[First published in University of Toronto Quarterly 55.1 (Fall 1985): 74-93. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English Conference, University of Guelph, 2-5 June 1984. ]

[Index: Jacques Derrida, A. D. Nuttall, Valentinus, gnosticism][Date: 1985]

Deconstruction and the Gnostics

Michael H. Keefer

I

Whatever its title might lead a new reader to expect, T.S. Eliot's well-known essay on Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca is not an argument for influence, but a pre-emptive strike. Eliot wrote, in his own words, to disinfect the Senecan Shakespeare before he appears. My ambitions would be realized if I could prevent him, in so doing, from appearing at all.1T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1951; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 129.

It is now late in the day to entertain similar thoughts with regard to that leading trend in post-structuralist literary theory known as deconstruction. The most violently jealous of traditionalists could hardly hope to strangle in its cradle a theory and a literary practice that already stalks with Herculean strength through English departments and publishers' lists, flushing out the Augean stables of humanistic commentary, and banging on the head such primordial monsters as the belief that the knowledge of relationships does not preclude a knowledge of things, or that truth is founded upon material characteristics rather than being simply a human invention or fiction, or that there is a real world (without inverted commas) which is not simply a web of intertextuality but an objective universe to which texts can and do, indeed must, refer. It may not seem clever, in the struggle between competing literary theories which has developed over the past decade, to say that one is on the side of Antaeus, the opponent of Hercules who drew strength from his contact with the earth: one remembers how many lumps that obtuse giant took before at last being lifted up (shall we say into the thin air of formalism?) and crushed. Nor is it much comfort, amid the enthusiasm of younger critics for the new theory, to remind oneself of the radical contradictions, even incoherence, of the deconstructionist metaphysic: Antaeus was long gone by the time Hercules, in his frenzy, slaughtered all his own children. Sanguinary allegories notwithstanding, it is not the purpose of this essay to deny that deconstruction has helped to revitalize critical discourse. Deconstruction has stirred literary critics from their dogmatic slumberseven if, all too often, into an equally dogmatic wakefulness. It has raised important and previously neglected questions about the activities of writing and textual appropriation, and, for this generation at least, has redirected the practice of interpretation into modes that are more frequently exciting than obscurantist. To refuse the mixed pleasures and sometimes liberating insights which the writings of deconstructionist critics can bring would be both stupid and dishonest. But a supine acceptance of their more radical claims might be equally dishonest, and rather more foolish. As A.D. Nuttall writes in A New Mimesis, It is after all common sense to welcome a gift and to resent a theft.2A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 8.

The line of thought which I wish to develop here was set off by encounters with two texts: the book by A.D. Nuttall from which I have just quoted, and John R. Searle's hostile review of Jonathan Culler's book On Deconstruction.3John R. Searle, The Word Turned Upside Down, review of Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), New York Review of Books 30.16 (27 October 1983): 74-79.

Searle is known for his work on Speech Acts and Intentionality, and Nuttall for his brilliant applications of philosophical argument to literary subjects in such books as Two Concepts of Allegory and A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination. In Searle's review of Culler and in Nuttall's A New Mimesis, two powerful philosophical minds encounter the central metaphysic of deconstruction, and raise serious questions abut the claims generated from it. The positions which they attack, and the arguments which they deploy against those positions, will be alluded to in this paper. But my primary concern here is with the probability, as I take it, that their refutations of the deconstructionist metaphysic will have only a marginal impact upon the continued advance of deconstruction as a literary methodology in North America. Although well aware that the cutting edge of Jacques Derrida's thought is considerably blunted in the works of his American disciples like Culler or Geoffrey Hartman, Nuttall and Searle both quite properly treat deconstruction as a philosophy of language, and engage it on that level as well as on the level of its literary applications. Not to be grateful for these analyses would be churlishand yet to expect that they will have much impact upon deconstruction would be to commit a nave error, one which philosophers term a category-mistake. Derrida is by mtier a philosopher, many of whose sources (Nietzsche and Heidegger, for example) are philosophical. But I would suggest that deconstruction in its Derridean form is neither a philosophy nor even, primarily, a set of strategies for dealing with texts: it is a Gnosis. One philosopher can refute another, and both know what has happened. For although the refuted party will usually insist (often rightly so) that her opponent is talking at cross purposes, both acknowledge that the formal possibility of refutation is embedded in philosophical discourse as one of its defining features. Since Gnostics habitually make use of philosophical terminology, a philosopher can also engage a Gnostic in debate. Yet while an onlooker may be convinced that the Gnostic's logic has been conclusively refuted, the Gnostic will confess himself untouched. This is not simply because a Gnostic system of thoughtlike any otherembodies a pre-logical commitment that transforms the sense in which specific words are used. It is a matter, rather, of a transformation in the manner in which language is deployed. The terms of discourse are refused any determinate meaning, and consequently are made to appear incommensurable to the terms of any competing discourse. Not surprisingly, a discourse which thus protects itself against the possibility of refutation also tends to devolve from argument into mere assertion.4For a discussion of assertions of incommensurability by several contemporary writers (including Paul de Man) see Hilary Putnam, The Craving for Objectivity, New Literary History 15.2 (Winter 1984): 229-39. The tendency of deconstructionists to substitute dogmatic assertion for philosophical argument has been commented on by Gerald Graff in Deconstruction as Dogma, or, 'Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Strether Honey!', Georgia Review 34 (1980): 404-21.

Or rather, it might be said that the arguments which the Gnostic adduces constitute an invitation to conversion more than a supporting structure in any coherent logical sense; any refutation of them therefore leaves the Gnostic system (subjectively at least) intact. In so far as deconstructionists share these characteristics (and Jacques Derrida, as will be argued below, does so rather fully), Nuttall and Searle can no more refute their metaphysic than they eat the Platonic Idea of an apple. Deconstructionist and apple alike inhabit a void from which any detailed concern for rules of evidence, for the laborious evaluation of probable truths, or for a thoroughgoing critique of the cultural relations of power at work in history and society have been carefully evacuated. Before proceeding to a more precise explanation of what I mean in identifying deconstruction as a Gnosis, and to an analysis of what makes literary critics so vulnerable to the claims of this Gnosis, I would like briefly to allude to some of the arguments against deconstruction formulated by A.D. Nuttall and John R. Searle. In analysing a Nietzschean deconstruction of causality which Jonathan Culler presents as a paradigm example of the deconstructionist method, Searle brings to light several curious mistakes, of which the most obvious is an equivocation over two quite distinct senses of the word origin. Culler's argument that when we sit on a pin, the effect (the pain we feel) is what causes its cause to become a cause, and thus that the effect should be treated as the origin,5Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 86-88.

is founded on a conflation of causal origin with epistemic origin. The argument tells us little, if anything, about causality, but rather more about Culler's philosophical navety. More important, Derrida's claim that the Western tradition has persistently privileged speech over writinga claim that is basic to his key notion of logocentrismis, so Searle argues, unfounded: The distinction between speech and writing is simply not very important to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, etc.6Searle, 75. One might wish to exclude Plato from this list. Searle suggests that the oddity of Culler's and Derrida's reading of the remarks of Plato and Aristotle on the relation of speech to writing may derive from ignorance of the evidence that the Greeks of antiquity usually read aloud. It seems relevant to remember St. Augustine's surprise at finding that when St. Ambrose read a text to himself, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest (Confessions, vi.3)an eccentricity which Augustine attributed to Ambrose's desire not to overstrain a weak voice or to be interrupted by the questions of ignorant listeners.

Derrida's proof that l'criture is prior to speech, that speech is really writing, is made possible by a tendentious redefinition of writing in terms of difference and traces which is itself an extension, by a notable non sequitur, of Saussure's position that dans la langue il n'y a que des diffrences.7Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, ed. C. Bally, A. Sechehaye, A. Reidlinger (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 166. The context of this famous aphorism deserves quotation: Tout ce qui prcde revient dire que dans la langue il n'y a que des diffrences. Bien plus: une diffrence suppose en gnral des termes positifs entre lesquels elle s'tablit; mais dans la langue il n'y a que des diffrences sans termes positifs. Qu'on prenne le signifi ou le signifiant, la langue ne comporte ni des ides ni des sons qui prexisteraient au systme linguistique, mais seulement des diffrences conceptuelles et des diffrences phoniques issues de ce systme. For commentary on this passage, see Nuttall, A New Mimesis, pp. 32-34.

Derrida and his followers attempt to use this insight to deconstruct the difference between presence and absence. In Searle's words: The correct claim that the elements of the language only function as elements because of the differences they have from one another is converted into the false claim that the elements consist of (Culler) or are constituted on (Derrida) the traces of these other elements. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. But the second thesis is not equivalent to the first, nor does it follow from it....Indeed, as with Culler's deconstruction of causation, the argument shows exactly the reverse of what Derrida claims.... The system of differences does nothing whatever to undermine the distinction between presence and absence; on the contrary the system of differences is precisely a system of presences and absences.8Searle, p. 76.

Nuttall's attack upon this strange metaphysic in which the world is dissolved into language, the elements of which themselves dissolve into an echoing system of interwoven differences and traces where there are no things but only relationships, is more generalized and therefore more powerful: The notion of a relationship presupposes the notion of things which are related. A world consisting of pure relationship, that is, a world in which there are no things, is ex hypothesi a world in which no thing is related to any other and in which there could therefore be no relationship. The proposition is thus fundamentally incoherent and one can watch it dismantle itself, like a self-destructive work of contemporary art.9Nuttall, A New Mimesis, pp. 8-9.

Accepting the more modest claim that it is the relationships between things which make for meaning and intelligibility, Nuttall confronts the structuralist and post-structuralist dctrine, derived ultimately from Vico's verum factum, that all of these relationships are merely the work of the human mind: So called knowledge is really fiction: verum factum, verum fictum, 'truth made is truth feigned.'10Ibid., p. 9.

But this doctrine in its modern form as a metaphysical absolute can only be sustained by what Nuttall calls the usual twentieth-century stratagem whereby the expert exempts himself from the non-cognitive determination which enslaves all the rest.... The claim that the truth of [any] given system inheres solely in certain arbitrary, collectively agreed conventions and patterns and that all reference has this purely conventional and contextual character is no more than rhetorical unless the structural anthropologist or the deconstructionist who makes it has some grounds for maintaining that the same claim does not apply with equal or greater force to his own system.11Ibid., p. 11.

This being so, Nuttall can argue, elegantly and powerfully, that The shapes we bring to bear on the world are interrogative rather than constitutive.12Ibid., p. 21; Nuttall's italics.

Derrida and his followers may seem to accept, with a certain lugubrious playfulness, the confinement to the level of rhetoric which the undercutting of deconstruction by its own scepticism would imply. But this is mere seeming. As Nuttall writes, the critic launches himself into the maelstrom. The fluid is interpreted by the fluid. As we watch, however, certain propositions recur...13Ibid., p. 27. Nuttall is here referring to a Derridean essay by Murray Schwartz in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

propositions which typically assert the priority of language to meaning, or reader to author, and of the shifting categories of relation to the blurred absences which they trace. The circlings and redoublings of Derrida's texts are tactics for evading a genuinely self-critical reflexiveness of the kind that Nuttall defines, in another book, as a reflexive check.14Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 62ff.

It is symptomatic of this evasiveness that in writing about Freud, Derrida (in Nuttall's words) is emphatic that we cannot even raise the question of the objectivity of Freud's method since Freud was himself then and there engaged in investigating the origins of subjectivity. This sounds very fine but is wholly without cogency. One might with equal force maintain that it is impossible to train a telescope on a lens factory.15Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 28.

Derrida's habit of doubling back over his own traces allows him to forestall the objection that he is unaware of the applicability of his sceptical arguments to his own discourse, and at the same time to continue using concepts which have supposedly been deconstructed. But when, for example, he writes that La 'rationalit'mais il faudrait peut-tre abandonner ce mot pour la raison qui apparatra la fin de cette phrasequi commande l'criture ainsi largie et radicalise, n'est plus issue d'un logos..., Nuttall can remark: The doubling back is violent, and yet it fails. For as long as one is rejecting rationality for reasons (whatever they are) one has not rejected rationality.16Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1967), p. 21; Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 35.

Having effectively removed the dogmatic stuffing of deconstruction, Nuttall does not neglect to take away also some of its attractive sheen of novelty. Derrida's repeated claims that the phonemic relativity observed by Saussure makes it impossible to know anything because one cannot know everything, and that the system of differences in language implies an endless deferral of meaning, are curiously reminiscent of two of the standard tropes of ancient Pyrrhonist scepticism:The third of Agrippa's five modes of perplexity, the mode of relativity, neatly encapsulates the history of structuralism and its resolution into scepticism: The mode derived from relativity declares that a thing can never be apprehended in and by itself, but only in connexion with something else. Hence all things are unknowable. Agrippa's second mode of perplexity mirrors Derrida's principle of indefinite deferral: The mode which involves extension ad infinitum refuses to admit that what is sought to be proved is firmly established because one thing furnishes the ground for belief in another, and so on ad infinitum. Agrippa applies the principle to rational demonstration, Derrida to semantic confirmation. The end result in either case is virtually the same.17Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 36, quoting from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, tr. R.D. Hicks, Loeb edition (London, 1925), ix.89, ix.88, vol. 2, pp. 500-01.

II

Much recent commentary on Derrida and deconstruction is strangely flaccid. Frank Lentricchia, for example, writes of a passage in De la grammatologie that The problem with such statements is not that they are 'wrong'Derrida is utterly persuasivebut that they postulate a set of textual determinants so broad ... so historically inclusive that they deny that a given text, or group of texts, is enmeshed in circumstances any different from the circumstances that enclose any other text.18Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 176.

Lentricchia seems not to accept the rejection of history entailed by Derrida's statements, and yet he has evidently been persuaded out of any capacity to weigh his own historical awareness against them, and even (so his inverted commas around wrong suggest) out of the belief that such statements can be categorized (logocentrically, no doubt) as true or false. It is a curious surrender. In this context the trenchant polemics of Nuttall and Searle, while in some respects anticipated by other writers,19See, for example, M.H. Abrams, The Deconstructive Angel, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 425-38; Denis Donaghue, Deconstructing Deconstruction, New York Review of Books 27.10 (12 June 1980): 37-41; Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Deconstruction as Dogma..., Georgia Review 34 (1980): 404-21; Peter Barry, Is There Life After Structuralism?, Critical Quarterly 23.3 (1981): 72-77.

are thoroughly invigorating. Derrida has sometimes been attacked, with a certain petulance, because he threatens unexamined metaphysical foundations dear to traditionalist literary critics; because he is too much of a philosopher. Nuttall and Searle, who are not metaphysicians, show rather that he is not enough of a philosopherthat, in Nuttall's words, his Pyrrhonian eristic victories end by being merely Pyrrhic.20Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 36.

I have suggested, however, that most North American critical theorists perhaps do not want to be invigorated by this kind of counter-argument. As a 1977 exchange between Searle and Derrida in the pages of Glyph reveals,21Searle, Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida, Glyph 1 (1977): 198-208; Derrida, Limited Inc a b c ... (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), English translation in Glyph 2 (1977): 162-254.

the master is himself too full of his own playful energies to be deflected from his course. A more recent attack by Edward Said upon the deconstructionist metaphysic, or rather upon the irresponsibility that is its concomitant, would seem to indicate that Derrida's American followers are in a similar manner deafened by the static which their own discourse generates. Said's Reflections on Recent American 'Left' Literary Criticism, presented to a symposium on textuality organized by the journal boundary 2, is an eloquent plea for critical engagement with the historical and political conditions involved in literary criticism. Said argues that the promise of oppositional knowledge22By this term Said means a knowledge which exists essentially to challenge and change received ideas, entrenched institutions, dangerous values; he suggests that in recent criticism a concern with such knowledge has succumbed to the passivity of ahistorical refinement upon what is already-given, there, acceptable, and above all, already-defined. Said, Reflections on Recent American 'Left' Literary Criticism, in The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism, ed. W.V. Spanos, P.A. Bov, and D. O'Hara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 20.

held out by structuralist and post-structuralist schools has, in practice, proved illusory: contemporary Left critics, with some honourable exceptions, have been stunningly silent about the relationships between culture and state power. A period of admirable technical brilliance has also been one characterized by a willingness to accept the confinement and isolation of literature and literary studies vis--vis the world, one in which most of us have tacitly accepted, even celebrated, the State and its silent rule over culturewithout so much, during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam period, as a polite murmur. Critics and intellectuals have acquiesced in the neutralizing of their own technical skill:In our rhetorical enthusiasm for buzz-words like scandal, rupture, transgression and discontinuity it has never occurred to us to be concerned with the relations of power at work in history and society, even as we have assumed that a text's textuality is a matter to be explored as something concerning other texts, vaguely denoted conspiracies, fraudulent genealogies entirely made up of books stripped of their history and force. A constant underlying assumption, Said says, has been that texts are radically homogeneous, the converse of which is the extraordinarily Laputan idea that to a certain extent everything can be regarded as a text.23Ibid., p. 25.

I will not dwell upon the Gramscian analytic pluralism advocated by Saidan approach which could fruitfully be combined with Nuttall's refutation of the collective solipsism of deconstruction and his pluralistic theory of mimesis. For what interests me here is the immediate muffling of Said's argument by the paper which followed his in the boundary 2 symposium, and also by the introduction to the volume in which these papers were published. Evan Watkins responds to Said's powerful essay by suggesting that one can see even the most interior and private gestures of criticism as inaugurating a social and political world24Evan Watkins, The Politics of Literary Criticism, in The Question of Textuality, p. 37.

and thus by implication replaces Said's demand for an interrogative, referential, political criticism with the weary view (refuted by Nuttall) that critical discourse constitutes the objects of its knowledge. In the editors' introduction, meanwhile, Said's critical theory is rapidly dissolved, by a weird series of moves, into a view of criticism as an antithetical quest, a pursuit of one's own obsessive phantasmagoria, a reenactment of the whirling dance of death of the scholar embracing for the thousandth time the self-generated phantasm of his own method and intention. This endeavour is bathed in the pathos of existential heroism:Suspended in the pallid cast of shadows, our post-modern critical figures, in an activity that dimly revives disturbing earlier traces of it, play out dangerously the spider webs of their methods and desires, their intentions and passions, consciously, futilely, spinning their knowledgemocking skeletal self-imagesout of that center into the formless voice of the abyss....25Spanos, O'Hara, Bov, Introduction to The Question of Textuality, pp. 4, 5.

It is not wholly unfair, when confronted with self-congratulator nihilist heroics of this kind, to invoke Terry Eagleton's suggestion that such posturing isa product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968. Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least, was likely to beat you over the head for doing so.26Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 142.

III

Eagleton's words provide an appropriate reminder that the context within which Derrida's early works were acclaimed in the late 1960s was to a considerable degree shaped by the strongly Marxist Tel quel group. Jean-Joseph Goux, for example, interpreted such key Derridean terms as archi-trace, logocentrisme, and diffrance as being homologous to key terms in Marx's labour theory of value.27Jean-Joseph Goux, Marx et l'inscription du travail, in Thorie d'ensemble, Collection 'Tel quel' (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1968), pp. 197-204.

Similarly, Jean-Louis Baudry saw a clear analogy between the proletariat and l'criture (in Derrida's sense) as revolutionary forces which have been suppressed and excluded by bourgeois society and by la parole respectively, and which yet remain within them, providing the necessary condition for their existence.28Jean-Louis Baudry, Linguistique et production textuelle, Thorie d'ensemble, p. 358.

The implied analogy between Derrida and Marx himself comes closer to the surface when Philippe Sollers, praising De la grammatologie as un texte qui claire ces dernires annes et les modifie radicalement, writes: Proposer une phrasologie rvolutionnaire est la porte de n'importe qui. Mais participer la rvolution de la pense qui s'crit en sachant qu'criture et rvolution sont prcisment homologues en ceci qu'elles exercent une force transformative muette, cela est beaucoup plus difficile....29Philippe Sollers, Le reflexe de rduction, Thorie d'ensemble, pp. 396-97.

It is not just our distance from the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s which makes these interpretations of Derrida seem strange. For while his thought is insistently subversive, it moves, not towards a Marxist praxis, but rather towards an aporia which undercuts Marxist as well as all other forms of discourse; it strains towards an ambiguous absence in which all opposing terms are confounded. The early essay Force et signification (first published in 1963 and reprinted in L'criture et la diffrence) provides an example of this movement. A recurring idea in this text is that of conversion. This word seems to designate a methodological turning-inward, a critical and creative reflex which Derrida endows with a curious finality, since its reflexiveness is supposed somehow to pre-empt any future criticism. As we will see, it is a term which also preserves powerful religious resonances. The essay (and hence also the book L'criture et la diffrence) begins with a denial that a future historian of ideas could properly treat l'invasion structuraliste as an object: ... l'historien se tromperait s'il en venait l: par le geste mme o il la considrerait comme un objet, il en oublierait le sens, et qu'il s'agit d'abord d'une aventure de regard, d'une conversion dans la manire de questionner devant tout objet. Devant les objets historiquesles siensen particulier. Et parmi eux trs insolite, la chose littraire.30Jacques Derrida, L'criture et la diffrence, Collection 'Tel quel' (Paris ditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 9.

By a strategy which Nuttall challenges in his example of the telescope trained on the lens factory, literary structuralism thus lifts itself out of history. The same notion of conversion is also used to collapse literature upon itself, or rather upon the absence which constitutes it:Pour ressaisir au plus proche l'opration de l'imagination cratrice, il faut donc se tourner vers l'invisible dedans de la libert potique. Il faut se sparer pour rejoindre en sa nuit l'origine aveugle de l'oeuvre. Cette exprience de conversion qui instaure l'acte littraire (criture ou lecture) est d'une telle sorte que les mots mme de sparation et d'exil, dsignant toujours une rupture et un cheminement l'intrieur du monde, ne peuvent la manifester directement.... Car il s'agit ici d'une sortie hors du monde, vers un lieu qui n'est ni un non-lieu ni un autre monde, ni une utopie ni un alibi.... Seule l'absence purenon pas l'absence de ceci ou de celamais l'absence de tout o s'annonce toute prsencepeut inspirer, autrement dit travailler, puis faire travailler. Le livre pur est naturellement tourn vers l'orient de cette absence qui est, par-del ou en dea de la gnialit de toute richesse, son contenu propre et premier.31Ibid., p. 17.

Force et signfication has a subversive function, to be sure: by way of exposing the static spatial metaphors of structuralism, Derrida moves from an initial expression of admiration for Jean Rousset's book Forme et signification to what might be termed an implosion of Rousset's view of critical reading as a passage de l'insignifiant la cohrence des significations, de l'informe la forme, du vide au plein, de l'absence la prsence.32Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littraires de Corneille Claudel (Paris: Librairie Jos Corti, 1962), p. Iii.

The spatial metaphors of structuralism are supplanted, however, by what Edward Said has called, with reference to De la grammatologie, a kind of negative theology.33Edward W. Said, Criticism Between Culture and System, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 184.

The absence to which Derrida returns us in Force et signification is a quasi-theological notion; so, likewise, is the concept of writing which he develops from it: L'criture est l'angoisse de la ruah hbraque prouve du cot de la solitude et de la responsabilit humaines.... Or again, more elliptically: trange labeur de conversion et d'aventure o la grce ne peut tre que l'absente.34Derrida, L'criture et la diffrence, pp. 19, 23.

The notion of conversion is still more deeply embedded in this essay than the passages I have quoted would suggest. For the essay concludes with an image of the inaugural moment of a new prophetic orderthe image is that of Nietzsche's Zarathustra seated among old shattered law-tables and new half-written onesand its last words are a quotation from Also Sprach Zarathustra: Regardez: voici une table nouvelle. Mais o sont mes frres qui m'aideront la porter aux valles et la graver dans les coeurs de chair?35Ibid., p. 49. Cf. Also Sprach Zarathustra, III.12.4. Behold, here is a new law-table: but where are my brothers, to bear it with me to the valley and to fleshly hearts? Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 216.

This prophetic gesture is allegorized: writing is a moment of conversion, of turning towards the valley, the originating otherness or absence within being;36L'criture et la diffrence, p. 49: L'criture est le moment de cette Valle originaire de l'autre dans l'tre.

but allegory or no allegory, the textthis text in particularis a call for converts.

IV

It is for the following reasons that the deconstructionist project can be termed a Gnosis. Deconstruction, like second-century Gnosticism, is radically antinomian, antihistorical, and anti-worldly. The mode of knowledge which it elaborates is closely parallel to what second-century thinkers like Valentinus understood by gnosis. In each case the knowledge in question is severed from reference to any positive externality. The transcendent deus absconditus of Gnosticism is an otherness, an absence, an abyss or trace, the endless deferral of whose meaning is testified to both by the proliferation of mediating hypostases in Gnostic speculations about the primordial divine pleroma or plenitude,37The Gnostic term pleroma refers to a pre-existent order of divine beings emanating from the unknown God; for examples of the proliferation of such mediating hypostases, see The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. and tr. James M. Robinson et al. (1977; rpt. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 100-03, 195-201.

and also by the fact that Gnostics commonly believed the cosmos to owe its existence to ignorance of the true God even within this pre-existent plenitude derived from him.38The Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 38, 68-70.

This inaccessible God is anterior to and also constitutive of all things: according to the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, Nothing happens without him, nor does anything happen without the will of the Father, but his will is incomprehensible. His trace is the will, and no one will know it, nor is it possible for one to scrutinize it in order to grasp it.39Ibid., p. 46.

Similarly, the Derridean archi-trace (a development of the notion of l'absence pure in Force et signification) is the unknowable, non-existent, and constitutive ground of language and of meaning.40Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 91-92: ...l'apparatre et le fonctionnement de la diffrence supposent une synthse originaire qu'aucune simplicit absolue ne prcde. Telle serait donc la trace originaire.... Il ne s'agit donc pas ici d'une diffrence constitue mais, avant toute dtermination de contenu, du mouvement pur qui produit la diffrence. La trace (pure) est la diffrance. Elle ne dpend d'aucune plnitude sensible, audible ou visible, phonique ou graphique. Elle en est au contraire la condition. Bien qu'elle n'existe pas, bien qu'elle ne soit jamais un tant-prsent hors de toute plnitude, sa possibilit est antrieure en droit tout ce qu'on appelle signe (signifi/signifiant, contenu/expression, etc.), concept ou opration, motrice ou sensible. Cette diffrance n'est donc pas plus sensible qu'intelligible.... Elle permet l'articulation de la parole et de l'critureau sens courantcomme elle fonde l'opposition mtaphysique entre le sensible et l'intelligible, puis entre signifiant et signifi, expression et contenu, etc.

What is central, for Derrida as for Valentinus, is the effective absence of this constitutive ground of meaningand the challenge which this originating absence poses to traditional modes of thought. In a sentence notable for its flickering alternation of absence and presence, Derrida writes: L'absence d'un autre ici-maintenant, d'un autre prsent transcendantal, d'une autre origine du monde apparaissant comme telle, se prsentant comme absence irrductible dans la prsence de la trace, ce n'est pas une formule mtaphysique substitue un concept scientifique de l'criture. Cette formule ... est la contestation de la mtaphysique elle-mme....41Ibid., p. 68.

By the same token and with equal validity, Valentinus might have claimed, eighteen centuries earlier, to have deconstructed the metaphysics of the Jews, the Greeks, and the Christians. Gnosis, whether Valentinian or Derridean, displaces an antecedent mode of knowledge as theoriaas a manipulation of universals in which the cognitive relation is 'optical,' i.e., an analogue of the visual relation to objective form that remains unaffected by the relation.42Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (2nd ed.; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 35.

In both cases gnosis achieves this displacement through a radical relativity which dissolves the traditional distinction between subject and object. Deconstruction reduces the subject to a trace within the weave of differences and deferred meaningsand Derrida insists that the terms by which it does so (such as diffrance, trace, d-limitation, supplment) cannot themselves be objectified: le mouvement de ces marques se transmet toute l'criture et ne peut donc se clore en une taxinomie finie, encore moins dans un lexique en tant que tel....43Jacques Derrida, La dissmination (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 32.

In a closely analogous manner, as Hans Jonas writes,the system of universal being which gnosis on its theoretical side expounds, is centred around the concept of gnosis itself and has thereby in its very constitution a reference to its becoming known by the individual knower. This broad metaphysical, theologico-cosmological underpinning of the saving power of knowledge, signified by the appearance of the term on both the subject and object side of the system, is the first distinctive feature of gnostic speculation.44Jonas, Delimitation of the Gnostic PhenomenonTypological and Historical, in The Origins of Gnosticism: Colloquium of Messina 13-18 April 1966, ed. Ugo Bianchi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), p. 91.

The knowing subject, in Gnosticism, is the pneuma or divine spirit within man; it has no relation to the empirical personality composed of psyche and the enveloping structures of ignorance imposed by the demiurge or world-creator and the planetary archons who serve him: this empirical self is by definition incapable of gnosis. However, as Jonas's words should remind us, Gnosticism typically had a transcendental impulse, a concern with salvation, that is wholly lacking in deconstruction. The language with which Derrida seeks to overturn the priority accorded to la parole over l'criture by Saussure and other linguists may echo, with its metaphors of the insaissisable point of origin, of passion, promiscuit dangereuse, usurpation, and la violence de l'oubli, the Gnostic myth of the passion of Sophia (also called Prunikos: the prurient) which accounts for the origin of the world.45De la grammatologie, pp. 54-55. With the exception of the idea of an ungraspable point of origin, these metaphors are derived from Saussure; however, Derrida intensifies them and gives them a quasi-mythic structure: his comment on the interlacing of parole and criturePromiscuit dangereuse, nfaste complicit entre le reflet et le reflet qui se laisse narcissiquement sduire (p. 54)is a tidy summary of the version of the Fall of the divine Primal Man given in the Poimandres, the foundational text of the Hermetic gnosis. Cf. Corpus Hermeticum, ed. and tr. A.D. Nock and A.J. Festugire (4 vols.; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), I, 11. For a conflated summary of the Sophia myth, see Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 176ff.

Yet as one of his translators remarks, Derrida seems to show no nostalgia for a lost presence;46Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1976; rpt. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), Translator's Preface, p. xvi.

and it must be recognized that it is one thing to preach the liberation of the pneumatikoi from the oppression of the ignorant demiurge and his archons, and another to preach the liberation of semiology from la rpression logocentrique.47Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 74.

This evident difference is, however, less significant than one might at first think. For as C. H. Dodd observed, any genuinely mystical piety is commonly lacking in Gnostic texts: Gnosis is not in fact so much knowledge of God, in any profoundly religious sense, as knowledge about the structure of the higher world and the way to get there....48C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 101.

Given the basic paradox of its status as a religion that implodes or deconstructs other religions by professing to reveal the hidden absence upon which they are constitutedits status as, in effect, an anti-religionthis general lack of piety in Gnosticism is hardly surprising. One exception to Dodd's observation would seem to be The Gospel of Truthbut the undoubted piety of that text is to a large degree focused upon a mysticism of the Name in which, as Joel Fineman has shown, the primary concern is the elaboration of a sequence of metaphorical substitutions, the originating term of which (the Father) is occulted by the very metaphors through which it is proclaimedalthough at the same time it is metonymically present in the terms (the Name of the Father, the Son) which replace it and testify to its absence. Of this carefully nuanced text, which is commonly attributed to Valentinus himself, Fineman writes: On the one hand, the Name is a principle of authority prior to its author. On the other hand, the Name is the devolution of truth as its own displacement. In both cases the signified is the effect of the signifier. But what is striking is that in neither case is the truth, origin, Father, adequate to itself alone: rather, it seems always to refer elsewhere instantly, backwards and forwards, to something that we can only call the truth of truth, as it is bespoken by a Name.49Joel Fineman, Gnosis and the Piety of Metaphor: The Gospel of Truth, in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism. Vol. 1: The School of Valentinus, ed. Bentley Layton (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), pp. 296-97.

The piety of this text, which Fineman defines as the piety of metaphoric semiosis,50Ibid., p. 293.

is mirrored by the semiotic piety of Derrida's doctrine of the occultation of the trace in the movement of diffrance: Il faut penser la trace avant l'tant. Mais le mouvement de la trace est ncessairement occult, il se produit comme occultation de soi. Quand l'autre s'annonce comme tel, il se prsente dans la dissimulation de soi. One can immediately agree with Derrida's insistence that Cette formulation n'est pas thologique, comme on pourrait le croire avec quelque prcipitation.51Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 69.

It is, precisely, anti-theological, which is to say (in this case at least), Gnostic. It might be possible to find in Derrida's acknowledged sourcesNietzsche and Heidegger in particularcertain clues as to the derivation of his Gnostic orientation. A central feature of Nietzsche's thought is the irrecoverable loss of any secure metaphysical presence, the death of God. He writes in one of his poems: Die Weltein TorZu tausend Wsten stumm und kalt!Wer das verlor,Was du verlorst, macht nirgends halt.52Friedrich Nietzsche, Vereinsamt, in Gedichte, ed. Jost Hermand (Suttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1964), p. 24. The worlda gate / To deserts stretching mute and cold! / Who once has lost / What thou hast lost nowhere stands still.

The American critic Harold Bloom has suggested that if philosophy is, as Novalis said, the desire to be at home everywhere, then Gnosis is closer to what Nietzsche thought the motive of art: the desire to be elsewhere, the desire to be different.53Harold Bloom, Lying against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism, in The School of Valentinus, ed. Layton, p. 63.

Similarly, one writer at least has found Gnostic tendencies in the philosophy of Heidegger: Hans Jonas, whose brilliant success in applying Heidegger's philosophy to the study of Gnosticism initially seemed to him to confirm the universal validity of that philosophy, later came to believer that his success was due rather to a remarkable parallelism between the two structures of thought.54Hans Jonas, Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, in The Gnostic Religion, pp. 320-40.

Rather than speculating on the sources of Derrida's gnosis, however, I would prefer to dwell upon the fact that on one occasion he seems himself to point (though in a typically elusive manner) to his own Gnostic affiliations.Harold Bloom, who is a self-confessed Gnostic, would deny to deconstructionists the status he claims for himself55Bloom, Lying against Time, p. 60; The Breaking of the Vessels (Wellek Library Lectures; University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-4.

for the reason, one may suspect, that his own anxieties about belatedness would not allow him to admit that, once again, Jacques Derrida was there before him. But Derrida himself seems in La dissmination to give him the lie. The hors livre which refaces that book deconstructs the possibility of prefacing the bookwhich is itself deconstructed by the opening (and conclusive) sentence of the hors livre: Ceci (donc) n'aura pas t un livre.56Derrida, La dissmination, p. 9.

Bobbing and weaving through the prefaces to Hegel's Phenomenology, Logic, and Philosophy of Right, and the afterword to Marx's Capital, with footnote excursions into the pseudepigraphic labyrinths of Kierkegaard's prefaces, Derrida arrives at Lautramont's Chants de Maldororan explicitly Gnostic text, in the line (one might say) of Carpocrates, the most violently antinomian of the second-century Gnostics.57For an account of Carpocratian Gnosticism, see Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 267ff.

What interests him here is the play of the prface du rengat to these Songs, in which le Chant sixime se prsente comme le corps du texte effectif, l'opration relle dont les cinq premiers Chants n'auraient t que la prface didactique, l'expos 'synthtique', le 'frontispice'.... Derrida asks: O situer, dans la topique du texte, cette trange dclaration, cette performance-ci qui n'est dj plus dans la prface et n'est pas encore dans la partie 'analytique' qui semble alors s'engager? The words of Lautramont which he quotes include the following: Les cinq premiers rcits n'ont pas t inutiles; ils taient le frontispice de mon ouvrage, le fondement de la construction, l'explication pralable de ma potique future.... En consquence, mon opinion est que, maintenant, la partie synthtique de mon oeuvre est complte et suffisamment paraphrase. C'est par elle que vous avez appris que je me suis propos d'attaquer l'homme et Celui qui le cra. Pour le moment et pour plus tard, vous n'avez pas besoin d'en savoir davantage! Des considrations nouvelles me paraissent superflues, car elles ne feraient que rpter, sous une autre forme plus ample, il est vrai, mais identique, l'nonc de la thse dont la fin de ce jour verra le premier dveloppement. Il rsulte, des observations qui prcdent, que mon intention est d'entreprendre, dsormais, la partie analytique; cela est si vrai qu'il n'y a que quelques minutes seulement, que j'exprimai le voeu ardent que vous fussiez emprisonn dans les glandes sudoripares de ma peau, pour vrifer la loyaut de ce que j'affirme, en connaissance de cause. Il faut, je le sais, tayer d'un grand nombre de preuves l'argumentation qui se trouve comprise dans mon thorme; eh bien, ces preuves existent, et vous savez que je n'attaque personne, sans avoir des motifs srieux! Je ris gorge dploye....58Derrida, La dissmination, p. 43. By ending the quotation at this point, Derrida turns this laughter back upon the ironic promise of methodical proofs; in Lautramont's text it is aimed rather at the anticipated reaction of the reader: Je ris gorge dploye, qand je songe que vous me reprochez de rpandre d'amres accusations contre l'humanit, dont je suis un des membres (cette seule remarque me donnerait raison!) et contre la Providence.... Oeuvres compltes d'Isidore Ducasse: Les Chants de Maldoror par le Comte de Lautramont, Posies, Lettres, ed. Maurice Saillet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1963), p. 316.

Lautramont is a mask: the wild laughter of the last line of this passage is Derrida's own, and the statements made there are as close to a programmatic summary of his own project and its deceptions as Derrida is going to get. For it is precisely in La dissmination, his own sixth booksixth song, if you likethat Derrida spins his webs around the necessarily proleptic relation between the text and its preface, offers (in a preface) an adequate paraphrase of the frontispice/foundation constituted by his previous five books, andby quoting this passage from Lautramontmocks any reader who expects an analytic part, with a large number of proofs, still to come. And at the centre of the programme? Je me suis propos d'attaquer l'homme et Celui qui le Cra. The strenuous gloom of a revived Gnosticism has seldom been made to seem so entertaining. Yet that is the atmosphere within which Derrida's laughter resounds.

V

A last comment on Gnosticism may reinforce one's sense of its similarity to deconstruction as a system of particular appeal to people involved with literature. Like much post-modernist literature, second-century Gnosticism was strongly and dogmatically antimimetic. In the Valentinian gnosis, the fall of Sophia, the primordial Wisdom-emanation who unwittingly initiates the cosmogonic process, was explicitly conceived in terms of her mimetic folly....59Fineman, Gnosis and the Piety of Metaphor, in The School of Valentinus, ed. Layton, p. 303.

Mimetic creativity, in The Gospel of Truth, is a consequence of the anguish and terror of ignorance:And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see. For this reason error became powerful; it fashioned its own matter foolishly, not having known the truth. It set about making a creature, with [all its] might preparing, in beauty, the substitute for the truth.60The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. Robinson et al., p. 38.

This recoil from the world, this separation of truth from even the pleromic archetype of worldly beauty, might with some plausibility be explained as stemming from a different sort of anguish and terror. Although the problem of the origins of Gnosticism is one of unresolved complexity, two factors seem to be of recurrent importance. The first is a revulsion from the Creator-God, the Law, and the prophetic and apocalyptic claims of Judaism; the second is a matter of the social conditions under the Roman Empire. What seems to relate the two is the failure of a series of apocalyptic social movements in Judaea and Samaria, beginning with such minor tumults as the Samaritan messianic revolt of AD 36the violent repression of which by Pontius Pilate may have had some influence on the subsequent development of Simonian Gnosticism61The episode is recounted by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII.iv.1. On Samaritan messianic expectations, see R.J. Coggins, Samaritans and Jews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 145-46. R.M. Grant has speculated that the Simon Magus of Acts 8, identified in Christian heresiological tradition as the founder of the Simonian Gnosis out of which Valentinus elaborated his system, may have presented himself as the Ta'eb or restorer of the Samaritans: ...it is at least possible that Simon's gospel was eschatological as well as magical, and that Gnostic reinterpretation arose out of the failure of his mission. Gnosticism and Early Christianity (2nd ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 73.

and culminating in the national risings which resulted in the massacres at Jerusalem and elsewhere, the destruction of the Temple by the Emperor Titus, and the mass suicide at Masada. The God of the Old Testament, or rather the God of Jewish apocalyptic writings, was a God that failed. The syncretic nature of even the earliest Gnostic systems suggests that the displacement of anguish and terror from their historical referents in imperial repression to a generalized anticosmic and antinomian ressentiment may well have been accomplished in the great urban centres of the eastern empire, where a generalized knowledge of Greek, Jewish, and other literary traditions was widely available. It is tempting to suggest that this displacement of historical anguish and terror into gnosis may have been accomplished by what we would call literary scholars. The Poimandres, the foundation text of the Hermetic gnosis, is a skilful literary allegory of the opening chapters of Genesis suffused with philosophical motifs derived from Middle Platonism.62For the text, see Corpus Hermeticum, ed. And tr. Nock and Festugire, vol. 1. An English translation is available in Gnosticism: An Anthology, ed. R.M. Grant (London: Collins, 1961). For a summary description of the Poimandres, see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. To A.D. 220 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 389-92.

Simon Magus, who was treated by Christian polemicists as the source and origin of the various Gnostic schools, is described by a late patristic text, the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, as a most vehement orator, trained in the dialectic art, and in the meshes of syllogisms....63The Clementine Recognitions, tr. B.P. Pratten et al. (Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. III; Edinburgh: T. And T. Clark, 1867), II.5, p. 195.

The Simonian gnosis, as reported by Hippolytus and Irenaeus, combines a strained use of philosophical language with a curious allegorical allusion to Homer that makes use of motifs from Jewish Wisdom literature. Let us consider again the imagery with which the editors of the boundary 2 symposium on textuality celebrated the spread of Derridean critical methodologies: Suspended in the pallid cast of shadows, our post-modern critical figures, in an activity that dimly revives disturbing earlier traces of it, play out dangerously the spider webs of their methods and desires, their intentions and passions, consciously, futilely, spinning their knowledgemocking skeletal self-imagesout of that center into the formless voice of the abyss....I have argued that the disturbing earlier traces of this activity can be clearly identified, and have proposed that these were, in part, a reaction to and an escape from the experience or the memory of imperial repression. Is it too much to suggest that in this case also one can make out, behind these mocking skeletal self-images, the outlines of real corpses? I do not wish to stress the evident analogies between the Gnostic recoil from history and the present situation, in which another empire is striving to reassert control over the fringes of its domain, using means (such as the financing of death squads and the systematic terrorizing of civilian populations)64For a cogent analysis of this situation, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights (2 vols.; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979).

which should inspire from its own citizens a horrified resistancewhile its literary scholars, bemused by the technicalities of another Gnosis, spin verbal webs in comfortable solipsistic isolation. I will say only that the deconstructionist enterprise in North America, however brave its nihilistic posturings, does not strike me as being a courageous endeavour. After speaking with complacency of confronting the formless voice of the abyss, the editors of the boundary 2 symposium offer, from Wallace Stevens's poem Cuisine Bourgeoise, an ironic image of contemporary critical theorists:... Who, then, are they, seated here?Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?Are they men eating reflections of themselves?I am tempted to reply, in the words of Ecclesiastes:The fool folds his hands, and eats his own flesh.