Theology is a discourse attended by constant prohibition, just as injunctions to
worship are invariably haunted by the temptation to idolatry.2 But to avoid the lure
of brazen images it will not suffice to cease worship – for then we find ourselves only
in another idolatry. So also, theology will not resist failure by silence.
In a seminal essay which functions as a horizon for this book, Jacques Derrida
raises the question of the (in)adequacy of concepts within the context of a theological
discussion.3 Fending off charges that his deconstruction is simply a reproduction of
negative theology,4 Derrida concedes that both are concerned with a similar
challenge: how to speak of that which resists language, which is otherwise than
conceptual. Negative theology, he notes, “has come to designate a certain typical
attitude toward language, and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, an
attitude toward semantic or conceptual determination.”5 The negative theologian is
faced with the challenge of how to speak of a God who exceeds all categories and
transcends all conceptual determination; “by a more or less tenable analogy,”
Derrida remarks, deconstruction grapples with a similar problem, which is precisely
why he constantly has recourse to apophatic strategies and a “rhetoric of negative
determination” when attempting to describe “this, which is called X (for example,
text, writing, the trace, differance, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the
parergon, etc.).” While insisting that this X is neither this nor that, neither being nor
non-being, neither present nor absent, such strategies remain insufficient, precisely
because “this X is neither a concept nor even a name; it does not lend itself to a series of
names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of
predicative discourse. . . . It is written completely otherwise.