Into the Darkness with Michæl Motia

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1. 

   Craig Brewer
   August 9, 2023

   Since you guys mentioned Derrida in this context, I’ll grind one small axe. In the last 5-10 years of his life, Derrida had a “theological” turn where he started talking about Christian/Hebrew texts. But he wasn’t just “deconstructing” them. Instead, I (and a lot of other folk) think he was more starting to do some straight up theology. Or negative theology (which is never straight up or straightforward), but it wasn’t for the purposes of showing that there was just a big “nothing” at the heart of it.

   To put it simply: I think Derrida became an apophatic theologian at the end of his life (and he may have somewhat been that the whole time). But there’s also a real sense in which that’s an ESOTERIC side of his writing. Everything about an absent center, a deferred signified, it’s almost as if he’s saying that phillosophy gets that wrong because they assume it’s something discrete, present, complete, etc., when instead “God” or “Reality” or whatever is always more and bigger and “is” only in ways that you can approach with the whole “shining darkness” paradoxes like you discuss with Greg.

   I know that goes against the common wisdom about Derrida, but I think his later writings will play that out. There’s a small cadre of people now like John Caputo who just straight up argue that Derrida’s another “negative theologian” but in a more “productive” than a dismissive sense. (Caputo was friends with Derrida, and they would do these conferences together in the last years of his life where Caputo would try to say things like, “Derrida is our Augustine” and Derrida would laugh it off and then give a talk about how he’s not necessarily wrong.)

   Anyway…. there’s a line of thought out there where, despite all appearances to the contrary, Derrida belongs on this show. Deconstruction isn’t getting rid of “oogly boogly” stuff but is more saying, “You’re getting closer, but you’re not esoteric enough yet, not listening to the secrets quite well enough yet…” It’s not that deconstruction says language is meaningless, but rather that since it’s constantly stretching toward “something,” the stretching (to use G’s terms) is the thing.

   Of course everything else about Christian doctrine here is not going to be found, so I’m not saying that Derrida has something productive to add to late antique discussions exactly. But… I think there are definitely aspects where he’s even more friendly to some of the apophatic ideas here, even somewhat in the spirit (heh) of Gregory.

   Craig

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   • 

     Michael Motia
     August 10, 2023

     Thanks Craig. I’m happy to grind that axe with you! It might go against popular wisdom, but Derrida definitely had an affinity for negative theology, especially in his later writings. Even in early essays like “Différance,” he admits that deconstruction “resembles” negative theology. Later, in “Sauf le nom,” he says that he trusts “no text that is not in some way contaminated by negative theology.” Deconstruction and negative theology, he says, share an affinity for “what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible, more impossible than the impossible if the impossible is the simple negative modality of the possible.” Derrida’s debates with Jean-Luc Marion—plus those Caputo books and conferences with people like Catherine Keller, Richard Kearney, and popularizations through podcasts like HomeBrewed Christianity—have brought many folks from philosophy into late antiquity. On Gregory of Nyssa specifically, work by Scot Douglass and Virginia Burrus comes to mind.

     I’m hoping that Derrida—many years and many great esoterics later—gets time on the SHWEP. And I certainly agree that, as the saying goes, deconstruction is not destruction. (We can think about the way, in “Force of Law,” he talks about the call of justice—that it moves readers even as it undoes our sense of justice, that justice “does not wait” even if it is always “to come,” that you have to act, even knowing that acting will change you and the context of the act.)

     That said, my sense is that Derrida is a good reader of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Derrida grooves with late ancient Christian negative theology and its insistence on the plasticity of human nature and the inability to know origins. And in terms of writing practices more broadly, for Derrida, as for Dionysius, every repetition requires both sameness and difference, and it’s not always the case that sameness = kataphasis and difference = apophasis. (E.g., yes, God is not good is more jarring than God is good, but God is worm destabilizes more than God is not worm. Dionysius affirms and deny both.) For Derrida and for Gregory, there’s always something more, and texts have all kinds of ways of getting readers to see the more. But Derrida senses (rightly, I think) that Dionysius’s, like Gregory’s, critiques of a metaphysics of God or humanity are in service of a higher truth that they believe in. There is, for them, a “God’s-eye-view” that Christians should try to align themselves with or prepare themselves to receive or something like that (different Christian thinkers will theorize it differently), even if—and this is the catch—it’s unknowable and shot through with an infinite God.

     I also worry, as a historian, that the Caputo & Co. project can overplay the subversiveness of people like Gregory. I’m thinking about the Augustine and Paul conferences you mentioned and how Paula Fredriksen had to give a paper reminding everyone that even if Paul said that there was no male or female or slave or free in Christ that, well, it made a big difference if you were male or female, and that we have very little evidence to suggest Christians challenged the ideas of slavery that were dominant in the Roman empire. Gregory’s ideas around negative theology have been generative for postmodern theology, but his ideas were also orthodox, as in, they were what the emperor wanted Christianity to be. They were part of an empire-legitimating project. That doesn’t at all mean they’re unusable or inherently imperialistic, but I think it’s worth remembering that mysticism (a word that the SHWEP is rightly suspicious of but that Gregory gets associated with) and esotericism are not always sticking it to the powerful.

     What do you think?

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     • 

       Craig Brewer
       August 10, 2023

       I’ll give hearty cheers to all of that, qualifications and all! I especially think you’re right about overplaying the subversiveness of the earlier writers… but then even Gregory was picking and choosing from the past, as do we all. It’s also true that Caputo himself is a bit more of a cheerleader for those ideas than a careful historian, and some of the things that came out of that line feel a bit more like the “enthusiastic” wing of continental philosophy than the historically cautious and critical.

       And your point about how Dionysus/Gregory are still committed to a specific religious tradition while talking about an infinite and unknowable God … that always bugged me. Of course you can say that they didn’t really have the cultural option to be just “vaguely spiritual” rather than committing to a particular orthodoxy, but it also always leaves me with the feeling of: “You just opened every door in the im/possible universe. Why walk back through the one you came from?”

       (Were you at those conferences, btw? I was at Penn State at the time, so it was a short hop over to Villanova. I was a very confused graduate student at the time, so my memory of the details is pretty well shot. I got to chat with Derrida at the coffee bar once, where he accidentally spilled coffee on me and was very gracious. More than anything else, I recall his red suit with these GIANT, almost wing-like (aliform?) lapels. But it was a lot of fun.)

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       • 

         Michael Motia
         August 10, 2023

         I wasn’t! I went to one of the Caputo conferences at Syracuse with Michael Hardt, Jessica Benjamin, Slavoj Zizek, Amy Hollywood, and others—also lots of fun—but only read and heard about the Villanova ones with Derrida. I’m glad to know that the giant lapels looked as big IRL as they did in the pictures and that Derrida documentary (with cinematography by Kristin Johnson!).

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       • 

         Earl Fontainelle
         August 10, 2023

         Craig,

         Maybe the answer to “You just opened every door in the im/possible universe. Why walk back through the one you came from?” lies in the facts that

         A: you in fact got to the infinite hall where all doors eventually lead via the particular path you followed,

         B: you, if you are Gregory of Nyssa or the Pseudo-D, actually believe that your doctrines are true (so, in other words, as Michael was saying, not only do ‘mystics’ not always turn into nice people, they also don’t turn into some kind of post-religious Henry James type folks either), but mostly

         C: religions are something you DO, fundamentally, so the answers to the questions of “why?” follow a particular religion are not to be found in say the history of religions (where the SHWEP mostly hangs out) but in anthropology (where we hope to hang out much more as time goes on). Gregory might say “But don’t you see, the infinity and impossibility and excess of god are all precisely the point of all this Christian stuff. You might not see the connection, but that’s because you’ve never done it.”

         I dunno. Some thoughts. I’m enjoying this exchange very much, and obviously Derrida will be featured on the podcast when the time comes; if that were ever in doubt, there can be no doubt any more!

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         • 

           Craig Brewer
           August 10, 2023

           All of those certainly make sense. And I know my attitude is pretty anachronistic, so it’s less a question for Greg/P-D than the more general question of how to square this type of philosophical questioning with any one tradition of practice. But that’s maybe more my own hang-up. (My bet is that most people are probably by default living in the #2 context… even people who try to argue for #3… but I’m cynical.)

           But it does bring up interesting questions: what do we do if some of the ancient “parents” of the tradition end up sharing some ideas with much later “atheist humanists”, especially when those ideas are about fundamental metaphysics? Is that a problem or is it productive? I have no good answers myself, which is why I read lots of other people. 😉