Mystical Languages of Unsaying
Mystical Languages of Unsaying
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不言而喻的神秘语言
DOI：
10.2307/606227
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发表时间：
1994
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
M. Sells
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
M. Sells
这篇文章考察了一种神秘的话语模式，“失语”，字面意思是“说话”。有时被翻译为“否定神学”，隐语的话语接受了这样一种可能性，即通过不断地反驳自己的命题和名字来命名一些不可言喻的东西。在这项关于希腊、基督教和伊斯兰文本中的失语的研究中，迈克尔·赛尔斯持续地、批判性地描述了失语语言是如何工作的，它所采用的惯例、逻辑和悖论，以及在试图分析它时遇到的两难境地。这本书包括阅读Plotinus，约翰的苏格兰Eriugena，伊本阿拉比，玛格丽特波雷特和梅斯特埃克哈特最严格的非哲学文本，与犹太传统中重要的非哲学作家，如亚伯拉罕阿布拉菲亚和摩西德莱昂的比较参考。赛尔斯揭示了这些作家的作品中的基本共同特征，尽管他们在时代、传统和神学上存在着广泛的差异。通过展示失语症如何作为一种话语模式而不是一种消极的神学来工作，这项工作的目的是为重新评估这一主题打开大门。赛尔斯证明，对于充分解释不可言说的神秘语言来说，非经验主义作家更激进的主张--批评家经常认为这些主张是夸张的，或者被谴责为泛神论或虚无主义的--是至关重要的。这项工作也对经典失语与当代不可说语言之间的关系产生了影响。赛尔斯挑战了解构主义者中广泛流传的许多关于失语的描述，以及中世纪神秘主义中关于中世纪思想和性别关系的一些常见概念。
This text examines a mode of mystical discourse, "apophasis", which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this study of apophasis in Greek, Christian and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it. This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition and theology. By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work aims to open the subject up for re-evaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers - claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic - are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists, as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.