Negative Theology in Marguerite Porete and Jacques Derrida

In his book on Deconstructing Theology, Mark C. Taylor has

outlined some themes of a postmodern AtheologyA: ADeconstruction

directs our attention to critical problems which merit serious

consideration: the death of God, the disappearance of the self,

the erasure of the (A)uthor, the interplay of absence and

presence and of silence and speech, the encounter with death, the

experience of exile, the insatiability of desire, the

inevitability of delay, the burden of totality, the repression of

difference, the otherness of Other, the subversion of authority,

the end of the book, the opening of textuality, and the advent of

writing.A (xix). Such a theology, as both a-theistic and yet

profoundly religious, is reminiscent of the theistic tradition of

negative theology in the West since Plato. While Taylor=s

themes clarify much of the postmodern situation, in particular

the work of Jacques Derrida, the chief spokesperson of the

postmodern movement known as deconstruction, they also

inadvertently and retrospectively shed light on the negative

theology of a little known mystic of the 14th century, Marguerite

Porete. Porete was burned at the stake by the Paris inquisition

in 1310, the first person burned in that inquisition. Her

mystical treatise, The Mirror of Simple Souls, had been condemned and

burned earlier and, since she presumably did not recant, it was

burned again along with her. Yet it survived. It will not be

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possible to address all the themes of the postmodern theology

outlined by Taylor, but many of these themes, especially the

disappearance of the self, the interplay of absence and presence

and silence and speech, the insatiability of desire, subversion

of authority, and the advent of writing loom so large in

Marguerite=s own pre-modern version of a negative theology that

she almost appears to subvert our periodizing categories of

modern, pre-modern, postmodern. When we examine M=s treatise in

light of the themes put forth by Mark Taylor, we may be surprised

to see how postmodern this pre-modern person sounds! This paper

will examine these themes in Marguerite, as well as viewing

negative theology through the lens of Jacques Derrida=s

engagement with it.

The postmodern deconstructionist theme of a presence which

is an absence in continual dialectical relation finds explicit

recognition in Marguerite=s=s treatise. Marguerite begins her

discourse by using the literary device of a courtly love

narrative or AexemplumA as prologue. Taken from the Roman

d=Alexandre by Alexander of Bernay, Marguerite=s version of this

favorite medieval tale is told by the figure of Love, Amour, who

tells of a maiden of Agreat heart and noble characterA who fell

in love with what she heard of Alexander (the Great) as a lord

AfarawayA who is yet Aso close to her.A1 Because this lord and

1Translations are taken from Ellen Babinsky, The Mirror of Simple Souls, unless otherwise indicated, and will be cited by Chapter and page number in this edition. Ch. 1, 80.

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his love are so unattainable for the maiden, she resolves to have

an image painted of him. While she is creating her image of him,

the lord makes her a present of another AimageA or memory of him,

in the form of the book itself, the Mirror, which as she says

Amakes present in some fashion His love itselfA (Ch.1, 80).

Thus, the book, the image, the soul, the love, the lover, are all

self-reflecting mirrors. This veritable house of mirrors

reflects but one object and that an invisible one, the

Aannihilated souls who only remain in will and desire of love,A

as the subtitle of the work has it. Mark=s Taylor=s meditation

on AThe Empty MirrorA in his volume on Deconstructing Theology bears a

curious if contrapuntal resemblance to Marguerite=s play with

mirrors, when he says, ANot only the artist, but we ourselves

seem to have disappeared in a play of mirrorsA or to Sartre=s

Estelle: AI feel so queer.... When I can=t see myself, I begin to

wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make

sure, but it doesn=t help much.... I=ve six mirrors in my

bedroom. They are there. I can see them. But they don=t see

me... how empty it is, a glass in which I=m absent!A (89)

The image of Alexander introduced in the Prologue becomes in

the dialogue the figure of AFarNear,A LoingPrès, the only male

figure in the work. The name AFarNearA already de-stabilizes the

relation of the loved one to the lover. The name itself is a

contradiction, a presence that is also an absence, and an absence

that is also a presence, just as the painting and the book

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represent absences and presences at the same time. Under the

constraints of the courtly love ethic employed by the narrative

in the Prologue, Alexander and his counterpart AFarNearA remain

only a desire for presence that is never fully met, an

indefinitely deferred desire, one that could become insatiable

were it not for the Aapophasis of desireA operating in the work.2

Marguerite deliberately introduces this character within the

imaginary world of the courtly love narrative, it seems, in order

to emphasize the impossibility of the attainment of desire. She

names her desire at the beginning of the treatise with the

narrative in order to deconstruct it with the dialogue by the end

of the work. Marguerite=s apophaticism of desire involves a

critique of the courtly love tradition she employs but subverts

throughout the treatise. Presence and absence are thus continual

ApresencesA haunting the discourse.

Like the postmodernists and the modernists before them,

Marguerite Porete preached a deliberate program of subverting

authority, a program with political implications which more than

any other factors contributed to her demise at the hands of the

Inquisition. In her treatise, Marguerite sets up a fateful

opposition between the AGreat Church,A composed of those who are

God=s true lovers, and the ALittle ChurchA of ecclesiastics and

pedants who sit in positions of power and authority within the

2The term is Michael Sells= in his elegant study, The Mystical Languages of Unsaying, especially Chap. 5, AApophasis of Desire and the Burning of Marguerite Porete.A

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church and academy. By setting up an opposition between the way

of Reason and that of Love, she joined battle in her text with

the patriarchal rationality of the hierarchical church, and

continually showed it up as stupid. Reason must eventually

expire and does so quite dramatically before Love can have Her

way with the Soul. She overtly condemns the learning of the

ALittle ChurchA when she says, Aneither your greatest

philosophers, nor biblical scholars, nor those who pursue love

and the virtues, can understand this, but only those who are

guided by true love (fine amor).... To be so guided is a gift

that can come in an instant.A3 She sees the mission of those

"simple souls" like herself as the teaching and nurturing of

"Sainte Église la petite," the Little Church ruled by reason

rather than love (Ch. 43, 122). She consequently sets out to

overturn at least on a spiritual plane the hierarchical

domination by clerics and academics over true spiritual adepts.

In her treatise, but not in reality, AHoly ChurchA (la petite)

itself acknowledges the spiritual superiority of these souls,

while making a weak bid for its role in teaching the Scriptures:

AAWe wish to say, says Holy Church, that these Souls are of the

life above us, for Love dwells in them and Reason dwells in us.

But this is not against us, says Holy Church the little, for we

teach her and advise her about it according to the glosses on our

ScripturesA (ibid.) In her treatise's allegorical dialogue

3In the Corpus Christianorum edition, Ch. 87, 246.

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between Raison and Amour, and implicitly therefore between the

Little Church and the Great Church, she anticipates the failure

of communication between these language games and theological

universes. The opposition within the text had prophetic

consequences for the fate of Marguerite. Ironically, it was

Marguerite=s fate to have to submit her book to the very court

of Reason that she knew would not understand it.

The Asimple soulsA of Marguerite=s AGreat ChurchA belonged to

a group of semi-religious called Beguines who took no vows but

lived mostly in the world the kind of vita apostolica which had been

increasingly prominent since the 12th century. Beguines took on

such tasks as serving the poor, working in hospitals, weaving,

but without much formal ecclesiastical structure or protection.

The Beguine movement became especially an early women=s

movement, for it enabled women who were unable to enter the

established and overcrowded religious houses such as those of the

Cistercians to find a religious home. Beguines lived a variety

of lifestyles: some in private homes, some in more communal

arrangements, the most organized of which was the beguinage,

found particularly in northern France and the Low Countries.

There is still debate as to whether these lifestyles evolved from

one stage to another.4 Without following a rule, Beguines still

developed a reputation for their piety with regard to poverty,

chastity, fasting, and prayer. Yet, because of their precarious 4See Ellen Babinsky, AIntroduction,A Marguerite Porete: The Mirror

of Simple Souls, for an updated discussion of these questions.

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situation outside regular religious orders, they equally

developed an ardent opposition. Just before Marguerite appeared

on the scene, at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, Beguines

had been called into question for their use of the vernacular and

their visibility in preaching the Scriptures, making Marguerite

especially vulnerable at this time.5 At some point before 1306,

her writings had been publicly burned in the plaza of her native

village of Valenciennes by the local bishop, Guy de Colmieu.

Rather than allowing her mystical teaching to be silenced, she

sought and won the approval of three theological authorities, a

Franciscan, a Cistercian, and a scholastic philosopher.6 Yet,

she had no permanent ecclesiastical protector, no established

religious order, no strong advocate in the form of a confessor,

in effect no buffering against the inquisition. And so she was

brought before the inquisitorial authorities whose Agrand

inquisitor,A William of Paris, assembled a tribunal of twenty-one

5See Paul Verdeyen, "Le Procès D'Inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart (1309-1310)," Revue h'Histoire Ecclésiastique 81, (1986), 47-94. Gilbert of Tournai had said: "Sunt apud nos mulieres, quae Beghinae vocantur, et quaedam earum subtilitatibus vigent et novitatibus gaudent. Habent interpretata scripturarum mysteria et in communi idiomate gallicata, quae tamen in sacra Scriptura exercitatis vix sunt pervia. Legunt ea communiter, irreverenter, audacter, in conventiculis, in ergastulis, in plateis." Verdeyen, 91.

6These authorites are cited in the Prologue to the Middle English translation, as found in "'Pe Mirrour of Simple Soules,' A Middle English Translation," Sr. Marilyn Doiron, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 5 (1968), 249-250.

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theologians to judge the orthodoxy of Marguerite=s work. It was

judged by that very court of Reason which she herself condemned

and found wanting from the standpoint of a higher court.

Marguerite=s mystical doctrine involves a highly refined

version of negative theology. Negative theology, unlike the

postmodernist deconstructive project, has existed for a long time

within Christian thought, with counterparts within the Jewish and

Islamic traditions as well. Negative theology AaffirmsA that all

language for God is at best symbolic and metaphorical, at worst

equivocal and meaningless. It assumes that because AGod,A being

inexpressible and incomprehensible, is beyond naming and knowing,

in terms of all the categories of human thought and knowledge, to

AknowA God, we must go beyond knowing to unknowing. As a moment

in a dialectical relation to affirmative theology, it negates

what can be said and known of God in order to leave the way open

for deeper affirmations, perhaps even for the AspeechA of God,

which is often silence. As Michel Despland puts it in his essay,

AOn Not Solving Riddles Alone,A negative theologies Acan serve

effectively to disengage Christian theologians from the habit of

naively authoritative utterance.A7 Also known as Aapophatic,A

which literally means Aaway fromA speech, it is contrasted with

AcataphaticA theology which returns speech to the knowledge of

God. Marguerite subscribes fully to the apophatic way of not-

knowing or as she puts it, Aknowing-nothingA (le nient-savoir). ASuch7In Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby

Foshay (Albany, NY: State Univ. Of New York Press, 1992), 147.

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creatures [the simple annihilated souls] know no longer how to

speak of God, for they know not how to say where God is any more

than how to say who GodA (Ch. 18, 101). Actually, Marguerite

sees the soul moving from the knowing of created things (savoir)

alone, to the knowing of their meanings (entendre), to the

understanding (connaistre) which is reserved for God alone.8 Her

mysticism therefore belongs to a tradition of intellectual or

cognitive apophaticism found in the fifth-century monk called

Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not possible to know God, both because

God as object has disappeared, and because the self who would be

knower has vanished as well into the all-consuming mirror of

nothingness.

In its apophasis of both the objective and subjective poles

of knowing, in the instability of the present-absent One and the

inconsequential self or subject, Marguerite=s negative theology

bears some haunting resemblances to deconstruction=s moves in

similar directions. The movement known as deconstruction begins

with a questioning of the philosophy of the self and of the

self's reduction of otherness to self-relation. In Mark Taylor's

words, "From its beginning, Western philosophy points toward the

constructive subject that is always remaking the world in its own

image."9 The identity of the knower and the relation between

8See Ellen Babinsky, AIntroduction,A The Mirror of Simple Souls ( NY: Paulist Press, 1993), 36.

9"Introduction," Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C.

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knower and known has been obtained at the expense of the

irreducible differences of the many. Parmenides' presumptuous

project of the identity of thought and being has finally been

found, especially after Hegel's system, to be bankrupt. For the

French thinker, Emmanuel Levinas, the subject must be subjected

to and suffers an other over which it has no control, an other

which puts into question all self-affirmation and egoism.10

The theme of a disappearance or deconstitution of the self,

and the primacy of the Other, though differently articulated, is

at the center of Marguerite=s theology. Marguerite's entire

treatise is in the form of a dialogue primarily between Love and

the Soul, between Amour and Âme.11 Love, the main character of

the dialogue with both Reason and the Soul, is always referred to

with the feminine pronoun, despite the fact that the noun

L=Amour is masculine in French. This feminine Love is also

identified with God. In naming all the characters in the

Taylor (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 33.

10In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, quoted in Mark C. Taylor, Deconstruction in Context, "Introduction" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 27.

11In this it resembles another Beguine's, Mechtild of Magdeburg's, treatise, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Lucy Menzies; excerpted in Elizabeth Petroff, eD., Medieval Women's Visionary Literature Yet, Mechtild clearly rejects the apophatic way advocated by Marguerite: "Thou must overcome . . . annihilation of self-will which drags so many souls back that they never come to real love" (Petroff, 218).

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feminine with the exception of Loingprès, Marguerite may be

responding to the Aburden of totalityA and Arepression of

differenceA in the false universalizing of a masculine God. At

any rate, the response to this Love is an increasing

clarification and simplification, the soul's "anéantissement,"

its annihilation. Marguerite's Mirror is emphatically apophatic

in its insistence on the soul=s being brought to nothing in

order to AknowA the nothingness of God. What shows up in

Marguerite's mirror is the utterly transparent, that is the no-

thinged soul.

But Marguerite's theology insists not only on "knowing

nothing" but also on Awilling nothingA in order to annihilate any

form of that self-will that stands in the way of being one with

God. Only self-will is outside of God. For Marguerite as for

Augustine, the will is the central problem. Marguerite is,

however, far more radical than Augustine, whose path of salvation

called for the turning of the will toward God. For Marguerite no

form of willing can remain, even the willing of good works. In a

chapter of the treatise called AHow such Souls no longer possess

will,A she states: AWhoever would ask such free Souls, sure and

peaceful, if they would want to be in purgatory, they would say

no; or if they would want to be certain of their salvation in

this life, they would say no; or if they would want to be in

paradise, they would say no. But then with what would they will

it? They no longer possess any will, and if they would desire

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anything, they would separate themselves from Love (Ch. 9, 86).

Even willing the will of God separates one from God and makes one

a servant of oneself, according to Marguerite (Ch. 48, 128; CC,

144). Willing-Nothing, le nient vouloir, becomes in Marguerite

a positive act whose ultimate effect is transformation into the

nothingness of God. The soul becomes more and more free of

projects and fantasies as it comes to know nothing and to will

nothing. Such a soul, says Marguerite, is Aunencumbered and

content. She does not need hell, or paradise, or any created

thing. She neither wills nor not-wills anything which might be

named here.A At this point in the dialogue, AHoly Church the

Little,A unwilling to accept the soul=s freedom from AworksA that

involve its own ministrations, steps in to cry out impatiently,

ABut what [does she will], for God=s sake? In response to this

outcry, Love insists more firmly that even if they willed to work

miracles, to accept martyrdom daily, or be ravished into heaven

and visions of the Trinity as was St. Paul (Ch.49, 128)12 these

souls= willing nothing in God would be more worthy.

Jacques Derrida, considered the primary spokesperson of

deconstruction, has encountered, one might almost say tussled

with, the notion of a negative theology, and in so doing has

12Cf. also her statement that "This soul knows only one thing, which is to know that she knows nothing, and wills only one thing, which is that she wills nothing. And this nothing-knowing (nient savoir) and this nothing-willing (nient vouloir) give her everything." CC, 130; Ch. 42.

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brought himself into relation with the work of Dionysius and

Meister Eckhart, mystics whose work either affected or was

affected by the work of Marguerite Porete.13 Curiously,

Derrida=s essay on negative theology, AHow to Avoid Speaking:

Denials,A reveals something about Marguerite even as it

unwittingly perhaps reveals something about Derrida himself. 14

Derrida finds the Aontological wagerA of a hyperessentiality, a

God beyond being, to be a constant feature of negative theology,

at least in its manifestations in Dionysius and Meister Eckhart.

It was after all Dionysius who spoke of God as hyperousios, beyond

or even without being, in his Mystical Theology. Derrida, in a

nearly confessional statement of self-Adenial,A admits, AI thought

I had to forbid myself to write in the register of >negative

theology,= because I was aware of this movement toward

hyperessentiality, beyond BeingA (79). In this hyperessential

God, there is perhaps too much presence, too much God, and too

much elevation, ascent, and rarefaction of the human for Derrida.

Although Marguerite follows the apophatic tradition of

Dionysius, she does not use the language of hyperessentiality.

But in his revulsion from ascent, Marguerite would agree with

13See Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. Bernard McGinn.

14Although Derrida has subtitled his essay in the French, ADénégations,A a complex double negation which could be an affirmation, the English subtitle is Adenials,A which may with its Freudian connotations apply just as appropriately to the essay=s evasions.

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Derrida For in her treatise, ascent reverses itself, and becomes

descent; her elevation of stages becomes a fall. These seven

stages are actually an elaboration of a broader three-stage

movement from grace through spirit to the life of unity in God.

They begin with keeping the commandments, imitating Christ in the

counsels of perfection, and doing the works of goodness in the

first three stages, but then move to a martyring and annihilating

of the will that is attached to doing these works. The soul then

passes into the embrace of union of the fourth state, but in her

pride over her own abundance of love she is in fact greatly

deceived. Just where one might expect a lingering in the

delights of a bridal mysticism or a Beguine amour courtois,

Marguerite passes beyond this state, thereby offering a subtle

critique of its affective mysticism. Her own will to love is

replaced by the will given her by the God who is overflowing

Goodness, and her own resplendence disappears in the flood of

Divine Light poured into the soul. The soul then finds herself

in a profundity so great that there is no beginning or measure or

end, but an abyss without foundation ("une abysme abysmee sans

fons; la se trouve elle, sans trouver et sans fons" CC, 326).

"Now this Soul has fallen from love into nothingness, and without

such nothingness she cannot be All. The fall is so deep, she is

so rightly fallen, that the soul cannot lift herself from such an

abyss" (Ch. 118, 196; CC, 328). At this point the terms of the

dialectic disappear into a nothingness that has become All, an

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all that has become Nothingness.15 ABut this soul, thus pure and

clarified, sees neither God nor herself, but God sees Himself of

Himself in her, for her without her. God shows to her that there

is nothing except Him. And thus this Soul understands nothing

except Him, and so loves nothing except Him, praises nothing

except Him, for there is nothing except HimA (Ch. 118, 193).

What Derrida prescribes, that Ain principle, the apophatic

movement of discourse would have to negatively retraverse all the

stages of symbolic theology and positive predicationA (81)

actually occurs in Marguerite, in her negative traversal through

seven stages of grace and works and their dismissal by the fall

into love and nothingness.

In his essay, AHow to Avoid Speaking: Denials,A after a

series of deferrals about promises, secrets,

and denials, Derrida tells us that Awe are

still at the thresholdA; that is, he is still

desisting in his promise to speak about

negative theology. At this point he

confesses that once the question has been

raised, it is already too late. AEven if one

speaks and says nothing, even if apophatic

discourse deprives itself of meaning or of an

object, it takes placeA (97). Marguerite=s

15See Romana Guarnieri, "Frères du libre esprit," in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 5 (1964), 1257-1259.

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apophatic discourse does deprive itself of

the object-God, but that is deliberately so,

because God can never be an object thrown out

against her simple souls. At last Derrida

finds three stages or places where he can

continue to avoid speaking of a question that

he is unable to treat. That is, he will go

on denying it, perhaps now in the fully

Freudian sense of bad faith. Here he

reveals, in what is his most self-disclosing,

confessional gesture, Aa certain void, the

place of an internal desert,A especially when

he alights briefly on the Jewish and Islamic

AphantomsA of Greek and Christian thought,

thus touching his personal and inner space.

This allusion to an internal desert,

paradoxically and probably deliberately the

language of the mystics, is at the heart of

Derrida=s inability to speak of negative

theology and thus to speak or not to speak

about God. His footnote to this

uncharacteristic personal admission is so

revealing that I quote it here in its

entirety:

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Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me to interpret this lecture as themost >autobiographical= speech I have ever risked. One will attach to this word as many quotation marks aspossible. It is necessary to surround with precautionsthe hypothesis of a self-presentation passing through aspeech on the negative theology of others. But if one day I had to tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start to speak of the thing itself if I did not come up against this fact; for lack of capacity, competence, or self-authorization, I have never yet been able to speak of what my birth, as one says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab.. . .In brief, how not to speak of oneself? But also: how to do it without allowing oneself to be invented by the other? Or without inventing the other? (135-136)

Derrida=s inability to speak of God is linked

then to his Ainternal desert,A his inability or

unwillingness to speak of himself. The absence of the

AIA that is willing to risk itself and to risk being

invented by the other, whether that other is God or

another person, prevents his telling his own story.

(Yet, one would think that it is precisely telling

one=s own story authentically that precludes the

invention of oneself by others.) This linkage suggests

that the autobiographical move is an inherently

spiritual one, a move in the direction of the I-Thou

language necessary for prayer. In the second part of

his essay, Derrida finds that prayer is in fact the key

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element necessary for negative theological discourse to

take place.

Having deferred and demurred through these strategies of

desistance, Derrida is ready to speak of Western negative

theological orientations (what he calls the Atropics of

negativityA). From the Greeks, he takes not only Plato=s

hyperessentiality (the Good that is beyond Being or essence), but

also the khora, which is that place, spacing, receptacle that is

so formless and virginal that it Areceives all.A As Derrida puts

it, the khora=s Aneither/nor easily becomes both...andA allowing and

making room for everything. Given Derrida=s reflections on the

khora, it is interesting to point out that the Soul of

Marguerite=s text becomes so completely khora that its

formlessness predominates and the receptacle entirely

disappears. The Soul becomes so annihilated that she is no

longer a place to have God. "For all that this soul has of God

in herself by gift of divine grace seems to her nothing from the

standpoint of what she loves, which is in God. . . ." (CC, Ch.

13, 60). When it is no longer possible to "have" God by way of

ownership, possession, or place, then one has entered into the

deepest poverty of spirit, into anéantissement. The khora bears

an uncanny resemblance to Marguerite=s le nient, the primal ground

of nothingness which is yet the seedbed of all possibilities.

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In considering the second stage of the tropics of negative

theology, Derrida asks what comes between the Greek philosophical

tradition and the Christian via negativa. In answer, he finds the

one experience, prayer. AAn experience must yet guide the

apophasis toward excellence, not allow it to say just anything,

and prevent it from manipulating its negations like empty and

purely mechanical phrases. This experience is that of prayer.

Here prayer is not a preamble, an accessory mode of access. It

constitutes an essential moment, it adjusts discursive

asceticism, the passage through the desert [the desert again!] of

discourse, the apparent referential vacuity which will only avoid

empty deliria and prattling, by addressing itself from the start

to the other, to youA (110). Leaving aside the echoes here of

another Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, it is tempting here to

turn Derrida=s words back on himself in what might be a self-

mocking of his own vacuous internal desert and of

deconstruction=s Aempty deliria and prattling.A But we can say

that he has located the essential (crucial) element of prayer, of

an I able to say You, in the discourse of Christian apophaticism,

which prevents its vacuity from being the last word. Dionysius=

texts begin in prayer, as Derrida notes.16 Although Marguerite=s

text does not often say prayers in the formal, technical sense, 16Quoting Derrida here, Aat the opening and from the first

words of the Mystical Theology, Dionysius addresses himself directlyto You, to God, from now on determined as >hyperessential Trinity= in the prayer that prepares the theologemes of the via negativaA (116). (Whose AYOUA is this, Dionysius= or Derrida=s?)

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she is continually dramatizing the I-Thou relationship of prayer

through the dialogue between Love and the Soul. Prayer has two

traits, says Derrida: first, Ain every prayer there must be an

address to the other as other;A and second, an encomium or

celebration (hymnein). For Derrida the encomium=s attributions

belong not to ordinary truth but rather to a hypertruth. Prayer

orients Athe incapacity of reading in the authentic >book= that

we are, as creatures, and the adverbial quality that we must

hence beA (116). Derrida quotes Meister Eckhart that AThe soul

is thus like an >adverb,= working together with God and finding

its beautification in the same self-knowledge that exalts him.

That for all time, may the Father, the Verbum, and the Holy

Spirit help us to remain adverbs of this Verbum. AmenA--which is

itself a prayer. In all the extensive quotations Derrida gives

from Eckhart, it is difficult to know whether he speaks for

Eckhart, to Eckhart, or even as Eckhart. Eckhart, in place of

God, almost seems to be that other toward which he orients his

own speech.

The final moment or stage of the tradition of negative

theology that Derrida discusses comes from Heidegger. But he

prefaces this discussion with another revealing personal comment:

AI thus decided not to speak of negativity or of apophatic movements

in, for example, the Jewish or Islamic traditions. To leave this

immense place empty, and above all that which can connect such a

name of God with the name of the Place, to remain thus on the

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threshold--was this not the most consistent possible apophasis?A

(122) This comment becomes personal when we consider his

previous reference to the AphantomsA of the Greek and Christian

traditions, the Jewish and Islamic ones, and to what his own

birth has made closest to him, Athe Jew, the Arab,A and his own

Ainternal desert.A In making this subtle personal reference

here, I believe Derrida interweaves his own story or really no-

story (apophasis of story) into Heidegger=s. Certainly, what he

says of Heidegger, and the critique he makes of him could be

applied to Derrida himself. Derrida finds that Heidegger=s

problem is not just How to avoid speaking, but more precisely, How to

avoid speaking of Being. When Derrida asks if Heidegger=s

avoidance of the speaking of Being belongs to the category of

denial (Verneinung) in the Freudian sense, could he not be asking

that question as aptly about himself? At the end of Derrida=s

discussion of Heidegger=s avoidance of speaking of Being, for

whom Being is sometimes written under erasure, which is under the

cross, Derrida adds a revealing AP.S.A where he once again

interweaves, almost by way of an anxiety of influence, his work

with Heidegger=s. Derrida says of Heidegger, Athere is never a

prayer, not even an apostrophe, in Heidegger=s rhetoric. Unlike

Dionysius, he never says >you=: neither to God nor to a disciple

or reader. Yet, Derrida=s own text, like the text of Heidegger

to which he refers, demonstrates the absence of prayer. This

absence is lack, void, what he calls in a footnote the Ainternal

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desertA without (yet) becoming khora. Their internal desert is

the absence of the kind of AIA which can participate in the I-

Thou language of prayer, the essence of the Jewish (and Islamic)

mode of communication with God, as shown throughout the biblical

tradition, in the Koran, and in Buber.

The questions Derrida raises of prayer and its expression

within the text could be raised of the texts of Dionysius and

Meister Eckhart from whom he quotes, and by implication, of

Marguerite Porete. He asks, ADoes one have the right to think

that, as a pure address, on the edge of silence, alien to every

code and to every rite, hence to every repetition, prayer should

never be turned away from its part by a notation or by the

movement of an apostrophe, by a multiplication of addresses?A

(130) Such a question is particularly appropriate with regard to

Marguerite=s text, where there are great tensions between the

allegorical figures and biblical exempla which vivify the

dialogue and the apophatic message it conveys.17 It would seem

though that Marguerite=s own project of demythologization and

de-allegorization is a deconstructive one. What Derrida suggests

at this point, the concluding point of his essay, offer the

merest hint, a trace, of a promise for his own work: APerhaps

there would be no prayer, no pure possibility of prayer, without

what we glimpse as a menace or as a contamination: writing, the 17See Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of

Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart for a discussion of this tension.

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code, repetition, analogy or the--at least apparent--multiplicity

of addresses, initiation. If there were a purely pure experience

of prayer, would one need religion and affirmative or negative

theologies? . . . But if there were no supplement, if quotation

did not bend prayer, if prayer did not bend, if it did not submit

to writing, would a theiology be possible? Would a theology be

possible?A (131) Marguerite=s text, like the texts of other

negative theologians, AbendsA her prayer, her living relationship

to God, so that we readers can bend and be bent to hear it and to

hear the Voice speaking within it. For Derrida these questions

remain only questions, deferrals, promises.

In conclusion, Derrida has confronted the negative theology

of these three moments as a kind of surd which cannot

be absorbed, dismissed, or finally ignored. In his

AfascinationA toward Dionysius and Meister Eckhart

there is very nearly a kind of awe or at least respect.

One wonders in fact if here he has found work which is

undeconstructable, or if he has come to realize that

the AdeconstructionsA of negative theology are at least

as Arigorous,A relentless, and insightful as his own.

With regard to the texts that Derrida reads from the

tradition of negative theology, it may be that what he

and by extension the postmodern mind has experienced

there is what Krister Stendhal calls Aholy envy,A the

experience of profound respect and regret toward

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another=s tradition. If it is holy envy, rather than

ressentiment, then perhaps Derrida=s AfascinationA

toward this tradition can turn into the mysterium

fascinans. Although Derrida is judged and AbentA by the

writings of Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, and by

implicaiton of Marguerite, his very Ainternal desertA

can be the ground of the wúste Gotheit, the nakedness

which is at the same time the khora. If this is so,

then the deconstructionist turn into the empty play of

words and interpretations of interpretations may yet

turn out to be the way to God.

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