Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Blaðsíða 184
Jón Ma. Asgeirsson
totalitarian in its representation of presence as it depends on supplements to
be known:
Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be
presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed
in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute make one forget the
vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plenitude of speech
whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements.66
Herein, then, smolders the danger: supplements are but additions or
replacements and can never take the place of the entity it attempts at making
complete. But the presence of speech in writing breaks down their opposite
nature without making them the same. It is in the very nature of differance61
that historical positivism is bound to fail as but a supplement consisting of
an ever ambiguous claim such as the one built on the metaphor of the cross
by Seeley.68
From speech to writing to the danger of writing, Derrida takes you on a
trip in which there are few certainties. The notable absence of a tale about
the death of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas69 like in the Synoptic Sayings
Source brings this element of uncertainty back into focus or, indeed, projects
this absence onto you the reader. It is in the absence of death that your death
becomes present. Yet, as long as you breath you continue to escape it, con-
tinue to seek meaning against your own destiny in these hidden words. When
asked about his own departure, which, incidently, may be the only real
reference to a death of Jesus in the Gospel ofThomas, he instructs his disciples
to follow the next mortal in line, namely, James the Just:
66 Ibid., 144.
67 The term applied by Derrida for an ever escaping meaning, cf. in particular his, Writing
and Difference (London & Henley: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1978) passim [L’écriture
et la différence (Paris: Minuit, 1967)]; “Différance,” in idem, Margins of Philosophy,
Translated with Additional Notes by A. Bass (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press, 1982) 1-27 [Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972)].
68 Pace Seeley who argues that the deconstructive method of Derrida in the end reveals a
certain historical positivism, op. cit. 1994, 159 n. 1. A position apparently favored by
Seeley against those who see Derrida’s method as pure subjectivism, ibid., 159-160.
69 Cf. Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel ofThomas and Jesus, Foundations and Facets, A. Y.
Collins et al. eds. (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1993) 230-231, n. 58. Patterson lists
three possible logia as possible references to the death of Jesus (logia 55, 66, and 104c)
all of which, as Patterson acknowledges, may be explained as secondary additions to the
original text of the gospel (logia 66 and 104c) or as metaphoric language not referring to
the death of Jesus at all (logion 55). Curiously, Patterson does not list logion 12—the least
obscure reference to the death of Jesus in the Gospel ofThomas.
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