Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004
Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext
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Tracing Difference: The Subtext of Derridean and Gaudiya Vaishnava Theology
by
Similarities abound between Indian thought and the philosophical school of deconstruction. Some noteworthy contributions include: Harold Coward: Derrida and Indian Philosophy (1990) and Carl Olson: Postmodern Thinkers and Indian Thought(2002). But while comparisons—both linguistic and philosophical—have been steadily developing a large body of knowledge, little attention has been paid to one key question: What do we make of these similarities? What do they really tell us? Other than the fact that these similarities are just that— similarities and interesting in that fact alone, the deeper and broader question is: what can account for these similarities historically and theoretically?
This paper argues that these similarities are too numerous and consistent to be cast off as merely interesting correspondences; it seeks rather to critically interrogate these co-incidences by suggesting that their occurrence can be traced to originary sources in Indian thought. Their subsequent re-appropriation in Derridean thought can be traced via the German philosophical tradition that includes—Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger—all of whom Derrida owes a deep debt of gratitude. Derrida often acknowledges these influences, noting once that none of his investigations would have been possible “without the opening of Heidegger’s questions” (Positions 9). Though he acknowledges the roots of his own conceptual thought in these German thinkers—Derrida derides them for remaining tied to the horizon of metaphysics. While their questions awaken the critical reevaluation of the notions of Being, time, and language, these confrontations and questionings revalorize the essence of man and being in ways that reconfirm the presuppositions of metaphysics. Noting in Speech and Phenomena that,
“Phenomenology has criticized metaphysics as it is in fact only in order to restore it” (107). Setting aside Derrida’s own criticisms and anxieties against his philosophical precursors, this paper aims to take these influences more seriously by seeking to push back the conceptual origins of Derrida’s deconstructionists thinking even further, beyond his German interlocutors. Derrida alludes to these origins at times, saying once, “ There is much of the ancient in what I have said. Everything perhaps” (Woods et al. 93).
What are the origins of Derridean thought, and why are they limited to Western sources? Why have non-Western sources been denied, suppressed, displaced and unacknowledged? Is this in order to maintain a certain sanitized and authentic view of the history of philosophy that is necessarily West-centric? As Bernasconi writes in his recent article, “Will the Real Kant Please Stand up?” which addresses the challenge of Enlightenment racism in the history of philosophy, when we reconstruct philosophy in order to meet certain pre-established standards by excluding, marginalizing and segregating certain facts that do not lend themselves to a view of philosophy that is much messier than we hoped it would be, we “diminish philosophy as an activity more generally,” making it much more restricted, and in doing so we “ damage the place of philosophy in our culture”(20). The point is that philosophy too is subject to the nuances, contradictions and errors of history, and should not conform to the tale of philosophical history, which we deem more comfortable with, but rather the one that is historically sensitive and comprehensive. In short, what this paper hopes to suggest is that similarities between Derridean and medieval Indian thought can point the way to thinking differently about the sources of deconstruction, without consigning it to Western origins.
The second aim of this paper is to draw a cross-cultural comparison between the idea of supplementarity in Derrida’s thought and its relation to the doctrine of acintya-bheda-bheda-tattva (inconceivably oneness and difference) in the Gaudiya Vaishanava theological school of bhakti. I explore the parallels between excessivity and surplus in Derrida as they relate to the theme of spontaneous love (prema) in Vaishnava theology. I argue that like Derrida’s expansion of meaning signifiers, Gaudiya theologians locate prema or love, the highest achievement in this path, between the moods (bhava) of love-in-union (Sambhoga) and love-in-separation (Vipralambha) from God or Krsna, which is continually nurtured by a movement between these two vacillating states. It is the Derridean non-limiting, ungraspable and illogical excess of meaning that the Vaishnavas express in emotive form. Like forgiveness in Derrida, love confounds measurement, calculation and any conceptual limit in the Gaudiya tradition. It erases these through movement, just as Derrida erases limitation in the supplementarity of the trace. The in-between state of the trace serves a theoretical subtext to the displaced location of love in the Gaudiya tradition.
Thus this paper aims to demonstrate how the principles of supplementarity and identity-in-difference serve as the subtext of both the Derridean and Vaishnavic perspectives, drawing them into dialogue with each other in enriching and unacknowledged ways. Additionally, it seeks to assert how these similarities—are not mere similarities—but have pre-dated their Derridean appropriation by subverting and erasing the influence of Indian thought on the development of the Indo-European philosophical tradition. This effacement acts to continue an intellectual colonization that dis-locates the voice of the other who is cut off from being a part of history—becoming that essentialized, atemporal object, displaced from the human intellectual situation. Neither knower nor interpreter, the other is merely an ahistorical inanimate observer, robbed of the ability to become more fully human because he/she is denied that gift which distinguishes human from animal—the ability to speak—and be heard and understood.
Derrida’s theory of writing outlined in Of Grammatology derives from a critique of Saussaurian semiology and the linguistic connection between the signifer and the signified. Saussure’s arbitrary nature of the sign positively determined that language was not a system of identities, but a system of differences, and to that extent it loosened the limits of the metaphysical system in which the concept of the sign was born (Positions 17). But the sign, according to Derrida, simultaneously impedes and progresses the deconstruction of the dominance of metaphysics (Positions 17). The difference between signified and signifer belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics. Saussure acknowledges the gap between the signifer and signified but his reinforcement of this opposition accentuates and reestablishes it more implicitly, according to Derrida. So too do the differences between parole and langue become equally problematic for the reason that they give oppositional force and form to these contraries. Additionally, argues Derrida, “the notion of the sign…remains within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning” (Of Grammatology 23). Meaning that for Derrida the sign (signifer/signified) privileges voice, speech and presence (Positions 21). “Phonic, in effect, is the signifying substance given to consciousness as that which is most intimately tied to the thought of the signified concept” (Positions 22). The concept—the signified—then is not constituted by a combination of the written word and the spoken word, but rather the latter alone constitutes the object, (Positions 25) thus reducing the necessity and importance of gram, the written sign. In short, the longing for oppositions and the reinstitution of the privileged place of voice/presence underscores the longing for a center, a telos, and a logos that orients, organizes and limits the play of differences. Thus the sign progressively pushes the limits of metaphysics, but in the end, impedes its own progress by re-using the very terms, ideas and conceptual strategies applied by metaphysics.
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The concept of supplementarity is set against this backdrop. In this section, I want to describe how supplementarity can be explained in terms of a particular relationship between identity and difference, even while Derrida derides the use of oppositions to order to understand supplementarity, stating in Speech and Phenomena that one cannot think of difference, that is, supplementarity, if one “begins on the basis of consciousness, that is, presence, or on the basis of its simple contrary, absence or non-consciousness” (88). Derrida’s main contention is that the dialectical system of oppositions ultimately re-unites these strategies to metaphysical categorizations and formalizations which are oriented and derived from a telos or center that delimits and structures the free play of signifiers. “ The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure…but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure” (Writing and Difference 88). Yet, despite this, it will be argued that Derrida negotiates the notion of supplementarity along side a new definition of identity and difference that circumvents the problem of limitation and the pitfalls of metaphysics.
Etymologically, the word supplee—means to take the place of, to represent the other, the thing in itself. Derrida says: “The supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void”(Of Grammatology 145). Thus the supplement functions to replace, substitute and stand-in-for-something-else, and in this sense it acts to interrupt presence for it never fulfills or brings relief, rather the work of the supplement marks the emptiness within presence (Of Grammatology 145). What the supplement does then is act quite literally as a sign that stands in for the thing itself. But this assumes that if something is substitutable, it needs substitution; it is somehow deficient, not self-sufficient and so replaceable (Of Grammatology 145). It must be concluded then that the thing in itself, that which the supplement stands-in-for—is incomplete, insufficient and lacking, and therefore able to be substituted by the supplement, which is exterior to or other than the thing in itself. In other words the thing in itself stands in the position of a lack, and it is only because of this lack that supplementarity can exist. “ The supplementary difference vicariously stands in for presence due to its primordial self-deficiency” (Speech and Phenomena 88). Supplement signifies inequality and non-identity for it never identities with the thing in itself, but expresses the in-betweeness that constitutes this inherent lack.
The question becomes how does the supplement work as non-identity or lack? Derrida gives some indication of this when he claims that the role of the supplement is some kind of “self-giving” which both reveals as it conceals the play of infinite differences. The substitution of the supplement is a doubling, a repetition that exceeds its own duplication because it does not commit itself but leaves only traces and effects in the infinite deferral of difference. In an interesting statement found in Of Grammatology, Derrida writes that differance “makes the opposition of presence and absence possible” (143). This statement suggests that difference/supplementarity is the movement between identity and difference that exists a priori and exterior to these principles, but nonetheless constitutes them, drawing them into a dialectical relational. To this end, supplementarity is both inside and outside for its surpluses are external, ungraspable and inarticulable, but this outside is also something, and this something is the same. In this way, difference arises from sameness. Derrida concedes stating that the provisional name of difference is “this sameness which is not identical” (Speech and Phenomena 129). In terms of the principles of identity and difference, identity is construed not as identity, but as identity within difference, that is, sameness. Sameness is construed as simultaneously oneness and difference. Thus, the sign of the supplement possesses simultaneously both an identity and a difference which constitutes its relational in-betweeness or lackness with the thing that it stands in for. Lack then is the in-betweeness that is produced by the positionality composed of the states of identity and difference in which the supplement moves by differing and deferring creating the clearing in which difference functions. Consequently identity and difference are both principal functions of supplementarity in which as identity, the supplement functions to disclose and reveal, while as difference it conceals and hides.
It must also be inferred that if something is used to stand in for something else, we are made blind to the thing in itself, to that thing which the supplement stands in substitution for. For the sign is used so that I can see but I am not seeing the thing in itself. I am only seeing the sign, the representor, and the image (Of Grammatology 145). So the sign both empowers us to see—identity—but also denies us the ability to see fully—difference. In that it grants us a way to see by way of the sign, but the very fact that the sign is a representation gives it the quality of being that which we cannot fully know, for if the supplement is not the thing in itself—it is not one thing. Therefore, by virtue of its signing nature—the supplement acts to simultaneously disclose and conceal by granting us a sign, which is nonetheless still a sign. “Blindness to the Supplement is the law” (Of Grammatology 149), says Derrida.
What this means essentially is that supplementarity is the force of the deferment, the surplus of meaning, the effect of the spacing—both temporal and spatial—which exceeds and is produced by the play of identity within difference. The dangerous supplement “is a question of making visible a distancing which is neither the same nor an other” (Of Grammatology 151). With this Derrida concurs with Heidegger in relating supplementarity neither to identity nor difference since the sign always out-distances that which it stands for, consuming it and bypasses it (Of Grammatology 151). This breakage and destruction is both the danger and seduction of the supplement that is constituted by the linkages and effects produced in the chain of signifiers. What comes to be the supplement, the sign, re-presents the present, which is wholly absent, lacking in fullness and essence. Like a chimera, the present portends itself, hints at itself but escapes its full disclosure. In this way, the experience of the supplement is utterly inconceivable; it is “maddening because it is neither presence nor absence…”(Of Grammatology 154).
While conceptually provocative, it is how the supplement reshapes other discourses and questions that Derrida confronts which is valuable and interesting. These include questions on forgiveness, hospitality and human experience in general. In this section, I would like to highlight some of the general ways supplementarity figures in Derrida’s writings on human experience.
In simple terms, the supplement explains the unexplainability and discontinuities of human experience, that which leaves our understanding incomplete, baffling our sense of logic and reason. This is why Derrida calls it the “dangerous supplement…” because, paraphrasing Rousseau, it is a “condition almost unintelligible and inconceivable (to reason)” (Of Grammatology 149). As an unstationary place of deferment the supplement, vacillates between these two positions, identity and difference, announcing what Derrida terms “ a seduction.” The supplement is properly seductive, he says, because it “leads desire away from the good path makes it err far from natural ways, guides it toward its loss or fall and therefore is a sort of lapse or scandal. It thus destroys Nature” (Of Grammatology 151). In this curious quote Derrida describes supplementarity as an enigmatic force that undercuts reason and nature—as it out-distances and exceeds the limits of nature to recover what is lost. Like a scandalous force, it ruptures and crosses the boundaries of economy, calculation and orderliness to recover the madness and vitality that lays concealed, subverted and marginalized.
What Derrida means here is not a recovery in the sense of returning to some original state but a recovery of life’s unexpectedness, its eventfulness and happenstance. In A Taste for the Secret, Jacques Derrida says, "Opening oneself to what comes can be a way of exposing oneself to the future or to the coming of the other, to the coming of what does not depend on me" (60). He calls this unexpected meeting with the Other—a chance event (60). While a chance event by its very definition means that which is uncaused and unplanned, it is the principle of supplementarity which makes possible a chance event for the supplement quite literally is the disruption caused by the unnatural interruption of the Other. Derrida uses the word aleatory, which means dependent on chance, luck or an uncertain outcome to convey the opening and possibility engendered by supplementarity. He links this word more generally with two other words, alterity and calculative rationality (61), arguing that any experience can be either calculative or a chance happening. We may plan and calculate, but when we least expect it the incalculable can happen and rupture reason by the interruption of the other. A chance event then is the dissonance caused by supplementarity that overturns our expectations and pre-disposed conjectures that hem us in, and hails us towards the impossibility that lurks undetermined and undetected.
Like chance events, life is eventful. It pulls us apart, disrupts the comfortability of our well-set lives, and throws us head first into the irrational, the unpredictable and the displaced. Thus logic and reason are pitted against illogic and supplementarity so that knowledge is in essence “surrendered and invaded by the incalculable, the other, the event” (Taste of the Secret 61). The situation created does not subvert the logic of reason for something better, rather the difference between the two—calculative rationality and its other—are erased and transgressed (61).
Derrida argues that a disruptive experience, in which knowledge structures are compromised, is a disarming experience in relation to the other (Taste of the Secret 63). There is a sense of vulnerability and weakness. He writes: “ But there is a moment of absolute weakness and disarmament...the occasion, chance ultimately means exposing ourselves to what we cannot appropriate: it is there, before us, without us….and this relation to event or supplementarity…leaves us completely disarmed; and one has to be disarmed” (Taste of the Secret 63). Two things come to mind in this quote that are significant. Derrida describes weakness in two ways: Firstly, as that thing which allows or makes possible the unexpected that cannot be appropriated. It is the thing which discombobulates the subject, leaving him/her momentarily disarmed. Derrida draws a correlation here between weakness/finitude and expectation. Weakness is a necessary component of the human experience because it represents an opening, a window, through which the subject may transgress in order to widen the horizon of possibility and meaning. Derrida similarly states, “ But there has to be a limit, and the opening is a limit. This affirmation of weakness is unconditional” (Taste of the Secret 64). So weakness or finitude engenders a breakage from the expected and the ordinary, making way for the impossible. Supplementarity as expectation and impossibility is the site of this breakage and boundary crossing—where meaning and feeling are proliferated.
The second important point here is that this disarmament, Derrida insists, is necessary. It has to be. Because contrary to logic, a situation where weakness is embraced, is not a situation of weakness at all, but rather one of exuberance and playfulness. “One has to accept that ‘it’, the other, is stronger than I am, for something to happen. I have to lack a certain strength, I have to lack it enough, for something to happen” (Taste of the Secret 64). The inherent lack at the heart of the postmodern subject is a place of liminal displacement, which though emptied of confidence, becomes a space that nurtures chance events—like life’s encounters. Weakness, thus for Derrida, as supplementarity, constitutes a strength to the extent that it incites an opening; it allows something to happen. Lack, limit or human finitude affirm anticipation and unknowability, making room for doubt and possibility. His definition of supplementarity hence invites the ‘Other,’ as the Unknown, in a place where certainty is radically surrendered for the impossible.
On a final note, supplementarity ultimately makes us uncomfortable because it rattles the status quo, and leaves us unsettled in our dis-belonging. When a sense of belonging is renounced, only then can the ‘other’ arise, since de-stabilization nurtures the experience of supplementarity and paradox. On another level, the existential displacement of the subject reaps a healthy discontent that ignites an insatiable hunger for the ‘unreachable impossible’ that manifests through the experiential disjuncture of the subject or in other words, the loss of self.
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Gaudiya Vaishnavism is a religious movement that swept across Northern India in the 14th and 17th centuries. The most significant figure of the Bengal movement is Sri Chaitanya (1486-1533), whose intense devotion to the deities of Radha and Krsna sparked a revival of Krsna-Bhakti (intense devotion) in the North. While Sri Chaitanya wrote little in the way of theology, his key disciples (The Six Goswamis) and subsequent followers filled in the theological and philosophical credentials that systematized this school of love and devotion to Krsna. In this section I would like to explicate the features of the unique doctrine Acintyabhedabhedatattva, a Sanskritic phrase, which means simultaneous identity and difference that forms the theological cornerstone of this religious system whose final goal is pure unconditional love (prema or bhakti) for
Sri Krsna. Along side this explication, I will explore theoretical and philosophical connections that illuminate the striking similarities between Derridean and Vaishnavic perspectives in terms of the principles of non-identity and difference in order to illustrate how the terminology and theoretical apparatus of Gaudiya Vaishnavism forecasts the philosophical machinations of Derrida’s deconstructive work.
The doctrine of Acintyabhedabhedatattva delineates the ontological position used to describe the relation between God (Krsna-Bhagavan) and the living entity or the Jivatman. Some schools of Vaishnava thought accept the absolute transcendence of God over the Jivatman, highlighting the difference or otherness of God, while other schools emphasize the inherent identity and similarity of God and the Jivatman. The Gaudiya school of Vaishnavism situates itself at the crossroads of these two positions between transcendence and immanence. God is neither transcendent and aloof, inspiring fear and awe, nor is he/it identical to the living being, a position highlighting his immanent, compassionate and human features. Rather the relationship obtained between Krsna and the Jivatman is much more complex than either of these simplistic formulations.
Rather, argue the Gaudiya scholars, the Jivatman shares a unique relationship of both simultaneously identity and difference with Krsna. This complex relation combining both non-difference and difference has often been explained by the example given of the relationship between a spark flung from a fire in which the spark is neither totally different from nor absolutely identical with the fire, which is its source. Yet the spark shares the quality of heat and burning with the fire even though it is not identical to the fire. Presaging Derrida’s enigmatic definition of sameness as identity that is not identity, the Gaudiya scholars describe the Jivatman as composed of two energies or saktis—Svarupa Sakti and Maya Sakti. Svarupa-Sakti is the internal sakti that emanates from Bhagavan or Sri Krsna, the Supreme Being. It “constitutes the intrinsic, essential and perfect selfhood of Bhagavan, and is therefore completely inseparable from him” (Haberman 57). Maya-Sakti is the external sakti of Bhagavan. Maya, which means “illusion,” works to conceal and distort the essential nature of Krsna Bhagavan. Hence, although Maya sakti essentially comes from Bhagavan, it is not an “essential” part of Bhagavan” (Haberman 58). It is extrinsic to Bhagavan. The Jiva Atman is composed of both these internal and external sakti’s or energies. Consequently, the Jiva-Atman is considered to be a marginal sakti because it holds an ambivalent position composed of these two—internal and external saktis, while continuing to remain distinct from both. Standing at the margins between the svarupa and maya saktis, Jiva-Atman is a hybrid and displaced identity. Its porous and uncertain ontological position locates itself in-between the divine and human condition. The marginal sakti is a fragment composite of two identities that places it in a state of discord and disillusionment. In Acting as a Way of Salvation, David Haberman writes, “ Standing on the marginal line between Svarupa-Sakti and Maya Sakti of Brahman, jiva-sakti reveals a dual inclination for divine as well as mundane life” (58). The term used to refer to it is tatastha meaning “standing on the borderline” (58). This in-between state of ontological distanciation connotes a place of liminal transformation and dissonance by which the Jiva Atman is simultaneously both one with Svarupa-sakti and Maya-Sakti—yet concurrently different from both of them. This brings to mind the longer philosophical phrase—abhedAbheda, meaning sameness and difference, meaning here that the Jiva-sakti is both different and non-different from the source—Svarupa-Sakti because of its partial identity with Maya-sakti. This unique existential position of dislocation marks the place of the jivatman in Gaudiya Vaishnavism as one of neither identity nor difference, but sameness with Krsna.
One particular attribute is ascribed to this relation between Jivatman and Bhagavan—Acintya meaning inconceivability or impossibility, which connotes the idea that neither identity nor difference can co-exist in one substance or entity without being a logically contradiction. From a Gaudiya perspective, the part, the living entity and the whole, the divine principle, are not merely part and whole; they are not attribute and substance, but rather both interpenetrate and are interdependent on each other. The part is the same with the whole, though still a part, and as such different from the whole. Similarly Krsna is pure identity, a complete unity, yet he/it appears in many forms, and yet inconceivably remains One. This is the acintya relation of Krsna and the Jivatman.
These terms—inconceivability and impossibility—are frequently employed by Derrida in his discourse on supplementarity to explain the opening or clearing which makes possible a chance event, the surprise of the Other, Impossible, that unglues us from our rationalizations and logical certitudes, making room for the unexpected. In Of Grammatology, he echoes the sentiment of Gaudiya thinkers:
Something promises itself as it escapes, gives itself as it moves away, and strictly speaking it cannot even be called presence. Such is the constraint of the supplement, such, exceeding all language of metaphysics, is this structure “almost inconceivable to reason” (Of Grammatology 154).
Likewise, Derrida states that “What the thinking of the original difference calls for is a kind of thinking that metaphysics, in its very essence, outlaws—the thinking of contradiction” (Wood et al. 35). In this way, as both the plenitude and the lack of impossibility, supplementarity incessantly withdraws and reveals the dialecticism of presence and absence, which it supercedes and invalidates through its inherent inconceivable contradiction that is akin to the dialectical contradiction between the causal relationality of part/whole in the Vaishnava school.
To take this relation a bit further, the notion of supplementarity/difference is represented in Gaudiya Vaishnavism by the term Visesa which functions like Derrida’s difference in making possible the impossible. A.K Mujumdar in Chaitanya: His Life and Doctrine, states that “ Visesa is not exactly difference, yet it performs the functions of a difference, and produces the consciousness of a difference where really none exist” (271). He adds that “Visesa is a substitutive and demonstrative difference, and the key to the power by which there is a realization of difference in non-difference” (271). These descriptions, while not definitive, do depict some strong parallels to Derrida’s concept of differance, which like visesa “functions like difference” even though it is not difference. That is why Derrida reminds us constantly not to call difference by the word difference or any word or concept because differance loses its differential capabilities—becoming identity—when it is inadvertently defined, rarified and substantiated. But—in essence (a highly loaded term)—difference functions to make possible difference, much in the way visesa functions within the Gaudiya system of theology.
This ontological relationship of non-difference in difference that exists between Krsna and the Jivatman illustrates the concept of liminality. Identity is not identity but rather a kind of similarity because it is conceived of not in terms of unity and non-difference, but rather suggests that identity is necessarily relational, admitting degrees of complexity and difference within its folds. Two substances, Krsna and the Jivatman, are simultaneously “identical” but due to this identity relation or because of it, a relation of otherness and separation is introduced. Identity is complexified, relationalized and problematized by the very nature of identity, which gives rise to alterity. Alterity or supplementarity is due to identity, yet the limits of identity do not delimit the contours of supplementarity, rather these limits represent the uncharted regions where supplementarity flourishes. The limits of identity represent the unlimited possibilities from which supplementarity emerges from its confrontation with identity. This confrontation is the root of supplementarity. As Derrida reiterates, “ Difference is derived…itself an effect of the irreducible play in-between two movements of differing that, at once, traces a sameness that is not properly identical” (Wood et al. 45). The Jivatman, henceforth, stands in a provisional place of discord and liminality because of its contradictory relation with Krsna that constitutes a similarity—a sameness—with Krsna, the Ultimate principle, which remains constantly discontinuous and displaced, and never wholly identical. Because for Gaudiya theologians, the distance from Krsna never transforms into identity or union with Krsna, but rests uneasily within this space of difference, much like Derrida’s insistence that difference is never self-sufficient or replaceable since it is a perversion, a seduction that substitutes its tracings and effects for new ones as it travels through and about the chain of supplements, always unintelligible, unreliable and dysfunctional.
The concept of supplementarity can be seen to function in the Gaudiya school’s theology of love and faith to Krsna in theoretically useful ways. Like supplementarity, love is born of disjuncture and oppositional dissimilarity. Vaishnavism is largely associated with the principle of bhakti or love, thus emotion is stressed above all else. Along with emotionalism comes a predilection for personalism since according to Gaudiya scholars, one cannot love in isolation, love is always and essentially a relational experience. The highest achievement in the bhakti tradition is pure love of god, prema, which manifests between the devotee (bhakta) and Krsna in a personalized form. This form of love comes in many facets and shapes, but the fundamental dynamic of this relationship of love is characterized by the moods of union (Sambhoga) and separation (Vipralambha). The separation between Krsna and the bhakta exemplifies the relationship of difference or in theological terms, transcendence. When Krsna is distant from the bhakta, this causes intense anguish and pain for both Krsna and the bhakta. Since the ultimate goal of the devotee’s life is to overcome the obstacles and distractions that separate her from Krsna, any prolongation of separation from Krsna is experienced as bitter pain and agony. In this state the devotee experiences a deep restlessness and anxiousness that perturbs the devotee constantly due to this state of absence and separation from Krsna.
Its opposite, union (Sambhoga), appeases the mood and emotion associated with the state of separation with Krsna, giving rise to intense pleasure and blissfulness. By union, however, Gaudiya Vaishnavas not mean identity or oneness, which is never achievable, but a shared intimacy with Krsna that can be called ‘sameness.’ Within union lies the seeds of separation, and within separation lies the foreshadowing of eventual ‘union’. “ Hence in liberation, there is non-difference between Brahman (the Absolute) and individual souls because of the non-perception of difference between them, while in certain aspects difference (exists) due to the natural limitation of the individual soul even in the state of liberation” (A.K Majundar 272). So while the devotee struggles to appease and undo the pangs of separation, there, in those pangs, lingers the fruit of ‘union,’ but a union that is necessarily tinged with feelings of differentiation due to the lack that continues to keep the devotee from experiencing a complete submersion within the One. Thus in the throes of pleasurable union one cannot escape the anticipation of detachment and separation. Much like Derrida’s notion of the “eventful chance,” spontaneous love and devotion is enhanced and accelerated by a sense of lack or limitation in the bhakta, which Gaudiya thinkers say even exist in the state of liberation, propelling the bhakta and Krsna to experience new and ever changing possibilities in their loving exchanges. The chain of signifiers is experienced as a chain of infinite loving interchanges that takes the bhakta and Krsna to new heights in the attainment of bhakti, that is never complete.
In short, the location of love is a place of acquaintance, where each term in the relation looks awry at its other. It is a space tinged with as Derrida says, the illogical of simultaneous surrender and refusal. The emotional love experience pulls the divinity and the living being within the liminal space of displacement and discontinuity. Thus, mingled with the pain of separation is the bliss of union.
Additionally, the shift from union to separation can be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between expectation to anticipation. In the mood of expectation, Krsna and the Jivatman seek to consume and each other with their love, whereas in anticipation Krsna and the Jivatman belong to one another as de-possessed subjects/others. The distance between expectation and anticipation locates the hybrid place of dialogical exchange that, using Homi Bhabha’s language, is a liminal space of negotiation and playfulness. The distanciation that marks this location between expectation and anticipation is one engendered by the encounter between expectation and finitude for it is this ‘lack’ that transforms expectation towards anticipation. Consequently, identity, the consumption of the Other or union connotes a mode of stasis and fixity which is expectational in nature—the Jivatman locates itself here as object in expectation of Krsna with whom he/she seeks to be subsumed. This expectation limits the nature of the love experience with Krsna because it is tinged by the subject/object relationality that persists in expectation. Krsna consumes and the devotee is consumed, so the subject/object complex remains intact, uninterrupted—a complete identity relation. Expectation is interrupted by what Derrida calls the lack or self-deficiency of presence that alludes to the otherness of finitude in which anticipation and ‘the unexpected’ arise. Anticipation, unlike its counterpart, contains plurality, distinction, separation, dissonance and struggle. It more accurately portrays the movement from subject-object (expectation) towards a total erasure of both categories (anticipation). The Other is neither Krsna nor the devotee, the other becomes the difference or supplementarity that passes through this relation in which neither is one or the other, but both mutually belong together differentially or supplementarily.
The erasure of Krsna and the JivaAtman creates a space of a constant surplus of love between sameness and difference. Love comes to be the excessivity of these two movements/modes/moods that reinterprets and re-realizes its potential through new possibilities and configurations. Emotionally, love is the contrary qualities of pain and bliss, sameness and difference that is exemplified in the excesses of supplementarity because love is not identity nor difference for the Gaudiya Vaishnava, it is the difference between these two modes that nurtures, imbibes and invokes love endlessly. Sameness works through difference to bring about love or prema.
In this way the supplementarity of love is not a static space, but one that is essentially luminous and liminal. It is a dynamic space of negotiation and playfulness in which Krsna and the living being dance ad infinitum. It is the Derridian non-limiting, ungraspable and illogical excess of meaning that the Vaishnavas express in emotive form. Like forgiveness in Derrida, love confounds measurement, calculation and any conceptual limit in the Gaudiya tradition. It erases these through movement, just as Derrida erases limitation in the supplementarity of the trace.
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To conclude, these affinities and comparisons between Indian medieval philosophy and Derridean thought are rich and numerous, offering much in the way of a cross-cultural inter-disciplinary dialogue. But while rewarding in and of themselves, this paper has tried to illustrate how these similarities are more far-reaching than have been acknowledged by scholars and researchers. This points to the need for more historically- based research to uncover and disclose the linkages between Indian and German thinkers, in order to trace the gaps and influences that have been glossed over, white-washed and distorted to bolster and sanctify one version of philosophy and its origins and sources. The hope is that more scholars will take up this challenge to reconstruct the story of philosophy, exhuming its ‘complete’ picture for all to consider.
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