Robert Magliola
Assumption University of Thailand, Graduate School of Philosophy and Religion, Prof. of Philosophy and Religions, retired
Robert Magliola: Biographical Notes
--Born in New Jersey (U.S.A.), 1940, of immigrant parents: mother, Lombard (b. in Maccio, subseq. a 'frazione' of Villa Guardia, Italy); father, Piemontese (b. in Chivazza, subseq. a 'rione' of Biella, Italy).
--Bellarmine College, Plattsburgh, N.Y., Jesuit Seminary (N.Y. Province), Greek, Latin, French curriculum, 1958-1962.
--B.A. St. Joseph's College (Philadelphia, PA), 1963, English, French, Philosophy.
--Ph.D., Princeton University (NJ) on full Woodrow Wilson and NDEA Fellowships, 1970, Comparative Lit. with specialization in Philosophical and Literary Hermeneutics.
--Asst. Prof., Purdue University (Indiana), with teaching duties in Phil. and Lit., English, Romance Langs./Lits. (initiated Classical and Medieval Latin curriculum at Purdue U.), 1970-73.
--Assoc. Prof., ibid., and in Philosophy Dept. (Esthetics), 1974-1980.
--Full prof., ibid., 1981-1984.
--Distinguished chair prof., Grad. School, Tamkang U. (Taiwan), 1985-1987.
--National Science Council Prof., then Distinguished Chair Prof., Grad. School of Liberal Arts, National Taiwan U., 1988-1992.
--Prof. of Philosophy & Religious Studies, [Interfaith-] Grad. School of Philosophy & Religions, Assumption U. of Thailand (teaching duties in European Phil., Buddhist Philosophy, Catholic Theology), 1994-1999.
--8-Precept Theravada retreatant, Wat Mahathat, Bangkok, Thailand, under direction of Rev. Dr. Pithoon Vidhuro, Sept. 24-30, 1994; followed by Renewal meditation sessions at Wat Mahathat, 1995-1997.
--Organizer and chair, Buddhist and Christian delegation of Grad.School of Philosophy & Religions, Assumption U., to 5th International Conf. on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (Chicago), July 27-Aug.3, 1996; and to 6th International Conf. on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (Tacoma), Aug. 5-12, 2000.
--Active member of Society of Buddhist-Christian Studies, 1992-present.
--Prof. of Literature, National Changhua U. of Education (Taiwan), 1999-2002.
--Retreatant (closed retreat), Ling Jiou Mountain Wu Sheng Monastery, Kungliao, Taiwan, week of June 2nd, 2001.
--Retirement from full-time academic teaching at age 62.
--Interfaith advisor and retreatant, Lin Jiou Shan Buddhist Monastery's center, Manhattan, N.Y., 2002-2005; Interfaith advisor, Lin Jiou Shan Buddhist Monastery's center, Flushing, N.Y., 2012-2017; Interfaith advisor, Lin Jiou Shan Buddhist Center, Manhattan, N.Y., 2018 to present.
--Co-editor, Council for Research in Values & Philosophy, Catholic U. of America, 2002-2007.
--Seminar Assoc. [upon invitation of Robert Thurman], Columbia U. Seminar in Buddhist Studies (NYC), 2002-2011.
--Active member, Buddhist Scholars Information Network (H-Buddhism), 2008-present.
--Co-Editor, DES Journal (circulation 22,000+), official organ of Delta Epsilon Sigma National Catholic Scholastic Honor Society, 2008-2015; Editor-in-chief, 2016-present.
--Peer-reviewer in Comparative Theology (Buddhism and Continental Philosophy), for Harvard Theological Review (Harvard University), 2012-2013.
--Affiliate, Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique/Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (www.dimmmid.org), 2011- present.
--Affiliate, Istituto Vangelo e Zen [approved by Cong. for the Doctrine of the Faith), Padri Saveriani (Xaverian Fathers), Desio, Italy and Milano, Italy, 2012-present.
--Certified on March 27, 2013, by Rev. Luciano Mazzocchi, S.X., Director, Vangelo e Zen, to teach meditation "as transmitted in Zen, and in other Oriental forms" to "priests, Religious, and laity of the Catholic Church" in accordance with "the spirituality of dialogue promoted by Vatican Council II."
--I have authored four books in Hermeneutics, and in Buddhism/Continental Philosophy/Catholic theology; and many chapters in book-collections and articles in journals. For bibliographical information, see pertinent parts of my full CV at my "CV" link at this Academia.edu webpage. Also see the same CV for my activities in Catholic Studies and Catholic retreats; and for my further training in Buddhist meditation (both under Theravada teachers, and under Masters and certified teachers of the "Big Vehicle" [Mahayanist/Vajrayanist]).
--I presented on the use of the Vajrayana mode for the purposes of Catholic meditation, before a conference of the Pontifical Council for Culture (Cardinal Poupard, pres.) and F.A.B.C., Bangkok, Thailand, Feb. 2, 1999.
---PLEASE SEE THE WIKIPAGE MY FORMER GRADUATE STUDENTS AND COLLEAGUES MAINTAIN FOR ME AT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_magliola
Phone: 1-212-991-8621
Address: Delta Epsilon Sigma National Journal: Editorial Office
411 10th St., Apt. 2
Union City
New Jersey 07087-4113
--Born in New Jersey (U.S.A.), 1940, of immigrant parents: mother, Lombard (b. in Maccio, subseq. a 'frazione' of Villa Guardia, Italy); father, Piemontese (b. in Chivazza, subseq. a 'rione' of Biella, Italy).
--Bellarmine College, Plattsburgh, N.Y., Jesuit Seminary (N.Y. Province), Greek, Latin, French curriculum, 1958-1962.
--B.A. St. Joseph's College (Philadelphia, PA), 1963, English, French, Philosophy.
--Ph.D., Princeton University (NJ) on full Woodrow Wilson and NDEA Fellowships, 1970, Comparative Lit. with specialization in Philosophical and Literary Hermeneutics.
--Asst. Prof., Purdue University (Indiana), with teaching duties in Phil. and Lit., English, Romance Langs./Lits. (initiated Classical and Medieval Latin curriculum at Purdue U.), 1970-73.
--Assoc. Prof., ibid., and in Philosophy Dept. (Esthetics), 1974-1980.
--Full prof., ibid., 1981-1984.
--Distinguished chair prof., Grad. School, Tamkang U. (Taiwan), 1985-1987.
--National Science Council Prof., then Distinguished Chair Prof., Grad. School of Liberal Arts, National Taiwan U., 1988-1992.
--Prof. of Philosophy & Religious Studies, [Interfaith-] Grad. School of Philosophy & Religions, Assumption U. of Thailand (teaching duties in European Phil., Buddhist Philosophy, Catholic Theology), 1994-1999.
--8-Precept Theravada retreatant, Wat Mahathat, Bangkok, Thailand, under direction of Rev. Dr. Pithoon Vidhuro, Sept. 24-30, 1994; followed by Renewal meditation sessions at Wat Mahathat, 1995-1997.
--Organizer and chair, Buddhist and Christian delegation of Grad.School of Philosophy & Religions, Assumption U., to 5th International Conf. on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (Chicago), July 27-Aug.3, 1996; and to 6th International Conf. on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (Tacoma), Aug. 5-12, 2000.
--Active member of Society of Buddhist-Christian Studies, 1992-present.
--Prof. of Literature, National Changhua U. of Education (Taiwan), 1999-2002.
--Retreatant (closed retreat), Ling Jiou Mountain Wu Sheng Monastery, Kungliao, Taiwan, week of June 2nd, 2001.
--Retirement from full-time academic teaching at age 62.
--Interfaith advisor and retreatant, Lin Jiou Shan Buddhist Monastery's center, Manhattan, N.Y., 2002-2005; Interfaith advisor, Lin Jiou Shan Buddhist Monastery's center, Flushing, N.Y., 2012-2017; Interfaith advisor, Lin Jiou Shan Buddhist Center, Manhattan, N.Y., 2018 to present.
--Co-editor, Council for Research in Values & Philosophy, Catholic U. of America, 2002-2007.
--Seminar Assoc. [upon invitation of Robert Thurman], Columbia U. Seminar in Buddhist Studies (NYC), 2002-2011.
--Active member, Buddhist Scholars Information Network (H-Buddhism), 2008-present.
--Co-Editor, DES Journal (circulation 22,000+), official organ of Delta Epsilon Sigma National Catholic Scholastic Honor Society, 2008-2015; Editor-in-chief, 2016-present.
--Peer-reviewer in Comparative Theology (Buddhism and Continental Philosophy), for Harvard Theological Review (Harvard University), 2012-2013.
--Affiliate, Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique/Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (www.dimmmid.org), 2011- present.
--Affiliate, Istituto Vangelo e Zen [approved by Cong. for the Doctrine of the Faith), Padri Saveriani (Xaverian Fathers), Desio, Italy and Milano, Italy, 2012-present.
--Certified on March 27, 2013, by Rev. Luciano Mazzocchi, S.X., Director, Vangelo e Zen, to teach meditation "as transmitted in Zen, and in other Oriental forms" to "priests, Religious, and laity of the Catholic Church" in accordance with "the spirituality of dialogue promoted by Vatican Council II."
--I have authored four books in Hermeneutics, and in Buddhism/Continental Philosophy/Catholic theology; and many chapters in book-collections and articles in journals. For bibliographical information, see pertinent parts of my full CV at my "CV" link at this Academia.edu webpage. Also see the same CV for my activities in Catholic Studies and Catholic retreats; and for my further training in Buddhist meditation (both under Theravada teachers, and under Masters and certified teachers of the "Big Vehicle" [Mahayanist/Vajrayanist]).
--I presented on the use of the Vajrayana mode for the purposes of Catholic meditation, before a conference of the Pontifical Council for Culture (Cardinal Poupard, pres.) and F.A.B.C., Bangkok, Thailand, Feb. 2, 1999.
---PLEASE SEE THE WIKIPAGE MY FORMER GRADUATE STUDENTS AND COLLEAGUES MAINTAIN FOR ME AT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_magliola
Phone: 1-212-991-8621
Address: Delta Epsilon Sigma National Journal: Editorial Office
411 10th St., Apt. 2
Union City
New Jersey 07087-4113
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Books by Robert Magliola
ABSTRACT:
This is the first book (1984) comparing in detail Nagarjuna’s thought and Derridean deconstruction. The book’s title involves a pun: Derrida is astride the “mend” (whereby “logocentrists” posit holistic formations) in order to unravel it, but—as he always readily granted himself—he must use logic (a “logocentric” operation) to do so. Deconstruction deploys logic against itself. _Derrida on the Mend_ finds in the proto- Madhyamikan Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (150-250 C.E.) a Buddhist solution to Derrida’s quandary: the Madhyamikan “Two Truths” permit deconstruction to proceed while enabling a relative validation of holism. _Derrida on the Mend_ has Four Parts and an Appendix. Part One provides a lengthy “reading” of Derrida’s first (and clearly most “deconstructive”) phase.. Part Two locates a recension/redaction of Heideggerian thought at a site Magliola calls “centric mysticism” (differing very much from the “differential mysticism” that Magliola goes on to explain later in the book). Part Three presents a full-scale analysis of Nagarjuna’s deconstructive techniques, and then goes on to pose a “differential Buddhism” deriving from Madhyamaka and contrasting sharply with the “centric Buddhisms” founded directly or indirectly on Yogacara (D. T. Suzuki’s version of Zen, for example). Part Four, on Christian theology, and more specifically, on Catholic doctrinal formulations, invokes Derridean “pure negative reference” in order to vindicate a Rahnerian theology of the Most Holy Trinity (over against an “Augustinian” or “logocentric” Trinitarianism). Magliola explicates in detail how seemingly arcane distinctions such as the “virtual” (rather than “real”) status of the “active spiration” of the Holy Spirit, reveal Catholic orthodoxy to be deconstructive rather than holistic. The Church’s "relationis oppositio" clause thwarts, for example, a logocentric reading of the Divine Unity, i.e., a reading of the Unity undertood as the “common ground” of the three Hypostases. The book’s Appendix, in two chapters, extends Derridean notions to esthetics and literary theory: the first chapter deconstructs both the “humanistic pluralism” of M. H. Abrams and the “Analytic esthetics” of Morris Weitz; the second chapter enumerates many deconstructive maneuvers/strategies useful in “literary criticism,” but exposes as latently “logocentric” several of the deconstructive scenarios associated with J. Hillis Miller’s “deconstructive” literary theory and practice. The book’s hard cover edition features on its dust jacket high commendations from such influential scholars as Raimundo Pannikar (interreligious dialogue); John H. Nota, S.J. (Catholic theology); and Frederick Streng (Madhyamaka Buddhism); among others. It has been reviewed in 18 journals, cited in more than 33 books, and referenced in both Protevi’s _Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy_ and Hart’s _Derrida and Religion_.
ABSTRACT:
Part One describes the practical criticism of the Geneva School and of the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger. It also infers literary theory from this practice and then compares such theory with the tenets of Parisian Structuralism. Among the Geneva critics treated are Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Rousset, and Jean Starobinski. The influence of Edmund Husserl on these critics receives special attention. Elaborate background information is provided so that Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Binswanger may be discussed. Part Two critiques phenomenological literary theory and provides the only English-language commentary [as of 1977] on Roman Ingarden’s _Das literarische Kunstwerk_ and Mikel Dufrenne’s _Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique_. It is demonstrated that Dufrenne’s work suffers from a flaw: vacillation between a Cartesian and a Heideggerian epistemology. Ultimately, Part Two is a comparative study of four phenomenologists—Husserl, Ingarden, Dufrenne, Heidegger—and one non-phenomenologist, E. D. Hirsch. Husserl, Heidegger, and Hirsch are addressed specific questions. Ingarden and Dufrenne are asked the same questions “en passant,” as part of the more global treatments of their respective books. The questions asked are crucial ones for any theorist of literature. What is meaning? When a text can present several senses, which is the valid sense? What does one do in the face of multiple meanings? What if a word projects contradictory senses? The last chapter offers an original Heideggerian solution to these dilemmas.
This book was the first book-length text explicating, for the English-speaking world, both French and Germanic phenomenology in their relations to literary theory and criticism. The book was reviewed in more than 20 academic journals; and cited in key reference works such as Orr’s _Dictionary of Critical Theory_ and Sepp and Embree’s _Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics_. Some commendations from academic specialists: “The best account of this subject available in English... His chapter on the confrontation between phenomenology and Parisian structuralism will be of interest to all students of structuralist literary criticism” (-Robert Scholes); “[Magliola] has performed a task left begging by philosophers . . . “ (-Eugene Kaelin); “The book is remarkable for the range of theories discussed [and] its ability to cope with the great difficulties in clarifying some of these ideas” (-Monroe Beardsley); “[This] work is distinguished by thoroughness and a fine intelligence” (-Ralph Freedman); “[It] is a youthful book . . . courageous and takes bold stands . . . meticulously researched and displays its scholarship with conspicuous flourishes” (_Philosophy and Literature_); “ . . . of significant worth to philosophers and especially aestheticians” (-Warren Steinkraus in _Philosophy and Phenomenological Research_); “It is an understatement to say that the book fulfills a glaring need” (-W. Wolfgang Holdheim in _Diacritics_).
ABSTRACT:
This is the first book (1984) comparing in detail Nagarjuna’s thought and Derridean deconstruction. The book’s title involves a pun: Derrida is astride the “mend” (whereby “logocentrists” posit holistic formations) in order to unravel it, but—as he always readily granted himself—he must use logic (a “logocentric” operation) to do so. Deconstruction deploys logic against itself. _Derrida on the Mend_ finds in the proto-Madhyamikan Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (150-250 C.E.) a Buddhist solution to Derrida’s quandary: the Madhyamikan “Two Truths” permit deconstruction to proceed while enabling a relative validation of holism. _Derrida on the Mend_ has Four Parts and an Appendix. Part One provides a lengthy “reading” of Derrida’s first (and clearly most “deconstructive”) phase.. Part Two locates a recension/redaction of Heideggerian thought at a site Magliola calls “centric mysticism” (differing very much from the “differential mysticism” that Magliola goes on to explain later in the book). Part Three presents a full-scale analysis of Nagarjuna’s deconstructive techniques, and then goes on to pose a “differential Buddhism” deriving from Madhyamaka and contrasting sharply with the “centric Buddhisms” founded directly or indirectly on Yogacara (D. T. Suzuki’s version of Zen, for example). Part Four, on Christian theology, and more specifically, on Catholic doctrinal formulations, invokes Derridean “pure negative reference” in order to vindicate a Rahnerian theology of the Most Holy Trinity (over against an “Augustinian” or “logocentric” Trinitarianism). Magliola explicates in detail how seemingly arcane distinctions such as the “virtual” (rather than “real”) status of the “active spiration” of the Holy Spirit, reveal Catholic orthodoxy to be deconstructive rather than holistic. The Church’s "relationis oppositio" clause thwarts, for example, a logocentric reading of the Divine Unity, i.e., a reading of the Unity undertood as the “common ground” of the three Hypostases. The book’s Appendix, in two chapters, extends Derridean notions to esthetics and literary theory: the first chapter deconstructs both the “humanistic pluralism” of M. H. Abrams and the “Analytic esthetics” of Morris Weitz; the second chapter enumerates many deconstructive maneuvers/strategies useful in “literary criticism,” but exposes as latently “logocentric” several of the deconstructive scenarios associated with J. Hillis Miller’s “deconstructive” literary theory and practice. The book’s hard cover edition features on its dust jacket high commendations from such influential scholars as Raimundo Pannikar (interreligious dialogue); John H. Nota, S.J. (Catholic theology); and Frederick Streng (Madhyamaka Buddhism); among others. It has been reviewed in 18 journals, cited in more than 33 books, and referenced in both Protevi’s _Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy_ and Hart’s _Derrida and Religion_.
ABSTRACT:
This book, by a specialist in French deconstruction, Buddhism, and Catholic Christian theology, written after many years in the Far East, celebrates both Buddhist and Christian cultures and the often negative but nonetheless fertile differentials between them. Throughout, the scaffolding of Magliola’s text is Jacques Derrida’s demonstration that ‘samenesses are appointed by irreducible differences that found them’. The book’s Part One is a specimen of postmodern “Life-Writing” cast in the mode of Derridean stylistique: the textual body is contrived to deconstruct itself, i.e., the sememes, morphemes, phones, floating graphic traits, etc., de/constitute themselves and each other. In Magliola’ work, such self-deconstruction is intended to serve Catholicism’s teaching that all existence is contingent, i.e., ultimately dependent on God who is “Unconditioned in se”; and it is intended to serve the Mahayanist Buddhist teaching that the true nature of all existents is the dharmakāya (the Unconditioned, the Emptiness beyond all ‘determinations’). The book’s Part Two has four sections. The first section analyzes the intricacies of the Prāsaṅgika versus Yogācāra-Svātantrika debate, and argues that the Prāsaṅgika better intersects with Derrida’s deconstructive project. Here Magliola also challenges some interpretations associated with Harold Coward and C.W. Huntington, Jr., respectively. The second section analyzes in detail Jacques Derrida’s very influential “Comment ne pas parler--Dénégations” (the longer version, in French, of his earlier lecture in English, “How to Avoid Speaking”). The French version is considered one of Derrida’s most probing ‘intersections’ of deconstruction and religion. Magliola also addresses, in this section, the question of “how much Derrida had really changed” between his early phase and what can be called his ‘middle phase’. The third section poses Magliola’s ‘differential’ approach to the Buddhist-Christian (and specifically Buddhist-Catholic) dialogue. Magliola challenges Masao Abe’s influential application of Buddhism’s “Two Truths” (i.e., saṃsāra is nirvāṇa, and vice versa) to God’s creative act, by demonstrating that Abe’s version of the Two Truths is Yogacaric, and thereby, “holistic” in Derrida’s pejorative sense. Magliola argues that a Prasangikan version of the Two Truths is deconstructive of such holism, and better matches Catholicism’s non-holistic theology of both the Holy Trinity and the creative act. The fourth section re-presents and then develops, in detail, several aspects of the Trinitarian theology propounded in Magliola’s well-known Derrida on the Mend (Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; 2000- ), Part Four, where he proposes an orthodox but differential interpretation of the Council of Florence’s relationis oppositio clause.
Book Reviews by Robert Magliola
Magliola highly praises Lefebure's book as a trove of historical information. He argues, however, that the book has some significant flaws. Firstly, it fails to acknowledge that U.S. Catholics tend to absorb the patriotic "exceptionalism" of their countrymen: Catholic spokespeople often "talk down" to the global Catholic population (and to non-Christian foreign cultures). Secondly, the book fails to face the bitterness of the divide among U.S. Catholics (pointed examples are cited). Magliola explains how this divide affects interfaith dialogue. Thirdly, Magliola shows that the quest for a "common ground" remains the "Holy Grail" for Catholic dialogists (he cites Lefebure's book for several prominent examples) but he goes on to show, quoting again from Lefebure's book, that these prominent dialogists admit failure. Does it not make more sense, Magliola asks, to grant that the founding doctrines of diverse religions contradict each other, but that the positive effects these doctrinal opposites generate are often very similar? The Zen capping phrase, "The marks are on the balance arm, not on the scale pan" is directly relevant: pure difference determines the convergence on the balance arm! In short, if one follows Derridean practice, comparing "samenesses" generated by pure difference, interfaith dialogue can bear fruit (but Derrida is systematically excluded from Lefebure's book).
Abstract of Magliola's Review: Olson compares many French postmodernist philosophers on the one hand and a large group of Zen/Chan Buddhist thinkers/practitioners on the other. He studies French postmodernism via Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard; and he studies Zen/Chan Buddhism via Dogen, Hakuin, Nishitani, many Chinese Chanists, and some Indian Buddhists. Chapters are arranged according to topoi such as "Language, Disruption, and Play," "Ways of Thinking," "The Body," etc. Because Olson's book assembles the "key ideas" of so many French postmodernists, and their respective similarities/dissimilarities via-à-vis Zen Buddhism, it serves an undergraduate readership well enough. The problem is that the book, taking on so many figures--each of which is unique and complicated--too often performs like a crib sheet in the "CliffsNotes" manner, reducing so-called "key ideas" to misleading clichés. Olson is at his best when he gives an author some length of attention, as he does with Dogen. Rather than reducing his review to a point-by-point critique of all of Olson's interpretations, Magliola uses the technique that hermeneuts call "Auerbachian découpage": a close analysis of several passages that can be taken as indicative of an author's (in this case, Olson's) thought-processes in general. Suchwise, Magliola focuses on three interpretations from Olson's book-- one of Derrida, one of a Chinese gong'an (kung-an), and one of Lacan. The Derridean text Olson cites, from _Writing and Difference_, is-- "Speech is stolen: since it is stolen from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative." Magliola argues that Olson's interpretation of this passage exposes readers to the mistaken assumption that Derrida denies all instrumentality to speech. Rather, Derrida is positing that speech is always undercut by an inevitable drift: this does not mean most of intention fails to "get through." It means, instead, that an author's intention never reaches its "purpose" in any absolute sense. Olson next undergoes a comparison of Derrida's "thief" to Case 85 of Chinese Buddhism's _Pi- yen-lu_ (_Blue Cliff Record_). Olson claims that in this famous gong'an the monk's "gesture of fright" enables the hermit "to steal the speech of the monk." Magliola disagrees, arguing that it is the "tiger's roar" that the hermit steals (from tigers), in order to teach the monk that "all phenomenal forms are interchangeable" since ultimately "all phenomena are really empty." The third focus of Magliola's critique is Olson's interpretation of the Lacanian "gaze." Olson rightly treats the "gaze" as a demonstration of the intersubjective nature of desire, but misses an opportunity when he merely declares that intersubjective desire is, from the Buddhist perspective, a "condition of unenlightenment." Why not, instead, appropriate Lacan's "intersubjective nature of desire" so that it positively abets Buddhist teaching? One can appropriate how Lacan organizes this intersubjectivity, namely, as an "empty chain of signifiers." Magliola goes on to "recruit" Lacan's well-known interpretation of Poe's short story _The Purloined Letter_ and to apply it to the _Pi-yen-lu_'s Case 85. Magliola closes by defending his own book _Derrida on the Mend_: Olson charges that the book equates Derrida's différance and Buddhist "emptiness," whereas the book--and Magliola supplies the textual references-- expressly emphasizes how Buddhist "emptiness" differs from différance because, among other reasons, it comports enlightened cognition.
KEYWORDS: Representational art postmodernist philosophy Derrida Lacan Chinese gong'an Japanese koan
ABSTRACT:
This is the first book (1984) comparing in detail Nagarjuna’s thought and Derridean deconstruction. The book’s title involves a pun: Derrida is astride the “mend” (whereby “logocentrists” posit holistic formations) in order to unravel it, but—as he always readily granted himself—he must use logic (a “logocentric” operation) to do so. Deconstruction deploys logic against itself. _Derrida on the Mend_ finds in the proto- Madhyamikan Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (150-250 C.E.) a Buddhist solution to Derrida’s quandary: the Madhyamikan “Two Truths” permit deconstruction to proceed while enabling a relative validation of holism. _Derrida on the Mend_ has Four Parts and an Appendix. Part One provides a lengthy “reading” of Derrida’s first (and clearly most “deconstructive”) phase.. Part Two locates a recension/redaction of Heideggerian thought at a site Magliola calls “centric mysticism” (differing very much from the “differential mysticism” that Magliola goes on to explain later in the book). Part Three presents a full-scale analysis of Nagarjuna’s deconstructive techniques, and then goes on to pose a “differential Buddhism” deriving from Madhyamaka and contrasting sharply with the “centric Buddhisms” founded directly or indirectly on Yogacara (D. T. Suzuki’s version of Zen, for example). Part Four, on Christian theology, and more specifically, on Catholic doctrinal formulations, invokes Derridean “pure negative reference” in order to vindicate a Rahnerian theology of the Most Holy Trinity (over against an “Augustinian” or “logocentric” Trinitarianism). Magliola explicates in detail how seemingly arcane distinctions such as the “virtual” (rather than “real”) status of the “active spiration” of the Holy Spirit, reveal Catholic orthodoxy to be deconstructive rather than holistic. The Church’s "relationis oppositio" clause thwarts, for example, a logocentric reading of the Divine Unity, i.e., a reading of the Unity undertood as the “common ground” of the three Hypostases. The book’s Appendix, in two chapters, extends Derridean notions to esthetics and literary theory: the first chapter deconstructs both the “humanistic pluralism” of M. H. Abrams and the “Analytic esthetics” of Morris Weitz; the second chapter enumerates many deconstructive maneuvers/strategies useful in “literary criticism,” but exposes as latently “logocentric” several of the deconstructive scenarios associated with J. Hillis Miller’s “deconstructive” literary theory and practice. The book’s hard cover edition features on its dust jacket high commendations from such influential scholars as Raimundo Pannikar (interreligious dialogue); John H. Nota, S.J. (Catholic theology); and Frederick Streng (Madhyamaka Buddhism); among others. It has been reviewed in 18 journals, cited in more than 33 books, and referenced in both Protevi’s _Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy_ and Hart’s _Derrida and Religion_.
ABSTRACT:
Part One describes the practical criticism of the Geneva School and of the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger. It also infers literary theory from this practice and then compares such theory with the tenets of Parisian Structuralism. Among the Geneva critics treated are Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Rousset, and Jean Starobinski. The influence of Edmund Husserl on these critics receives special attention. Elaborate background information is provided so that Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Binswanger may be discussed. Part Two critiques phenomenological literary theory and provides the only English-language commentary [as of 1977] on Roman Ingarden’s _Das literarische Kunstwerk_ and Mikel Dufrenne’s _Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique_. It is demonstrated that Dufrenne’s work suffers from a flaw: vacillation between a Cartesian and a Heideggerian epistemology. Ultimately, Part Two is a comparative study of four phenomenologists—Husserl, Ingarden, Dufrenne, Heidegger—and one non-phenomenologist, E. D. Hirsch. Husserl, Heidegger, and Hirsch are addressed specific questions. Ingarden and Dufrenne are asked the same questions “en passant,” as part of the more global treatments of their respective books. The questions asked are crucial ones for any theorist of literature. What is meaning? When a text can present several senses, which is the valid sense? What does one do in the face of multiple meanings? What if a word projects contradictory senses? The last chapter offers an original Heideggerian solution to these dilemmas.
This book was the first book-length text explicating, for the English-speaking world, both French and Germanic phenomenology in their relations to literary theory and criticism. The book was reviewed in more than 20 academic journals; and cited in key reference works such as Orr’s _Dictionary of Critical Theory_ and Sepp and Embree’s _Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics_. Some commendations from academic specialists: “The best account of this subject available in English... His chapter on the confrontation between phenomenology and Parisian structuralism will be of interest to all students of structuralist literary criticism” (-Robert Scholes); “[Magliola] has performed a task left begging by philosophers . . . “ (-Eugene Kaelin); “The book is remarkable for the range of theories discussed [and] its ability to cope with the great difficulties in clarifying some of these ideas” (-Monroe Beardsley); “[This] work is distinguished by thoroughness and a fine intelligence” (-Ralph Freedman); “[It] is a youthful book . . . courageous and takes bold stands . . . meticulously researched and displays its scholarship with conspicuous flourishes” (_Philosophy and Literature_); “ . . . of significant worth to philosophers and especially aestheticians” (-Warren Steinkraus in _Philosophy and Phenomenological Research_); “It is an understatement to say that the book fulfills a glaring need” (-W. Wolfgang Holdheim in _Diacritics_).
ABSTRACT:
This is the first book (1984) comparing in detail Nagarjuna’s thought and Derridean deconstruction. The book’s title involves a pun: Derrida is astride the “mend” (whereby “logocentrists” posit holistic formations) in order to unravel it, but—as he always readily granted himself—he must use logic (a “logocentric” operation) to do so. Deconstruction deploys logic against itself. _Derrida on the Mend_ finds in the proto-Madhyamikan Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (150-250 C.E.) a Buddhist solution to Derrida’s quandary: the Madhyamikan “Two Truths” permit deconstruction to proceed while enabling a relative validation of holism. _Derrida on the Mend_ has Four Parts and an Appendix. Part One provides a lengthy “reading” of Derrida’s first (and clearly most “deconstructive”) phase.. Part Two locates a recension/redaction of Heideggerian thought at a site Magliola calls “centric mysticism” (differing very much from the “differential mysticism” that Magliola goes on to explain later in the book). Part Three presents a full-scale analysis of Nagarjuna’s deconstructive techniques, and then goes on to pose a “differential Buddhism” deriving from Madhyamaka and contrasting sharply with the “centric Buddhisms” founded directly or indirectly on Yogacara (D. T. Suzuki’s version of Zen, for example). Part Four, on Christian theology, and more specifically, on Catholic doctrinal formulations, invokes Derridean “pure negative reference” in order to vindicate a Rahnerian theology of the Most Holy Trinity (over against an “Augustinian” or “logocentric” Trinitarianism). Magliola explicates in detail how seemingly arcane distinctions such as the “virtual” (rather than “real”) status of the “active spiration” of the Holy Spirit, reveal Catholic orthodoxy to be deconstructive rather than holistic. The Church’s "relationis oppositio" clause thwarts, for example, a logocentric reading of the Divine Unity, i.e., a reading of the Unity undertood as the “common ground” of the three Hypostases. The book’s Appendix, in two chapters, extends Derridean notions to esthetics and literary theory: the first chapter deconstructs both the “humanistic pluralism” of M. H. Abrams and the “Analytic esthetics” of Morris Weitz; the second chapter enumerates many deconstructive maneuvers/strategies useful in “literary criticism,” but exposes as latently “logocentric” several of the deconstructive scenarios associated with J. Hillis Miller’s “deconstructive” literary theory and practice. The book’s hard cover edition features on its dust jacket high commendations from such influential scholars as Raimundo Pannikar (interreligious dialogue); John H. Nota, S.J. (Catholic theology); and Frederick Streng (Madhyamaka Buddhism); among others. It has been reviewed in 18 journals, cited in more than 33 books, and referenced in both Protevi’s _Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy_ and Hart’s _Derrida and Religion_.
ABSTRACT:
This book, by a specialist in French deconstruction, Buddhism, and Catholic Christian theology, written after many years in the Far East, celebrates both Buddhist and Christian cultures and the often negative but nonetheless fertile differentials between them. Throughout, the scaffolding of Magliola’s text is Jacques Derrida’s demonstration that ‘samenesses are appointed by irreducible differences that found them’. The book’s Part One is a specimen of postmodern “Life-Writing” cast in the mode of Derridean stylistique: the textual body is contrived to deconstruct itself, i.e., the sememes, morphemes, phones, floating graphic traits, etc., de/constitute themselves and each other. In Magliola’ work, such self-deconstruction is intended to serve Catholicism’s teaching that all existence is contingent, i.e., ultimately dependent on God who is “Unconditioned in se”; and it is intended to serve the Mahayanist Buddhist teaching that the true nature of all existents is the dharmakāya (the Unconditioned, the Emptiness beyond all ‘determinations’). The book’s Part Two has four sections. The first section analyzes the intricacies of the Prāsaṅgika versus Yogācāra-Svātantrika debate, and argues that the Prāsaṅgika better intersects with Derrida’s deconstructive project. Here Magliola also challenges some interpretations associated with Harold Coward and C.W. Huntington, Jr., respectively. The second section analyzes in detail Jacques Derrida’s very influential “Comment ne pas parler--Dénégations” (the longer version, in French, of his earlier lecture in English, “How to Avoid Speaking”). The French version is considered one of Derrida’s most probing ‘intersections’ of deconstruction and religion. Magliola also addresses, in this section, the question of “how much Derrida had really changed” between his early phase and what can be called his ‘middle phase’. The third section poses Magliola’s ‘differential’ approach to the Buddhist-Christian (and specifically Buddhist-Catholic) dialogue. Magliola challenges Masao Abe’s influential application of Buddhism’s “Two Truths” (i.e., saṃsāra is nirvāṇa, and vice versa) to God’s creative act, by demonstrating that Abe’s version of the Two Truths is Yogacaric, and thereby, “holistic” in Derrida’s pejorative sense. Magliola argues that a Prasangikan version of the Two Truths is deconstructive of such holism, and better matches Catholicism’s non-holistic theology of both the Holy Trinity and the creative act. The fourth section re-presents and then develops, in detail, several aspects of the Trinitarian theology propounded in Magliola’s well-known Derrida on the Mend (Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; 2000- ), Part Four, where he proposes an orthodox but differential interpretation of the Council of Florence’s relationis oppositio clause.
Magliola highly praises Lefebure's book as a trove of historical information. He argues, however, that the book has some significant flaws. Firstly, it fails to acknowledge that U.S. Catholics tend to absorb the patriotic "exceptionalism" of their countrymen: Catholic spokespeople often "talk down" to the global Catholic population (and to non-Christian foreign cultures). Secondly, the book fails to face the bitterness of the divide among U.S. Catholics (pointed examples are cited). Magliola explains how this divide affects interfaith dialogue. Thirdly, Magliola shows that the quest for a "common ground" remains the "Holy Grail" for Catholic dialogists (he cites Lefebure's book for several prominent examples) but he goes on to show, quoting again from Lefebure's book, that these prominent dialogists admit failure. Does it not make more sense, Magliola asks, to grant that the founding doctrines of diverse religions contradict each other, but that the positive effects these doctrinal opposites generate are often very similar? The Zen capping phrase, "The marks are on the balance arm, not on the scale pan" is directly relevant: pure difference determines the convergence on the balance arm! In short, if one follows Derridean practice, comparing "samenesses" generated by pure difference, interfaith dialogue can bear fruit (but Derrida is systematically excluded from Lefebure's book).
Abstract of Magliola's Review: Olson compares many French postmodernist philosophers on the one hand and a large group of Zen/Chan Buddhist thinkers/practitioners on the other. He studies French postmodernism via Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard; and he studies Zen/Chan Buddhism via Dogen, Hakuin, Nishitani, many Chinese Chanists, and some Indian Buddhists. Chapters are arranged according to topoi such as "Language, Disruption, and Play," "Ways of Thinking," "The Body," etc. Because Olson's book assembles the "key ideas" of so many French postmodernists, and their respective similarities/dissimilarities via-à-vis Zen Buddhism, it serves an undergraduate readership well enough. The problem is that the book, taking on so many figures--each of which is unique and complicated--too often performs like a crib sheet in the "CliffsNotes" manner, reducing so-called "key ideas" to misleading clichés. Olson is at his best when he gives an author some length of attention, as he does with Dogen. Rather than reducing his review to a point-by-point critique of all of Olson's interpretations, Magliola uses the technique that hermeneuts call "Auerbachian découpage": a close analysis of several passages that can be taken as indicative of an author's (in this case, Olson's) thought-processes in general. Suchwise, Magliola focuses on three interpretations from Olson's book-- one of Derrida, one of a Chinese gong'an (kung-an), and one of Lacan. The Derridean text Olson cites, from _Writing and Difference_, is-- "Speech is stolen: since it is stolen from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative." Magliola argues that Olson's interpretation of this passage exposes readers to the mistaken assumption that Derrida denies all instrumentality to speech. Rather, Derrida is positing that speech is always undercut by an inevitable drift: this does not mean most of intention fails to "get through." It means, instead, that an author's intention never reaches its "purpose" in any absolute sense. Olson next undergoes a comparison of Derrida's "thief" to Case 85 of Chinese Buddhism's _Pi- yen-lu_ (_Blue Cliff Record_). Olson claims that in this famous gong'an the monk's "gesture of fright" enables the hermit "to steal the speech of the monk." Magliola disagrees, arguing that it is the "tiger's roar" that the hermit steals (from tigers), in order to teach the monk that "all phenomenal forms are interchangeable" since ultimately "all phenomena are really empty." The third focus of Magliola's critique is Olson's interpretation of the Lacanian "gaze." Olson rightly treats the "gaze" as a demonstration of the intersubjective nature of desire, but misses an opportunity when he merely declares that intersubjective desire is, from the Buddhist perspective, a "condition of unenlightenment." Why not, instead, appropriate Lacan's "intersubjective nature of desire" so that it positively abets Buddhist teaching? One can appropriate how Lacan organizes this intersubjectivity, namely, as an "empty chain of signifiers." Magliola goes on to "recruit" Lacan's well-known interpretation of Poe's short story _The Purloined Letter_ and to apply it to the _Pi-yen-lu_'s Case 85. Magliola closes by defending his own book _Derrida on the Mend_: Olson charges that the book equates Derrida's différance and Buddhist "emptiness," whereas the book--and Magliola supplies the textual references-- expressly emphasizes how Buddhist "emptiness" differs from différance because, among other reasons, it comports enlightened cognition.
KEYWORDS: Representational art postmodernist philosophy Derrida Lacan Chinese gong'an Japanese koan
APPENDIX: The essay critiqued by Magliola here is the keynote essay in J. Cobb & C. Ives, eds, _The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation_ (Orbis, 1990)]. Magliola affirms the value of Abe's work as an important meeting between the notions of Buddhist śūnyatā and Christian kenōsis, but disfavors Abe's resort to paradox as the way the two notions resemble each other. Abe posits that God/śūnyatā is not God/śūnyatā and precisely because God/śūnyatā is not affirmative of itself, God/śūnyatā is truly God/śūnyatā. Magliola does not mean that Abe equates the concepts of God and śūnyatā: rather, what Magliola is referencing is Abe's claim that both God and śúnyatā are paradoxical. Abe's "paradox" is a binary of A = non-A that constitutes a mystical oneness, and for a deconstructionist such as Magliola, such a binary framed into a oneness is "logocentric." Derrida takes "logocentrism" to mean a holism (meaning "wholeness," here) of any kind, and not the mere "essentialism" that many American commentators attribute to Derrida's use of the term. Magliola shows that Masao Abe, like most Japanese Zennists, operates within the Svatantrikan-Madhyamikan-Yogacaric tradition, which is a holistic Buddhism. The specialist in Chinese Buddhism, Hsueh-Li Cheng (U. of Hawaii), goes so far as to decry D. T. Suzuki's śūnyatā as "transcendentalist." Magliola in _Derrida on the Mend_ (1984; 1986) and his subsequent books (1997 and 2014) and in many book chapters and articles, intersects in many ways Derrida's deconstruction with Nagarjuna's argumentation in the _mūlamadhyamakakārikas_. And Nagarjuna's version of śūnyatā differs from the śunyatā of the Prajnaparamitan tradition, and from those of the "Nagarjuna"s of subsequent traditions. Of the _mūlamadhyamakakārikas_, Richard Robinson rightly says that there are no paradoxes whatsoever in it. As for the paradoxical formation Abe attributes to Christianity's God (and to the Most Holy Trinity), Magliola rejects it and-- identifying with Catholic Christianity as he does--cites the Council of Florence's magisterial provision that "everything is one" in God "except where an oppostion of relationship [relationis oppositio] exists," so that each of the three Hypostases ("Persons") of the Trinity is constituted only by oppostional relations among the Hypostases. The only "functions" applied uniquely to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively in Scripture are "Paternity" to the Father, Filiation ("Sonship") to the Son, and "Passive Spiration" to the Holy Spirit. Thus all that the Hypostases would share is preempted, "gutted out" of them, so that it belongs to the Unity of God instead. This syncopated "preemption" marks one of several ways that kenōsis functions in Catholic Christianity. Since the preemption is different for each Hypostasis, one should properly refer to kenōses rather than kenōsis. The term kenōsis is not referencing "voidness" (a holistic "emptiness") but "devoidness," since the Trinity involves differing negative references and differentiation between what belongs solely to the Unity of God and what uniquely defines a Hypostasis. Paradox is not at all involved. Magliola next engages the Catholic doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and/through the Son "as from one principle," applying to it--in what he argues is an orthodox but yet untapped resource--such deconstructive notions as salubrious "double-bind" and "glitch." He closes with a discussion of Karl Rahner's and Raimundo Panikkar's call for a theology of the "more than personal" in God.
Keywords: kenosis śunyatā Masao Abe Buddhist-Christian Dialogue
paradox Derrida Trinitarian theology Catholic theology Karl Rahner
ROBERT MAGLIOLA, "EIGENTLICHKEIT and EINFALL: THE HEIDEGGERIAN 'RETURN TO THINGS THEMSELVES'," in _YEARBOOK OF COMPARATIVE CRITICISM, VOL. 10: LITERARY CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY_, ed. J. Strelka (PENN STATE UP, 1982; rpt. 1990), pp. 113-131. //// This book-chapter engaged what was the heated debate in English-language literary criticism between E.D. Hirsch and René Wellek. Wellek and his associates argued that a literary work's "meaning" can change, and Hirsch argued that a literary work's "meaning" (which Hirsch identifies with 'Sinn') is the author's intended meaning and cannot change--only, says Hirsch, the work's "significance," that is, subjective interpretation of the meaning, can change. Hirsch accuses Wellek (and T.S. Eliot, and some others) of "relativism." In the decades since the 1970s and 80s, the debate, though with some important variations, has continued up to the present day. Magliola in this article proposed a "neo-Heideggerian hermeneutics" that mapped the problematic of "validity" in a new way that became widely known: it justifies Wellek's position, but according to re-worked Heideggerian parameters drawn largely from section 32 of Heidegger's _Sein und Zeit_. Interpretive activity manifests three functions: the "As-question" (what can be called the "interpretive question"), the "As-which" (or the textual "aspect" which is contacted), and the "As-structure" (or "interpretation" proper, which is equivalent to Heidegger's definition of "meaning"). The "As-structure" is the "taking of something-as-something." It is the Articulation ('Artikulation': literally, "exercising of the joints"), or description of the "joining together" of interpretative question and textual aspect. "Understanding" is a prereflective at-oneness of critic and text; "interpretation" is the phenomenological description of understanding, and consists of an As-structure which is the articulated "hold" an interpretive question has on a textual aspect, and vice versa; and finally, "assertion" is the logical language which abstracts from interpretation, and classifies interpretation into concepts (thereby breaking interpretation all the way down into subject and object). Heideggerian "fore-structure" ('Vor-Struktur') takes the "fore" ('Vor-') to mean (1) that a kind of structure antedates encounter with text, and in part determines how the text will be understood; and that (2) that the structure meshes with a text before the interpreter even knows this is the case. Fore-structure is characterized by three kinds of fore-awareness: (1) fore-having ('Vorhabe'), (2) fore-sight ('Vorsicht'), and (3) Fore-conception ('Vergriff'), all of which this article explains in detail. Next, Section 32 addresses the question of meaning and the related percept of the "hermeneutical circle." Heidegger concludes section 32 with a crucial discussion of "authentic" ('eigentliche'--implying "taken as my own") interpretation, and its distinction from mere "fancy" ('Einfall'--"falling down/in"). Fore-structure is necessary to interpretation, and is a vantage-point both enabling and blinding ("blinding" in that it cannot "see" what of the text can be seen from the other side--as it were--i.e., from a diametrically opposite vantage-point). Magliola next takes up criteriology--what are apposite as-questions? How does one demonstrate that the textual aspects alleged are "really there"? He argues that literary criticism is ultimately a communal activity, and he invokes the traditional maxim of phenomenology: "Corroborative description is the only [public or forensic] verification." Intersubjectivty is the operative here: "American" New Critics, Marxists, Freudians, etc., they all have their own set of values that determine criteria. Magliola demonstrates all the preceding by treating René Wellek's famous test-case of Andrew Marvel's phrase "vegetable love," and the curious end-event of the character "Bevel" in Flannery O'Connor's story "The River." The book-chapter concludes with a lengthy interrogation of E.D. Hirsch's theory of "validity" in the light of Magliola's "neo-Heideggerian" phenomenology of the hermeneutic act.
ROBERT MAGLIOLA, "LIKE THE GLAZE ON A KAYDID-WING: PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICISM" in _CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY_, eds. G. D. Atkins & L. Morrow (Amherst: U. of Massachusetts P., 1989), pp. 101-116. Magliola's book-chapter supplies a detailed survey of what had come to be known as "phenomenological criticism," the subject, in fact, of his first book, _Phenomenology and Literature_ (Purdue UP, 1977; 2nd printing, 1978), which was the first book-length text for the English-speaking world that explicated both French and German phenomenology in their relations to literary theory and criticism [reviewed in more than 20 academic journals, and cited in key reference works such as Orr's _Dictionary of Critical Theory_ and Sepp and Embréé's _Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics_). Atkins' and Morrow's textbook, _Contemporary Literary Theory_, remains the best survey in English of literary approaches--twelve all told--that dominated literary criticism during the second half of the 20th century--a period when critical controversy was extraordinarily intense and influential. Magliola's book-chapter begins with a brief description of the Husserlian phenomenology that is phenomenological criticism's initial inspiration, and then, addressing the fierce "deconstructionist vs. phenomenology" debate of the 1970s, points out the stubborn perdurance of "phenomenological criticism" through the 1980s and thereafter. First, the parameters of both early and late-phase Husserl are laid out, and the countervailing developments associated with Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; and then the emergence of the "Geneva School" and the literary theory and criticism associated with it--that of Marcel Raymond and Albert Béguin in particular, followed by Georges Poulet a generation later (1950 and 1960s). Other figures influenced by the Geneva School and treated in this section are Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset, the late-phase Gaston Bachelard, and--in Anglo-American letters--J. Hillis Miller, Paul Brodtkorb, and David Halliburton. Magliola at this point begins a more detailed analysis of "phenomenological literary theory": how its hermeneutic moves from a given text's "surface configurations" to that text's deep "experiential patterns" and the dialectical relations among patterns. He shows how Roman Ingarden's four-strata model orchestrating a text's "polyphonic harmony" can be accommodated to serve the Geneva School's "ontology of the literary work." Next, Magliola enumerates seven "modes" of consciousness, each a concretely differentiated function of consciousness, where consciousness means, of course, "intentionality," the reciprocal implication of self and world. The patterns of the "field of consciousness" are also charted according to four "content categories of consciousness," the quiddities of self and world involved in intentionality. While the Geneva School operates in the tradition of the 19th century hermeneut Friedrich Schleiermacher and of Husserl himself, the second branch of "phenomenological theory and criticism" springs from Heidegger and Gadamer. Magliola here explicates this second branch in detail, citing Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss. Lastly, Magliola takes up the "extramural" debates between phenomenology and its adversaries, in particular, Jürgen Habermas--against whom phenomenology pits David Hoy, among others; and Jacques Derrida, against whom Félix Martinez-Bonati and Paul Ricoeur militate in their own ways. The book-chapter closes with four thought-motifs that--in Magliola's opinion--reveal that Derrida remains a "residual" or "closet" phenomenologist. This book-chapter's "Selected Bibliography" is substantially annotated, and features thirty-six key works in sections entitled "Phenomenology and Philosophy," "Phenomenology and Literary Theory," "Phenomenology and Literary Criticism," and "Phenomenology and Controversy."
Robert Magliola, _Appropriative and/or Imitative Use(s): Some Cruxes—Greek, Latin, English, French, Sanskrit_, in _Concepts of Literary Theory East and West [bilingual edition]_, Proceedings of the Third Colloquium, Committee on Literary Theory, International Comparative Literature Association (April 27-30, 1990, Taipei), ed. Han-Liang Chang (Taipei: Bookman Books and Chinese Comparative Literature Assoc., 1993), pp. 183-244. Chinese version of Magliola’s paper, trans. into Chinese by Shu-chen Chiang, also appears in _Zhong-Wai Literary Monthly_, Vol. 20, No. 2.
Magliola addresses those cases when literary/textual “artifacts” belonging to mutually exclusive histories are said to be nonetheless “similar.” He asks how is this the case and what the significance. At the outset, Magliola provisionally agrees with Heidegger that cause and effect are really co-causal (and co-effective), and that the interpretive act is always a part of this co-causal field. Thus, similarities and differences are to an extent caused by interpreters and are their APPROPRIATIONS insofar as all knowing—even imitative efforts to recuperate so-called “original” meaning—is appropriative. Magliola calls this phenomenon by the name of Epistemological Appropriation. Within the frame of Epistemological Appropriation, he then goes on to distinguish between (1) Imitation and (2) Ideological Appropriation. Imitation seeks to recuperate as best it can the signifieds attached to a text by its “original” context, viz., what was its contemporary community. Ideological Appropriation supplies a second order of signifieds, a developed code or order of meaning distinct from the “original.” Sometimes Ideological Appropriation knows what it is doing; on the other hand, sometimes it is naïve, thinking itself to be Imitation.
In order to demonstrate (and futher enact!) these distinctions, Magliola compares three “translations” of the Greek Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2, verses 34 and 35: the renderings of this passage in the Vulgate, King James, and New International versions. At stake is whether the clause referencing the sword piercing Mary’s soul is to be taken parenthetically, or in direct connection with the concluding clause that reads “so as may be revealed the thoughts of many hearts.” Traditionally, Catholicism’s Marian devotion does not take the first clause parenthetically. Throughout this early part of Magliola’s discussion, co-causality is described in terms of the early-phase Heidegger (as adapted in Magliola’s _Phenomenology and Literature_ Purdue UP, 1977). Next, Magliola indicates how the Postmodern Moment disorients and fractures the above programme, including “Magliola’s Heidegger’s co-causality.” Next, reworking in a different way the comparison of Nagarjuna and Derrida associated with his _Derrida on the Mend_ (Purdue UP, 1984), Magliola examines the problematic of comparing texts from mutually exclusive histories by comparing deconstructive strategy in Nagarjuna’s _Mūlamadhyamakakārikās_ and Jacques Derrida’s “La mythologie blanche.” The matter for comparison here, namely, deconstructive strategy, interacts with itself and with the anterior treatment of co-causality and Postmodernism (in Magliola’s same paper), thus decentering the project further. Lastly, Magliola answers objections raised in some of the reviews of his _Derrida on the Mend_. As for CRUXES, they pervade his whole text—linguistic ones, rhetorical ones, scriptural ones, logical ones, postmodern ones, and they have (mischievously) the so-called “last word.” Thus Magliola closes his paper with a découpage from a famous exchange between Jan Kott and Jacques Derrida recorded in _The Structuralist Controversy_, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Johns Hopkins UP, 1970-1972), p. 270:
Jan Kott: At one time, this famous phrase of Mallarmé seemed to be very significant--
‘A throw of dice will never abolish chance’. [‘Un coup de dés n’ abolira jamais
le hasard’.] After this lesson you have given us, isn’t it possible to say that—
‘And chance will never abolish the throw of dice’! [‘Et le hazard n’abolira
jamais le coup de dés’!].
Jacques Derrida: I say “Yes” immediately to Mr. Kott.
[Nei/wai yu yanyi—geleian gelin yu yuanteng zhouzuo bufen xiaoshuo dui jiaohui de taidu], in A. Brankamp, ed., _Diyijie guoji wenxue yu zongjiao huiyi lunwenji_ [Proceedings of the First International Conference on Literature and Religion], Taipei: China Times, Ltd., 1987), pp. 105-120.
Magliola re-visits a long-standing topic in studies of Graham Greene and Shusaku Endo, namely, their respective (and changing) relationships to their Catholic Faith, but he does so in a very new way that draws upon several Derridean “philosophemes” developed at length in his second book, Derrida on the Mend (1984) and in his long paper, “Postmodernism on the Brim: A Differentialist Manifesto,” Proceedings of the Symposium on Postmodernism, Le Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle (CCIC), Cerisy-la-Salle, France, Sept. 7, 1983; available in _Krisis_, I. Marcoulesco, ed. (Houston, Texas: International Circle for Research in Philosophy, Menil Foundation), Nos. 3/4 (1985), pp. 91-111. Magliola employs a deconstructive déroulement whereby the “crack” in the surface of a “cosmeticized” structure is detected, and its “trail”--leading deep below the surface of the pertaining “structure”—carefully tracked. The structure’s more likely “cause,” called the “alternate solution,” is unearthed, and is regarded as a better approximation of how “life goes on” than that proclaimed by the classical solution. However, the “alternate solution,” too, necessarily comes “under erasure,” and thus continues on only as a fragile clue, an “alternate solution X’d over” but still viable. Magliola applies this déroulement in diverse ways to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Honorary Consul, and to Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Magliola also brings into play two other Derridean descriptors, namely “logocentrism” and “ellipticity.” He finds discourse of The Power and the Glory “logocentric” or “centered” (though deconstructible, as all logocentrisms/centers are), and he finds The Honorary Consul manifestly “elliptical.” An ellipsis, having a moving center, remains spheroid: it is not a perfect circle but neither has it passed over into something else—a rectangle or a triangle, for example. Nor is it a “synthesis” of two genres of structure—it is not a half circle combined with half a square, for example. (Indeed, “synthesis,” for Derrida, is a form of “logocentrism.) In the second half of this paper, Magliola likewise passes Endo’s Silence through stages of déroulement. Magliola then concludes by examining—in great detail—the personal end-philosophies of the novel’s two Jesuits, Fathers Ferreira and Rodrigues. He concludes that Fr. Ferreira chooses an “alternate solution” which is neither Catholic nor even Christian in a broader sense, and Fr. Rodrigues chooses an “alternate solution” which deconstructs Catholicism while remaining elliptically “Christian.”
.......... Chinese version of Magliola's article, trans. Nancy Wang, appears in _Zhongwai [Chung-Wai] Literary Monthly_ , Vol. 18, No. 10 (March 1990), pp. 34-50. _Chung-Wai Literary Monthly_ is published by National Taiwan University.
Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2006, 290 pp.
--This anthology collects a selection of papers from the Close Encounter session on “Buddhism, Deconstruction, and the Work of Robert Magliola,” 23rd Annual Meeting, International Association of Philosophy and Literature, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, May 15, 1999, and adds several other pertaining papers as well.
******ABSTRACT: Magliola’s AFTER-WORD, pp. 235-270 of BUDDHISMS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS----
Magliola’s “After-Word,” invited by JIn Y. Park, is his prolonged commentary on the collected papers. Magliola declares at the outset: “Given the pressure of time and space, I have opted to comment only on the contributions which most pique me, keeping in mind Vajra Yogini and her _khatvanga_ (sharp trident staff).” Magliola first treats the arguments that Roger Jackson brings against the “intersection” of Derrida and Buddhism that Magliola’s _oeuvre_ proposes via several books and articles. Jackson, Magliola argues, egregiously misunderstands Jacques Derrida and ignores the Prasangika Madhyamaka completely, though the latter is the branch of Buddhism that Magliola most often ‘intersects’ with Derridean thought. Magliola next takes up the papers of Zong-qi Cai and Ellen Y. Zhang. Though agreeing with much that Cai and Zhang say, he finds that both of them treat the levels of the Buddhist “Two Truths” as a “climbing ladder.” Instead, he interprets Ji-Zang’s “Three Levels of Two Truths” and Ji-Zang’s “Fourth Level” as ultimately a declaration of absolute “non-abidingness.” The Levels cease to constitute a “ladder” from which one jumps to the Transcendent because from the viewpoint of the “Fourth Level Supreme Truth,” all the levels are equally empty. The levels cease to constitute a “ladder” because ultimately all the levels are recognized as themselves “immanent” and “transcendent”—there’s no need for a “leap to the Transcendent.” Magliola next addresses David Loy’s paper. Loy, he argues, ignores Prasangika Madhyamaka much as Jackson does, and brings only the Yogacaric traditions to bear (negatively) on Derrida. Magliola’s comparison of Buddhist “deconstruction” and Derridean “deconstruction” has been intended all along to show Derrideans that Madhyamaka can give them a more adequate way of validating “conventional reality” (than the ways Derrideans customarily invoke) while retaining (and continuing) deconstruction. On the other hand, Yogacara--because of what Derrideans would consider its “holism”--blocks their access to Buddhist thought.
Frank Stevenson’s paper addresses Magiola’s articles treating Derridean deconstruction and selected “gong’an” (koans) drawn from two famous collections of Chan “gong’an”, the _Wumenguan_ and _Biyanlu_. Stevenson proposes his own interpretations of the pertaining “gong’an,”while critiquing Magliola’s. The latter’s response is two-fold. In the first instance, Magliola points out that his intent was to demonstrate for his Taiwanese Buddhist readers that the “gong’an” in question uses the same technique that many centuries later Derrida frequently deploys, viz., “exposing the veiled re-appearance of a term in its opposite.” In the second instance, Magliola argues that his treatment of the koan “Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha” is not at all an appeal to a “transcendental Signified.” Magliola next confronts a series of objections raised by E. H. Jarow, Gad Horowitz, and Jane Augustine. All three examine those parts of Magliola’s _oeuvre_ that demonstrate how Derridean deconstruction, far from vitiating his personal commitment to Catholic Christianity, has abetted (and continues to abet) this commitment. Magliola, in two of his books and a further book-chapter, demonstrates, for example, that Catholic teaching on the Trinity deconstructs logocentric theories thereof. Jarow, he finds, refuses to accept his (Magliola’s) “otherness” and Gad Horowitz--perhaps through carelessness or wishful thinking—crucially mis-quotes and mis-represents several of Magliola’s key texts. Jane Augustine understands the Derridean “stylistique” characterizing Magliola’s “oto-biographie” (“ear-biography,” Derrida’s name for “autobiography-as-deconstructed”) in his (Magliola’s) _On Deconstructing Life-Worlds-_ , but misunderstands the “logocentrism-as-deconstructed” of Magliola’s theology. Magliola concludes with an accounting of his ongoing version of the Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue (to which he has devoted several decades).
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COMMENDATION from Prof. Dan Lusthaus' review of _Buddhisms and Deconstructions_ in _Journal of Chinese Religions_, No. 35 (2007), pp. 183, 184: "The gem of this collection is Magliola's response, which not only answers Jackson's critique by rightly pointing out that relying on secondary sources by Anglo-American philosophers who 'flatten Derrida's philosophical elegance' in order to render it suitable to their own sensibilities leads to basic 'mistakes' (p. 235-236) in one's understanding of Derrida's thought; more intriguing are his replies, both positive and critical, to other essays in this book. By demonstrating how thinking Buddhist ideas, such as the two-truths and gong’ans, in a Derridean manner exposes limitations in the way Buddhist scholars think about Buddhism, Magliola shows us how Buddhism can learn from deconstruction." --Dan Lusthaus, Harvard University
ROBERT MAGLIOLA’S “FOREWORD,” pp. xi-xvi, to MASTER HSIN TAO’S _THE BUDDHIST VOYAGE BEYOND DEATH: LIVING NIRVANA_ , Trans. & Ed., CHUNGMIN MARIA TU, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, 200 pp.
Magliola explains that so many in the world, especially the secular world of the West, live and move solely in the perceptible experiences which they call “hard reality,” and Master Hsin Tao arrives precisely to turn the “world” of these self-declared realists “upside down.” Master Hsin Tao, born in upper Burma in 1948 to ethnic Chinese parents, and orphaned at an early age, was taken in by soldiers operating along the border of Yunnan, China, and brought to Taiwan in 1961. He ordained as a Chan Buddhist monk at the age of 25, practiced decades of austerities (including years of “graveyard meditation” in the Theravada tradition), and went on to found the Wu Sheng Monastery in northern Taiwan and its Ling Jiu Shan Buddhist Society. A frequent traveler between the Continent and Taiwan, he also trained intensively in the (Tibetan) Nyingma Kathok tradition, and became recognized as an Incarnate Teacher in that tradition. He brings to the West the “classical” versions of these traditions, contradicting those now “trendy” forms of western Buddhism that tone down or “bracket out” the “other-worldly.” In the face of such revisionism, the Master emphasizes the necessity of strict vegetarianism, and repentance ceremonies in the name of the dead. He stresses that we must “settle” with our present foes, and also our “foes from our previous lives”: we must “make up” with our foes “for the grudges we established in our numberless past lives,” and that by so doing, “we liberate them from endless suffering” because they are no longer lured into hating us.
Master Hsin Tao resorts to computer metaphors to explain rebirth to beginners. “If our personal life is like a computer and our collective life like the Internet, then karma can be likened to data on a microchip, which can run through all the interconnected computers…. Karma is the endless accumulation of data on our hard drive. When our computer breaks down, we need a new one. But the memory—the data—persists. Likewise with karma. What changes is the physical hardware, but the software never dies.” Our rebirths are a “material congealment” of our attachments to the three poisons-- greed, aversion, and ignorance. True spirituality brings us into contact with our “original nature.” “Original nature” is the Unconditioned,--the “Bright Void.”
The Master’s teaching emphasizes the crucial importance of universal Compassion—especially for Hell Beings, the Hungry Ghosts, animals, etc…. and for all those who have not yet attained perfect enlightenment. The elaborate Liberation Rite of Water and Land (which originated in China, in the sixth century C.E.) is particularly efficacious in this regard, and Master Hsin Tao holds it on a mass scale annually in Taiwan. Associated topics that the Master delineates with care are (1) knowing how to prepare for one’s own death, and knowing how to attend the death-beds of others, and (2) knowing how to navigate the Bardo (the intermediate state between death and rebirth, or, instead, the site of liberation, if one knows how to “seize the moment” when—for an instant—that precious moment manifests). Master Hsin Tao describes the Bardo as the Nyingma Kathok tradition understands it—it differs in some important respects from Sogyal Rinpoche’s description in the latter’s best-seller The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
Besides singling out those teachings of Master Hsin Tao that western Buddhists rarely hear, Magliola, in his Foreword, also illuminates “intersections” of Buddhism and Catholicism that can abet Dialogue. Magliola is a Carmelite Tertiary specializing in Interfaith Dialogue; he is the Interfaith Advisor at Ling Jiu Shan. He explains that at bottom Buddhism and Catholicism are irreducibly different, but that the two religions have analogous teachings and practices that can encourage mutual understanding. Among these, his Foreword give attention to the role of the Unconditioned in the two religions. Master Hsin Tao demonstrates how close analysis of the conditioned (“observing the illusion”) functions as a “pointer” leading to the “invisible Void.” Magliola compares this to St. John of the Cross’s famous metaphor of “specks of dust” (the conditioned) the observation of which points to the “invisible light/Light” (since the invisible light is what makes the specks of dust visible). Magliola goes on to propose several other “resemblances with a difference”: (1) St. John Paul II’s great theme, the “purification of memory,” and what Master Hsin Tao calls the “second kind of memory” (the “memories others keep for us [and of us]”); (2) Catholicism’s “Mystical Body” and Master Hsin Tao’s “reciprocity of the members of the collective”; and (3) Catholicism’s Purgatory and Master Hsin Tao’s “Liberation Rite of the Water and Land.”
Keywords: Jacques Derrida Buddhism deconstruction stylistique Mādhyamaka Śūnyatā
ABSTRACT: Magliola argues that the Buddhist doctrine of the "two truths" involves, in this world, ongoing entitative behavior (relative or mundane truth) while realizing "the emptiness of entities" (supreme truth). In Magliola's book _Derrida on the Mend_ (1984; 2nd ed., 1986), he had demonstrated the remarkable intersection, at several points, of Nagarjuna's argumentation and Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction." In that book, he also offered to Derridean deconstructionists the Buddhist doctrine of "two truths" as a remedy for what many perceived as the Derridean dilemma, namely, the justification of ongoing "logocentric" (= "entitative") behavior while deconstructing that very same "logocentric" behavior. In thispresent paper, Magliola finds four motifs in the Cases studied: (1) Derridean "reinscription," (2) an"off/Lacanian" lack ("le manque"), (3) "carnavalesque" (somewhat analogous to Bakhtin's) and (4) a very Derridean and Buddhist "ever-altering 'going on'." Finding these four maneuvers operative in several famous Cases and appended Commentaries of the Wumenguan (Wu-men- kuan; Jp Mumonkan), he shows that the pertaining Chinese texts act-out what is analogous to Derridean "dissémination." Of course, the Chinese texts are treated in their original Chinese--the puns and other language- games of the Wumenguan are utterly language-dependent. Associated Japanese commentaries are alsoincorporated into the discussion and are often very relevant. The famous Case XLIII ("Shou-shan's Staff") is examined in detail. R. H. Blyth, the ex-patriot Englishman who devoted much of his life to Buddhist thought, once observed that Wumen's Chan is such that "one must do one thing, and at the same time do-it-and-not-do-it." Magliola applies this formula to Case XLIII, showing that the text "does one thing" and "does not do one thing" and that a veiled "doing one thing" is "reinscribed" into the subtext of "does not do one thing." Another Case treated in detail is Case XXXVIII, "Wu-tsu's Tail," which Magliola interprets in terms of "lack," "carnivalesque," and the trail of "traces" that is the ever-altering "going on." He ends with an allusion to the Buddhist transformation of "craving" (taṇhā/tṛṣ́ṇā) into compassion, citing an oddly apposite quotation from the _Anti-Oedipe_ of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
KEYWORDS: Wumenkuan Mumonkan Derrida deconstruction gong'an/koan Chan Buddhism Zen French Postmodernists Zen Postmodern philosophy
Magliola begins with the phenomenological side of the confrontation. Ricoeur accuses the Structuralists of subordinating "parole" to "langue." "Parole" for the Structuralists is only a particular combination of elements drawn from the "combinatoire" whereas "parole" is a "mediating act" necessarily involving reference. As for the "subjective" end of the mediating act, the phenomenologist Doubrovsky puts the matter most succinctly: "Whenever something is said, someone must be saying it." Merleau-Ponty, decades earlier, had already shown--much as Heidegger did--that meaning is the mutual implication of subject and object (where "object," in this context, represents the "referent"). Whereas for Ricoeur the "sign" consists of signifier, signified, and referent, for a structuralist such as Barthes the sign is composed of signifier and signified alone. In the case of literary language, Barthes asserts the literary work is autonomous, and literary criticism should decipher its "coherent [internal] system of signs." Structuralists such as Genet agree, and that in fact "one of the functions ... of literature as language is to destroy the speaker and designate him as absent." For his part, Philip Lewis accuses the phenomenologists of misrepresenting Structuralism: the latter study the "form of content, not form excised from content." Magliola devotes much time to Tzvetan Todorov, whose positive expositions of Structuralism are most sophisticated: for him, the literary text as object involves "poétique" and "lecture" (which in turn differs from "interprétation"). At this point, Magliola presents the phenomenological case, using adaptations of Husserlian thought to confront Todorov. Magliola next proposes that the outstanding difference between Structuralism and Phenomenology "does not concern degree of immanence but the nature of immanence." For Structuralism, "deep structure" has for its ultimate model algebraic "laws of transformation," whereas for Phenomenology "deep structure" is "consciousness-in-language." Magliola's next section tries to show that these two schools actually "overlap" and can be understood as complementary. To demonstrate, Magliola draws from Todorov, whose adjustments to Structuralism attenuate the more flamboyant statements of Jakobson, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss. Todorov alters Jakobson's "principle of equivalence," Barthes' structuralist purism (in S/Z), and Lévi_Strauss's "atemporal, matrix-like structure." Ricoeur, from the phenomenological side, cautiously approaches "complementarity" by making his own adjustments, granting a greater role to "structural awareness" but keeping it subordinate, still, to "substantive awareness." Jean Piaget, the structural psychologist, grants that the "dialectical attitude" rejected by Lévi-Strauss actually is important. Magliola concludes his discussion of complementarity by turning to practical criticism and "the future." in the long run, he argues, Phenomenology and Structuralism will come to see themselves as "contiguous spans" on what Piaget calls the "historical spiral."
This translation is of Robert Magliola's paper delivered at the Fourth Congress of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy (ISCP), State U. of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, N.Y., July 15, 1985. Later, the English version of the same appeared in the _Journal of Chinese Philosophy_ (JCP), Vol. 17 (1990), pp. 87-97 (U. of Hawaii). The JCP version appears in this same "Articles" section of Magliola's www.academia.edu account.
ABSTRACT: Magliola argues that the Buddhist doctrine of the "two truths" involves, in this world, ongoing entitative behavior (relative or mundane truth) while realizing "the emptiness of entities" (supreme truth). In Magliola's book _Derrida on the Mend_ (1984; 2nd ed., 1986), he had demonstrated the remarkable intersection, at several points, of Nagarjuna's argumentation and Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction." In that book, he also offered to Derridean deconstructionists the Buddhist doctrine of "two truths" as a remedy for what many perceived as the Derridean dilemma, namely, the justification of ongoing "logocentric" (= "entitative") behavior while deconstructing that very same "logocentric" behavior. In this present paper, Magliola finds four motifs in the Cases studied: (1) Derridean "reinscription," (2) an "off/Lacanian" lack ("le manque"), (3) "carnavalesque" (somewhat analogous to Bakhtin's) and (4) a very Derridean and Buddhist "ever-altering 'going on'." Finding these four maneuvers operative in several famous Cases and appended Commentaries of the Wumenguan (Wu-men- kuan; Jp Mumonkan), he shows that the pertaining Chinese texts act-out what is analogous to Derridean "dissémination." Of course, the Chinese texts are treated in their original Chinese--the puns and other language- games of the Wumenguan are utterly language-dependent. Associated Japanese commentaries are also incorporated into the discussion and are often very relevant. The famous Case XLIII ("Shou-shan's Staff") is examined in detail. R. H. Blyth, the ex-patriot Englishman who devoted much of his life to Buddhist thought, once observed that Wumen's Chan is such that "one must do one thing, and at the same time do-it-and-not-do-it." Magliola applies this formula to Case XLIII, showing that the text "does one thing" and "does not do one thing" and that a veiled "doing one thing" is "reinscribed" into the subtext of "does not do one thing." Another Case treated in detail is Case XXXVIII, "Wu-tsu's Tail," which Magliola interprets in terms of "lack," "carnivalesque," and the trail of "traces" that is the ever-altering "going on." He ends with an allusion to the Buddhist transformation of "craving" (taṇhā/tṛṣ́ṇā) into compassion, citing an oddly apposite quotation from the _Anti-Oedipe_ of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
KEYWORDS: Wumenkuan Mumonkan Derrida deconstruction gong'an/koan Chan Buddhism Zen French Postmodernists
Zen Postmodern philosophy French postmodernists
ROBERT MAGLIOLA, _THE OFF/FIGURAL: POSTMODERNISM IN ITALIAN ARCHITECTURE AND AMERICAN POETRY_, trans. Virginia Chiang, _Zhong Wai Wenxue_, National Taiwan U., Vol. 14, No. 12 [May 1986], pp. 127-146. //// Because of Taiwan's general interest in western literary theory and its intense interest in postmodern architecture [now, decades after the initial publication of this article in 1986, interests of course that are very active for quite some time already in Mainland China as well], this article functions as a source-text for several crucial postmodern techniques identified with Derridean deconstruction,-- techniques that Magliola argues can foster positive social advance. Magliola points out that he has argued elsewhere--against the adversaries of postmodernism in the West--that postmodernism understood and practiced as a Derridean "differentialism" is not reactionary. A "differential" postmodernism correctly understood is not premodern feudalism nor decadent aetheticism nor an autonomous technocracy ("Rule by the Machine")---all three of which are, in the eyes of a Derridean, notorious "logocentrisms." Moreover, the three are the opposites, respectively, of three other logocentrisms--"laisser-faire" capitalism, Stalinist state-planning, and elitist use of technology. In the Derridean thought that Magliola affirms, contraries of logocentric formulae are likewise logocentric. Postmodernism in Derridean terms is an "alternative" which is neither a contrary (e.g. hot-cold, black-white) nor a mediating synthesis (e.g., tepid, grey). In the article at hand, Magliola first explains "Torqued Time/Space--Some Strategies of Postmodern Italian Architecture." He accompanies these strategies by seven full-page illustrations, diagrams, photographs from the Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, Italy 1973; Aldo Rossi's "Projet d'hôtel face au grand canal" (reproduced in _Babylone_, 1980); the "Avanguardia/Transavanguardia" project on the Aurelian Wall (1982); maquettes by Peter Eisenman (1969-71); and several other exhibits [see diagrams, pp. 141-146]. Under the sub-heading of "Maquettes and Drawings," Magliola treats (1) Splicing of Inside and Outside (Eisenman), (2) Rejection of Mediation (A. Rivkin), (3) Furtive Reinscription of Opposition (Františ Lesák), and (4) Furtive Reinscription of Holistic Formula (Anselmo Anselmi). Under the sub-heading of "City and Off/City," he treats (1) Bricolage (Aldo Rossi), and (2) Differential Déroulement and the Off/Figural (Bonito Oliva et al.). In the second part of this article, "Torqued Time/Space--Some Strategies of a Postmodern American Poet," Magliola turns to the postmodern poetry of John Ashbery, finding in his texts differential strategies off/correlevant to those operative in postmodern architecture. In the sub-section "Frontal and Yet to One Side: Room or Loom in a John Asbery Text," a nine-line excerpt from Ashbery's poem "Tapestry" is closely examined in detail--the poem's repeated mixing of signified and signifier, its reinscription of separation, identity, and reversal into each other, and its deployment of "off/tracking" (a technique that Magliola also explains in his article "Postmodernism on the Brim: A Differentialist Manifesto" (_Krisis_, Vols. 4-4, Fondation Menil, Paris, France & Houston, Texas, USA, 1985). In the sub-section "Empty Entablatures: Facade and Mirror in a John Asbery Text," a sixteen-line excerpt from Ashbery's poem "Litany" is closely examined. The poem "torques" the appearances of a Palladian-style building, displaying counterfeits of counterfeits, oeils-de-boeuf windows punning off a literal "bull's eye," etc. The poem's technique of "allusion-on-the-bias" functions to reference a famous Zen capping-phrase and the "wayfarer" in T.S. Eliot's _Four Quartets_, but to deflect each. Magliola concludes with an excerpt from "Litany" that decenters itself and his very article (as indeed is to be off/expected from a differentialist paper "drawing to a conclusion").
ABSTRACT: Magliola begins with Nathalie Sarraute’s “tropismes,” which—in their immotivations, ongoing mutations—“still bear all humanity along.” He identifies this ongoing discontinuity of “starts and halts” with postmodernism understood in Derrida’s broader sense, that is, as erratic dispersal that is “neither empty nor not-empty”—dispersal as “errance,” “dissémination.” In this article Magliola continues one of the main projects of his well-received and widely reviewed book _Derrida on the Mend_ (1983), namely, the intersection of a Derridean-style “postmodernism” (Derrida himself distanced himself from any “Postmodern School” as such) and Buddhism, particularly Madhyamika Buddhism. Magliola’s article here extends his project in a more literary direction than in his book—he exposes the display of “errance,” etc., in detailed treatments of poems by Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery (correlating, in one poem, Ashbery’s format with that in Derrida’s _Glas_, and in several of his other poems, with Derridean “mise-en-abyme,” “dédoublement,” and “effacement”). As in _Derrida on the Mend_, Magliola demonstrates that—if and when Derridean “errance,” etc., are transvalued by way of a Buddhist optic—the “tropismes” can be non-OBstructive and even blissful. His article proceeds at this point to several Chinese and Japanese Buddhist poems (including one by Rinzai Master, Shutaku) and other texts (including a famous Pure Land text) that beautifully “act-out” such a transvaluation. Also continuing a further “intersection” that he cultivates in _Derrida on the Mend_, Magliola splices into his discussion several Catholic Christian versions of Derridean “differentialism,” drawing both upon a “Reimspruch” of Angelus Silesius and various images identified with Carmelite spirituality. He does likewise with Jewish mysticism, showing how “midrashic” techniques influence Allen Mandelbaum’s _Chelmaxioms_,--a brilliant work that sets out to deconstruct “centric” Jewish mysticism: Mandelbaum associates the latter with “metamorphosists” and “analogists” whereas he practices the sacred ludic game that is forever erratic—“how they crack / the word and the fragmentary matter” (_Chelmaxioms_, p. 119). Magliola follows with a close reading of a “differentialist” passage from Eugenio Montale, one acting-out both Derridean “pure negative reference” (“ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo”: “what we are NOT, what we want NOT”) and Gianni Vattimo’s “Verwindung.” Magliola concludes with Buddhism’s later RE-reading of one of its principal tenets, namely “dependent arising,” as precisely the ongoing of “thirst” [craving], but “thirst-taken-wisely,” so it become “absolute compassion.” To RE-read Derrida’s “errance”in such wise--Magliola proposes-- is precisely how to transvalue Derrida’s “errance.”
KEYWORDS: Derrida Nathalie Sarraute deconstruction tropismes
errance mysticism Madhyamaka Zen Emily Dickinson Wallace Stevens
John Ashbery Angelus Silesius Allen Mandelbaum Eugenio Montale
Carmelite spirituality pure negative reference Glas Différance dissémination
trace effacement Cerisy-la-Salle Verwindung Gianni Vattimo Shutaku
Pure Land Buddhism
In his previous most well-known publications, Magliola shows that Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive tactics are remarkably similar to those that Buddhism, for many many centuries, has deployed against inherent identity. More importantly, he shows that what he calls “differential” Buddhism deconstructs “centric Buddhism” (those forms of Buddhism that imply latent holisms and/or that resort to holistic rhetoric). Thus, in Tibetan Buddhism, Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamaka deconstructs Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Mādhyamaka; and in Chinese Buddhism, both the Sānlùn school and “differential” Chán produce arguments (in the case of Sānlùn) or verbal and other performatives (in the case of differential Chán) that can deconstruct the Huáyán school, “centric” Chán, and other centric Buddhisms. Magliola’s main contribution is to reveal how the tactics of Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamaka and “differential Chan” anticipate deconstructive maneuvers recognizable in western Continental philosophy as “Derridean” (that is, associated with Jacques Derrida and the movement called “deconstruction”). /// In the present article, Magliola—pursuing further a line-of-thought introduced in Part Four of his book _Derrida on the Mend_ (Purdue Univ. P.), and later in his book _On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture_ (Purdue Univ. P; Oxford Univ. P.) shows that (1) the Judeo-Christian Bible, customarily read (especially by Christians) in a “centric” or—to use Derrida’s term--“logocentric” mode, is in fact a very “deconstructive” collection of discourses wherein “centric” texts are deconstructed by their own “differential” sub-texts (Magliola, who is a Carmelite tertiary, elsewhere reads established Catholic theology, too, in a differential way, showing—to the chagrin of secularists and modernizers—that traditional Catholic teaching—when analyzed attentively—is in fact deconstructive of holisms). In the present article, he exposes the cosmetic “fixes” and sleights-of-hand whereby exegetes mask the ‘cruxes” (contradictions, in this case) and “lacunae” (gaps in the text due to incomplete ancient sources) riddling Psalm 110, considered by Catholics and other Christians as a “Messianic” psalm. Arguing that the non-holistic formations that constitute our “Psalm 110” are not--unless the exegete cheats--reducible to a “whole,” Magliola shows that this Psalm’s unwieldiness and brokenness, far from being an embarrassment, should be cause for celebration on the part of Catholics and other Christians. His differential readings of the Psalm show how, in incisive and detailed ways, this Psalm teaches us how God works in the world.
This paper demonstrates how Derrida’s ‘stylistique’ (here meaning ‘stylistic practice’) acts-out in the style of his French discourse the same project as is evident on its overt semantic level. The style as well as the thematics of Derridean philosophy undertake the project of deconstructing identity (entitativeness). Anglophonic interpreters of Derrida, and especially British and American philosophers—even if they be specialists in Derrida—for the most part ignore (or, If they are not Francophonic, cannot even detect) his stylistic games, and this is all the more the case because many of the games are Talmudic in provenance . . . Derrida was an informed Sephardic Jew though non-observant. The Anglophonic interpreters, with few exceptions, treat Derrida’s overt semantic only, that is, his logical discourse thematically expressed. In both Magliola’s _Derrida on the Mend_ (1984-) and _On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture_ (1997- ), he has argued at length that the Derridean deconstruction of identity intersects with ‘devoidness’ (Skrt., ‘Śūnyatā’; Pali, ‘suññatā’) as the Madhyamika school of Buddhism generally understands it. In this article he shows in particular how Derrida’s STYLE acts-out self-devoiding, and thus participates in this intersecting. Intersection does not mean a sharing of common ground. Lines have no width so there is no common ground when they cut across each other. Derrida did not have an express Buddhist agenda at all. However, Magliola’s work DOES show deconstructionists that Buddhism can be VERY congenial to/for them. This article demonstrates, quoting--throughout--from Derrida’s original French text [accompanied by Magliola’s English translation], Derrida’s specific stylistic maneuvers, and their intersection with the Madhyamikan project. Sections are entitled (1) themes [‘cryptically’] undoing themes; (2) image motifs undoing themselves; (3) the undoing of personal identity; (4) how the ‘Uncanny’ deconstructs logical formations; (5) how enumeration (counting, repetition) undoes ontology; and (6) how Derridean homophones and homographs shake correspondence-theory. The article then goes on to show Derrida’s deployment of (7) ‘free-floating syllables’; (8) ‘floating graphic traits’; and (8) palindromes and scrambled words, in order to further still more this ‘devoiding’ which is one of his most crucial aims. (Another, of course, is the detection of flaws in the cosmeticized surface of appearances, so one can trace back to more hidden ‘causes’ deep below the surface.)
Robert Magliola’s _DERRIDEAN GAMING AND BUDDHIST UTPADA/BHANGA (Rising/Falling): How a Philosophical Style Can De/void Substantive Field_ , appeared originally in the _International Journal for Field-Being_, on-line journal of the International Institute for Field-Being, Fairfield U., Connecticut, inaugural issue, Vol. One, part two, article one (SEE the original English-language text [with quotations from Derrida in his original French] in this same [Magliola-] Profile, www.academia.edu, ARTICLES IN JOURNALS section).
ROBERT MAGLIOLA, “NEITHER I NOR NOT-I: THE DIALOGIC COMMUNITY ‘VANGELO E ZEN’ (THE GOSPEL AND ZEN) AND ITS MONASTIC LIFE AT VILLA VANGELO E ZEN, DESIO ITALY,” book-chapter in the book-anthology _Dilatato Corde_ , Rev. William Skudlarek, O.S.B., ed., Vol. 3, Nos. 1 & 2 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lantern Books, 2014), pp. 35-42; reprint of the article of the same name in _Dilatato Corde_, online journal of the Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique/Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (www.dimmid.org), Vol. III, No. 2 (July-Dec. 2013)
At the Comunità Vangelo e Zen, three factors converge: (1) the integration of Catholic monastic practice (Mass, Liturgy of the Hours, etc.) and meditation in Buddhist-form (classic sitting position and breathing—in lotus, half-lotus, or Burmese style, depending on the practitioner’s competency); (2) a Catholic leadership trained in Catholic religious life and qualified to teach Zen meditation; and—in the West most difficult to find conjoined with the above two—(3) both long-term and short-term residency for lay people at minimal economic cost. (Note, however, that the sole operating language is Italian, though Japanese can be heard sometimes too, since the Director speaks Japanese and Japanese living in Italy constitute a vital segment of the membership.) Vangelo and Zen is a “community of interreligious dialogue” directed by Father Luciano Mazzocchi, a Xaverian priest who is one of the pioneers of Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue in Italy (his apostolate is specifically approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). In this article, Robert Magliola describes in detail his experience practicing the life at Vangelo e Zen. The unique spirituality of Vangelo e Zen, formed as it is by Fr. Mazzocchi’s decades of presence in Japan, identifies the Logos with “as-it-isness” (Tathātā; jp. Shinnyo). The “gift of the Orient” is taken to be the “Silence that is positive emptiness” and the gift of the West to be “Alterity” (the “value” of the individual “other”). In the matter of Buddhist-Catholic “reciprocity,” there are many lessons each religion can learn from the other. Catholics, for example, should not so emphasize “individuality” that they ignore universal “interdependence,” and Buddhists should not so emphasize “negative karma” that they ignore the gratuitous nature of forgiveness (and here, Mazzocchi cites Dogen, who teaches that “repentance causes the infinite compassion of the Buddhas to rain down, and that repentance can—instantly—transform guilt into the “guiltless and pure”).
ABSTRACT:
In his previous most well-known publications, Magliola shows that Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive tactics are remarkably similar to those that Buddhism, for many many centuries, has deployed against inherent identity. More importantly, he shows that what he calls “differential” Buddhism deconstructs “centric Buddhism” (those forms of Buddhism that imply latent holisms and/or that resort to holistic rhetoric). Thus, in Tibetan Buddhism, Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamaka deconstructs Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Mādhyamaka; and in Chinese Buddhism, both the Sānlùn school and “differential” Chán produce arguments (in the case of Sānlùn) or verbal and other performatives (in the case of differential Chán) that can deconstruct the Huáyán school, “centric” Chán, and other centric Buddhisms. Magliola’s main contribution is to reveal how the tactics of Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamaka and “differential Chan” anticipate deconstructive maneuvers recognizable in western Continental philosophy as “Derridean” (that is, associated with Jacques Derrida and the movement called “deconstruction”). /// In the present article, Magliola—pursuing further a line-of-thought introduced in Part Four of his book _Derrida on the Mend_ (Purdue Univ. P.), and later in his book _On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture_ (Purdue Univ. P; Oxford Univ. P.) shows that (1) the Judeo-Christian Bible, customarily read (especially by Christians) in a “centric” or—to use Derrida’s term--“logocentric” mode, is in fact a very “deconstructive” collection of discourses wherein “centric” texts are deconstructed by their own “differential” sub-texts (Magliola, who is a Carmelite tertiary, elsewhere reads established Catholic theology, too, in a differential way, showing—to the chagrin of secularists and modernizers—that traditional Catholic teaching—when analyzed attentively—is in fact deconstructive of holisms). In the present article, he exposes the cosmetic “fixes” and sleights-of-hand whereby exegetes mask the ‘cruxes” (contradictions, in this case) and “lacunae” (gaps in the text due to incomplete ancient sources) riddling Psalm 110, considered by Catholics and other Christians as a “Messianic” psalm. Arguing that the non-holistic formations that constitute our “Psalm 110” are not--unless the exegete cheats--reducible to a “whole,” Magliola shows that this Psalm’s unwieldiness and brokenness, far from being an embarrassment, should be cause for celebration. His differential readings of the Psalm show how, in incisive and detailed ways, this Psalm teaches us how God works in the world.
Both Buddhist and Christian teaching-texts often deconstruct the “merely” mundane so that the learner can advance towards beatitude. A precious few of these texts teach by miming such a deconstruction via subtle literary techniques: the textual surfaces or conventions act-out the role of naïve appearance, and the subtexts that subvert them act-out how confident trust (in the Buddha’s Teachings, for the Buddhists; in Christ’s Divine Promises, for the Christians) can find fulfillment. In the great poem “The Altar” (by George Herbert, 1593-1633), the holistic appearance of the altar bears hidden signals of its own real brokenness, and these signals point to the sub-text that is the Christian’s hope. In the great Shōbō-genzō of Dōgen Zenji (1200-1253), formal techniques scramble conventional holisms and fixed identities in order to act-out the “true nature” of reality—reality, for Dōgen, is at once “continuous flux” (and “absolute density”).
This paper demonstrates that Roger Jackson and David Loy, arguing from a Yogacaric perspective when critiquing Derridean deconstruction, (1) grossly misrepresent Derrida’s thought, and (2) fail to acknowledge that Madhyamika Buddhism, especially in its Tibetan Prasangikan version, intersects Derridean thought in fruitful ways. Much as Prasangika Madhyamaka argues that Yogacara falls into a vitiating substantialism, Magliola maintains that Derridean thought, when leveled against Jackson and Loy, shows them to be latently substantialist. Jackson claims that Magliola’s own work (two books on this subject, and several articles) which “intersects” Derridean thought-motifs and (a Madhyamikian version of-) “Nagarjunist” Buddhism, both “overstates and underestimates” Nagarjuna’s affinity with Derrida. Jackson interprets Buddhism’s Two Truths (the mundane and the ultimate) as the “positive” and the “negative” of a polarity, with dependent-arising (pratitya-samutpada) posed as the “positive counterpart” to the ultimate’s “emptiness” (sunyata). Jackson then can argue that Magliola over-estimates Nagarjuna’s “anti-foundationalism” (and therefore that Magliola overestimates the similarity to Derrida’s “deconstruction”). On the other hand, Jackson argues that Magliola underestimates Nagarjuna because he argues that Nagarjuna has a way of justifying “logocentrism” whereas, says Jackson, Nagarjuna is anti-logocentric.
Magliola’s riposte to the first charge is that for a Madhyamikan, pratitya-samutpada is sunyata (not its “positive” polar opposite) and is a “falsity” (i.e., the “mundane” is samvrti-satya understood in the Prasangikan way as “truth-for-a-concealer” or “concealing the truth”). Derrida, for his part, regards all holisms as “cosmetic,” i.e., as deceptive appearances really erected or constituted by well-nigh undetectable differential movement. Thus, when Magliola affiliates with the Madhyamikan position as he does, he is correct to argue that Nagarjuna is every bit as deconstructive as Derrida is. Magliola’s riposte to the second charge begins with a correction of Jackson’s understanding of (Derrida’s) term “logocentrism.” Logocentrism is not mere “essentialism.” Rather, logocentrism refers to any holistic formation, so even a “word” or a “number” or a “code or logic,” is logocentric. Thus, humans cannot function in this world without “logocentrism.” Clearly, Nagarjuna is “logocentric” in this sense: that is, he grants that the “falsities” which are logocentric formations have a conventional validity. The Prasangikan Madhyamikan version of meditation as higher-order cognition enables a clearer insight into the role of the “conventionally valid.” What Magliola offers Derrida is this meditative “access” to the conventional validity of what Derrida calls the “cosmetic.”
David Loy asserts that the early phase Derrida “just deconstructs language,” and thus deconstruction falls into the trap of “duality” (as opposed to Buddhist “non-duality”). This is to misunderstand Derrida’s thought completely, argues Magliola, citing relevant passages from Derrida (and Derridean specialists such as Geoffrey Bennington) to show that for Derrida, all life is Writing in the sense that all life is a text. Loy’s argument concerning “duality” does not apply. Loy’s own position combines a Yogacaric/Vijnaptimatratatic interpretation of Nagarjuna (including a version of the Trisvabhava-theory) and Hua-yen formulations of absolute Pure Mind. A close examination of the Sanskrit of the _Mulamadhyamakakarikas_ disproves Yogacara’s (and also Hua-yen’s) subsumption of Nagarjuna into a Mind-Only frame. While granting that Yogacara can function as an effective “prajnapti” for some, Magliola argues that its “totalism” is too holistic, thus rendering it ineffective as a “prajnapti” for Derridean deconstructionists.
ABSTRACT
"Christian Meditation and Heidegger's 'Thinking About Being': a Comparative Inquiry into (Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II's) _Segno di Contradizzione_, With Special Reference to Biblical Hermeneutics"
_Segno di Contradizzione_ , published in 1978, collects the "spiritual exercises" preached by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to Pope Paul VI and the Roman curia in 1975, three years before he was elevated to the Papacy. Wojtyla opens by acknowledging that "il filosofico correlato di Dio come Assoluto ha indubbiamente perso il suo posto privilegiato nella filosophia moderna," and in Anglo-American Analytic philosophy and French Post-Structuralism has vanished completely, but then goes on to propose that in the middle- and late-phases of Heidegger's thought there appears a rehabilitation of many "insights" which can be called "religious," and even specifically Christian. These insights appear in _Der Feldweg_, _Unterwegs zur Sprache_, Zur Seinsfrage_, etc. Magliola points out that the preponderance of Catholic theologians, taking their cue from the secular Heideggerians, have limited their reading of Heidegger to _Sein und Zeit_, and thus have drawn the conclusion that he is an out-and-out relativist and an atheist existentialist. Magliola aims in this paper to compare characteristic Catholic interpretations of "meditative thought," and Heidegger's descriptions of "thinking about being." Magliola chooses various quotations from _Segno di Contradizzione_, using them as "touchstones" whereby he can draw comparisons, positive, negative, or neutral, to Heidegger's "meditative gaze" that looks deeply into the "heart" of man. Heidegger comes to realize that the "presencing of the divine" involves a "reserving proximity." Magliola examines diverse Heideggerian thought-motifs such as "belonging-together," Gelassenheit, "Logos" under erasure (the site of Being), and "poetic language" (understood as a quasi-sacramental). Among the several ways in which Heideggerian thought can serve contemporary Catholic thought is in its elevation of "sapienza" over "scienza." Magliola argues that John McKenzie, S.J., the widely known Catholic scripture scholar, wrongly rejects the Church's traditional identification of "the Woman clothed with the sun" (Revelation 12:1-6) with Mary (and not just with "God's people") because he uses so-called "scientific norms" for the validation of meaning. Magliola opts for the Heideggerian description of "meaning" as the "mutual enfoldment" of an "As-question" issuing from the interpreter's "Fore-structure" and an "As-which" profiled by the text.
Magliola's paper demonstrates how, according to Jacques Derrida--even (what was) the 'more recent' Derrida of "Comment ne pas parler-Dénégations" (1987)-- traces 'denegate', mark all happenings. ('Mark' for Derrida is a signifier without a signified, a stroke without a body). Thus Magliola dissents rigorously from the role Harold Coward assigns to 'silence' in Harold Coward, _Derrida and Indian Philosophy_ in the latter's pertaining chapter on Nagarjunist and Derridean thought. Coward proposes that the 'silence' which is used to describe Buddhism's paramārtha puts Nagarjuna at variance with Derrida because Derrida always entangles the human condition with and in language. Magliola, in a long analysis of Coward's secondary sources--Stcherbatsky, T. R. V. Murti, Gadjin M. Nagao, Mervyn Sprung (though Coward mis-takes Sprung, with whom Magliola often concurs)--, shows that Coward is drawing sometimes from discredited readings and other times very Yogacaric readings of Nagarjuna, whereas Magliola maintains, as he did already in his _Derrida on the Mend_ (1984), that Derridean deconstruction intersects with the Mūlamādhyamakakārikās text (and Sanskrit Ur-text extracted from Candrakirti's 6th-7th century commentary), and not Yogacaric re-readings of the Middle Way. Magliola argues that even the privileged Buddhist silence of the enlightened state is for Nagarjuna 'differential' or 'marked'. 'Dependent arising' is sunya, 'empty', for Nagarjuna precisely because 'dependent arising' must be true to anitya ('impermanence') and 'relatedness' both: that which is 'purely dependent' and impermanent is 'marked'. Likewise for Derrida, all happenings, including 'silence', are a stream of 'effect only' and thus 'marked' (Derrida deconstructs the cause-->effect dyad by showing there are only effects). /// Magliola praises Abe's work as an important meeting between śūnyatā and Christian kenōsis but rejects Abe's resort to paradox as the way the two notions resemble each other. Abe posits that God/śūnyatā is not God/ śūnyatā and precisely because God/śūnyatā is not affirmative of itself, God/śūnyatā is truly God/śūnyatā. Magliola does not mean that Abe equates the concepts of God and śūnyatā: rather, what Magliola is referencing is Abe's claim that both God and śūnyatā are paradoxical. Abe's "paradox" is a binary of "A = non-A" that constitutes a mystical oneness, and for a deconstructionist such as Magliola, a binary framed into a oneness is holistic and thus radically misleading. Magliola in his last section demonstrates that in Catholicism's Trinitarian theology, the Trinity is not "paradoxical" nor would kenosis be understood as a "voiding-out." Because of Catholicism's "relationis oppostio" clause (Council of Florence), the Trinitarian dynamic involves differing negative relations and differentiation between what belongs solely to the Unity of God and what uniquely defines each of the three Hypostases. Thus Trinitarian kenōsis would be, to coin a phrase, a "devoiding-out."
Robert Magliola, _THE OFF/FIGURAL: POSTMODERNISM IN ITALIAN ARCHITECTURE AND AMERICAN POETRY_ is a Conference-paper that Prof. Magliola presented on May 3, 1985, at the "Conference on City, Text, and Thought" sponsored by the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL). His paper was later translated into Chinese by Virginia Chiang and published in _Zhong Wai Wenxue_, Vol. 14, No. 12 (May 1986), pp. 127-146 (National Taiwan University). This Chinese translation now appears online in the "Journal Articles" section of Magliola's www.academia.edu account. The same Chinese translation is also reprinted as a book-chapter in the _Proceedings of the National Conference in Literary Criticism_ [Chinese Language], ed. Lin Yao-Fu (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 1986, pp. 122-141. ////// This article functions as a source-text for several crucial postmodern techniques identified with Derridean deconstruction-- techniques that Magliola argues can foster positive social advance. Magliola points out that he has argued elsewhere--against the adversaries of postmodernism in the West--that postmodernism understood and practiced as a Derridean "differentialism" is not reactionary. A "differential" postmodernism correctly understood is not premodern feudalism nor decadent aestheticism nor an autonomous technocracy ("Rule by the Machine")---all three of which are, in the eyes of a Derridean, notorious "logocentrisms." Moreover, the three are the opposites, respectively, of three other logocentrisms--"laisser-faire" capitalism, Stalinist state-planning, and elitist use of technology. In the Derridean thought that Magliola affirms, contraries of logocentric formulae are likewise logocentric. Postmodernism in Derridean terms is an "alternative" which is neither a contrary (e.g. hot-cold, black-white) nor a mediating synthesis (e.g., tepid, grey). In the work at hand, Magliola first explains "Torqued Time/Space--Some Strategies of Postmodern Italian Architecture." He accompanies these strategies by seven full-page illustrations, diagrams, photographs from the Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, Italy 1973; Aldo Rossi's "Projet d'hôtel face au grand canal" (reproduced in _Babylone_, 1980); the "Avanguardia/Transavanguardia" project on the Aurelian Wall (1982); maquettes by Peter Eisenman (1969-71); and several other exhibits [see diagrams at the rear of the paper]. Under the sub-heading of "Maquettes and Drawings," Magliola treats (1) Splicing of Inside and Outside (Eisenman), (2) Rejection of Mediation (A. Rivkin), (3) Furtive Reinscription of Opposition (Františ Lesák), and (4) Furtive Reinscription of Holistic Formula (Anselmo Anselmi). Under the sub-heading of "City and Off/City," he treats (1) Bricolage (Aldo Rossi), and (2) Differential Déroulement and the Off/Figural (Bonito Oliva et al.). In the second part of this paper, "Torqued Time/Space--Some Strategies of a Postmodern American Poet," Magliola turns to the postmodern poetry of John Ashbery, finding in his texts differential strategies off/correlevant to those operative in postmodern architecture. In the sub-section "Frontal and Yet to One Side: Room or Loom in a John Asbery Text," a nine-line excerpt from Ashbery's poem "Tapestry" is closely examined in detail--the poem's repeated mixing of signified and signifier, its reinscription of separation, identity, and reversal into each other, and its deployment of "off/tracking" (a technique that Magliola also explains in his article "Postmodernism on the Brim: A Differentialist Manifesto" (_Krisis_, Vols. 3-4, Fondation Menil, Paris, France & Houston, Texas, USA, 1985--This work is also uploaded at Magliola's www.academic.edu account). In the sub-section "Empty Entablatures: Facade and Mirror in a John Asbery Text," a sixteen-line excerpt from Ashbery's poem "Litany" is closely examined. The poem "torques" the appearances of a Palladian-style building, displaying counterfeits of counterfeits, oeils-de-boeuf windows punning off a literal "bull's eye," etc. The poem's technique of "allusion-on-the-bias" functions to reference both a famous Zen capping-phrase and the "wayfarer" in T.S. Eliot's _Four Quartets_, but to deflect each. Magliola concludes with an excerpt from "Litany" that decenters itself and his very article (as indeed is to be off/expected from a differentialist paper "drawing to a conclusion").
KEYWORDS: John Ashbery postmodern architecture Italian postmodernism postmodernismo postmodernisme differentialism deconstruction Robert Magliola Aldo Rossi Peter Eisenman
ABSTRACT: In his widely-known book _Christianity and the World Religions_(1985), Hans Küng reprints 12 "lecture-dialogues" in which he "converses" with scholars representing Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism respectively. His dialogue with the esteemed Buddhologist Heinz Bechert invokes at least ten topics, of which four constitute the matter of Magliola's critique: (1) the "concept" (distinguished from the "experience," of course) of Sunyata, (2) corporeality in Vajrayana Buddhism, (3) the relevance of Buddhist demythologizing, and (4) the logical "inconsistency" of "anātman" (no-self). Magliola argues that at worst Küng dangerously misconstrues the Buddhist teachings involved, and at best fails to accommodate what in Buddhist teachings can best advance contemporary Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Treating Theravada's Sunyata as "nihilistic" and Mahayana's Sunyata as a "positive" nothingness, Küng argues that the former cannot fulfill human needs and the latter just serves as an inchoate version of Christianity's better defined "God-concept." Magliola, on the contrary, understands Sunyata to be a dissolution of the "principle of identity," and thereby, as necessarily a dissolution both of self-identities (entities) and a "personal" Absolute (God). Moreover, Küng ignores the contemporary paradigm shift to the post-phenomenological moment and the chance this shift offers for discussion of Sunyata in terms of "devoidness" rather than the less suitable (because--in Derridean terms--"holistic") frame-concept "voidness." Magliola argues that postmodern "devoidness" can enable Christian theologians, for the first time, to develop in orthodox terms a convincing theory of divine (and even Trinitarian!) impersonality, and that this devoidness (unlike the results of the old "negative theology") can become a promising zone of dialogue with Buddhism. /// Misrepresenting A. Bharati's classic description of the tantras, Küng attributes to the tantra of the Vajrayana the function of Hindu Shaktism. In actuality, Buddhist "Shaktism" is designed to nullify rather than indulge desire. /// Küng calls for a scholarly restoration of the "historical Sakyamuni" and for a general demythologizing of Buddhism--especially in the matter of Mahayana sutras. Magliola, while granting that many Mahayana sutras fabricate their literal authorship by the historical Sakyamuni, argues that there is a basis in Buddhist epistemology for legitimation of scriptural validity by other means: the revealing Buddhas and their scriptures are understood to be generated out of a transcendental space that is neither subjective nor objective. /// Küng claims that the doctrine of "anātman" is contradictory, since "it takes a self to know there's no-self." Magliola replies that there are at least three solutions to the alleged dilemma: (1) Chinese Mahayana's doctrine of the "great self" (where "no self" means "no little self") though he finds this formulation too Taoist to be congenial; (2) the fourth lemma--that which knows is "neither self nor non-self"; and (3) the doctrine of the Two Truths--the "conventional" self recognizes its simultaneous "ontological " emptiness--its emptiness in terms of Supreme Truth. /// Magliola's paper goes on to demonstrate--drawing from his previous work intersecting the thought of Nagarjuna and Jacques Derrida--the "devoidness" rather than "voidness" of Sunyata, and then broaches a new section [unfinished] entitled "Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: The Differential Divine"[Magliola goes on to explain the "Differential Divine" in Part Two of his 1997 book, _On Deconstructing Life-Worlds_ (Scholars P. of AAR, 1997; Oxford UP, 2000-); in the lengthy Annexes to his 2014 book, _Facing Up to Real Doctrinal Difference: How Some Thought-Motifs from Derrida Can Nourish the Catholic-Buddhist Encounter_(Angelico P., 2104-); and in several book chapters, especially "Two Models of Trinity,--French Post-Structuralist versus the Historical-Critical-," in Blanchette, Imamich, and McLean, eds., _Philosophical Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization_ (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2001). /// Keywords:
Buddhist-Christian Dialogue Hans Küng Mulamadhyamakakarikas Nagarjuna Sunyata anātman
_______________________________________________________________________
Jacques Derrida
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
54, Bvd Raspail
75006 Paris
24 rue des Bergeronnettes
91130 Ris-Orange
Ris-Orangis, July 6, 1997
Dear Robert,
What a magnificent book ! I have been diving into it for several days. I marvel and
learn much, I play much at watching you play so seriously with all these riches (I am
not speaking of my texts, surely, but of all the others, so many many others.)
What you do with my little history, from El-Biar to Khora [1], from my tr through to
the tr [2] of Aurobindo, traverses so many worlds that I must hold on and be out of
breath in order to appear as if I know where I am going.
Your profundity, your boldness, and your independence amaze and impress me.
They also revive the memory of our happy meeting at Irvine.
Please know that despite the distance, and with the supposition that the word still
has a meaning and is to be wished for, I sense myself very near to you, I continue to
read you and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I hope to have the opportunity to see you again (in recent days, on my way to Paris,
It was good to speak with Stephen Barker about you).
With my best wishes and my faithful affection
Jacques Derrida
_________________________________________________________________
[1] El-Biar is the name of the Algerian village where Derrida was born. It turns out to be an anagram for the Bible’s beliar (Gk.), the English Bible’s “belial”; and apocalyptic literature’s Beliar (“Belial”). My ODLW calls this irony to Derrida’s attention (p. 157). Derrida in his work cites Plato’s Khôra, but ODLW also interprets the word as a pun for the Bible’s “Korah” (ibid.).
[2] Derrida’s tr- is a “floating graphic trait.” A graphic trait is a consonant cluster treated as an element, independent of whatever meaning-unit it happens to constitute when it joins with a vowel: thus, for example, “transfer,” “intransitive,” “train” (all from Latin’s trans-, “across”) but also “tree” (from M.E.<O.E.) and “tref” (from Yid.<H.). For Derrida, floating graphic traits act-out that which wends its way, but discontinuously, and between meaning and non-meaning. In ODLW, I deploy them to represent the mysterious recurrences that some Catholics sense in their personal lives—recurrences that seem to signal a Divine meaning, but a meaning somehow hidden from their rational explanation or interpretation. I took care to design ODLW in such a way that some Buddhists, reading the ‘same’ text, may construe the recurrences to represent the uncanny unfolding of karma in their personal lives. For the Catholic, the uncanny can represent the hidden workings of Divine Providence. For a Buddhist, the uncanny can represent the hidden exactitudes of karma.
FROM PERIPHERIES TO CENTER TO PERIPHERIES: AN EXPOSITION AND EVALUATION OF ROBERT MAGLIOLA ON BUDDHIST-CATHOLIC DIALOGUE
By Jaime M. Rivera, S.J., Thesis in Theological Studies, 439 pp., Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines
Oral Defense Examination successfully passed, March 21, 2016; Original and certified copies deposited in the University Archives of Ateneo de Manila University and the Commission on Higher Education of the Philippines (CHED), shortly thereafter.
Abstract
The thesis examines the work and contribution of Robert Magliola, a lay Catholic theologian specializing in Derridean Deconstruction, in the field of Buddhist-Catholic dialogue. The thesis proposes that Magliola’s dialogue based on “founding and irreducible differences,” which departs from the “common ground” model of dialogue, can foster or help break the impasse of Buddhist-Catholic dialogue in Thailand.
In his new book, Facing Up to Real Doctrinal Difference: How Some Thought-Motifs From Derrida Can Nourish The Catholic-Buddhist Encounter, Magliola proposes that certain Derridean “thought-structures” can be adapted to address proselytization, misrepresentation, syncretism, etc.—issues that have blocked dialogue efforts in Thailand. In light of this, the thesis explains how: (1) Magliola appropriates Derrida; (2) Magliola uses his own brand of Deconstruction, known as Differentialism, in Buddhist-Christian dialogue; and (3) Differentialism can be appropriated in the Thai context, to foster dialogue of life, action, religious experience and doctrinal exchange. This is in line with Pope Francis’ call for theological reflection to follow “the movement of the logic of God” from the “peripheries to center to peripheries.”
The thesis found Differentialism to be especially useful in exposing logocentric formulations or mindsets in various texts that impede dialogue and in fostering an environment conducive to Buddhist-Catholic encounters. In line with Dialogue and Proclamation, it helps prepare Catholics, “to learn and to receive from and through others the positive values of their traditions” while “keeping their identity intact.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION 1
Statement of the Problem 4
Scope and Limitations 6
Significance of the Study 9
Methodology 13
Definition of Terms 18
II. LOGOCENTRISM AND DECONSTRUCTIVE MANEUVERS:
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR DIFFERENTIALISM
AND DIALOGUE BASED ON DIFFERENCES 21
Logocentrism 22
Derridean Deconstruction/Differentialism 32
Derridean Deconstruction ‘Defined’ 33
Dédoublement 35
Dissémination 36
Pure Negative Reference 37
Différance 38
Différance Originaire 41
Dénégation 42
Law of Aberrant Reinscription/Asymmetry/Dissymmetry 44
Derridean Thought Motifs Proposed For Dialogue 46
III. MAGLIOLA, DIFFERENTIALISM, AND
BUDDHIST-CATHOLIC DIALOGUE 55
Dialogue between Contemporary Philosophy
and Buddhism: Setting the Stage for
Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue 55
Pure Negative Reference in Derrida and Nagarjuna 57
Pure Negative Reference as Applied to Conciliar
Notions of the Trinity 62
Differentialism and Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue:
Dialogue with Masao Abe 64
Off-rational Differentialism 69
Rhetorical style: Mimicking Life’s Aberrant Reinscriptions,--in Writing 70
Life-Worlds as Texts 72
Out-of-Placeness/Being Marked by the Cross 75
Differential Reading of Scripture 84
Dialogue based on difference 87
Samenesses and Irreducible Differences 88
Buddhists and Christians Appraising Each Other 90
Implications for Buddhist-Catholic Practice and Relations 101
Chiasm and Positive Overlap 102
Double-bind 105
Spatial Relationships 106
Tetralemmas 109
IV. SITUATING BUDDHIST-CATHOLIC DIALOGUE
IN THE THAI CONTEXT 112
Context of Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue in Thailand 112
Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue Today 122
Dialogue of Life 124
Dialogue of Religious Experience 125
Dialogue of Action 129
Dialogue of Theological or Doctrinal Exchange 134
V. SIGNIFICANCE/USEFULNESS OF MAGLIOLA’S
DIFFERENTIAL APPROACH TO
BUDDHIST-CATHOLIC DIALOGUE 136
Dialogue of Life 137
Identity of Buddhist Monk/Catholic Priest 142
Deconstruction/Differential Reading of “Catholic Priest” 146
Common Priesthood vs. Ordained Priesthood 151
“Head” vs. “Body” as Verbal Signs 154
“Fore front” as glitch 163
The ‘Place’ of Ordained Priests vis-à-vis
Christ’s in PDV No. 16§6 171
Double-bind 233
Dialogue of Religious Experience 234
Magliola’s possible contribution to Dialogue of Life
and Dialogue of Religious Practice 237
Out-of-Placeness 246
Dialogue of Action 251
Unsettling feelings 252
Recommendations from FABC 255
Action 256
Escaping/shifting the frame 268
Difference between Church and People of God 270
Divine Impersonality 283
Of God, “Monsters” and “Freaks” 285
Matthew 25:40 and Colossians 1:15-20 as subtext
of PDV No. 16&6 and PDV No. 22 &4 286
Triumphalism 296
Logocentric vs. Differential reading 300
Instrumentality 307
Coffey: Christological and Pneumatological
References to Christ’s Priesthood 307
Infant/Baby Jesus as model of humility 309
Kenosis of Mary 310
Suffering 320
Dialogue of Doctrinal Exchange 324
Tetralemmas and dialogue 324
First Lemma 332
Second Lemma 335
Third Lemma 337
Sriwarakuel’s rejection of exclusivism and
inclusivism following a logocentric frame 338
Fourth Lemma 349
Thai Culture and Thai Identity 351
Magliola, Church and the Postmodern era 360
VI. CONCLUSION 359
Contribution 359
Strength Becoming Weakness 372
Weakness Becoming Strength 381
Proposed Methodology 383
Preparation for Dialogue 384
Recommendations for Further Study 390
Pastoral Considerations 391
APPENDIXES 394
Appendix I ………………………………………………………………………………………. 394
Appendix II 405
WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY 411