Without negative theology: Deconstruction and the politics of negative theology

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 133-147

  Bradley, Arthur ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149335574     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2265.00166     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Jacques Derrida, 'Sauf le nom: (Post-Scriptum)', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr in Thomas Dutoit (ed.), On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 35-89, here p. 81; hereafter abbreviated in the text as (SN).
2. See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), hereafter (OH);
3. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), hereafter (SM);
4. The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1995);
5. Cosmopolite de tous les pays: encore un effort! (Paris: Editions de Galilée, 1996)
6. and De l'hospitalité: avec Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre (Paris: Calman Lévy, 1997), amongst many other texts.
7. I am particularly indebted to Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996)
8. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), hereafter (PT)
9. Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998)
10. and Simon Critchley, Ethics - Politics - Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), hereafter (EPS), for my understanding of negativity, politics and theology in deconstruction. Unfortunately, Caputo is the only critic to discuss Derrida's work on the politics of negative theology in any detail and I will consider his reading in more detail below.
11. Jacques Derrida, 'Différance' in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-29, here p. 26; hereafter abbreviated in the text as (D). (Translation emended slightly.)
12. See Jean-Luc Marion, L'Idole et la distance (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1977);
13. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
14. Mark C. Taylor, Tears (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990);
15. Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994);
16. John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997);
17. Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
18. and John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, Post-Modernism and the Gift (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), hereafter abbreviated in the text as (GG), amongst many other texts.
19. Jacques Derrida, 'Pas', in Parages (Paris: Éditions de Galilée, 1986), pp. 10-116, here p. 90. (Translation and square brackets are mine.)
20. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. 401.
21. Jacques Derrida, 'How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', trans. Ken Frieden, in Sandford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (eds.), Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 3-71, here p. 8; hereafter abbreviated in the text as (HS). Like Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo and other critics, I have emended the translated title to 'How to Avoid Speaking: Denegations'.
22. In recent years, Derrida's reading of negative theology as ontotheological has been criticized for relying too heavily on Duns Scotus's univocal interpretation of ousia and neglecting more apophatic or analogical traditions of interpretation by Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas; but, in fairness to Derrida, he has never claimed to offer a definitive reading of negative theology and is often at pains to show why such a reading is not possible. For a discussion of Derrida's reading of ousia and hyperousios, see, among other texts, Jacques Derrida, 'Letter to John P. Leavey, Jr' in Robert Detweiler (ed.), Derrida and Biblical Studies, Semeia (23) (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1982), p. 61;
23. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell: Oxford, 1990), pp. 278-326;
24. Kevin Hart, 'Jacques Derrida: The God Effect' in Phillip Blond (ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 259-80.
25. In a recent oral response to criticism of his work by Jean-Luc Marion, Derrida stated: 'Marion constantly refers to what I said about negative theology as if I had a thesis, one thesis, phrased in one form through a single voice - concerning the metaphysics of presence, the distinction between position and negation and so on. Now I think that if time permitted I could show that my texts on this subject are written texts, by which I mean they are not a thesis on a theme.' Jacques Derrida, 'Derrida's Response to Jean-Luc Marion' in (GG), pp. 42-54, here p. 43.
26. In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo sometimes appears to suggest that Derrida prefers the non-traditional, generalized mode of negative theology to the traditional and localized mode ('Derrida means to let himself be addressed by the name of God and to that end to see whether and how negative theology can be translated, whether and how it overflows its boundaries so that it is something more than Graeco-Christian Neoplatonism, something more universal' (PT, p. 46); but I argue here that Derrida always makes clear that he is not simply opposed to the localized mode and that, more importantly, there is no question of a choice to be made.
27. In his essay 'The Other's Decision in Me', Simon Critchley gives what is, in my view, the best currently available definition of the complex temporalities of the democracy to come: 'la démocratie à venir does not mean that tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) democracy will be realised, but rather that the experience of justice as the maintaining-now of the relation to an absolute singularity is the à venir of democracy, the temporality of democracy is advent, it is arrival happening now' (EPS, p. 154).
28. John D. Caputo brilliantly situates Derrida's work within a larger movement from Christian Neoplatonism to Judaism, theology to faith, and from religious content to religious structure or form (see PT, pp. xvi-xxvi, 331-9);
29. but my concern, which cannot be substantiated here, is that this necessary gesture also risks re-essentializing distinctions that Derrida renders problematic, most famously at the end of 'Violence and Metaphysics': 'JewGreek is greekjew. Extremes meet' in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 79-195, here p. 195.