Apophasis and the Trace of Transcendence

Abstract

Fame is the tint that Scholars leave Upon their Setting Names - The Iris not of Occident That disappears as comes - Emily Dickinson Undoubtedly, it will take some time before the full measure of the contributions of Edith Wyschogrod the disciplines of philosophy and religious studies are appreciated. Needless say, there have already been some major works of scholarship that have critically engaged various aspects of her multifaceted and interdisciplinary thought. In particular, her status as one of the premier interpreters of Levinas - she was the first publish a full-length monograph on him in English1 - has been duly noted. Additionally, there have been essays that have called attention her interventions in the fields of phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and historiography. What has been less scrutinized is her status as a creative Jewish thinker. This essay attempts fill that lacuna by charting some of the ways in which she offers a deconstructive Jewish philosophy that I will call, borrowing her own taxonomy, an immanent a/theology.2 Fissure, Non-Self Identity, and the Aporia of Incommensurable Faiths I commence my reflections by recalling Wyschogrod's comment on the fact that in the essay How Avoid Speaking: Denials, which was first delivered in June 1986 as the opening lecture of the colloquium on Absence and Negativity organized by the Hebrew University and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem,3 Derrida (by his own admission) intentionally avoided discussing the apophatic element in the Jewish and Islamic traditions, thereby being compelled to speak of it without speaking of it.4 Glossing this part of the lecture, Derrida himself added in a note, Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me interpret this lecture as the most 'autobiographical' speech I have ever risked __ But if one day I had tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start 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 speak of what my birth . . . should have made closest me: the Jew, the Arab.5 This is, of course, a deeply ironic passage: precisely by not discussing the tradition of apophasis in either Judaism or Islam, Derrida performatively enacted the very topic of his lecture, for with respect what cannot be spoken, not speak is the pertinent gesture.6 Wyschogrod is thus completely justified in her own exegetical surmise: Yet it is precisely with regard the missing traditions that one might apply Derrida's term 'the logic of the supplement,' the hidden presuppositions that drive his analyses, his account of apophasis and denegation.7 I submit that the sentiment expressed by these words can be applied the role of Judaism in Wyschogrod, even though the situation is not completely analogous, inasmuch as she does often attend Jewish figures and themes more overtly. My point is, rather, that what drives her post-phenomenological and post-structural analyses is her philosophical grappling with her Jewishness. This is not parochialize her thought; on the contrary, it seems me that she saw the particular as the only possible way implement the universal without reducing the other the identity of the same. To some degree, Wyschogrod's perspective is congruous with Levinas's notion of a universalist singularity,8 that is, a universalism grounded in the preservation of the singular, the oneself that is prior the distinction between the particular and the universal.9 The paradox of Israel is the promotion of an exceptional message that is nevertheless addressed all, the peculiarity beyond universality . . . made manifest well before the distinction between the particular and the universal makes its appearance in the speculation of logicians. …