Writing without presence: Metaphysics and negative theology in the thought Michel de Certeau

Abstract

From the moment in which all body is hidden, and the grave is empty of all presence, has a fundamental lack in common (corpus mysticum). Therefore this lack, in regard to the Christian world, is expressed in terms of original concealment (Deus absconditus). For its part, the medieval theological and mystical tradition, heiress and interlocutor of a metaphysical tradition of the Hellenic world (particularly Neoplatonism), systematized throughout the centuries the grammar of this disappearance in terms of an inaccessibility and irreducibility of being, namely, an essential of the Logos negativity (“this or that”, “neither the one nor the other”). One could anticipate, therefore, as arrival point, than the language of the Christian mystical tradition, is not only the language of the lack of a body (the incarnation of the word), but also the search for one language enough to reconcile the universal with the autonomous unit of the language. This article proposes, therefore, rebuild the way in that historian and Jesuit theologian, Michel de Certeau, genealogically rebuilt part of a mystical tradition that, immersed in a series of variables and potential historical of enunciation, is expressed in terms of “a place without place”, originally missing whose, would lead to a relationship of alterity. This would be one of the outcomes in early Western modernity of what from the origins of Neoplatonism known as the solitude of the one, either, the absence of God.