7 - An Other Negative Theology - On Derrida's How To Avoid Speaking - Denials

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
An "Other" Negative Theology: On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"

Author(s): Shira Wolosky
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 2, Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics of
Cultural Influence and Exchange II (Summer, 1998), pp. 261-280
Published by: Duke University Press
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An "Other" Negative Theology:
On Derrida's"Howto AvoidSpeaking:Denials"
ShiraWolosky
English,HebrewUniversity
Abstract This article explores Derrida's relation to Hebraism and Hellenism in

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

sesses a kind of sirenlike appeal that is intensely seductive, yet filled with
doom. The term Hellenism, as Jacques Derrida has noted, contains both
heterogeneity and rupture.' As to "Hebraism," this has, since ancient times,
unfolded with "Hellenism" deeply embedded within it, and controversy
continues with regard to the precise moments and extents with which
the two currents interacted with each other, as well as the larger im-
plications of their interaction.2 Besides the obvious fact that Christianity
1. Later in this essay, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida suggests that the khoraof
the Timaeusrepresents a second "tropic of negativity" that is "heterogeneous" rather than
"hyper-essential"(1989b: 31-32, 35-38).
2. See, for just one discussion of this enormous area, Moshe Idel, "Jewish Kabbalah and
Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance" (1992a), and also Scholem, "La Lutte"
(1983), discussed later.
PoeticsToday19:2 (Summer 1998) Copyright ? 1998 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

262 PoeticsToday19:2
itself is a mode of Hebreo-Hellenism, Judaism in its historical develop-

ment adapted, transformed, polemicized, and apotropaically warded off
Aristotelian, Platonist, Neoplatonist, and Gnostic movements within and
from the Hellenistic world. Yet outside of historical discourse, the terms
threaten to degenerate into an even emptier sloganism, becoming, to use
Derrida's terms in Marginsof Philosophy, a mere "displacement"rather than
"a certain difference, a certain trembling, a certain decentering that is not
the position of an other center" (1982: 38).
Despite this admission, and despite his own attempts to avoid using the
opposition, Hebraism and Hellenism continue to exert a powerful force in
configuring Derrida's work. This is most obviously evident in the case of
Hellenism. For example, in his essay "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,"
Derrida specifically sets out to distinguish his discourse from the main
Western tradition of negative theology. In this tradition, the transcendence
of God is indicated by placing the Divine beyond all knowledge, beyond
all description and predication, and, not least, beyond all language. In this
apophatic or negative tradition, God is approached not through positive
description but by negating any attribute, any quality, indeed, anything
that might be said of him.3Derrida's essay is undertaken partly in response
to an ongoing and aggressive effort on the part of contemporary theolo-
gians to save theology not from but, rather, for deconstruction. Indeed,
against Derrida's own rigorous and consistent critique of theological tradi-
tion, a number of recent writers have attempted to recuperate Derrida as
a valuable contributor to theological doctrine. For this purpose, they have
used negative theology to introduce and claim a saving denial in the very
bosom of ontology, thus enabling Derrida's return to the theological fold.
Derrida's critique of theology revolves around the implicit links he sees
between the Hellenist tradition of Greek ontotheology and its Christian
developments. This includes the Western elaboration of negative theology,
whose diverse material Derrida nevertheless sees as remaining "within
a certain Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition" (1989b: 4). Explicitly, then,
Derrida represents himself as an antagonist of Hellenism. In the case of
Hebraism, the situation is more complicated. Some students of Derrida's
work see his attempts at evading a Hellenist discourse as implying that his
grammatology is a kind of Hebraic alternative, as when Derrida's work is
described as a "displaced Rabbinism" and "Jewish heretic hermeneutic."4
3. For an overview of negative theology within the Neoplatonist and Christian traditions,
see, for example, the writings of A. Hilary Armstrong (1967, 1979) and Andrew Louth (1981).
I have explored its implications for literary discourse in LanguageMysticism(Wolosky 1995).
4. See Handelman 1983: 109. Just when displacement breaks away from, rather than re-

Wolosky* On Derrida's"Howto AvoidSpeaking:Denials" 263
Yet Derrida avoids elaborating a Hebraist position no less than a Helle-

nist one. Derrida is resolute in distinguishing himself from the tradition of
negative theology, which he associates with a Greek heritage, a "Platonism
and Neoplatonism, which themselves remain so present at the heart of
Dionysius' negative theology" (ibid.: 20). He is, however, at least equally
evasive with regard to some "other" negative discourse within which his
own might reside. It is true that he once suggested in an interview that
such an "other" might be akin to something Hebraic, as the "outskirtsof
the Greek philosophical traditions [which] have as their 'other' the model
of the Jew, the Jew-as-other" (Kearney 1984: 107).Yet in a key text such
as "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida assiduously avoids speak-
ing about such a possible Hebraist alternative. His question-is there "a
tradition of thought that is neither Greek nor Christian? In other words,
what of Jewish and Islamic thought in this regard?" (i989b: 31)--elides
Jewish with Islamic thought in one of many instances where Derrida de-
clines to speak: for example, by not "speak[ing] of what my birth, as one
says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab" (66); "decid[ing]
not to speak of negativity or of apophatic movements in, for example, the
Jewish or Islamic traditions" (53); choosing "to say nothing, once again,
of the mysticisms or theologies in the Jewish, Islamic, or other traditions"
(55). What Derrida finally does is to "leave this immense place empty" (53)
as "a certain void" (31) by avoiding speaking about it.
Because he chooses to leave it empty, this space remains vulnerable to
miscomprehension and misinterpretation. It is a curious fact that theolo-
gians who wish to reclaim deconstruction for theology not only refuse to
acknowledge the Hebraic dimension of this alternative space in his thought
but also tend to dismiss Derrida's relation to Judaic or Hebraist traditions
as no more than a "subgroup"among many "similar connections between
Derrida and many cultural and political movements" (Hart 1989: 65, x).
They even claim that any Derridean alignment with a "rabbinic interpre-
tation" is possible "only if God is absent, if God is silent, if God is a stranger
even to himself ... [reflecting] the indeterminate situation of a displaced
people, a people who never have the certainties of Greek metaphysics ...
Hegel's bad infinity" (Joy 1992: 274). Here, in a serious misappropriation
of Derridean senses of otherness, the "strange"is condemned as a betrayal
of the same, which must be redeemed through an incorporation back into
Presence. But this line of thought utterly misinterprets Derridean notions
maining within the parameters of, a hermeneutical tradition, is a question Handelman's

essay fails to address, but this question is central to considering Derrida's Hebraism. In-
deed, it is peculiarly posed by him.

of difference and the critique they launch against just such divinization of
erasive Presence.
What these theologians tend to avoid in Derrida's critique is his repeated
assertion regarding the continued force of Greek ontology within Christian
discourses, even negative ones. And even when they admit to the existence
of this ontological tradition, they do so toward quite distinct ends, using it
as a deconstructive moment within positive theology, a negative corrective
to affirmative images of the Divine in which the two nevertheless remain
"systematically related." Such negation "check[s] that our discourse about
God is, in fact, about God and not just about human images of God." In
so doing, it "reveals a non-metaphysical theology at work within positive
ideology" and indeed "prior"to it (Hart 1989: 104). While Derridean de-
construction is in itself not declared to be a negative theology, (some of) its
practices are seen as consistent with negative theology: "as a strategy, as a
way that negative theologians have found to hold the claims of cataphatic
[positive] theology at bay" (Caputo 1989: 24); as a "breach"that "drives
to its limit" the hermeneutical experience but finally rejoins hermeneutics
toward the "unity of the two senses of 'God"' (Klemm 1992: 20, 22). In
fact, such confirmation between negative and positive theologies is central
to the thinking of Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings remain the
primary source for apophatic or negative discourse in the Christian tra-
dition and who, with Meister Eckhart-a major, and extreme, medieval
Christian mystic in the tradition of negative theology-serves as exem-
plary in Derrida's essay. Derrida himself cites Jean-Luc Marion's work on
Dionysius, stating that if Dionysius "speaks of 'negative theologies' ... he
does not separate them from the 'affirmativetheologies"' (1989b: 63).5
Derrida does not contest this mutual implication of negative and posi-
tive theology. Indeed, he explores it, but in doing so he questions the
escape of negative theology from ontology. Negation does not in itself
guarantee such an escape, does not necessarily deontologize theological
structures.The formulas that place the Divine as "beyond" or "without"
do so, he insists, as superlatives that reconfirm ontological hierarchy and
structure:"'Negative theology' seems to reserve, beyond all positive predi-
cation, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality,
a being beyond Being" (ibid.: 7-8). Derrida reiterates (in a footnote) an
5. Derrida presents Jean-Luc Marion's work as an instance of the attempt to recover de-
construction for negative theology and vice versa. See Derrida's footnotes 1, 2, 9, 16-e.g.,
"I feel that Marion's thought is both very close and extremely distant; others might say
opposed" (1989b: 65). Toby Foshay, in reviewing Derridean stances that distinguish decon-
struction from the stance of negative theology, discusses the relation to Marion (1992: 2-4)
but carries it into a discussion of authorial subjectivity.

earlier statement from Marginsof Philosophyin which he insisted that "dif-

feranceis not . . . irreducible to any ontological or theological-onto-
theological -reappropriation" because it remains without ontology, un-
like negative theology: "Those aspects of diff6rancewhich are [negatively]
delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most nega-
tive of negative theologies, which are always concerned with disengaging
a superessentiality beyond the finite categories of essence and existence,
that is, of presence and always hastening to recall that God is refused the
predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his superior, incon-
ceivable, and ineffable mode of being" (ibid.: 63n).6
Negative theology remains "concerned with disengaging a superessen-
tiality" that Derrida here still considers a category of presence. Such an
"ontological wager of hyperessentiality" can be found in both Dionysius
and Meister Eckhart, in passages that Derrida goes on to cite and study
at length. Against all efforts within negative theology itself to release such
hyperessentiality from ontological structure, Derrida insists that what it
promises is still "the immediacy of a presence . . leading to union with
God" and that it remains "a genuine vision and a genuine knowledge"
(ibid.: 9-10). As in the Augustinian tradition to which Meister Eckhart
repeatedly refers, negative statements are simultaneously "hyperaffirma-
tive," transmuting "into affirmation its purely phenomenal negativity" (8-
9). The hyperof hyperessentiality
(hyperousias) indicates a "beyond"that essen-
tially means above and more: "God (is) beyond Being but as such is more
(being) than Being" (20). In this, Christian apophatics remains true to its
antecedents in what Derrida calls a Greek "paradigm,"to "Plato and the
Neoplatonisms," or at least that element in Plato that treats the "beyond
Being" as "not a non-being" (32) but rather as a "hyperbolism"in which
"negativity serves the hypermovement." It "obeys the logic of the sur,of the
hyper,over and beyond, which heralds all the hyperessentialisms of Chris-
tian apophases and all the debates that develop around them" (ibid.).
Derrida thus contests the claim that negative theology itself escapes
from ontology, or that it rescues positive theology from the ontological
critique leveled against it from Nietzsche through Heidegger and into Der-
rida's own work. What particularly disturbs negative theology's claim to
exceed being is "the promise of the presence given to intuition or vision"
(ibid.: 9), or, more specifically, the apophatic movement as an elevation
"toward that contact or vision, that pure intuition of the ineffable, that
6. Derrida is citing from Marginsof Philosophy(1982: 6). WritingandDiferencereturns to this

theme a numberof times, as when Derridacommentsthat in MeisterEckhart,"thenega-
tive momentof the discourseon God is only a phaseof positiveontotheology"(1978:337
n. 37).See also pages116,146-49, 189,271.

266 Poetics Today 19:2
silent union with that which remains inaccessible to speech" (lo); "where
profane vision ceases and where it is necessary to be silent" (22).
Derrida here brings together different issues--contact, vision, intuition,
the ineffable, union, silence -that are crucial for situating his critique and
in fact indicate its direction. Ontological critique has shifted to questions of
language; or, rather, a specific axiology of language is revealed as already
implicit or entailed within structures of ontology. Derrida's critique goes
beyond argument over the ontological status of the "beyond Being," over
the question of whether the formulas of negation in fact escape ontology.
It investigates how ontology implies stances toward language, stances that
apophatic discourse only intensifies and confirms. Indeed, Derrida begins
by defining negative theology as an attitude toward language:
"Negativetheology"has come to designatea certaintypical attitudetoward
language, and within it, in the act of definitionor attribution,an attitude
towardsemanticor conceptualdetermination.Suppose... that negativethe-
ology consistedof consideringthat everypredicativelanguageis inadequateto
(thebeing beyondBeing)of God;
the essence,in truthto the hyperessentiality
consequently,only a negative("apophatic") can claim to approach
attribution
God, and to prepareus for a silentintuitionof God. (4)
The interiority of "intuition,"just like the immediacy of "vision" or "con-
tact," all militate for the silence that itself marks their attainment. To be
"beyond Being" is in fact the same as to be beyond language. The founda-
tion of negative theology as a discourse- and this is how Derrida finally
treats it-is its essentially negative attitude toward discourse: its commit-
ment that "every predicative language is inadequate to the essence."
Such a negative attitude toward language becomes the ground for those
who would claim a convergence between Derridean deconstruction and
negative theology.7But this antilinguistic stance is the very reverse of Der-
ridean deconstruction, which remains a grammatology, a "thinking of dif-
ferance or the writing of writing" (18). Far from supporting the notion of a
position to be achieved beyond the faulty medium of language, it investi-
gates the impossibility of such a position. As Derrida remarked to Lucien
Goldmann, deconstruction "is simply a question of (and this is a necessity
of criticism in the classical sense of the word) being alert to the implica-
tions, to the historical sedimentation of the language which we use" (1970:
271). It is to take language absolutely at its indispensable word.
"a salientexample
7. In this argument,negativetheologyis saidto be, like deconstruction,
of this recognitionthat languageis caughtup in a self-defeatingenterprise"(Caputo1989:
29). Cf. Hart, "What then is negative about 'negative theology'? I have said that negative
theology denies the adequacy of the language and concepts of positive theology" (1989:
176). Cf. Sells 1994: 12.

This impossibility of evading language lays the ground for Derrida's cri-
tique of negative theology. As language, as rhetoric, apophatics, far from
transcending ontology, is itself fundamentally structured by ontology. Its
language procedures bear the very mark of ontology, both in apophatic
rhetoric and in the negative linguistic attitude that continues to direct
negative theology. Derrida makes this point by citing a text central to Dio-
nysius's Mystical Theology:
Now, however,that we are to enterthe darknessbeyondintellect,you will not
finda brief[brakhylogian]
discoursebut a completeabsenceof discourse[alogian]
In affirmativetheology the logosdescendsfrom
and intelligibility[anoesian].
what is abovedown to the last, and increasesaccordingto the measureof the
descenttowardan analogicalmultitude.But here,as we ascendfromthe high-
est to what lies beyond,the logosis drawninwardaccordingto the measureof
the ascent.Afterall ascentit will be whollywithoutsoundand whollyunitedto
the unspeakable [aphthegkto]. (1989b: 11)
Dionysius here is discussing the relation between the negative theology of

his MysticalTheologyin reference to the positive theology he had explored
in other works such as the Divine James, which was used as a textbook
for analogical knowledge of God in the medieval West. But, as Derrida
points out, these two movements do not merely reverse each other, some-
thing Dionysius himself would confirm. The negative process, although
for Dionysius ultimately prior, is no less determined by ontology than
the affirmative one. Moreover, both negative and positive are functions of
the rhetoric they employ; they are the descent and ascent up a ladder of
being that itself is also inescapably linguistic: "The apophatic movement
of discourse would have to negatively retraverseall the stages of symbolic
theology and positive predication. It would thus be coextensive with it,
confined to the same quantity of discourse" (11).
Implicit here is not only the foundational role of language even in this
discourse, which seeks to dispense with language, but a whole model of
signification-in fact, a sign theory. Derrida remarks: "This ascent cor-
responds to a rarefaction of signs, figures, symbols," which finally issues
beyond signs altogether: "By the passage beyond the intelligible itself, the
apophatikaitheologaiaim toward absolute rarefaction, toward silent union
with the ineffable" (lo-11). As in the Saussurean sign theory that Derrida
discusses as the first topic in Of Grammatology, the mystical ascent moves
from an outward signifier to a transcendent signified beyond any of its
representations, a signified that ideally dispenses with language and rep-
resentation altogether. The Saussurean model, however, itself duplicates a
sign theory deeply rooted in the discourse of theology, from Augustine's On

the Trinitythrough Dionysius and into Meister Eckhart.8To avoid speak-

ing here means to be silent, according to Augustine according to Eckhart,
within contemplation of "the unique one ... of the divine unity, which
is the hyperessential Being resting unmoved in itself." As Eckhart com-
ments, "'Because of this, be silent.' Without that you lie and you commit
sin" (51-52). As to signs, they undergo the "rarefaction"Derrida speaks of
in relation to Dionysius, which Rene Roques further specifies in his analy-
sis of Dionysian symbology: "The symbol must be purified to rejoin the
hidden significance that it envelops .... For it is also a question of dis-
engaging in all its purity the element properly significative and anagogic
of the symbol, and of rejecting all that can obscure that signification of the
transcendent order, and all that can trouble it and pervert it in the intelli-
gence, which can compromise the entire symbolic process" (1962: 167-68,
my translation). The ascent from symbol or signifier to signified it is in-
tended to convey is a process of purgation or purification, of stripping away
or negating the outward envelope, which obscures the "significationof the
transcendent order."Such purification emerges in Meister Eckhart in the
figure of an "unveiling":what Derrida describes as "a certain signification
of unveiling, of laying bare, of truth as what is beyond the covering of the
garment" (1989b: 45). This again confirms Derrida's claim that at issue in
this theology, despite its negativity, is in fact an ontology: "Is it arbitraryto
still call truth or hyper-truth this unveiling which is perhaps no longer an
unveiling of Being? ... I do not believe so" (45). The signs, even the nega-
tive signs, presuppose, depend upon, and signify "what is beyond Being in
being," in the language of Dionysius. And this ontology presumes an axi-
ology of language in which what is negated is not the divine superiority
but language itself: "In brief, we learn to read, to decipher the rhetoric
without rhetoric of God- and finally to be silent" (50).
It is here that the relevance of deconstructive grammatology to negative
theology emerges, but in an obverse way to those who would enlist Der-
rida within the orders of theology. Instead of confirming the apophatic
intuition against language, Derrida's analysis implies that apophasis itself
takes place within language and can never be disengaged from it. The
beyond-Being that is cited as what transcends language instead is exposed
as being produced by the particular linguistic procedures of mystical the-
ology. "Figurationand the so-called places (topoi)of rhetoric constitute the
very concern of apophatic procedures" (27). The very language this the-
ology would dispense with, in contrast, makes it possible and defines it.
8. For further discussion of the theological structure of sign theory, see Wolosky, "Derrida,
Jabes, Levinas" (1982) and LanguageMysticism(1995).

Thus, in his "Post-Scriptum"to a volume titled DerridaandNegativeThe-

ologyDerrida remarks:"The modality of apophasis,despite its negative or
interrogative value, is often that of the sentence, verdict or decision, of
the statement" (1992: 283). Paul Ricoeur, commenting on an effort by
Dominic Crossan to incorporate Derridean deconstruction into theologi-
cal discourse, responds: "I doubt that a negative theology can be based
on Derrida's deconstructive program" (1979: 74). Negative theology can
indeed not be assimilated to deconstruction, except as a self-critique that
would no longer be recuperable to ontotheology, one where the negations
of negative theology would interrupt (hyper)essentialismrather than con-
firming it. It is this grammatological critique of negative theology that
"How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" offers.
Two questions nonetheless remain: If Derridean grammatology precludes

a negative theological discourse that continues Greek ontological tradi-
tion, does it thereby commit itself to a discourse in which negation and lan-
guage are no longer mutually subversive but are, rather, mutually affirm-
ing? And could such a discourse be called "Hebraic"?In "How to Avoid
Speaking," Derrida does gesture toward an "other" apophatics: "The ex-
perience of negative theology," he writes, "perhaps holds to a promise,
that of the other, which I must keep because it commits me to speak
where negativity ought to absolutely rarefy discourse" (1989b: 14). Der-
rida's "other" apophatics registers at once a first difference: in the stance
toward language, even before ontology. The negativity that should "rarefy"
discourse, as Dionysius's purgational apophatics does, here instead "com-
mits me to speak." This linguistic difference is directly tied, however,
to ontological questioning. Traditional apophatics--that is, a negative or
mystical theology of negation-claims to go beyond being, to break free
of ontological determination through progressive negations. Indeed, this
is the basis for modern attempts to see traditional negative theology as
deconstructive. But Derrida distinguishes this traditional negativity from
ontological rupture. A controlling unity remains between negative and af-
firmative theology and within the "hyperessentiality"itself. The discourse
of negative theology may be "in itself interminable," but "the apophatic
movement cannot contain within itself the principle of its interruption. It
can only indefinitely defer the encounter with its own limit" (11).Against
this, Derrida contrasts a "thinking of difference" that is "alien, heteroge-
neous, in any case irreducible to the intuitive telos--to the experience of
the ineffable and of the mute vision which seems to orient all of this apo-
phatics" (ibid.).
It is this "thinking of difference" as "heterogeneous"and irreducible to

"mute vision" that authorizes Derrida's own discourse; that marks a break
with Greek ontology; and, not least, that undoes the negation of language
entailed and embraced within the (Greek) apophatic "experience of the
ineffable." Derridean difference marks a genuine shift in language values,
indeed, marks a commitment to language as what distinguishes his own
negative discourse from the Greek apophatic tradition. His "other" apo-
phatics, one that may "contain within itself the principle of its interrup-
tion," has peculiar implications for, or within, a positive linguistic com-
mitment, such that language is no longer the sign of betrayal of a true
(hyperessential) being experienced in its ultimacy as hyperlinguistic, that
is, as silence, but rather is recognized as the very condition for facing an
ultimacy that resists reappropriation. The line of demarcation between a
Hellenist and an "other" apophatics is language itself. Language itself is
the boundary of the negative theology that Derrida traces in "How to
Avoid Speaking."
To what extent Derrida's encounter across that border of language may
be called Hebraism remains, however, far from clear. On the one hand,
Derrida's engagement with Jewish writers certainly confutes those who
wish to dissociate him fromJudaic affiliation. From biographical hints such
as those in Glas(1989a), to references in the Grammatology (1976) and then
essays on Emmanuel Levinas and Edmond Jabes in WritingandDifference
(1978), to what amounts to a meditation on midrash and Walter Benjamin
in the essay "Des Tours de Babel" (1985), Derrida's writing evidences
countless intercrossings with Jewish culture and thinkers. "Des Tours de
Babel" is particularly suggestive as to where Derridean and Judaic dis-
courses may be mutually illuminating regarding, for example, the limits
of negative theology that "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" explores.
There Derrida is concerned with the divine, Hebrew "unpronounceable
name" (170), as further interpreted through a Benjaminian "discourse on
the proper name and on translation" (175).Such a (divine) notion of "the
origin of language" is posed also as its disruption, an "origin of tongues"
in the sense of founding "the multiplicity of idioms" (167).Indeed, disrup-
tion erupts not only within human discourse but also within the divine:
"The war that [God] declares has first raged within his name: divided,
bifid, ambivalent, polysemic: God deconstructing" (170). But this divine
dispersion, rather than imposing violence as loss of unity, instead opposes
violence as itself the imposition of unity. At the Tower, humankind wished
"to make a name for themselves" as a "unity of place" (169). This unity,
if also the emblem of a fantasized "peaceful transparency of the human
community," is equally "a colonial violence." Against such violence, God

"imposes and opposes his name, he ruptures the rational transparencybut

interrupts also the colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism" (174).
Derrida places such originary, divine, linguistic disruption in the terms
that Walter Benjamin set in speaking through the figure of translation:
In givinghis name,God also appealedto translation,not onlybecausebetween
the tonguesthat had suddenlybecome multipleand confused,but first of his
name,of the name he had proclaimed,given, and which shouldbe translated
as confusionto be understood,hence to let it be understoodthat it is difficult
to translateand so to understand... he pleadsfor a translator.... The law
does not commandwithoutdemandingto be read, deciphered,translated.It
demandstransference.... Evenin God, and it is necessaryto followrigorously
the consequence:in hisname. (184,emphasisin original)
The divine name, ruptured rather than unitary, inaugurates linguistic mul-
tiplicity, mediation, and the injunction to (and not to) translate. Its appeal
to translation, founded in its inner interruption, is both a "giving his name"
and a withholding of it. This in turn founds language as the multiplicity of
tongues, marking a difference not to be elided, or suppressed, in the name
of unity but rather to be linguistically negotiated.
Edith Wyschogrod, linking Derrida to Levinas, argues that Derrida's is
a critique of ontological thinking as a mode of "transcendental oppres-
sion, that of the Same and the One," where "metaphysical oppression is
a source of 'oppression in the world' as war and violence" (1992: 50). Her
argument rightly opposes those theologizing readers who wish to measure
this originary disruption by the standard of ontological unity, as its loss.
Rather, Derrida, like Levinas, here sets out to critique ontological unity
as violence. Yet what remains striking about Derrida's account is how it
suggests at once both a close proximity and a restrained distance from a
Judaic negative discourse. Derrida, in "Des Tours de Babel," refers in fact
to Benjamin rather than Levinas. These two figures are not commensu-
rate; indeed, they point toward distinct and not entirely congruent Hebra-
ist genealogies for Derridean thinking. Perhaps more telling still is a figure
who is oddly missing from the Derridean discourse, in what seems like
another apotropaic gesture: that is, Gershom Scholem. While the lines of
influence and interchange between Scholem and Benjamin may remain in
many ways obscure, the one seems inevitably to conjure up the other, even
if also by way of divergences.9It is this very inevitability of association that
9. Scholem claims that Benjamin undertook his own language philosophy in conjunction
with Scholem's, as for example in "The Task of the Translator" (1981:34, 121), but his may
not be a full or adequateaccountof the matter.Forthe complexityof the relationshipbe-

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

guage mysticism develops features central to Derrida's linguistic critique,
but in the specifically Hebraic matrix that Derrida elides.
At issue in Scholem, as in Benjamin and Derrida, is the status and value
of language as central and primary, rather than as secondary and ulti-
mately dispensable if not compromised, within negative theological dis-
course.10Scholem distinguishes a "metaphysicallypositive attitude towards
language as God's own instrument" as singular to Jewish tradition, even
in its mysticism: "Kabbalism is distinguished by an attitude towards lan-
guage which is quite unusually positive. Kabbalists who differ in almost
everything else are at one in regarding language as something more pre-
cious than an inadequate instrument.... Language in its purest form, that
is, Hebrew . . . reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in
other words, it has a mystical value. Speech reaches God because it comes
from God" (1961:15).
This "superabundantlypositive delineation of language" (1972: 62) as
"the medium in which the spiritual life of man is accomplished, or con-
summated" (ibid.: 60) serves as the opening topic of Scholem's essay de-
voted to language theory, "The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of
the Kabbalah," which Scholem first conceived for his dissertation but only
completed fifty years later. Such assertion of language, however, by no
means eliminates negation. Scholem's language theory pursues negativity
as both fundamental and initiatory. Not unlike the apophatics Derrida ex-
plores in "How to Avoid Speaking,"the divine in its ultimacy is designated
as ineffable. In rabbinic tradition the great Name of God had already been
"withdrawnfrom the acoustic sphere"and had thus become unpronounce-
able (ibid.: 67). In this, however, the Name institutes language and world
("the alphabet is the original source of language and at the same time
the original source of being" [75]), even as it stands beyond them, "com-
pletely withdrawn into the realm of the ineffable" (67). In mystical writ-
ings this transcendent ultimacy comes to be designated in negative terms,
as "En-Sof" (without-end), a Name that is "nameless" (175).Although it
is the ultimate source of all creative process, "this name has no 'meaning'
in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete significa-
tion. The meaninglessness of the name of God indicates its situation in the
very central point of the revelation, at the basis of which it lies" (194).
tween Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, see David Stern, "The Man with Qualities"
(1995). See also Biale 1982: 120-21. On differences between Scholem and Derrida, see Alter
1991:86-87.
o1. Benjamin writes: "Revelation lies in the metaphysically acoustic sphere" (Biale 1982:
193).

Wolosky * On Derrida's"Howto AvoidSpeaking:Denials" 273
Yet even in this absoluteness of beyond language, the ultimate does not
negate language but rather is committed to language as among its most
penetrating figures. "The coming into being of the linguistic movement,"
writes Scholem, "has its original source in the infinite being of God him-
self" (181).The letters of the divine Name(s) are not only "condensations of
the energy" that radiates forth in creation; they also "representthe linguis-
tic innerness of the cosmic process"(175).Linguistic differentiation, that is,
originates and penetrates the divine itself, made possible by (as) a complex
of inner disjunctions within divinity: "When En-Sof entwined itself within
itself this texture of the original Torah folded up and remained as the origi-
nal force of all linguistic movement in En-Sof" (182). Linguistic differen-
tiation, then, is not opposed against divine ultimacy but rather manifests
it, both as creation and as figure, as the letters of a linguistic movement
"which ramifies and is differentiated in the infinite, but then returns once
again in dialectical change into its focus and its original source" (170).
Scholem's discourse has complex links with the Neoplatonist tradition
that Derrida critiques. This is a topic Scholem himself explores. In his
essay "La Lutte entre le Dieu de Plotin et le Dieu de la Bible dans la Kab-
bale Ancienne," for example, Scholem traces the very term En-Sofas an
"absence of name" to Neoplatonist negations (1983:26-28). Nevertheless,
within Judaic discourse this term common to negative theologies comes
to be inseparable "from the traditional Name of God" and its revelatory,
creative expression (ibid.: 29, my translation). Indeed, under the aegis of
language figures, the "En-Sof" itself becomes associated with lettristic ac-
tivity, as the "point of departure which effects all articulation";or, in the
words of a twelfth-century Kabbalist: "The alef [first letter of the alpha-
bet] corresponds to an essence the most intimate and the most hidden ...
which unites with infinity and unlimitedness" (ibid.: 47, my translation).
What this linguistic commitment distinguishes within Hebraist discourse
is a sense of negativity interior to the utmost divinity itself: not as a loss
of coherence but as what generates all creation. This notion is developed
in Scholem's "Unhistorical Aphorisms,"where he insists on
distinguishing
Kabbalah from Neoplatonist continuities of being (Biale 1987: 116)and, in
contrast, describes a passageway through Nothingness as within the cre-
ative act itself (ibid.: 111).11The divine Nothingness emerges more
fully
still in Scholem's essay "Creation out of Nothing and the Self-Limitation
of God" (Schopfung aus Nichts und SelbstverschrankungGottes) in asso-
11. Nathan Rotenstreich discusses Scholem's contrast in the "Aphorisms" between Neo-
platonist emanation and Kabbalistic creation, which he calls an "interruption within the
procedures of being" (1977:609). See also Biale, who speaks of "a differentiation within the
divine itself" (1982: 59) and the contrast with Neoplatonism (1987: 111-12,
115-17).

ciation with the Lurianic image of Zimzum,the self-contraction of God.'2

This process Scholem describes as a "double movement" both "within
God himself" and also from God into world, such that divine nothingness
not only empties space for the coming into being of creation but continu-
ally penetrates it. "In every living process, the Nothing breaks out through
its transformations. It is an abyss, which accompanies every Something.
No being is complete, but always fractional and incomplete. Out of an
ever renewed contact with the Nothing stems the ever occurring creation"
(Scholem 1956: 117-19, my translation).
The differentiations of language, penetrating divinity itself, thus imply
a negativity that is both ultimate and generative. This in turn implies an
axiology of language with distinctive features. Where traditional apopha-
tics sees language, despite the essential role it in fact plays, as a mere
instrument of ascent, as secondary, and finally as the object of negation,
Scholem proposes language as essential, not only within creation but also
for the Divine. This point is remarked by Moshe Idel, who distinguishes
"the positive attitude of Jewish mysticism toward language and the nega-
tive conception of language in Christian mysticism. It is language, or lan-
guages, that are to be surpassed in order to reach the acme of mysticism
. . . [whereas] conceiving Hebrew as the perfect and the divine language,
there was no reason [for Kabbalists] to attempt to transcend, attenuate, or
obliterate its use" (1992b: 55).13 This difference emerges most dramatically
through the trope of writing Scholem delineates, where writing constitutes
the founding divine activity, as an act of differentiation at once divine and
creative: "From this innermost movement the original texture is woven
in the substance of the En-sof itself. This is the actual original Torah, in
which, in an extremely remarkable way, the writing-the hidden signa-
ture of God-precedes the act of speaking. With the result that, in the
final analysis, speech comes into being from the sound-evolution of writ-
ing, and not vice versa" (1972: 181). In Scholem, the world as the letters
of the divine Name is one in which that Name "has left its mark behind,"
where the letters are "the hidden, secret signs of the divine in all spheres
and stages which the process of the creation passes through" (ibid.: 165-
66). In this sense, "linguistic mysticism is at the same time a mysticism of
12. It is impossible here to review the Lurianic Kabbalah and its notion of Zimzumas di-
vine "self-negation," as Biale calls it (1982: 60). See, for example, Scholem's MajorTrendsin
JewishMysticism(1961)and Novak 1992.
13. Cf. Kabbalah,where Idel notes that the Kabbalist generally "felt his language was ade-
quate to convey his mystical feeling" (1988: 219); "even the spiritual world is adequately
projected onto the structure of linguistic material" (ibid.: 235-36). I have also discussed this
positive Hebraist linguistic commitment in "Pharisaic"(Wolosky 1993).

writing. ... Writing ... is the real centre of the mysteries of speech...
The creative word of God is legitimately and distinctly marked precisely
in these holy lines" (ibid.: 167).This grants priority not only to language,
now raised into the highest "metaphysical sphere" (ibid.: 176), but also to
writing: "The letters, which are configurations of the divine creative force,
thus represent the highest forms" (ibid.: 168).
This elevation of writing represents a dramatic contrast to the attitude
toward writing, as the extreme of language, in the Dionysian tradition. As
Rene Roques observes:
Discoursein effect is composedof sensibleelementsto which a uniquesigni-
ficationno doubt attaches,but whichthe voice, and even more,writing,must
dissociate:"Itmustbe acknowledged... thatwe use the elements,the syllables
and the words,of writingand of discoursefor the necessityof the senses"(Di-
vine Names 708 D). But these senses . . . can only perceivethe idea by way
of the successionof elementsof discourseand in the reciprocalexteriorityof
their diverseparts. In other words,no intelligibleobject can be deliveredto
the sensesin its totalityand simultaneity;and that constitutestheir incurable
poverty. (1983: 203, my translation)
The ultimate object of Dionysian devotion cannot tolerate the intrusion
of language, with its succession of elements and the "reciprocalexteriority
of their diverse parts." Its totality and simultaneity are finally opposed to
language, and especially to writing, which it can tolerate only as a means
"for the necessity of the senses" and beyond which the spirit must ascend.
Derrida, in "How to Avoid Speaking," notes that "in the register of
'negative theology' . . . onto-theological reappropriation always remains
possible. . . . One can always say: hyperessentiality is precisely that, a
supreme Being who remains incommensurate to the being of all that is,
which is nothing, neither present nor absent, and so on. ... I concede this
question remains at the heart of a thinking of differance or of the writ-
ing of writing" (1989b: 9). Negative discourses reside at an unstable bor-
der, which ever holds open the possibility of each crossing into the other:
Neoplatonist, Christian, and Jewish. Yet Derrida poses his grammatology
against negative theology: "What diferance,the trace,and so on 'mean'-
which hence does not mean anything-is 'before' the concept, the name,
the word, 'something' that would be nothing, that no longer arises from
Being, from presence or from the presence of the present, nor even from
absence, and even less from some hyperessentiality"(9, emphasis in origi-
nal). A difference that penetrates into, rather than reassembling within,
the very sources of being, in Derrida emerges as a discourse of writing,
of the "trace."Founded neither in presence nor in hyperessentiality, it in-

stead pursues a movement through negativity, a movement that emerges

as language.
Geoffrey Hartman, observing that the Hebrew tradition's prohibition
against graven images "obliged a channeling into the written word of its
imaginal energies," remarks that "Derrida in this is Hebrew rather than
Hellene: aniconic yet intensely graphic" (1981: 17).What Derrida's work
does show is how a positive linguistic commitment entails values and pri-
orities, which cannot be reabsorbed into, for example, traditional Chris-
tian negative theology. To regard negative theology from the viewpoint of
its language, against its own resignation as a "speech that knew itself failed
and finite, inferior to logos as God's understanding" (1978: 116),is to cross
outside the boundaries of the ontological tradition. As Derrida writes in
WritingandDifference, "The difference between metaphysical ontotheology
on the one hand and the thought of Being (of difference) on the other sig-
nifies the essential importance of the letter" (ibid.: 146). Derrida, then,
engages in what I would call a Hebraist critique of ontotheological tradi-
tion in its Hellenist resources, and, centrally to this critique, he announces
a revolution of language values. If, as Derrida suggests, the "strange dia-
logue between the Jew and the Greek [takes] the form of infinite separa-
tion and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other" (ibid.:
153), it is language that marks this separation, that situates them otherwise
in facing transcendence.
Yet while Derrida's writings may be Hebraic in theory, Derrida declines
to commit himself to a Hebraic position that would require a commitment
to history. Derrida's work may indeed take place on what he calls the "out-
skirts of the Greek philosophical tradition ... as their 'other"' (Kearney
1984: 107), but he hesitates to investigate the "other"negative discourse he
launches. Or, rather, he retains it as an "outskirts"that remains crucially
tied to the orders it critiques. What seems oddly elided is the very tempo-
rality by which Derrida distinguishes between his own negative discourse
as against theo-ontological unities of Being, whether figured as negative
or affirmative. Both speaking and not speaking take place within the struc-
ture of the Derridean trace,and in this they are temporal events made
possible through an already instituted discourse--a discourse instituted as
the trace of the other, as a movement
towardthe other (otherthan Being)who calls or to whom this speech is ad-
dressed-even if it speaksonly in orderto speak,or to say nothing.This call of
the other,havingalwaysalreadyprecededthe speechto whichit hasneverbeen
presenta firsttime, announcesitself in advanceas a recall.Such a referenceto
the otherwill alwayshavetakenplace. Priorto everypropositionand evenbe-
fore all discoursein general-discourse evenbeyondall nihilismsand negative

dialectics,preservesa traceof the other.A traceof an event olderthan it or of

a "taking-place"to come,both of them:herethereis neitheran alternativenor
a contradiction. (1989b:28, emphasisin original)
Here negation plays a crucial role, not against language but as a sustain-
ing difference without which discourse itself collapses. The very negations
of negative theology, far from abnegating discourse, become inscribed
within it, where the other neither is possessed at the expense of language
nor is incorporated within language but rather institutes, as its "trace,"the
"taking-place"of address itself, of call and recall.
Yet this temporality of structure, which language radically asserts and
which Derrida opposes against Greek ontologies of Being, does not emerge
in Derrida as specific historical commitment. Here Derrida differs not
only from Scholem, for whom history is the fundamental provenance of
all discourse, but also from Benjamin, at least as Derrida represents him
within the "Tours de Babel." In this essay, Derrida's Benjaminian figure of
translation explores what might be called the oxymoron of historical iden-
tity: where identity itself is displaced as a foundational ontological notion
to become a term of temporalized transformation.The very notion of "ori-
gin" itself then takes shape through its historical transformations, "living
on," and indeed truly living, only "in mutation": "The original gives itself
in modifying itself; this gift is not an object given; it lives and lives on
in mutation" (1985: 183).Yet such temporalization is neither arbitrary nor
unregulated. "Growth does not give rise to just any form" (188).There re-
mains a principle "authorizing,making possible or guaranteeing the corre-
spondence" (182);a "transcendental contract" that "renderspossible every
contract" (185);a structure of "promise"in which a "commitment" takes
place, "bequeathing its record" (191).
This sense of historical definition as retaining authenticity through all
its modifications challenges the ontological formulas of Hellenism. Dem-
onstrating this difference and finding alternative modes for describing it
are central to Derrida's own philosophical and rhetorical tasks. Yet Der-
rida's appeal here to religious language remains ambiguous. On the one
hand, Derrida openly acknowledges Benjamin's as a kind of religious dis-
course: "This religious code is essential here. The sacred text marks the
limit, the pure even if inaccessible model, of pure transferability"(202). Yet
its status remains obscure, at least in the case of Derrida. Benjamin may
be offering his discussion as commentary on the Judaic sacred text, but
Derrida's invocations seem more figural, displacing any historical course
into theoretical structure.
The evasion of historicity, however, finally poses questions of theory.
The "Tours de Babel" concludes in a play of words that remains telling:

"the sacred text is the occurence of a pas de sens,"a "no meaning" that
thereby renders the text "absolute ... because in its event it communicates
nothing" (204). Here the rhetoric of negation returns in force. But it re-
mains unclear whether the force of negation, while clearly not ontological,
is indeed regulative, within the sort of particular commitment of historical
generation that Hebraism traces. At issue may be not necessarily a par-
ticular line of occurrences but that very structure of event that Derrida
theorizes: that call of the other which is addressed in return, as an absolute
point (ratherthan topic) of reference, and whose discourse takes place tem-
porally, as history.The transcendent "Nothing" that calls from beyond lan-
guage not only affirms but situates it, as a discourse of history in ongoing
definition-what Derrida himself describes in terms of a "promise ... an
event, and the decisive signature of a contract" (191).That "structure of
survival" through which texts are historically translated is conducted, as
Derrida insists, by one who is "committed by the other" and in response
to the question "in the name of whom or what" (183). But while Derrida
in one sense eloquently addresses this question, his own response seems
almost one of avoidance: as though he wishes neither to speak nor to deny.
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An "Other" Negative Theology: On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"

This content downloaded from 193.137.34.26 on Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:00:12 PM

Abstract This article explores Derrida's relation to Hebraism and Hellenism in

The impulse to schematize Hebraism and Hellenism as antonyms pos-

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itself is a mode of Hebreo-Hellenism, Judaism in its historical develop-

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Yet Derrida avoids elaborating a Hebraist position no less than a Helle-

maining within the parameters of, a hermeneutical tradition, is a question Handelman's

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earlier statement from Marginsof Philosophyin which he insisted that "dif-

6. Derrida is citing from Marginsof Philosophy(1982: 6). WritingandDiferencereturns to this

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Dionysius here is discussing the relation between the negative theology of

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the Trinitythrough Dionysius and into Meister Eckhart.8To avoid speak-

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Thus, in his "Post-Scriptum"to a volume titled DerridaandNegativeThe-

Two questions nonetheless remain: If Derridean grammatology precludes

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"imposes and opposes his name, he ruptures the rational transparencybut

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

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This content downloaded from 193.137.34.26 on Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:00:12 PM

ciation with the Lurianic image of Zimzum,the self-contraction of God.'2

This content downloaded from 193.137.34.26 on Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:00:12 PM

This content downloaded from 193.137.34.26 on Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:00:12 PM

stead pursues a movement through negativity, a movement that emerges

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dialectics,preservesa traceof the other.A traceof an event olderthan it or of

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989gb"How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Languagesof the Unsayable,edited by S. Budick

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