Lurianic Models and Beyond

Syntactic Infinities

Another highly significant strategy for tackling the ‘anti-system’ of the system of Lurianic Kabbalah revolves around the Derridean expansion of our notion of syntax. We are challenged by the relationship between the syntactic and the semantic. Probing the extent to which each respectively, or both in unison, founds the meaning of a text may prove to be an unsolvable mystery.

Introducing unprecedented elasticity to our definition of syntax through careful consideration of Gasché’s remarkable representation of Derrida’s view on the matter ignites new enthusiasm for what is otherwise an intractable Lurianic model. In reading the following excerpt from Gasché’s picture of Derrida, we must bear in mind the question of how our diacritics as extra-textual effects supplement the literally text just as syntax would constitute the plethora of the semantic.

The undecidability of infrastructures results from the syntactic arrangement of their parts. But what does Derrida mean by syntax? As opposed to semantics (and pragmatics), as another major aspect of the grammatical construction of sentences (and of the general theory of signs), syntax refers traditionally to the formal arrangements of words and signs, to their connection and relation in phrases or sentences, as well as to the established usages of grammatical construction and the rules deduced therefrom. Derrida’s use of the concept of syntax, however, is not simply a reference to the formal properties of language insofar as these are traditionally considered to refer to the articulation of the signifieds. Indeed form is just another name for presence, Derrida notes. His use of syntax does not imply the traditional subjection of syntax to semantics. In distinction from the grammatical opposition of the syntactic and the semantic, of form and content, and so on, Derrida’s use of syntax is intended to undo these oppositions systematically. Syntax is conceived by Derrida as being irreducibly in excess of the semantic, and consequently as disequilibrating that traditional grammatical and philosophical distinction. How, then, are we to think such an ‘irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic?’ (Dissemination, p.221). Such an excess takes place where it can be shown that the formal properties of language are not simply a function of signifieds, of the content of the words, but that they are arranged in and intrinsically dependent on syntax of their own. Yet if it can be demonstrated that formal syntactic properties can be syntactically composed and decomposed, a syntax of syntax comes into play, along with the problem of the simulacrum, which, as we have seen, is no longer subject to truth or, in the case of syntax, to the content of the words. In ‘The Double Session,’ Derrida has shown that the writing of Mallarmé is precisely such an attempt to explore the possibilities of syntactical excess. It is, therefore, a literature in which ‘The suspense is due only to the placement and not to the content of words’ (Dissemination, p.220). (41)

Is not our image of syntax in the tanta [טנת”א] model one that totality immerses the semantic? Or, could we not say, in broad handed fashion, that most of the kabbalistic models imitate this relationship of excessive dependence on the syntactic? Nowhere amongst the complex models of Lurianic Kabbalah are we immune to syntactic excess—although it is admittedly more difficult to understand the syntactic itself as ‘semantic excess’. This focus of Derrida’s on the ‘syntax of syntax’ is also worthy of further investigation. Might we suggest that our earlier comparison of tanta [טנת”א] to asmab [עסמ”ב] or the layers of textuality and the modes of Being, stages a kind of ontotextual version of the syntax of syntax. Continuing with Gasché, we can open the ambiguities that Wolfson sees in the Lurianic system a bit more:

Now, the syntactic excess responsible for the infrastructures’ undecidability stems from the fact that their formal arrangements, dispositions, distribution, or constellations of predicates refer to a supplementary mark. The infrastructure of re-marking or of the double mark demonstrates this essential character or infrastructures in general, which consists of their being folded upon themselves in such a manner that they themselves become a paradigm of the law they represent. Infrastructures apply to themselves. The arrangement that they represent is always rearrangement by themselves. For this reason they are, as we have seen, in constant displacement, incapable of assuming any stable identity. By re-marking the syntactic disposition with a supplementary syntactic trait, the infrastructures can no longer be brought to a semantic halt. They seem to be purely syntactic; yet since these purely ‘formal’ or syntactic structures or knots of intersections are their own paradigm, they also, unquestionably, signify and are thus not purely syntactic. ‘Through the re-marking of its semantic void, it in fact begins to signify. Its semantic void signifies, but it signifies spacing and articulation; it has as its meaning the possibility of syntax; it orders the play of means. Neither purely syntactic nor purely semantic, it marks the articulated opening of that opposition’ (Dissemination, p.222).

The infrastructures thus float indefinitely between the possibilities of the semantic and the syntactic, in short of meaning. Though not purely syntactic (or, for that matter, purely semantic), they are in a position of anteriority and possibility to both aspects of language, precisely because of the excess of the syntactic over meaning—that is, of the re-marked syntax—of a syntax that arranges (itself). It is in this sense that I shall continue to speak of the infrastructures as syntactically undecidable. (42)

As a folding of four within four or tanta [טנת”א] within tanta [טנת”א] the model creates the ‘syntactic excesses’ that make the system so hard to manage. Like Gasché explanation of Derrida’s infrastructures with their character of “being folded upon themselves” or “applying to themselves” in “constant displacement”—the nomadic wandering of signs in exile—so too, the axiomatic pronouncements in our text of Etz Chaim come off in like fashion. “Floating” and “undecidable” in the non-place or utopia between the ‘purely syntactic’ and ‘purely semantic,’ the multiplex of textual reality, tanta [טנת”א] may gratefully embrace Derrida’s insight as a helpful way of explaining its service record. What is more:

Based on the developments of ‘The Double Session,’ one could call Derrida’s notion of infinity a syntactic infinity, keeping in mind, of course, that the text also sets out to ‘systematically outwit and undo the opposition between the syntactic and the semantic’ (Dissemination, p.263). (43) P.139 Inventions

Feeling out the affinity of the Lurianic proposal towards this new idea of ‘syntactic infinities’ we have opened an untapped outlet for deconstruction to aid in the explanation of yet another kabbalistic phenomenon. Architectonically, these are no ordinary structures. We may have lost our grip on the very idea of structure. “But in the same way as the opposition of the syntactic and the semantic becomes undone in the perspective of a more ‘radical’ concept of the syntactic, the opposition between the structural and its others is deconstructed in the construction of a more ‘originary’ structurality, so to speak,” according to Gasché.

In closing, we will take up Gasché’s use of the re-mark or structure of the fold—in our case the fourfold—self referencing itself. This endless interplay entrenched as it is in the kabbalists mindset, reverberates in efforts of philosophic history. Following-up with Gasché again:

What one has to understand is that the re-mark is not only a replication of the marks, or semes, of the text, but a repetition-toward-themselves of these marks as well, and, consequently, the addition of themselves of a supplementary fold. Marks, semes, states Derrida, are constituted differentially, diacritically. If such is the case, the marks, as they are deployed within the series which they designate as well (as designating all other marks of that same series), designate in addition, or, more generally, must blend into, or take the fold of, the anemic space of production or inscription that unfolds between the terms of the series. (44)

Our collection contains them all. We have marks and re-marks, folds and inscriptions, but what we cannot highlight enough is the part about “marks, semes,” that are “constituted differentially, diacritically (my emphasis). This allows for ontotextual manifestations irreducible to an idol text. We are saved from textual totality. We are enjoined by Gasché to remember:

If something forbids us to seek an overall and totalizing meaning of a text—a meaning in short—of a series or system of marks, if it is also useless to let oneself become entangled in a text’s interminable network of references, this is so precisely because the limit to semantic totalization is of a kind other than that of spurious infinity. This limit is that of the re-mark. Itself re-cross-referencing, it is a limit that comes about ‘through the angle and the intersection of a re-mark that folds the text back upon itself without any possibility of its fitting back over or into itself’ (Dissemination, p.251). It is the limit of the syntax of that fold. Syntax means here the arrangement, combination, and intimate connection of all the nuclear traits of the re-mark. (45)

⁴¹ Ibid, p.242-243.

⁴² Ibid, p.243-244.

⁴³ Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida, p.139.

⁴⁴ Ibid, p.142.

⁴⁵ Ibid, p.144.

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