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.


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