Población y muestra

It is the kind of desire that is set in motion when God is dead—that is, when God cannot be personified or fully characterized in understandable terms but is rather called “boundless,” an unfath-omable something that constantly eludes human categories and defies

“objective” language that would distance the maker from what is made. The “boundless” cannot be captured … but it can be imagined.

—Patricia Cox Miller The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity

In the Beginning

I am beginning this essay, but the page is already full. More than that: it is overflowing. I write over the overflowing page. I write the page over.

Why not leave it alone, or make a clean start? Why begin again?

Because I want to. (A child’s answer—or a god’s.) I write first about writing, next about wanting. (But the wanting was always there, in the writing, in the wanting to write.) I write about poiesis, about eros, about the desire to create, about the desire at the heart of creation. The text is layered and shifty.

Still, it is the same logos as before, and by then it was already ancient.

Full—overflowing. Perfect—a perfect mess.

Try again. Keep trying again. Do it over. If I have to, I will make a mockery of this logos, of the very act of writing, of the inexplicable desire to make something out of these words. There is no way to give a straight account of desire, which is always perverse, least of all divine desire, the ultimate perversity.

Here is my question: Why should an eternal and immutable god begin again? Begin anything at all? Because the god wants to. What? How can a god—the God—be found wanting?

Not a Blank Page: Word as Writing

Jacques Derrida both writes and unwrites a history of textuality. It is his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that initially draws my attention. Therein the philosopher discovers an instructive scene that is also a scene of instruction regarding the the priority of speech over writing, in which speech—logos—is aligned with the presence, transparency, or graspability of meaning, writing—graphein—with meaning’s absence, occlusion, deferral. Gazing at the Platonic text over Derrida’s shoulder, I see the prototypical scene extended—and seemingly indefinitely suspended—in a chain of iteration: the Phaedrus itself already claims to revoice an Egyptian myth, while at the same time it appears to agree in advance with “that other, Judaeo-Christian account of God’s creating word and the power of the logos to manifest itself direct in thought-made-deed”²—as one commentator boldly interpolates the Derridean text. The so-called

“Judaeo-Christian account” seemingly so uncannily prefigured is presented by Derrida himself as the “all of philosophy, which is as such constituted” in the Platonic gesture of writing’s repudiation.³ (Here, as so often, he leaves the critique of theology merely implicit.) The perduring Platonic pattern tracked by Derrida across centuries of western intellectual habit encounters epochal shifts as it is “re-edited” in the writings of Rousseau and Saussure, both of whom inaugurate new “‘eras’ in the repetition of Platonism.”⁴

If a long history of Platonic logocentrism—silently intersecting with

“the Judeo-Christian account”—is the problem, what is the solution? It begins—but does not end—with a strategic reversal: in Derrida’s works,

“speech is presented, explained, as a form of writing.”⁵ “The alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the ‘original,’ ‘natural,’ etc. language had never existed, never been intact or untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing,” proposes Derrida. “An archi-writing …”⁶ A new

practice of reading—dubbed “deconstruction”—thus disrupts the Platonic history of writing as a late (and lamentable) arrival. Derrida not only embraces the “fall” from speech into writing (thereby inverting the Platonic binary) but also erases the pre-lapsarian era of pure orality (effectively collapsing the binary). Now we learn that speech is always already “fallen,” marked by writing, marked as writing. “Discontinuity, delay, heterogeneity, and alterity already were working upon the voice, producing it from its first breath as a system of differential traces, that is, as writing before the letter,” asserts Derrida.⁷ Logocentrism itself turns out not to have a history but to perpetuate a fiction, through a practice of reading that continually reinscribes a false origin—that reinstates the fal-lacy of originality.

It is, however, a useful fiction, not least for deconstructionists. (“It is necessary … to accede to the virtue of the lie.”)⁸ If it is tempting—albeit manifestly false—to imagine that Derrida has simply evacuated the interiority of the Platonic myth of the Logos (a.k.a. “the Judaeo-Chris-tian account”), it is more difficult to position him purely on the outside of the Jewish question of the Book, as we encounter him, for example in his meditative reading of Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions:

God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us. He did so not by speaking but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs, by letting the Tables be broken

writes Derrida between the lines and in the margins of Jabès’s text.

In Exodus God repented and said so at least twice, before the first and before the new Tables, between original speech and writing and, within Scripture, between the origin and repetition (Exodus 32:14, 33:17). Writing is, thus, originally hermetic and secondary.

Our writing, certainly but already His, which starts with the stifling of his voice and the dissimulation of his Face. This difference, this negativity in God is our freedom …⁹

Here we see clearly that the aim for deconstruction can never be to annihi-late the myth of logocentrism that funds the hierarchical dualisms of the western ontotheological tradition so as to inscribe a new theory of language ex nihilo. Rather, deconstruction uses the posited primacy of a speaking God to articulate what is otherwise virtually inarticulable, namely the self-silencing of God and the “original secondariness” of all language. One might say that the deconstructive process necessarily

inscribes a narrative of origins—promotes a fallacy of originality—that it subsequently overwrites, thereby locating itself in the almost unlocatable (and impossibly fertile) space “between the origin and the repetition.”

Once we understand that Derrida is not writing history after all (but rather engaging in an interpretive practice that continually both mimes and undermines narratives of origin and fall, presence and exile),¹⁰ we are able to see that he is a surprisingly faithful interpreter of the “Judaeo-Christian” tradition of Logos theology. By this, I mean that his move to deconstruct logocentrism by subverting the binary of writing and word repeats a dynamic already subtly at work “in the beginning,” “before the letter”—before Christianity and Judaism (Logos and Book) had hardened into opposing (or even “opposite”) identities.¹¹ For the ancients, as for Derrida, Word is always already Writing, “hermetic and secondary.” Or, in Derrida’s own somewhat more abstract terms: “The name of the relation is the same as that of one of its terms. The pharmakon¹² is comprehended in the structure of logos.”¹³

Am I now writing history over Derrida’s erasure? Perhaps (though my

“history” is therefore inevitably tainted with the memory and thus the anticipation of its own undoing). Historically speaking, the figure of Logos is more a product of scriptural interpretation than of Platonic specula-tion—a “fact” that is most frequently overlooked or even deliberately obscured, swallowed by the chasm forcefully (falsely?) wedged open between Logos and Book. The divinized or hypostasized Logos that reap-pears in Derrida’s texts is collaboratively invented in antiquity by writers who are (with a few minor exceptions) readers of Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8,¹⁴ ma‘ny (but not all) of whom also happen to be readers of Plato and other philosophers. From the Gospel of John to the Gospel of Truth, from the Tripartite Tractate to Clement’s Alexandrian trilogy of the Word, from Philo to Justin to Origen, Logos emerges in the dialogical play of scriptural interpretation. More intriguing still, the figure is paralleled in (if not antic-ipated by) the Aramaic exegesis of the Hebrew “memra” (“word”)—it is thus not only almost always a “Jewish” but sometimes also a non-Greek invention.¹⁵ I might broaden the point further and say that Logos, first and foremost a product of scriptural exegesis, is also a product of a particular style of self-consciously intertextual reading that makes Scripture Scrip-ture. (For Scripture does not preexist its interpretation but emerges as an effect of interpretation.)

Reinscribing the Page: Creation as Desire

Contemporary historical theologians find reason to critique the “logocen-trism” of pre-Nicene theology, but their concerns are diametrically

opposed to those of deconstructionists. “To speak of the Logos as ‘coming forth’ from God, and so as ‘becoming Son of God’ seems to suggest some kind of change in the Logos himself,” objects Alasdair Heron. “The ambivalence of the Logos concept, with its double reference to ‘mind’ and

‘word,’ partly conceals this suggestion, but it cannot eliminate it, for the suggestion flows from that very ambivalence,” he observes astutely, going on to comment further on the ontological instability of the pre-Nicene Logos (and its concommitant tendency to destabilize ontology):

By the same token, the nature of the continuity between the two stages in the history of the Logos remains problematic, and for the same reasons. Similarly, to link his “being begotten” with the cre-ation of the universe does indeed serve the purpose of connecting him with God the Creator, and of subordinating the existence of all other reality to his being; but it also ties him in his status as Logos/

Son to the whole of created reality as its arche, as the mediating principle between God and everything else.¹⁶

Like it or not (and Heron doesn’t much like it), Logos is neither sheerly internal nor sheerly external in relation to either God or God’s creation. It is ambivalent, doubled, and from that ambivalence flow other troubling suggestions. Indeed, Logos as both God’s primal product and the agent of all subsequent creation, is situated at the most unstable place, not only ontologically but narratively as well. For why, and indeed how, should a God who is one, indivisible and unchanging, create anything at all? Is creation not the “fall” of God? Is a creative God not always already “fallen”

—thinking the thought, uttering the word, desiring the world, opening up the gap, the fecund void, in which wholeness is ever exceeding itself, one-ness ever shattering into multiplicity? The very concept of a “pre-lapsarian”

deity who is independent of and prior to creation may be, for Platonic and scriptural traditions, and above all for those traditions that are both Pla-tonic and scriptural, a necessary and productive fiction that invites its own deconstruction—not unlike the myth, both Platonic and Derridean, of an original logocentrism. The focal figure—the conceptual node—of that theological deconstruction (of that deconstructive theology) is Logos itself.

Cosmologically framed, Logos is both the interval of separation and the agent of mediation between God and creation, as Heron points out. I am here suggesting that one might push this point just a bit further and say that Logos is the binary itself—the One-Many—as well as its inevitable subversion, both revealing and reveiling the instability inhering in the unchanging, the multiplicity harbored within the unity, the difference with which sameness is impregnated—that Logos is thus yet another term

in “the chain…of non-synonomous substitutions” for the Derridean pharmakos, “archi-writing,” différance.¹⁷ Like the Pythagorean Monad-Dyad, or the still more unstable co-presence “in the beginning” of Demiurge, Forms, and Receptacle depicted in the Timaeus (diversely interpreted by later Platonists), Logos contains and also exposes the excessiveness and deficiency of a perfect monotheism. Where limitless divine outpouring (plenitude and then some) spills into the yawning abyss of infinite potenti-ality (leaving the cosmos itself always less than complete), the posited dichotomy of a holy wholeness (pure being) and an unholy deficiency (absolute nothingness) collapses, and “creation” is reframed as “a flow at the heart of things, rather than a creator set over against a thing created.”¹⁸ As we shall see, it is above all by exposing desire as the font of divine creativity that Logos undermines the absolute alterity claimed for a tran-scendent God.

It is “gnostic” texts that are most attuned to the generative ambivalence of Logos. Forcefully asserting the radical otherness and incomprehensibil-ity of the invisible Spirit who is “more than a god,” these works also subtly subvert both the epistemological and the ontological foundations of such a theology:

And his thought performed a deed and she came forth, namely she who had appeared before him in the shine of his light. This is the first power which was before all of them and which came forth from his mind. She is the forethought of the All—her light shines like his light—the perfect power which is the image of the invisible, virginal Spirit who is perfect… This is the first thought, his image;

she became the womb of everything… (NH II 1, 4–5).¹⁹

Thus the Sethian Apocryphon of John regarding its Logos-figure, Barbelo, from which “womb” the “fullness”—pleroma—of divine perfection proceeds. Already, one might say, the pristine Spirit is in trouble, exceeding the bounds of its Oneness (as if caught in an embarrassing pregnancy).

Already the text reveals (even as it tries to cover its own messy tracks) that divine “thought” is the site of a dangerous excessiveness, the point at which God’s “fullness” is marked as a self-transgressive process, defying any limit that might be implied by “wholeness.” (Indeed, when limit is eventually inscribed, it comes as both a concession to and a confession of the defi-ciency of divinity that is at the same time the font of divine plenitude.)

Enacting such excess through the explosive proliferation of names (“the Mother-Father, the first man, the holy Spirit, the thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one”) as well as aeonic off-spring (foreknowledge, indestructibility, eternal life, truth) (NH II 1, 5–6),

the Barbelo Logos-figure continues to transgress limits by subsequently (and not for the last time) duplicating itself, with the introduction of another divinely womblike persona—who both is and is not “the same,” in this strangely postcolonial text-world of fractured, overlapped, hybridized identities.²⁰ “And the Sophia of the Epinoia, being an aeon, conceived a thought from herself and the conception of the invisible Spirit and foreknowledge.” Here, the creative desire is explicitly marked as exces-sive—indeed excessively marked as such, marked with the sign of the “fall.”

She wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit—he had not approved—and without her consort, and without his consideration. And though the person of her maleness had not approved and she had not found her agreement, and she had thought without the consent of the Spirit, and the knowledge of her agreement, yet she brought forth. And because of the invincible power which is in her, her thought did not remain idle and something came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance (NH II 1, 9–10).

To cut a long story short: the “something” that Sophia conceives illegiti-mately (out of her desire) turns out to be the “God” of Genesis 1–2, and thus Sophia—not father to an only-begotten word but mother to a misbegotten creator—gives rise to the arrogant pseudo-deity and his cosmos (itself a perverse replica of the divine pleroma) as “the conse-quences of her desire” (NH II 1, 10). This explicit act of creatio ex libidine is so ambivalent that Sophia herself is fractured in her repentance, broken off from herself, taken up into the ninth heaven and also dispersed and also sent to the dispersion to correct her deficiency—a split subject indeed, parody of perfection, both savior and the one, the many to be saved.²¹

The gnostic myth thus equates the fall of an intermediate—and not inconsequentially “feminine”—divine entity with the creation of the material universe, an identification that has earned gnosticism a robust reputation for “cosmic dualism.” We should note, however, that this

“dualism” is based at least as much on imitation and iteration—on resemblance—as on negation. Taking the specific form of mimicry, gnos-tic cosmology exposes the deficiency of the material world and/or its political regime by situating it as a “bad copy” of a divine original. The myth thereby devours the totalizing claims of the Creator God Ialdabaoth and his imperial henchmen in the maw of an even more totalizing, directly oppositional metanarrative, as Karen King has argued persua-sively.²² As Patricia Cox Miller has pointed out, the gnostic critique is aimed not merely at “creation” as we know it but at the very concept of

God as “Creator”—or, more precisely, at a demiurgic theology that implies an “artistic or plastic model of creating.” For the gnostic, as for a Platonist like Porphyry, “to be enlightened … involves coming to terms with metaphors of divine making,” suggests Miller. Specifically, enlight-enment involves excavating “the erotic foundations of creating,” rejecting as false the notion that “the maker…is related to the objects that he has forged from nothing by power rather than by nature” and recognizing instead that “the ‘first reality’ is a flow, not the work of a potter.”²³

Less frequently remarked is that the mimetic and repetitious patterning of gnostic cosmology does more than mock the derivativeness and consequent inauthenticity or imperfection of “the world.” Like the forms of mimicry analyzed by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, the gnostic myth also undermines the very concept of “originality” and thus disturbs the serene stasis of the perfect “One.” It is here, in the (delicate and ambiv-alent) mockery of theology itself, that I would locate the ancient concept of creativity that Miller describes as “making under the banner of … the kind of desire that is set in motion when God is dead.”²⁴ Although there is a sense in which the Logos qua “writing” is “patricidal,”²⁵ the point for the reader of the gnostic text is not so much to kill the Father or even trium-phantly to announce “his” death, as to attempt to glimpse what cannot quite be seen, namely, the always already dying or withdrawing that is God—“the stifling of his voice and dissimulation of his Face,” as Derrida also puts it—which is merely the shadowed side of the always already desiring or outpouring that is also God. Sophia—re-presenting, intensify-ing, and partly revising Logos-Barbelo as First Thought and Womb of All, but also presenting the invisible Spirit (as Barbelo herself already re-presents it)—becomes a hermeneutical key releasing the abysmal secret of creativity as the dying/desiring of God, a “flow at the heart of things.” The self-contained transcendence of the invisible Spirit and the self-transgress-ing womb of divine fecundity; the safety of a controllself-transgress-ing will and the

Less frequently remarked is that the mimetic and repetitious patterning of gnostic cosmology does more than mock the derivativeness and consequent inauthenticity or imperfection of “the world.” Like the forms of mimicry analyzed by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, the gnostic myth also undermines the very concept of “originality” and thus disturbs the serene stasis of the perfect “One.” It is here, in the (delicate and ambiv-alent) mockery of theology itself, that I would locate the ancient concept of creativity that Miller describes as “making under the banner of … the kind of desire that is set in motion when God is dead.”²⁴ Although there is a sense in which the Logos qua “writing” is “patricidal,”²⁵ the point for the reader of the gnostic text is not so much to kill the Father or even trium-phantly to announce “his” death, as to attempt to glimpse what cannot quite be seen, namely, the always already dying or withdrawing that is God—“the stifling of his voice and dissimulation of his Face,” as Derrida also puts it—which is merely the shadowed side of the always already desiring or outpouring that is also God. Sophia—re-presenting, intensify-ing, and partly revising Logos-Barbelo as First Thought and Womb of All, but also presenting the invisible Spirit (as Barbelo herself already re-presents it)—becomes a hermeneutical key releasing the abysmal secret of creativity as the dying/desiring of God, a “flow at the heart of things.” The self-contained transcendence of the invisible Spirit and the self-transgress-ing womb of divine fecundity; the safety of a controllself-transgress-ing will and the