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Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004

Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext

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No Views is Good Views: A Comparative Study of Nagarjuna’s Sunyata and Derrida’s Différance

 

by

 

Lara Braitstein

McGill University

[D]ifférance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form; and we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not, that is, everything; and consequently that it has neither existence nor essence.  It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent. (Derrida 6)

 

Whatever is dependently arisen is

Unceasing, unborn,

Unannihilated, not permanent,

Not coming, not going,

Without distinction, without identity,

And free from conceptual construction.

(Nagarjuna 2)

 

In contemporary Western philosophical and text critical circles, Jacques Derrida needs no introduction.  Nagarjuna’s name and work, on the other hand, are for the most part totally unheard of in those same milieux.  He is a 2nd century CE Indian Buddhist philosopher, held to be the founder of a school of Mahayana Buddhism known as Madhyamaka (the ‘middle way’ school).  Though any scholar of Indian or Buddhist philosophy would be conversant in his ideas, and though his work clearly challenges the same boundaries as that of Derrida, students of Western philosophy (through no fault of their own) may greet Nagarjuna’s name with no more acknowledgement than a confused shrug.

 

I will compare one aspect of Derrida’s “Différance” and one aspect of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, drawing both upon the texts themselves and on a few comparisons which have already been made between them. To broaden the scope more than that would more than likely diminish the capacity of my work to make a meaningful comparison. At the outset it is already critical to point out that the idea of a comparison in this context is an intense challenge, as its basis is a kind of refusal, a deferral which is not an absence: ‘différance’ Derrida calls it; ‘sunyata’ Nagarjuna called it nearly two millenia earlier.

My decision to compare Derrida’s différance specifically with Nagarjuna’s interpretation of sunyata is one born of an appreciation of the complexity and diversity of what is too often lumped into a single package labeled ‘Indian Thought’.  I hope that my treatment of Nagarjuna in the following paper will encourage readers unfamiliar with ‘Indian Thought’ to explore the long and nuanced history of ideas it entails. 

What follows will be a brief analysis of the refusals proper to Nagarjuna and Derrida, an examination of how Robert Magliola, David Loy and Harold Coward have brought the two together, and finally my own evaluation of whether this exercise has been (or ever could be) performed effectively.

 

SUNYATA

Buddhism, though it spans two and a half millenia and multiple cultural and linguistic contexts, can be said to have only one ultimate aim: the liberation of sentient beings from suffering (Sanskrit: duhkha).  Though the nature of ‘liberation’ is much contested, it is fair to characterize Buddhist thought as being guided broadly by that soteriological context.  What one might refer to, then, as Buddhist philosophy, epistemology or ontology, must be understood to be taking part within that soteriological framework.  The destruction of false or mistaken views is therefore necessary if one hopes to attain to real wisdom – the profound view which recognizes reality accurately as it is.

In the study of Buddhist thought, there are few concepts which cause greater distress to the aspiring student than sunyata[i].  It is translated variously as emptiness, voidness and devoidness, and is used to describe the nature of things, the way things ‘really’ are.  Fundamental to the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana, a school held to have been founded by Nagarjuna (circa 2nd century, CE), sunyata describes the essenceless, illusory nature of reality and is therefore the ultimate antidote to wrong views.  The following passage provides a useful summary of what is meant by ‘the illusory nature of conventional reality’:

A monk with defective eyesight may imagine that he sees flies in his begging bowl, and they have full reality for the percipient.  Though the flies are not real the illusion of flies is.  The Madhyamika philosophers tried to prove that all our experience of the phenomenal world is like that of the short-sighted monk, that all beings labour under the constant illusion of perceiving things where in fact there is only emptiness.  (Basham 157)

 

In other words, to draw on another common Buddhist metaphor, sentient beings are as though diseased, unable to correctly perceive reality.  Just as one who has a disease of the eye may see two moons in the sky, so we go about our lives developing relationships, habits (psychological, emotional, etc.) and views that are based entirely on our mistaken perception of reality.  Leaping ahead to the final conclusion of the Madhyamika Buddhist inquiry into reality, it is not simply that ‘we’ perceive ‘things’ incorrectly - it is all empty.  The perceiving ‘I’ and the ‘things’ - the very categories of self and other, subject and object - these are empty illusions.  This extends, naturally, to the realm of language and thought: “...every rational theory about the world is a theory about something unreal evolved by an unreal thinker with unreal thoughts” (Basham 157).  This extends, predictably, to theories about or any reification of emptiness - in fact, to any argument at all.

 

In Nagarjuna’s terms, synonymous with this emptiness which characterizes all of conventional reality is pratitya-samutpada, or dependent origination.  Dependent origination, while it is a doctrine which has been interpreted somewhat differently by various Buddhist schools, according to Nagarjuna and the tradition that followed him, “denotes the nexus between phenomena in virtue of which events depend on other events, composites depend on their parts, and so forth” (Garfield 91).  In plainer English, it describes interdependence: no-thing exists apart from its relationship with other ‘things’; there is no-thing which ‘is’ or exists independently.  What this amounts to ontologically, is that no-thing has a permanent or individual essence (svabhava), there is only this dependent origination. That absence of a lasting, individual essence is another way to understand sunyata.

Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (Root Verses on the Middle Way - to be referred to here on as MMK) is his most famous work, and is hailed widely as one of the most important philosophical texts of Buddhism.  It is composed of 27 chapters, each of which addresses a different topic. In a style typical of Indian philosophical treatises, he first states the opponent’s view, then proceeds to destroy it.  Pratitya-samutpada, where it is synonymous with emptiness, is central to Nagarjuna’s work.  Kenneth Inada writes:

            [It] is so basic with Nagarjuna that he will use it as the key concept in meeting ontological             reality “face to face,” so to speak.  It is the ruling concept underlying all the discussions in          the chapters of the Karika. (Inada 18)

 

In the MMK, Nagarjuna approaches everything from the perspective of pratitya-samutpada/sunyata.  He addresses motion, cause and effect, becoming and destruction, compounded phenomena, and some of the most basic tenets of Buddhism itself, like the Four Noble Truths and Nirvana - to name but a few topics.  Starting from the assumption that everything is empty, however, he does not take part in the adversarial process of debate - he attempts to undermine all views (drsti) by showing them to be, by their very nature (that is, entrenched in taking themselves and their referents to be real) false.  To hold views, any views, is to make a grave onto/logical error:

            So, because all entities are empty,

            Which views of permanence, etc., would occur,

            And to whom, when, why, and about what

            Would they occur at all?     (Nagarjuna 83; MMK XXVII: 29)

 

Claiming not to subscribe to or put forward any views of his own, Nagarjuna uses a method known in Sanskrit at Prasanga-vakya - in essence, the logic of reduction ad absurdum - to show how his opponents’ views make no sense because, when pushed to their logical extreme, they contradict not only their proper views, but also the ultimately empty nature of reality by asserting one thing over another and thus falling into the trap of duality.  The prasanga method consists in the use of a four-pronged set of possible perspectives (catuskoti) from which any concept or proposition can be viewed.  Those four possibilities are:  x is a; is not-a; both is a and is not-a; neither is a nor is not not-a.  While this may not help make the matter clearer, an illustration from the MMK will at least help demonstrate how Nagarjuna uses the catuskoti.  In the first chapter, Nagarjuna examines conditions (the conditions by means of which ‘things’ come into being, exist and cease).  The tack of his argument is both to show how coming into existence is logically impossible for one who believes that ‘things’ have essences or come about by means of causes, and that in any case whatever view about it one holds will necessarily entail an absurd conclusion about the very nature of ‘things’ and their existence.  He writes:

            Neither from itself nor from another

            Nor from both,

            Nor without a cause,

            Does anything whatever, anywhere arise. (Nagarjuna 3; MMK I: 1)

 

The above statement describes, according to Nagarjuna, the four possible means by which things come into existence.  They are all untenable if one accepts emptiness and absurd if one doesn’t. The entire chapter is devoted to demonstrating it.  For example, let’s examine the second possibility, “from another”.  If each ‘thing’ has a lasting, independently existing essence (svabhava), proposing that it arises from another thing which has its own lasting, independently existing essence is absurd.  This is because if those essences are independent from each other, they cannot have any essential relationship to each other. If they had the same essence they would be the same thing.  Having different essences, they are essentially different things and for that reason can have no causal or serial relationship to each other.  After showing the impossibility of any of the above four possibilities, Nagarjuna refrains from then proposing a view of his own.  He simply proves the impossibility of arising then leaves the reader to float in a state of profound insecurity and mistrust of the phenomenal world.  While my explanation does not do justice to Nagarjuna’s own nuanced and effective argument, I only hope to give readers a taste of how he works.  To go deeper in his thought and exactly how he destroys views, one must read the MMK oneself. 

Sunyata (where sunyata equals pratitya-samutpada) is not a view and not exactly a method.  Nor, one could argue is it not not either of these, nor both, nor neither.  It ‘is’ a correct onto/logical understanding which results in a process of destroying that which fails to comprehend it.  The MMK is Nagarjuna’s foray into demonstrating sunyata by showing how absurd it is to hold any view in the context of the true nature of things. 

 

DIFFÉRANCE

As Nagarjuna has done to Buddhists since the second century, so Jacques Derrida has deferred the understanding of aspiring critical theorists over the past three decades.  Différance is a word that Derrida created to capture the spirit of the ‘play’ he is trying to express.  Perhaps it is not fair to refer to it as a word - it ‘is’ a function, a force, as much as anything else.  The ‘a’ is an inaudible error.  Différance sounds just like différence - they are indistinguishable unless one passes through a text.[ii]  Différance, he explains, is a useful term, an efficacious tool which is both strategic (ordered, systematic but still functioning within language - without pretense of standing outside of language) and adventurous (the strategy leads to no goal) (Derrida, 1982, 7).  Throughout the essay, Derrida explores the polysemic potential of différance.  He explains that it contains both the notions of ‘to differ’, “to be not identical, to be other, discernable” (Derrida  8) - otherwise referred as ‘spacing’; and ‘to defer’:

            ...to temporize, to take recourse...in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of ‘desire’ or ‘will,’ and equally effects             this     

suspension in a mode that annuls or tempers its own effect.  (Derrida 8)

 

In other words, not only does différance connote both differing and deferring, it is felt in both space (‘spacing’) and time (‘temporization’), insinuated in everything but not exactly consisting in anything. 

 

Derrida cites Saussure’s philosophy of difference in language which illustrates how there can be efficient functionality, meaning and even understanding without there being ‘things’ to grasp in themselves:  “the elements of signification function due not to the compact force of their nuclei but rather to the network of oppositions that distinguishes them, and then relates them to one another” (Derrida 10).[iii]  In other words, a signified thing or concept is never present in and of itself (Derrida 11) and, in language, “there are only differences” (Derrida 11), the relations of words to each other.  Like a beginningless web where everything is connected to every other thing, where there are no ‘things’ apart from that interdependence, so, Derrida writes, that which is written as différance can be “the playing movement of that which ‘produces’...these differences, these effects of differance” (Derrida 11).  He designates it as the movement according to which any system of referral “is constituted...as a weave of differences”  (Derrida 12).

Having situated différance within this weave of differences, Derrida asks a crucial question:  “what differs?  who differs?  what is différance” (Derrida 14)?  By way of an answer, he questions the very notion of conscious presence, and the privilege granted to the present (Derrida 16) which are connoted by the “what” and the “who”.  In other words, he extends the horizon of his discussion of différance to include more than language and embrace (more than) ontological questioning as well.[iv]  Characterizing the understanding of Being that precedes him as comprehending only consciousness, or self-presence, he explains that it is actually only one mode or effect of Being and does not constitute it in its entirety.  He posits différance as a referring/deferring to Being to replace ‘presence’ - a referring/deferring which “no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity nor that of cause and effect, etc.”  (Derrida 16) - in other words, in différance there are no absolute identities, none of the absolute dualities (such as that of presence and absence) which characterize ‘presence’. 

 

DARING TO COMPARE

The parallels are perhaps obvious: sunyata and différance are dynamic, destabilizing forces that serve to undermine rigid patterns of thinking and habits of establishing meaning through relying on a perceived coherency inhering in the world and one’s experience of it.   These parallels have not gone unnoticed, and I believe it is useful here to examine some attempts at teasing them out. 

 

In Derrida on the Mend, Robert Magliola attempts to trace links between Derrida’s thought and, in this order, Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity.  His goals are lofty and noble: to “reinstate organic theories of philosophy, literary theory and criticism, and so on, while introducing a ‘differentialism’ which liberates and bears bliss” (Magliola ix).  This is a project which he was inspired to undertake when he “found that Derridean deconstruction and Nagarjunist Buddhism...resorted to the ‘same’ logical techniques”  (Magliola ix).  First, in establishing their sameness, Magliola explains that for Nagarjuna, sunyata “is not logocentric, not ‘absolute’ in such a sense (i.e., in the Derridean sense of being ‘closed’ within a signifier and signified of any kind...)”  (Magliola 92).  In other words, like Derrida’s différance, Nagarjuna’s sunyata ‘is’ beyond any binary is / is not.

In essence, his position is that Derrida and Nagarjuna are playing the same game, but that Nagarjuna takes it one important step further; a step which allows for growth, liberation and, most importantly, reengagement with the logocentric/conventional:

Nagarjuna’s Middle Path, the Way of the Between, tracks the Derridean trace, and goes “beyond Derrida” in that if frequents the “unheard-of-thought,” and also, “with one and the same stroke,” allows the reinstatement of the logocentric too. (Magliola  87)

 

Nagarjuna is not using sunyata as a means to eliminate illusions about conventional reality in order to reveal some non-discursive absolute; rather, he is revealing the empty nature of conventional reality.  What this amounts to in practical (and spiritual) terms, is the possibility of freely moving back and forth between conventional and ultimate, or “the logocentric and the differential” (Magliola 126), as Magliola puts it.  Magliola deems Nagarjuna’s ‘deconstruction’ superior because it can be applied as a ‘way’ to liberation, whereas Derrida’s can not.

In “The Clôture of Deconstruction: A Mahayana Critique of Derrida,” David Loy asserts that Nagarjuna and Derrida embarked on the same ‘deconstructive’ journey through their respective traditions.  Nagarjuna, he argues, does it better than Derrida because he does not stop the process with language:  “Suddenly, language/thought is no longer the means (as according to metaphysics) nor even the end (according to Heidegger and Derrida, in very different ways) but the problem itself” (Loy 61).  In other words, Loy argues for “an experience beyond language” (Loy 60) which Nagarjuna points to and Derrida misses. 

Ironically, while his conclusion is the same, the content of that conclusion contradicts that of Magliola.  He writes of Nagarjuna:

[He] realizes that his own deconstruction implies the refutation of all truth as well as error, including any truth that might be called his own...The “devoidness” (sunyata) of all language pleases him because he has another, nonconceptual, perspective, the experience of which is the goal of Buddhist deconstruction.  (Loy 76)

 

And of Derrida:

Derrida understands that all philosophy, including his, can only “reinscribe,” but, for him, the sole solution is to disseminate wildly in the hope of avoiding any fixation into a system that will subvert his insight.  One wonders what freedom can be found in such a need to keep ahead of yourself.  (Loy 75)

 

This characterization of both thinkers is fascinating because it is at once so similar and dissimilar to that of Magliola.  That following Nagarjuna’s mode of ‘deconstruction’ potentially results in spiritual development and inner peace is the reason for his superiority according to both commentators.  Loy, however, posits a kind of content to sunyata; he believes it to be a non-discursive ultimate which is outside of, or beyond conventional reality.  Derrida, on the other hand, is limited by his own deconstruction of “any proffered ‘transcendental signified’” (Loy, 1987, 59).  If there is nothing outside the text, the challenge to not succumb to asserting views is a rigorous one, a thankless task according to Loy, which affords no peace at all (Loy 75). 

 

Another comparative effort to which I will draw readers’ attention is Harold Coward’s chapter in Derrida and Indian Philosophy comparing Nagarjuna and Derrida.  Coward asserts that for Nagarjuna and all Buddhists, language is exclusively in the domain of conventional reality, that it has no purpose save as a would-be pointer to the ‘really real’.  He argues that Nagarjuna and all Buddhists have taken an extreme position vis-à-vis language: “language...is limited to conventional truth and cannot represent ultimate reality” (Coward 136).  In that respect, he argues, Derrida more skillfully takes the middle-path, in that he does not posit an absolutely real outside of language that language cannot take part in: “Derrida criticizes any view of language that privileges one opposite or extreme over the other” (Coward 136).

In his solid delineation of the categories ‘conventional’ and ‘ultimate’, as well as his casual placement of language in the former, he is guilty of attributing an extreme dualism to Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka Buddhism which is simply inaccurate.  There is evidence to contradict his analysis even within the MMK.  For example:

            There is not the slightest difference

            Between cyclic [conventional] existence and nirvana.

            There is not the slightest difference

            Between nirvana and cyclic existence.

 

            Whatever is the limit of nirvana,

            That is the limit of cyclic existence.

            There is not even the slightest difference between them,

            Or even the subtlest thing.  (Nagarjuna 75; MMK XXV: 19-20)

 

Though I disagree with his evaluation of Madhyamaka thought, Coward’s work is interesting to me because of the symmetry it affords this paper:  three different comparisons, presenting three completely different understandings of both authors. 

 

To recapitulate, there do appear to be numerous obvious points of comparison between Derrida and Nagarjuna: sunyata and différance; pratitya-samutpada and the ‘weave of differences’; the method of reducing all views to absurdity; and the intention of undermining the dualities which underlie all kind of debate or argumentation - which underlie, in fact, all views.  However, the point of each of the comparisons I reviewed can be pretty much reduced to one or more of the following: to use Derrida to explain Nagarjuna; to use Nagarjuna to explain Derrida; to demonstrate Nagarjuna’s superiority; to demonstrate Derrida’s superiority; to show that Derrida is not as original as he takes himself to be; or to stake a claim for Nagarjuna as a sophisticated philosopher, by showing that he predates our most current critical theory by about 2000 years.  The question, however, that emerged in my mind while considering all this is:  do these comparisons reflect the ignorance or the understanding of the authors who have dared to compare?

As with so many comparisons which cross cultural and contextual boundaries, the person who does such work is usually well versed in one unit of comparison and only generally acquainted with the other.  People have a tendency to use whatever is around them to deepen and further solidify their own views and understanding, never putting their understanding at stake; that which, in fact, most needs to be challenged.  Loy and Magliola are not exception to this generalization.  To illustrate with a concrete example, Loy is a Buddhologist who thinks that Nagarjuna is brilliant.  Noting some similarities between Nagarjuna and Derrida, he writes a paper which in the end concludes that there are similarities, Nagarjuna is still brilliant, and Derrida doesn’t take his work as far as it needs to go.  He does not appear to deepen his grasp of either Nagarjuna or Derrida.

To illustrate my point further, Harold Coward has obviously read Derrida closely and is fascinated by him.  Having noted some similarities between Derrida and Nagarjuna, he concludes that Derrida is still fascinating, and there are similarities between the two thinkers, but that Nagarjuna just doesn’t push his own theories to the limits.  This unfortunate pattern of entrenching oneself ever deeper in one’s own views is ironic and almost amusing in the context of the two thinkers being compared here. 

Something else that Nagarjuna and Derrida share, is the desire, the intent, of putting forward no view.  Both are grappling with the slippery issue of trying to put into words the end of discursive thought, and both take as their method not only the destruction of the views of their opponents, but also the rereading of those thinkers who may be said to be on the ‘same side’ (other Buddhists trying to understand emptiness, for Nagarjuna; and thinkers like Heidegger and Freud for Derrida).  By demonstrating how all views, just by virtue of their being views, necessarily contradict the ‘truth’ of sunyata /différance, both Nagarjuna and Derrida understand that a reader taking their work as a solid view will have made a grave error in understanding.  Nagarjuna writes:

            The victorious ones [Buddhas] have said

            That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.

            For whomever emptiness is a view,

            That one will accomplish nothing.  (Nagarjuna 36; MMK XIII: 8)

 

To hold emptiness as a view - to reify it or think of it as the essence of things - is to misunderstand it entirely.  As the goal of the MMK is to show how absurd it is to hold any view whatsoever, one may with confidence conflate sunyata with Nagarjuna’s position.  Therefore, whoever takes Nagarjuna’s work as proposing a view has done something wrong.  Derrida writes with more words and less drama:

What differs?  Who differs?  What is différance?  If we answered these questions before examining them as questions, before turning them back on themselves, and before suspecting their very form, including what seems most natural and necessary about them, we would immediately fall back into what we just disengaged ourselves from.  In effect, if we accepted the form of the question, in its meaning and its syntax (“what is?” “who is?” “who is it that?”), we would have to conclude that différance has been derived, has happened, is to be mastered and governed on the basis of the point a present being...a what, or a present being as a subject, a who.  (Derrida 14-15)

 

In other words, asking questions of différance as though it were a concept or view like any other, immediately situates the query in precisely the conceptual context différance is meant to undermine.  Put simply, “différance,” writes Derrida, “is not” (Derrida 21);  “It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority” (Derrida 22)[v] .

 

CONCLUSIONS

So, where does all this leave my paper?  By using Derrida and Nagarjuna side by side to show that they are both working to go beyond the discursive realities they emerged from in order to allow the freedom of holding no view, by allowing their methods to work in tandem, I believe (I hope!) I have given a small taste of what they share.  At the same time, I have tried to show that the work that precedes my own tends to fall into the trap of reifying both their positions in order to compare them; an exercise that erases both of them and accomplishes, really, very little.  Each author tries to show that the thinker he is more familiar with ‘does’ emptiness better, instead of using their respective methods to test the limits of their own theories.  This leads me to say that the authors I looked at who tried to compare Nagarjuna and Derrida, are all deferred away from sunyata /différance, and find themselves embedded in precisely that which both Nagarjuna and Derrida tried to destroy: conceptual debate.  This brings me to a quote from Nagarjuna:

            By a misperception of emptiness

            A person of little intelligence is destroyed,

            Like a snake incorrectly seized

            Or like a spell incorrectly cast. (Nagarjuna 68; MMK XXIV: 11)

 

I don’t want to exaggerate my opinions of Coward, Loy and Magliola - certainly none of them is ‘a person of little intelligence’ or destroyed by his errors.  Then again, perhaps that is the heart of the problem.  Emptiness and différance are supposed to be threatening, are supposed to force one to risk everything.  While, as Derrida writes, “one can always act as if it made no difference” (Derrida 3), to do so is an act of intellectual cowardice:

Not only is there no kingdom of différance,  but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom.  Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom.  And it is always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach différance with wishing to reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with a capital letter.  (Derrida 22)

 

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION…

It is perhaps an appropriate time to draw attention to another figure whose inability to put himself at risk calls to mind Nagarjuna’s warning about the fate of one who casts a spell incorrectly: Jacques Derrida.  The very limited comparison I have drawn between différance and sunyata at the very least demonstrates the striking parallels between the thought of Derrida and that of Nagarjuna.  That I have drawn attention to some of the many works that develop the comparison between the two also serves as a proof that many astute scholars and thinkers noticed the similarities long before I did.  Neither thinker exists in a vacuum.  Neither is anything less or more than a dependently-arisen product of his environment.  It is therefore safe to also draw the conclusion that not only the particular works, but also the philosophical, onto-theological  ambience of Nagarjuna is something that Derrida ought to feel compelled to explore in detail and to acknowledge.  That he refuses to do so constitutes an inappropriate deferral, one that indicates a couple of possibilities: either Derrida indeed studied enough ‘Indian Thought’ to inform his own ideas and feels it does not behoove him to own up to his (often superior) intellectual colleagues; or he did begin interrogating his epistemological and ontological ‘reality’ with some of the same tools quite on his own, but refuses to believe that his ‘tricks’ are not original.  The first possibility is, I believe, both unlikely and impossible to prove.  The second possibility seems an obvious choice.  In either case, the ‘kingdom’ being maintained is that of Eurocentrism, and curiously enough, by the supposedly revolutionary force of différance. 

Appropriately using the language of ‘difference’, Homi K. Bhabha explains in The Location of Culture how for the heirs of Eurocentrism, “the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation.”  He continues, “The Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot of strategy of a serial enlightenment” (Bhabha 31). Derrida’s deferral of Nagarjuna, whatever his reasons, indicates to me that he holds a belief that the history of ideas is the tracing of an evolution,  and that  perceived ‘otherness’ in terms of temporal, geographical and cultural space  designates  a ‘pre-‘ or some static source that can never do more than inform as a distant foundation the freshness of his ‘now.’  In other words, relegating Nagarjuna to the ‘ancient’ or to the ‘East’, and therefore to the obscurity of never being more than a curiosity, posits Derrida by default at the crest of critical thought.

Bhabha asks, “What is at stake in the naming of critical theory as ‘Western’?” “It is,” he answers, “a designation of institutional power and ideological Eurocentrism” (Bhabha 31). Being – well – alive, currently still publishing, and lecturing at western institutions in French and English, makes Derrida ‘present’ (in his own worldview) and therefore powerful.  If he were to alter his understanding of what constitutes ‘presence’, however, as historicity   (rather than the simplistic ‘not-yet-history’), his view of Nagarjuna  and a whole host of other thinkers would be forced to change.  Nagarjuna’s ideas, in fact, remain a vibrant, challenging and even revolutionary force not only in Buddhist Studies and Indology departments,  but in Mahayana Buddhist institutions around the world.  With an influence spanning some two thousand years and multiple cultural, geographic and linguistic contexts; as a figure revered in some contexts as a ‘second Buddha,’ it is embarrassing to imagine someone considering Nagarjuna as nothing more than an ancient ‘source’ for European thought.  Nagarjuna is current, he is contemporary, he is present.

It is now time for Derrida to put his ‘presence’ at risk.  He must himself be willing to be deferred, or placed sous-rature, by différance.  He writes,  “And it is always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach différance with wishing to reign,” not realizing that différance is reigning for him by proxy over the ‘kingdom’ of Eurocentrism.  

Unless one allows one’s engagement with a text to put at stake one’s most dearly held concepts - unless one put oneself at profound risk, one can approach (or exist as) neither Derrida nor Nagarjuna and expect to comprehend either. 



[i] Pronounced ‘shoon-ya-taw’

[ii] “Différance” was originally a speech addressed to the French Society of Philosophy, therefore this inaudible difference serve to force Derrida’s listeners into contact with writing.

[iii] Another interesting parallel can be found between Saussure’s philosophy of difference (and Derrida’s development thereof) and the apoha theory of language developed by Dignaga and Dharmakirti (respectively, 5th and 6th century CE Buddhist logicians) and further developed by such thinkers as Sakya Pandita (Tibet, 13th century).  Their theory of meaning holds that no term has an intrinsic referent but rather functions merely to distinguish that to which it can correctly be applied from that from which it cannot be correctly applied.  I refer readers to Richard Hayes’ Dignaga on the Interpretation of Signs (1988) and Georges Dreyfus’ Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti’s Philosophy and Its Tibetan Interpretations (1996) for a study of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist language theory, and to Eva Ottmer’s Finger, die auf den Mond zeigen: Eine Gegenuberstellung europaischer und buddhistischer Sprachtheorien am Beispiel Ferdinand de Saussures und Sakya Panditas (2003) for a comparative study of Indo-Tibetan and European language theory systems. 

[iv] Perhaps it would be more fitting to say that he extends the horizon of textuality to include Being itself:  Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological - ontotheological - reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology - philosophy - produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return”  (Derrida  6). 

[v] One may point out that both Nagarjuna and Derrida use language, concepts, etc. to put forward their respective non-views.  Both have answered the charge.  Derrida writes:  “I utilize such concepts, like many others, only for their strategic convenience and in order to undertake their deconstruction at the currently most decisive point” (12).  Nagarjuna, in the Vigraha-vyavartani - a text devoted to answering various opponents’ challenges to his work, writes:  “Suppose that a person, artificially created, should prevent another artificial person...[from doing something].  Of the same nature would be this negation” (quoted in Bhattacharya 108).  In other words, he acknowledges the emptiness of his own means, but asserts that this does not diminish their efficacy. 

 

 

 

References

 

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Betty, L. Stafford, 1983, “Nagarjuna’s Masterpiece – Logical, Mystical, Both, or

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Bhabha, Homi K., 1994, The Location of Culture.  London and New York: Routledge.

 

Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar, 1990, The Dialectical Method of Nagarjuna:

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Coward, Harold, 1990, Derrida and Indian Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press.

 

Derrida, Jacques, 1982 ‘Différance,’  Margins of Philosophy.  trans. Alan Bass.  Chicago: 

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Dreyfus, Georges, 1996,   Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti’s Philosophy and Its Tibetan

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Hayes, Richard, 1988, Dignaga on the Interpretation of Signs.  Dordrecht: Kluwer

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---.  1994, “Nagarjuna’s Appeal” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 22, 299-378

 

Huntington, C. W., 1989, The Emptiness of Emptiness, Honolulu:  University of Hawaii

         Press.

 

Inada, Kenneth, 1970, Nagarjuna: A Translation of his Mulamadhyamakakarika with an

         Introductory Essay, Tokyo: Hokuseido Press.

 

Loy, David, 1987, “The Clôture of Deconstruction: A Mahayana Critique of Derrida”

         International Philosophical Quarterly, 27, March, 59-80

 

---.  1984, “How not to criticize Nagarjuna: A Response to L. Stafford Betty” Philosophy

         East & West, 34, 437-445

 

---.  1993, “Indra’s Postmodern Net”  Philosophy East & West, 43, 481-510

 

Magliola, Robert, 1984, Derrida on the Mend, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.

 

Nagarjuna, 1995, “Mulamadhyamakakarika”  The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle

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Ottmer, Eva, 2003, Finger, die auf den Mond zeigen: Eine Gegenuberstellung

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