Before "apophasis" arrived on the continental philosophy scene in the 1970s, the association of “negation” and “negative theology” with a key moral standard of modernity, i.e., critique, had long been underway. Negativity was conceptualized as a term of critique already by Nietzsche (d.1900), E. Husserl (d.1938), Heidegger (d.1976), and the Frankfurt School, but pure negation was not generally seen as a healthy prospect for thinking in continental philosophy. The philosophical and theological negativity espoused by Karl Jaspers (d.1969), for example, was a productive one. The movement of this “qualified negativity”
provides according to him the basis for “transcending-thinking” as a dialectic, instead of a pure negation.95 Walter Benjamin (d.1940) was another critical thinker to incorporate negative theology into his work. For Benjamin, negative theology presents an emancipating denial of social functions and categorizations, but he also adds immediately that the denial of specific social functions itself will inescapably create its own limitations.96 Negative theology saves us from dependence, but not infinitely, as it eventually creates another dependence.
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Thus qualified negativity is an essential aspect of Jaspers’ modality of Existenzerhellung and is a productive and not a destructive negativity. Its movement provides the basis for “transcending-thinking” as a dialectic which elucidates horizons of transcending that are more and more encompassing and less and less constrictive, but it does not, as negativity, make its claim in the absolute sense as Hegel’s Aufhebung. (Olson 1979, p.20.)
Also see Peach 2008, pp.175-180.
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With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of
“pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to take this position.) An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.
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T. Adorno (d.1969) declared that he was “not afraid of the reproach of unfruitful negativity” as early as 1931 when he called for a dialectical negation of idealism and the bourgeois philosophies of history.97 Adorno’s negation of negation very much responds to Hegel’s determinate negation, which yields positive residue through a process Hegel calls “sublation” [Aufhebung].98 Adorno in some places equates his negative dialectics with determinate negation, yet he also seems to criticize the Hegelian thesis that the negation of the negation yields a positive content. Adorno’s negative dialectics, and the concepts he uses, such as “non- identity,” “the ineffable,” and “the non-conceptual,” “the non-identical” induced the objections of Jürgen Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, and Herbert Schnädelbach alike. Habermas compares the role that the notion of non-identity or the non-identical plays in Adorno’s late work with the theme of “a hidden, world-transcendent God” in mysticism.99 While there are diverse interpretations in the secondary literature, I think it is safe to claim that Adorno had virtually no interest in negative theology.100 Non-conceptual and ineffable or not, “negation”
already entails an affirmative gesture towards future, hope, and promise. Any negation has to be grounded by a firm and radical affirmation, “the hope of utopia,” that makes sense of the negation.101 Again, “negation” has to be situated within dialectics in order to become complete and constructive.
From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. (Benjamin 1968, p.224.)
97 Buck-Morrs 1977, p.36.
98 See Finlayson 2012, pp.18-21.
99 Finlayson 2012, p.2.
100
Adorno appears to refer to apophatic theology only in two places: in his essay on Kafka and in his essay “Sacred Fragment: On Schönberg’s Moses and Aaron.” Even in this last essay, the only place where Adorno actually uses the term “negative theology,” he uses it to refer the Old Testament prohibitions against making graven images and on pronouncing or writing the name of God.
(Finlayson 2012, pp.7-8.) Also see Steunebink 2000.
101 See Buck-Morrs 1977, p.90.
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Herbert Marcuse (d.1979)’s writings follow a similar dialectical approach to negation with Adorno. “Negation needs to be read affirmatively, to draw out connections to today, to other present struggles, and to the current crisis.
Affirmatively, which is to say also, and at the same time, through a strategy of negation.”102 The productive dynamics of the affirmative, future-oriented, radical, imaginative hope and the critical negation of history is what Marcuse calls the “materialist dialectic.” “Critical theory” is its socially active form of thinking, which is perpetually self-negating. “Critical theory is … critical of itself and of the social forces that make up its own basis.”103 However this double- negation, again, is conditioned by the affirmative hope of utopia.
The dialectical emphasis of the Frankfurt School leaves its place to radical negativism in France in the late 1960s, with the la nouvelle théologie, as well as with such intellectuals as Henry Corbin (d.1978),104 and Jacques Derrida (d.2004).
Immediately after he presented a paper on différance in 1968, Derrida encountered Brice Parain (d.1971)’s challenge that his concept “différance” was identical with “the God of negative theology.”105 Derrida dismissed this claim without hesitation, arguing that negative theology was still a “theology” working within the limits of what Heidegger had called “onto-theology.” The charge, however, never left the scene, and finally, with writers such as John Caputo (b.1940) and Jean-Luc Marion (b.1946), the gap between deconstruction and negative theology was reduced, and for some, disappeared.106 Derrida’s Sauf le Nom is his most often cited text within this discussion. “Sauf le Nom” is best translated as “Save the Name,” where “save” has both senses of “rescuing” and
“except.” Here Derrida ends up coming back to his point in 1968 with slight compromises—an approach that honors negative theology, but also keeps its distinction from deconstruction firm.107 Briefly, Derrida accepts here that negative theology negates the discourse on god, including the name of god. The erasure of the name is fundamentally important, because naming relies on repetition, via which discourse, and implicitly power and politics, emerge.
Deconstruction, as “infinite critique,” erases all the names as well, which means that it operates against all discursive spaces. The crux of Derrida’s argument is
102 Shapiro in Marcuse 2009, p.xvi; emphasis original.
103 Marcuse 2009, pp.115-116.
104 Corbin’s approach to “apophasis” is discussed in the next chapter.
105 See Derrida and Parain in Wood and Bernasconi 1988, p.84.
106 Caputo 1997, pp.1-6; Nault 1999; Almond 2004, pp.29-34. See T. Jones 2011, pp.8-9.
107 See Derrida 1995, pp.35-88.
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that the deferral of god’s name in negative theology is actually saving the name.
Though unnamable, the apophatic god remains as the hyper-real principle in negative theology. On the one hand, Derrida sees an absolute critical power of negative theology, and he does not dismiss it as “naming,” or “discourse” as such.
On the other hand, it is still a discourse, though an inherently critical one.
Towards the end of Save the Name, he brings this point forth, asking “what would negative theology look like today?” His answer is certainly not
“deconstruction.” Instead, Derrida claims, it would be a kind of peaceful activism in the post-colonial world, working for just peace treaties criticizing oppressive, unequal, unjust, international law.108 It is absolutely shocking for a philosophy student to see a conversation on international law in the middle of a discussion of negative theology—a shock specifically intended by Derrida in order to point out that the distinction between deconstruction and negative theology is clear. It was rather the Frankfurt School that focused on the critique of the international, capitalist mode of production and the commodification of life. Derrida distinguishes his own method of infinite critique from negative theology by associating the latter with the Frankfurt School’s conception of negation, which successfully criticizes global capitalism and its institutions, but exists only within a dialectical relationship with affirmation.
Derrida’s former student Jean-Luc Marion (b.1946-), who shares his radicalization of negation, is more direct in the critique of dialectics in favor of negativity:
Why, indeed, does the dialectical movement suffer no exception, whereas applied to the confession of faith, it comes to terms with another logic …? It is because the dialectical movement is put to work by the ‘seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.’ Now the negative rules the totality of being as universally as Spirit, to which, in a sense, it exclusively returns.109
Marion later comes to a discussion of Derrida’s approach to negative theology and deconstruction with “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of It.”110 Responding to Derrida’s distinction between différance and negative theology, Marion uses “eventmentality,” a concept that he carefully develops throughout
108 Derrida 1995, p.81.
109 Marion 1991, pp.191-192.
110 Originally written and given in the context of a conference at Villanova in 1997, the essay was published at the very end of Marion’s Studies in Excess. See T. Jones 2011, p.32.
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the book as well as Marion’s earlier writings. Accordingly, phenomena give themselves in eventmentality in time, which is itself eventmental. The phenomenological primacy of the event implies that the self is “donated”
(adonee), not that there is an agency behind the givenness.111 This is a major, and indeed, very creative deviation from classical Western phenomenology. In a process-philosophical manner, Marion undertakes a long critique of Cartesian dualism to show that (1) the self is not the “donator,” but the “donated,” (2) there is no donator. Marion links the primacy of the eventmentality and the absence of the donator in order to defend the position that negative theology does not affirm a hyper-reality. Apophasis negates all hyper-realities beyond the name, by negating the name of god.112
Setting aside other implications and variant readings of these thinkers, the association of negative theology and negative speech with critique or even
“infinite critique” is somewhat clear in Derrida, Marion and the philosophical debates on the role of critique in theology. Negativity was conceptualized as a term of critique already in various strands of philosophy as far back as Kant, Hegel and Marx. However, with Derrida and Marion, critique becomes the defining aspect of not only Western philosophy, but also that of negative theology—an association that will render it philosophically self-conscious and ethically superior to others. Apophasis could stand on its own, independent of any positive ground, and negate discourse in any form with its infinite power of critique. This recently developed approach became quite influential in the study of religion in the last decades. The Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, to give a recent example, puts “negative theology” under the rubric of “apophasis,”
neither of which can be defined because of their infinite negativity.
[L]ike divinity, negation is infinite. … Thus, negative theology points to certain limits of all disciplinary discourses, their inability to circumscribe their domains and give an adequate account of themselves. … Theology, as the discourse of the unlimited, or as discourse without limits, turns out to be radically negative. … Negative theology invades discourse throughout its whole extent.
There is always a factor of negation in discourse, since it is not what it says. And there are no limits to the capability of recursive self-negation of discourse: it reaches to infinity. This makes negative theology impossible to define. In fact, it does not exist, as
111 Marion 2002, pp.30-49. See T. Jones 2011, pp.95-96; 114-116.
112 Marion 2002, pp.128-162.
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Jacques Derrida lucidly maintained. There is no negative theology as such; there can only be a negative theology of negative theology: a discourse that cancels itself out by its very nature and necessity and that exists only in and as this act of self-annihilation or self-erasure.113