Inventing the Other and Asserting the Impossible

After some decades of integrating deconstruction into literary and philosophical discourse, Derrida turned his attention in the mid-eighties to the topic of “invention”.  He wanted, at least in part, to contribute to the endless genesis accorded to deconstruction, beginning with a discourse on the notion of originality and invention.

These two words – originality and invention – are most pertinent to a discussion of Eckhartian thinking, especially his thoughts on Genesis.  This is seen especially in Eckhart’s conformity to the “impossibility” of invention that Derrida wishes to expose as authentic to the notion.  Eckhart also precariously wanders over the line of pre-conceived possibilities, happy to transgress and start again.  Owing to this fact, Eckhart was able to exercise a certain illegality in philosophy and theology, which accorded to him the very pure notion of invention that Derrida concerns himself with.

Derrida frames for us the notion of invention in a manner that expresses the fullness of Eckhartian thinking; thereby extending a hand of welcome to the play of themes that Eckhart finds it so necessary to do.  Thus Derrida writes:

“An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a disorder into the peaceful ordering of things, it disregards the properties.”[1]

There are no grounds for arguing that Eckhart was somehow inserting “a disorder into the peaceful ordering of things”, given the intellectual climate into which he was born and raised.  But certainly it is true that he was not willing to unquestioningly inherit any particular tradition, nor was he especially keen to conflate pre-existing schools of thought.  Instead we find a figure whose explosive sermons dared to give a voice to the “implicit contract”, and then transgress it.  This is also true of the more studious Latin works, but perhaps in a more veiled fashion; harbouring both an anticipation of a highly intellectualised audience – whose ability to truly follow his thinking would predispose them against rash judgement and immediate dismissal – as well as a careful withdrawal from the contemporary intellectual volatility, whose ultimate terminus is by no means a solid or reassuring haven.

It is not the general inventive drive of Eckhart’s methodology that is important here, however.  Rather we are concerned with precisely the way in which Eckhart understood the line “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” (Genesis 1:1), and the inventiveness thereof.  This therefore means a faithful assessment of the way in which God creates and the nature of Creator and created in themselves and toward one another.  This being the given starting point, Derrida’s deconstruction of “invention” provides us with especially relevant tools to dissect the Eckhartian processes.

Ensuring the radicalness of the “inventive” we could ascribe to Eckhart no doubt reaches its culmination in the prosaic construction of a new attentiveness to the analogy of being between God and creation.  The very statement of something new, inventive, original, unique, here prevents a preconditioned sameness necessary to relate to an Other; a sameness that in penetrating all things, is able to flow over to generate a genuine Other.  The lack of such reciprocity does not (paradigmatically or proleptically) foreclose all avenues of Otherness, since a disunity is the precondition for all unity.  Thus Derrida’s need for the event of invention to be “countersigned by a social consensus according to a system of conventions,”[2] is undermined by a pre-existing and freestanding conflation of the performative and the constative, which means any otherness is to be first found internally, thus breaking down the meeting of two external others.  In Eckhart, this condition is met by the looming shadow of speech-events, carrying in its arms the violence of a metaphysics of presence.  But it is precisely in the conflation of the performative and the constative that Eckhart – somewhat ironically – has always already transposed onto the Other that which is problematic with the subject; thus, when there is a problem with speech, there is no issue with metaphysics, and when there is a problem with metaphysics, there is no issue with speech.  This is because the two act simultaneously in disunity, eliciting a creative space that is, in the end, in the shape of a Derridean invention.

The reflexive moments are thus lost on Eckhart, since there are no events of invention.  In a certain sense, the reliance of Derrida upon the “advent” of an invention – an advent securing l’avenier – demonstrates Derrida’s own leaning toward a metaphysics of presence.  Eckhart does not deny this, but removes himself at once from the whole question by having already united the material and the immaterial, the temporal and the non-temporal.

The unity accorded to these things by Eckhart allows for a mutual illumination of Derridean “invention” and Eckhartian creation.  This is no clearer than in Derrida’s exposition of Francis Ponge’s poem “Fable”.  What is most important is the interaction of elements in the first line:

“With the word with begins then this text.” (Par le mot par commence donc ce texte)

Derrida’s intrigue is with the unusual conflation of the performative and the constative here.  It is “a performative demonstration of the very thing it is saying.”[3]  The importance of this is not so much the insight it gives into the nature of “invention”, but the closeness it gets to the Eckhartian conflation of what we may now categorise as both an ontological and semantic conflation of the performative and constative.  Derrida concerns himself with the way in which the second “with” relates to the first: it is not an invention, but a repetition of the invention, a reinvention.  It is a) a discovery that the subject can discover (or invent?) an Other in a self-reflexion and b) a discovery of the necessary interdependence of the performative and constative as the very means of invention.

The paradoxical drive of the first line of the poem is the very same paradoxical tension that exists in the creative act of God for Eckhart.  The origin, or inventive event (namely, God) is not constrained as an event to some “advent” (this is why we see that “prevent” is a much more Eckhartian word), which is then constatively concretised either semantically or onotologically – as is demonstrable by the “with”, the second instance, as relative to the “With” in the first instance.  The grander narrative – that is, the sentence as a whole – is simultaneously both a mentioning and a mentioned, wholly and completely self-referential, being exactly what it states it is.  Thus is Eckhart’s view of God and creation, where the creative act – the creative event – is within God Himself, and thus self-referential: being exactly what it states it is. (Where ‘state’ is transposed from semantics to ontology).

The inner inaccessibility and unknowability of God remains in tact despite the theophanic outflowing, since God remains ultimately self-referential.  Thus the product of the Goodness of God is His creation, which has always already referred back to Himself in some sense, since the performative nature of theophany is at the same time its constative nature.  Similarly, like the repeated “with”, man bears the trace of God as imago Dei, always secondary and subservient, and yet takes an intimate part in the process of God being exactly what He states He is.

With this second point, we have another mode of analogy with Ponge’s “Fable” and Derrida’s insightful commentary on it.  We may posit an allegorical relationship between both instances of “with”, which illuminates the God-creation relationship in Eckhart.  This occurs principally in two ways. 

Firstly, the initial “With” performatively confronts and presents an originating presence of “with”.  This is utterly irreducable – we might say undeconstructable – presence, and hence not a metaphysics of presence.  “With” thus remains beyond any easy or immediate access, especially (and somewhat paradoxically) with reference to semantics.  The necessary precondition of “With” is a superseding equipollence with anything other than itself, which accords the necessary elevation of allegorical status.  “With” remains radically unlike anything else, in form and category, because it is always already first, the origin, the beginning, in principio.  The performative arrival of “With” is irreplaceable and unrepeatable.  Alongside this assertion about the nature of “With”, we have the appearance of “with”, which remains constatively and allegorically related to the originating “With”.  The “with” does not arrogate “With” precisely – indeed, it cannot – but attempts to synchronically represent the “With”.  This attempt is almost as futile as arrogating “With” for itself, since “with” will always remain second to “With”: it’s echo, it’s image, and it’s diachronically restrained representation.

Secondly, Eckhart states that “God’s speaking is his making” (Comm. Gen. nn. 9), which correlates to what we have already been discovering about Derrida’s “invention” with the conflation of the performative and constative.  This is to say that the speech act of God – His speaking the Word – is the very act of making because the performative and constative are not separated.  This is not to express, however, that the speech act of God occurs exactly as the semantics in Francis Ponge’s poem play out.  Indeed, the relation of performative and constative suffice to demonstrate that the creation has occurred, not that it occurs purely because it is speech.

The Word in Eckhart is not just that which receives the Father’s image perfectly, but is defined by this characteristic of reception.  This is to say that the nature of receiving is the Word of the Father – His speech act, broadly speaking.  This goes beyond Derrida’s analysis of the “With” with the “with”, where the second occurrence is not just repeating the unrepeatable, but is always receiving what it is (a constative and performative occurrence) from the originating “With”, with which it shares the life of the first line.  Instead what we have is the eternal receiving of the person of the Father as the Son, the Word, which is to say that the speech act is an act of communicating the personhood of the self in a declarative (or constative) form.  Thus God does not merely “say” something – by way of labially formed sounds – for it to then take place.  Rather the taking place of the creative act is one and the same with the statement of it.  The personal act is a communicative interchange of persons, in which the Son (Word) is begotten.  That is his nature: speaking.  It is the bullitio and the ebullitio of God’s goodness.

So we see with the statement “Let there be light! And light came to be” (Genesis 1:3: rwa-yhyw rwa yhy) the constative and performative nature of the words in Hebrew.  The yhy (“let there be!”) is related - in expressing something existential - to the tetragrammaton itself, as it is seen both in Exodus 3:14 (hyha rva hyha) and other places where the divine name is used (hwhy).  For Eckhart this correlation between the speech act of commanding something “to be” and the name of God Himself, would not be unimportant.  So if the act of being is simultaneously a constative of what it is, we can see why Eckhart would suggest that the efficient and final causes of things are irrelevant. 

Work in progress.  Comments/suggestions are very welcome.