Derrida, Freud, and Lacan make the philosophical and psychological case for Paul’s argument that the letter kills (2 Cor 3:6), while also leaving open the implication that the Spirit gives life. What they demonstrate, and what is implicit in Paul’s point, is not simply that there is a distinction to be made between speech and writing but that speech contains the problems of graphic communication in that it too is reducible to the material, the finite, the repetitive, and that there is an enslaving aspect to language. There is an orientation to language and law, identifying it with access to God or the fulness of reality, in which the material, cultural, and finite form of language shuts off from the freedom and fulness of the Spirit. Paul is not making some Platonic argument, privileging speech over writing, but he is making a broader point about two ways in which language can order reality. The letter or Scripture, or the law engraved on stones, is inherently deadly, not because it falls short of the spoken word (after-all it was spoken by God’s messengers and then written), but because, by its very nature, it obstructs and hides the Spirit. In Paul’s depiction the letter obscures, as it creates duplicity, hiding, and shame, due to its fading reality (2 Cor 3:4-18; Php 3:19) and those put to shame by this circumstance would equate the letter with access to God. The letter made absolute is not simply the Jewish problem, but is universal and attached to the organs of speech and to language (Rom 3:10-20), which gives rise to division and violence, and Freud, Derrida, and Lacan show why this is the case.
Jacques Lacan develops Freuds picture of the working of the unconscious as following the system of signs, claiming “the unconscious is structured like a language.”[1] He argues that the psyche develops along the material or concrete structures of language, necessarily working through difference in sounds and meaning, and always driven to an end it cannot achieve. Just as language naturally divides and gains meaning through different phonemes, letters, or words (over and against others), so too the structure of consciousness (largely in the unconscious) takes on this material function. One meaning is against another, just as one letter and sound gains its meaning over-and-against another, so there is no origin to be found in language, but only an ever-receding meaning.
The parallel argument of Jacques Derrida is that there really is no difference between speech and writing, inasmuch as both share the characteristics of language in marking differentiation.[2] The drive to privilege speech over writing is due to the notion that speech or the phonic sign has no structure of difference (which demonstrates the drive to synthesis); and then the presumption that in this perfect accord there is immediate access to the signified. This desired access is first an access to myself, or my self-presence, as I would have myself in my thought life. The presumption is that I am in or behind the silent speaking, and this inner voice not only provides access to myself but access to the world and to God. The obvious characteristics of writing (its material form, its exterior and conventional nature, its rule based iterability), in this argument, are absent in speech. Writing is presumed to be a parasite on speech, with speech not being completely reducible to marks in stone or ink but is a future possibility or outworking derived from speech.
The linguistic counter-point is that the phonic sign employs the same conventions as the graphic sign, and writing is not imposed upon speech but oral language “already belongs to this writing.”[3] “Original” or “natural” language shows signs of always having been touched and shaped by writing, and the notion that there is a living speech as opposed to a dead letter, misses that breath, the clicking of the tongue, aspiration, etc., are as material as ink and stone. “Living speech,” due to its existence in human interiority may more successfully hide the objective, material, and chain-like necessity, of language made explicit in writing. There is only the continual unfolding of signs which endlessly refer to other signs to gain meaning. Whether the medium is ink or a stream of air, the substance is built upon a chain of differences. No one, however, has thought to examine the chemical content of ink to get at the substance of language, though a certain deceptive magical quality is sometimes assigned to air, but in both, what Derrida calls arche-writing, is at work.[4] Both create meaning through the play of differences, or what Derrida calls “différance,” in that meaning is never fully present. Movement, temporality, and iterability, may give the appearance of some stable substance, a presence or ego, behind the movement producing difference.
The psychological point is that the letter shapes the psyche in its pursuit of presence through this illusive absence. This is evident in Freud’s focus on symbols and signs in dreams, fantasies, and everyday discourse, and it is stated in the title of one of Lacan’s articles “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.”[5] This is a “literal” or material work which can be traced in the structure of the psyche: “By ‘letter’ we designate that material support which concrete speech borrows from language.”[6] The “unconscious structured like a language” posits the meaning of the conscious and unconscious as following the structure of contrasting binary pairs. The unconscious is not a deep structure obscured from view but is simply the obverse side of the signs of language or the place of the signifiers. Lacan links this directly to what Freud calls the “death instinct” as the pursuit of self, or the insistence to be through language is bent on obtaining being through non-being, or on obtaining presence through absence. In Paul’s explanation, the letter kills because it does not contain life, and yet it is presumed to be the source of life. One who is coming to identity in and through language is subject to the fate of language. There is the dynamic of language in the chain of signifiers, but meaning (the self) is not found in any singular signifier or any moment in time.
In the description of both Paul and Slavoj Žižek, the realization of the impossibility of law or language to produce life, creates a feeling of alienation or of being “out of joint.” According to Žižek, “Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the ‘great chain of being,’ as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint,’ as excluded from the ‘order of the things,’ from the positive order of entities.”[7] Paul describes his realization that all he counted as most important is now so much excrement (Php 3:8). Locating the self in language or the law is a frustrating impossibility which points to a further need and realization. No longer does Paul find comfort in his identity as a Jew, though he at one time had total “confidence in the flesh.” The fleshly sign of circumcision, the national sign of Israel, the genetic sign of being of the tribe of Benjamin, and the legal sign of being a Pharisee, he now counts as loss. But for Paul, this loss is embraced as part of an alternative identity: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Php 3:7).
Paul relinquishes his striving to find identity and life in his Jewishness in his turn to Christ, though he makes it clear that this is not something to be grasped, in the way he grasped after being a Jew. “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (Php 3:12). Desire and its attainment, the role of the logos or language, and the understanding of the self, undergo a shift in this new understanding. Paul refers to it as the freedom of the Spirit, which is the alternative to the deadly letter. “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Co 3:17). It is not that Paul has lost confidence in speech or language, but he now recognizes the working of the Spirit, which gives him a new confidence in speech (2 Cor 3:12) and in which he can identify Christians as “the letters of Christ” (3:3). This letter is not material, it is not formed in opposition, it is not fading, it is not mortal, it is not finite. This is the sort of letter that provides adequacy.
Maximus the Confessor’s picture of this realization, which ironically gets confused with Platonism (and thus falls back into reification of language), focuses on the absolute difference between God and world, bridged by the Logos. That is, there is no natural speech, natural origin, or human logos that can attain the divine Logos. There is no supposed natural synthesis between sign and signified or of God and the world. The theological and philosophical tendency is to follow the human sickness (identity through difference), by either identifying God with the world (e.g., in various forms of pantheism) or by making God absolutely transcendent and unattainable (e.g., nominalism). The tendency is to erase difference or to accentuate it, or in biblical terms, to keep the law or attempt to be the law. Maximus point is that in Christ, God is both absolutely different from creation while identified with creation as incarnate Word: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[8] Creation does not account for itself “naturally” but calls for the supernatural as both its logic and end.
The way in which this Christo-logic or the Logos is deployed in the world is through what Maximus calls logoi. In creation as incarnation, the Logos is spread out in the logoi, the particulars of creation which are part of Christ’s becoming “all in all” (Col 3:11; Eph 1:22-23). In Jordan Woods description, Maximus’s logoi are the “One Logos’s hypostatic, kenotic procession into becoming the natural power of every individual creature to be, and that such a procession secures the metaphysical ground of an inevitable, identical, unnecessary creation.”[9] There is simultaneously no confusion between Creator and creation, and yet direct identity in the Logos and logoi. The hypostatic identity of Christ grounds the world in a deeper identity than a Spinoza-line pantheism (which leaves out subjectivity) and a wider difference and logic than the actual non-difference embraced in linguistic and psychological difference. “Only this sort of “both-and” – both similarity-dissimilarity and identity – can claim rights to a truly Christo-logical God-world relation.”[10] According to Maximus, “if we wish to have a complete knowledge of things, it is not enough to enumerate the multitude of characteristics,” that is, “whatever is around the subject,” but it is “absolutely necessary that we also indicate what is the subject of these characteristics, which is the foundation, as it were, upon which they stand.”[11] The foundation or subject which Paul says, “fills all things” (Eph 1:23)
Identity and difference are not naturally resolved, language is not its own end, and according to Maximus no creature simply “coincides in its essence with what is and is called the assemblage of characteristics that are recognized and predicated of it.” The grounding identity of the individual creature “is something different from these characteristics, which holds them all together, but is in no way held together by them” and so “is not derived from” or “identical with them.”[12] This Word found in creation is not structured like the letter, the law, or the order of language. Things do not otherwise hold together, and this psychological, linguistic, and theological reality, is directly addressed in the God/man who is the beginning and end of creation. In the language of Paul, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). According to Maximus, from the viewpoint of God taken up by the virtuous person “by conforming to this beginning,” a beginning in which “he received being and participation in what is naturally good,” “he hastens to the end, diligently.”[13] This end is deification of all things: “In this way, the grace that divinizes all things will manifestly appear to have been realized.”[14] There is an overcoming of the law, of the human sickness bound to the letter that kills, through the freedom of Christ’s Spirit, filling all things.
[1] Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” (Yale French Studies, 1966, No. 36/37, Structuralism (1966), pp. 112-147) 113.
[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) xvi-xvii; 54, 74.
[3] Derrida, 55.
[4] Derrida,60
[5] Lacan, Ibid.
[6] Lacan, 114.
[7] Slavoj Žižek, cogtto and the unconscious, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 4.
[8] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7:22.
[9] Jordan Wood, “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor” (Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2017 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online) 4.
[10] Ibid, Wood.
[11] Amb 17.5, cited in Wood, 6.
[12] Amb 17.6, cited in Wood, 6.
[13]Amb. 7.21.
[14] QThal. 2.2.