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International Journal for Philosophy and Theology

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TOWARDS A DERRIDEAN SPIRITUALITY

RICO SNELLER

To cite this article: RICO SNELLER (2011) TOWARDS A DERRIDEAN SPIRITUALITY, Bijdragen,
72:3, 298-321

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Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 72(3), 298-321.
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TOWARDS A DERRIDEAN SPIRITUALITY

DERRIDA AND ABULAFIA

RICO SNELLER

Indeed, each and every body is a letter, and a distinguishing sign for one
who perceives, so that by their means one may recognise God and His enactments.
Every letter is a wonder and a sign and a proof that instructs us as regards the
effluence of the Name which causes dibbur [speech] to overflow through its means;
and thus, the entire world and all years and all souls are full of letters.
Abulafia, Sefer Otsar Eden Ganuz
And the one who apprehends the contemplation of the letters will
contemplate themas though they speak with him.
Abulafia, Sefer ha-Chesheq
Ce qui entame le mouvement de Ia signification, c'est ce qui en rend
!'interruption impossible. La chose meme est un signe.
J. Derrida, De Ia grammatologie
L'ordre alphabetique est lui-meme aveugle, on ne peut lui faire confiance qu'en
aveugle, par un acte de foi, meme si [... ] on ecrit pour lui rendre du sens et, si on peut
dire, lui donner raison.
J. Derrida and S. Fathy, Tourner le mots. Au bord d'unfilm

Introduction

The audacity to bring Derrida in connection with the medieval kabbalist Abulafia
presupposes quite a big uncertainty about what mysticism truly is. Had Derrida
not been clear enough, even while admittedly "dreaming" about mysticism
sometimes, in saying that it was wholly strange to him? To be true, "mysticism"
taken in the sense of "the experience of a [transcendent] presence"' is what he
felt himself utterly unacquainted to. This does not exclude the experience of
an absence, one might immediately respond. But does this experience of an
absence, which Derrida is ready to accept, justify any more a confrontation of
his thought to the great advocate of 'ecstatic kabbala' that Abulafia was?

1
J. Derrida and P.-J. Labarriere, Alterites. Avec des etudes de Francis Guibal et Stanislas, Paris,
Osiris, 1986, p. 32.
Rico Sneller 299

Philosophical interpretations - except perhaps those by Moshe ldel and

Umberto Eco - have barely noticed any telling connections here. The Jewish
element in Derrida's writings, however diversely interpreted, has indeed
always been pointed at, to start by Derrida himself. But rare are the authors
familiar enough both with kabbalist tradition or Hebrew language, on the one
hand, and, on the other, with Derrida's complex oeuvre, to have something
noteworthy to say on possible mystical traces in Derrida. Considering these
traces carefully, though, will have the double advantage of shedding a different
light not only on Derrida's philosophical heritage but also on the enigmas of
kabbalistic experiences themselves. For can one rely on the simple conclusion,
as E.R. Wolfson does in a recent article on Derrida and Kabbala, that "for the
kabbalist the originary trace can be traced back ontologically to the infinite,
the luminous darkness, exposed through its occlusion in the multiplicity of
differentiated beings, a superabundance whose absence signifies a presence of
a being so full that it must be empty? " 2 Does not any mystical tradition radi-
cally defy ontology? And does it not question the subjectivity of the subject
that is claiming or denying mystical skill? Even if Derrida, in rejecting any
definable arche/origin, can be supposed to have excluded "the kabbalistic
tenet regarding the imaginal configuration of the formless in the form of the
sefirotic emanations",3•4 it might be retorted that at least Abulafia - in accord-
ance here with medieval Jewish philosophers - fervently opposed this
'sefirotic' configuration presenting God's innermost structure as a tenfold
layered emanation process. Abulafia considered the contemporary kabbalistic
currents defending such a theosophical construction to be worse than Christians
advocating a triune God. 5

2
E.R. Wolfson, 'Assaulting the Border: Kabbalistic Traces in the Margins of Derrida', in Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 10 (2002) 475-514. See also: S. Wolosky, 'Derrida, Jabes,
Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical/Discourse', in Prooftexts 2 (1982) 300-301 and M. Ide!, Absorbing
Perfections. Kabbalah and Interpretation, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2002,
pp. 77f; 105; 124f.
3 E.R. Wolfson, 'Assaulting the Border,' p. 507. See also: (ldel2003a, p. 155). H. Bloom, on the

contrary, states: 'Kabbalah is a theory of writing, but this is a theory that denies the absolute distinc-
tion between writing and inspired speech, even as it denies human distinctions between presence and
absence' (Bloom 2005, p. 25).
4 See also: M. Ide!, 'Jacques Derrida et les sources kabbalistiques', in J. Cohen and R. Zagury-

Orly (eds.), Judeites. Questions pour Jacques Derrida, Paris: Galilee, 2003, p. 155. H. Bloom, on the
contrary, states: "Kabbalah is a theory of writing, but this is a theory that denies the absolute distinc-
tion between writing and inspired speech, even as it denies human distinctions between presence and
absence." (H. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, London/New York, Continuum, 2005, p. 25)
5 M. Ide!, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, Albany, SUNY Press, 1988, p. 8.
300 Towards a Derridean Spirit

In this article I will read Derrida in the light of Abulafia. There are some reasons
inducing such a reading and giving rise to my hypothesis that the connections
are closer than one may think at first sight. Both Derrida and Abulafia empha-
sise written language and the precedence it takes over oral language. Both match
being up to textuality. In both there is a tendency to obfuscate sentences, words
and even letters, in order to show a new, other, sense in the text than the appar-
ent one. They share this tendency with Freud, anyway. 6 It would perhaps not
add up referring here also to seeming convergences in their prolific authorship
or in their itinerant life. Relating Abulafia's intended visit to the pope to ask his
consideration for the Jewish people and his ensuing captivity, to Derrida's infe-
licitous trip to communist Czechoslovakia to support the student movement,
might introduce too much arbitrariness. It might seduce the reticent reader to
highlight much larger dissimilarities between the two, such as the complete
absence of any Aristotelian-metaphysical framework in Derrida, the declared
opposition of the latter to a notion of an infinite divine understanding of which
human thinking partakes (Abulafia accepting the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic
notion of an emanated Active Intellect), the development of practical, yoga-
like meditation techniques by Abulafia, and their different attitude towards
society (Abulafia advocating a fmal withdrawal from society, as opposed to
Derrida engaging himself actively with all kind of public urgencies).
Yet, the similarities mentioned above are too conspicuous, it seems to me, not
to enhance a more detailed re-reading of Derrida's philosophical corpus. I am
not implying at all that there has been any direct influence from Abulafia upon
Derrida, for there has not been in the least. Influences tend to be indirect,
disparate and uncontrollable, as Derrida himself has always assured.
Abulafia's texts have been transmitted to European Christianity by Reuchlin
(1455-1522); Hegel and Schelling have been influenced by the Christian
kabbalist Franz von Baader, while the 19th Century pseudo-kabbalist Eliphas
Levi greatly influenced modem French poetry, for example Stephane Mal-
larme's.7 And we know how much both Hegel and Mallarme meant to Derrida
philosophical itinerary. But Abulafia's influence on his intellectual posterity
has been far from unidirectional, so as to thwart any evidence regarding a
pretended Derridean indebtedness.

6
See: D. Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical tradition, Mineola/New York, Dover
Publications, 2004, esp. Ch 10 and H. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 20. See also: "[O]n devrait
reconnaitre uncertain privilege a une recherche de type psychanalytique". J. Derrida, De Ia gram-
matologie, Paris, Minuit, 1967, p. 132.
7
M. Idel, 'Jacques Derrida et les sources kabbalistiques', pp. 141; 146; 154.
Rico Sneller 301

As a last introductory remark, I would like to emphasize that this comparative

reading of Derrida and Abulafia does not pretend whatsoever to be all-com-
prehensive. I merely aim at interpreting some distinctive passages in both
authors through a cross-reading, rather than giving a full account of all kab-
balistic reminiscences in Derrida's work- which would be a never-ending
undertaking and would obfuscate more than elucidate.

Abulafia

Let me first shortly introduce Abulafia from a biographical and a more wide-
ranging perspective. Abraham Abulafia was born in 1240 in Saragossa, but he
travelled all throughout his life: through Castillia and Catalonia, Italy, Sicily
and even Palestine. Deeply involved in Aristotelian thinking as he was, he
developed a new, philosophical interpretation of the kabbalistic currents
already predominant, and called it the 'kabbala of names.' Moshe Idel, who
wrote several books on Abulafia, calls this type of mystics 'ecstatic' or 'pro-
phetic kabbala,' as opposed to the 'sefrrotic kabbala' of Abulafia's immediate
predecessors; in its interpretative zest inspired by the old, enigmatic Judaeo-
neopythagorean text Sefer Yetsira, the latter had distinguished an inner-divine
life comprising ten sefiroth (dimensions, emanations). Abulafia, on the con-
trary, decisively rejected this theosophy as being worse than the Christian
notion of Trinity. He admired Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, chiefly its
doctrine of prophecy, as a more moderate unravelling of the secrets of the
Torah. He himself, however, went even further and applied exegetical methods
to decipher the esoteric contents of the Torah. Apart from this, Abulafia intro-
duced meditation techniques that betray his acquaintance with Eastern yoga
traditions. The divine names, so he claimed, are to be recited according to
particular musical rules, and one should make use of special breathing tech-
niques and corporeal movements. All this in order to gain an extraordinary,
physical experience of God himself. Idel claims that Abulafia presents us with
an unusual exception to Jewish mysticism; whereas, generally speaking, in
Jewish mysticism the summit of God experience is limited to devequt, that is,
the sole human 'cleaving' to the divinity, in Abulafia, however, a real unifica-
tion of human spirit with the divine Active Intellect is admittedly reached. 8

8 "This indicates to us that a literary expression of mystical unity does appear in Jewish philo-

sophy, a fact indicating the importance of philosophic thought for the understanding of medieval
Jewish mysticism". (M. Ide!, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, p. 131) This conclusion
is mainly based on Abulafia's following statement: "and he will then fmd himself in His presence,
302 Towards a Derridean Spirit

Abulafia's influence was huge, especially upon the Italian renaissance and
humanism (Reuchlin, Pico della Mirandola). Within Jewish kabbalist circles,
Abulafia had been of considerable importance to 161h Century Palestine
kabbala (Cordovero, Luria).9

Language

What seems to bind Derrida and Abulafia, as we will see, is their radical inter-
pretation of language. Language, both hold, is not a simple instrument of com-
munication but represents an 'ontological' structure. Affirming this automati-
cally implies the immediate end of any ontology, that is, of a clearly defined
concept of being. For if everything which 'is' finally comes down to some-
thing to 'read' or to be 'read', and if reading is always a text-creative process,
then the supposed purity of reality or objectivity does not exist. Reality will
then consist of something which is not stable but which is reducible to its
permanent (re-)/(de-)construction. Neither in Abulafia nor in Derrida, how-
ever, does this lead to despondency. On the contrary, a hermeneutic orientation
upon the purely 'linguistic', 'literal,' non-communicative side of language, let
alone the discovery of the linguistic structure of 'reality' itself, may give rise
to encountering the operative force of divine spirit itself. In Derrida, who of
course would be most reserved towards seeing things in a spirit-oriented way,
deconstruction (of 'texts' or of 'reality') is nevertheless always taken as an
affirmative force.
Let us have a closer look at Abulafia first. Subsequently, we will consider the
possible occurrence of Abulafian echoes in Derrida. Abulafia has been pre-
sented to a wider public mainly by Moshe ldel, who has written several books
and articles about him. These books were partially based on ancient manu-
scripts that had not been published previously. Only recently have Abulafia's
works been translated into English. 10 The first scholar to have edited some of
Abulafia's work was Adolph Jellinek, in 1853. He published a short Abulafian

without obstacle or separation, and his soul will be united to Him in absolute devequt, without any
more separation for ever, all the days".
9 See: M. Ide!, 'Jacques Derrida et les sources kabbalistiques'.
10 Abulafia, Sefer Ha-Ot I The Book of the Sign, Providence University, 2007; Abulafia, Sheva

Netivot Ha-Torah I The Seven Paths of Torah, Providence University, 2007; Abulafia, Get Ha-Shemot
I Divorce of the Names, Providence University, 2007; Abulafia, Ner Elohim I Candle of God, Provi-
dence University, 2007; Shaarei Tzedek- Gates of Righteousness, Providence University, 2008;
Chaye Ha-Olam Ha-Ba I Life in the World to Come, Providence University, 2008; Or Ha-Sekhel I
Light of the Intellect, Providence University, 2008; Sitrei Torah I The Secrets of the Torah (2 vols.)
Providence University, 2009.
Rico Sneller 303

missive (1853). 11 My main sources on Abulafia in this chapter, however, are

!del's studies and quotations of the Judaeo-Spanish mystic. They are very
detailed and strongly rely on the whole range of manuscripts themselves. But
of course, !del's interpretation of Abulafia's occasionally very obscure writ-
ings inevitably requires some degree of philosophical reflection and theoretical
distance, to make them intelligible at all.
In Abulafia, the distinction between a hermeneutics of the Holy Writ, on the
one hand, and ontology, on the other, is only seeming. Interpreting the bible
is not just a matter of reading ancient ('religious') interpretations of reality, it
is also a means to vivify the prophetic experience 'behind' the text. Idel says:
[i]n the end, the powerful dissection of the text allows, according to Abulafia, a prophetic
experience in which the mystic may open a dialogue with the revealing entity, which is,
at least in some cases, the projection of his own spiritual force. [ ... ] Abulafia transforms
his experience into a text; experiencing is, at its highest, a text-creative process. 12

We will have to consider this in more detail to understand what is said here.
Suffice it for the moment that the material side of the text, its hyle, is taken as
its most important one. Its formal content, supposed to be 'conveyed' by the
text's outward appearance, is finally not essential. Interpreting a text, in
Abulafia, comes down to intervening in its 'literal' process and contributing
to it, that is, to its 'body', through interpretation. The interpretation belongs to
the text itself, to its 'inner' movement. The divine spirit is operative in the
interpreted text again, just as it was when the text was first written down. The
interpreter, Idel says, establishes a relationship with God through the text. 13
Another important feature of Abulafia's attitude towards language, apart from
the equation of language and ontology, is its emphasis on single words, as
opposed to complete, well-ordered sentences. Idel compares this to Roland
Barthes' analogous distinction between 'classical' and 'poetic' language, the
latter equally being rather word- than sentence-oriented. 14 This orientation on
words at the dispense of sentences seems illogical, as it is mainly the orientation
on the latter that contributes to what we usually call 'communication,' whereas
the former tend to be merely 'self-expressive'.

11 Also see G. Scholem, Die judische Mystik in ihren Hauptstromungen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,

1980, p. 134.
12 M. Ide!, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. xi.
13 Ibidem.
14
Ibid., p. xv. See also: R. Barthes, Le degre zero de l'ecriture, suivi de Nouveaux essais cri-
tiques, Paris, Seuil, 1972, pp. 35-38.
304 Towards a Derridean Spirit

The idea of the profound unity of 'being' and 'language,' not uncommon in
medieval kabbalah although it had been radicalised by Abulafia, goes back to
an ancient, enigmatic text, of Jewish-Neopythagorean origin, entitled Sefer
Yetsirah (Book of the Formation, that is, of the world). This text, dating from
the earliest ages of our common era, presents divine creation as a process in
which God took the (Hebrew) letters of his own ineffable name, the tetragram-
maton YHWH (mil'), out of himself, and moulded them into the other letters,
out of which he created the world.
This entire enigmatic procedure has been interpreted again and again in medi-
eval Kabbalah; most Kabbalists wrote an commentary upon the Sefer Yetsirah,
implying thereby that the conundrum of its content had apparently not yet been
suitably solved. According to the Zohar (13th Century, Castillia), for instance,
the letters of the tetragrammaton had been previously taken from the orthog-
raphy of the aleph (N), the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, expressing the
inaudible (sic!) glottal stop.
Abulafia shows himself indebted to the Sefer Yetsirah in holding that nature
is ('literally') composed of divine names. Adding to this Abulafia's view that
the letters of the divine names are the foundation of language, one might con-
clude that 'reality' is fundamentally (written) language, and also that God,
through his name, is secretly 'present' in reality. "The [Hebrew] letters instruct
us of the true nature of things, [and] with greater ease [than philosophy]", 15
Abulafia writes. For philosophy needs thinking and is therefore mediate; wis-
dom, on the contrary, merely contemplates language and thereby gets an
immediate entry into ultimate reality.
Although Abulafia's aim is not at all to work out a scientific linguistic theory,
he nevertheless anticipates modem theories of language, for example Roman
Jakobson's. Letters, so the Spanish mystic claims, contain first a phonetic
dimension - ideally there are twenty-two natural sounds according to the
twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alphabet, other sounds being merely
derivative; they enclose secondly a graphical dimension - this dimension
being conventional, although the Hebrew characters rely upon a prophetical
convention between God and the prophets who recorded God's word: the
Hebrew characters are most apposite to render this word; and these letters
finally contain an intellectual dimension, as they are also paradigmatically
found in our mental experience: the letters correspond to the real forms of
everything that exists, as God created all things by means of these letters. 16

15 Abulafia in M. Ide!, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 1.

6
1 Ibid., pp. 3-6; 12-13.
Rico Sneller 305

When Abulafia almost neglects the graphical dimension of the Hebrew charac-
ters, as these rely on (prophetic) convention, he seems to take implicitly into
account the fact that the Hebrew characters as they are commonly used and
known (square script) are in fact not original; they have been borrowed from
Aramaic, Hebrew language having originally been written with different letters
in their tum borrowed from the ancient Canaanite script. What is essential to
Abulafia, however, is their reverberation as well as their mental or ideal feature.
Idel does not mention the derivative, non-original aspect of the 'Hebrew'
alphabet. 17 This seems remarkable to me. The Talmud rabbis already struggled
with the question as to the script God used when writing the stone tablets on
Mount Sinai. For the script commonly known as 'Hebrew' only dates from
Ezra (500 BC), who upon his return from exile first introduced it as the Holy
Writ's, commanding a complete transcription of the ancient texts in the newly
adopted 'Aramaic' script.
Just as little as to the script question ldel pays attention to the profound 'onto-
logical' sense of a highly interesting quote from Abulafia's Sefer lmre Shefer
(Book of Wise Proverbs). In this passage, Abulafia associates the Hebrew
word for 'letter' ('ot, rmc) to the Aramaic verb 'to come:'
[the word] 'ot [letter] is related to the word bi'at [l"'N'!l, arrival of]. Now the Targum (the
Aramaic translation) of 'olam haba' [c?ur N!li1, the world to come] is 'alma de'atei [N~?lr
'l"'N,, the world that is coming] and its secret meaning is the world of the letters, whence
signs and wonders appear. 18

If the world of being is composed of letters, and if these letters are seen as
incompletes, as arrivals, then 'being' as such does not exist. Being only is
(still) to be. It never is what it is, it only 'comes'. Being is writing, it is in a
process of constant reworking. Gershom Scholem notes that one of Abulafia's
predecessors, Isaac the Blind (around 1200), was the first to link letters
(m""rmc, 'othioth) to the messianic quality implied in the Aramaic verb 'to
come' (Nmc,'atha). For indeed, Scholem explains, the Hebrew word 'oth (letter)
remarkably has an irregular plural form ('othioth), the regular form 'othoth
(mmN) meaning '(miraculous) signs'. 19

17
J. Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet. An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Pal-
aeography, Leiden/Jerusalem, Brill/Magnes Press, 1982, pp. 11: 112ff; 162ff. J.H. Laenen, Frederik
Weinreb en de Joodse mystiek, Baam, Ten Have, 2003, pp. 83-85. M.L. Munk, The Wisdom in the
Hebrew Alphabet, New York, Mesorah, 1983.
18
Abulafia in M. Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 6.
19 G. Scholem, Gershom, 'Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala', in Judaica 3

(1973) 33.
306 Towards a Derridean Spirit

Exegesis

For Gematria is interpretative freedom gone mad.

H. Bloom

Sevenfold is the method of biblical exegesis that Abulafia defends. According

to ldel, this method "constitutes the most detailed presentation of a system of
Biblical commentary known among Jewish sources".20 Abulafia refers to this
sevenfold method in the already mentioned Sefer Otsar Eden Ganuz, in his
Sefer Maphteach Hachochmot (Book of the Key to the Wisdoms), and in the
epistle Sheva' Netivot ha-Torah (Seven Ways of the Torah). His Perush Sefer
Yetzirah (Commentary to the Sefer Yetsirah), to which he also refers, has been
lost.
The first four layers of Abulafia' s exegetical method are too common to be of
particular interest here (that is, plain meaning, oral tradition, narrative legends
and allegory). The last three methods, however, are particularly kabbalistic,
most of them the seventh. "This fifth path is the beginning of the stages of
Kabbalistic wisdom, which only Israel possesses. It is here that we separate
from the masses of the world, from the wise of the nations of the world and
from the same wise Rabbis of Israel, who remain in the sphere of the three
previously recalled methods of the parables". 21 There is a method (5) based
on the Sefer Yetsirah. It concerns the scribal oddities occurring here and there
in the Hebrew text. It is not quite clear what is meant by this, because Abulafia
gives different explanations of it. This method probably relies upon the Sefer
Yetsirah because it concerns single letters (the Sefer Yetsirah interprets divine
creation as a process of transforming the letters of the Hebrew alphabet). It
considers anomalous writings of letters in the Torah, either within words, or
separately (as for example Numbers, X, 35-36, which has been enigmatically
marked in the Hebrew text by two inverted nun's; 22 this cannot be rendered
by any translation, of course). Idel notes that neither this fifth method is orig-
inal, as it had already been defended by Ibn Ezra as the method of the
Massorah; however, he adds, Abulafia had revalued it substantially.23

20
M. ldel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 83. For a brief account
of the 'seven paths', see Abulafia, Sheva Netivot Ha-Torah, pp. 3-13.
21
Abulafia, Sheva Netivot Ha-Torah, p. 5.
22
The nun is equivalent to the letter 'n'. It should be written thus: l.
23
M. ldel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 97 and Abulafia, Sheva
Netivot Ha-Torah, pp. 5-6.
Rico Sneller 307

Figure 1: Inverted Nuns

Figure 2: Large Beth

The sixth method of Abulafia's hermeneutics is termed by Idel as restitutio

literarum. To quote here from the Sefer Otsar Eden Ganuz: "The sixth method
[consists of] returning all the letters to their prime-material state and you [that
is, the practitioner) give them form in accordance with your insight" .24 This
method comes down to what usually is taken as typically kabbalistic, as it
makes use of 'permutation' of letters. There are four techniques, which
Abulafia without any doubt had borrowed from some of his predecessors, such
as the 12th Century Ashkenazi Chassidim. Gematria (derived from geometria)
attempts to give meaning to texts by paying attention to the numerical weight
of their letters (in Hebrew, each letter also possesses a numerical value).
Temurah (substitution) substitutes the letters used in a text for other letters,
following a fixed procedure in this. Tseruf (letter combination) tries to rear-
range the letters of a particular text without adding or taking away letters.
Multiplication of letters is a calculative approach of the numerical value of
letters, by means of which these values are multiplied in a regular procedure
to arrive at new meanings.
The minutiae of these various techniques do not matter here. The techniques
might be compared to playing scrabble, with this difference: to Abulafia and
his disciples, these hermeneutical techniques are completely serious. And one
must admit that the outcomes sometimes are breathtaking, although scarcely
intelligible to non-Hebrew speakers.

24 Abulafia in M. Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 97.

308 Towards a Derridean Spirit

The seventh method, fmally, is the holiest one. It is the truest, most proper
kabbalistic method of hermeneutics. In the Otsar Eden Ganuz Abulafia speaks
about the "method of the names that leads to prophecy". We can infer from
this that, according to Abulafia, already Israel's ancient prophets can be taken
to have applied this method. What is at stake here? The so-called 'method of
the names' attempts at transforming the verses of the Torah into divine names.
Again, this requires that abstraction be made of the text's 'content'. The entire
Torah may be read as an inventory of divine names, instead of as an account
of events, images, rules, prescriptions and so on.

This is the method which I called 'the Seal within a Seal' [chotam betokh chotam] and it
impresses the seal by means of the engravings of the seal, they considered it also as Holy
unto the Lord. 25

If the entire Torah, as a seal, is sealed itself by God's name which is not clear
beforehand, then what about the tetragrammaton, God's self-revealed name
(Exodus, III, 14)? In a text on the divine name and the linguistics of the
Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem suggests that Abulafia is here more radical than
any other kabbalist. Abulafia, Scholem claims, holds that God's true name has
not been revealed at all, not even in the Torah. For his supposed proper name
(YHWH) is in fact a hidden name, it solely consists of matres lectionis, that
is, of non-letters, Hebrew consonants that only serve to 'convey' a particular
vowel without having a consonant sound of their own. 'The tetragrammaton
is only a make-shift, concealing God's true name' .26

God's name is to be found hidden in language, since language as such, that is, the Hebrew
alphabet that contains its condition of possibility, is to be seen as God's name itself:
simultaneity of revelation and concealment. "Therefore," Abulafia says, "the entire cre-
ation, and the entire act of speech- [dibbur] emerges with the Name". 27

This leads to a fairly radical conclusion - and I do not have the idea that Idel
is aware of the far reaching consequences of it when he writes:

the transformation of verses into Divine Names or into letters which are Names of God
is not associated exclusively with Scripture and may be done with any other book. There-
fore the letters of the Aleph Bet may indicate Divine Names without their having any
exclusive association with Scripture. In other words, one who is capable of perceiving
Divine Names in all linguistic phenomena or who can transform any linguistic phenomenon

25 Ibid., p. 102.
26
G. Scholem, 'Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala,' p. 43.
27 Abulafia in M. Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 106.
Rico Sneller 309

into a Divine Name is said to cleave to the Active Intellect and perhaps even to God
Himself, in that he transforms everything that is not in and of itself intelligible into some-
thing intelligible. 28

To distinguish this seventh, typically prophetic method of exegesis from the

sixth, !del notes, Abulafia uses the verbs create (bara') and 'innovate'. "Can
it be", he asks, "that these expressions indicate a function different from 'the
provision of new forms' of the sixth method? For while in the sixth method
the practitioner is likened to the Active Intellect, can it be that through the
'creation' or 'new' words the practitioner is likened to God Himself?" 29
So, what ultimately takes place in the method of the names is a thoroughly
creative process, in which the scriptural verse is transformed into divine
names.

You create the words and confer onto them [or innovate] a [new] meaning.""You should
consider that [it is] you [who] decided on its meaning and you [who] created it in accor-
dance with your wish. 30

Wherein, following !del's remarks, lies the radical character of Abulafia's

doctrine? In that the alphabet as such is productive of divine names, not only
the Torah. The text of the Torah may well be at the basis of other texts, yet,
the divine names also hide elsewhere, outside the Torah.
The whole point and purpose of the scripture's dissolution into separate letters,
"whose order", !del concludes, "is to be decided by man, who also infuses
new meanings into the combinations of letters", 31 is the broadening and
enlargement of consciousness. "In the thoughts of your mind combine and be
purified" ,32 Abulafia says. The biblical stories become mirrors of one's inner
spiritual life and biography. The mind is purified through the exegetical pro-
cess, such as to allow a deeper perspective upon life. Why? Because it has
arrived at the bottom level of 'existence', it has reached its origin, its source.

28
Ibid., p. 107. Emphasis added. See also G. Scholem, Die judische Mystik in ihren Hauptstro-
mungen, Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp, p. 146: "Ja auch aile gesprochenen Sprachen, nicht nur das
Hebraische, vermag die mystische Kombinatorik in heilige Sprache und heilige Namen umzuschme-
lzen. Und da fiir ihn aile Sprachen aus einer Korruption der Ursprache - des Hebraischen - her-
vorgegangen sind, bleiben aile dem Hebraischen verwandt".
29
M. ldel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p. 103.
30
Ibidem.
31 Ibid., p. 122.
32
Abulafia in M. Ide!, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, p. 13. In note 26 Ide!
remarks that the verbs 'combine' and 'purify' both derive from the same root tsrf. Cf. also Idel, 1989,
Introduction.
310 Towards a Derridean Spirit

From this source onwards it can follow 'life' or 'being' as its outflow, it can
encapsulate it in its entirety. This can explain prophecy as a heightened or
deepened state of mind, capable not only of seeing what is given (without for
that matter implying the possession of a Hegelian 'absolute consciousness' :
being consists of letters, not of the movement of the concept), but also of shar-
ing in it ("[it is] you [who] decided on its meaning and you [who] created it
in accordance with your wish"). The divine spirit enters the interpreter's mind
and engages it in its co-creative or co-scriptural activities. 33

Derrida
Quant a Derrid.a, il a combine Ia logique combinatoire de Ia Kabbale d'Abulafia avec Ia
definition du role de Ia poesie selon Stephane Mallarme.
M. ldel
Let us tum to Derrida, who has only haphazardly made some remarks on the
kabbalah without any structure or regularity. But my aim is not to summarise
these remarks as such but rather to indicate and interpret some common fea-
tures between Derrida and Abulafia (which can eventually be generalised for
other kabbalistic authors) relating to 'ontology' and text interpretation. Reading
Derrida requires many efforts, and not in the least, a vast erudition. His entire
oeuvre consists of text interpretations. To do justice to these interpretations,
one cannot afford to confme oneself to Derrida' s text alone. One cannot but
take the commented text itself into account and (re-)read it as carefully as pos-
sible, along with Derrida.
The range of textual genres that have raised Derrida's interpretative interest is
obviously much wider than Abulafia's. He has discussed at great length texts
by most of the Western tradition's great philosophers (from Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine and Rousseau, to Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas). But he
has also paid attention to biblical texts, to poetry (Ponge, Mallarme), literature
(Poe, Genet, Kafka), pictorial art (Atlan, Deble, Plissart, Artaud) and architec-
ture (Eisenmann, Tschumi), and so on.
Does this mean, as authors like ldel and Wolfson repeatedly suggest, that he
'secularised' kabbalistic motives (which, as ldel acknowledges, are indubitably
present in his work)? 34 Can kabbalistic motives, I would ask conversely, be
secularised at all? Does it make sense at all to distinguish, as Wolfson does,
between a kabbalistic experience of a divine presence beyond absence on the

33
Cf. also Avi Solomon Abraham, Abulafia: Meditations on the Divine Name [kindle edition],
Avi Solomon, Amazon Digital Services, 2011 3•
34
M. Ide!, Absorbing Perfections, pp. 76ff; 124ff.
Rico Sneller 311

one hand, and a Derridean acknowledgment of a true absence, on the other? 35

Do not both assessments (that is, !del's and Wolfson's) of the relation between
Derrida and kabbalah rely upon philosophical prejudices as to what 'presence'
and 'absence' truly are, or as to the nature of the truly 'religious' supposedly
susceptible of secularisation? I would argue that both Abulafia (to restrict my
claim to this thinker here) and Derrida have profoundly questioned the nature
of 'being' and of the 'religious'. If it is not clear anymore what in fact being
and presence are, then one can neither concretely delineate absence. The expe-
rience of the trace, which Derrida undeniably opposes to the pretended 'full
presence' of the phenomenon, can without doubt be termed as the experience
of an 'absence'; but such a qualification still rests upon the (inverted) notion
of being as presence. It would make sense, so I will argue, to take the Derridean
experience of the trace (for example of God) at face value and re-interpret it
phenomenologically. Indeed, the 'experience of an absence' always remains
the experience of an absence.
Before studying more closely Derrida's approach of language and of textual
interpretation in relation to Abulafia's views, I will give here two interesting
quotes. The first comes from his 1963/4 essay on Levinas, 'Violence and met-
aphysics'. As we know, Derrida strongly denounces Levinas' 'empiricism' in
the phenomenology of the Other's face infinitely differing- as Levinas claims-
from the Ego and its constructions. "[C]an one", so Derrida asks, "speak of
an experience of the other or of difference? Has not the concept of experience
always been determined by the metaphysics of presence? Is not experience
always an encountering of an irreducible presence, the perception of a
phenomenality? " 36 Derrida complicates here the concept of experience, which,
so he claims, as a concept, has always implied an experienced (encountered)
presence. But, so one could rejoin, is it necessary to conceive of an experience
or to turn it into a concept? Does not Derrida repeatedly appeal to an experi-
ence without a concept of experience? Does not phenomenology finally entail
a radical defy to any concept of experience?
In an interview Derrida testifies to his persisting fidelity to 'experience,' despite
its obvious connotations.

I like the very word 'experience' enough; the origin of this word expresses something of
traversing (traversee); but traversing with the body, the traversing of a space that has not

35 E.R. Wolfson, 'Assaulting the Border', p. 505.

36 J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 52.
312 Towards a Derridean Spirit

been given beforehand but that opens itself as one proceeds. I would probably opt for the
word 'experience' if it were, say, reactivated, rejuvenated a bit. 37

Language and text interpretation

Si une signature (pure) est sans signification, elle equivaut a Ia nature, l'arbitraire et le
nature/ se confondant enfin, puisque Ia nature est une ecriture "non significative".
J. Derrida, Signeponge
The topic of writing has been present in Derrida's texts from the very begin-
ning. It would be audacious to reconstruct a Derridean ontology of writing, for
the very notion of writing excludes such a thing as an ontology. But there are
too many traces in Derrida's texts of a radical ('kabbalistic') notion of lan-
guage and of writing to neglect them.
In Derrida's 'ontology' (nontology) of writing it is suggested that beyond the
surface of what we call 'reality', there is something at work like an experience
of 'pure speech'. (Ia pure parole)38 This pure speech, or 'linguality', corre-
sponds to a referential process that can be neither blocked nor stopped. Meaning,
significance, and so on, must yield to it. Experience as such must. But the pure
speech itself is literally non-significant, it is tantamount to incessant 'movement'
or 'malleability.' This means that in human speech there is and will always be
an non-significant element (deemed to be insignificant by the major philosophi-
cal tradition emphasising pure thought or pure meaning). This non-significant
element guarantees not only the possibility of speech as such, its continuation
and infinite renewal, but also its being threatened by unclarity or equivocity.
So the situation is ambiguous: there is a promising aspect of language, but at
the same time this promise is unclear and being spoilt by uncertainty.
I take these ideas as a more philosophical articulation of Abulafia's 'ontology'
of writing. They can be found almost everywhere in Derrida's work but I
derive them here more explicitly from 'Force and Signification' (1978).
We must not forget, however, that Abulafia obeyed to a pre-Modem logic,
whereas atheistic Modernity (let alone post-Modernity), as Derrida claims, is
equivalent to "this lost certainty, this absence of divine writing, that is to say,
first of all, the absence of the Jewish God (who himself writes, when
necessary)". 39 There cannot be found anymore such a thing, he suggests, as an
infmite, divine manuscript holding together all fragmentary pieces.

37
J. Derrida and E. Weber, Points ... Interviews 1974-1994, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
1995, p. 207.
38 J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 9.
39 Ibid., p. 10.
Rico Sneller 313

To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no other
dwelling place, does not await us as prescription in some topos ouranios, or some divine
understanding. Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in
order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning". "It is because writing is
inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing [angoissante ].
It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipi-
tation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future. 40

But whereas these passages seem to definitely exclude an affinity between

Derrida and Abulafia, as they precisely exclude the metaphysical framework
the latter relies on, the following passage, in my view, can be taken as an
acknowledgment of what is central to Abulafia's doctrine, despite the rebuttal
of the framework:

Is not that which is called God, that which imprints every human course and recourse with
its secondarity, the passageway of deferred reciprocity between reading and writing? or
the absolute witness to the dialogue in which what one sets out to write has already been
read, and what one sets out to say is already a response, the third party as the transparency
of meaning? Simultaneously part of creation and Father of Logos. 41

Passages such as these, incomprehensible though they may seem, should be

'understood' (if we may say so) in light of an 'ontology' of writing as deline-
ated in Abulafia's mystical musings. God, Derrida suggests, is the name of that
which makes that every human uttering, written or spoken, is always already,
from its incipient moment, read or heard. He is their inaudible sonority or their
invisible light. Obviously Derrida is not referring here to an omniscient, distant
creator God. What takes place in writing or speaking is the discovery of these
activities being mirrored by a process (of writing, speaking) that has already
started. Everything which is, consists initially, not of some neutral stuff but of
'letters', 'signs': without, however, clear-cut references to which they refer.
One may retort that the notions of 'sign' or 'letter' are not applicable anymore,
then. But what makes them applicable is, in my view, primarily some initial
'expressivity' or operativity (Derrida would prefer 'force') taking the shape of
letters. Letters, in their initial form, are the original modulations of 'being' (but
can this word be maintained at all?) that cannot be determined from a rational,
philosophical or perhaps even phenomenological meta-level.
In another text Derrida goes so far as to compare the original texture of being
to the tain of a mirror that not only mirrors what is captured by it, but also

40 Ibid., p. 11.
41 Ibidem.
314 Towards a Derridean Spirit

transforms it. From that moment onward, no purity is rendered anymore: pres-
ence is permeated by absence, the past by the future, life by death, space by
time, and vice versa. "If there is no extratext [hors-texte], it is because the
graphic- graphicity in general- has always already begun, is always implanted
in 'prior' writing" .42

Exegesis

It would be in vain to single out one single 'method' of Derridean exegesis,

for, as in Abulafia, there is not one. It would be more suitable to verify occur-
rences in Derrida's work of Abulafia's fifth, sixth and seventh way of explain-
ing texts. Just as little as in the previous part of this essay, I will attempt here
to be fully exhaustive.

Paragrammatical effects

Nombres indechiffrables par cela meme qu 'ils auront ete des inscriptions de far;ade- mais de
far;adeS (S vouS disseminant ... )
Derrida 1981
Abulafia's fifth 'path' of explanation concerned what I have called the scribal
oddities, that is, deviant ways of writing particular letters in the Torah. Obvi-
ously, Derrida is not after such curiosities in the Hebrew bible. But where else
than in contemporary poetry could one find analogies of such scribal oddities?
Instead of enumerating them one by one,43 which would result into a confusing
tearing up of contexts, I will limit myself here to one specific text, in which
the most telling examples can be found. I am aiming at Derrida's reading of
Philippe Sollers, a French novelist whose style (for example in his cut-ups)
in itself already most resembles, as Derrida himself repeatedly remarks,
Kabbalistic permutational techniques. Again, Sollers' use of upper cases, as
well as his use of Chinese characters in the French text of his book Nombres,
are put in the centre of Derrida's interest. On Sollers' insertion of Chinese
characters into his French text, Derrida writes:

Exoticism has nothing to do with it. The text is penetrated otherwise; it draws a different
kind of strength from that graphy [graphie] that invades it, framing it in a regular, obses-
sive manner, which becomes more and more massive and inescapable, coming from the
other side of the mirror - from the est -, acting within the so-called phonetic sequence

42
J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, London/New York, Continuum, 1981, p. 360.
43 J. Derrida, Psyche. Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, ed. P. Kamuf and E. Rottenberg, Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 15.
Rico Sneller 315

itself, working it through, translating itself into the latter even before appearing, before
letting itself be recognized after the fact, at the point at which it is dropped like a textual
tail, like a remainder, like a sentence upon the text. Its active translation has been clan-
destinely inseminated; it has for a long time been (under)mining the organism and the
history of your domestic text, just as it now punctuates its end, like the registered trade-
mark of a kind of labor that is fmished, yet still in progress -. 44

What seems most important to me here, and what could shed an alternative
light on the scribal oddities in the Hebrew scriptures mentioned by Abulafia,
is the fact that they point to the scriptural character of the text's content. "But
these writing-effects, which will henceforth be called paragrammatical effects,
are much more numerous than these examples might lead one to believe". 45
They transform a text's two-dimensionality into a pluridimensionality.

Undecipherable ciphers
Un texte reste d'ailleurs toujours imperceptible.
J. Derrida, Dissemination
The sixth Abulafian method of exegesis, the restitutio litterarum (ldel), com-
prised gematria, temurah, tseruf and multiplication of letters.
Gematria, as we saw, comes down to taking the numerical value of letters
instead of taking for granted their phonetical, let alone their communicational
virtue. What we find in Derrida is not this particular attention paid to letters'
numerical weight: our Latin alphabet, as opposed to the Hebrew, does not
dispose of that property. But we do fmd in his texts, as we just saw, attention
paid to the pictorial, ultra-lingual or extra-communicational aspects of letters
or of letter combinations. We cannot neglect, however, that he shares this
interest with the literary authors he comments (for example Sollers, Mallarme,
Genet)- this sharing being, in my view, a testimony of a linguistic sensitivity
that by far surpasses the 'purely' literary or the 'purely' mystical; it rather
unites the literary and the mystical - in a way traditional philosophy can do
no more than denounce as nonsensical or as 'merely' esthetical.
The following remarks pertain to Sollers' Nombres and to this novel's para-
digmatic untranslatability - paradigmatic, because any text, as text, finally
remains untranslatable.

A text that is unreadable because it is only readable. Untranslatable for the same reason.
1. what links the text to numbers, to its cipher [chiffre] (a kind of writing that does not

44 J. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 391.

45 Ibid., p. 372.
316 Towards a Derridean Spirit

say, that no longer speaks), cannot be decomposed, un-done, unstitched, de-ciphered;

2. something, somewhere within the text, something that is not really anything and does
not even take place, cannot be counted, recounted, numbered, ciphered, deciphered.[ ... ]
Numbers would be considered undecipherable because something in them surpasses mere
number or cipher; and yet they would also be undecipherable because everything in them
is not ciphered [chiffre], but rather "cipherly" [de chiffre]. They are undecipherable
because they are numerable, and undecipherable because they are innumerable. 46

Derrida hints here at the paradox of pictorial script (Chinese characters, hiero-
glyphs, and so on), which does not depict sounds but which immediately
expresses them. This paradox is implicit in the French word chiffre, which
means both 'cipher', 'digit' or 'number' and 'code', 'code number'. A chiffre
is readable and unreadable at once. Taking scripture seriously requires that one
pay meticulous attention to its pictorial, 'nonsensical' appearance, to that
which resists idealising comprehension. It would perhaps not be inadequate to
refer here to a psychoanalyst having to consider not so much the conversa-
tional content of his client's talk as the manner of its conveyance.47
The examples of Derridean 'gematria' we could give are countless, dispersed
all over his work. They have abhorred 'analytical' philosophers such as to
withhold the predicate 'philosophy' from Derrida's writings.
The following quote is almost untranslatable in its irreducible ambiguity, and
should be re-read several times. For does one know if word, concept or simple
sound are meant here?

The literal (r [pronounced "air" in French]) cannot be dissociated from number (of which
it is the elemental column) and from sperm (tenn/germ), for which it makes room and to
which it gives rise. [L'air litteral (r) ne se laisse pas dissocier du nombre (dont il est la
colonne elementaire) et du sperme (terme/germe) auquel illaisse le passage.] [ ... ]The air
is the apeiron of Presocratic physiology, the tehiru of the Kabbalah, the possibility of
presence, of visibility, of appearance, of voice, etc. "Air" means this, is-trying-to-say that,
and so on. 48

46
Ibid., p. 397. Cf.: "L'expropriation ne se marque pas seulement par le chiffre du nombre, dont
!'operation non-phonetique, suspendant Ia voix, disloque Ia proximite a soi, Ia vivante presence qui
s'entend representer par Ia parole. [ ... ] [L]a chiffration est melodique, un chant frappe en mesure
toutes le marques de Nombres. A tousles sens du mot, c'est une cadence qui vous devez y suivre".
(Ibid., pp. 368f.) Another text on music is 'Ce qui reste a force de musique' (in J. Derrida, Psyche.
Inventions de /'autre, Paris, Galilee, 1987, pp. 95-103). As to the musical character of Hebrew letters
in Abulafia, see Ide!, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, Ch. 2.
47 Cf. D. Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical tradition, pp. 246-268. Bakan also

relates Freudian psychoanalysis to kabbalistic types of interpretation: gematria, notarikon and

temurah.
48 J. Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 380-381.
Rico Sneller 317

Derrida suggests here that letters always contain a nonsensical exteriority that
both allows for the conveyance of sense and is open to new meanings. These
new meanings cannot be mastered, their possibility disowns the speaker of his
or her own words: "Expropriation thus does not proceed merely by a ciphered
[chiffre] suspension of voice, by a kind of spacing that punctuates it or rather
draws its shafts from it, or at it; it is also an operation within voice" .49 Upon
speaking I do not lose my own words as soon as they are 'exteriorised' or
'uttered', the very moment of speaking already entails their loss. Every letter
has its own dynamics, which can never be fully mastered by its user.
Of all Derrida's texts it is perhaps Glas- Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? -
often considered as an inaccessible book because of its four-columned com-
position - which is most appropriate to our re-reading of them in a kabbalistic
light. Take for example the following passage, in which a complete dismissal
is prepared of all naturalistic or teleological approaches of letters and their
sounds, by theorists such as De Saussure or Fonagy.

one must surely admit, for example, that mimesis recharges itself and operates from one
text to the other, from each text to its theme or to its reference, without the words origi-
nally resembling things and without them immediately resembling each other; And yet
the resemblance reconstitutes itself, superimposes or superimprints itself through and
thanks to differential or relational structures. There the content is exhausted, sometimes
to the point of being about to disappear. To disappear as quality, as quantity, but more
rarely as rhythm (From "The Double Session" onward, the purpose would be to rethink
the value of rhythm and to introduce it to a reelaboration of the graphics of mimesis.) 50

What is discussed here is the pretended onomatopoeic nature of isolated letters

or words. This is resolutely rejected. Indeed, Derrida admits, there is a kind of
mimesis between letters and words on the one hand, and their references on
the other; but this mimesis is produced rather than reproduced. Resemblances
form themselves each time anew; letters generate similarities to themselves,
but they cannot be fit into some predetermined representational structure.
We cannot disregard here, in the light of what we previously saw in Abulafia,
that Derrida describes a process in which the outward appearance of words
gradually exhausts their inner meaning. What finally remains, he suggests, is
often only rhythm. Rhythm is audible and inaudible at once. Could we perhaps
not link what is called here 'rhythm' to the pre-audible, pre-visible 'shape' of
the letters Abulafia speaks of?

49 Ibid., p. 367.
50 J. Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. and R. Rand, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press,
1990, p. 154.
318 Towards a Derridean Spirit

In what follows immediately Derrida goes one step further. Inspired by the
word glas (G-L-A-S), the linguistic 'key operator' of his book and, apart from
its meaning ('death bell'), undoubtedly chosen for its explorative, operational
virtues, he compares the phonetic radiation of the letter L supplemented with
another random consonant, in poems by the French poet Mallarme ('A un
mendiant') and the American poet E.A. Poe ('The Bells'); poems that are, by
the way, frequently taken as paradigmatically onomatopoeic.

There is indeed the appearance of a simple kernel, around which everything seems to be
agglomerated: gl, cl, kl, tl, fl, and to confme ourselves to the lexical account, very insuf-
ficient in reading rhythm, we single out [releve] in effect tinKLe, oversprinKLe,jinGLing,
turTLe, GLoats, starTLed, CLamorous, CLang, CLash, janGLing, wranGLing, CLamor,
CLangor, FLoats, GLory, CLoches, GLacial, CLigner, CLicquetis, Flotte, enFLe, CLa-
meur, eCLat, Glas, Gloire, gonFLe, sanGLot, the two letters recomposing their attraction
elsewhere, at a distance, in the poem, according to numerous and complex games. More-
over, this appearance of a kernel is more denuded, better read and remarked by the relievo
of two versions, Poe's and Mallarme's. Which does not mean (to say) that there is an
absolute kernel and a dominant center, since rhythm does not only bind itself to words
and least of all to the proximity of the contact between two letters. 5 1

Is there perhaps a deeper reason to connect these nouns in virtue of their

similar phonetic appearances? Probably not, unless one takes the word 'glas'
- that is its gl-structure - as one. But one is struck by a whole range of new
linguistic relations evoked, relations that might become meaningful, and
already are so if one looks at the unpredicted interplay of motives in the entire
book Glas. One could hold, as I would propose here, that the evocative effects
take away the apparent arbitrary nature of the key word glas. Its legitimacy
is only accessible in anticipation. The selected word will then turn out to be
a 'verbal bridge' (Wortbriicke) or a 'stimulating word complex' (Komplex-
reizwort), analogous to the word Ratte (rat) in the legendary case of Freud's
patient (der Rattenmann, the rat man). In it, the idea of 'rats', barely itself
being related to the patient's disturbance, merely elucidated that the very word
'Ratte' contained several phonetic references to the patient's genuine prob-
lems.52

51 Ibid., p. 158. Also see: "Tout signe, linguistique ou non linguistique, parle ou ecrit [ ... ] peut

etre cite, mis entre guillemets; par la, il peut rompre avec tout contexte determine, engendrer a l'infini
nouveaux contextes, de fa~on absolument non saturable". (J. Derrida, Marges- de Ia philosophie,
Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 381).
52
Cf. H. Stroeken, Freud und seine Patienten, Frankfurt a/M, Fischer, 1992, pp. 89f and
D. Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical tradition, pp. 263-268.
Rico Sneller 319

Save the name

.. .faire de Ia chose sa signature
Derrida, Signeponge

The seventh method distinguished by Abulafia, considered by him to be most

properly kabbalistic, is called the method of the names. As we have seen this
method attempts at transforming the verses of the Torah into divine names.
This requires abstraction to be made of the text's denotative content. The
whole Torah could be read as a record of divine names. We also saw that
according to Abulafia language as such, not only Torah, is susceptible of being
transformed into divine names.
Derrida's treatment of the 'proper name' is too elaborate to be entirely
reproduced in this article. Suffice the following remarks.
The approach is twofold. On the one hand, Derrida states that proper names
are part and parcel of language and so, they cannot avoid losing the property,
propriety or appropriateness the proper name claims to detain. "Thus the
name, especially the so-called proper name, is always caught in a chain or a
system of differences. It becomes an appellation only to the extent that it may
inscribe itself within a figuration". 53 But on the other hand, and this is far more
germane to our Abulafian context, neither can language avoid rendering
singularity previously concealed. The latter aspect continuously returns in
Derrida' s approach of poets or literary authors (Ponge, Celan, Nietzsche):
those who are explicitly out for articulating their innermost experience of lan-
guage and being. "Its unpronounceability keeps and destroys the name; it
keeps it, like the name of God, or dooms it to annihilation among the ashes". 54
Derrida goes as far as saying that experiencing language the way literature or
poetry does cannot but entail experiencing the spectre of singularity. Language
is adumbrated by it. "This spectral [revenance] return is partaken of by all
words, from their first emergence. [... ] What one calls poetry or literature, art
itself (let us not distinguish them for the moment), in other words a certain
experience of language, of the mark or of the trait as such, is nothing perhaps
but an intense familiarity with the ineluctable originarity of the spectre". 55

53 J. Derrida, OfGrammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press,

1974, p. 89.
54 J. Derrida, 'Shibboleth,' in A. Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces. Readings of Paul Celan, trans.

J. Wilner, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1994, p. 54. Also: J. Derrida, Otobiographies.
L'enseignement de Nietzsche et Ia politique du nom propre, Paris, Galilee, 1984, pp. 43; 47 and
J. Derrida, Signeponge, Paris, Seuil, 1988, pp. 99; 102f.
55 J. Derrida, 'Shibboleth', p. 58.
320 Towards a Derridean Spirit

But how does this relate to transforming texts into divine names? What Derrida
most often seems to be doing in his readings of poets (Celan, Mallarme, Ponge,
Nietzsche) is 'reducing' proper names to descriptive contents. 56 How, on the
contrary, to tum texts into divine names?
In my view, Derrida's pseudo-conceptual apparatus, which contains names like
trace, differance, ecriture, supplement, texte, and so on, comes down to just
as many 'proper' names of God, that is, names liable to the effacement of their
own appropriateness. One would only have to consider apparent definitions of
'God' such as:

This is what God's name always names, before or beyond other names: the trace of the
singular event that will have rendered speech possible even before it turns itself back
toward- in order to respond to- this first or last reference. 57

Or else:

- Save his name ... - that names nothing that might hold, not even a divinity (Gottheit),
nothing whose withdrawal [derobement] does not carry away every phrase that tries to
measure itself against him. "God" "is" the name of this bottomless collapse, of this
endless desertification of language. But the trace of this negative operation is inscribed
in and on and as the event (what comes, what there is and which is always singular, what
fmds in this kenosis the most decisive condition of its coming or its upsurging). There is
this event, which remains, even if this remnance is not more substantial, more essential
than this God of whom it is said that he names nothing that is, neither this nor that. It is
even said of him that he is not what is given there in the sense of es gibt: He is not what
gives, he is beyond all gifts ("GOtt tiber alle Gaben", 4:30). 58

I do not have time or space here to go deeper into Derrida's highly fascinating
dealing with the proper name, especially in Sauf le nom: 'except the name',
or even better 'save the name'. What seems crucial to me here is "this event,
which remains". The names of God produce (! ), are productive of, an event,
the coming or the arrival of something singular, something indescribable,
something which is only accessible indirectly, through invented (that is, found)
names. Those names do not so much call forth as they recall. They are traces

56
For example on Ponge: "Or la chance ou le malheur de son arbitraire [i.e. of the proper name]
[ ... ], c'est que son inscription dans la langue l'affecte toujours d'une potentialite de sens; et de n'etre
plus propre des lors qu'il signifie". (J. Derrida, Signeponge, p. 96)
51
J. Derrida, Psyche. Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, p. 98.
58 J. Derrida, 'Aporias, Ways and Voices', in H. Coward and T. Foshay (eds.), Derrida and Nega-

tive Theology, Albany, SUNY Press, 1992, p. 300. For a more elaborate treatment of Derrida on the
name of God, see R. Sneller, Het Woord is Schrift geworden: Derrida en de Negatieve Theologie,
Kampen, Kok Agora, 1998, Ch.8.
Rico Sneller 321

of an event. But before one hastily concludes to the past tense character of the
'event' mentioned, one should also remind their future tense character, as the
essence of the 'event' lies in its coming or upsurging. This 'coming' is irreduc-
ible to a perfect, let alone a pluperfect tense. It is a coming that is always about
to come, in a 'time' beyond ordinary, measurable time.

Conclusive remarks

In this contribution I have attempted to re-read Derrida in the light of

Abulafia's letter-oriented mysticism. It appeared that such an attempt sheds a
light on both authors. In itself, the Abulafian letter-mysticism seems almost
incomprehensible to modern minds taking letters as mere vehicles of mental
sense. Derrida's heritage, however, could be seen as a modern, philosophical,
more or less 'rational' articulation of apparently obsolete or at best extravagant
ideas about letters and language. Taking into account the 'ontology' of lan-
guage Derrida points at, Abulafia's mystical doctrine seems to entail a horizon
of boundless meaning affianced in constant self-renewal. This horizon can
even be said to open up a space of divine agency of which human beings are
the operators.
It would be a little naive to equate Derrida's philosophical texts to Abulafian
spirituality. Even mystical consciousness cannot evade the mental earthquakes
Modernity has produced. One could say that Derridean 'spirituality' (if the pre-
ceding entitles me to use this term by now) testifies itself to greater discontinuities
in the sphere of mystical awareness. But I would conjecture that these are also
(mainly) due to deconstructionist necessities and to false (metaphysical) 'spir-
itualities' unable to meet their self-imposed requirements, and not primarily to
some negative or repellent 'nature' of the mystical-spiritual dimension in itself
(as for instance G. Bataille would defend). To expand on this would be a sub-
ject for another article.

Rico Sneller is assistant professor for Ethics and History of Philosophy at Leiden University,
Institute for Religious Studies. He wrote a study on Derrida and negative theology (in Dutch).
His main interests concern ethics, metaphysics, Jewish philosophy, mysticism and exceptional
states of consciousness.
Address: Institute for Religious Studies, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9515, NL-2300 RA
Leiden.