

and Sigmund Freud, 201±2, 203, 208,

210

and Franz Kafka, 200±1, 202, 203±12,

214±15

and the body, 209±10

and Christianity, 198±200, 203, 205,

206, 207, 208, 213

and the Enlightenment, 201±2, 203,

208, 210

and Judaism, 201±2, 203, 208,

210

and Kabbalism, 203, 208

and light, 201±5, 207, 211, 214

agape, see love

alcohol, see intoxication

Althusser, Louis, xiii

Amherst College, 27±8, 32, 34,

43nn.13&14

antihumanism, see humanism

apocalypse, 133, 149, 150, 220±3, 224,

228±229

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 52

Arendt, Hannah, 199

Aristotle, 97±98, 223

Artaud, Antonin, 186

BarreÁs, Maurice, 183, 184

Barthes, Roland

`The Death of the Author', xiv

The Grain of the Voice, 129±30

`The Imagination of the Sign', 12±13

and Georges Bataille, 195n.55,

196n.65

and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 96

Bataille, Georges, xv, 84, 177±97, 223,

227

Inner Experience, 21±2, 177±97

La limite de l'utiliteÁ, 185

MeÂthod de meÂditation, 189

Visions of Excess, 179, 185, 193n.24

and Roland Barthes, 195n.55,

196n.65

and G.W.F. Hegel, 179, 187, 188, 190,

196n.65

and Martin Heidegger, 187, 190

and Christianity, 84, 185, 186

and ecstasy, 178, 179, 185, 186, 188,

192, 193±4n.24 and textuality, 188, 190

Baudelaire, Charles, 180±1, 183

beauty, 28±9, 31, 35, 73, 74±5

Being, see ontology

Benda, Julian, 184±6

Benjamin, Walter, xvi,

and Theodor W. Adorno, 199±200, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 214

Bergson, Henri, 178, 180, 183

Bernanos, Georges, 183, 184

Bernard of Clairvaux, 105

Besnier, Jean-Michel, 195±7n.65

Bhabha, Homi, xv

Bhagavad Gita, xi

Blanchot, Maurice, 117, 125, 126,

195n.55

The Infinite Conversation, 120, 121±2,

127

`The Limits of Experience', 222±3

blindness, 20, 58, 65, 129, 149±50,

173n.26, 209, 212, 236n.29

Bloch, Ernst, 215n.1

Bloom, Harold,

and Kabbalism, xvi

and Pierre Reverdy, 47±8, 65, 67

239



Index

body, the and Theodor W. Adorno, 209±10 and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 96 and Pierre Reverdy, 64±5 and Simone Weil, 74±5, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84±9, 90n.12 and textuality, 32±3 Boehme, Jacob, 135, 142, 148, 153, 159, 166, 178, 179 Bonaventura, 106 Brunschvicq, LeÁon, 233 Buddhism, xi, 75, 90n.6 Bunyan, John, 33±4 Bushnell, Horace, 32±4

and Jacques Derrida, 94±5, 96, 97 and St Teresa of Avila, 101±2, 103±5, 109 and the body, 96 and Christianity, 95, 101±2, 105, 106 and desire, 95, 102±3, 105 and Judaism, 96, 101 and love, 106, 107 and textuality, 102, 109 community, 19±21 Creation, xii, 122±3, 137, 138, 148, 151, 163, 166 see also origins Cubism, 46, 50, 69

Caputo, John, 164, 175n.61 Catholicism, 3, 4, 6, 70, 184, 199, 207 Celan, Paul, 25±7, 36±41 charity, 73, 76, 136 Chestov, LeÂon, see Shestov, Lev Christ, xii, 101, 105, 106, 108, 151, 207, 208 Christianity, xi±xiv, 116, 220, 229 and Theodor W. Adorno, 198±200, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 213 and Georges Bataille, 84, 185, 186 and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 95, 101±2, 103, 105, 106 and Jacques Derrida, 94, 98, 99, 121, 229 and Emily Dickinson, 29, 33, 34 and Emmanuel Levinas, 225 and Pierre Reverdy, 47, 66 and St John of the Cross, 4, 12, 16, 17 and F.W. Schelling, 139, 152 and Simone Weil, 85 Cixous, HeÂleÁne, 94±115 `Coming to Writing', 104 Entre l'eÂcriture, 96 Èxtreme Fidelity', 105, 107 La, 95 `The Laugh of the Medusa', 95 The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine CleÁment), 95±6, 103±4, 110n.11 Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange, 94, 96, 97, 100±3 With ou l'art de l'innocence, 106 and Roland Barthes, 96

darkness, xiii and Pierre Reverdy, 53, 56, 58, 65 and St John of the Cross, 6, 16±17, 55, 56, 58, 65, 227 and F.W. Schelling, 148, 149, 151, 156, 158, 166 and Simone Weil, 76 see also illumination; light Davidson, Donald, 89 de Certeau, Michel Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, 3, 9±10, 13 Le christianisme eÂclateÂ, 82±3 Le fable mystique, 84 de Man, Paul, 136, 154, 164, 174n.46, 175n.63 death, 8, 18±20, 25±26, 35, 67, 78, 104, 134, 150, 178, 185, 215 deconstruction, 63±4, 94, 143, 147, 189, 195n.58 see also Derrida, Jacques; poststructuralism Deleuze, Gilles, 63, 128, 221 Derrida, Jacques, 66, 91n.20, 110n.20, 117, 121, 125, 126, 134, 140, 147, 148, 159, 173, 174n.30, 189 Cinders, 150 `DiffeÂrance', 67±8, 70, 227±28, 229± 30, 232 Dissemination, 127, 128, 129, 174± 5n.49 Èdmond JabeÁs and the Question of the Book', 124 Èllipsis', 68±9, 153



240 Index

ecstasy, xi and Georges Bataille, 178, 179, 185, 186, 188, 192, 193±4n.24 and Emily Dickinson, 35 and Pierre Reverdy, 57 and St John of the Cross, 17, 21 and Simone Weil, 77, 78 Edwards, Jonathan, 27±34 emasculation, 135, 140, 157, 158 see also masculinity; feminine, the; patriarchy; phallocentrism; sexual difference Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 32, 44 n.36 Enlightenment, the, 178, 190, 221 and Theodor W. Adorno, 201±2, 203, 208, 210 and F.W. Schelling, 133±4, 135, 153 eroticism, see desire ethics, xv, 69, 186, 219 evil, 139, 147 Exodus, 116, 117±19, 120 Ezekiel, 100, 111n.34

`From Restricted to General Economy', 177, 227, 232 `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', 152±5, 162±5, 167, 168, 171, 230± 2 Òf an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy', 228±30, 232, 235 Of Grammatology, 94, 97±8, 99, 109n.1, 124, 150, 171, 227 Positions, 195n.58 Spectres of Marx, 138 The Gift of Death, 141 `Violence and Metaphysics', 88±9, 226, 231, 232 and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 94±5, 96, 97 and G.W.F. Hegel, 228, 229 and Martin Heidegger, 167, 228, 231 and Emmanuel Levinas, 47, 68±9, 71n.15, 229±32 and Christianity, 94, 98, 99, 121, 229 and Judaism, 99, 235 and textuality, 97±98, 171 Descartes, ReneÂ, 77, 86, 133±4, 177, 192n.6, 192n.8 Descombes, Vincent, 83 desire, xv, 90±1n.13, 153 and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 95, 102±3, 105 and Emmanuel Levinas, 226 and Pierre Reverdy, 47, 57, 62, 66, 67, 69±70 and St John of the Cross, 7±10, 17, 22 and Simone Weil, 79, 84, 85 and Kabbalah, 129±30 Dickinson, Emily, 25±45 and Paul Celan, 25±7, 36±41 and Christianity, 29, 33, 34 and ecstasy, 35 and textuality, 26±7, 29, 32±41 Dionysius the Areopagite, xii, 105, 152, 178, 231 On Divine Names, 108, 193n.24 Mystical Theology, 95, 99, 100±1, 109± 10n.8, 226±7

feminine, the, 94±7, 100±9 see also, Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Irigaray, Luce; masculine, the; patriarchy; phallocentrism; sexual difference Fichte, Johann, 134 Foucault, Michel, 189, 195n.55, 224 À Preface to Transgression', 188, 221 The History of Sexuality, xiii±iv Francis of Assisi, 76 Frank, Manfred, 146 Frankfurt School, the, 198±9, 212 see also Adorno, Theodor W. freedom, 61, 104, 133, 135, 153, 165, 166, 170 Freud, Sigmund, 228 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 148 Civilization and its Discontents, xiv, 184 Mourning and Melancholy, 138, 143±4 and Theodor W. Adorno, 201±2, 203, 208, 210

Eckhart, Meister, xii, 152, 162, 178, 179, 226, 231 eÂcriture feÂminine, 95±7 see also Cixous, HeÂleÁne

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 145 Girard, ReneÂ, 90±1n.13 gnosis, 4, 6, 7, 12, 18, 20, 46, 47, 55, 70, 79, 205



Index 241

È rgen, xv, 190±1, 238n.51 Habermas, Ju Handelman, Susan, 66±7, 71n.15 Hart, Kevin, 192n.6, 226±7, 232 Hegel, G.W.F., 100, 198, 201, 225 and Georges Bataille, 179, 187, 188, 190, 196n.65 and Jacques Derrida, 228, 229 and F.W. Schelling, 135, 153, 162 Heidegger, Martin, 136, 178, 195n.53, 200, 222±3 and Georges Bataille, 187, 190 and Jacques Derrida, 167, 228, 231 and F.W. Schelling, 134, 135, 139, 145, 146, 155, 159, 166, 172n.5 history, 39±41, 198, 204, 206 Holocaust, the, 40, 199, 205 Horkheimer, Max, 198, 212, 214 humanism, 168, 220±3, 229, 234 Husserl, Edmund, 219 idealism, 134, 135, 140, 143, 147, 153, 158, 168, 191, 211, 221 illumination, 5, 72, 148, 149, 178, 203, 209 see also darkness; light intellectuals, 179, 184±5, 188±9, 195n.65, 213 intertextuality, 11±16, 47±8 intoxication, 21, 52, 108, 124, 188 Irigaray, Luce `Divine Women', 226 `Questions to Emmanuel Levinas', 225 Speculum of the Other Woman, xvi and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 96 see also feminine, the; phallocentrism, patriarchy Isaac the Blind, Rabbi, 122±3, 125, 129, 131n.6 Israelites, the, 117±18 JabeÁs, Edmond, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129 James, William, 178 John, 229±30 jouissance, 106 Judaism, xi±xii, 236±7n.30 and Theodor. W. Adorno, 201±2, 203, 208, 210

and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 96, 101 and Jacques Derrida, 99, 235 and Emmanuel Levinas, 219, 220, 232±3, 235 and SteÂphane MallarmeÂ, 115±18, 120, 123±6, 128 and Pierre Reverdy, 47, 66±7, 70 and St John of the Cross, 3, 4, 10, 15, 17, 47 È nger, Ernst, 185±6 Ju Kabbalism, xii, 115±30, 225 and Theodor Adorno, 203, 208 and Walter Benjamin, xvi, and Harold Bloom, xvi, 120 and SteÂphane MallarmeÂ, 115±18, 120, 123±6, 128 and desire, 129±30 and modernity, 120, 125, 126 and textuality, 116±130 Kafka, Franz, 200±1, 202, 203±12, 214±15 Kant, Immanuel, 133±4, 139, 146, 164, 173n.26, 178, 192n.6, 228±9 Kempis, Thomas aÁ, 34 kenosis, 225, 233, 234 khora, 134, 167, 168 Klee, Paul, 204±5 Klossowski, Pierre, 195n.55, 221, 224 KoyreÂ, Alexandre, 191 Krell, David Farrell, 136, 160, 165, 169 Kristeva, Julia, xvi, 96, 138 Lacan, Jacques, xiv, 48 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 199 Land, Nick, 189 Laredo, Bernardino de, 98, 99, 106 law, the, 69, 70, 98, 116, 117±18, 120, 165, 208, 225 Leibnitz, G.W., 134, 166. 223 Lent, 52 Levinas, Emmanuel, 88, 136, 219±38 Difficult Freedom, 23n.11, 232±3 `God and Philosophy', 225 Otherwise than Being or Beyond

Essence, 223±4, 230±1

`The Trace of the Other', 223

Totality and Infinity, 69±70

and Abraham, 223



242 Index

and Jacques Derrida, 47, 68±9, 71n.15, 229±32 and Luce Irigaray, 225±6 and Christianity, 225 and desire, 226 and Judaism, 219, 220, 232±3, 235 life, 141±4, 149 light, 30±1, 227, 236±7n.29 and Theodor W. Adorno, 201±5, 207, 211, 214 and Jean-Luc Marion, 138 and Pierre Reverdy, 59±60 and F.W. Schelling, 148, 149, 151, 156, 158, 166 see also darkness; illumination liminality, 5, 18±22, 72 Lispector, Clarice, 95, 97, 100±3, 108 logocentrism see Derrida, Jacques Locke, John, 30 love, 139, 149, 151, 154, 226 and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 106, 107 and Jean-Luc Marion, 136±8 and Pierre Reverdy, 53±8, 60, 62 and St John of the Cross, 5±10, 16 and F.W. Schelling, 136±8 È wenthal, Leo, 198±9 Lo LukaÂcs, Georg, 212 Lyotard, Jean-FrancËois, 66, 221 MallarmeÂ, SteÂphane, 77, 181 and Kabbalah, 115±18, 120, 123±6, 128 Marcel, Gabriel, 186, 190 Marion, Jean-Luc, 90n.7, 159, 172n.4, 172n.6, 230 and F.W. Schelling, 133±41 and light, 138 and love, 136±8 Marx, Karl, xiii, xiv, xv, 206, 229 Marxism, 198, 199, 204, 210±11, 212 see also Adorno, Theodor Maurras, Charles, 183, 184 masculine, the, 96, 97 see also Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Irigaray, Luce; emasculation; feminine, the; patriarchy; phallocentrism meditation, xii

melancholy, xvi, 138, 139, 143±7, 164, 203, 211 Merkabah, xii Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 91n.15 messianism, 198, 199, 200, 205, 207±8, 210±15 Midrash, 4, 206 Millet, Kate, xiv mimesis, 7, 91n.20, 215 and Simone Weil, 75±6, 78±9, 80, 82, 85±8 modernity, 190, 201, 209 and Kabbalah, 120, 125, 126 and F.W. Schelling, 133, 135, 152 Moses, 116, 117±21, 125, 129 mourning, 143±7, 164, 173±4n.30 È ntzel, Herbert, 199 Mu Nancy, Jean-Luc, 119, 124, 131n.5, 172n.5, 238n.50 nationality, xiv±xv, 183±5, 199 Nazism, 139, 185, 199, 200 Neoplatonism, 4, 139 Newman, Cardinal, 177 New Testament, 52, 136 Nicholas of Cusa, xii, 178, 179, 191 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber, 200 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiii, xiv, 94, 139, 170, 178, 188, 191, 196n.65, 210, 229 On the Genealogy of Morals, 142 The Gay Science, 220±3, 224 The Will to Power, 185 Old Testament, 98±100, 105, 106±7, 164, 175n.61 ontology, 74, 75, 85, 87, 88, 124, 134±76, 219±38 orality, 14, 52, 96±7, 99±100, 105, 106±7, 109, 116 see also speech origins, x, 83±4, 118±24, 134, 144±7, 151±71 see also Creation Osuna, Francisco de, 106 Pascal, Blaise, 99, 103 patriarchy, xiv



Index 243

patriarchy (Contd.) see also, Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Irigaray, Luce; emasculation; feminine, the; masculine, the; phallocentrism PeÁguy, Charles, 180, 183±5 Pfau, Thomas, 171 phallocentrism, xiv see also Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Irigaray, Luce; emasculation; feminine, the; masculine, the; patriarchy phenomenology, 80, 84, 91n.15 phonocentrism see Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Derrida, Jacques; speech Plato, 134, 135, 154, 167, 191, 231±2 Platonism, 34, 116, 121, 152, 227 Ponge, Francis, 117, 129 post-modernism, 125, 128, 147, 188, 189, 219 post-structuralism, 3±4, 10, 72, 117, 188, 195n.58, 219 see also Barthes, Roland; Cixous, HeÂleÁne; deconstruction; Derrida, Jacques property, 142, 166 Psych et Po, 96 psyche, 48 Puritanism, 31±2 purity, 74±5 Quine, W.V., 82, 91n.20 rapture, see ecstasy responsibility, 163±6, 178, 186, 194n.53, 219 Reverdy, Pierre, 46±71 and Harold Bloom, 47±8, 65, 67 and the body, 64±5 and Christianity, 47, 66 and darkness, 53, 56, 58, 65 and desire, 47, 57, 62, 66, 67, 69±70 and ecstasy, 57 and Judaism, 47, 66±7, 70 and light, 59±60 and love, 53±8, 60, 62 and textuality, 46±7, 63±4, 67 Richardson, Michael, 189 Rimbaud, Arthur, 180±3 Rolland, Romain, 180, 184

Said, Edward, xiv±xv St John of the Cross, 3±24 Àscent of Mount Carmel', 226±7 `Spritual Canticle', 3±24 and Georges Bataille, 178, 182 and Pierre Reverdy, 47, 55±6, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65±6, 70 and Christianity, 4, 12, 16, 17 and darkness, 6, 16±17, 55, 56, 58, 65, 227 and desire, 7±10, 17, 22 and ecstasy, 17, 21 and Judaism, 3, 4, 10, 15, 17, 47 and liminality, 5, 18±22 and love, 5±10, 16 and textuality, 3±16, 17±18, 22 St Teresa of Avila, xvi, 3, 178 Meditations on the Song of Songs, 108 The Book of her Life, 107 Way of Perfection, 107 and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 101±2, 103±5, 109 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 177, 180, 186±7, 194± 5n.53, 196±7n.65 Schelling, F.W., 133±176 and Abraham, 164, 166 and G.W.F. Hegel, 135, 153, 162 and Martin Heidegger, 134, 135, 139, 145, 146, 155, 159, 166, 172n.5 and Jean-Luc Marion, 133±41 and Christianity, 139, 152 and darkness 148, 149, 151, 156, 158, 166 and the Enlightenment, 133±4, 135, 153 and light, 148, 149, 151, 156, 158, 166 and love, 136±8 and modernity, 133, 135, 152 and textuality, 136, 164±5, 170±1 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 145 scholastic theology, 98, 106, 107 Scholem, Gershom, 203 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, xii, 238n.53 On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, 232 secular, the, xv, 198±203, 206 semiotics, see structuralism



244 Index

sexual difference, xiv

see also Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Irigaray, Luce; feminine; the; masculine, the; phallocentrism; patriarchy sexuality, 57, 84, 96

see also desire

Shamanism, xi

Shestov, Lev, 180, 191±2, 192±3n.12

Sollers, Philippe, 84, 125, 126, 127,

195n.55

Song of Songs, 105, 108

speech, 35, 84, 98±103, 116±30, 164±5

see also Abraham; Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Derrida, Jacques; Moses; Kabbalah

speech act theory, 75, 100

Spinoza, Baruch, 134

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 233

Steiner, George

À Note on Kafka's Trial', 206±8, 209

Real Presences, 9, 15

Stevens, Wallace, 41

Stoekl, Allan, 196n.65

structuralism, 11±12, 13, 83, 84, 98,

188

see also Barthes, Roland

Swift, Jonathan, 78

Symbolism, 180±1, 183

Symons, Arthur, 181

Talmud, the, 122, 206, 220

Taoism, xi

Taylor, Mark, 233

Tetragrammaton, 121, 235

textuality, xii, 29±30, 207, 235

and Georges Bataille, 188, 190

and HeÂleÁne Cixous, 102, 109

and Jacques Derrida, 97±8, 171

and Emily Dickinson, 26±7, 29,

32±41

and Pierre Reverdy, 46±7, 63±4, 67

and St John of the Cross, 3±16,

17±18, 22

and F.W. Schelling, 136, 164±5, 170±1

and Simone Weil, 72, 80, 82±9

and the body, 32±3

and Kabbalah, 116±30

theosophy, 135, 153

time, 38±41, 50, 53, 60

Torah, the, xii, 68±9, 116, 121±2, 125±7

translation, 26, 36±41, 82

Trinity, the, 102

Turner, Victor, 5

`Liminality and Community', 19±20 The Ritual Process, 20±1 Upanishads, the, xi

Valery, Paul, 129

Varela, Francisco, 79, 89n.1

war, xvi, 185±6

Weil, Simone, 72±93

and the body, 74±5, 78, 80, 82, 83,

84±9, 90n.12

and Christianity, 85

and darkness, 76

and desire, 79, 84, 85

and ecstasy, 77, 78

and mimesis, 75±6, 78±9, 80, 82,

85±8 and textuality, 72, 80, 82±9

Wisdom, 121±3, 125

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 152, 226

Philosophical Investigations, 81 Tractatus Logico-Philosophical, 77±8, 80, 87

Wolosky, Shira, 9±10

woman, xvi, 84, 100, 103, 105

see also Cixous, HeÂleÁne; Irigaray, Luce; feminine, the; sexual difference writing see textuality Zohar, the, xii, 116



Index 245

Trajectories of mysticism in theory and literature

Mysticism in English Literature

Mysticism in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature

Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Singular trajectories and their role in control theory

Geodesic and horocyclic trajectories

Mysticism and Magic In Turkey

Mysticism

Hypnotism and Mysticism of India

Lethal Trajectories

Lethal Trajectories

Mysticism in modern mathematics

Studies in Islamic Mysticism

Mysticism in modern mathematics

Theory & History of Folklore (Theory and history of literature)

Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and Merkavah Literature

Geodesic and Horocyclic Trajectories (Universitext)

Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist

Aesthetic Ideology (Theory and History of Literature)

Inoperative Community (Theory and History of Literature)

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis

Mysticism and Language

Mysticism and Philosophy

Mysticism and Sacred Scripture

Essentials of Mysticism

Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film

Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays

Making Sense in Life and Literature (Theory and History of Literature)

Mysticism in the World's Religions

Practical Mysticism

Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 150)

Trajectories of mysticism in theory and literature

Mysticism in English Literature

Mysticism in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature

Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Singular trajectories and their role in control theory

Geodesic and horocyclic trajectories

Mysticism and Magic In Turkey

Mysticism

Hypnotism and Mysticism of India

Lethal Trajectories

Lethal Trajectories

Mysticism in modern mathematics

Studies in Islamic Mysticism

Mysticism in modern mathematics

Theory & History of Folklore (Theory and history of literature)

Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and Merkavah Literature

Geodesic and Horocyclic Trajectories (Universitext)

Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist

Aesthetic Ideology (Theory and History of Literature)

Inoperative Community (Theory and History of Literature)

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis

Mysticism and Language

Mysticism and Philosophy

Mysticism and Sacred Scripture

Essentials of Mysticism

Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film

Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays

Making Sense in Life and Literature (Theory and History of Literature)

Mysticism in the World's Religions

Practical Mysticism

Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 150)

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