The Return to Apophaticism: Neo-Platonism of Alexey Losev and Jacques Derrida

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to initiate a virtual dialogue between the ideas of two twentieth-century philosophers who turned their interest to the concept of the apophatic unity – A.F. Losev and Jacques Derrida. This thopic, as well as the interest in the concepts of Neo-Platonism in general, one of the basic ones in the works of Losev, turns out to be in the focus of modern European philoso­phy, generating an independent intellectual current – Henology. As Losev re­marked, European scholarship for a long time have been ignored the Neoplaton­ists’ interpretations of Plato, while his philosophical system is based precisely on the Christian version of Neoplatonism. It will be noted that both thinkers draw the idea of apophaticism from the texts of the Corpus Dionysiacum Areopagiticum, but have understood it differently. Losev’s system implies that the one is expressed symbolically and in name, suggesting Christian overtones, while Jacques Derrida has a radical apophatic, an unattainable supersubstantial reality, designated by him as negative theology. But his deconstruction project, however, is not Christian. It will be concluded that the topic requires a compara­tive analysis of the ideas of the neo-platonist Losev with his variant of apophatic henology, which he presents as onomatology and symbolism (the expressed unity) and a completely different variant of the topic in Jacques Derrida’s works, who deconstructaed antique-medieval term of the one and looked for ways to “avoid talking” about it.