Derrida and Nonsense Theology

Jay Michaelson
May 10, 1996

Outline


I.   Introductions

II.  Gleaning a Positive from the Negative (and anti-Negative)
     A. What will Fail
          1. Ontotheology
          2. Logocentrism
     B. What Derrida Might Want

III. Can Nonsense avoid ontotheology and logocentrism?
     A. Introduction
          1. A preliminary note on spells
     B. Opposites Attract too Much
     C. Signifiers and Nonsense
          1. Vowels and consonants
          2. Speech and writing
     D. Ontotheology and gnostic nonsense

IV.  Endings

I. Introductions

Of the many dualisms Jacques Derrida is said to be play- fighting with in his forays into theology/philosophy/literature, one of the more frequently observed is that of Hellenism and Hebraism, the conflict of rationalistic Athens and perhaps mystical Jerusalem. In my view, this dualism is itself so malleable as to be a conceptual proteus.¹ Yet the problems of Greece and Palestine will be our entry point here only in an appropriately tangential way, because it is a set of trends within one of their overlooked (by Derrida) confluences -- Mediterranean spiritual practices in the centuries around the turn of the era -- that I will be proposing as a possible Model Theology in a Derridian world.

That the source of this possible candidate for Derridian satisfaction is historically a Hellenist-Hebraist (as well as many other -ists) polybrid may be coincidental, or it may indeed reflect some substantive muscle to the skeletal Athens/Jerusalem framework, but this concern is only in the background here. In the foreground will be three explorations. First, I will try to provide a reading of what it is, in rejecting negative theology, that Derrida would want from a "good" theology, what a non-onto- theology would have to avoid and what it would eventually look like, if it could look like anything. Concluding from this preliminary exploration the basic idea that it cannot look like anything (the nuances of the wordplay to be developed below, of course), I will take up the challenge and provide a non- ontotheology that looks like nothing, that is not negative theology but rather a theology of nonsense and incommensurability. This second exploration will take this paper not to any particular text within the Nag Hammadi Library, though I will circle around "Thunder: Perfect Mind" somewhat more than others, but rather to the trend within some gnostic texts of doing a theology not of sense or narrative but of non-sense, which, given the more prevalent embrace of reified language and its connection with reality, may be suitably subversive. I will try at the end of this second exercise to work out how nonsense- theology connects with Derridian (a)theology, and in the brief third exploration that concludes the paper, try and see what it all means, if anything.

II. Gleaning a Positive from the Negative (and anti-Negative)

A. What will fail

One of the reassuring aspects of trying to figure out what Jacques Derrida is trying to say is that the very impossibility of the task makes whatever answer one comes up with a correct one: like a graduate school exam, it seems as though how well one argues is more important than the answer one reaches. Derrida's method also encourages one to have recourse to the process of elimination; since he only tells us what he seems to be against, it is up to us to deduce from that list what is is he might be for. Such is the task here. For four reasons, my investigation here will be somewhat attenuated: first, it is largely recapitulation of "what has gone before" (in this case, in class); second, it is probably wrong; third, I am going to deliberately (and conveniently, for me) avoid wading into any particular Derridian text, which can easily take me too far afield, and take the risk of simply stating my reading of Derrida without referring at any length to the twists and turns of any particular texts; and finally, I treat this portion of the paper as a necessary but mere preliminary step towards the more interesting task of matching Derrida's pharmaceutical prescription with the cryptic theology of the Perfect Mind and similar texts.

That selection of disclaimers thus made, I will address two key problems facing a potential (non-)theology: ontotheology and logocentrism.

1. Ontotheology

The central problem of ontotheology seems to be what drives much of Derrida's critical project. In Heideggerian terms, ontotheology is largely the statement that "Being can be given the name of God,"² but for Derrida, the stakes become somewhat more stark than they were for Heidegger. If we can name Being thus, we have authority for prioritizing identify over difference, the one over the many, with its attendant conceptual and presumably ethical concerns. According to Derrida, this has actually taken place. With its totalizing discourses of ultimate meaning, Western metaphysics has tended to favor consumption of the other (in more Levinasian than Derridian terms) over allowance for (and, in the ethical realm, acceptance of) difference. While ontotheology has been reduced at times to the level of a politically correct cliche, it functions as an important rejector for potential theological statements, insofar as statements wish to make any relational claim between a ground of reality/Divine essence and the world we've got in front of us.

Derrida tries to formulate rigorous modes of difference in order to address this crisis in Western thought, probably the most extreme of which is his "differance,"³ a "neologism . . . coined in order to suggest how meaning is at once 'differential' and 'deferred,'"⁴ but which is so untotalizable as to be nearly and probably deliberately incomprehensible. "Neither a word now a concept,"⁵ differance is not-everything, in a more useful negative way than mere negative theology, which always falls into the trap of "disengaging a superessentiality."⁶ Differance, like negative theology, refuses to equate God and existence, but goes one step further by refusing also any further mode of being that is somehow "more real" than the real.⁷ Differance can thus be seen as an ideally Derridian response to ontotheology. At the "ground" of reality, which does not exist, is not some super-existent entity which somehow redeems the notion of ontotheology, but rather some-not-thing move which does not even have semiotic substance.

Ontotheology also implies, among many things, a commitment to presence, which will infect most (if not all) properly theological projects within the Western metaphysical tradition. The "myth of the given" (Hegel) seems in the Derridian world to be yet another impulse toward totalization. Thus there are a few "no entry" signposts which we may put up based on this extremely brief look at the problem of ontotheology: no privileging of presence, no recovery of the world-as-God in any form, no redemption of an ultimate "ground" through a via negativa that ends in some sort of affirmation.

Of course, this emphasis on ontotheology may be misguided.⁸ Yet while I am sympathetic to this claim and Rorty's corollary that "the big esoteric problem common to Heidegger and Derrida of how to 'overcome' or escape from the ontotheological tradition is an artificial one and needs to be replaced by lots of little pragmatic questions about which bits of that tradition might be used for some current purpose,"⁹ if Derrida is to be the subject here, his criteria must remain the testing ground, and the signposts proposed above will be summarily accepted as we move onwards.

2. Logocentrism

Bound up with the rejection of ontotheology is the problem of logocentrism. Derrida would agree with the apostle John that, as far as Western metaphysics is concerned, "in the beginning, there was the logos." But, Derrida might add, "that is the problem." The problem with logocentrism, as recharacterized by Rorty, is that "Philosophy, defined by the dream of finding the one true metaphor, has to aim at some statement of the form 'No linguistic expression is intelligible unless . . ."¹⁰ A simple inversion cannot undo the preferencing of a logocentric criterion for intelligibility -- "making God into the Devil" will not be adequate if the Devil is made God. Rather, Derrida wants to undo the "precession" of truth to speech and writing as forms of linguistic signification.

Related to logocentrism, then, is the prioritizing of speech over writing, which Derrida labels phonocentrism.¹¹ Favoring speech being linked with favoring intelligibility, Derrida consequently seeks to deconstruct the priority of speech, in a post-Sausseurian move whose marshes I will not wade into at this time.¹² (Of course, along the way, Derrida himself tries to overcome potentially totalizing dualisms in his own discourse, which is one reason that texts about Derrida are so much easier to understand than texts by Derrida, but -- in a method that may seem familiar to the reader -- I shall leave the juicy "integrity of writing" issue for the end.) For our purposes, we need only flag the nexus between logocentrism and the writing/speech problem, not the substance of the debate, which would of course be an entirely different paper. Suffice to say that the relation of word-thought-reality, is for Derrida, as discussed in the context of presence above, an extremely problematic one -- as it has been, it may be remembered, for generations of Western philosophers.

One particularly difficult subtlety of Derrida's treatment of logocentrism is the idea that the logocentric commitment to intelligibility leads to a mystification of presence. While I can understand the concern that an intelligible abstract (e.g. forms) leads to an ontology of concealment (e.g. Plato), I do not see how this tendency connects with the problem of priority of presence, whose critique was discussed earlier. Indeed, it seems to me that Derrida in deconstructive moments is not demystifying presence but further mystifying it, by rendering useless any explication of it. That is, while it is true that having a blueprint makes the actual building seem a mystery by comparison, denying even that an approximate blueprint may be drawn seems to further destable the building itself and its idea. The complexities of this point will resurface in Part III, however, and I will only note them here.

To foreshadow for a moment, it is worth nothing that creation as a verbal act will have an interesting role to play in nonsense-theology. While it may seem at first that Derrida would be appalled at an ontology that reifies language and places it at the root of all being, as does much Mediterranean thought of the gnostic period, the situation might change when the ultimate god(dess) herself is named in unpronounceable, written-only combinations of letters and vowels. Moreover, the critique of the Jewish and Christian bibles as determinate texts with fixed meanings gets turned on its head by Jewish-gnostic speculations of the period which seem to suggest that the Bible has an "infinity of meanings,"¹³ not a totality of them.

Ordinary negative theology, of course, fails once again, providing semiotic closure where there should be none, notwithstanding the ontic moves (such as that "God is beyond God") attempted in some sources.¹⁴ What we need is a complete rejection of logocentrism, not a postponement ("higher logocentrism") of it. We cannot have philosophy as it has gone before; nor can we have theology. (But we may have nonsense.)

B. What Derrida Might Want

Obviously, the twin demons of ontotheology and logocentrism are but two of Derrida's menagerie of evils, but it is impossible to discuss them all, and the pair are probably necessary accompaniments with any of the others. Reduced down to its barest form (as it so often is in the literature), Derrida refuses any statement -- particularly any logical one -- that places some sort of existence or coherence at the foundation of reality. Negative theology, which Derrida minimizes as "a certain typical attitude toward language, and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, an attitude toward semantic or conceptual determination,"¹⁵ is "haunted" with this sort of coherence -- God -- which permeates its texts.¹⁶ Worse, it frequently contains a "place where God resides"¹⁷ suggesting that the sorts of conceptual closure Derrida had sought to overcome is "residing" somewhere after all.

Derrida is thus more than a "nonfoundationalist," although he certainly is that. Derrida refuses to admit any closure, even within a nonfoundationalist system, for reasons which, if I may be frank, are not entirely clear, but which seem to have too much similarity to a Grand Total. Given that "the" complete system is rendered thoroughly suspect in several of Derrida's texts, it may be that any complete system, nonfoundationalist though it may be, will fall by dint of its attempt at being complete. It would seem, then, that one cannot generate any systematic theology from Derridian roots while remaining faithful to them.

Unlike many of my classmates, I can simply leave that statement to stew in its own juices, because in Part III I will not attempt to reconcile a system with Derrida's requirements, only note a few possible points of connection between certain ideas about reality with Derridian ones. Although I shall touch on the possible insufficiency of such a project at the end of the paper, I will now turn to the task of defending the proposition that nonsense theology, inasmuch as it is not really a theology, avoids the systemic problem, and inasmuch as it conveys some ideas nonetheless, avoids both ontotheology and logocentrism, as they have been developed thus far.

III. Can Nonsense avoid ontotheology and logocentrism?

A. Introduction

If the foregoing can serve as an ad hoc summary of what Jacques Derrida might want out of a (non)theology, the following is an attempt to test what looks like a possible candidate for acceptability, and see if Derrida's concerns about presence, closure, totalizing discourse, and ontotheology can be satisfied, if only partially, by it. What I will try to do is look at various trends within Mediterranean spirituality, not focusing so much on one text -- though I will come back a few times to Thunder: Perfect Mind -- as on characteristic moves within "gnostic"¹⁸ systems of thought. In particular, there is a fairly defined anti-gnostic move in some Mediterranean texts that does more than simply speak in opposites (as does Perfect Mind) but actually speak in nonsense. I cannot say how much this will "work" for a Derridian; the project is merely, in the few pages available, propose how this untested "theology" might fare on some Derridian trials. That, as mentioned above, Mediterranean spirituality stands at something of a nexus between Judaism, Christianity, and Classical thought is interesting, but only as a side-note; likewise its status (notwithstanding the familiarity of the reader with the texts) as a "marginal" discourse.¹⁹ Whatever the merits of these side claims, some parts of Mediterranean spirituality seems as good candidates as any for avoiding some Derridian pitfalls, and, as I shall try to argue below, they may do even better than that.

1. A Preliminary Note on Spells

It is important to make one preliminary note in order to bracket off a large segment of the literature under discussion. To the extent that the "nonsenses" in gnostic texts are used as theurgical tools, of course, they are counterproductive in the Derridian project. Not only do they refer to a definite presence, they call that presence forth, or at least call its attention.²⁰ But even mystical texts themselves recognize that theurgy and theosophy (or, hopefully, antitheosophy) are separate and possibly diametrically opposed trends.²¹ Anything can be used as a spell. One can chant passages from Differance in the hopes of bringing down the goddess; it does not make the essay a totalizing discourse of presence. Obviously, the connection between gnostic texts and magic is closer than that between Derrida and wicca. But I think it is possible to at least bracket the magic question for a treatment of some, though not all, of the texts. Scholars apparently sympathetic with gnostic religious practice have already inveighed against texts which seem to use angelic and other names for magical purposes.²² We need not share their almost polemical distaste for theurgy and spells, though, to recognize that language for many Mediterraneans is a thing, and things are used in different ways. For many it is not really a "thing," and it is this group of people whom I hope to discuss, because they run counter to what I would say is the dominant view of language in the traditions at hand. This point is one to be debated. But the issue of how language functions in magic and theurgy is under firm brackets, and I hope to keep it pinned within them for the remainder of the discussion.

B. Opposites attract too much

It should be clear that simple paradox will not elude Derrida's traps. Perfect Mind says "I am the first and the last/I am the honored one and the scorned one/I am the whore and the holy one"²³ but such paradox may yet convey meaning. In the first place, it suggests, particularly in a gnostic context, that there is something to be "known," that there is some "there" there, however incomprehensible it may be.²⁴ Negative theology, with which this sort of paradoxical speech may be joined, simply puts off the question of presence and logocentrism. There is a "higher order,"²⁵ which in gnostic terms can mean a quite specified and detailed order indeed. Mere paradox and simple opposites will not be enough; they are not so different from negative theology, and in the context of gnosticism, may even be less close to what Derrida wants. What will be needed is a more rigorous "praise of nonsense,"²⁶ to which I now turn.

C. Signifiers and Nonsense

Perfect Mind and similar texts have very appealing semiotic points which may fare better with Derrida. The trouble here is understanding what to make of them. When Perfect Mind says "I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name/I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division,"²⁷ what does she mean? Of course, it is tempting to just put asterisks by the lines and say they look Derridian. But it is also tempting, and slightly more responsible, to say that in the Ultimate, there is no disjunction at all between the written and the spoken, that language -- itself the foundation of cognizable reality -- is only "ultimate" insofar as it is both written and spoken. Tempting--but perilous. It may simply be that Perfect Mind is a letter, or vowel, and that this is all that is meant. This "all" will, in a few pages, be argued to be quite sufficient, and the simple Derridian speech/writing issue to be too facile to be taken seriously in this context. But first I must say a little more about how nonsense functions in the gnostic context under discussion. For now, the point is to acknowledge that while there may be some interesting semiotic curiosities in texts such as Perfect Mind, these will not get us as far as I would like to go.²⁸

Perfect Mind also says that "I am the hearing which is attainable to everyone/and the speech which cannot be grasped." ²⁹ This may simply support the claim that "when ordinary language is scrambled, the 'insides' of the great name of God are revealed."³⁰ The question is what it means for 'ordinary language' to be 'scrambled' in the context of a system in which language was seen to be the constitutive basis of reality. The world, at least in Judaic trends within the gnostic corpus, is created through language -- though if it is created through "logos," that will do just as well for our terms. Yet it is not just created through language in some texts -- it seems to be created by language, from Late Antiquity period Jewish texts which, culminating in the later Sefer Yetzira, reified language and made it the physical constitutive building blocks of reality, to the idea of the logos generally, which, whatever Derrida's (mis)treatment of it, suggests an intimate connection between the agency of God as expressed in the creation (and perhaps maintenance) of the world and the sort of linguistic rationality that becomes such a thorn in Derrida's side. In some gnostic texts, it has even been said that "God seems to dwell in the making of unmaking of language."³¹

If this is true, if language is ordinarily seen as being in some way related to the coherence of the world, then there is something more interesting being said by Perfect Mind when She identifies herself with "Speech that cannot be grasped." The statement may be one of several things. First, it may be a simple paradox, as discussed above, in which case it is not interesting here. Second, though, it may be a statement of negative theology, which is interesting but which will fail the Derridian test because it postpones, but continues to insist, on some likeness between God and the order of the world: Perfect Mind is still "speech," even if she may not be grasped. Yet it may be, if we leave the Perfect Mind text itself behind, that the "hearing available to everyone" is just the sort of signifier that Derrida wishes, and it is this possibility to which I now turn.

1. Consonants and Vowels

At this point I can unveil one of the Ises which I think can be construed from the gnostic river. It seems not unfair to correlate consonants with sense and rationality and vowels with more "fluid," less ontotheologically present referents to ultimacy. From a purely Derridian standpoint, there is no reason not to analyze the text this way, and it seems easy to see consonants as "closed" and possibly even masculine, vowels as "open" and feminine. To invert the dominance of consonants over vowels -- which has both a written dimension, in which vowels are sometimes not represented (as in Hebrew) and a spoken dimension, in which consonants 'shape' the word and vowels 'color' it -- is thus immediately appealing, much as Derrida is interested in inverting the dominance of the spoken over the written.

But I confess that, as a non-Derridian, I would like to construct something other (and slightly more 'substantial') than a clever, aestheticized deconstruction. It would be nice to find some connection between the consonant/vowel issue (though it may seem to have come out of the blue, I think the issue is a crucial one) the sorts of nonsense theology we have been discussing, and the Derridian problematics outlined in Part I. It would seem necessary to step outside the texts for a moment.

A vowel is something vocalized, something added to the logical meaning of a signifier, which can be conveyed by its root. In Hebrew in particular, the whole of the logical sense of a word can be conveyed in its consonants. And yet, perhaps ironically, the name of the Hebrew deity became written in Greek in nothing but vowels: Yahweh became Iao. The use of vowels in Mediterranean and subsequent meditative practices in the Hermetic tradition has been well documented and I will not repeat the histories here. Obviously, in the West as well as in the East, the use of vowels as meditative tools is linked to their status as referents to the Ultimate.

Vowels can be much be yet more. They can be "silent pregnancies" in Rimbaud's Sonnet on the Vowels.³² There, vowels seem to connote by their onomatopoetic sound almost Wordsworthian "impulses" of the world that may not be adequately communicable. "U, . . . diving movement of viridian seas,/Peace of pastures animal-strewn, peace of calm lines/Drawn on foreheads worn with heavy alchemies."³³ They are even Divine: "O, supreme Trumpet, hars with strange stridencies,/Silences traced in angels and astral designs:/O ... omega ... the violet light of His Eyes!"³⁴ Vowels may communicate, in Rimbaud and in Lewis Carroll and in any poet worth his salt, more than just a profound emotional significance which may be impossible to adequately describe in words. They may in their poetics offer their own theory of the limits of logical speech. Returning to the Hebraic context above, one would expect that Hebrew philosophy could be fully comprehended without vocalization. But Hebrew poetry surely could not be.

2. Writing and Speech

It is becoming clear that the preference of vowel over consonant, while similar to the written/spoken issue, runs directly counter to it. "Differance" is vocalized the same way as "difference;" the only difference (...) is in the vowel used to write it. But I wonder what "differance" would look like if it were written in Hebrew. In the context of magical bowls in which written letters were combined with one another, magical papyri in which written letters were used as talismans, and the whole tradition of magical writing which would lead, a thousand years later, to the idea of the golem, called into being by the writing of a word, to preference writing over speech is utterly redundant. To be Derridian to the letter ("..." once again) is to be not Derridian enough. It is the spoken word which is both separate from the logos and yet at the same time a representation of ultimacy. The Divine is not just not-this and not-that; it is "not anything that can be this or not-this or that or not-that." It is a word that cannot be written or not-written. It is a vowel.

At the same time, the speech/writing issue plays itself out in ways more interesting than simple inversion. Quoting Miller once more, the

     written word is an alphabetical fantasia, and it is
     precisely here that magical language preserves the Platonic
     conundrum that living language, which cannot be captured by
     writing, is itself a kind of writing. . . . Magical writing
     takes the form of ordinary writing by using its letters and
     so is faithful to it, but it betrays that writing by its
     nonsensical use of those letters and is thus faithful to the
     writing that is an invisible inscription on the soul.  Yet
     it betrays the invisible inscription as well . . .

³⁵

Once more recalling the functioning of language in Derrida on the one hand and the elements of gnosticism I've been discussing on the other, the betrayal of inscriptions both visible and visible may connote a similar sort of disruption as Derrida's differance (or, perhaps more closely, the Other as it functions in Levinas). It would be rash to jump from morphology to identity, but perhaps less rash to say that this sort of god- talk looks as though it may be compatible with the Derridian model. It does not make propositions -- though I freely admit that it may be part of a larger, proposition-making system -- does not act ontotheologically, and seems to be the kind of Derridian negation that plays such an important role in what I would call the Derridian dialectic.³⁶

D. Ontotheology and gnostic nonsense

That, then, is part of the affirmative case. The nonsense theology in its vowel incarnation in Mediterranean spirituality is not Derridian itself, but is in some ways more Derridian than Derrida. With spells bracketed as above, it is the spoken word that carries no dominating ontotheological baggage, and the spoken-only is the vowel, which is the Divine Name as morphed by gnostic sources. This name stands in direct contrast to the definable ("closable" with consonants) names of angels, archangels, and so on, which refer to beings "actually" encountered.

The name is not just the Hebrew unpronounceable tetragrammaton; as Moshe Idel has pointed out,³⁷ was and will be pronounced. ³⁸ It is only that in an incomplete world without the temple that true "presence" is impossible. Rather, the nonsense name is a non-name, which speaks of the ground of reality in terms that are simply not terms.

Can "being be given the name of God" in these terms? Certainly God cannot be given the name of being (as Heidegger himself seemed to do at times). But "God," if it is not only represented by but in fact is a set of non-cognitive signs, cannot be said to be the postponed ontotheology of negative theology or anything else. God cannot even really be "said" in any meaningful sense, because there are no consonants with which to form the word. If nothing else, this hyperineffability looks suspiciously Derridian; if I have raised this suspicion adequately, it is as much as case as I am entitled to make.

IV. Endings

The gnostic case is one which suggests that the picture may be more complicated than a straight-up deconstruction of texts might initially suggest. Derrida would certainly be able to craft a nuanced and thorough de(con)struction of gnostic nonsense, vowels, and magical writing. But it is something to suggest that he should have to do so.

If nonsense theology is any more than non-theology or negative theology, it at least raises a set of interesting questions for the Derridian. To what extent, first of all, can any cognitive claim be made about anything connected to ultimacy? Even a negative theologian might be pleased with the answer of "none," but Christian negative theologians nonetheless had a set of conceptions, unsayable perhaps, with which they related to the ineffable. And I do not pretend that, historically, the gnostics who produced the vowel-chants and paradoxes gestured to above were in any way less conceptual about their relationship to whatever ultimate they were invoking. But such hedges may not survive Derrida. If you banish priority of presence only to rescue it in the end, and then rescue it with a totalizing set of value structures, the banishment seems insufficient.

The question with which I conclude, though, is why exactly this matters. The tension of "pure" Derrida versus his degenerate interpreters has garnered some discussion, but not, seemingly, on the grounds of the claims made by each. Let us say that most commentators on Derrida have got him wrong, by straining out a few seemingly philosophical principles from a non-strainable discourse, and betraying the whole in so doing. Vive la differance! If Derrida is to be the Stuart Sutcliffe to someone else's John Lennon, or perhaps more obscurely the Angus MacLise to someone else's Lou Reed and John Cale, the "degeneration" in question has to be measured against some standard -- however postmodern we would like the standard to be. Certainly (more or less), rigorous thought is rigorous thought, and to be valued over careless thought for that reason alone. But when bringing a set of (onto-)theological propositions to the table, the rigorousness of one set of criticisms versus another no longer has intrinsic merit. Its merit is rather derived from the application of the criticism to the criticized, from the various values and claims that spring from one or the other.

Moreover, if those values and claims are to admit non- rational criteria, the jig may be up completely for Derrida, as all sorts of non-rational "sparks" come out of a religious text that do not emanate from Derridian ones. As I have indicated earlier, such conceptual nihilism does not appeal to me, in the face of both public and personal history. But the deconstructive enterprise seems first and foremost an exercise in criticism, and I do not believe Derrida to be the first to recognize that everything is well criticized.³⁹ And even Derrida's resistance to putting up skyhooks between the ineffable and the everyday seems to be fading, as his forays into proper ethics may suggest.

In any case, as in my last paper, these provocative questions are simply thrown out here as I slip out the door. Nonsense theology of vowel sounds, in fact, strikes me as a faithful and satisfying description of the "grounds," if not foundations, of the way things are and aren't. But even when the grounds are quicksand or oceans, something has to be built atop them, or there are no homes, shelters, or hospitals.

Endnotes

1. Sometimes Athens is rationality and Jerusalem arationality, but sometimes Athens is surface and Jerusalem substance, Athens aesthetics and Jerusalem ethics -- in short, neither term seems to continually hold the same conceptual water on more than one occasion.

2. It is ironic that Heidegger implicitly objects to such immanentism, while at the same time supporting a historical project (German fascism) that had in its philosophical roots a commitment to a radical immanence of ultimacy in the world.

3. Jacques Derrida, Differance.

4. Christopher Norris, Derrida, at 15.

5. Id. at 3.

6. Id. at 6.

7. I hesitate to "define" differance in these terms, both because defining differance is to literally define it away and because I dispute the reading of it that makes it first and foremost a term with religious importance. Norris is probably correct in focusing on the linguistic and structural elements of the 'differance' moment. See Norris, supra, at 16.

8. See Richard Rorty, Deconstruction and Circumvention at 87 ("The claim, shared by Heidegger and Derrida, that the 'ontotheological' tradition has permeated science, literature, and poltics . . . is a self-deceptive attempt to magnify the importance of an academic specialty.")

9. Id.

10. Rorty, supra, at 92. Later, in Two Meanings of 'Logocentrism,' Rorty disputes that the logocentric "problem" even really exists in "the discourse of philosophy." But enough about Rorty.

11. See Jacques Derrida, The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing in Grammatology, at 6-10, 12.

12. See id. at 38ff, and Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy, in Writing and Difference, at 265-273.

13. Joseph Dan, On the Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism (citation temporarily unavailable).

14. See Jacques Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking: Denials in Derrida and Negative Theology (in packet), at 88- 89.

15. Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, supra, at 74.

16. Id. at 76.

17. Id. at 95.

18. I scarequote the term both because I am doubtful as to whether some of the texts discussed herein, though labeled gnostic, are truly so, and because I would like not to give a treatment of gnosticism per se (whatever that may be) but choose from the gnostic salad bar a potentially Derridian set of items and condiments.

19. As an amusing side-note, Derrida would almost certainly be pleased with the scholarship of marginalia that has evolved around the Nag Hammadi library. See, e.g., James M. Robinson, Inside the Front Cover of Codex VI, in Essays on the Nag Hammadi Texts in Honour of Alexander Bohlig (Martin Krause ed. 1972), which discusses a couple of small markings on the margins of the inside cover of one of the codices, which had been blocked from view on facsimile editions by a frame.

20. See, e.g., "Lord, I represent you faithfully by the seven vowels; come and listen to me; a ee eee iiii ooooo uuuuuuu oooooooo," in the magical papyrus entitled Monas, or the Eighth book of Moses, in Karl Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae, papyrus 13, lines 876-87.

21. I am thinking here of the dichotomy between the way of Cain and the way of Enoch as seen in Jewish mystical sources: Cain, who obviously has some fairly negative connotative baggage, is seen as one who obtains wisdom for the use of earthly goods and "brings down" Divine power for theurgical purposes. Enoch, who as Metatron has a better set of connotations, is seen as one who obtains wisdom for the use of heavenly ascent and "goes up" to Divine power for theosophical or divine-repair purposes.

22. See Arthur Darby Nock, Greek Magical Papyri in Arthur Darby Nock: Essays on Religion and the Ancient World (Zeph Stewart ed.).

23. Thunder: Perfect Mind, Codex VI, 2, p. 13. (George MacRae trans.)

24. See Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking, supra, at 113ff.

25. Indeed, some may likewise claim that Perfect Mind's language of paradox has a particular cognitive content, referring to the Deity cast out by the evil/fallen/illusory world. While this claim is debatable, if it is true it renders Perfect Mind not negative theology at all, but a fairly straightforward mythic narrative.

26. I take the phrase from Patricia Cox Miller's essay, In Praise of Nonsense, which discusses the use of language in Perfect Mind and elsewhere. The essay is in the Crossroad's Classical Mediterranean Spirituality volume (A.H. Armstrong ed. 1986). Miller's project is more a renovation of the magical than a move away from it, and ultimately links the "alphabetical nonsense" in magical texts with a Neoplatonist "piety of the alphabet." Id. at 499-501.

27. Thunder: Perfect Mind, p.20.

28. Here, and once below, I mention that if I were more Derridian at heart, I would be content to simply interpret these semiotic references without bothering about context: after all, "free play" is a principle to be taken as "seriously" as any other enterprise, like my own aspires to be. But, insofar as such method has allowed Jacques Derrida to defend Paul Deman's Nazi propaganda, it will not be my method here, a decision made on the historical grounds I proposed in class.

29. Thunder: Perfect Mind, supra, p. 20. Perfect Mind continues, "I am a mute who does not speak,/and great is my multitude of words."

30. Miller, supra, at 487.

31. Miller, supra, at 488.

32. Arthur Rimbaud, Vowels in Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works (Paul Schmidt trans. 1967) at 123.

33. Id. The kabbalistic/golem reference is probably unintentional, but the coincidence, in light of the spells discussion, should be noted by any Jungian reader.

34. I confess to quoting this much of the poem just because I want to share it with you, but whether Rimbaud is drawing on the "Om" reservoir (I doubt he is aware of the "Iao" one) or not, he is at least conscious of the alpha-and-omega issue, and, together with the present essay, is good proof to the Derridian point that some truths are better conveyed in poetry.

35. Miller, supra, at 490. Miller's use of the term "magical" here is to me somewhat unclear. She does not limit this portion of her discussion to spells and papyri only, although they are certainly included in it, but also refers to texts to be meditated upon for whatever aims we may attribute to the gnostics. I think, then, that the adjective should not be given too much weight.

36. I am aware Derrida might cringe at this characterization, but aside from the resolution of the negative into the positive synthesis, I am not convinced that the deconstructive (anti-) method is so radically different from a careful, non-resolving Hegelianism, as was discussed in class.

37. Moshe Idel, lecture on Kabbalistic Symbolism, Hebrew University, February, 1994. Idel suggests that the tetragrammaton in Kabbalah be viewed as a signifier of the deus absconditus that is a condition of exile, rather than as a signifier of an absolute ineffable being.

38. Indeed, the pronunciation of the ineffable may be intimately linked with some fascinating ways in which contradictions and unpronounceable phrases are spoken in reference to ecstatic mystical practices roughly contemporaneous with the period under study. See Naomi Janowitz, The Poetics of Ascent: Theories of Language in a Rabbinic Ascent Text 94-103 (1989) (discussing "semantization" and "repragmatization" of the exegeted name of God in a text of the Maasei Merkabah).

39. "Senator, I have a list..." that might include Socrates, certainly includes Kohelet and Laurence Sterne, and possibly claims Cervantes, but has little coherence (to its credit).

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