Derrida's essay is undertaken partly in response
to an ongoing and aggressive effort on the part of contemporary theolo-
gians to save theology not from but, rather, for deconstruction..(261)


work within positive
ideology" and indeed "prior"to it (Hart 1989: 104). While Derridean de-
construction is in itself not declared to be a negative theology, (some of) its
practices are seen as consistent with negative theology: "as a strategy, as a
way that negative theologians have found to hold the claims of cataphatic
[positive] theology at bay" (Caputo 1989: 24); as a "breach"that "drives
to its limit" the hermeneutical experience but finally rejoins hermeneutics
toward the "unity of the two senses of 'God"' (Klemm 1992: 20, 22).(263)


work within positive
ideology" and indeed "prior"to it (Hart 1989: 104). While Derridean de-
construction is in itself not declared to be a negative theology, (some of) its
practices are seen as consistent with negative theology: "as a strategy, as a
way that negative theologians have found to hold the claims of cataphatic
[positive] theology at bay" (Caputo 1989: 24); as a "breach"that "drives
to its limit" the hermeneutical experience but finally rejoins hermeneutics
toward the "unity of the two senses of 'God"' (Klemm 1992: 20, 22).(265)

De Tours le babel, 85

Derrida places such originary, divine, linguistic disruption in the terms
that Walter Benjamin set in speaking through the figure of translation:


n givinghis name,God also appealedto translation, onlybecausebetween
not
the tonguesthat had suddenlybecome multipleand confused,but first of his
name, the name he had proclaimed,given, and which shouldbe translated
of
as confusionto be understood, that it is difficult
hence to let it be understood
to translateand so to understand he pleadsfor a translator.... The law
...
does not commandwithoutdemandingto be read, deciphered,translated. It
demandstransference.... Evenin God, and it is necessary followrigorously
to
the consequence: hisname. (184,emphasis original)
in in


The divine name, ruptured rather than unitary, inaugurates linguistic mul-
tiplicity, mediation, and the injunction to (and not to) translate. Its appeal
to translation, founded in its inner interruption, is both a "giving his name"
and a withholding of it. This in turn founds language as the multiplicity of
tongues, marking a difference not to be elided, or suppressed, in the name
of unity but rather to be linguistically negotiated. (271)

he ultimate object of Dionysian devotion cannot tolerate the intrusion
of language, with its succession of elements and the "reciprocalexteriority
of their diverse parts." Its totality and simultaneity are finally opposed to
language, and especially to writing, which it can tolerate only as a means
"for the necessity of the senses" and beyond which the spirit must ascend
(275)

An "Other" Negative Theology: On Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"
Author(s): Shira Wolosky Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 2, Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics of
Cultural Influence and Exchange II (Summer, 1998), pp. 261-280