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Doing Violence upon God: Nonviolent Alterities and Their Medieval Precedents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Ian Almond
Affiliation:
Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey

Extract

The Other resembles God.

To welcome the Other absolutely is to preserve the Other as a state of irreducible uncertainty, to suspend the desire to ascertain exactly who or what the Other is, to suppress the wish to name, and to avoid assimilating or incorporating the Other into a reassuringly familiar vocabulary. The object of this paper is a tentative comparison between Eckhartian gelâzenheit and Derridean openness. I will compare the Derridean response to the uncertainty of the infinitely Other with that of the German Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1329) in order to examine their respective terms of “emptiness” and “openness” and to try to understand how Eckhart's idea of description or conception as doing violence upon the Other is, in part, adopted and, in part, rejected by Jacques Derrida. As some of the most interesting aspects of Derrida's understanding of otherness can be discerned in his early work on Levinas, I will first examine Derrida's initial skepticism toward the idea of a nonviolent phenomenology, in contrast to his more recent reappraisal of his relation to Levinas and the “welcome of the Other.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1999

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References

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21 The three citations (in order) are taken from “In hoc apparuit,” in Sermons and Treatises, 1. 117; “Omne datum optimum,” in Meister Eckhart: An Introduction, 173; and “Quasi vas auri,” in Schürmann, Reiner, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher: Translations with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) 102Google Scholar.

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32 “vielle amitie occulte entre la lumière et la puissance” (, Derrida, Écriture, 136;Google Scholaridem, Writing and Difference, 91).

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37 Ibid., 145.

38 Ibid., 90.

39 Ibid., 116.

40 Ibid., 121.

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57 See, for example, Simon Critchley: “If there indeed exists this happy homoiosis between Levinas and Derrida … then what on earth is Derrida doing in his extended, and at times highly critical, 1964 monograph on Levinas?” in , Midgley, Responsibilities of Deconstruction, 94Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., 13.

59 Derrida, Jacques, “Psyché: Inventions of the Other,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (ed. Kamuf, Peggy; Exeter: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 209.Google Scholar

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