The Seminal Trace: Presence, Difference, and Transubstantiation

Abstract

I propose to explore the deconstructive themes of signification, presence, difference, supplementarity, and the like, as they play through a classical theological text. I take as my focus that most metaphysical of discourses about the nature and meaning of the eucharist, found in Part III of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. But is this not a perverse point at which to undertake a deconstructive reading? Is not Aquinas the epitome of ontotheology, of a metaphysics of presence of the totalistic, absolute, behind-the-text sort, of everything Derrida, for example, derides? So it would seem. But it is possible to read otherwise. Aquinas' repeated contrasts between real and perceptible, substance and accidents, may be read as a place where originary difference marks itself, inscribes itself, in the ritual act and text. Throughout Thomas' text, we find a contrast between the real that is known through the senses and the real that is Really present though the senses show otherwise. This tension between the real and the Real pervades the Thomistic discourse, and is one of the sources of its power. The affirmation of the eternal, invisible Real recurrently annuls the material, sensual real; yet the eternal invisible Real gives back an insistent and sustained affirmation of the material and sensual. The rhetoric of this discourse of displacement and return, and the dynamics of the subtext and its counter-displacements, will be the center of our attention. It is common to suppose that Thomas' metaphysical system defines,