Impossible Passions

Abstract

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes obscured text omitted.) If said decisively: I have seen that which see would change. Instead the inconceivable unknown-wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it-there would be a dead object and the thing the theologian. -Bataille1 Discussions on the relation between deconstruction and negative theology settle, for the most part, on speculative questions: i.e., questions pertaining to the status the apophatic God beyond versus the status differance/khord below or without being. One the virtues John Caputo's book The Prayers and Tears Jacques Derrida is that it draws attention to the unique desires and passions informing apophatic and deconstructive discourses. Following Caputo, will explore the differences and strange affinities between the apophatic desire for God and the Derridean passion for the (impossible as that which surpasses and challenges the possible, in contrast with impossible as logical contradiction). will argue that Derrida's passion differs from apophatic eros most radically the point in which, for Derrida, the wholly other undercuts any distinction between divine and non-divine others. In this way, Derrida's conception the radical singularity and alterity the other blends the ethical (our love humans) and the religious (our love God) as allegedly distinct modes thought or practice. This blending constitutes, in a single gesture, Derrida's passion as and Derrida's passion for the impossible. Two Passions For The Impossible Differance/Hyperessentiality In How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, originally published in 1987, Derrida makes clear why he feels uneasy about negative theology, especially the writings Dionysius. He is uneasy about Dionysius's promise of such a presence given to intuition or vision . . . the vision a dark light. . . . leading to union with God.2 While Derrida admits that the detours, locutions, and syntax3 deconstruction and negative theology intersect to the point being indistinguishable, he is emphatic that deconstruction is not a precursor to mystical experience. Derrida's mode deconstruction, rather, exposes the non-origin and non-closure language, the constitutive play differance with-in and in-between speech. Deconstructive discourse always operates on the edge language and always risks the unintelligibility silence, but the silence deconstruction is not divine. The mute, terrifying form silence deconstruction encounters is not that a transcendent God, but a singular monstrosity constantly disrupting discourse, an elusive limit that places Derrida's texts at the edge the abyss, madness and silence.4 For Derrida, differance is a pure absence, a desert-like, empty space, much like Plato's description khora as the empty receptacle matter in Timaeus.5 In his essay Khora, Derrida asks: won't the discourse on khora have opened, between the sensible and the intelligible, belonging neither to one nor to the other, hence neither to the cosmos as sensible god nor to the intelligible god, an apparently empty space, even though it is no doubt not emptiness?6 The notion something that is not nothing, almost nothing, hovering between a thing and no-thing, is one the most common motifs in Derrida's writing career. It is, as we have already suggested with the differance/khora couplet, the way in which Derrida describes the differing and deferring permutations discourse. The neither/nor logic Derrida employs to gesture towards differance places the language deconstruction in close proximity to negative theology, which often describes God as neither being nor non-being. But Derrida argues that differance lacks nomination because it is thoroughly emptied any fixed centre, not because it exceeds the finite structure discourse. …