Abstract

If one would attempt to answer the Derridean question “How to avoid speaking?” one would be placing one’s self in the middle of the confrontations between deconstruction, phenomenology, and negative theology. Derrida discusses this troubling question: how could we speak in universal language of the secret experience of singularity, be it according to the religious mystical vision or to the silent phenomenological intuition? This paper accounts for the discussion firstly from the viewpoint of the deconstructivist critique that Derrida applies to negative theology and, secondly, from the viewpoint of his debate with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological enquiry. We show that Derrida’s point no longer credits the promise of an immediate presence beyond the universal intelligible structures of language, as is given in phenomenological intuition or in the vision of mystical revelation, and therefore places us upon a frail and undecidable border between the secret of our singular experience and universal language.