Wolosky 1

1) Shira Wolosky "An "Other" Negative Theology: On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking:
Denials," Poetics Today 19:2, Summer 1998, 261-280.

An "Other" Negative Theology; or, the Difference of Language

in Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"
Shira Wolosky

I. Deconstruction and Negative Theology

In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida distinguishes his own discourse from the

tradition of negative theology which he sees as extending from Greek onto-theology through the

Christian centuries.i He feels under "obligation" to do so, given his own scattered remarks on

negative theology in other of his writings; and in the face of the many claims about negative

theology and deconstruction proposed in the writings of others. These have indeed proliferated,

with myriad recent attempts to

save theology for, rather than from, deconstruction; to embrace Derrida within the theological

fold by way of negative theology. These efforts generally rest on a reduction of Derridean

discourse to a kind of subsidiary theology, one which offers valuable contributions to the

theological tradition but itself

requires to be reincorporated within this tradition.

In these readings, Derridean deconstruction is characteristically posed as is in itself

"parasitic" with no "substantive position on its own," one which "itself has nothing to say," but

only can "inhabit[] the [ontological] discourse of others" (Caputo, 24, 30). Derrida's "relation to

the positive is purely parasitical," and "cannot be theologically meaningful by its own lights,"

having "remove[d] itself from communicative practice within human [i.e. "ecclesiastical and

contemplative"] communities" (Klemm, 16-18). Nevertheless, a "process" of deconstruction

recuperable by theology is said to be distinguishable from "certain of its Derridean themes"

which resist theologizing (Hart, 64); a distinction which can also be applied within negative
 Wolosky 2

theology itself, where "theory" in the sense of what theology "asserts" is differentiated from the

"discourse" in which it is "performed" (Sells, 3). Thus, while Derridean deconstruction 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, 24); as a "breach" that "drives to its

limit" the hermeneutical experience, but which finally rejoins hermeneutics towards the "unity of

the two senses of "God"" (Klemm, 20, 22). As Kevin Hart puts it in his book length study, while
"deconstruction is [not] a form of negative theology. . . negative theology is a form of

deconstruction" (Hart, 186), a chiasm in theory given rich historical application by Michael Sells

in his study of specific apophatic writers who, in their practice of "un-saying or speaking-away"

makes retractive discourse itself part of "the effort at transcendence" (Sells, 3), thus unveiling in

the very bosom of ontology its own saving denial.

This attempt to reintegrate deconstruction into theology, however, is extremely

problematic. It evades the force of the Derridean critique of onto-theology. And its attempt to

release the conduct of a discourse from what that discourse "asserts" is one that deconstruction

rigorously questions. These issues are taken up by Derrida himself in "How to Avoid Speaking:

Denials."

There, Derrida's own discussion also centers around the issue of negative theology as a "textual

practice" (HAS, 3); but this will have a decisive force for him in ways unintended within the

discourse of negative theology itself. Despite an apparent similarity between his and negative

theology's "rhetoric of negative determination," he restates that he is not "resifting the procedures

of negative theology," procedures which in fact have quite specific rhetorical formulation:
This, which is called X . . . "is" neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible,
neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside, neither superior nor
inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent. . . Despite
appearances, then, this X is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lend itself
to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and
the structure of predicative discourse. It "is" not and does not say what it "is."
 Wolosky 3

(HAS, 4)

While Derrida himself often proceeds according to negative formulation, against those who

"would like to consider these procedures a simple rhetoric," he rejects association by "simulation

or parody." Language practices cannot be reduced to a question of "mechanical repetition"

(HAS, 4-5). It is fundamental to his entire project that the practice of language is in itself

supremely consequential, that claims and implications inhere in such practice, what he calls the

"experience [of] what happens to speech through speech itself" (HAS, 4-5). Derrida resists

emptying language practices of their implications, with specific consequences for negative

theology, as against his own language of negation: "No, what I write is not "negative theology"

(HAS, 7).

In the course of "How to Avoid Speaking," Derrida addresses questions central to the

status of negative theology within the broader range of theological systems. The attempt to claim

deconstruction for negative theology poses it as revealing within positive theology's assertion of

God as Being and Presence a negative element. It is to claim that, as Kevin Hart writes,

"negative theology performs the deconstruction of positive theology," even while the two 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, 104). Such

confirmation between negative and positive theologies is in fact central to the thinking of

Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings, with Meister Eckhart's, serve as exemplary 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 'affirmative

theologies'" (HAS, 63).ii

Derrida does not contest this mutual implication of negative and positive theology.
Indeed, he peculiarly explores it; but in doing so he questions the escape of negative theology
 Wolosky 4

from ontology. Negation does not in itself guarantee such an escape. Derrida denies that the

form of negative discourse in itself issues in theology, what he calls "the becoming-theological of

all [negative] discourse." Negativity in discourse (such as his own) will neither necessarily

produce divinity, nor support the reversal where God then produces discourse (HAS, 6). But

Derrida also denies that negative discourse within theology de-ontologizes theological structures.

The formulae which 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 predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being

beyond Being" (HAS, 7-8). Derrida reiterates (in a footnote) an earlier statement from Margins

of Philosophy in which he insisted that "differance is not. . . irreducible to any ontological or

theological-- ontotheological-- reappropriation" because it remains without ontology, unlike

negative theology:
Those aspects of differance which are [negatively] delineated are not theological, not
even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies, which are always
concerned with disengaging a superessentiality beyond the finite categores 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,
inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being.(HAS, 63)iii

Negative theology remains "concerned with disengaging a superessentiality" which 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" (HAS, 9-10). As in the Augustinian tradition to which Meister Eckhart repeatedly

refers, negative statements are simultaneously "hyperaffirmative," transmuting "into affirmation

its purely phenomenal negativity" (HAS, 8-9). The "hyper" of "hyperessentiality" (hyperousias)
 Wolosky 5

indicates a "beyond" that essentially means above and more: "God (is) beyond Being but as such

is more (being) than Being" (HAS, 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" (HAS, 32), but

rather as a "hyperbolism" in which "negativity serves the hyper movement." It "obeys the logic

of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds all the hyperessentialisms of Christian

apophases and all the debates that develop around them" (HAS, 32).
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 Derrida's own work. What particularly disturbs the claim by

negative theology to exceed being is "the promise of the presence given to intuition or vision,"

(HAS, 9) and more specifically and essentially, the apophatic movement as an elevation "toward

that contact or vision, that pure intuition of the ineffable, that silent union with that which

remains inaccessible to speech" (HAS, 10); "where profane vision ceases and where it is

necessary to be silent" (HAS, 22). Derrida here assembles 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 whether

the formulae of negation in fact escape ontology. It investigates how ontology implies stances

toward language, stances which apophatic discourse only intensifies and confirms. Indeed,

Derrida begins by defining negative theology as an attitude toward language:

"[N]egative theology" has come to designate a certain typical attitude toward language,
and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, an attitude toward semantic or
conceptual determination. Suppose. . . that negative theology consists of
considering that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence, in truth
to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently, only a
negative ("apophatic") attribution can claim to approach God, and to prepare us
 Wolosky 6

for a silent intuition of God. (HAS, 4)

The interiority of "intuition," just as the immediacy of "vision" or "contact" all militate towards

the silence that itself marks their attainment. To be "beyond Being" is in fact the same as to be

beyond language. The foundation of negative theology as a discourse -- and this is how Derrida

finally treats it -- is its essentially negative attitude towards discourse: its commitment that "every

predicative language is inadequate to the essence."

Such a negative attitude towards language would seem to be the exact site of intersection

between Derrida's own deconstructive discourse and the discourse of negative theology. So

indeed it has been taken. Deconstruction, it is claimed,

throws a scare into our discourse, destroys a bit of the prestige and self-importance of
'reference,' and ends up creating a salutary distrust in the power of language to do
what it sets out to do.

Just so, negative theology

is a salient example of this recognition that language is caught up in a self-defeating

enterprise. . . so that language keeps on saying what it says, undoing what it does,
and in general failing again and again to make good on its claims. (Caputo, 29)iv

This effort to enlist deconstruction for negative theology as an anti-linguisticist stance misreads

deconstruction. It is important to recall that Derrida's discourse of "deconstruction" is itself a

grammatology, a "thinking of differance or the writing of writing" (HAS, 18). Far from

supporting the notion of a position to be achieved beyond the faulty medium of language, it

investigates 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 implications, to the historical sedimentation of the language which

we use" (Discussion, 271). It is to take language absolutely at its indispensable word.

This impossibility of evading language lays the ground for Derrida's critique 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,
 Wolosky 7

both in apophatic rhetoric and in the negative linguistic attitude that continues to direct negative

theology. Derrida makes this point by way of a text central to Dionysius's Mystical Theology:
Now, however, that we are to enter the darkness beyond intellect, you will not find a brief
[brakhylogian] discourse but a complete absence of discourse [alogian] and
intelligibility [anoesian]. In affirmative theology the logos descends from what is
above down to the last, and increases according to the measure of the descent
toward an analogical multitude. But here, as we ascend from the highest to what
lies beyond, the logos is drawn inward according to the measure of the ascent.
After all ascent it will be wholly without sound and wholly united to the
unspeakable [aphthegkto^]. (HAS, 11).

Dionysius here is discussing the relation between the negative theology of his Mystical Theology

in reference to the positive theology he had explored in other works such as the Divine Names,

which was used as a textbook for analogical knowledge of God in the medieval West. In

Dionysian terms, descent founds positive theology, as the movement from God toward creation,

which makes analogical knowledge of him possible; while ascent is the movement of negative

theology up out of things created towards the divine beyond them.v But, as Derrida points out,

these two movements are not merely reversals of each other, something Dionysius himself would

confirm. The negative process, althoug for Dionysius ultimately prior, is no less determined by

ontology that is the affirmative one. Moreover, both negative and positive are functions of the

rhetoric which they employ, are the descent and ascent up a ladder of being which is inextricably

a ladder of language: "the apophatic movement of discourse would have to negatively retraverse

all the stages of symbolic theology and positive predication. It would thus be coextensive with it,

confined to the same quantity of discourse" (HAS,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 corresponds to a rarefaction of signs, figures, symbols," which finally
issues beyond signs altogether:
 Wolosky 8

"By the passage beyond the intelligible itself, the apophatikai theologai aim toward absolute

rarefaction, toward silent union with the ineffable" (HAS, 10-11). As in the Saussurean sign-

theory which 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, one which

ideally dispenses with language and representation altogether. The Saussurean model, however,

itself duplicates a sign-theory deeply rooted in the discourse of theology, from Augustine's On

the Trinity through Dionysius and into Meister Eckhart.vi To avoid speaking 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

comments, "'Because of this, be silent.' Without that you lie and you commit sin." (HAS, 51-52).

As to signs, they undergo the "rarefaction" Derrida speaks of in relation to Dionysius, which

Rene' Roques further specifies in his analysis of Dionysian symbology:

The symbol must be purified to rejoin the hidden significance that it envelops. . . For it is
also a question of disengaging in all its purity the element properly signficative
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
intelligence, which can compromise the entire symbolic process. (Structures, 167-
68).

The ascent from symbol or signifier to the signified it is intended to convey is a process of

purgation or purification, of stripping away or negating the outward envelope as obscuring the

"signification of 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" (HAS, 45). This again confirms

Derrida's claim that at issue in this theology, despite its negativity, is in fact an ontology: "Is it

arbitrary to still call truth or hyper-truth this unveiling which is perhaps no longer an unveiling of

Being?. . . I do not believe so" (HAS, 45). The signs, even the negative signs, presuppose,
depend upon, and signify "what is beyond Being in being," in the language of Dionysius. And
 Wolosky 9

this ontology conducts an axiology 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" (HAS, 50).

It is here that the relevance of deconstructive grammatology to negative theology

emerges, but in an obverse way to those who would enlist Derrida 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 very
beyond-Being that is cited as what transcends language instead is exposed as being produced by

the particular linguistic procedures of mystical theology. "Figuration and the so-called places

(topoi) of rhetoric constitute the very concern of apophatic procedures" (HAS, 27). The very

language this theology would dispense with, in contrast makes it possible and defines it.

Thus, in his "Post-Scriptum" to a volume on Derrida and Negative Theology Derrida remarks:

"the modality of apophasis, despite its negative or interrogative value, is often that of the

sentence, verdict or decision, of the statement" (283). Paul Ricoeur, commenting on an effort by

Dominic Crossan to

incorporate Derridean deconstruction into theological discourse, responds: "I doubt that a

negative theology can be based on Derrida's deconstructive program" (Ricoeur, 74). Negative

theology can indeed not be assimilated to deconstruction, except as a self-critique which would

no longer be recuperable to onto-theology, one where the negations of negative theology would

interrupt (hyper)essentialism rather than confirming it. It is this grammatological critique of

negative theology that "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" offers.

II. The Difference of Language

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" (HAS, 20). But, then, how is his
 Wolosky 10

own negative discourse to be situated? Is there an "other" to this Greek tradition in which it

might reside, one which might be called, as Derrida suggests in an interview, Hebraic, as the

"outskirts of the Greek philosophical traditions [which] have as their "other" the model of the

Jew, the Jew-as-other?" (Kearney, 107). Or, as he similarly asks in "How to Avoid Speaking:

Denials," is there "a tradition of thought that is neither Greek nor Christian? In other words,

what of Jewish and Islamic thought in this regard?" (HAS, 31). In "How to Avoid Speaking,"

however, Derrida avoids speaking about such an "other"; indeed, he (speaks to) avoid speaking
of it a multiplicity of times. He will not "speak of what my birth, as one says, should have made

closest to me: the Jew, the Arab" (HAS, 66); having "decided not to speak of negativity or of

apophatic movements in, for example, the Jewish or Islamic traditions" (HAS, 53); choosing "to

say nothing, once again, of the mysticisms or theologies in the Jewish, Islamic, or other

traditions" (HAS, 55).

This reticence is neither arbitrary nor merely evasive. It refuses the temptation to

schematize an antonym to "Hellenism" which might then be called "Hebraism." In the area of

negative theology, such distinctions act like a siren: the seduction is intense, but so is the doom.

Within "Hellenism" itself there are severe ruptures, as Derrida insists in "How to Avoid

Speaking." The khora of the Timaeus represents a second "tropic of negativity" radically

"heterogeneous" from the negativity of the beyond-Being that "serves the hyper movement"

which "heralds all the hyperessentialisms of Christian apophases and all the debates that develop

around them" (HAS, 31-32). Against hyper- essentialism, the khora introduces a second

language into the Timaeus, one of "disproportion and heterogeneity," which Derrida more fully

explores elsewhere (HAS, 35-38).

As to "Hebraism," this has, since ancient times, unfolded with "Hellenism" deeply

involuted within it. Controversy continues with regard to the precise moments, kinds, extents,
and philosophical implications of this intercalation.vii But, besides the obvious fact that

Christianity itself is a mode of Hebraic/ Hellenism, Judaism in its historical development

 Wolosky 11

adapted, transformed, polemicized, and apotropaically warded off Aristotelian, Platonist,

Neoplatonist, as well as Gnostic movements within and from the Hellenistic world. As Gershom

Scholem writes, there is no "essence" to Judaism reducible to a "finite sequence of historical,

philosophical, doctrinal, or dogmatic judgments and statements" (Judaism, 505).

Thus, as historical terms, "Hebraism" and "Hellenism" are deeply problematic. But

without historical situation, the terms threaten to degenerate into an even emptier sloganism,

becoming, to use Derrida's terms in Margins of Philosophy, a mere "displacement" rather than "a
certain difference, a certain trembling, a certain decentering that is not the position of an other

center" (MoP 38). There is, in this regard, forceful validity in Derrida's refusal to construct a

Hebraist alternative that would be no more than inversive reduction, choosing instead to "leave

this immense place empty" (HAS, 53) as "a certain void" (HAS, 31) by avoiding speaking about

it.

At the same time, to dismiss Derrida's relation to Judaic issues as one "subgroup" among

many "similar connections between Derrida and many cultural and political movements" may

count as ideological evasion (Hart, 65, x). This suspicion deepens when difference is described

as a "mode of being" that, however, has failed, and "is" only "as the wandering sophist or

stranger, whose discomfort with the world extends even to the nomadic existence it leads"

(Klemm, 18). It becomes nearly chilling when a "rabbinic interpretation" with which Derrida

may be aligned is described as a "form of Scripture that can occur 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, 274). Here, in a serious misappropriation of Derridean senses of otherness, the

"strange" is condemned as a betrayal of the same, as an absence, if not denial, of its redemptive

presence, only to be redeemed through erasive incorporation. But this is utterly to misinterpret
both Derridean notions of difference and the critique they launch against just such divinization of

erasive presence.
 Wolosky 12

Derrida's writings evidence countless Jewish intercrossings: with Emmanuel Levinas and

Edmond Jabes; with midrash, strongly evoked, for example, in Derrida's own interpretation of

"Des Tours de Babel," where he is concerned with naming and with the divine, Hebrew,

"unpronounceable name" (TB, 170); and with Walter Benjamin, who is linked to Babel in the

same essay through a "discourse on the proper name and on translation" (TB, 175). Indeed, "Des

Tours de Babel" provides hints as to precisely where Derridean and Judaic discourses may be

mutually illuminating, regarding, for example, the limits of negative theology which "How to
Avoid Speaking" explores.

For, in "How to Avoid Speaking," Derrida nevertheless does gesture towards an "other"

apophatics: "The experience 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" (HAS, 14). Derrida's "other" apophatics registers at once a first

difference: in the stance towards language, even before ontology. The negativity which should

"rarefy" discourse, as Dionysius' purgational apophatics does, here instead "commits me to

speak." This linguistic difference is directly tied, however, to ontological questioning.

Traditional apophatics claims to go beyond being, to break free of ontological determination

through progressive negations. Indeed, this is the basis for modern attempts to see it as

deconstructive. But Derrida distinguishes its negative recourse from ontological rupture. A

controlling unity remains between negative and affirmative 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" (HAS, 11). Against this, Derrida contrasts a

"thinking of difference" that is "[a]lien, heterogeneous, 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
apophatics" (HAS, 11).

It is this "thinking of difference" as "heterogeneous" and irreducible to "mute vision" that

 Wolosky 13

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" apophatics, as one that may "contain within itself the principle of

its interruption," has peculiarly linguisticist implication, 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 of an ultimacy that resists

reappropriation. The line of demarcation is language itself, language as itself the boundary of the

negative theology that Derrida traces in "How to Avoid Speaking."

"Des Tours de Babel" suggests how what Derrida encounters across this border of

language may be called Hebraism. There, Derrida poses the (divine) notion of "the origin of

language" as also its disruption, an "origin of tongues" in the sense of founding "the multiplicity

of idioms (TB, 167). Disruption erupts, moreover, 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" (TB, 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;" (TB, 169).

This unity, however, signifies not only a "peaceful transparency of the human community" but

also "a colonial violence." Against this, God "imposes and opposes his name, he ruptures the

rational transparency but interrupts also the colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism" (TB,

174). As Edith Wyschogrod observes, linking Derrida to Levinas, what Derrida launches is

critique of ontological thinking as a mode of "transcendental oppression, that of the Same and the

One," where "metaphysical oppression is a source of "oppression in the world" as war and
violence (Wyschogrod, 50). To measure this disruption by the standard of ontological unity, as

its loss, is to miss Derrida's critique of ontological unity as violence.

 Wolosky 14

Derrida, in "Des Tours de Babel," refers to Benjamin rather than Levinas, through the

figure of translation:

In giving his name, God also appealed to translation, not only because between the

tongues that had suddenly become multiple and confused, but first of his name, of

the name he had proclaimed, given, and which should be translated as confusion

to be understood, hence to let it be understood that it is difficult to translate and so

to understand. . . he pleads for a translator. . . The law does not command without
demanding to be read, deciphered, translated. It demands transference. . . Even in

God, and it is necessary to follow rigourously the consequence: in his name. (TB,

184)

The divine name, ruptured rather than unitary, inaugurates linguistic multiplicity, 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. With this articulation of difference, however,

Benjamin, and Derrida as well, has entered a Hebraist language discourse, such as has been most

fully theorized by Gershom Scholem. Benjamin himself, as Scholem recounts, undertook his

own language philosophy in conjunction with Scholem's, as for example in "The Task of the

Translator" (Benjamin, 34, 121).viii What distinguishes the views on language of both Scholem

and Benjamin is perhaps above all its positive status, seen as a peculiarly Hebraist commitment,

with each in his own way responding to what Scholem calls "the Jew's special attachment to the

world of language" (Benjamin, 106-07). Thus, Benjamin writes: "Revelation lies in the

metaphysically acoustic sphere" (Biale, 193). In Scholem, this "metaphysically positive attitude

towards language as God's own instrument" is presented as singular to Jewish tradition, even in
its mysticism:
 Wolosky 15

Kabbalism is distinguished by an attitude towards language which is quite unusually

positive. Kabbalists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding
language as something more precious 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. (Major, 15)

This "superabundantly positive delineation of language" (NG, 62) as "the medium in

which the spiritual life of man is accomplished, or consummated" (NG, 60) serves as the opening

topic of Scholem's essay devoted 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. This assertion of language, however, by no means abnegates negation.

Scholem's language theory pursues negativity as both fundamental and initiatory. Not unlike the

apophatics which Derrida explores in "How to Avoid Speaking," the divine in its ultimacy is

designated as ineffable. The great Name of God had already in Rabbinic tradition been

"withdrawn from the acoustic sphere and become[] unpronouncable" (NG, 67). In this, however,

the Name institutes language and world ("the alphabet is the original source of language and at

the the same time the original source of being," NG, 75), even as it stands beyond them,

"completely withdrawn into the realm of the ineffable" (NG, 67). This transcendent ultimacy

comes in mystical writings to be designated in negative terms, as "En-Sof," without-end; a Name

which is "nameless" (NG, 175). Although the ultimate source of all creative process, "this name

has no "meaning" in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete signification.

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" (NG, 194).

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 himself" (NG, 181).
 Wolosky 16

The letters of the divine Name(s) are not only "condensations of the energy" which radiate forth

in creation, but "represent the linguistic innerness of the cosmic process." (NG, 175)

Linguistic differentation, 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 original force of all linguistic movement in En-Sof" (NG, 182). Linguistic differentiation is

then 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" (NG, 170).

Scholem's discourse has complex links with the Neoplatonist tradition that Derrida

critiques. This is a topic he himself explores. In, for example, his essay on "La Lutte entre le

Dieu de Plotin et le Dieu de la Bible dans la Kabbale Ancienne," Scholem traces the very term

"En-Sof" as an "absence of name" to Neoplatonist negations (Lutte, 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 (Lutte, 29). Indeed, under the

aegis of language figures, the "En-Sof" itself becomes associated with lettristic activity, as the

"point of departure which effects all articulation," or, in the words of a 12th century Kabbalist:

"The alef [first letter of the alphabet] corresponds to an essence the most intimate and the most

hidden . . . which unites with infinity and unlimitedness" (Lutte, 47).

What this linguisticist figuration distinguishes within Hebraist discourse is a sense of negativity

or interruption within 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 Kabblah from Neoplatonist continuities of being (Aphorism 7), and in contrast

describes a passageway through Nothingness as within the creative act itself (Aphorism 5).ix The
divine Nothingness emerges more fully still in Scholem's essay on "Scho"pfung aus Nichts und

Selbstverschra"nkung Gottes," in association with the Lurianic image of Zimzum, the self-
 Wolosky 17

contraction of God.x This Scholem describes as a "double movement" both "within God himself"

and also from him into world, such that divine nothingness not only empties space for the

coming into being of creation but continually 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" (Scho"pfung, 117-119).

The differentiations of language, penetrating divinity itself, thus imply a negativity which
is both ultimate and generative. This in turn implies an axiology of language with distinctive

features. Where traditional apophatics sees language, despite the essential role it in fact plays, as

a mere instrument of ascent, secondary, and finally 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 negative conception of
language in Christian mysticism. It is language, or languages, 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. (Reification,
55).xi

This difference emerges most dramatically through the trope of writing Scholem delineates,

where writing constitutes the founding divine activity, as 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 signature of God-- precedes the act of speaking.
With the result that, in the final analysis, speech comes into being from the sound-
evolution of writing, and not vice versa. (NG, 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 (NG, 165-166). But in this sense,
 Wolosky 18

"linguistic mysticism is at the same time a mysticism of 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" (NG, 167). This grants priority not only to language, now raised

into the highest "metaphysical sphere" (NG, 176), but to writing: "The letters, which are

configurations of the divine creative force, thus represent the highest forms" (NG, 168).

This elevation of writing represents a dramatic contrast to the attitude towards writing, as

the extreme of language, in the Dionysian tradition. As Rene' Roque observes:

Discourse in effect is composed of sensible elements to which a unique signification no
doubt attaches, but which the voice, and even more, writing, must dissociate: "It
must be acknowledged. . . that we use the elements, the syllables and the words,
of writing and of discourse for the necessity of the senses" (Divine Names 708 D).
But these senses . . . can only perceive the idea by way of the succession of
elements of discourse and in the reciprocal exteriority of their diverse parts. In
other words, no intelligible object can be delivered to the senses in its totality and
simulteneity; and that constitutes their incurable poverty. (Univers, 203).

The ultimate object of Dionysian devotion cannot tolerate the intrusion of language, with its

succession of elements and the "reciprocal exteriority of their diverse parts." Its totality and

simulteneity 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 writing of writing" (HAS, 9).

Negative discourses reside at an unstable border, which ever holds open the possibility of each

crossing into the other: Neoplatonist, Christian, and Jewish. And yet, Derrida poses his

grammatology against negative theology:

What differance, 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,
 Wolosky 19

nor even from absence, and even less from some hyperessentiality. (HAS, 9)

A difference that penetrates, rather than resolving into the very sources of being, in Derrida

emerges as a discourse of writing, of the "trace." Founded neither in presence nor hyper-

essentiality, it instead pursues a movement through and of negativity, a movement which

emerges as language. Derrida's discourse must assuredly be distinguished from Scholem's (Alter,

86-87), and indeed can not be assigned as Hebraist in any direct or prescriptive sense. His

Hebraism, rather, emerges on what he calls the "outskirts of the Greek philosophical tradition. .

.as their 'other'" (Kearney, 107), that is, less as a fixed position in itself than as a stance for

interrogation. But if, as Derrida also suggests, the "strange dialogue between the Jew and the

Greek [takes] the form of infinite separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of

the other," (WD 153), it is language that demarcates this irreducible difference. 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" (WD 116) is to cross a

border into, and reflect back from, a commitment to language that also marks Hebraism. As

Derrida writes in Writing and Difference, "The difference between metaphysical ontotheology on

the one hand and the thought of Being (of difference) on the other signifies the essential

importance of the letter" (WD, 146).

Derrida dedicates "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," to an "obligation" to speak, to a

"trace" and a "promise" which "always inscribe themselves in the body of a language, in its

vocabulary and syntax," saying also that "one must be able to rediscover the trace, still unique, in

other languages, bodies, and negativities" (HAS, 38). Derrida here embraces the conditions of

language, as heterogeneous, multiple space of inscription, one

which, far from demanding reduction of difference between "other languages, bodies and

negativities" instead authorizes them. Negation plays a crucial role, not against language, but as
a sustaining difference without which discourse itself collapses. This finally re-stages negative
 Wolosky 20

theology itself, which, even as an attempt to avoid speaking, nevertheless "takes place," has in its

very denials already plunged into discourse. In doing so, it already points
toward the other (other than Being) who calls or to whom this speech is addressed -- even
if it speaks only in order to speak, or to say nothing. This call of the other, having
always already preceded the speech to which it has never been present a first time,
announces itself in advance as a recall. Such a reference to the other will always
have taken place. Prior to every proposition and even before all discourse in
general -- discourse even beyond all nihilisms and negative dialectics, preserves a
trace of the other. A trace of an event older than it or of a "taking-place" to come,
both of them: here there is neither an alternative nor a contradiction. (HAS, 28)

The very negations of negative theology, far from abnegating discourse, become inscribed within

it, where the other is neither possessed at the expense of language nor incorporated within

language, but rather institutes, as its "trace," the "taking-place" of address itself, of call and recall.

Negative theology then itself becomes, as Derrida puts it in his "Post-Script," a "voice that

multiplies itself." For, "it is necessary to be more than one to speak, several voices are necessary

for that" (283). In "How to Avoid Speaking," Derrida places negation not as an attempt to evade

the conditions of discourse, but rather as what underwrites them in obligation.

Shira Wolosky
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Notes

1. Derrida is careful to assert from the outset that there is not one negative theology, but a body
of material that remains, however, historically situated and which he places "within a certain
Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition" (HAS, 4).

2. 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," (HAS, 65). Foshay, in reviewing Derridean stances
that distinguish deconstruction from that of negative theology, discusses the relation to Marion
(2-4), but carries it into a discussion of authorial subjectivity.

3. Derrida is citing from MoP (6). WD returns to this theme a number of times, as when Derrida
comments that in Meister Eckhart "The negative moment of the discourse on God is only a phase
of positive ontotheolgy," (337 n. 37). See also pp. 116, 146-149,
 Wolosky 21

189, 271.

4. Caputo, 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" (176).

5. See Lossky for further discussion of these determinations of ascent and descent, as well as the
relation between negative and affirmative theology.

6. For further discussion of the theological structure of sign-theory, see Wolosky, "Derrida, Jabe
s, Levinas," and Language Mysticism.

7. On this immense topic, see for example, Moshe Idel, "Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism;" and
also Scholem, "La Lutte," discussed below.

8. For discussion of Scholem's relation to Benjamin, see Biale, 120-121. Also Handelman, Alter.

9. Nathan Rotenstreich discusses Scholem's contrast in the Aphorisms between Neoplatonist

emanation and Kabbalistic creation, which he calls an "interruption within the procedures of
being" (609). See also Biale, who speaks of "a differentiation within the divine itself" (Biale, 59)
and the contrast with Neoplatonism, "Aphorisms, 11-112, 115-117.

10. It is impossible here to review the Lurianic Kabbalah and its notion of tzimtzum as divine
"self-negation," as Biale calls it (Biale, 60). See, for example, Scholem, Major Trends; and
David Novak.

11. cf. Kabbalah, where Idel notes that the Kabbalist generally "felt his language was adequate to
convey his mystical feeling," (219); "even the spiritual world is adequately projected onto the
structure of linguistic material," (235-36). I have also discussed this positive linguistic
commitment in Hebraism in "Pharisaic."

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. Necessary Angels. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, Mass.: Haruvard
University Press, 1982. Cited as "Biale."

Biale, David. "Gershom Scholem's Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and
Commentary," in Gershom Scholem, ed. H. Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1897. Cited as
"Aphorism."

John D. Caputo, "Mysticism and Transgression: Derrida and Meister Eckhart, Derrida and
 Wolosky 22

Deconstruction ed. Hugh J. SIlverman New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 24, 30.

Jacques Derrida, "Discussion" in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and
Eugenio Donato, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, 265-272.

Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Languages of the Unsayable, eds. S. Budick and
W. Iser, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Cited as HAS.

Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Derrida, "Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices," in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H.
Coward and T. Foshay, Albany: State University Press of New York, 1992, 283-323.

Derrida, "Des Tours de Babel," trans. Joseph Graham, in Difference in Translation ed. Joseph
Graham, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985, 165-205. Cited as TB.

Derrida, Writing and Difference, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Cited as WD.

Foshay, Toby. "Introduction: Denegation and Resentment," in

Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay, Albany: State University Press of
New York, 1992, 1-24.

Handelman, Susan. fragments of Redemption. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,

1994.

Hart, Kevin. The Tresspass of the Sign, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Moshe Idel, "Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,"
Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed Lenn E. Goodman,State University of New York Press,
1992, 319-352.

Idel, Kabbalah New Perspectives New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Idel, "Reification of Language in Jewish Mysticism," in Mysticism and Language, ed. S. Katz,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 42-79.

Joy, Morny, "Conclusion: Divine Reservations," in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H.
Coward and T. Foshay, Albany: State University Press of New York, 1992, 255-282.

Kearney, Richard, "Jaques Derrida," Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The
Phenomenological Heritage, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984, 105-26.

Klemm, David E. "Open Secrets: Derrida and Negative Theology" in Negation and Theology ed.
 Wolosky 23

Robert P. Scharlemann, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 8-24.

Lossky, Vladimir, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge: James Clarke,
1957.

Novak, David, "Self-Contraction of the Godhead in Kabbalistic Theology," in Neoplatonism and

Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, 299-
318.

Ricoeur, Paul, "A Response," Biblical Research Vol. XXIV-XXV 1979-80, 70-79.

Roques, Rene'. Structures theologiques de la gnose a Richard de Saint-Victor. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1962. Translations here is my own.

Roques, L'univers dionysien. Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 1983. Translations here are my own.

Rotenstreich, Nathan, "Symbolism and Transcendence: On Some Philosophical Aspects of

Gershom Scholem's Opus," Review of Metaphysics 31, 1977-78, 604-14.

G. Scholem. "Judaism" in eds. A.A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Florhr, Contemporary Jewish
Religious Thought, New York: 1987.

Scholem. "La Lutte entre le Dieu de Plotin et le Dieu de la Bible dans la Kabbale Ancienne" in
Le Nom et les Symboles de Dieu dans la mystique juive Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 1983, 17-53.
Cited as "Lutte." Translations here are my own.

Scholem. "The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah," Diogenes 79 (1972):
59-80 and Diogenes 80 (1972): 165-94.

Scholem. "Scho"pfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschra"nkung Gottes"

Eranos Jahrbuch 25 1956, 87-119. Translations here are my own.

Michael A. Sells. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Wolosky, Shira. "Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse," Prooftexts 2

(1982), 283-302.

Wolosky, Language Mysticism. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995.

Wolosky, "Pharisaic," Common Knowledge, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall, 1993, 66-80.

Edith Wyschogrod, "How to Say No in French," in Negation and Theology, ed. Robert P.
Scharlemann, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 8-24.
Wolosky 24
 Wolosky 25

i. Jacques Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Languages

of the Unsayable, eds. S. Budick and W. Iser, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989. Derrida is careful to assert from the
outset that there is not one negative theology, but a body of
material that remains, however, historically situated and which he
places "within a certain Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition" (4).

ii. Derrida himself cites the work of Jean-Luc Marion as an

instance of the attempt to recover deconstruction 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," (65).
here Loshay? Here put in re discussion of Foshay: reviewing these
issues; but taking it in direction of subjectivity, authorship
rather than language.
Here footnote Lossky et al on neg/positive mutuality.

iii. Hart concedes that in this elaboration of his topic Derrida

reiterates earlier sporadic remarks, p. 184. add from WD 146 etc.
WD returns to this theme a number of times: e.g. 337 n. 37 In
Meister Eckhart "The negative moment of the discourse on God is
only a phase of positive ontotheolgy." 146-149.

iv. Caputo, 29, here based in Meister Eckhart. Cf. Hart p. 176
"What then is negative about 'negative theology'? I have said that
negative theology denies the adequacy of the language and concepts
of positive theology." cf p. 186.

v.see LM ch 1 fn 28, here Lossky

vi. see Derrida Jabes Levinas. For Augustinian background see

Language Mysticism.

vii. See, just one discussion of this enormous area, Moshe Idel,
"Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance," Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed Lenn E.
Goodman,State University of New York Press, 1992, 319-352.

viii.For discussion of Scholem's relation to Benjamin, see Biale,

120-121. Also Handelman, Alter.

ix. re Nathan Rotenstreich calls an "interruption within the

procedures of being" (609??), check cf There is, as David Biale
explicates, "a differentiation within the divine itself" (Biale,
59).

x. "Scho"pfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschra"nkung Gottes"

Eranos Jahrbuch 25 1956, 87-119, pp. 117-119.
It is impossible here to review the Lurianic Kabbalah and its
 Wolosky 26

notion of tzimtzum as divine "self-negation," as Biale calls it

(60). See David Novak, "Self-Contraction of the Godhead in
Kabbalistic Theology," in Goodman. 299-318.

xi.re Idel: cf Reification of language etc. note New K: 219,

language adequate; and 235-6.