HeyJ XLII (2001), pp.

133147

WITHOUT NEGATIVE THEOLOGY:

DECONSTRUCTION AND THE
POLITICS OF NEGATIVE THEOLOGY
ARTHUR BRADLEY

Chester College of Higher Education, UK

Would you go as far as to say that today there is a politics and a law of negative
theology? A juridico-political lesson to be drawn from the possibility of this
theology?
No, not to be drawn, not to be deduced as from a program, from premises or
axioms. But there would no more be any politics, law, or morals without this
possibility 1

INTRODUCTION

In this article, I examine Jacques Derridas reading of negative theology,

and in particular, his dramatic and uncharacteristically sweeping claim
that there would be no politics without negative theology. I begin by
briefly introducing and summarizing the general thrust of Derridas
critique of negative theology. I then focus on the complex history of the
term without in Derridas specific readings of negative theologians like
Pseudo-Dionysius, Angelus Silesius and the contemporary French philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion. Finally, and more provisionally, I try to place this reading of negative theology in the context of the
so-called political turn in Derridas work following the appearance
of explicitly political texts on Europe, democracy, friendship, cosmopolitanism and hospitality, amongst other subjects in recent years.2 In
many ways, I will suggest, the concept of the without that Derrida
gradually develops in his work on negative theology precedes, and helps
to clarify, comparatively more famous Derridaean political themes like
the impossible, the decision and religion without religion. The theological and political implications of Derridas work have been discussed
widely in recent years but the relationship between theology and politics
in deconstruction has still not been considered in much detail and this is
the difficult territory that I tentatively enter here.3 If we can come to a

The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

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ARTHUR BRADLEY

more precise definition of exactly what Derrida means when he says

that there is no politics without negative theology, I will conclude, we
will also arrive at a clearer understanding of the politics of
deconstruction.

I. WITHOUT DECONSTRUCTION

I begin by briefly summarizing the general terms of Derridas critique of

negative theology. In his classic essay Diffrance (1968) he gives the
following definition of his most famous neologism:
The unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for
example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the
relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of or
substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect diffrance is itself
emeshed (pp. 267).

In Derridas analysis, diffrance is not God, not even the deus absconditus of negative theology, but simply the differential matrix in
which all meaningful signs are produced. This argument is worth
unpacking in very simple and dogmatic terms here because we are going
to encounter it repeatedly throughout this article in different contexts
and under different guises. In Derridas account, language does not
simply refer to a pre-existing real but to a system of differences
which can in principle be extended ad infinitum. The linguistic terms
we use depend upon their difference from other terms in order to be
meaningful in the first place. This dependence insists that the meaning
of each term necessarily contains the possibility of other meanings
within it. The necessary possibility of other meanings ensures that the
meaning of the terms we use becomes inherently unstable and subject
to possible change when repeated in different situations or contexts.
This inherent instability means that the appearance of other meanings on
the scene cannot be dismissed as accidental or improper because the
possibility of this accident or impropriety is the condition for the
appearance of the supposedly real or proper meaning to begin with.
What this analysis ultimately entails, Derrida insists, is neither the
destruction of meaning, nor the claim that all meaning is equivalent in
value, but rather that each and every meaning is singular, unique or
other. In Derridas analysis, as we will see, the decision to respect the
other as absolutely other (tout autre), rather than to equate it with
some pre-existing same, increasingly assumes ethical and political
importance.
What, then, is the difference between diffrance and negative theology? In a revealing passage in Diffrance, Derrida goes to great

WITHOUT NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

135

pains to differentiate diffrance or deconstruction from all forms of

theology, and in particular negative theology:
So much so that the detours, locutions, and syntax in which I will have to take
recourse will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of
being indistinguishable from negative theology. Already we have had to delineate
that diffrance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on), in any form; and
we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not, that is everything; and
consequently that it has neither existence or essence. It derives from no category of
being, whether present or absent. And yet those aspects of diffrance which are
thereby delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of
negative theologies, which as one knows are always concerned with disengaging a
superessentiality beyond the finite categories of essence and existence, that is, of
presence, and always hastening to recall that God is refused the predicate of
existence, only in order to acknowledge his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable
mode of being.4

This is the essence of Derridas critique of negative theology. In

Derridas view, deconstruction and negative theology share certain
similarities. Both have a predilection for negative syntax. Both deny the
ability of language to describe the particular object they seek to address.
Both insist that their object is in some sense beyond the ontological
categories of being and essence. This, however, is where the similarities
would appear to end. Deconstruction and negative theology are not the
same thing. Negative theology is not ultimately negative. It denies the
being of God only in order to more emphatically affirm it. If it claims
that God is beyond being, it does so not in order to deny that He is a
being, but to better predicate the pre-eminent nature of His being. This
is why it is different from deconstruction. Deconstruction, in this restricted
context at least, is more radically negative than negative theology. It
denies the being of diffrance unreservedly. Whereas the negative theologian refuses all the categories of existence and essence because the
God which s/he addresses is not an essential being but a superessential
one, the deconstructionist refuses all these categories because the diffrance
which s/he addresses is neither an essential nor a superessential being,
nor, in fact a being of any kind. The reason why we cannot address
diffrance is not because it ontologically transcends all names as God
does but because it is nothing more than the system of differences and
substitutions in which all language, including theological language, is
formed. In Derridas analysis, the theological identity of negative theology
is made possible by diffrance and, as we will see, this condition of
possibility ensures that negative theology carries within it the necessary
possibility of other equally proper identities as well.
If Derrida sets out the differences between deconstruction and negative theology in rather uncompromising terms here, his critique has
subsequently proved to be only the first contribution to a prolonged
debate on the subject. The relationship between deconstruction and

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ARTHUR BRADLEY

negative theology has continued to exercise philosophers and

theologians of many different persuasions in the thirty years or so since
Diffrance. In the last twenty years, Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank
and others have mounted trenchant defences of Gregory of Nyssa,
Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas and Eckhart against the deconstruction of
ousia; Geoffrey Bennington, Mark C. Taylor, Kevin Hart and
particularly John D. Caputo have uncovered new structural affinities
between deconstructions respect for the other as absolutely other and
Christian mysticism or Judaism; and many more, too numerous to
mention, have read Derrida as everything from a relativist nihilist to a
mystic manqu.5 The most intriguing contribution to this debate,
however, has arguably come from Derrida himself. In a series of texts
over the last fifteen years or so, he has re-read negative theology in
increasingly patient, generous and grateful terms, a gratitude that
reaches its high point, I would argue, with the claim that there would be
no politics without negative theology. The historic discourse of
negative theology has been accorded an increasingly privileged status in
the politics of deconstruction. If we want to get a better idea of why this
might be, though, we first need to trace the complex history of the term
without in Derrida.
II. WITHOUT NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

I continue, then, by examining what Derrida actually means by the term

without. In Pas (1977), his dialogue on Blanchots Le Pas au-dla,
Derrida introduces the concept of the without which so informs his
later work on negative theology. His reading of Blanchot in this text
hinges upon the fact that, in French, pas has a simultaneously negative
and positive significance, meaning both not and step which makes it
impossible to determine or, for that matter, translate. Like the pas,
Derrida argues, sans does not just have the negative force of depriving
or denying words of their old meanings but also the positive force of
repeating or re-inscribing their old meanings in new ones:
If I write, for example: the water without [sans] water, what has happened? Or
again, a reply without reply? The same word and the same thing seem removed
from themselves, taken away from their reference and their identity, while continuing to be left to traverse, in their old body towards an entirely other [tout autre],
dissimulated in them. But not [pas] more than in pas; this operation does not consist
simply in depriving or denying, it is necessary in itself. It forms the trace or the step
[pas] of the entirely other about which it is concerned, the retreat [re-trait] of the
pas, and of the pas without pas. It plays between two apparently identical words 6

In this dense passage from Pas, I think Derrida is rehearsing what we

have seen to be his characteristic argument that, to achieve meaning,

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137

every term must by definition be open to repetition in contexts in which

it may mean something entirely other [tout autre] than itself. If the argument is the same, the context has changed. The system of differences
and substitutions signified by the term diffrance in the essay of that
name is here filled by the term sans or without. Every word or thing,
to employ the vocabulary Derrida is using here, is without itself, that is,
in a process of play between its old body and an entirely new other. Now
it is important to stress again here that Derrida thinks that the slippage
between positive and negative, old and new, meanings which is set in
motion by the system named without is built into language from the
start. There is no question of choosing one meaning over another the
proper meaning over the improper, for instance or of dialectically
sublating them in the form of a Hegelian Aufhebung. This operation
does not consist simply in depriving or denying, he notes; it is necessary in itself. In his subsequent book The Post Card (1980), indeed,
which reiterates many of these points about the without, I would argue
that Derrida employs the arresting tripartite negative of expressions like
pas without pas and without without without7 precisely in order
to exceed the logic of the double negative, which leads back to the
original term in classical logic, or progresses to a third term in Hegelian
dialectic. Instead of returning to an original thesis, or proceeding to a
Hegelian synthesis, without without without re-inscribes the thesis in a
tout autre which cannot be re-appropriated by those logical systems. To
consider how Blanchots without is relevant to negative theology, and
ultimately to politics, it is necessary to turn to Derridas readings of
Pseudo-Dionysius.
In How to Avoid Speaking: Denegations (1987), Derrida considers
deconstruction in relation to three paradigms of negativity which he sees
as represented by Plato, Pseudo-Dionysius and Heidegger respectively.
If it is chiefly relevant for putting the discourse on the without in the
context of negative theology, this text also begins to consider the various
implications of the term, not least for politics. In the first section of the
essay, which I will concentrate upon here, Derrida is once again at pains
to distinguish deconstruction from negative theology on the grounds
that the latter still remains within the orbit of positive theology and
ontotheology:
No, what I write is not negative theology. First of all, in the measure to which this
belongs to the predicative or judicative space of discourse, to its strictly propositional form, and privileges not only the indestructible unity of the word but also
the authority of the name such axioms as a deconstruction must start by
reconsidering (which I have tried to do since the first part of Of Grammatology).
Next, in the measure to which negative theology seems to reserve, beyond all
positive predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being. This is the word that Dionysius so often uses in
the Divine Names: hyperousios, -s, hyperousiotes, God as being beyond Being or
also God as without Being.8

138 ARTHUR BRADLEY

Derrida sets out the differences between deconstruction and negative
theology in a categorical fashion again here, but a number of qualifications, including the significant addition of without being as a
possible translation for the Greek hyperousios, blur the distinction a
little.9 If the without of Dionysius is anything like the without of
Blanchot, then it will become increasingly difficult for Derrida to
embrace or reject negative theology as if it were a single, stable identity.
The argument has shifted to another new context. When the without is
in play, negative theology, as Derrida revealingly calls it, can never be
simply or singularly itself: there is within it, hidden, restless, diverse,
and itself heterogeneous, a voluminous and nebulous multiplicity of
potentials to which the single expression negative theology yet
remains inadequate (HS, p. 12). Like water in the essay on Blanchot,
negative theology is subject to the same tendency to move outside its
original meaning and assume new meanings in new contexts. To claim
that deconstruction is or is not a form of negative theology as if
negative theology always meant the same thing is perhaps to miss the
point.10 In a subsequent gloss upon his translation of hyperousios as
without Being, Derrida repeats his argument from Pas that the
without does not consist simply in depriving or denying an expression of its meaning but, in a more affirmative fashion, brings its hidden
multiplicity of potentials to light:
The without of which I spoke a moment ago marks neither a privation, a lack nor an
absence. As for the beyond (hyper) of that which is beyond being (hyperousios), it
has the double and ambiguous meaning of what is above in a hierarchy, thus both
beyond and more. God (is) beyond Being but as such is more (being) than Being:
no more being and being more than Being: being more. The French expression
plus dtre (more being, no more being) formulates this equivocation in a fairly
economical manner (HS, p. 20).

In this yet again difficult passage, Derrida beings to show how the
negative theology which seeks to privilege the indestructible unity of
the word and preserve the stable identity of God beyond or without
being is bifurcated by the play of differences signified with the term
without. Like the water without water, the God without Being oscillates between the continuation of His old identity (more being) and the
re-inscription or opening out of that identity into an absolutely tout autre
(no more being). If it is by definition impossible to predict what form
this tout autre might take, at the very least it is possible to say that it is
not necessarily Godly. In a footnote on the magnificent title of JeanLuc Marions book Dieu sans Ltre (1982), Derrida notes how its meaning is suspended between two distinct possibilities: God without Being
and the more heterogeneous and perhaps heretical God without being
God (HS, p. 64n). Whichever meaning we read into that phrase, it is
once again important to stress that Derrida is not asking us to choose

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139

between them but to recognize the impact of the linguistic system which
insists that the former can only be possible in so far as it presupposes the
necessary possibility of the latter. In this sense, negative theology is without
itself, that is, another word or thing traversing in its old body towards
an entirely other dissimulated in itself. If this tends to suggest that the
implications of negative theology are potentially endless and, as we
shall see, Derridas work could be criticized in this respect it is
significant that the first implication Derrida chooses to focus on is the
political.
Immediately after his reflection on the without, Derrida rehearses a
charge which has historically been laid at the door of negative theology,
and more recently of deconstruction, namely, that it is a form of secret
society, clique, or brotherhood which reserves a secret truth or pseudotruth for itself and excludes all those who do not share that secret. This
accusation has many implications but the most obvious one is political.
In the view of its accusers, Derrida argues, negative theologians are
terrorists who organize themselves around a social power founded on
the magic of a speech that is suited to speaking in order to say nothing
and whose alleged secret belongs to sham, mystification, or at best to a
politics of grammar (HS, p. 19). Derrida is keen to dissociate himself
from the pejorative nature of these remarks but he is not averse to
reading negative theology as political. In a discussion of the topos of
negative theology, he refers to it as a politopology (HS, p. 21) and a
topolitology of the secret (HS, p. 23) in which the allegorical figures
of theological rhetoric are a political shield, the solid barrier of a social
division; or, if you prefer, a shibboleth (HS, p. 24). While this topolitology of the secret seems to offer one obvious politics of negative
theology, however, Derrida begins to show that it intersects with another, non-secret, politics. In a detour on the concept of the secret, he
argues that it is a structural condition of every secret to be non-secret,
that is, no secret can be secret unless it discloses itself as a secret (HS,
pp. 246). The argument here is, for all its density, not substantively
different from Derridas original argument that all meanings are
unstable and necessarily subject to the possibility of change. In this
context, he argues, it once again becomes clear that negative theology is
bifurcated by a double tradition, a double mode of transmission [ditten
paradosin] of secrecy and non-secrecy. On the one hand, negative
theology is unspeakable, secret, prohibited, reserved, inaccessible,
with all the political implications of exclusivity this involves. On the
other hand, it must be philosophic, demonstrative [apodeiktiken],
capable of being shown (HS, p. 24) and this, too, has obvious political implications. Finally, and most importantly of all, Derrida again
insists that the critical question here is not a matter of choosing between these two modes of politics but of determining or deciding
another mode, law, or politics, which recognizes that the two former

140 ARTHUR BRADLEY

modes remain interrelated in a sense that exceeds the possibility of
choice:
The critical question evidently becomes: How do these two modes relate to each
other? What is the law of their reciprocal translation or of their hierarchy? What
would be its institutional or political figure? (HS, p. 24).

Now Derrida allows these questions to resonate in the above extract

but in the remainder of How to Avoid Speaking he proceeds to suggest various institutional or political figures for the unfigurable play
between secrecy and non-secrecy in negative theology, such as Platos
symploke, khra, and, perhaps more significantly for our purposes,
Blanchots sans (HS, p. 64n). Significantly, Derrida insists yet again that
this doubling does not consist in denying or depriving the secret, but is
essential and originary and gives no chance to dialectic (HS, p. 25).
And so the secret politics of negative theology could also be said to be
without itself, yet another word or thing traversing in its old body
towards an entirely other dissimulated in itself:
I refer first of all to the secret shared within itself, its partition proper, which
divides the essence of a secret that cannot even appear to one alone except in
starting to be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing
itself (HS, p. 25).

What are the politics of negative theology? In How to Avoid Speaking:

Denegations, then, Derrida argues (1) that negative theologys secret,
inaccessible mode has a politics; (2) that negative theologys pedagogical, demonstrative mode also has a politics; but most importantly
(3) that the politics of negative theology in which Derrida is interested
is not a question of choosing between these two contradictory modes but
of deciding the mode of their interrelation. We will return to the question
of the decision later. If we are to understand why Derrida assigns such
significance to the politics of negative theology even to the point of
arguing that it constitutes the political as such it will be helpful to turn
to his reading of Angelus Silesius.
III. WITHOUT POLITICS

I want to continue, then, to put Derridas readings of negative theology

into an explicitly political context. In Sauf le nom: (Post-Scriptum)
(1993), a polylogue on Angelus Silesiuss The Cherubinic Wanderer,
Derrida reads the double tradition of negative theology almost exclusively in terms of the political. If again it might seem that Derrida is
placing too much importance on negative theology in this text extending it far beyond its proper bounds it is also crucial to realize that
it is exactly these questions of propriety and boundaries that he thinks

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141

negative theology helps us to call into question. The historic role of

negative theology has been to go beyond itself into the epekeina tes ousias
and this, in Derridas view, lends it a quasi-exemplary status amongst the
kind of politics he is trying to describe.
Instantly recalling How to Avoid Speaking, Derrida begins by raising the possibility that the traditionally exclusive and excluding politics
of negative theology may be structurally open, or, as he puts it, translated
into a more inclusive politics of negative theology:
How would what still comes to us under the domestic, European, Greek, and
Christian term of negative theology, of negative way, of apophatic discourse, be the
chance of an incomparable translatability in principle without limit? Not of a
universal tongue, of an ecumenism or of some consensus, but of a tongue to come
that can be shared more than ever? (SN, p. 47).

In this passage, Derrida introduces the questions or aporias around

which Sauf le nom will turn: the secret and the non-secret, the specific
idiom and the translation, the European and the international, and so on.
Derrida has some harsh things to say about the European, Greek, and
Christian name of negative theology in this essay, as John D. Caputo
notices, but again I am not sure that he is asking us to simply choose one
set of oppositions over another here.11 The point is once again not to
favour one set of values over their opposites but to recognize that one
always contains the necessary possibility of the other. In this context,
Derrida makes clear that the two political movements of negative
theology cannot be separated because they are inter-implicated:
Lets be more modest, to a working hypothesis. Here it is. What permits localizing
negative theology in a historical site and identifying its very own idiom is also what
uproots it from its rooting. What assigns it a proper place is what expropriates it and
engages it thus in a movement of universalizing translation (SN, p. 63).

Why is negative theology both local and universal? Derrida answers this
question by rehearsing another new version of his argument that the
meaning of every term or concept necessarily contains the possibility of
other meanings within it. The idiom of negative theology can only truly
be idiomatic (with all the implications of singularity, propriety and
locality that involves) if it opens itself to repetition (or, as Derrida
prefers to put it here, to translation) in contexts which may efface that
idiomatic quality. This is why negative theology is divided against itself,
both contesting and confirming its domestic, European, Greek and Christian origins:
On the one hand, the principle of negative theology, in a movement of internal
rebellion, radically contests the tradition from which it seems to come. Principle
against principle. Parricide and uprooting, rupture of belonging, interruption of a
sort of social contract, the one that gives right to the State, the nation, more
generally to the philosophical community as rational and logocentric community.

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Negative theology uproots itself from there after the fact [aprs coup], in the torsion
or conversion of a second movement of uprooting, as if a signature was not
countersigned but contradicted in a codicil or in the remorse of a post-scriptum at
the bottom of the contract. This contract rupture programs a whole series of
analogous and recurrent movements, a whole outbidding of the ne plus ultra that
calls to witness the epekeina ts ousias, and at times without presenting itself as
negative theology (Plotinus, Heidegger, Levinas).
But on the other hand, and in that very way, nothing is more faithful than this
hyperbole to the originary ontotheological injunction. The post-scriptum remains a
counter-signature, even if it denies this. And as in every human or divine signature,
there the name is necessary [il y faut le nom]. Unless, as was suggested a moment
ago, the name be what effaces itself in front of what it names. Then the name is
necessary would mean that the name is lacking [fait dfaut]: it must be lacking, a
name is necessary [il faut un nom] that is lacking [fasse dfaut]. Thus managing to
efface itself, it itself will be safe, will be, save itself [sera sauf lui-mme]. In the most
apophatic moment, when one says: God is not, God is neither this nor that, neither
that nor its contrary or being is not, etc., even then it is still a matter of saying the
entity [tant] such as it is, in its truth, even were it meta-metaphysical, metaontological. It is a matter of holding the promise of saying the truth at any price, of
testifying, of rendering oneself to the truth of the name, to the thing itself such as it
must be named by the name, that is, beyond the name. The thing, save the name
(SN, pp. 678).

Derrida is here repeating his argument that negative theology is bifurcated by a double tradition, but he also begins to re-inscribe that argument within an explicitly political sphere. On the one hand, he argues
that negative theologys faith in the truth of the name, the propriety of
the place, the locality of the idiom, and so on, is the basis for the nation
state and the unified community. On the other hand, its simultaneous
interrupting, uprooting, or rupturing of the principles or values from
which it appears to come is the basis for the universalizing politics
mentioned earlier. The double politics which are being described here
are not restricted to negative theology, Derrida argues, but nevertheless
it remains one of the most remarkable manifestations of this selfdifference (SN, p. 71). In the history of negative theology, then, two
modes of politics are held together in a continuous double-bind of
rooting and uprooting, and Derrida is once again at pains to demonstrate
that there is no question of separating the one from the other.
What, though, is the best way to do justice to this impossibility? In
one of the most complex parts of Sauf le nom, Derrida begins by dismissing the possibility of choosing one politics of negative theology
over the other, but he then goes on to advance a potential figure for the
relationship between the two:
Do we have any choice? Why choose between the two? Is it possible? But it is
true that these two places, these two experiences of place, these two ways are no
doubt of an absolute heterogeneity. One place excludes the other, one (sur)passes
the other, one does without the other, one is, absolutely, without the other. But what
still relates them to each other is this strange preposition, this strange with-without
or without-with, without [English in original Ed] (SN, p. 76).

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Derrida begins to re-introduce the concept of the without here as an

appropriate political figure for the double tradition (and double politics)
of negative theology. If it is impossible to choose between the old and
new meanings of negative theology, as I have suggested, it is because the
old one harbours the necessary possibility, the dissimulation, of the new
within itself, and, vice versa, the new identity also contains the dissimulation of the old. The old argument about the inherent instability of
meaning assumes another new form here but it still continues to militate
against any attempt to separate one set of meanings from the other. Each
is, to use Derridas terms, with-without, or without-with, without the
other. This is why the objection that Derrida is assigning too much importance to negative theology, or generalizing negative theology to an
impossible extent, also perhaps misses the point. When the without is
in play, negative theology is never wholly itself in the first place but
perpetually in transit between the singular and the universal, the original
and the translation, and so on. To grasp how the without functions as
a political figure for the double tradition of negative theology, we need
to examine the remainder of this text.
In the remarkable conclusion to Sauf le nom which, I would argue,
also concludes the discourse on the without begun in Pas and How
to Avoid Speaking: Denegations Derrida finally makes his dramatic
claim that this impossibility of choosing within and without negative
theology might even constitute the political as such:
Yes, the via negativa would perhaps today be the passage of the idiom into the
most common desert, as the chance of law [droit] and of another treaty of universal
peace (beyond what is today called international law, that thing very positive but
still so tributary of the European concept of the State and of law, then so easy to
arraign [arraisonner] for particular States): the chance of a promise and of an
announcement in any case.
Would you go as far as to say that today there is a politics and a law of
negative theology? A juridico-political lesson to be drawn from the possibility of
this theology?
No, not to be drawn, not to be deduced as from a program, from premises or
axioms. But there would no more be any politics, law, or morals without this
possibility, the very possibility that obliges us from now on to place these words
between quotation marks. Their sense will have trembled.
But you admit at the same time that without and not without [pas sans] are
the most difficult words to say and to hear/understand, the most unthinkable or most
impossible (SN, pp. 812).

In Derridas view, it is the very impossibility of deducing any simple

politics of negative theology of deciding when exactly we are without or not without negative theology that opens the sphere of
political responsibility and decision. In other words, the reason why
there is no politics without negative theology is not because negative
theology is essentially Eurocentric or international, with all the political
implications such forces involve, but because the logic of the without

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binds these forces to one another and demands a politics which neither
contradicts nor sublates them. If it is objected that such a politics is
strictly speaking impossible, then I think Derrida would reply that there
can be no politics without this impossibility, because it is only when
we have broken through the boundaries of the currently possible that
a genuine politics begins. The application of existing categories or
criteria to new cases or events reduces political responsibility and
decision-making to the mechanistic application of predetermined rules
or programmes. Only when we stop applying pre-existing rules in this
programmatic way, and start considering each case in its singularity,
does actual political decision-making become possible. This is the
decision I mentioned earlier. In Derridas account, which is clarified
in roughly contemporaneous texts like The Other Heading (1991) and
Force of Law (1992) and has been a constant theme in his subsequent work, only a political decision that is made without recourse to
given criteria or programmes of politics is a political decision worth the
name:
The difficulty of the without spreads into what is still called politics, morals, or
law, which are just as threatened as promised by apophasis. Take the example of
democracy, of the idea of democracy, of democracy to come (neither the Idea in the
Kantian sense, nor the current, limited, and determined concept of democracy, but
democracy as the inheritance of a promise). Its path passes perhaps today in the
world through (across) the aporias of negative theology that we have just analyzed
so schematically.
How can a path pass through aporias?
What would a path be without aporia? Would there be a way [voie] without
what clears the way there where the way is not opened, whether it is blocked or still
buried in the nonway? I cannot think the notion of the way without the necessity of
deciding there where the decision seems impossible. Nor can I think the decision
and thus the responsibility there where the decision is already possible and programmable. And would one speak, could one only speak of this thing? Would there
be a voice (voix) for that? A name? (SN, p. 83).

In this passage, it becomes even clearer that the without is the space
in which politics, and more particularly democratic politics, begins. If
this politics has a space, it is once again one which is opened up by
the impossibility of choosing between two contradictory political
demands, in this case the demand to respect both the current, limited
form of democracy and a structurally open democracy to come
which can only be defined in negative terms.12 In Sauf le nom, then,
Derrida argues (1) that negative theology is the basis for a GraecoChristian political desire for a secret or exclusive community, (2) that
negative theology is also the basis for a more radical political desire
for a more open or universal community, and most crucially, (3) that
it is only by recognizing the impossibility of separating these two
political desires that a political decision becomes possible: Understand

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145

me, its a matter of maintaining a double injunction (SN, pp. 834).

If this concept of the without haunts Derridas readings of negative
theology, it is also possible to see it at work in his political works
more generally.
IV. CONCLUSION

I conclude by briefly analysing some current formulations of the

relationship between the politics of negative theology and deconstruction and by considering what contribution the concept of the without
might make to this debate. In Derridas texts, politics is the art of the
impossible. If the way can only be found in the non-way, and the decision in the impossibility of deciding, then politics necessarily becomes
a mode of via negativa, and this point is made in many of Derridas
recent political texts. In The Other Heading (1991), he writes: [t]hese
conditions can only take a negative form (without X there would not
be Y) (OH, pp. 801) and in Specters of Marx, the integral concept of
the democracy to come is again approached in negative (and indeed
negative theological) terms:
It is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without
religion, even a messianism without messianism, an idea of justice which we
distinguish from law or right and even from human rights and an idea of
democracy which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined
predicated today (SM, p. 59).

In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997), his brilliant study
of the relationship between deconstruction and religion, John D. Caputo
has famously described deconstruction as a religion without religion in
the sense that it is the kenosis or desertification of the doctrinal content
of religion in favour of its structure or form:
So to the theologica negativa, one could add an anthropologia negativa, an ethica
negativa, politica negativa, where of the humanity, or the ethics, or the politics or
the democracy to come we cannot say a thing, except that they want to twist free
from the regimes of presence, from the historically restricted concepts of humanity,
ethics and democracy under which they presently labour. Humanity, ethics, politics
or whatever, nimporte would belong to a generalised apophatics (PT, p. 56).

In summary, then, the current state of the argument seems to be that

deconstruction is not a religion but that it shares the same formal structure as a religion. This analysis is particularly applicable to negative
theology which occupies, as we have seen, a quasi-exemplary position
in Derridas readings of religion. The specific historical role of negative
theology is translated into a more generalized, structural negativity. The
negative theological discourse upon the epekeina tes ousias is translated

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ARTHUR BRADLEY

into a discourse upon a tout autre about which we cannot say a thing.
The politics of negative theology are translated into the politics of
deconstruction.
In this article, I have tried to explain the process by which the politics
of negative theology become the politics of deconstruction via the
paradoxical concept of the without. This concept is an important and
perhaps still underestimated factor in recent formulations of deconstruction as the kenosis, formalization or generalization of religion. The
argument that deconstruction is a religion without religion has a
tendency to fall into a series of simple and potentially essentialist
distinctions between specificity and generality, content and form, and so
on, which concepts like the without, translation, secrecy, and so on,
help to problematize.13 To argue that deconstruction is simply a generalized negative theology, for instance, is to overlook the fact that
negative theology cannot adequately be thought of as historically
specific in the first place. The consistent line in texts like Pas, How to
Avoid Speaking and Sauf le nom is that the historic form of negative
theology cannot be separated from the necessary possibility of its future
generalization into deconstruction, which means that the limit between
what is within and without negative theology as it is currently formulated becomes impossible to draw. This means that the distinction
between the politics of negative theology on the one hand and the politics
of deconstruction on the other also becomes difficult to sustain in its
current form and perhaps needs to be refined. The paradoxical concept
of the without offers one means of rethinking the political possibilities
of a negative theology which is always saying too much or too little,
each time it leaves you without ever going away from you (SN, p. 85)
(emphasis mine). Negative theology is constantly without itself and we
are never without negative theology. In Derridas words, there is no
politics without negative theology.

Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom: (Post-Scriptum), trans. John P. Leavey, Jr in Thomas Dutoit
(ed.), On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 3589, here p. 81; hereafter
abbreviated in the text as (SN).
2 See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992),
hereafter (OH); Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), hereafter (SM); The
Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1995); Cosmopolite de tous les pays:
encore un effort! (Paris: Editions de Galile, 1996) and De lhospitalit: avec Anne Dufourmantelle
invite Jacques Derrida rpondre (Paris: Calman Lvy, 1997), amongst many other texts.
3 I am particularly indebted to Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London:
Routledge, 1996), John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), hereafter (PT), Marian Hobson, Jacques
Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998), and Simon Critchley, Ethics Politics
Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso,
1999), hereafter (EPS), for my understanding of negativity, politics and theology in deconstruction.

WITHOUT NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

147

Unfortunately, Caputo is the only critic to discuss Derridas work on the politics of negative
theology in any detail and I will consider his reading in more detail below.
4 Jacques Derrida, Diffrance in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 129, here p. 26; hereafter abbreviated in the text as (D).
(Translation emended slightly.)
5 See Jean-Luc Marion, LIdole et la distance (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1977); Kevin Hart, The
Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); Mark C. Taylor, Tears (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990); Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations:
The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994); John Milbank, The Word Made Strange:
Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and John D. Caputo and
Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, Post-Modernism and the Gift (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999), hereafter abbreviated in the text as (GG), amongst many other texts.
6 Jacques Derrida, Pas, in Parages (Paris: ditions de Galile, 1986), pp. 10116, here p. 90.
(Translation and square brackets are mine.)
7 Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. 401.
8 Jacques Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, trans. Ken Frieden, in Sandford Budick
and Wolfgang Iser (eds.), Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and
Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 371, here p. 8; hereafter
abbreviated in the text as (HS). Like Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo and other critics, I have
emended the translated title to How to Avoid Speaking: Denegations.
9 In recent years, Derridas reading of negative theology as ontotheological has been criticized
for relying too heavily on Duns Scotuss univocal interpretation of ousia and neglecting more
apophatic or analogical traditions of interpretation by Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius and
Aquinas; but, in fairness to Derrida, he has never claimed to offer a definitive reading of negative
theology and is often at pains to show why such a reading is not possible. For a discussion of
Derridas reading of ousia and hyperousios, see, among other texts, Jacques Derrida, Letter to John
P. Leavey, Jr in Robert Detweiler (ed.), Derrida and Biblical Studies, Semeia (23) (Chico,
California: Scholars Press, 1982), p. 61; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond
Secular Reason (Blackwell: Oxford, 1990), pp. 278326; Kevin Hart, Jacques Derrida: The God
Effect in Phillip Blond (ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London
and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 25980.
10 In a recent oral response to criticism of his work by Jean-Luc Marion, Derrida stated:
Marion constantly refers to what I said about negative theology as if I had a thesis, one thesis,
phrased in one form through a single voice concerning the metaphysics of presence, the
distinction between position and negation and so on. Now I think that if time permitted I could show
that my texts on this subject are written texts, by which I mean they are not a thesis on a theme.
Jacques Derrida, Derridas Response to Jean-Luc Marion in (GG), pp. 4254, here p. 43.
11 In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo sometimes appears to suggest
that Derrida prefers the non-traditional, generalized mode of negative theology to the traditional
and localized mode (Derrida means to let himself be addressed by the name of God and to that end
to see whether and how negative theology can be translated, whether and how it overflows its
boundaries so that it is something more than Graeco-Christian Neoplatonism, something more
universal (PT, p. 46); but I argue here that Derrida always makes clear that he is not simply
opposed to the localized mode and that, more importantly, there is no question of a choice to be
made.
12 In his essay The Others Decision in Me, Simon Critchley gives what is, in my view, the
best currently available definition of the complex temporalities of the democracy to come: la
dmocratie venir does not mean that tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) democracy will be
realised, but rather that the experience of justice as the maintaining-now of the relation to an
absolute singularity is the venir of democracy, the temporality of democracy is advent, it is arrival
happening now (EPS, p. 154).
13 John D. Caputo brilliantly situates Derridas work within a larger movement from Christian
Neoplatonism to Judaism, theology to faith, and from religious content to religious structure or
form (see PT, pp. xvixxvi, 3319); but my concern, which cannot be substantiated here, is that this
necessary gesture also risks re-essentializing distinctions that Derrida renders problematic, most
famously at the end of Violence and Metaphysics: JewGreek is greekjew. Extremes meet in
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 79195, here p. 195.