Apophatic Discourse Research Articles

Edmond Jabes, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God

The work of Jabès calls to be read in a tradition of apophatic discourse that reaches back to Neoplatonic sources on the ineffable One, as well as to the tradition of reflection on the Name of God as the Ineffable par excellence that one finds in the Kabbalah. Such modes of thinking and writing prove to be key to the significance of Jabès's project as a whole. His oeuvre is exemplary of new forms that this type of discourse can assume in its revival underway today. Jabès contemplates ineffability in language in the first instance in the Name of God. But all language is engendered by the divine Name, and consequently language in general proves in Jabès's work to be inhabited by a silent instance that it cannot name or say. The Name of God thereby emerges as the vanity of language in the heart of every word.

The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabes and Paul Celan

Postmodern writers and artists of all sorts have evolved radical new poetics based preeminently on the secret resources of silence. Poets have focused particularly on silences become audible in the tearing of language and the rending of sense. To a significant degree, this is a rediscovery of the oftentimes repressed resources in Western tradition of apophatic discourse, discourse on what cannot be said. Jewish writers have been particularly important in this revival, partly because the biblical interdiction on representations of the divine, denounced as idolatrous ("graven images"), gave Jewish tradition a peculiar attunement to the limits of representation and a special sensibility for the Unrepresentable. Edmond Jab�s and Paul Celan, emerging almost contemporaneously out of widely divergent cultural backgrounds in Egypt and Romania respectively, nevertheless share these coordinates in common. Writing as post-Holocaust Jews, each in a different way lends language to silence in order to give voice to the unspeakable. An attempt is made, furthermore, to distinguish between two different traditions of apophatic thinking, one based on the ineffability of being or existence and the other on the ineffability of language itself. These strands are traced back to Neoplatonism and the Bible and are aligned primarily with Celan and Jab�s respectively.

Judging Judgment

This article proposes that the “eschatological renaissance” characteristic of twentieth-century theology needs to proceed further with a renewal of pastoral concern for judgment. After a brief review of the difficulties associated with traditional talk of judgment, the article suggests that the apophatic tradition may furnish the resources necessary to such a renewal. An outline sketch of the nature of apophasis is followed by some particular suggestions as to how an apophatic strategy might be brought to bear upon the topic of judgment. In conclusion, the article sets out the criteria that would characterize an apophatic discourse upon judgment.

‘Whereof We Speak’: Gregory of Nyssa, Jean‐Luc Marion and the Current Apophatic Rage

Recent postmodern discussions of the Christian apophatic tradition level a noteworthy criticism: after all its negations doesn't Christian apophatic discourse in fact slip back into kataphatic assertions about God? This article seeks to address this claim by bringing into concert two important Christian apophaticists (Gregory of Nyssa and Jean‐Luc Marion) in order to designate a type of discourse that emerges from apophatic union, a discourse that is not kataphatic but logophatic.

Mystical Languages of Unsaying

This text examines a mode of mystical discourse, apophasis, which literally means speaking away. Sometimes translated as apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this study of apophasis in Greek, Christian and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it. This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition and theology. By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work aims to open the subject up for re-evaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers - claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic - are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists, as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.

Apophatic and kataphatic Discourse in Mahayana: A Chinese View

Apophatic and kataphatic Discourse in Mahayana: A Chinese View