Seeker After Truth

Allah and criture: the centre is not the centre, God’ is not the Real

The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre elsewhere. The centre is not the centre.

It will come as no surprise that we are finally moving towards the conclusion that the way in which Sufi thinkers like Ibn `Arabi talk about God is uncannily similar to the way in which post-structuralists like Derrida talk about writing. Neither writing nor the Real ever stands still long enough to be a ‘centre’ for anything; separated by seven centuries, both thinkers featured in this study have been castigated and vilified for daring to suggest the ‘blindness’ of their peers to this situation. The Ash’arites failed to understand how the ‘centre’ of their own theology (an immanent God) was no nearer to the Real than the ‘centre’ of the rival theology belonging to their opponents, the Mu’tazilites. The structuralists who claimed to perform a critique of empiricism did not see how they themselves shared the same ‘centre’ as empiricism a truth ‘which can always be completed or invalidated by new information’. Both thinkers have discerned a variety of idols which philosophers and theologians, ever the centuries, have mistaken for a ‘centre’ an ultimate point of reference which would justify, incontestably, all the propositions made about it.

If Derrida and Ibn `Arabi share one thing in common and they are very different thinkers it is this awareness of how obstructive and ineluctably misleading representations can be. No surprise, then, that both thinkers speak of metaphysics in terms of chains and ‘knots’ and of their own projects as attempts to untie those `knots’; neither is it surprising how both thinkers seem to see in the state of confusion a possibility for ‘truer’ knowledge, or how they come to see texts as bearing an ultimately uncontrollable number of meanings, or how they perceive the `self’ (or indeed all autonomous, self-present identities) as being rooted in an ‘abyss’ … this common store of motifs and metaphors is no patched-together collection of superficial similarities, but simply the consequences of a genuine suspicion of rational/metaphysical thought.

Neither is it surprising that both Ibn `Arabi and Derrida have been the subject of comparisons with Taoism. Izutsu’s famous 1967 study sees the tao’s production (sheng) of the ‘ten thousand things’ (tao –> sheng * wan wu) as an ‘exact Taoist counterpart of the Islamic haqq’ that is, the way Ibn `Arabi’s Real manifests itself constantly in the world of possible beings (haqq –>tajalli –>mumkinat).35 Similarly, critics such as Michelle Yeh have discerned a common opposition to ‘dualistic conceptualization’ in the thought of both Derrida and the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu, whilst others such as Donald Wesling have gone so far as to call Derrida’s thought an ‘incomplete Taoism’. Of the two approaches Izutsu is the more convinced of the veracity of his comparison, with Hongchu Fu more soberly discerning a number of clear differences between Derrida’s ‘active attitude’ and the ‘Taoist transcendence’. Nevertheless, both comparisons reflect in deconstruction and Sufism a basic dissatisfaction with the metaphysical, essentialist structure of philosophy, even if the alternatives provided seem to be of a very different nature.

The question remains: what are the implications of any comparative study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi for Sufism and deconstruction? When we speak of a radical re-emphasizing of the unthinkable in both God and the text, an analogous mistrust of metaphysical thought and a parallel affirmation of confusion and infinite interpretation, what consequences do such comparisons have for the way we continue to read Derrida and Ibn `Arabi?

In Ibn `Arabi’s case two important points can be drawn, the first concerning the Shaykh’s alleged status as a genius of systematization, the second concerning the ontological status of that system itself. Most recently Hamid Dabashi, in an otherwise admirable study of the twelfth-century Persian thinker and mystic ‘Ayn al-Qudat, has spoken of Ibn `Arabi as a ‘grand totalising master narrator’, one who produced a `dead, compromising, politically correct “Sufism”‘ (ibid.). Dabashi’s shallow and ungrounded reading of Ibn ‘Arabi, in particular his curious claim that after ‘Ayn al-Qudat, Sufism ‘lost’ its ‘centrality of irony and paradox’ and ‘impetuous undoing of reason’, is never supported by a single quotation from Ibn ‘Arabi, whom Dabashi holds single-handedly responsible for the metaphysical murder of Sufism. The only evidence offered for this claim is an unconvincing argument from biography: `Ayn al-Qudat was executed as a heretic at thirty-three, whereas Ibn `Arabi `lived a full and long life’, ergo the former was deconstructively subversive, the latter in full complicity with metaphysics. What becomes clear, however, from any genuine reading of Ibn `Arabi, is that his system is no logocentric description of essences and hierarchies inscribed in stone, but rather a series of ladders which ultimately lead one to a ’station of no station’. Ibn `Arabi’s system, far from being an example of metaphysics, actually leads us past it, to a place where (in Abu Yazid’s words) there is no morning or evening, no attributes or names.

A second, connected point maybe that in constructing a provisionary system in order to be (ultimately) able to dispense with it that is, using names and entities to talk about that which ultimately is ‘unknown’ and without ‘definition’ Ibn `Arabi could be said to be putting terms such as theology and God (under what Derrida calls `erasure’ (sous rature). Although this textual strategy of forever deleting the validity of one’s assertions as soon as they are written but nevertheless retaining the gesture one has deleted has been used on several occasions by Derrida, the term ’sous rature’ actually comes from Heidegger’s 1956 work Zur Seinsfrage (Towards A Question of Being). Here Heidegger is trying to reply to Junger’s request for a ‘good definition of nihilism’ (eine gute Definition des Nihilismus). Heidegger tells us how `no information [keine Auskunft] can be given about nothingness and Being … which can be presented tangibly [grifIbereit vorliegen] in the form of assertions’, which already sounds like Ibn Arabi’s understanding of the ungraspable Real. Such a problem, insists Heidegger, `leads us into a realm which requires a different language [der ein anderes Sagen verlangt]‘ . In such a realm, Being could only ever be written asBeing just as Ibn ‘Arabi’s God can only ever be spoken of as God ( Such a crossing out (Durchkreuzung) is not merely negative, not simply a reminder of what one cannot say, but also a pointer towards how much infinitely remains to be said. Spivak is quite correct in her remark concerning the different things Heidegger and Derrida put ‘under erasure’. Whereas Heidegger’s Being refers to an ‘inarticulable presence’, Derrida’s concept of thetrace indicates rather `the absence of a presence, an always already absent present’. Spivak’s deconstructive suspicion of Heidegger’s `inarticulable presence’ would also apply to Ibn `Arabi’s Real. In Derrida, words are placed under erasure because of a restless play within language, and not because of some semantic inability to express an elusive signified ‘out-there’. Semantic instability that is, radical indeterminacy within finite parameters of play makes such Durchkreuzung necessary, not the presence of some ineffable unsignifiable which constantly makes us lament how ‘finite’ and ‘imperfect’ our language is.

Possibly, in any comparison between a medieval Sufi thinker and a French post-structuralist, the consequences for the status, reception and ultimate re-evaluation of Derrida’s writing remain more significant, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The first of these must inevitably be a reassessment of the relationship between deconstruction and the spiritual belief systems it has (by various quarters) been set against. Which certainly does not mean the sudden re-packaging of deconstruction as a post-religious mysticism, but simply an awareness of the theological provenance of some of its gestures. Kevin Hart has already shown how deconstruction was first received in the English-speaking world in ‘contexts that were at the least secular and at the most determinedly atheistic’. Replacing the usual trinity of Nietzsche/Freud/Heidegger, Hart suggests, one could always try reading Derrida in the context of Jabes, Levinas and Celan. This re-contextualizing of Derrida’s work the possibility that deconstruction might not simply be (in Mark C. Taylor’s words) the hermeneutics of the death of God in turn suggests the re-linking of Derrida with a much longer tradition. Over the past twenty years, a wide variety of scholars have been locating moments of anti-metaphysical decentring in a number of religious traditions Coward’s Sankara, Loy’s Nagarjuna, Dabashi’s ‘Ayn al-Qudat, Caputo’s Eckhart, Yeh’s Lao-Tzu, to mention but a few. How valid these alleged precedents are (including the example offered by the present study) remains debatable; what is certain, however, is that the familiar antireligious/nihilistic reputation of deconstruction considered in the past as ‘antitheological scepticism’ (Goodheart), ‘counter-theological’ (Gould), ‘non-theological’ (Dufrenne) and even ‘a swipe at Christianity from arche to telos’ (Schneidenau) is going to be increasingly revised in the light of such research.

All of which, in turn, does cast doubt on the various ‘clarifying’ and `serious’ versions of Derrida which have been offered by critics such as Norris, Gasche and Culler. What is most interesting about such readings is that they see Derrida not so much as mystifying but explicating, as a method which ‘accounts for a heterogenous variety … of discursive inequalities … that continue to haunt even the successful development of philosophical arguments’. An elucidating view of deconstruction’s raison d’ tre which stands in stark contrast to Derrida’s words in Of Grammatology: `To make enigmatic what one think one understands by the words ‘proximity’, ‘immediacy’, ‘presence’ is my final intention in this book.‘ To ‘make enigmatic’ means, literally, to darken (from the Greek ainigma). To re-introduce a darkness into what was previously illuminated; to obscure something which was felt to be clear. In comparing Derrida with Ibn ‘Arabi, one cannot help how this parallel suspicion of rational clarity as something both illusory and restrictive leads to a subsequent affirmation of the uncertain, be it God or text, cloud or darkness, ama or ainigma, an affirmation which in turn would belong to a much wider history of gestures. In his work Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, Hugo Rahner describes how the flourishing enlightenment of Greek thought and the arts in the first four centuries after Christ provoked, in turn, the desire for a ‘mystery atmosphere’ once more:

… the Apollonian brilliance of Greek sculpture … the acids of Attic comedy, and later the rationalism of the Stoa, dissolved the traditional belief in gods and goddesses … [and] led the Greeks increasingly to seek refuge in the eerie realm of the cults.

The enlightenment certainties in Greek thought aroused in many a nostalgia for the ancient mystery cults, a yearning for what Rahner calls the ‘pre-Hellenic darkness’ of earlier times: `What man now seeks is the bizarre … as against the Olympian calm of classical times’ (ibid.). Which is not to serve up Derrida as the latest swing against systematization in some potted, dialectical history of light and darkness, reason and feeling, structure and mysticism, but simply to show how the deconstructive gesture and the authentic darkness it restores to our foolish and overambitious clarities could be re-inscribed into a very metaphysical history of rebellions against the metaphysical.

Perhaps, finally, the most interesting consequence of reading French sixties’ deconstruction in the rather strange context of medieval Sufism is the oddly mystical meaning which many of Derrida’s terms take on infinity, endless play, the unnamable, the trace, the elusive force which is “older” than Being itself’. Of course, there is no God not even a deus absconditus in Derrida’s universe which would give these terms the kind of meaning compatible with a ‘mysticism’. Derrida’s infinite text, as we have already said, springs from an infinite emptiness, not an infinite Mind; the Derridean unthinkable lies in the relentless play of differences within the text, and not in some epistemologically ungraspable notion of the Divine. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the use of such terms cannot escape the echoes of God, cannot elude the ghost of the divine; how even remarks concerning ‘the consciousness of nothing, upon which all consciousness of something enriches itself… ‘ seem to push differance as Derrida has already feared in the direction of the non-present, eternally generative God of negative theology. Derrida’s protestations to the contrary resemble all too well the cries of the author who wishes his text to wander in one direction, instead of another.

Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi disconcert. They make us think twice about the things we take for granted; they wake us up to the overconfidence with which, all too often, we dupe ourselves whenever we talk about ‘truths’ we have never really questioned. They raise in us the unsettling possibility that all the things we have felt so comfortable about (`God’, `truth’, ‘literature’, etc.) may actually be radically unthinkable, formed more from our own beliefs and experiences rather than embodying the things themselves. Much in the manner of Eckhartian geldzenheit, works like the Futuhat and ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ ask us to remain open in Derridean terms, open towards the Other, ‘an absolute openness towards what is coming’, a voluntary self-dismantling of all our (pre)conceptions about the Other in order to encounter its true alterity. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s case, this translates as remaining open towards God by `freeing the locus (tafrigh al-mahall) and sanctifying the heart (taqdis al-qalb) from the stains of reflective thoughts’. Once Ibn ‘Arabi’s perfect gnostic finally realizes that the centre he has always worshipped is not really the centre, he is able to accept the Real in all Its manifestations, without cluttering up his `locus’ with his own theological constructs. This emphasis on opening in both deconstructive and Sufi epistemologies forms the most thematic and yet the clearest link between two writers who, in their own original ways, make us realize that what we call ‘God’ may not always be God; that what we call ‘Truth’ may not always be true.