In many respects, deconstruction and negative theology make very strange bedfellows. Under one interpretation of deconstruction, transcendence is an impossibility, there being no limit to the notion of textual horizon and the immanent play of signifiers with it. At the same time, apophatic mysticism and its attendant theologies have been presented (at the least) as assurances that God is supremely transcendent and that humans may know something about that transcendence.
The plausibility for the claim that negative theology and deconstruction are engaged in similar projects might be considered slight were it not given weight by the observations of those such as Dufrenne, Hartman, Handelman and Crossan that there are important parallels between negative theology and in particular Derrida's thought. Two works written in the first half of this decade-Kevin Hart's The Trespass of the Sign and Coward and Forshay's Derrida and Negative Theology-are the result of mighty labors to make the union between negative theology and deconstruction conceivable, even in the face of some apparently obvious incompatibilities. Since space prevents the presentation of these claims in their totality, I should like to focus my discussion of Derridean deconstruction and negative theology within the narrower context of a historically specific example of negative theology, that of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. It is Pseudo-Dionysius who stands as example and as one of the major points of departure of each work under review.
In The Trespass of the Sign, Kevin Hart presents a nuanced (but often meandering and disorganized) argument that 'metaphysics, deconstruction and theology have always existed in a covert economy' (Hart, p. ix). He takes negative theology in particular as his example that 'no text can be totalized without a supplement of signification' (Hart, p. ix). This approach is directed less to establish that Derrida's program achieves finality as a means for the interpretation of negative theology than to bring 'deconstruction into conversation with Christian theology' (Hart, p. x). The end of this conversation will be a reconstitution (of the understanding) of negative theology that 'seeks to guarantee that human speech about God is in fact about God and not a concept of God ' Hart, p. 192).
Hart begins by critiquing two misconstruals of deconstruction promoted by the Derridistas: the first of these views portrays deconstruction as valorizing the essentially Nietzschean project belonging to death of God theology; the other interprets deconstruction itself as a displaced variety of negative theology. Both views miss the mark in their construal of the central point of the original deconstructive project, which is to establish 'a transcendental argument that any discourse will contain the means to call its metaphysical claims into question' (Hart, p. xi). This part of Derrida's project is