The Meaning of Infinity in Sufi and Deconstructive Hermeneutics: When Is an Empty Text an Infinite One?

Abstract

In this article I examine the role of infinity in the hermeneutics of two very separate thinkers—a thirteenth-century Sufi and a contemporary French poststructuralist. In both cases, the way a certain idea of infinity (be it the inexhaustible mind of an infinite God or the infinite array of different contexts for a text) leads to an infinitizing of the text itself is the subject. Ultimately, the article suggests that deconstruction actually restores a medieval sense of infinity to the text—albeit in a very different way from its mystical predecessors—by emphasizing the endless range of contexts a text can be read in. We may conclude this history of hermeneutics with the following remark. The initial purpose of hermeneutics was to explain the word of God. This purpose was eventually expanded into an attempt to regulate the process of explaining the word of man. In the nineteenth century we learned, first from Hegel and then more effectively from Nietzsche, that God is dead. In the twentieth century, Kojève and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gates into an abyss of postanthropological deconstruction. As the scope of hermeneutics has expanded, then, the two original sources of meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity, which we choose to call the philosophy of language, linguistic philosophy, or one of their synonyms. If nothing is real, the real is nothing; there is no difference between the written lines of a text and the blank spaces between them. —Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics