to recall that God is refused the predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his
superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being. Such a development is not in
question here” (6; compare
end p.488
26). Corresponding to this is the absence of nostalgia or hope for “a lost native country of
thought” in which language could express pure presence without difference and thus
without absence (27). In other words, unlike negative theologies, which conjoin
mysticism with their conceptual skepticism, deconstruction is in the service of no
mysticism.
In 1987 (1992a) Derrida repeats these two points. Deconstruction does not rest on the
“ontological wager of hyperessentiality that one finds at work both in Dionysius and in
Meister Eckhart” (78). Nor does it aspire to “a silent intuition of Godthe promise of that
presence given to intuition or vision. The promise of such a presence often accompanies
the apophatic voyage. It is doubtless the vision of a dark lightbut still it is the immediacy
of a presence. Leading to union with Goda truth that is not an adequation but an
unveilingcontact or vision, that pure intuition of the ineffable, that silent union with that
which remains inaccessible to speech” (74, 79–80). But now Derrida presents a corollary
to his first two points. If deconstruction does not posit a hyperessential God with whom it
seeks union, then a fortiori it does not address such a deity in prayer and praise, as does
Pseudo-Dionysius.
When Derrida returns to the question of negative theology in 1993 (1995), he points to a
further corollary to his first two points. Absent the wager of hyperessentiality, the
negativity of deconstruction is not directed toward a particular, transcendent “object” but
is about the nature of language as such: “As soon as there are wordsdirect intuition no
longer has any chance” (30). Deconstruction could well be identified as nothing but an
explication of this thesis.
But within the limits of its special concern, negative theology has long since anticipated
this insight. It is “what questions and casts suspicion on the very essence or possibility of
language.” It is a “ critique' (for the moment let's not say adeconstruction')” of
language, the very “Kenosis of discourse.” It is a “sweet rage against language, this
jealous anger of language within itself and against itself.” For this reason, “I trust no text
that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology” (1995, 48–50, 59, 69). By
shifting focus from God-talk to language as such, Derrida offers what John Caputo calls a
“generalized apophatics” (1997, 41). The claim is quite simply that language is never
able to be adequate to what it refers to beyond itself. It may be that for Kant there is an
important difference between God and objects of ordinary sense experience. But the
absence of adequation is not limited to the theological case, and in this respect
deconstruction's “generalized apophatics” is simply a linguistic Kantianism.
This negative semantics, which echoes and extends the apophatic traditions, is a kind of
skepticism (neither Pyrrhonian nor Humean). We have seen that it is not in the service of
mysticism. If it were in the service of nothing but the deconstructor's desire to be free
from all constraints, it would be the cynical nihilism its critics are so eager to assure us it
is. But like Hegelian dialectic, deconstruction is not so much something we do as
observe. Moreover, as pre