ABSTRACT
I’ve chosen to begin this chapter on Derrida and Ibn 2Arabi’s ideas of interpretation with Rosen’s faintly apocalyptic remarks for two reasons. First of all, Rosen’s remarks (although over a decade old) effectively sum up the place contemporary hermeneutics has reached in its exploration of the death of the subject/author/canon and their consequences for the way we read books. Rosen’s point is, of course, a familiar one: the collapse of the subject, the mistrust of the object, the demise of various institutions – along with all of their theological raisons d1être – has brought about the demise of stable, repeatable meaning. If both readers and writers really are, as one theorist says, nothing more than ‘centreless webs of beliefs and desires’2 then exactly how are human beings to continue reading and writing sheets of symbols no-one agrees upon? It is
a question which, in their respective centuries, faced both Ibn 2Arabi and Derrida, even though in the Great Shaykh’s case it is the infinity of the mind of God, rather than any agonistic plurality of interpretative perspectives, which lay as the source of the problem. The point supplies the second reason why our chapter on thirteenth-century Sufi hermeneutics must begin with mention of ‘the abyss of postanthropological deconstruction’. Just as Derrida’s work on the endless text reminds us of how uncannily contemporary Ibn 2Arabi is, Ibn 2Arabi’s understanding of what it means to read the Quran brings to light a much older genealogy in Derrida’s work.
