Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion

The Enigmatic Absolute

Joshua Ramey, Matthew S. Haar Farris, Joshua Ramey, Matthew S. Haar Farris

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781786601407
• eBook ISBN: 9781786601421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Many in continental philosophy of religion aver that we are in a new moment, one where the intellectually marginalized and religiously bastardized traditions of mystical, intuitive, and esoteric apprehensions must be re-articulated and appreciated anew. In an era marked by catastrophic events and atrophied cultural institutions, what seems to be needed is an affirmation of the human potential to truck with non-human or even inhuman forces and intentions, at scales of speed, slowness, or intensity that break with consensual conceptions of human limitations. The essays in this volume outline patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix from a position that takes quite seriously possible relations with the absolute, however enigmatic, that modernity has denied and postmodernity has obscured in the name of academic skepticism and humanist reservations. Beyond post-modernist pastiche and post-secular nostalgia, these essays explore the potencies of archaic spiritual disciplines as well as the passions driving the mystical, heretical, and Gnostic intimations riddling contemporary relations with the absolute.

Part I

SPECULATIONS (I): FUTURES OF THE ABSOLUTE

Chapter 1

First Reflections on the Idea of a Speculative Pragmatics

Daniel Whistler

1.The day that writing dies

[Written words] go on telling you just the same thing forever.

(Plato 1961: 275d)

From Flusser to Malabou, the end of writing has long been proclaimed, and with it the death of grammatology, that ‘science of the arbitrariness of the sign’ (Derrida 1976: 51). Writing becomes obsolete as we enter ‘a new epoch’ (Malabou 2010: 77) – an epoch of the image, the neuron or the plastic.1 Indeed, for Malabou, the very text of Of Grammatology announces this epochal shift, for Derridean writing itself modifies the concept of writing in a way that the logic of writing (différance) cannot capture. The reader of Of Grammatology bears witness to a form of supplementarity that exceeds the logic of the deconstructed sign:

If grammatology could honour [this] changing of supplementarity, it would no longer be a grammatology but a plastology, a genesis of the plastic formation of schemes. In my view, the impossibility of thinking the end of writing threatens the grammatological project from the inside and from the very start of the game. (2007: 439, emphasis in original)2

At stake is the transitory, ephemeral history of writing to which Derrida is supposedly blind. Read by Malabou, Derrida must insist that the play of the sign (even in its self-deconstruction) is enduring, and in this sense he remains a faithful son to Plato, for language goes on writing itself in just the same way over and over again.3 It sticks around. Derrida cannot envision a writing that ends, a sign that changes so radically it reveals an entirely different (i.e. plastic) logic.

It is to this question of linguistic change that this chapter is devoted: the extent to which fixations on linguistic invariance have limited philosophical thinking in late modernity, and so the extent to which the thought of radical linguistic change (amelioration, even) opens up a new range of philosophical capabilities.

2.A transparent absolute?

“We need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge”.

(Berkeley 1975: 88)

What marks out speculation as a distinctive practice is its affirmation (immediate or otherwise) of the principle, something can now be described. It is now possible, according to the impatient speculative stance, to achieve some form of textual clarity; hence, the speculative text is characterised by graphic transparency and liberation from the enigmatic (however momentary or partial).4 To some extent, then, speculation demands a transparent absolute, ‘the great outdoors’ (Meillassoux 2008: 7) transcribed clearly and distinctly on the page. It calls for words that communicate the in-itself without simultaneously defacing such communication. What follows consists in a set of reflections on the possibility of just such a transparent absolute, on the possibility, therefore, of the historical contingency (and so possible death) of the enigmatic absolute. My overarching question runs as follows: What comes after the death of the enigmatic? Will it then be possible to conceive of a language capable of transparently communicating the great outdoors of speculation, a language that can bear the Real?

* * *

‘No!’ has of course been a common answer to such questions; indeed, it has, I will go on to argue, been the natural answer since Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Moreover, there is a variation on this response that has proven particularly powerful in the history of philosophy: ‘No, except mathematics’. That is, the formal language of mathematics has served as the sole exemplar of a language of the Real from Plato through Descartes and Spinoza to Badiou and Meillassoux. On this view, the discursive philosophical text becomes speculative only on the condition of negating or effacing itself in the name of the mathematical sign. Where all natural languages fail at transparently inscribing the great outdoors, mathematics succeeds.

Meillassoux’s recent identification of the mathematical kenotype as the speculative sign provides an exemplary instance of this move. His project is conceived as follows:

I will try to exhibit a minimal condition, modest yet fundamental, of various contemporary formal languages [which concerns] our capacity to think a meaningless sign…. This factual derivation of the meaningless sign allows us to argue that [speculation] must be based upon this absoluteness of the void sign in order to produce hypothetical (revisable) descriptions of the present world, capable, in turn, of being true in an absolute sense – that is to say, independently of our existence. (2012a: 18)5

The correlation6 is superseded in linguistic presentation only by means of formal (mathematical, logical) languages, because only these are grounded consistently in a meaningless sign (or kenotype). Hence, Meillassoux continues, ‘I cannot surpass correlationism … by a natural (non-mathematicised) language’ (2012a: 19). In other words, only those forms of discourse that employ mathematicised language speculate.7 And on this basis, Meillassoux goes on to provide ‘an ontology of the empty sign’ (24) which reveals the fundamental mathematical principle ‘that meaning is contingent in the constitution of the sign’ (25, emphasis in original).

All this rests, of course, on the ability of the philosopher to neatly differentiate formal from natural signs, an ability to which Meillassoux explicitly lays claim:

We can draw a precise principle of distinction between a natural language and a formal language: for we can decide to differentiate them according to the role that meaningless signs play within them. We shall therefore say that a formal language, unlike a natural language, accords a structural role to the meaningless sign – at least on a syntactical level. (23)

The key point here is not so much how Meillassoux constitutes this fixed distinction between natural and formal languages, but it is that he does so at all. Natural language is defined by its incapacity to accord a structural role to the kenotype at a syntactical level. This is put forward as a necessary condition of all natural languages; they could never alter so radically as to be still capable of communicating discursively while syntactically founded on kenotypes.

For a philosopher so invested in contingency – down to the contingency of the most fundamental natural laws – this is a strikingly bold move. Indeed, it smacks of recklessness, especially when considered in light of a later passage in which Meillassoux analyses the form of arbitrariness pertaining to the kenotype:

By the notion of arbitrariness, recall that we do not mean the Saussurian immotivation of the signifier in relation to the signified, but the more profound possibility of every sign – and this before even being freighted with any meaning – to be recoded by another sensible mark charged with the same function…. The contingency of which we speak is speculative, not physical. It designates the possible being-otherwise of every entity. (36)

This possibility of being-otherwise affirmed so fervently of the formal sign is denied to the natural sign, which remains stuck necessarily within the limits of syntactical meaningfulness. The historical contingency that Meillassoux is elsewhere happy to ascribe to basic natural laws and even an inexistent deity eludes one entity alone in the Meillassouxian cosmos: the natural sign.

* * *

My concern here is not to show that natural language does in fact become otherwise, nor precisely what it could so become, nor even how ameliorated language might be capable of bearing the Real; rather, my far more preliminary task consists in uncovering what has prevented philosophers from discerning this possibility, why it has become so difficult to think a language that can bear the Real or, in other words, what has led to the naturalisation of this odd state of affairs in which natural language is the only entity incapable of being-otherwise, doomed to stick around always the same. Therefore, the aim of the next two sections of this chapter is twofold: first, to identify the particular epistemic blockages that have resulted in language being conceived as something invariant and incapable of radical change; second, to reveal the contingency of such a conception – language need not be thought this way.

3.On an apophatic tone recently adopted in philosophy

The age of the sign is essentially theological.

(Derrida 1976: 14)

To meet these aims, I am going to tell a story. It is a story that begins with Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding and ends with the return to apophatics so popular at the turn of the millennium. The moral of this story concerns fetishisation; that is, it narrates how quite peculiar linguistic invariants came to be taken for granted and ultimately incorporated into philosophical common sense. I begin at the end of my story.

The early development of French post-structuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s was marked by a profound distrust of religion and theology. Theology came under attack because of its intrinsic connection to metaphysics and ontotheology in general (Derrida 1976: 4, 12–13; 1982: 7),8 but also, when it came to language, for the following additional reasons: (a) its fixation of meaning (...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Introduction
• PART I: SPECULATIONS (I): FUTURES OF THE ABSOLUTE
• PART II: SPECULATIONS (II): VISIONARY CONDITIONS
• PART III: HERESY: EXPERIMENTS
• PART IV: GNOSIS: CREATURES OF SAYING AND UNSAYING
• Index
• Notes on Contributors