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This chapter concentrates on two of Derrida's texts, How to Avoid Speaking: Denials and Circumfession, in order to show how the author reads major figures within the Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition—particularly Augustine and pseudo‐Dionysius—in counterpoint with such modern thinkers as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. Contrary to the opinion of certain contemporary historians of ideas and post‐modern theologians, Derrida reveals a highly sophisticated grasp of what might be termed the negative‐differential, onto‐theo‐logical, and incipiently performative aspects of this ancient philosophical tradition. His only serious failing as a reader is perhaps to separate too radically the ‘mystical’ from the ‘Platonic’ aspects of late ancient thought, thereby missing the opportunity to release fully the deconstructive energy within many texts to which he had rightly drawn attention.

Heidegger's critique of Gerede and Kierkegaard's analysis of chatter show language in crisis. However, this also reveals tensions in the basic structures of linguistic representation. This is explored further through Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. Particular attention is paid to the development in Heidegger's concept of language from his early lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric through to his later concept of Ereignis. However, language is a human practice and what language ‘means’ is inseparable from how it is used or performed by those who speak it. Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and M.M. Bakhtin are used to draw out the significance of the moral commitment of the speaker and the consequent problematization of language as a means of truthful communication in a human world characteristically moving in a fog of lies, prevarications, and misunderstanding. The question of language therefore leads to the question of human relationships, and their capacity to reveal Being.

A triple sampling of the rich diversity of philosophical reflection on religion and on the relation of philosophy to religion within “continental” traditions. The first part explores three accounts of the relation of phenomenology to religion as presented by Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Marion (in relation to Janicaud’s critique). The second part explores Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics in its onto-theological constitution with detailed attention to just what he means by this notion and with special reference to the religious and theological motivations one might have for wanting to avoid onto-theological thinking. The third part explores the renewed interest in negative theology that revolves around the conversation between Derrida and Marion.

This chapter explores Derrida’s work in relation to apophatic theology, examining the ways in which the Dionysian inheritance is transformed in his writings so as to repeat differently the four themes of freedom, materiality, hierarchy, and universalism according to a new configuration of eros and ontology. This new configuration in turn becomes a problem for theology. These responses to the apophatic elements of Dionysius’s work are perhaps best captured by the twin poles of radical orthodoxy and deconstructionist Christianity. Although these two appear initially to be dramatically divergent responses to Derrida, I will show that both ultimately retain the same colonizing universalism of systematic theology.

An essential part of the law's theology, as Maimonides explains it, is that God knows all things as their creator. It is usually thought that this view opposes Maimonides' negative theology. This chapter argues that Maimonides describes God's knowledge in the same way as uncreated perfections were described in chapter 5. It shows that Maimonides' presentation of God's knowledge can then be squared with his negative theology and that he tries to meet philosophical objections by emphasizing the absolute difference between God's knowledge and human knowledge. As with creation, the law is opposed to Aristotle's view, and neither can be demonstrated. The law can only be supported by dialectical levels of authority. An appendix to the chapter considers the thorny issue of the opposition between Maimonides' negative theology and his clear assertion that God is an intellect. It argues that this difficulty might be solved in the same fashion.

Apophatic theology has little to (un)say about bodies, whereas it speaks volumes about that which it deems worthy of unsaying. It treats bodies generally not as wicked or repulsive, but as sites of obstruction, suffering, distraction. Since feminist theology as a collective comprises a critical mass of that body-affirming movement, and since some are also dangerously attracted to the apophatic way, the cloud of the impossible engulfs the present exploration from the start. Nicholas of Cusa oddly appears as a mediator both of method and of content. He would plunge one not into an empty chasm but into the “cloud of impossibility”. The necessity of entering the “cloud of impossibility” is no mere metaphysical inevitability, but an all too familiar experience. If we do not cling to a certainty whose oppositional purity we doubt anyway, we enter the Cusan cloud. Then we may relinquish the binary structure of the impasse itself. This chapter examines the cloud of the impossible and the relation between deconstruction and negative theology.

This chapter introduces the framework and the content of the book and discusses the basic conceptual problems revolving around “negative theology.” It argues that we should not only move from “negative theology” to “negative theologies” in order to approach Islamic intellectual landscapes, but we should also qualify the particular question of theology we are examining. Discussions of negative theology as such tend to confuse divine attributes and the divine essence and reduce apophaticism into a hunt for negative particles and statements. The chapter narrows down the scope of the book to the negative theologies of the divine essence. It also presents justifications for its boundaries and its linguistic preferences, and it defines some technical terms that appear throughout the book. It provides a conceptual introduction to negative theology and a compass to the subsequent chapters of the book.

The literary theorist Anne-Marie Priest argues that if poststructural scholars of religion have pointed out the connections between Derridean deconstruction and negative theology, the affinities between feminist theories of sexual difference and negative theology have been less explored. By reading the early texts of philosopher Luce Irigaray on alterity and sexual difference, Priest claims apophatic practices at the heart of contemporary feminism of difference. She maintains that for those feminists who affirm sexual difference, woman-as-the-Other holds a place similar to that held by God for apophatic theologians. Irigaray sheds light on the “womanliness” of God, suggesting that God is both a model and an agent for the disruption of patriarchy and the creation of feminine subjectivity. For feminist theology, which is committed to the quest for the full humanity of women and to the end of their oppression within the Christian tradition, can anything sensible come out of this tradition of silence and unsaying? This chapter highlights some apophatic patterns within the field of feminist theology and considers the prospects of apophatic feminist theology.

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.

This chapter looks at Derrida's attempt to distinguish deconstruction from negative theology. In this context, it argues that Derrida opens the door without entering it, for an Augustinian understanding of divine alterity in terms of the combined motifs of creation and fall, as developed by Augustine, as well as Aquinas and Bonaventure. In Heidegger's view one could not more eloquently express the danger that the metaphysical tradition represents. It follows that Nietzsche is a Neoplatonist in the grips of ontological xenophobia, while Heidegger is, if not an instance of the Augustinian faith that overcomes this fear of meeting a stranger, at least someone who deliberately holds open the space for such a possibility. The chapter presents this Neoplatonist/Augustinian typology as alternative and corrective to the Augustinian/Thomistic distinction presented by Tillich in his famous essay “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion”.

The ancient tradition of apophasis, or negative theology, concerns itself with the infinity called “God”. It says and unsays talk about that God. It falls speechless before a mystery that inspires more speech in the next moment. Surely the paradox entailed in this traditional apophatic gesture is mind-bending enough—speaking as unspeaking, knowing as unknowing, darkness as light—to keep us occupied for all these pages? The apophatic mystics—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—do surely speak. They speak and unspeak volumes. With uninhibited kataphasis (the presumed affirmative opposite of apophasis), at once confessional and speculative, liturgical and philosophical, they speak about God. The relation of the classic apophatic traditions to the body, and therefore to this split obligation between divine infinity and embodied finitude, may not be as straightforward as it appears at first blush. The problem posed by the apophatic gesture is also one of too great a distance, too radical a separation, between divine and creaturely reality; too absolute a sense of divine transcendence in relation to the finite realm of creaturely embodiment.

This chapter describes Donald MacKinnon's inference that Kant's religious thought was a negative theology because its doctrine emphasizes God's superiority and that he must be removed beyond the reach of descriptive language. Kant fully accepted the idea that the old doctrine had collapsed and for him it was God's existence rather than his nature that was unknowable and God's nature that was not mysterious. It seems that Kant was deliberately setting out to contradict the element of authoritarian appeal to mystery in the old negative theology. Thus, Kant continued the themes of the old negative theology, and he even changed it considerably in order to make it intellectually and morally more acceptable. Though, Donald MacKinnon takes a very different view, still he insists on sticking to a more descriptive and realist interpretation of the major themes of traditional Christian theology because he thinks one should stay and endure the strange inflexible intellectual difficulties that such a position involves.

This chapter examines the notion of the abyss as it has been developed within the tradition of Western philosophy and theology. It traces the abyss back to its first inception in Neoplatonic philosophy by Plato and his Timaeus, followed by Plotinus who develops the traces of panentheist mysticism lurking in Plato’s system into the seed of negative theology. In the Neoplatonic tradition and medieval mysticism of Pseudo-Dioysius and Meister Eckhart, the abyss points to the theological crossroad in which finitude and infinity, creaturely vulnerability and divine potency intersect with each other. The paradoxical path of via negativa renders the abyss a site of uncertainty and unknowing in which both God and the self are uncreated (Eckhart). Subsequently, the ethical implication or potential of the abyss is probed via the works of contemporary philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Slavoj Zizek) who engage negative theology from a postmodern perspective.