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x is beyond names
There's been a really interesting discussion on spirituality, poetry, and the unconscious happening over at Ron Silliman's weblog. A few days ago, the discussion turned to apophasis, also described as "negative theology." Curious about what that might be, I headed to the library to pick up Michael Sells' Mystical Languages of Unsaying, a book-length study on apophasis.
As I understand it so far, apophasis seems to be a mode of religious discourse which confronts the problem of language's inability to express the inexpressible event at the heart of the mystical experience. In some ways apophatic figures (Meister Eckhart, Plotinus, and Marguerite Porete, among others) embrace this inability by speaking in ways that are self-canceling or paradoxical.
"[Negative theology] is negative in the sense that it denies that the transcendent can be named. [But] to say that 'X is beyond names,' if true, entails that it cannot then be called by the name 'X.' In turn, the statement 'it cannot then be called X' becomes suspect, since the 'it,' as a pronoun, substitutes for a name, but the transcendent is beyond all names. As I attempt to state the aporia of transcendence, I am caught in a linguistic recess. Each statement I make—positive or 'negative'—reveals itself as in need of correction. The correcting statement must then itself be corrected, ad infinitum. The authentic subject of discourse slips continually back beyond each effort to name it or even to deny its nameability. This regress is harnessed and becomes the guiding semantic force, the dynamis, of a new kind of language."
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Thursday, February 20, 2003
10:51 AM
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