ISSN: 2641-9130
Authors: Allaerts W*
Presumably, the starting point for this paper was formed by Jacques Derrida’s lecture ‘How to avoid speaking: Denials’, given in 1986 in Jerusalem, a lecture devoted to the ancient doctrine of ‘Negative Theology’ (Apophasis). ‘Presumably’ means that I wasn’t among the audience then – I was a philosophy student at the time – but nevertheless, fortuitously I found a book containing his lecture on my shelf. Although Derrida himself made abundantly clear that his work could not be interpreted as a restoration of negative theology, some critics have refuted Derrida’s Denials based on the obligate inscription of the apophatic experience within the discursive logic of written language. In this paper a different route is followed, inspired by the so-called gesture of ‘shame’ in the work of Franz Kafka. Derrida’s analysis recalls the importance of the experience of ‘chora’ (after Plato’s Timaeus) in several paradigms of negativity. According to Derrida, the chora experience is an ill-defined, elusive mechanism, at best formulated as the occurring of an occurrence, the idea of having taken place. Throughout this paper, the notions of shamefulness and chora appear to follow Derrida’s spur in a contemporary reflection on the catastrophic nature of the world of mankind in its present, shameful appearance. It thus becomes an alternative reading of the instruction ‘How to avoid speaking’, where shamefulness is the new paradigm of negativity. Moreover, Derrida’s analysis invokes the darkest hollow for the faintest ray of light to become illuminative, similar to his ancient sources of inspiration. Also, Derrida’s analysis is found a meaningful way to avoid confusion by religious or theological analogies in explaining our shameful relation to the planet, in times of climate change and pending natural catastrophes.
Keywords: Negative Theology; Derrida’s Analysis; Chora; Avoidance; Gesture of Shame in Kafka’s stories
