Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004

Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext

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Derrida’s Indian Literary Subtext     

 

by  

 

William S. Haney II 

American University of Sharjah, U.A.E

 

As this paper hopes to demonstrate, Derridean deconstruction—which consists of “deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting ‘out of joint’ the authority of the ‘is’” (“The Time is Out of Joint” 25)—has antecedents in Indian literary theory or Sanskrit poetics.  Rooted in the ancient Vedas, Sanskrit poetics unfolded through a medieval flowering and is currently being applied by a growing number of western critics drawing upon the study of consciousness.  The theory and practice of deconstruction, including the notions of difference, trace, supplementarity, play, iterability, phonocentrism, and presence, not only share attributes with but can also be shown to follow indirectly from an earlier, eastern philosophical tradition largely unacknowledged in the work of western writers.  Although critics such as Robert Magliola (1984), Harold Coward (1990), and Carl Olson (2002) have explored the parallels between Derrida and Indian thought, western critics by and large avoid eastern literary theory, partly out of fear of being stigmatized by association with religion or what they misconstrue as subjectivism, mysticism or intuitionism. This paper will suggest that in critiquing his German predecessors, Derrida, especially in his earlier work, may also be borrowing from and re-contextualizing elements of Indian philosophy widely disseminated in the west since the late 19^th century.  It will also suggest that the deconstructive notion of iterability, or the contextual nature of all knowledge, is not a western invention but has roots in Indian thought, particularly as understood from the perspective of Shankara’s Advaita (nondual) Vedanta (the end or final knowledge of the Veda), the sixth and last system of Indian philosophy (Yogi 472-94). 

The unsayable (as well as the language used to convey it) that Derrida finds in literature has clear affinities with the absolute one of Plotinus, the nondual consciousness as suchness of Buddhist Vijnanas, and the Brahman-Atman of Shankara's Advaita (nondual) Vedanta.  In this analysis, I follow Shankara’s advaitan definition of consciousness and its derivative in perennial psychology as expounded by Jonathan Shear (1990), Robert Forman (1998), Arthur Deikman (1996), and others who posit higher states in the development of consciousness.  As Charles Alexander notes, Vedic psychology proposes “an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or levels of mind” (1990, 290).  The term “mind” as I use it here derives from the latter of its two following uses in Vedic psychology: “It [mind] refers to the overall multilevel functioning of consciousness as well as to the specific level of thinking [buddhi] (apprehending and comparing) within that overall structure” (Alexander 1986, 291).  The levels of the overall functioning of mind in Vedic psychology extend from the senses, desire, mind, intellect, feelings, and ego, to pure transcendental consciousness, or Self as internal observer.  Pure consciousness (turiya or the fourth state), which is physiologically distinct from the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, is immanent within yet transcendental to the individual ego and thinking mind. 

The aim in Advaita Vedanta is to establish the oneness of reality and to lead us to a realization of it (Deutsch 1973, 47), which comes through the "experience" of consciousness as qualityless Being or Atman (turiya).  This fourth state, which underlies the qualia or mental phenomena of the three ordinary states, corresponds to what Zen calls “no-mind,” and to what Antonin Artaud calls a “void in thought” (1958, 71).  As witnessing awareness immanent within yet transcendent to the other states, it constitutes an “experience” based on identity, not to be confused with experience in the ordinary sense of a division between subject and object.  As Jonathan Shear notes, such an experience corresponds to what Plato intends by his fourth level, the “Forms,” as reached through the “dialectic,” a faculty which is “radically different from thinking and reasoning as we find them in mathematics and science” (Shear 14).  Arguably, this expansion of the mind toward an experience beyond duality is not unlike the way a deconstructive reader moves toward the unsayable in literature.

 

Iterability and the Panentheistic

J. Hillis Miller writes that “Literature is for Derrida the possibility for any utterance, writing, or mark to be iterated in innumerable contexts and to function in the absence of identifiable contexts, reference, or hearer” (2001, 59).  Miller proceeds to show that Derrida’s literary criticism calls into question the primacy of consciousness in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and other western thinkers, thereby deconstructing—or rather re-contextualizing through the play of difference—the presence, unity, and transcendentality associated with metaphysical traditions.  From the perspective of non-dual Vedanta, however, which distinguishes between mind and consciousness, a transcendental experience—understood as a direct experience as opposed to a concept—is always already contextualized in the sense of being rooted in the experiencer’s physiological condition.  The difference here is between the thinking mind and witnessing consciousness.  To appreciate the connection between Derrida and Indian philosophy, we first need to understand the distinction between the duality of mind and the non-duality of consciousness.   As explained by Samkhya-Yoga (the third system of Indian philosophy), “there are two irreducible, innate, and independent realities in our universe of experience: 1. consciousness itself (purusha); 2. primordial materiality (prakrti) (Pflueger 48).  As I will suggest, the freedom from rationalizations and conceptual boundaries that Derrida’s earlier, more philosophical work attempts to achieve by working on the level of mind, Indian literary criticism achieves on the level of consciousness. 

By defining literature in terms of “the possibility of detaching language from its firm embeddedness in a social or biographical context and allowing it to play freely as fiction” (Miller 60), Derrida’s notion of iterability suggests that meaning, by pointing beyond the referent, points beyond the mind as a material entity situated within a material context toward the possibility of an experience so rarified that it underlies the infinity of contexts in which a work of literature can be read.  Ultimately, then, what it suggests is the possibility of the mind expanding toward an experience of non-material consciousness (Chakrabarti 1971, 33; Deutsch 1973, 48-65).    By making a connection between the experience of consciousness as a conceptual void and the non-referential (or non-material), which Miller describes as “the properly literary in literature, that is, what is improper about literary language”—its possible detachment from “its proper referential or performative use, its ‘serious,’ or ‘non-etiolated’ use” (60)—, I am not referring to anything with which an ordinary reader might not already be familiar even outside of aesthetic experience.  Indeed, in the oppositions reference/self-referral, material/non-material, mind/consciousness, the latter term suggests itself not only in literature and Indian philosophy but also in the “panentheistic” experience of around “58% of Americans, or 152.8 million Americans!” who belong to what Robert Forman calls a “Grassroots Spirituality Movement” (2004, 11).  Forman’s definition of spirituality, based on a widespread government-funded study of its grassroots movement in American culture, suggests how the contextual/non-contextual opposition self-deconstructs in the experience of higher consciousness, whether induced by way of literature, eastern meditation, or spontaneous experience: “Grassroots Spirituality involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is indwelling, sometimes bodily, as the deepest self and accessed through not-strictly-rational means of self-transformation and group process that becomes the holistic organization for all of life” (51, Forman’s emphasis).  As I will try to show, an interest in the spiritual, a not-strictly-rational interest that as Forman notes “dwarfs Judaism, Islam, and every single denomination of Christianity” (11), parallels and possibly underpins the deconstructive interest in freedom from rationalizations and logical certitudes.

Not to be confused with pantheism (“the doctrine that the deity is the universe and its phenomena”), Forman defines panentheism as the doctrine “that all things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made up of one single principle, but that one principle is not limited to those worldly phenomena” (52, Forman’s emphasis).  Thus all things, including humans, “are made up of a single ‘stuff’ or substance” (52), but this “stuff,” while including the beings within it, also extends beyond them.  “It is both transcendent (in the sense of beyond) and immanent (within).  As the early Hindu Upanishads put this, ‘having pervaded the universe with a fragment of myself, I remain’” (ibid.).  The remarkable thing about the panentheistic experience is that a growing number of people, not only in the United States but around the world, seem to realize that the phenomenologically reductive definition of consciousness as always containing an object—that “Consciousness is always consciousness of some object or other, never a self-enclosed emptiness” (Miller 62)—is not confirmed by the firsthand immediacy of their own experience.   One person who tells of an experience common among the hundreds interviewed by Forman and his team describes the panentheistic spiritual ultimate as “a formless reality that lies at the heart of all forms.  It’s something that is one, beyond our usual apprehension of space and time. . . . It’s like quietness within, the still point of the turning world” (55).  Michael Lerner, the editor of the journal Tikkun who was also interviewed, said “that transcendent reality . . . is both within us, at the core of our being, and all around us” (58).  Forman concludes that “the traditional western ‘transcendent’ model of God is no longer operative in the Grassroots Spirituality Movement.  Its Ultimate is reminiscent of the omnipresent, immanent yet infinitely extended vacuum state of quantum physics, more like an ‘It’ than a ‘He’ or ‘She.’ In ‘It’ ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28)” (Forman 58). 

Beyond the smallest time and distance scales of the physical universe, the vacuum state, also known as the Planck Scale or unified field (Hagelin 1987, 56-57; Penrose 1997, 3-4), is described by Nick Herbert, Fritjof Capra, Roger Penrose, John Hagelin and other physicists as being analogous to human consciousness.   The vacuum state also corresponds to Plato’s description of a unique kind of direct experience, “the brightest region of being” (Republic 750-51a, 518 b-d).  The Phaedrus also describes this qualityless state of consciousness: “It is there that true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched; reason [nous or pure intelligence] alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof” (494).  This experience, Shear notes, “is devoid of all color, shape, and tangibility. . . . Indeed, except for its association with ‘brightness’ the experience seems to have no content at all” (20).   Derridean deconstruction, taken to its radical conclusion, implies that this panentheistic, non-referential dimension of experience can be understood as something intimated by the acts of writing and reading literature.

 

Consciousness and the Unsayable Secret of Literature

As Derrida says, literarity, a function of the iterability of literature, emerges through an interrelation between text and reader.

Literarity is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text.  It is the correlative of an intentional relation to the text, an intentional relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional layer, the more or less implicit consciousness of rules which are conventional or institutional—social, in any case.  Of course, this does not mean that literarity is merely projective or subjective—in the sense of the empirical subjectivity or caprice of each reader.  The literary character of the text is inscribed on the side of the intentional object, in its noematic structure, one could say, and not only on the subjective side of the noetic act.  There are ‘in’ the text features which call for the literary reading and recall the convention, institution, or history of literature.  (“An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Acts of Literature 44)

 

In the Husserlian distinction between noetic and noematic,  noetic, derived from nous (mind), means “apprehended by the intellect alone, while noematic refers to features in what is to be known that makes them knowable, or subject to noesis” (Miller 62, original emphasis).  As Derrida says, “the literary character of a text is inscribed on the side of the intentional object,” “not only on the subjective side of the noetic act.”  Although Derrida bends Hesserlian phenomenology by calling into question the primacy of consciousness, the phrase “not only” suggests that subjectivity still plays an important role in the movement toward the non-referential literarity of a text.  This subjectivity is not only a private, individual subjectivity characterized by the thinking mind but extends panentheistically toward a transpersonal subject:  it is a “subjectivity which is non-empirical and linked to an intersubjective and transcendental community. . .  The essence of literature, if we hold to the word essence, is produced as a set of objective rules in an original history of the ‘acts’ of inscription and reading” (Acts of Literature 44, 45).  This essence, which Derrida later in Acts describes as a secret, depends on an intersubjective play of transcendence and immanence between reader and community.  It is a function of the infinite extension of the contexts of meaning or iterability.  Through an interplay of noetic subjectivity and noematic intentional object, the rational mind moves away from the limitations of particular material contexts toward an underlying context defined only as a secret.  As Miller puts it, “Literature keeps a secret that does not have to be revealed, or rather that cannot by any means, from gentle interrogation all the way to torture, be revealed” (65).  This secret is like the formless reality at the heart of all forms, a reality accessible not to the thinking mind, a subject/object duality, but only to witnessing consciousness after all language and interpretation have run their course. 

By associating literature with democracy and free speech, Derrida describes the irresponsibility of literature as the author’s freedom to say everything without having to respond to questions.  Literature keeps a secret, even though, as Derrida cryptically puts it, “these ‘voices’ speak, allow or make to come—even in literature without persons and without characters” (Passions 28).  Miller discusses this secret at length but like Derrida never defines it beyond calling it a space in which the “other intervenes, or does not intervene” (Miller 69).  To allow passage to the other, or allow the other to come, would be nonsense if the other were simply another aspect of the same—the thinking mind.  For after all, what is it that allows to come if not something beyond conceptuality or rationalizations?  Deconstruction suggests that what literature allows to come is not just another thought or conceptual boundary, which gets infinitely deferred in any case through the play of difference, but a trace of consciousness as a void in thought, the ultimate supplement to thought without which, from an advaitan perspective, it would have no substance or possibility of meaning.  But as Derrida emphasizes, “The call of the other is a call to come, and that happens only in multiple voices” (quoted in Miller 70).  This call, moreover, “forbids or forecloses the temptation to think of the other, the wholly other, as some Platonic ‘One’” (Miller 70).  There are two ways to interpret the Platonic One: as a transcendental signified, which is what poststructuralism generally refers to when it talks about absolutes, including the absolute self; and pure witnessing consciousness, which is both transcendent and immanent, the Brahman and Atman of  Advaita Vedanta, and the Platonic “Forms” available only to direct experience.  Derrida deconstructs the former as a fixed concept, but the principle of literature’s secret, which always remains unsaid as a trace or supplement, suggests the latter as an openness to all possibilities.  Here Atman is the same as Brahman, although each Atman expresses itself in a different voice, thus creating a coexistence of unity-amidst-diversity.

The wholly other, which literature by destabilizing language allows or makes to come, involves what Derrida calls an impossible invention.  “The other is not the possible.  One must say that the only possible invention would be of the impossible.  But the invention of the impossible is impossible, the other would say.  Certainly, but it is the only possibility: an invention must announce itself as invention of that which would not appear possible, without which it does no more that make explicit a program of possibles, with the economy of the same” (Psyché 59, translated in Miller 69).  As discussed below in the context of Indian literary theory, the wholly other or secret of literature is an impossible invention because, being unmanifest like pure consciousness as a void in thought, it is uncreated, self-sufficient, and inaccessible to the thinking mind.  William Demastes argues that theater “forces us to think materially about everything before us, even the apparently immaterial” (2002, 42).  But as Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes, “This is incorrect if we consider thinking.  The immaterial cannot be thought about immaterially, because thinking is a function of the intellect [which is material rather than non-material like consciousness], and the intellect, on the model of mind in Vedic literature, cannot grasp any more refined levels than itself, and thus cannot grasp the level of the immaterial, which is the level of pure consciousness” (2003, 11, original emphasis).  Immaterial pure consciousness exceeds the material mind, just as the wholly other, which can only be allowed to come, exceeds the possibility of material invention. 

For poststructuralists, the Platonic One is regarded as a function of the material mind, the fixation on a transcendental signified that disallows multiplicity.  As discussed more below, an advaitan perspective suggests that the Platonic One is a function of pure consciousness beyond oppositional structures—the non-material secret of literature that emerges through the suggestive power of a noematic structure and “not only” the noetic act.  This relation can be explained in terms of a holon, a word coined by Arthur Koestler (1967) to describe an entity that is itself a whole but simultaneously part of a larger whole, in an infinite series, such that each entity is neither whole nor part, but a whole/part, or holon.   In the noematic/noetic fusion, the subjective side consists of a “primal artistic holon” (Wilber 1997) or void in thought manifested through aesthetic form.  The primal holon, however, does not enter our mind as a blank slate but rather instantly engages the multiple contexts of our existence: the unconscious structures of our mind, the structures of our culture, the global currents of the world about which we may not even be consciously aware.  Paradoxically, as defined in eastern thought and experience panentheistically by many, the transcendent primal whole, pure consciousness, subsumes and by entering becomes part of the tangible, expressed wholes of the mind’s cultural contexts. It thus allows for a coexistence of opposites, an experience of both/and rather than either/or.  Derridean deconstruction, which I am arguing also operates within the panentheistic interplay between mind and consciousness, contains as a subtext the structure of consciousness that it both veils with the undecidable trappings of the mind and makes to come as an unsayable secret through a play of difference.  Even had he addressed Indian thought or acknowledged its influence on his own, Derrida would still have had to work from a different approach simply because western philosophy per se has not developed an experiential tradition that allows one to transcend the thinking mind like the yogic practices of India.

Nevertheless, the deconstructive process of moving the mind closer to the secret of literature uses mechanics similar to the yogic process of transcending thought, as Richard Harland notes in drawing an analogy between the trace and eastern meditation (150-51).  Derrida says that “when there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret behind the surface of a textual manifestation (and it is this situation which I would call text or trace) when it is the call of this secret, however, which points back to the other or to something else, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us.  Even if there is none, even if it does not exist, hidden behind anything whatever” (Passions 29-30, quoted in Miller 65).  The secret as a trace incites “passion” in the double sense of suffering and desire: suffering because the limitation of language as a referential gesture, the province of the mind, occludes the secret of literature; and desire because the taste of infinity, the province of consciousness, is allowed to come through the non-referential play of a work of literature as an intentional object.   Like eastern meditation, passion as desire operates through the trace as a play of difference through which the self-referral of the sign induces a corresponding self-referral of the subject, shifting awareness from the conscious content of the mind toward a void in thought.   As Derrida puts it, the trace as a principle forbids the possibility that “a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself”; “no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present” (Positions 26).  The trace is thus a quasi-ontological, non-present, quasi-origin of difference, or what Derrida calls—along with the supplement, the pharmakon, difference, and other Derridean terms—an “aconceptual concept” (Limited Inc 118).  Of the supplement, “No ontology can think its operation,” since the supplement like the trace is “neither a presence nor an absence” (Of Grammatology 314).  What we find in all aconceptual concepts, despite their diverse contexts in Derrida’s philosophy, is the tendency to swing the awareness from the concrete to the abstract, the material to the non-material in the direction of pure consciousness or Atman—as in yogic meditation.

In his own literary criticism, Derrida revels in the richness of play he finds in literature, enhancing through his own texts the natural tendency of the mind to move through the play of duality toward the nonduality of consciousness.  “I multiply statements, discursive gestures, forms of writing, the structure of which reinforces my demonstration in something like a practical manner, that is, by providing instances of ‘speech act’ which by themselves render impracticable and theoretically insufficient the conceptual oppositions upon which speech act theory in general . . . relies (serious/nonserious, literal/metaphoric or ironic, normal forms/parasitical forms, use/mention, intentional/nonintentional, etc.) (Limited Inc 114).  As Miller puts it, Derrida’s “intuition (though that is not quite the right word) of a certain unsayable or something unavailable to cognition is, I claim, the motivation of all his work” (76).  As in the panentheism experienced by so many today, Derrida’s intuition is an experience of something immanent as well as transcendent, neither a presence nor an absence.  It pervades everything but is not limited to the expressions of worldly phenomena.  In revealing the idiomatic style through which a particular work invokes the other, tracing its secret, “the inaccessible [that] incites from its place of hiding” (Acts 191), Derrida brings the reader toward the unsayable, which, as argued here, is available only to undifferentiated consciousness.  In his radical approach to literature, Derrida hints at a connection between language and subjectivity found not in western philosophy but in the Indian theory of language.

 

Deconstruction and the Indian Theory of Language

To understand the full implications of aconceptual concepts like the trace and difference, we now turn to the Indian theory of language, which describes four levels of language that correspond to different levels of consciousness.  Indology, with its longstanding popularity in the German academy, has had a strong influence on Derrida’s German predecessors.  Max Müller, for example, translated the Upanishads in the 1880s, influencing philosophers like A. Schopenhauer, who declared “How every line is full of sure, definite and throughout harmonizing significance!  How out of every page confront us deep, original, elevated thoughts, while a higher and highly sacred earnestness vibrates through the whole! . . . It has become the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death” (quoted in Grinshpon 106).   Whatever exposure Derrida himself may or may not have had to Indian language theory, by antedating his intuition of a trans-cognitive aspect of language, it may possibly have influenced the collective unconscious of western philosophers and thereby promoted the development of Derrida’s own line of thought. 

As Harold Coward, T. Chakrabarti, S. K. De, and other critics have noted, in the language theory expounded in the Vedas and developed by the fifth-century grammarian Bhartrhari, ordinary waking and transcendental consciousness yield the experience of different levels of language. Ordinary language as a temporal sequence consists of two aspects: vaikhari or outward speech, and madhyama or inward speech or thought, which are characterized by temporal sequence.  In addition there are two levels of language beyond ordinary experience: pashyanti and para (Coward, Sphota 126-37).  These higher levels, which are unavailable to the ordinary mind, consist of a unity of sound and meaning without temporal sequence; all phenomenal differentiations disappear and meaning is apprehended as a noumenal whole.  Bhartrhari notes that pashyanti appears in savikalpa samadhi (temporary experience of turiya) and para in nirvikalpa samadhi (the fifth state when turiya becomes permanent, sustained with the three ordinary states).  The main difference between pashyanti and para is that in para the unity of sound and meaning is devoid of the impulse toward outward expression found in pashyanti.  As words or thoughts in ordinary waking consciousness, vaikhari and madhyama give only a partial expression of a unified meaning or “transcendental signified” available on the higher levels of language.

The deconstructive play of difference occurs on the lower levels of language in which sound/meaning, signifier/signified are separated by a spatial/temporal gap—a gap in the authority of “is” that renders them open to deconstruction.  In contrast, the higher levels of language are experienced on the boundary of or beyond space, time and causality.  As such they would be undeconstructable, beyond the spatializing/temporalizing movement of difference that depends on a space/time continuum.  Inadvertently approached through Derrida’s aconceptual concepts, these higher levels are cognized not in the temporality of ordinary waking consciousness and its duality of subject and object, but through a process in which meaning and consciousness begin to fuse (as discussed more below in terms of rasa). 

Given the distinction between mind and consciousness, Derrida and other poststructuralists operating on the level of mind attempt to deconstruct the absolute truth value of that which turns out to be merely a relative manifestation of the absolute (vaikhari and madhyama) rather than the absolute itself (para).  From an advaitan perspective, because the latter is unavailable to the temporal mind alone, strictly speaking it can neither be deconstructed nor legitimated by it.  Derrida refers to “the epoch of logos” (Of Grammatology 12) that began with Plato as positing an “absolute proximity” of voice and meaning, “of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning” (OG 11).  In the phonocentrism of “the epoch of logos,” voice is more authentic than writing.  But in distinguishing between voice on the one hand and text or history on the other, Derrida in effect misconstrues the absolute proximity of sound and meaning as understood in Plato and Sanskrit poetics.  As mentioned earlier, Plato and Indian language theory both describe a trans-rational experience of higher consciousness.  Derrida never distinguishes the voice of ordinary waking consciousness (vaikhari and madhyama) that operates within space/time from the possibility of a transcendent voice (pashyanti and para) elicited by the trans-rational experience of pure consciousness.  While Derrida justly deconstructs the possibility of a logocentrism based on the duality of mind, when Plato and Indian language theory refer to what Derrida would call “the being of the entity as presence” (OG 12), they are talking about an altogether different kind of experience than anything represented (or representable) by the ordinary mind and voice.

As if sensing this dilemma, Derrida deconstructs language through the trace and the play of differance (spelled with an “a”), conflating its temporality through the retention and protention of all signifiers inherent within any particular signifier in a chain that replaces the signified.  Coward claims that Bhartrhari, like Derrida, sees difference, or the sequencing of time, as the non-logocentric, non-transcendental originary state of language (1990, 49-80).  Bhartrhari, for example, would agree with Derrida’s famous statement that “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text.”) (OG 158), that no metaphysical “other” exists outside of speech or writing as its source.  Bhartrhari seems to accept this because he equates language with the absolute or Brahman, defined in terms of Sabdatattva or the Word-Principle (Coward 1990, 37; Haney 79-83).  Pashyanti, the highest level of language that Bhartrhari considers, is the word whole without temporal sequence, but unlike para it still contains the inherent impulse toward expression in time and space.

Even the differential play of language, therefore, is not unique to deconstruction but has Indian grammarian antecedents.  To equate Bhartrhari and Derrida in terms of difference like Coward does, however, would be to identify Bhartrhari’s notion of Self more strongly with ordinary waking consciousness than he might have intended.  From an advaitan perspective, without pure consciousness (turiya), pashyanti or the logocentric voice would by definition be inaccessible.  Derrida does not in theory accept the transcendental Self, but as suggested here the issue is not so simple.  Although Derrida and Bhartrhari conceive of the real and language as one and the same, pashyanti is a level of language that borders on two dimensions: refined ordinary waking consciousness (jagrat chetna), which determines the force of expression that Derrida deconstructs; and transcendental consciousness (turiya chetna), which determines the nonsequenced unity of sound and meaning intimated by the trace.  Although deconstruction in theory rejects the latter, in practice aconceptual concepts expand the intellect to the point of transcendence, like a Zen koan.  Paradoxically, then, the arche-trace seems to “make come” a taste of pashyanti, although one still diluted with the flavor of the ordinary mind.  Still, the rhetorical play of deconstruction, by extending the meaning of a word or sentence toward indeterminacy, stretches the reader’s awareness toward the extreme limit of the mind’s capacity for rational comprehension. 

By invoking aconceptual concepts, therefore, deconstruction expands the mind to the verge of self-transcendence.  The mind can either resist this movement and cling to its rational, historical content, or go with the flow toward the threshold of “no-mind” or witnessing consciousness.  These alternatives represent two kinds of infinity: that of dissemination, of unlimited extension within space, time and causality; and that of turiya and pashyanti, of transcending duality.  In theory, deconstruction dwells on a temporal connectedness of all meaning based on the ordinary voice and mind, but in practice it invokes the unsayable, something unavailable to ordinary comprehension, the nontemporal connectedness of all meaning and consciousness.  Indian literary criticism describes this connection in terms of aesthetic rapture as induced by the power of suggestion.

 

The Unsayable Power of Suggestion

Aesthetic experience, or rasa in Sanskrit poetics, can be described as intuition of the unsayable, which for Derrida is invoked by iterability, the non-referential quality of literature.  For deconstruction, this structure of sameness-and-difference, or repetition-as-singularity, enables and limits the singularity of everything, making it a flickering of presence and absence.  Derrida uses iterability to deconstruct the logocentric ideal of the self-presence of a concept, showing how its ideality or presence depends on textual mediation or projection, since the ideal itself always remains “inaccessible” (Limited Inc 117).  As we have seen, Derrida’s point is that concepts are always within writing or the text, dependent on their iterability which precludes their having a fixed center.  As Derrida deconstructively notes with regard to the trace, iterability, and supplementarity, “the possibility of the reference to the other, and thus of radical alterity and heterogeneity, of differance” is always already inscribed “in the presence of the present that it dis-joins” (Specters of Marx 75).  In Derrida’s interpretation, “transcendence” is confined to the relation between inside and outside on a material plane, with the outside being “transcendent” only to the inside, rather than being something independent of our thoughts altogether—something radically other like a non-dual internal observer.  But from an advaitan perspective, the other in its radical alterity and heterogeneity always already encompasses two dimensions: the material and non-material, duality and singularity, mind and consciousness, vaikhari/madhyama and pashyant/para, with the latter dimension both immanent within the former and transcendent.  In this version of metaphysics, what is gathered up or united does not close anything off, but remains open and boundless, inviting a unity-amidst-diversity (which as Alison Scott-Baumann and Christopher Norris, in their contribution to this special issue of CLA, seem to suggest is the direction that Derrida takes in some of his later texts).  Anything outside a material supplement also has a non-material inside through which it merges with the inside of its other, while simultaneously remaining heterogeneous in a material sense. 

Aporia or indeterminacy, if taken far enough, suggests this kind of radical alterity—not just the material, one-dimensional multiplicity of differance.  An aconceptual concept implies that while presence is inaccessible to the thinking mind, it can still be noematically pointed to by way of suggestion, either through literature’s unsayable secret, or, as posited by Indian literary criticism, through the power of figurative language to allow or make come a non-ordinary level of language and consciousness—the essence of aesthetic experience. 

In Sanskrit poetics, aesthetic experience (rasa) culminates in a spiritual joy or santa that K. Krishnamoorthy describes as “wild tranquility” or “passionless passion” (26).  As S. K. De says, “an ordinary emotion (bhava) may be pleasurable or painful; but a poetic sentiment (rasa), transcending the limitations of the personal attitude, is lifted above such pain and pleasure into pure joy, the essence of which is its relish itself” (13).  This joy or relish is nothing other than the Self (turiya), also known as sat-chit-ananda (being, consciousness, bliss) (Deutsch 9).  Aesthetic experience ultimately leads the attention toward the bliss of pure awareness.   While Derrida, of course, does not explicitly endorse the full import of rasa or the sublime (far from it), the aconceptual intuition of an unsayable dimension in literature bears the hallmark of such an experience.   Like rasa, the unsayable is non-rational, aconceptual, and trans-personal.  By attenuating the material boundaries of the mind through rhetorical play, it is also relishing and joyous, swinging the attention from the concrete to the abstract, from individual words to their universalized meanings, and ultimately from the material mind toward non-material consciousness.  As if it wanted to have its cake and eat it too, deconstruction in practice pushes against the limits of rationalization through a nano-nuancing of multiplicity and indeterminacy (heading for the vacuum state on the wings of suggestion), while in theory it refuses to cross the threshold into the unified field, even as quantum physics comes ever closer to validating what Vedanta has posited for millennia.  On one side deconstruction appears to suffer from a Eurocentric anxiety of influence, while on the other it inadvertently reflects a “joy of influence” in its drive toward a quantum field of all possibilities. 

From an advaitan viewpoint, the joy, unsayability, and secret of literature is conveyed not so much through its expressed as its suggested content (dhvani), or what Derrida would call the non-referential, noematic structure of the text.  Anandavardhana, the great ninth-century exponent of the dhvani school and author of the Dhvanyaloka, opposed the older formalist school of criticism by showing how the suggested content of poetry manifests itself in the form of facts, poetic figures or emotions (Chakrabarti 66).  Suggestion more than denotation, connotation, or other kinds of expression is responsible for conveying rasa.  Suggestion, moreover, resides in the reader’s mind in the form of latent impressions (vasanas), which for Derrida would be the subjective side of the noetic act, and beyond that in the structure of pure consciousness itself.  Anandavardhana defines dhvani as a suggested meaning that “flashes into the minds of sympathetic appreciators who perceive the true import (of poetry) when they have turned away from conventional meaning” (Ramachandran 75).  This turning away from conventional meaning corresponds to the deconstructive turning from the referential sign to its dissemination, the scattered, plurivocal sense (of a sense) of something allowed to come.  In terms of the interrelation between language and consciousness, the power of suggestion (dhvani), by inducing aesthetic rapture (rasa), disseminates awareness from the concrete levels of the senses and intellect (vaikhari and madhyama) to the more abstract levels of feeling and intuition (pashyanti and para), and simultaneously back again. 

This swing of awareness—like the flickering of presence and absence in the proliferation of meaning—is induced by the juxtaposition of contrasting elements in language, its tropes and rhythm, which in terms of consciousness results in a coexistence of opposites.  Literature, especially poetry, depends on its power to charm the reader on all levels of the mind simultaneously.  But suggestion, like dissemination, is found also in “ordinary” language and is not unique to “literature”; indeed, as the enabling force of language for deconstruction, dissemination calls into question the very concept of literature.  As Derrida asks, “why should ‘literature’ still designate that which already breaks away from literature—away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name—or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it?” (Dissemination 3).   Similarly, pashyanti and para can appear in all forms of language.  Dissemination and suggestion share features that illustrate again how the practice of deconstruction and Indian literary criticism overlap.  Both refuse the ontology of semantic determinacy, but while the former does so by leading to an encounter with the other as alterity, the latter does so by finding unity-amidst-diversity in both language and subjectivity. 

 

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The difference between Derrida and Indian philosophy centers on the fact that while deconstruction allows the other to come, in theory it never closes the gap between subject and object, taking the mind’s contingency with its duality of knower and known as an ineluctable given.  In practice, however, by denying presence to subject and object, revealing the nothingness of knower and known, exposing the self as a non-self, it implacably allows to come the radical alterity of non-material consciousness (turiya) as the internal observer.    As Deikman notes, “we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it” (355, original emphasis).  After dissemination has run its course through the gamut of aconceptual concepts, the final supplement is the nothingness of the internal observer, without which there would be neither presence nor absence, nor the oscillation between them.  While Derrida may intellectually refute this position, the Indian subtext of deconstruction does something quite different. 

The contradiction that Derrida finds in a text, the way its content will say one thing and its form will do the opposite, also applies to deconstruction itself when it questions the logic of certain binary oppositions—the authority of “is” in making distinctions of ethnic origins, social class and cultural privilege.  By this contradiction I refer not to the way in which deconstruction, by undermining logocentrism, remains within the logocentric structure of oppositions—however true this is on the ordinary levels of mind and language.  Rather, I refer to the contradiction in the effect of deconstruction, its allowing something to come from beyond the logocentric structure of oppositions that characterizes logical discourse.  The western fear that the experience of no-mind or a void in thought would mean the end of philosophy stems in part from a misunderstanding of the relationship between pure consciousness (turiya) and mind.  Pure consciousness, once stabilized in daily experience, coexists with all levels of thought, from the temporal to the trans-cognitive, which includes binary oppositions the presence of unity (see Deutsch passim).    The capacity to go beyond the finest level of ordinary thought means experiencing thought closer to its source in the para level of language.  Appreciating a thought in its seed form would allow us to comprehend its full implications in the field of action, something the intellect alone can never accomplish.  For this reason, as Scott-Baumann suggests (see this issue of CLA), any conventional application of deconstruction in politics or other social activity would have limited success.  Real social improvement has to emerge from a deeper source than the ordinary mind, a field of constant change, to have any lasting value or effect.  To make a viable contribution to individual and social development, therefore, western philosophy would do well to consider the advantages of complementing the rational mind with the experience of pure consciousness, as so many people in the United States and around the world already seem to be discovering, partly through the influence of Indian philosophy.

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