Art speaks without speaking . Art is able to say something without not saying it. It means where off we cannot speak, we speak in silence or we speak through art. Art takes us to the limit of language or a relation of speaking to its other. Art has a capacity to embody the truth. It speaks without speaking. Its speech is non-propositional and is already emptied of language. It is and ‘not saying’ art is speaking the truth. This ‘not saying’ brings art closer to apophatism.
In some way Art is the Other of philosophy and does not speak its language. But there are kataphatic, essentialist and positivist traces in art. Art is a place holder. It stands for something absent. It circumscribes as truth that is bared for us. Art makes it visible to us only as a kind of inversion or negation. Adorno calls it as mirror-writing of what is.
This is a negative knowledge and art still stays with the kataphatic traditions. But it does have the jouissance of apophatism. It is haunted by the Real of Lacan. It cannot fully empty its content. The Real of art and the art of the Real cross each other and what we have is a Real-ed art, art in search of its completion. This means art remains unstable and can cannot fully and eloquently stay in its ‘ not saying’.
Art in the manner Adorno sees belong to the negative theology of Christian tradition. It is called the via negativa . It takes us to the limit of theology as such tries to ‘ not say’ of God, accepting God as Other and as such remains ineffable and unknowable. God, therefore, is not reducible to human names and form. God exceeds all languages and concepts. Negative theology, thus, attempts to unlearn, unthink all positivists names and forms reductively applied to God.
Pseudo-Dionysious seems to point that when one God beyond human names and forms as the case of Mosses (He says Mosses being Human could the see God. He say the place where God is), one experience a Jouissance in which one’s subjectivity risks dissolution. Even when language fails to speak of God , we still try to ‘ not say’ and attempt to take our thinking and speaking to a new level. Hence, we have to say ‘where off we cannot speak we babble’.
Pseudo-Dionysious for instance, uses prefixes like super and writes super-divine , super good etc. He even uses unusual words like sun, star, fire , dew etc., trying to name the unnameable God. Thus, apophatism returns to qualified kataphatism in its attempt to ‘ not say’ God in the metaphysical terms as Martin Heidegger would tell us. We have to address our habitual ontotheological thinking
We can also see within this chain of thoughts, how the death of God of Fredrick Nietzsche has been appropriated by the death of God theologians. Doing this theology, language is not abandoned. Language is brought to an edge of collapse when it is placed side by side of a superabundance. This is where we approach the Real of the language and encounter the language of the Real. In fact , negative theology is the language of the Real. This is why language speaks of the Real/ God without speaking ( murmuring, babbling sighing, crying etc.,)
Negative theology speaks through its death. This tells us that it follows the principle of loss and not of profit or progress. Today, we can dynamically produce auto-destructive art (a apophatic art). We may also consider the body-without-organs of Antonin Artaud also as apophatic art. Such and art is dynamic unsaying art. We may use digital technology to produce such an art that undergoes its own destruction while it is performed. Can we think of outside such art beyond the digital realm?
Such an production of art is credited to Gustav Metzger. He is said to have made a public demonstration of an auto destructive art which involved painting a large glass-backed screen of nylon fabric with hydrochloric acid so that it is partially dissolved revealing Metzger himself and the Cathedral Church in the background. This self-destructive art forms follow the logic of loss linked to Jouissance. Metzger attempt to think the void through his art. Nearing the void is nearing fullness/ pleroma or superabundance. It is thinking about nothing. It tries to figure the unfigurable.
We do also reach the limits of language through intuition. Panikkar’s intuitive ‘Cosmotheandrism’ is plunge into the unfigurable and is also a leap into apophatic hermeneutics. It is through his ‘ comostheandric’ experience that Panikkar seems to arrive at a negative theology that lives on the edge of dissolution. This is why he could say that I left as a Christian, found myself to be a Hindu, became a Buddhist, all without ceasing to be a Christian’. His mystical experience brought him to the superabundance that he tried to speak without really speaking through his cosmotheandric intuition.
This tells us that following the Jouissance of Appohatism, we return enriched and are able to speak with an inundated tongue that is trying to ‘ not say’ superabundance. We turn to poetic kataphatism and speak a language that is produced by the experience of Jouissance of apophatism. It is within this Jouissance of apophatism that we may place the work of Francis Desa.