Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

marius timmann mjaaland

Radical Nominalism

There can be no analysis of ultimate conditions without a nominal
approach. The analysis of a given as given and a universal as real does
not allow room for a discourse on the Ultimate. The Ultimate remains
hidden as a precondition for the discourse on givens. There would
never have been a Descartes or a Luther without the questions raised
by the nominalists in the 13th century.^1 The question “What’s in a
name?” opens up a critical discussion on what words signify and how
they relate to the signified. The gap between the signifier and the
signified is determining for any discussion on ultimates. In this sense,
Jacques Derrida is a philosopher of ultimate conditions in modernity
from the outset. And he is a nominalist. His nominalistic approach to
highly significant philosophical questions is in this case what interests,
and aggravates, me. One of his essays on negative theology carries the
characteristic title: “How to Avoid Speaking?”^2
Derrida is not only a nominalist, he is a radical nominalist. Every
question of Being, Origin, Method, and Structure is thrown into the
destabilization of nominal questioning. “There is nothing outside the
text” has become a slogan that shows the comprehension of his theory,
but the radicality of his approach becomes obvious when he describes
the origin of phenomena, i.e., of phenomenality and meaning in
general:

The unheard-of difference between the apparaissant [the appearance]

and the apparaître [the appearing] is the condition of all the other

differences, of all the other traces, and it is already a trace. Accordingly,

this latter concept is absolutely and de jure “antecedent” both to every

physiological problem connected with the nature of the organic trace

left on the brain, and to every metaphysical problem connected with

the meaning of that absolute presence whose trace we must decipher.

In reality, the trace is the absolute origin of meaning in general. Once

again, this amounts to the affirmation that there is no absolute origin of

1. Cf. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indi-
   ana University Press, 2003, 354.


2. Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking?” trans. Ken Frieden in Languages of
   the Unsayable, eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, New York: Columbia Uni-
   versity Press, 1989, 3–70.