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Doing Violence upon God: Nonviolent Alterities and Their Medieval Precedents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Ian Almond
Ian Almond
Affiliation:
Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey
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Extract

The Other resembles God.

To welcome the Other absolutely is to preserve the Other as a state of irreducible uncertainty, to suspend the desire to ascertain exactly who or what the Other is, to suppress the wish to name, and to avoid assimilating or incorporating the Other into a reassuringly familiar vocabulary. The object of this paper is a tentative comparison between Eckhartian gelâzenheit and Derridean openness. I will compare the Derridean response to the uncertainty of the infinitely Other with that of the German Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1329) in order to examine their respective terms of “emptiness” and “openness” and to try to understand how Eckhart's idea of description or conception as doing violence upon the Other is, in part, adopted and, in part, rejected by Jacques Derrida. As some of the most interesting aspects of Derrida's understanding of otherness can be discerned in his early work on Levinas, I will first examine Derrida's initial skepticism toward the idea of a nonviolent phenomenology, in contrast to his more recent reappraisal of his relation to Levinas and the “welcome of the Other.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , July 1999 , pp. 325 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1999

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References

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21 The three citations (in order) are taken from “In hoc apparuit,” in Sermons and Treatises, 1. 117; “Omne datum optimum,” in Meister Eckhart: An Introduction, 173; and “Quasi vas auri,” in Schürmann, Reiner, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher: Translations with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) 102Google Scholar.

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32 “vielle amitie occulte entre la lumière et la puissance” (, Derrida, Écriture, 136;Google Scholaridem, Writing and Difference, 91).

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37 Ibid., 145.

38 Ibid., 90.

39 Ibid., 116.

40 Ibid., 121.

41 Ibid., 83.

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53 In Nicholas's own library at Cues (or Cusa), on the river Moselle, the fifteenth-century churchman had in his possession Codex 21, one of the largest collections of Eckhart's Latin scholastic works. However, it was in a theological quarrel with the traditionalist theologian von Herrenberg that the Eckhartian influences of Cusano's works (particularly Of Learned Ignorance) were pointed out. For von Herrenberg at that time, “Eckhartian” is clearly just another word for “heretical.” Cusano was, in turn, prompted to defend “Magister Eghardus” at some length in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1448). SeeGoogle ScholarPenzo, Giorgio, Invito al Pensiero di Eckhart (Milan: Bompiani, 1997)Google Scholar.

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57 See, for example, Simon Critchley: “If there indeed exists this happy homoiosis between Levinas and Derrida … then what on earth is Derrida doing in his extended, and at times highly critical, 1964 monograph on Levinas?” in , Midgley, Responsibilities of Deconstruction, 94Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., 13.

59 Derrida, Jacques, “Psyché: Inventions of the Other,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (ed. Kamuf, Peggy; Exeter: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 209.Google Scholar

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66 “L'abandon à cette Gelassenheit n'exclut pas le plaisir ou la jouissance, il leur donne lieu au contraire. II ouvre lejeu de Dieu (de Dieu et avec Dieu, de Dieu avec soi et avec la création” (Derrida, Jacques, Sauf le nom [Paris: Editions Galilee, 1993] 102,Google Scholaridem, “Post-Scriptum,” in , Coward and , Foshay, Derrida and Negative Theology, 317)Google Scholar.

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