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According to Kevin Hart, “that God can be experienced is to have assumed that the divine offers itself as a phenomenon, and this runs counter to everything you know about the proper usage of the word God”. That observation itself, however, assumes something about both the nature of “experience”, what constitutes a “phenomenon”, as well as the nature of God and God's “donation”. There is a correlation between experience and phenomenon: only a phenomenon can be experienced, and experience can only be experience of a phenomenon in a strict sense. So any “encounter” with something (or someone) that cannot — or will not — be subjected to the conditions of phenomenality cannot be “experienced” in a strict sense. But this does not mean that it cannot be encountered, or that it cannot encounter us; we will just have to find a different name for that “event” — a “counterexperience”. Faith is understood as the medium of this counterexperience that is not an experience and becomes the condition of possibility for the revelation of God.

This chapter provides a very brief and very general characterization of a deconstructive reading of negative theology. It discusses, in addition to Jacques Derrida himself, the interpretations by John Caputo and Kevin Hart of Derrida's reading of Pseudo-Dionysius. Calling negative theology here, is, as all traditions, varied and multiform, and Derrida's deconstructive analysis and critique of one of its featured practitioners should in no way be taken as an authoritative representation of the tradition as a whole. The chapter then focuses on a certain apophatic desire of its own: a twofold desire—theologically, to “save the name” of God from human mastery, and in doing so, to ethically “save the neighbor” from the always toxic consequences of said mastery. The chapter then suggests an alternative strand of the theological tradition that may provide resources for the apophatic desire of theologically minded interpreters of deconstruction.