The Anarchē of Spirit^269dialectic is the relationship between the kataphatic assertion ‘God is
light’, and its apophatic denial ‘God is not light’ or ‘God is dark’, in
which the contradiction between these two statements is transcended
by the apophatic vision of God as ‘dazzling darkness’. The seminal
mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius proposes the notion of God as
“dazzling darkness” as a violation and sublation of the law of logical
non-contradiction. Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Mystical Theology seeks
contemplation of the “mysteries of God’s word” which lie “beyond
unknowing and light”, hidden “in the brilliant darkness of a hid-
den silence” and “beyond assertion and denial.” Pseudo-Dionysius,
‘The Mystical Theology’, Chapter 1.1, The Complete Works, trans.
Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 135, 141. For a
helpful treatment of the relation between apophasis and anarchism
see Christopher R. Williams, ‘Anarchic Insurgencies: The Mythos
of Authority and the Violence of Mental Health’, in Psychological
Jurisprudence: Critical Explorations in Law, Crime, and Society, ed.
by Bruce A. Arrigo (Albany: State University of New York, 2004),
pp. 46–53. Williams writes that “To suggest that a spirit of apophasis
runs throughout anarchism’s search for a more human social order is
to suggest that humanity and justice require a stripping away, a nega-
tion, of that which subjugates the affirmative in life [...] the apophat-
ic indirectly seeks the affirmation of life through the negation of that
which inhibits it. In a word, the apophatic seeks justice” (p. 47).
- This reading of kenosis as subversively emptying human forms
of power and empowering forms of vulnerability is indebted in part
to Sarah Coakley, ‘Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of
‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing’, ed. Daphne Hampson,
Swallowing a Fishbone?: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity
(London: SPCK, 1996), 82–111. See further my Struggling With
God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (Cambridge:
James Clarke & Co., 2013), p. 263–5. - JP 4:4711.
- The relative relationships of Kierkegaard and Proudhon to
Hegel would demand a substantial study in itself. I have addressed
Kierkegaard’s critical stance towards the Hegelian sublation of
what Kierkegaard upholds as a paradoxical and inviolable “in-
finite qualitative difference” between the human and the divine
elsewhere (Struggling With God, p. 219–226). The scholarship on