Derrida as Mystic

 

In my opinion, Jacques Derrida was comparable to Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and others (perhaps Martin Buber? Gershom Scholem?).  That is to say, he was a mystic.  And that's fine.  I have no problem with mystics.  Of course, Derrida managed to finesse this mysticism into a very successful academic career, wearing clean, pressed, unbuttoned shirts and expensive designer suits to match his famously coifed hair, and wound up in films - indeed, films were made about him.  He was a movie star.  So that's one difference between him and Walter Benjamin.  Walter Benjamin was no movie star.  Perhaps, had Walter Benjamin lived a little later, he would have been a movie star.

But to me, Derrida's famous statement that "There is nothing outside of the text" is a slight variation on the statement from Be'ur Eser S'firot 3, that "There is nothing outside of God."  Anyone who studies sacred scripture deeply enough, having reached the level in which they find themselves in the hermeneutic circle, will inevitably reach the point where they are inclined to declare that "There is nothing outside of the text."  That is to say, nothing can be completely freed from its context, without a trace; there is no escape from the work of interpretation.  This is neither the beginning nor the end of the path of the mystic, but it is a moment on the journey.

This applies whether the sacred scripture in question is the Torah, or it is, for instance, Plato's Phaedrus, in which Plato writes Socrates's eloquent speech about divine madness.  This dialogue was of course the inspiration for Derrida's celebrated essay, "Plato's Pharmacy," which was published in his book, Dissemination - an essay which begins by telling us that "A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible."  And the section directly dealing with the "pharmakon," section 4, begins "Let us return to the text of Plato, assuming we ever left it."  The unstated implication is that we have never left it and we can never leave it, no matter how many times we "return".  This is the cry of despair of the mystic who has given up any hope of either entering fully "in" or ever fully getting "out" of the labyrinth: the realization that one is moving in a circle, and has become utterly lost.  (It need hardly be said that nothing, at least in the west, has inspired as much systematic mysticism as the Neoplatonic tradition.)

Plato, for his part, tells us in The Republic that there is an ongoing conflict between poetry and philosophy - a conflict that was, already in his day, "ancient."  For the Greeks, there were two contrary principles each vying for total universal triumph, namely logos and mythos.  Where does Derrida stand in this conflict?  He traces the history of "logocentrism," which he insists is "nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism" - all the way up to "the concept of science or the scientificity of science."  Even in Plato's writings, the deconstructionist detects a profound ambivalence: superficially, Plato appears to be calling for the liberation of logos from mythos, but he does so only within the structure of a myth.  There is no escape from the labyrinth.

Like the fandom of J.R.R. Tolkien, the rise of Derridean deconstruction can be seen as a cultural movement towards the reassertion of the the mythopoetic - towards what Derrida calls "writing," to which he assigns something like a salvific, indeed messianic, power.  No longer will dry logos, from which we derive the word "logic," be central - it will be decentered through the power of writing - or rather, writing will reveal that logos has always-already been dependent upon the mythic.  Derrida peers back into the mysteries of Egypt, invoking hymns to the God Samas, who can see the space of the land as hieroglyphs.  

Derrida's mysticism is the mysticism of writing.  Derrida's texts are mystical texts - I would go so far as to call them magical texts.  Particular care is placed on the placement of words within a page (even the language of "centrality" and "centrism" attest to this).  There is a well-known phrase among occult circles: "Know! Will! Dare! And Keep Silence!"  The mystical power of writing is precisely its power to keep silence.  As opposed to the phonetic power of speech, writing is mystical, not so much for what is written, but for what is not written - the spaces between and outside of words.  The power of writing is a power of space, and of place.  It is precisely the absences of writing that make it mystical.  It is through this power that writing can overcome the metaphysics of presence.  This can be seen as the obverse of Wittgenstein's observation, "It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is."  Superficially, Wittgenstein's mysticism and Derrida's would seem to be opposites, but there is a profound identity between them.  With Wittgenstein's "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence," Derrida profoundly agrees - but for Derrida, though we cannot "speak" of such things, we can indeed write - though only through writing's absences, through the spaces between words.

If I were to compare Derrida's writing to anything, it would be to an amulet, in which the placement of every symbol is its power.