NEGATIVITY THEN AND NOW: An exploration of Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius and Jacques Derrida

Abstract

I should like to begin with a few autobiographical details in order to put this essay into proper perspective. I discovered the Eckhart Society by chance-or was it Providence?-in the summer of 1991 through a small announcement in a bookshop opposite King's College, Cambridge, where I was attending a conference entitled: "The Shadow of the Spirit: contemporary Western thought and its religious subtexts." Much to my amazement, it was Meister Eckhart, with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite as a close runner-up, who dominated many of the conference papers, presented from a variety of perspectives; in my own literary oriented paper I suggested some striking similarities in thought and expression between medieval negative theology (Meister Eckhart) and contemporary literary theory, represented by the influential French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, the father of what has come to be called deconstruction. Summed up quickly these are: both are predicated on negation; both arise from linguistic scepticism (what Nietzsche called Sprachskepsis) and point up, in their own way, the inadequacy of language to predicate presence and ultimate reality, be it God's transcendence or the philosopher's stone. Both, finally, employ the metaphor of the desert to describe God's place (which is not and has, to use Derrida's term, no "realm" or khora), and the mystic's experience of God's presence ("the desert of the Godhead")~ the selfsame metaphor is used to describe the wilderness of human discourse, as is the case with Derrida, who speaks of the "desertification" of language, and·refers to writing as the word (without a capital) in ~e desert, and to the Bible as "the desert-book, made of sand, of mad sand."· I had discovered Meister Eckhart some ten years before, again by chance-or was it Providence? -in the course of preparing a doctoral dissertation on a much neglected, fascinating, modem, allegorical and