[First published in University of Toronto Quarterly 55.1 (Fall 1985): 74-93.

An earlier version of this essay was

presented at the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English Conference, University of Guelph, 2-5
June 1984. ]

[Index: Jacques Derrida, A. D. Nuttall, Valentinus, gnosticism]

[Date: 1985]

Deconstruction and the Gnostics

Michael H. Keefer

I
Whatever its title might lead a new reader to expect, T.S. Eliot's well-known essay
on Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca is not an argument for influence, but a preemptive strike. Eliot wrote, in his own words, to disinfect the Senecan Shakespeare
before he appears. My ambitions would be realized if I could prevent him, in so doing,
from appearing at all.1 It is now late in the day to entertain similar thoughts with regard
to that leading trend in post-structuralist literary theory known as deconstruction. The
most violently jealous of traditionalists could hardly hope to strangle in its cradle a theory
and a literary practice that already stalks with Herculean strength through English
departments and publishers' lists, flushing out the Augean stables of humanistic
commentary, and banging on the head such primordial monsters as the belief that the
knowledge of relationships does not preclude a knowledge of things, or that truth is
founded upon material characteristics rather than being simply a human invention or
fiction, or that there is a real world (without inverted commas) which is not simply a web
of intertextuality but an objective universe to which texts can and do, indeed must, refer.
1 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1951; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 129.

It may not seem clever, in the struggle between competing literary theories which has
developed over the past decade, to say that one is on the side of Antaeus, the opponent of
Hercules who drew strength from his contact with the earth: one remembers how many
lumps that obtuse giant took before at last being lifted up (shall we say into the thin air of
formalism?) and crushed. Nor is it much comfort, amid the enthusiasm of younger critics
for the new theory, to remind oneself of the radical contradictions, even incoherence, of
the deconstructionist metaphysic: Antaeus was long gone by the time Hercules, in his
frenzy, slaughtered all his own children.
Sanguinary allegories notwithstanding, it is not the purpose of this essay to deny
that deconstruction has helped to revitalize critical discourse. Deconstruction has stirred
literary critics from their dogmatic slumberseven if, all too often, into an equally
dogmatic wakefulness. It has raised important and previously neglected questions about
the activities of writing and textual appropriation, and, for this generation at least, has
redirected the practice of interpretation into modes that are more frequently exciting than
obscurantist. To refuse the mixed pleasures and sometimes liberating insights which the
writings of deconstructionist critics can bring would be both stupid and dishonest. But a
supine acceptance of their more radical claims might be equally dishonest, and rather
more foolish. As A.D. Nuttall writes in A New Mimesis, It is after all common sense to
welcome a gift and to resent a theft.2
The line of thought which I wish to develop here was set off by encounters with
two texts: the book by A.D. Nuttall from which I have just quoted, and John R. Searle's
hostile review of Jonathan Culler's book On Deconstruction.3 Searle is known for his
work on Speech Acts and Intentionality, and Nuttall for his brilliant applications of
philosophical argument to literary subjects in such books as Two Concepts of Allegory
and A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination. In Searle's review of
Culler and in Nuttall's A New Mimesis, two powerful philosophical minds encounter the
central metaphysic of deconstruction, and raise serious questions abut the claims
generated from it. The positions which they attack, and the arguments which they deploy
against those positions, will be alluded to in this paper. But my primary concern here is
with the probability, as I take it, that their refutations of the deconstructionist metaphysic
2 A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983),
p. 8.
3 John R. Searle, The Word Turned Upside Down, review of Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction:
Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), New York
Review of Books 30.16 (27 October 1983): 74-79.

will have only a marginal impact upon the continued advance of deconstruction as a
literary methodology in North America. Although well aware that the cutting edge of
Jacques Derrida's thought is considerably blunted in the works of his American disciples
like Culler or Geoffrey Hartman, Nuttall and Searle both quite properly treat
deconstruction as a philosophy of language, and engage it on that level as well as on the
level of its literary applications. Not to be grateful for these analyses would be churlish
and yet to expect that they will have much impact upon deconstruction would be to
commit a nave error, one which philosophers term a category-mistake. Derrida is by
mtier a philosopher, many of whose sources (Nietzsche and Heidegger, for example) are
philosophical. But I would suggest that deconstruction in its Derridean form is neither a
philosophy nor even, primarily, a set of strategies for dealing with texts: it is a Gnosis.
One philosopher can refute another, and both know what has happened. For
although the refuted party will usually insist (often rightly so) that her opponent is talking
at cross purposes, both acknowledge that the formal possibility of refutation is embedded
in philosophical discourse as one of its defining features. Since Gnostics habitually make
use of philosophical terminology, a philosopher can also engage a Gnostic in debate. Yet
while an onlooker may be convinced that the Gnostic's logic has been conclusively
refuted, the Gnostic will confess himself untouched. This is not simply because a Gnostic
system of thoughtlike any otherembodies a pre-logical commitment that transforms
the sense in which specific words are used. It is a matter, rather, of a transformation in the
manner in which language is deployed. The terms of discourse are refused any
determinate meaning, and consequently are made to appear incommensurable to the
terms of any competing discourse. Not surprisingly, a discourse which thus protects itself
against the possibility of refutation also tends to devolve from argument into mere
assertion.4 Or rather, it might be said that the arguments which the Gnostic adduces
constitute an invitation to conversion more than a supporting structure in any coherent
logical sense; any refutation of them therefore leaves the Gnostic system (subjectively at
least) intact.
In so far as deconstructionists share these characteristics (and Jacques Derrida, as
will be argued below, does so rather fully), Nuttall and Searle can no more refute their
4 For a discussion of assertions of incommensurability by several contemporary writers (including Paul
de Man) see Hilary Putnam, The Craving for Objectivity, New Literary History 15.2 (Winter 1984):
229-39. The tendency of deconstructionists to substitute dogmatic assertion for philosophical argument
has been commented on by Gerald Graff in Deconstruction as Dogma, or, 'Come Back to the Raft
Ag'in, Strether Honey!', Georgia Review 34 (1980): 404-21.

metaphysic than they eat the Platonic Idea of an apple. Deconstructionist and apple alike
inhabit a void from which any detailed concern for rules of evidence, for the laborious
evaluation of probable truths, or for a thoroughgoing critique of the cultural relations of
power at work in history and society have been carefully evacuated.
Before proceeding to a more precise explanation of what I mean in identifying
deconstruction as a Gnosis, and to an analysis of what makes literary critics so vulnerable
to the claims of this Gnosis, I would like briefly to allude to some of the arguments
against deconstruction formulated by A.D. Nuttall and John R. Searle. In analysing a
Nietzschean deconstruction of causality which Jonathan Culler presents as a paradigm
example of the deconstructionist method, Searle brings to light several curious mistakes,
of which the most obvious is an equivocation over two quite distinct senses of the word
origin. Culler's argument that when we sit on a pin, the effect (the pain we feel) is what
causes its cause to become a cause, and thus that the effect should be treated as the
origin,5 is founded on a conflation of causal origin with epistemic origin. The argument
tells us little, if anything, about causality, but rather more about Culler's philosophical
navety. More important, Derrida's claim that the Western tradition has persistently
privileged speech over writinga claim that is basic to his key notion of
logocentrismis, so Searle argues, unfounded: The distinction between speech and
writing is simply not very important to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, etc.6 Derrida's proof that l'criture is prior to speech, that
speech is really writing, is made possible by a tendentious redefinition of writing in terms
of difference and traces which is itself an extension, by a notable non sequitur, of
Saussure's position that dans la langue il n'y a que des diffrences. 7 Derrida and his
5 Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 86-88.
6 Searle, 75. One might wish to exclude Plato from this list. Searle suggests that the oddity of Culler's and
Derrida's reading of the remarks of Plato and Aristotle on the relation of speech to writing may derive
from ignorance of the evidence that the Greeks of antiquity usually read aloud. It seems relevant to
remember St. Augustine's surprise at finding that when St. Ambrose read a text to himself, his eye
glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest
(Confessions, vi.3)an eccentricity which Augustine attributed to Ambrose's desire not to overstrain a
weak voice or to be interrupted by the questions of ignorant listeners.
7 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, ed. C. Bally, A. Sechehaye, A. Reidlinger (Paris:
Payot, 1972), p. 166. The context of this famous aphorism deserves quotation: Tout ce qui prcde
revient dire que dans la langue il n'y a que des diffrences. Bien plus: une diffrence suppose en
gnral des termes positifs entre lesquels elle s'tablit; mais dans la langue il n'y a que des diffrences
sans termes positifs. Qu'on prenne le signifi ou le signifiant, la langue ne comporte ni des ides ni des
sons qui prexisteraient au systme linguistique, mais seulement des diffrences conceptuelles et des
diffrences phoniques issues de ce systme. For commentary on this passage, see Nuttall, A New
Mimesis, pp. 32-34.

followers attempt to use this insight to deconstruct the difference between presence and
absence. In Searle's words:
The correct claim that the elements of the language only function
as elements because of the differences they have from one another
is converted into the false claim that the elements consist of
(Culler) or are constituted on (Derrida) the traces of these other
elements. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of
traces. But the second thesis is not equivalent to the first, nor
does it follow from it....
Indeed, as with Culler's deconstruction of causation, the
argument shows exactly the reverse of what Derrida claims.... The
system of differences does nothing whatever to undermine the
distinction between presence and absence; on the contrary the
system of differences is precisely a system of presences and
absences.8
Nuttall's attack upon this strange metaphysic in which the world is dissolved into
language, the elements of which themselves dissolve into an echoing system of
interwoven differences and traces where there are no things but only relationships, is
more generalized and therefore more powerful:
The notion of a relationship presupposes the notion of things
which are related. A world consisting of pure relationship, that is,
a world in which there are no things, is ex hypothesi a world in
which no thing is related to any other and in which there could
therefore

be

no

relationship.

The

proposition

is

thus

fundamentally incoherent and one can watch it dismantle itself,

like a self-destructive work of contemporary art.9
Accepting the more modest claim that it is the relationships between things which make
for meaning and intelligibility, Nuttall confronts the structuralist and post-structuralist
dctrine, derived ultimately from Vico's verum factum, that all of these relationships are
merely the work of the human mind: So called knowledge is really fiction: verum
factum, verum fictum, 'truth made is truth feigned.'10 But this doctrine in its modern form
8 Searle, p. 76.
9 Nuttall, A New Mimesis, pp. 8-9.
10 Ibid., p. 9.

as a metaphysical absolute can only be sustained by what Nuttall calls the usual
twentieth-century stratagem whereby the expert exempts himself from the non-cognitive
determination which enslaves all the rest.... The claim that the truth of [any] given
system inheres solely in certain arbitrary, collectively agreed conventions and patterns
and that all reference has this purely conventional and contextual character is no more
than rhetorical unless the structural anthropologist or the deconstructionist who makes it
has some grounds for maintaining that the same claim does not apply with equal or
greater force to his own system.11 This being so, Nuttall can argue, elegantly and
powerfully, that The shapes we bring to bear on the world are interrogative rather than
constitutive.12
Derrida and his followers may seem to accept, with a certain lugubrious
playfulness, the confinement to the level of rhetoric which the undercutting of
deconstruction by its own scepticism would imply. But this is mere seeming. As Nuttall
writes, the critic launches himself into the maelstrom. The fluid is interpreted by the
fluid. As we watch, however, certain propositions recur... 13propositions which
typically assert the priority of language to meaning, or reader to author, and of the
shifting categories of relation to the blurred absences which they trace. The circlings and
redoublings of Derrida's texts are tactics for evading a genuinely self-critical
reflexiveness of the kind that Nuttall defines, in another book, as a reflexive check. 14 It
is symptomatic of this evasiveness that in writing about Freud, Derrida (in Nuttall's
words)
is emphatic that we cannot even raise the question of the
objectivity of Freud's method since Freud was himself then and
there engaged in investigating the origins of subjectivity. This
sounds very fine but is wholly without cogency. One might with
equal force maintain that it is impossible to train a telescope on a
lens factory.15
Derrida's habit of doubling back over his own traces allows him to forestall the objection
11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 Ibid., p. 21; Nuttall's italics.
13 Ibid., p. 27. Nuttall is here referring to a Derridean essay by Murray Schwartz in Psychoanalysis and
the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978).
14 Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (London:
Methuen, 1980), pp. 62ff.
15 Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 28.

that he is unaware of the applicability of his sceptical arguments to his own discourse,
and at the same time to continue using concepts which have supposedly been
deconstructed. But when, for example, he writes that La 'rationalit'mais il faudrait
peut-tre abandonner ce mot pour la raison qui apparatra la fin de cette phrasequi
commande l'criture ainsi largie et radicalise, n'est plus issue d'un logos..., Nuttall can
remark: The doubling back is violent, and yet it fails. For as long as one is rejecting
rationality for reasons (whatever they are) one has not rejected rationality.16
Having effectively removed the dogmatic stuffing of deconstruction, Nuttall does
not neglect to take away also some of its attractive sheen of novelty. Derrida's repeated
claims that the phonemic relativity observed by Saussure makes it impossible to know
anything because one cannot know everything, and that the system of differences in
language implies an endless deferral of meaning, are curiously reminiscent of two of the
standard tropes of ancient Pyrrhonist scepticism:
The third of Agrippa's five modes of perplexity, the mode of
relativity, neatly encapsulates the history of structuralism and its
resolution into scepticism: The mode derived from relativity
declares that a thing can never be apprehended in and by itself,
but only in connexion with something else. Hence all things are
unknowable. Agrippa's second mode of perplexity mirrors
Derrida's principle of indefinite deferral: The mode which
involves extension ad infinitum refuses to admit that what is
sought to be proved is firmly established because one thing
furnishes the ground for belief in another, and so on ad
infinitum.

Agrippa

applies

the

principle

to

rational

demonstration, Derrida to semantic confirmation. The end result

in either case is virtually the same.17

II

16 Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1967), p. 21; Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p.
35.
17 Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 36, quoting from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, tr.
R.D. Hicks, Loeb edition (London, 1925), ix.89, ix.88, vol. 2, pp. 500-01.

Much recent commentary on Derrida and deconstruction is strangely flaccid.

Frank Lentricchia, for example, writes of a passage in De la grammatologie that The
problem with such statements is not that they are 'wrong'Derrida is utterly persuasive
but that they postulate a set of textual determinants so broad ... so historically inclusive
that they deny that a given text, or group of texts, is enmeshed in circumstances any
different from the circumstances that enclose any other text.18 Lentricchia seems not to
accept the rejection of history entailed by Derrida's statements, and yet he has evidently
been persuaded out of any capacity to weigh his own historical awareness against them,
and even (so his inverted commas around wrong suggest) out of the belief that such
statements can be categorized (logocentrically, no doubt) as true or false. It is a curious
surrender.
In this context the trenchant polemics of Nuttall and Searle, while in some
respects anticipated by other writers,19 are thoroughly invigorating. Derrida has
sometimes been attacked, with a certain petulance, because he threatens unexamined
metaphysical foundations dear to traditionalist literary critics; because he is too much of a
philosopher. Nuttall and Searle, who are not metaphysicians, show rather that he is not
enough of a philosopherthat, in Nuttall's words, his Pyrrhonian eristic victories end by
being merely Pyrrhic.20 I have suggested, however, that most North American critical
theorists perhaps do not want to be invigorated by this kind of counter-argument. As a
1977 exchange between Searle and Derrida in the pages of Glyph reveals,21 the master is
himself too full of his own playful energies to be deflected from his course. A more recent
attack by Edward Said upon the deconstructionist metaphysic, or rather upon the
irresponsibility that is its concomitant, would seem to indicate that Derrida's American
followers are in a similar manner deafened by the static which their own discourse
generates.
Said's Reflections on Recent American 'Left' Literary Criticism, presented to a
symposium on textuality organized by the journal boundary 2, is an eloquent plea for
18 Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 176.
19 See, for example, M.H. Abrams, The Deconstructive Angel, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 425-38; Denis
Donaghue, Deconstructing Deconstruction, New York Review of Books 27.10 (12 June 1980): 37-41;
Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and
Deconstruction as Dogma..., Georgia Review 34 (1980): 404-21; Peter Barry, Is There Life After
Structuralism?, Critical Quarterly 23.3 (1981): 72-77.
20 Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 36.
21 Searle, Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida, Glyph 1 (1977): 198-208; Derrida, Limited
Inc a b c ... (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), English translation in
Glyph 2 (1977): 162-254.

critical engagement with the historical and political conditions involved in literary
criticism. Said argues that the promise of oppositional knowledge 22 held out by
structuralist and post-structuralist schools has, in practice, proved illusory: contemporary
Left critics, with some honourable exceptions, have been stunningly silent about the
relationships between culture and state power. A period of admirable technical brilliance
has also been one characterized by a willingness to accept the confinement and isolation
of literature and literary studies vis--vis the world, one in which most of us have
tacitly accepted, even celebrated, the State and its silent rule over culturewithout so
much, during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam period, as a polite murmur. Critics and
intellectuals have acquiesced in the neutralizing of their own technical skill:
In our rhetorical enthusiasm for buzz-words like scandal, rupture,
transgression and discontinuity it has never occurred to us to be
concerned with the relations of power at work in history and
society, even as we have assumed that a text's textuality is a
matter to be explored as something concerning other texts,
vaguely denoted conspiracies, fraudulent genealogies entirely
made up of books stripped of their history and force.
A constant underlying assumption, Said says, has been that texts are radically
homogeneous, the converse of which is the extraordinarily Laputan idea that to a certain
extent everything can be regarded as a text.23
I will not dwell upon the Gramscian analytic pluralism advocated by Saidan
approach which could fruitfully be combined with Nuttall's refutation of the collective
solipsism of deconstruction and his pluralistic theory of mimesis. For what interests me
here is the immediate muffling of Said's argument by the paper which followed his in the
boundary 2 symposium, and also by the introduction to the volume in which these papers
were published. Evan Watkins responds to Said's powerful essay by suggesting that one
can see even the most interior and private gestures of criticism as inaugurating a social
and political world24and thus by implication replaces Said's demand for an
22 By this term Said means a knowledge which exists essentially to challenge and change received ideas,
entrenched institutions, dangerous values; he suggests that in recent criticism a concern with such
knowledge has succumbed to the passivity of ahistorical refinement upon what is already-given, there,
acceptable, and above all, already-defined. Said, Reflections on Recent American 'Left' Literary
Criticism, in The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism,
ed. W.V. Spanos, P.A. Bov, and D. O'Hara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 20.
23 Ibid., p. 25.
24 Evan Watkins, The Politics of Literary Criticism, in The Question of Textuality, p. 37.

interrogative, referential, political criticism with the weary view (refuted by Nuttall) that
critical discourse constitutes the objects of its knowledge. In the editors' introduction,
meanwhile, Said's critical theory is rapidly dissolved, by a weird series of moves, into a
view of criticism as an antithetical quest, a pursuit of one's own obsessive
phantasmagoria, a reenactment of the whirling dance of death of the scholar embracing
for the thousandth time the self-generated phantasm of his own method and intention.
This endeavour is bathed in the pathos of existential heroism:
Suspended in the pallid cast of shadows, our post-modern critical
figures, in an activity that dimly revives disturbing earlier traces
of it, play out dangerously the spider webs of their methods and
desires, their intentions and passions, consciously, futilely,
spinning their knowledgemocking skeletal self-imagesout of
that center into the formless voice of the abyss....25
It is not wholly unfair, when confronted with self-congratulator nihilist heroics of this
kind, to invoke Terry Eagleton's suggestion that such posturing is
a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation
and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968.
Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism
found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language.
Nobody, at least, was likely to beat you over the head for doing
so.26

III
Eagleton's words provide an appropriate reminder that the context within which
Derrida's early works were acclaimed in the late 1960s was to a considerable degree
shaped by the strongly Marxist Tel quel group. Jean-Joseph Goux, for example,
interpreted such key Derridean terms as archi-trace, logocentrisme, and diffrance as
being homologous to key terms in Marx's labour theory of value. 27 Similarly, Jean-Louis
25 Spanos, O'Hara, Bov, Introduction to The Question of Textuality, pp. 4, 5.
26 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 142.
27 Jean-Joseph Goux, Marx et l'inscription du travail, in Thorie d'ensemble, Collection 'Tel quel' (Paris:
ditions du Seuil, 1968), pp. 197-204.

Baudry saw a clear analogy between the proletariat and l'criture (in Derrida's sense) as
revolutionary forces which have been suppressed and excluded by bourgeois society and
by la parole respectively, and which yet remain within them, providing the necessary
condition for their existence.28 The implied analogy between Derrida and Marx himself
comes closer to the surface when Philippe Sollers, praising De la grammatologie as un
texte qui claire ces dernires annes et les modifie radicalement, writes:
Proposer une phrasologie rvolutionnaire est la porte de
n'importe qui. Mais participer la rvolution de la pense qui
s'crit en sachant qu'criture et rvolution sont prcisment
homologues en ceci qu'elles exercent une force transformative
muette, cela est beaucoup plus difficile....29
It is not just our distance from the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s which
makes these interpretations of Derrida seem strange. For while his thought is insistently
subversive, it moves, not towards a Marxist praxis, but rather towards an aporia which
undercuts Marxist as well as all other forms of discourse; it strains towards an ambiguous
absence in which all opposing terms are confounded. The early essay Force et
signification (first published in 1963 and reprinted in L'criture et la diffrence) provides
an example of this movement. A recurring idea in this text is that of conversion. This
word seems to designate a methodological turning-inward, a critical and creative reflex
which Derrida endows with a curious finality, since its reflexiveness is supposed
somehow to pre-empt any future criticism. As we will see, it is a term which also
preserves powerful religious resonances. The essay (and hence also the book L'criture et
la diffrence) begins with a denial that a future historian of ideas could properly treat
l'invasion structuraliste as an object:
... l'historien se tromperait s'il en venait l: par le geste mme o il
la considrerait comme un objet, il en oublierait le sens, et qu'il
s'agit d'abord d'une aventure de regard, d'une conversion dans la
manire de questionner devant tout objet. Devant les objets
historiquesles siensen particulier. Et parmi eux trs insolite,
la chose littraire.30
By a strategy which Nuttall challenges in his example of the telescope trained on the lens
28 Jean-Louis Baudry, Linguistique et production textuelle, Thorie d'ensemble, p. 358.
29 Philippe Sollers, Le reflexe de rduction, Thorie d'ensemble, pp. 396-97.
30 Jacques Derrida, L'criture et la diffrence, Collection 'Tel quel' (Paris ditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 9.

factory, literary structuralism thus lifts itself out of history. The same notion of
conversion is also used to collapse literature upon itself, or rather upon the absence which
constitutes it:
Pour ressaisir au plus proche l'opration de l'imagination
cratrice, il faut donc se tourner vers l'invisible dedans de la
libert potique. Il faut se sparer pour rejoindre en sa nuit
l'origine aveugle de l'oeuvre. Cette exprience de conversion qui
instaure l'acte littraire (criture ou lecture) est d'une telle sorte
que les mots mme de sparation et d'exil, dsignant toujours une
rupture et un cheminement l'intrieur du monde, ne peuvent la
manifester directement.... Car il s'agit ici d'une sortie hors du
monde, vers un lieu qui n'est ni un non-lieu ni un autre monde, ni
une utopie ni un alibi.... Seule l'absence purenon pas l'absence
de ceci ou de celamais l'absence de tout o s'annonce toute
prsencepeut inspirer, autrement dit travailler, puis faire
travailler. Le livre pur est naturellement tourn vers l'orient de
cette absence qui est, par-del ou en dea de la gnialit de toute
richesse, son contenu propre et premier.31
Force et signfication has a subversive function, to be sure: by way of exposing
the static spatial metaphors of structuralism, Derrida moves from an initial expression of
admiration for Jean Rousset's book Forme et signification to what might be termed an
implosion of Rousset's view of critical reading as a passage de l'insignifiant la
cohrence des significations, de l'informe la forme, du vide au plein, de l'absence la
prsence.32 The spatial metaphors of structuralism are supplanted, however, by what
Edward Said has called, with reference to De la grammatologie, a kind of negative
theology.33 The absence to which Derrida returns us in Force et signification is a
quasi-theological notion; so, likewise, is the concept of writing which he develops from
it: L'criture est l'angoisse de la ruah hbraque prouve du cot de la solitude et de la
responsabilit humaines.... Or again, more elliptically: trange labeur de conversion et
31 Ibid., p. 17.
32 Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littraires de Corneille Claudel (Paris:
Librairie Jos Corti, 1962), p. Iii.
33 Edward W. Said, Criticism Between Culture and System, in The World, the Text, and the Critic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 184.

d'aventure o la grce ne peut tre que l'absente.34

The notion of conversion is still more deeply embedded in this essay than the
passages I have quoted would suggest. For the essay concludes with an image of the
inaugural moment of a new prophetic orderthe image is that of Nietzsche's Zarathustra
seated among old shattered law-tables and new half-written onesand its last words are a
quotation from Also Sprach Zarathustra:
Regardez: voici une table nouvelle. Mais o sont mes frres qui
m'aideront la porter aux valles et la graver dans les coeurs de
chair?35
This prophetic gesture is allegorized: writing is a moment of conversion, of turning
towards the valley, the originating otherness or absence within being; 36 but allegory or no
allegory, the textthis text in particularis a call for converts.

IV
It is for the following reasons that the deconstructionist project can be termed a
Gnosis. Deconstruction, like second-century Gnosticism, is radically antinomian,
antihistorical, and anti-worldly. The mode of knowledge which it elaborates is closely
parallel to what second-century thinkers like Valentinus understood by gnosis. In each
case the knowledge in question is severed from reference to any positive externality. The
transcendent deus absconditus of Gnosticism is an otherness, an absence, an abyss or
trace, the endless deferral of whose meaning is testified to both by the proliferation of
mediating hypostases in Gnostic speculations about the primordial divine pleroma or
plenitude,37 and also by the fact that Gnostics commonly believed the cosmos to owe its
existence to ignorance of the true God even within this pre-existent plenitude derived

34 Derrida, L'criture et la diffrence, pp. 19, 23.

35 Ibid., p. 49. Cf. Also Sprach Zarathustra, III.12.4. Behold, here is a new law-table: but where are my
brothers, to bear it with me to the valley and to fleshly hearts? Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J.
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 216.
36 L'criture et la diffrence, p. 49: L'criture est le moment de cette Valle originaire de l'autre dans
l'tre.
37 The Gnostic term pleroma refers to a pre-existent order of divine beings emanating from the unknown
God; for examples of the proliferation of such mediating hypostases, see The Nag Hammadi Library in
English, ed. and tr. James M. Robinson et al. (1977; rpt. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), pp.
100-03, 195-201.

from him.38 This inaccessible God is anterior to and also constitutive of all things:
according to the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, Nothing happens without him, nor does
anything happen without the will of the Father, but his will is incomprehensible. His trace
is the will, and no one will know it, nor is it possible for one to scrutinize it in order to
grasp it.39 Similarly, the Derridean archi-trace (a development of the notion of l'absence
pure in Force et signification) is the unknowable, non-existent, and constitutive ground
of language and of meaning.40 What is central, for Derrida as for Valentinus, is the
effective absence of this constitutive ground of meaningand the challenge which this
originating absence poses to traditional modes of thought. In a sentence notable for its
flickering alternation of absence and presence, Derrida writes: L'absence d'un autre icimaintenant, d'un autre prsent transcendantal, d'une autre origine du monde apparaissant
comme telle, se prsentant comme absence irrductible dans la prsence de la trace, ce
n'est pas une formule mtaphysique substitue un concept scientifique de l'criture.
Cette formule ... est la contestation de la mtaphysique elle-mme....41 By the same
token and with equal validity, Valentinus might have claimed, eighteen centuries earlier,
to have deconstructed the metaphysics of the Jews, the Greeks, and the Christians.
Gnosis, whether Valentinian or Derridean, displaces an antecedent mode of
knowledge as theoriaas a manipulation of universals in which the cognitive relation is
'optical,' i.e., an analogue of the visual relation to objective form that remains unaffected
by the relation.42 In both cases gnosis achieves this displacement through a radical
relativity which dissolves the traditional distinction between subject and object.
Deconstruction reduces the subject to a trace within the weave of differences and deferred
meaningsand Derrida insists that the terms by which it does so (such as diffrance,
trace, d-limitation, supplment) cannot themselves be objectified: le mouvement de ces
38 The Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 38, 68-70.
39 Ibid., p. 46.
40 Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 91-92: ...l'apparatre et le fonctionnement de la diffrence supposent
une synthse originaire qu'aucune simplicit absolue ne prcde. Telle serait donc la trace originaire....
Il ne s'agit donc pas ici d'une diffrence constitue mais, avant toute dtermination de contenu, du
mouvement pur qui produit la diffrence. La trace (pure) est la diffrance. Elle ne dpend d'aucune
plnitude sensible, audible ou visible, phonique ou graphique. Elle en est au contraire la condition. Bien
qu'elle n'existe pas, bien qu'elle ne soit jamais un tant-prsent hors de toute plnitude, sa possibilit est
antrieure en droit tout ce qu'on appelle signe (signifi/signifiant, contenu/expression, etc.), concept
ou opration, motrice ou sensible. Cette diffrance n'est donc pas plus sensible qu'intelligible.... Elle
permet l'articulation de la parole et de l'critureau sens courantcomme elle fonde l'opposition
mtaphysique entre le sensible et l'intelligible, puis entre signifiant et signifi, expression et contenu,
etc.
41 Ibid., p. 68.
42 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (2nd ed.; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 35.

marques se transmet toute l'criture et ne peut donc se clore en une taxinomie finie,
encore moins dans un lexique en tant que tel.... 43 In a closely analogous manner, as Hans
Jonas writes,
the system of universal being which gnosis on its theoretical side
expounds, is centred around the concept of gnosis itself and has
thereby in its very constitution a reference to its becoming known
by the individual knower. This broad metaphysical, theologicocosmological underpinning of the saving power of knowledge,
signified by the appearance of the term on both the subject and
object side of the system, is the first distinctive feature of gnostic
speculation.44
The knowing subject, in Gnosticism, is the pneuma or divine spirit within man; it has no
relation to the empirical personality composed of psyche and the enveloping structures of
ignorance imposed by the demiurge or world-creator and the planetary archons who serve
him: this empirical self is by definition incapable of gnosis.
However, as Jonas's words should remind us, Gnosticism typically had a
transcendental impulse, a concern with salvation, that is wholly lacking in deconstruction.
The language with which Derrida seeks to overturn the priority accorded to la parole over
l'criture by Saussure and other linguists may echo, with its metaphors of the
insaissisable point of origin, of passion, promiscuit dangereuse, usurpation, and la
violence de l'oubli, the Gnostic myth of the passion of Sophia (also called Prunikos: the
prurient) which accounts for the origin of the world. 45 Yet as one of his translators
remarks, Derrida seems to show no nostalgia for a lost presence; 46 and it must be
recognized that it is one thing to preach the liberation of the pneumatikoi from the
oppression of the ignorant demiurge and his archons, and another to preach the liberation
43 Jacques Derrida, La dissmination (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 32.
44 Jonas, Delimitation of the Gnostic PhenomenonTypological and Historical, in The Origins of
Gnosticism: Colloquium of Messina 13-18 April 1966, ed. Ugo Bianchi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), p. 91.
45 De la grammatologie, pp. 54-55. With the exception of the idea of an ungraspable point of origin, these
metaphors are derived from Saussure; however, Derrida intensifies them and gives them a quasi-mythic
structure: his comment on the interlacing of parole and criturePromiscuit dangereuse, nfaste
complicit entre le reflet et le reflet qui se laisse narcissiquement sduire (p. 54)is a tidy summary
of the version of the Fall of the divine Primal Man given in the Poimandres, the foundational text of the
Hermetic gnosis. Cf. Corpus Hermeticum, ed. and tr. A.D. Nock and A.J. Festugire (4 vols.; Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1960), I, 11. For a conflated summary of the Sophia myth, see Jonas, The Gnostic
Religion, pp. 176ff.
46 Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1976; rpt. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), Translator's Preface, p. xvi.

of semiology from la rpression logocentrique.47

This evident difference is, however, less significant than one might at first think.
For as C. H. Dodd observed, any genuinely mystical piety is commonly lacking in
Gnostic texts: Gnosis is not in fact so much knowledge of God, in any profoundly
religious sense, as knowledge about the structure of the higher world and the way to get
there....48 Given the basic paradox of its status as a religion that implodes or deconstructs
other religions by professing to reveal the hidden absence upon which they are
constitutedits status as, in effect, an anti-religionthis general lack of piety in
Gnosticism is hardly surprising. One exception to Dodd's observation would seem to be
The Gospel of Truthbut the undoubted piety of that text is to a large degree focused
upon a mysticism of the Name in which, as Joel Fineman has shown, the primary concern
is the elaboration of a sequence of metaphorical substitutions, the originating term of
which (the Father) is occulted by the very metaphors through which it is proclaimed
although at the same time it is metonymically present in the terms (the Name of the
Father, the Son) which replace it and testify to its absence. Of this carefully nuanced text,
which is commonly attributed to Valentinus himself, Fineman writes:
On the one hand, the Name is a principle of authority prior to its
author. On the other hand, the Name is the devolution of truth as
its own displacement. In both cases the signified is the effect of
the signifier. But what is striking is that in neither case is the
truth, origin, Father, adequate to itself alone: rather, it seems
always to refer elsewhere instantly, backwards and forwards, to
something that we can only call the truth of truth, as it is
bespoken by a Name.49
The piety of this text, which Fineman defines as the piety of metaphoric semiosis, 50 is
mirrored by the semiotic piety of Derrida's doctrine of the occultation of the trace in
the movement of diffrance: Il faut penser la trace avant l'tant. Mais le mouvement de
la trace est ncessairement occult, il se produit comme occultation de soi. Quand l'autre
s'annonce comme tel, il se prsente dans la dissimulation de soi. One can immediately
47 Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 74.
48 C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), p. 101.
49 Joel Fineman, Gnosis and the Piety of Metaphor: The Gospel of Truth, in The Rediscovery of
Gnosticism. Vol. 1: The School of Valentinus, ed. Bentley Layton (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), pp. 296-97.
50 Ibid., p. 293.

agree with Derrida's insistence that Cette formulation n'est pas thologique, comme on
pourrait le croire avec quelque prcipitation.51 It is, precisely, anti-theological, which is
to say (in this case at least), Gnostic.
It might be possible to find in Derrida's acknowledged sourcesNietzsche and
Heidegger in particularcertain clues as to the derivation of his Gnostic orientation. A
central feature of Nietzsche's thought is the irrecoverable loss of any secure metaphysical
presence, the death of God. He writes in one of his poems:
Die Weltein Tor
Zu tausend Wsten stumm und kalt!
Wer das verlor,
Was du verlorst, macht nirgends halt.52
The American critic Harold Bloom has suggested that if philosophy is, as Novalis said,
the desire to be at home everywhere, then Gnosis is closer to what Nietzsche thought the
motive of art: the desire to be elsewhere, the desire to be different. 53 Similarly, one
writer at least has found Gnostic tendencies in the philosophy of Heidegger: Hans Jonas,
whose brilliant success in applying Heidegger's philosophy to the study of Gnosticism
initially seemed to him to confirm the universal validity of that philosophy, later came to
believer that his success was due rather to a remarkable parallelism between the two
structures of thought.54 Rather than speculating on the sources of Derrida's gnosis,
however, I would prefer to dwell upon the fact that on one occasion he seems himself to
point (though in a typically elusive manner) to his own Gnostic affiliations.
Harold Bloom, who is a self-confessed Gnostic, would deny to deconstructionists
the status he claims for himself55for the reason, one may suspect, that his own anxieties
about belatedness would not allow him to admit that, once again, Jacques Derrida was
there before him. But Derrida himself seems in La dissmination to give him the lie. The
hors livre which refaces that book deconstructs the possibility of prefacing the book
which is itself deconstructed by the opening (and conclusive) sentence of the hors livre:
51 Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 69.
52 Friedrich Nietzsche, Vereinsamt, in Gedichte, ed. Jost Hermand (Suttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1964),
p. 24. The worlda gate / To deserts stretching mute and cold! / Who once has lost / What thou hast
lost nowhere stands still.
53 Harold Bloom, Lying against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism, in The School of Valentinus, ed.
Layton, p. 63.
54 Hans Jonas, Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, in The Gnostic Religion, pp. 320-40.
55 Bloom, Lying against Time, p. 60; The Breaking of the Vessels (Wellek Library Lectures; University of
Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-4.

Ceci (donc) n'aura pas t un livre.56 Bobbing and weaving through the prefaces to
Hegel's Phenomenology, Logic, and Philosophy of Right, and the afterword to Marx's
Capital, with footnote excursions into the pseudepigraphic labyrinths of Kierkegaard's
prefaces, Derrida arrives at Lautramont's Chants de Maldororan explicitly Gnostic
text, in the line (one might say) of Carpocrates, the most violently antinomian of the
second-century Gnostics.57 What interests him here is the play of the prface du rengat
to these Songs, in which le Chant sixime se prsente comme le corps du texte effectif,
l'opration relle dont les cinq premiers Chants n'auraient t que la prface didactique,
l'expos 'synthtique', le 'frontispice'.... Derrida asks: O situer, dans la topique du
texte, cette trange dclaration, cette performance-ci qui n'est dj plus dans la prface et
n'est pas encore dans la partie 'analytique' qui semble alors s'engager? The words of
Lautramont which he quotes include the following:
Les cinq premiers rcits n'ont pas t inutiles; ils taient le
frontispice de mon ouvrage, le fondement de la construction,
l'explication pralable de ma potique future.... En consquence,
mon opinion est que, maintenant, la partie synthtique de mon
oeuvre est complte et suffisamment paraphrase. C'est par elle
que vous avez appris que je me suis propos d'attaquer l'homme
et Celui qui le cra. Pour le moment et pour plus tard, vous n'avez
pas besoin d'en savoir davantage! Des considrations nouvelles
me paraissent superflues, car elles ne feraient que rpter, sous
une autre forme plus ample, il est vrai, mais identique, l'nonc
de la thse dont la fin de ce jour verra le premier dveloppement.
Il rsulte, des observations qui prcdent, que mon intention est
d'entreprendre, dsormais, la partie analytique; cela est si vrai
qu'il n'y a que quelques minutes seulement, que j'exprimai le voeu
ardent que vous fussiez emprisonn dans les glandes sudoripares
de ma peau, pour vrifer la loyaut de ce que j'affirme, en
connaissance de cause. Il faut, je le sais, tayer d'un grand
nombre de preuves l'argumentation qui se trouve comprise dans
mon thorme; eh bien, ces preuves existent, et vous savez que je
56 Derrida, La dissmination, p. 9.
57 For an account of Carpocratian Gnosticism, see Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret
Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 267ff.

n'attaque personne, sans avoir des motifs srieux! Je ris gorge

dploye....58
Lautramont is a mask: the wild laughter of the last line of this passage is
Derrida's own, and the statements made there are as close to a programmatic summary of
his own project and its deceptions as Derrida is going to get. For it is precisely in La
dissmination, his own sixth booksixth song, if you likethat Derrida spins his webs
around the necessarily proleptic relation between the text and its preface, offers (in a
preface) an adequate paraphrase of the frontispice/foundation constituted by his
previous five books, andby quoting this passage from Lautramontmocks any reader
who expects an analytic part, with a large number of proofs, still to come. And at the
centre of the programme? Je me suis propos d'attaquer l'homme et Celui qui le Cra.
The strenuous gloom of a revived Gnosticism has seldom been made to seem so
entertaining. Yet that is the atmosphere within which Derrida's laughter resounds.

V
A last comment on Gnosticism may reinforce one's sense of its similarity to
deconstruction as a system of particular appeal to people involved with literature. Like
much

post-modernist

literature,

second-century Gnosticism was

strongly and

dogmatically antimimetic. In the Valentinian gnosis, the fall of Sophia, the primordial
Wisdom-emanation who unwittingly initiates the cosmogonic process, was explicitly
conceived in terms of her mimetic folly.... 59 Mimetic creativity, in The Gospel of Truth,
is a consequence of the anguish and terror of ignorance:
And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to
see. For this reason error became powerful; it fashioned its own
matter foolishly, not having known the truth. It set about making a
creature, with [all its] might preparing, in beauty, the substitute
58 Derrida, La dissmination, p. 43. By ending the quotation at this point, Derrida turns this laughter back
upon the ironic promise of methodical proofs; in Lautramont's text it is aimed rather at the anticipated
reaction of the reader: Je ris gorge dploye, qand je songe que vous me reprochez de rpandre
d'amres accusations contre l'humanit, dont je suis un des membres (cette seule remarque me donnerait
raison!) et contre la Providence.... Oeuvres compltes d'Isidore Ducasse: Les Chants de Maldoror par
le Comte de Lautramont, Posies, Lettres, ed. Maurice Saillet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1963), p. 316.
59 Fineman, Gnosis and the Piety of Metaphor, in The School of Valentinus, ed. Layton, p. 303.

for the truth.60

This recoil from the world, this separation of truth from even the pleromic
archetype of worldly beauty, might with some plausibility be explained as stemming from
a different sort of anguish and terror. Although the problem of the origins of
Gnosticism is one of unresolved complexity, two factors seem to be of recurrent
importance. The first is a revulsion from the Creator-God, the Law, and the prophetic and
apocalyptic claims of Judaism; the second is a matter of the social conditions under the
Roman Empire. What seems to relate the two is the failure of a series of apocalyptic
social movements in Judaea and Samaria, beginning with such minor tumults as the
Samaritan messianic revolt of AD 36the violent repression of which by Pontius Pilate
may have had some influence on the subsequent development of Simonian Gnosticism 61
and culminating in the national risings which resulted in the massacres at Jerusalem
and elsewhere, the destruction of the Temple by the Emperor Titus, and the mass suicide
at Masada. The God of the Old Testament, or rather the God of Jewish apocalyptic
writings, was a God that failed.
The syncretic nature of even the earliest Gnostic systems suggests that the
displacement of anguish and terror from their historical referents in imperial repression
to a generalized anticosmic and antinomian ressentiment may well have been
accomplished in the great urban centres of the eastern empire, where a generalized
knowledge of Greek, Jewish, and other literary traditions was widely available. It is
tempting to suggest that this displacement of historical anguish and terror into gnosis may
have been accomplished by what we would call literary scholars. The Poimandres, the
foundation text of the Hermetic gnosis, is a skilful literary allegory of the opening
chapters of Genesis suffused with philosophical motifs derived from Middle Platonism. 62
Simon Magus, who was treated by Christian polemicists as the source and origin of the
60 The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Robinson et al., p. 38.
61 The episode is recounted by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII.iv.1. On Samaritan messianic
expectations, see R.J. Coggins, Samaritans and Jews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 145-46. R.M.
Grant has speculated that the Simon Magus of Acts 8, identified in Christian heresiological tradition as
the founder of the Simonian Gnosis out of which Valentinus elaborated his system, may have presented
himself as the Ta'eb or restorer of the Samaritans: ...it is at least possible that Simon's gospel was
eschatological as well as magical, and that Gnostic reinterpretation arose out of the failure of his
mission. Gnosticism and Early Christianity (2nd ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p.
73.
62 For the text, see Corpus Hermeticum, ed. And tr. Nock and Festugire, vol. 1. An English translation is
available in Gnosticism: An Anthology, ed. R.M. Grant (London: Collins, 1961). For a summary
description of the Poimandres, see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. To A.D. 220 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 389-92.

various Gnostic schools, is described by a late patristic text, the pseudo-Clementine

Recognitions, as a most vehement orator, trained in the dialectic art, and in the meshes
of syllogisms....63 The Simonian gnosis, as reported by Hippolytus and Irenaeus,
combines a strained use of philosophical language with a curious allegorical allusion to
Homer that makes use of motifs from Jewish Wisdom literature.
Let us consider again the imagery with which the editors of the boundary 2
symposium on textuality celebrated the spread of Derridean critical methodologies:
Suspended in the pallid cast of shadows, our post-modern critical
figures, in an activity that dimly revives disturbing earlier traces
of it, play out dangerously the spider webs of their methods and
desires, their intentions and passions, consciously, futilely,
spinning their knowledgemocking skeletal self-imagesout of
that center into the formless voice of the abyss....
I have argued that the disturbing earlier traces of this activity can be clearly identified,
and have proposed that these were, in part, a reaction to and an escape from the
experience or the memory of imperial repression. Is it too much to suggest that in this
case also one can make out, behind these mocking skeletal self-images, the outlines of
real corpses?
I do not wish to stress the evident analogies between the Gnostic recoil from
history and the present situation, in which another empire is striving to reassert control
over the fringes of its domain, using means (such as the financing of death squads and the
systematic terrorizing of civilian populations)64 which should inspire from its own
citizens a horrified resistancewhile its literary scholars, bemused by the technicalities
of another Gnosis, spin verbal webs in comfortable solipsistic isolation. I will say only
that the deconstructionist enterprise in North America, however brave its nihilistic
posturings, does not strike me as being a courageous endeavour. After speaking with
complacency of confronting the formless voice of the abyss, the editors of the
boundary 2 symposium offer, from Wallace Stevens's poem Cuisine Bourgeoise, an
ironic image of contemporary critical theorists:
... Who, then, are they, seated here?
63 The Clementine Recognitions, tr. B.P. Pratten et al. (Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. III; Edinburgh:
T. And T. Clark, 1867), II.5, p. 195.
64 For a cogent analysis of this situation, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political
Economy of Human Rights (2 vols.; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979).

Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?

Are they men eating reflections of themselves?
I am tempted to reply, in the words of Ecclesiastes:
The fool folds his hands, and eats his own flesh.