Chapter 7

Jung and Derrida: the numinous,

deconstruction and myth
Susan Rowland

The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the

influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of
consciousness.
(Jung 1938/1940: 6) 1
A great many ritualistic performances are carried out for the sole
purpose of producing at will the effect of the numinosum . . . But a
religious belief in an external and objective divine cause is always prior to
any such performance.
(Jung 193811940: 7)
[l]f the image is charged with numinosity, that is, with psychic energy,
then it becomes dynamic and will produce consequences . . . the
archetype is living matter.
(Jung 1961: 589)
[O]ur consciousness has deprived itself of the organs by which the
auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious could be
assimilated. These organs were the numinous symbols, held holy by
common consent.
(Jung 1961: 583)

Introduction
The idea of the numinous haunts Jung's psyche. When used synonymously
for psychic energy (in the fourth quotation above), it opens the ground of
Jungian psychology to the discipline's ancestry in theology and philosophy.
In itself, Jung's numinous proves liminal, a quality denoting disputed
regions between consciousness and unconsciousness, the conceivable and
the unknowable, the 'inside' psyche and the 'exterior' cosmos, of the dis-
tinction between form and matter.
For example, is the numinous a gift from outside the individual, the grace
of God, as construed by monotheistic religions? Or, is it a psychic creation
of the deep interior? This question is yet another version of the Cartesian
split between self and world. As a founding structure of modernity, it is
Jung and Derrida 99

now a commonplace to assume a separation of conscious rational mind

from unconsciousness, body, matter and cosmos. Jung's treatJV:ent of the
numinous, then, is first of all to trouble such an assumption. For in the
!quotations above, the numinous is the influence of a presence that cannot
!be securely consigned to either 'outside' or 'inside' the psyche. Carried by
the religious symbolism of a culture, the numinous is the psychic matter
that matters. It will prove integral to Jung's urgent attempt to heal the
modem psyche, now dwelling in alien territory because it has lost the
connection to its vitally charged symbols.
So Jung's numinous is at the heart of his cultural criticism. To him the
modem world is sick because it has exalted rationality and the knowledge
created by it, so far above unconscious sources of being that the resulting
neglect of the whole psyche has turned it dark. .Mrhen rationality is entirely
· divorced from its irrational roots it proves fragiie. It is dangerously liable to
· being swallowed up by unconscious powers. These powers have turned
demonic through being ignored too long. 2 Jung, always concerned with the ·
relation of the individual to the collective (unconscious and culture), argues
that the cultural numinous is not extinguished. Rather, when traditional
religious symbols lose their potency to regulate the psyche, the collective
turns to other icons. What Jung liked to call the devilish 'isms' exert a
hypnotic fascination as the psyche succumbs to fanaticism.
Fortunately, Jung takes his cultural criticism in two directions that
ultimately will provide tools for social-psychic reconstruction: that of myth,
and of an essentially aesthetic re-ordering of science. For if the problem of
modernity is the privileging of reason above all other modes of the psyche,
then one prominent example is the construction of modem science. The
Enlightenment belief that science is built upon objective observations of a
reality exterior to the observing process is not only questioned by twentieth-
century particle physics, it is also a logical contradiction for psychology.
Since there is no exterior point outside the psyche from which to observe it,
psychology is necessarily a 'science' from within. Consequently, as Jung was
well aware, phenomena that alter consciousness, such as the numinous, can
never be definitively attributed to either 'inside' or 'outside' realms.
After the critique of reason and 'objective' science, a third element of
Jung's cultural criticism is his questioning of the hero myth as the major
structure of western consciousness. The myth supplies the narrative model
of the masculine hero who fights the monstrous (m)other of the uncon-
scious, seizes the territory of the other, and wins union with the feminine as
a prize. Such a powerful narrative is, as Jung noted, a close sponsor of the
cultural triumph of reason and colonialism. Rationality as hero conquering
the psyche and colonising its habitable, knowable domain, is an aspect of
the mythical dimension of modem ills. So in order to comprehend Jung's
numinous, it will be necessary to trace the deep myths of being that struc-
ture psyche, culture and history.
1 00 Susan Rowland

THE MYTHICAL FRAME

To Jung, the 'objective' mode of modern scientific observations was closely

related to theological error. He understood that modern scientific assump-
tions about the world are directly descended from Christian theology. His
book, A ion, is an exploration of the legacy of this history (Jung 1951 ). With
a model of God as transcendent of and separate from 'his' creation,
theologians sought to understand the mind of God, the logos, by studying
its secondary product, nature. Just as God is separate from his creation,
nature and man, so man, conceived in the image of God, is similarly
separate from, and indeed transcendent of, nature. God exists above man,
is 'outside' and has given man dominion over nature, which man is simi-
larly 'outside'. To Jung, the theological error derives from this regimented
portrayal of reality. Transcendent God is defined as wholly good. To
achieve such a structuring of good means splitting the supreme divine being
off from evil and irrationality. Hence evil and irrationality become proper-
ties of matter.
So theologians continue to seek the good and rational mind of God as
logos transcendent of creation. Eventually belief in this sacred in the sky
declines and those theologians studying creation re-define themselves as
scientists. They are still in pursuit of a logos: now science, knowledge and
reason are regarded as transcendent, logocentric, and divisible from irra-
tionality, the human psyche and matter. The Christian myth of transcen-
dence produces the scientific myth of objectivity.
Significantly, the myth of transcendence is also highly gendered. With
Christianity's male actors of Father and Son, reason and logos become
associated with masculinity, while irrationality and matter are gendered
feminine. Much of Jung's writing is marked with a struggle to both resist
and recuperate this not-so-hidden gender politics of modernity. For
example, he posits a psychic binary of logos and eros as factors in the
psyche. In the first instance these appear to be more an expression of the
triumph of masculine logos than its amelioration. For Jung's logos
connotes rational consciousness and spirit, regarded as masculine and
proper to the male conscious psyche. Eros is connectedness and feeling, said
to be more characteristic of the female psyche.
Here, as elsewhere in Jung's work, a potentially radical feminine is
introduced, only to serve as a support to the fragile nature of masculine
reason in modernity. Jung is a conservative with revolutionary ideas. He
wants to save the modern world more than he wants to transform it.
Nevertheless his healing project has subversive implications that bring him
close to a later attempt to re-make culture and meaning: that of Jacques
Derrida's deconstruction? For, taken mythically, what both thinkers are
doing is realigning the two great myths of creation shaping cultural
signifying: the Sky-Father logos and the Earth-Mother eros.
jung and Derrida 101

TWO CREATION MYTHS AND THE RELATIVITY OF

FORM AND MATTER

The Judaeo-Christian creation myth appears to be a straightforward

version of a Sky-Father. This is a mythical form that gained ascendancy
over earlier religions in the ancient world when nomadic tribes took over
formerly agrarian societies (Baring and Cashford 1991: 666). 'He' creates
the worlds as separate from himself and so remains the logos, transcendent
of it. 'He' needs no feminine consort. Such a narrative becomes the found-
ing structure of logocentrism. It shapes basic assumptions such as distinc-
tions between inside and outside, and form and matter. In the myth of the
logos, transcendent mind is a 'masculine' creative principle working on
inert 'feminine' matter. Typically, Jung seems to accept the distinction while
problematising it.

[I]t makes no substantial difference whether you call the world principle
male and a father (spirit), or female and a mother (matter). Essentially
we know as little of the one as of the other.
(Jung 1961: 582)

Derrida is equally very conscious that his life-long critique of the

apparently obvious nature of basic distinctions such as form and matter, is,
at root, a challenge to the Sky-Father creation myth.

In any case, Christian creationism would ... have brought with it ... a
supplementary motivation for considering the form-matter complex as
the structure of every entity, the ens creatum as the unity of forma and
materia. Though faith has disappeared, the schemas of Christian
philosophy remain effective.
(Derrida 1987: 66)

Jung's analysis reminds us of another creation myth, this time gendered

feminine. In the Earth-Mother story, the Earth herself is sacred and
generative of all reality in a great web of being. Here the sacred is not
transcendent. Rather it is immanent within her fertile materiality. Matter
and spirit are one rather than entirely separate. The Earth-Mother gives
birth to a divine son, who becomes her lover. He suffers a fall in death, only
to be reborn again with the aid of the feminine principle.
- Such a founding story of Earth-Mother with her son-lover is the core of
the myths of Osiris and Attis. More controversially, it is still perceptible in
Christianity. Within the Sky-Father's impregnation of a virgin, is the pagan
story of a divine son of Virgin Mother Earth who dies only to be resur-
rected. Much iconography of the Christian Virgin Mary portrays her in the
garb of the Mother Goddess. She clasps her dying son much as the Great
1 02 Susan Rowland

Mother embraced her son-lover. So entwined, yet barely visible in Christian

myth, is an earlier myth of the immanent Goddess giving birth out of the
sacredness of matter.
Indeed, the word 'matter' is derived from 'mater', mother. Where the
logocentric perspective of separation has feminine matter as the evil 'other'
of transcendent rational good, Earth-Mother sponsors a theology of the
connectedness of all the cosmos. 'She' has no form/matter distinction.
Matter and spirit, humanity and nature, are all part of an unimaginable
whole; a whole whose plurality cannot be contained in a single image. In
fact such a 'whole' cannot be represented, because we cannot get 'outside'
her embrace to see this sacred reality as separate from ourselves.
Here we can see Jung's principles of logos and eros are simultaneously
Sky-Father spirit and Earth-Mother connectedness. By bringing them
together in the psyche he is attempting to reconcile two gendered myths of
creation. His point that neither is self-evidently 'the truth' (because we
cannot get outside psyche and world to know it rationally) will prove to be
an opening to his profound evocation of the numinous.
So although Christianity is predominantly a Sky-Father logos oriented
myth, it retains significant Earth-Mother elements. In addition to the bodily
incarnation of the son-lover, the story of creation in a garden, the moulding
of human beings out of clay, and the presence of that 'other' to God's
commands, the serpent (ancient image of the Mother Goddess), all include
the substance of the earlier myth.
In fact, Christianity's constitution as an entwinement of two myths, one
dominant, one virtually invisible to Christian culture, suggests that the
mythical frame of consciousness may necessarily be plural. The psyche
requires more than one myth. While the two gendered myths of creation
each beget other generations of mythical stories of the gods and goddesses,
perhaps, as Jung hints, proper psychic health requires a better balance
between the two contrasting frames. So how, precisely, might the Earth-
Mother be rescued - in a world in which the Sky-Father of rational con-
sciousness is dying of loneliness?

THE MOTHER GODDESS AND MODERNITY

To call the Sky-Father logocentric is to recognise that his form-matter

narrative structures all kinds of oppositions that make up the tacit assump-
tions of modernity: that between good and evil, inside and outside, above
and below, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit. By contrast, Earth-
Mother eros is to be found in all the cultural challenges to such 'natural'
oppositions, including the environmental movement that seeks to overcome
the notion that man is inherently transcendent of nature. Eco-logically,
human beings are immanent in nature and need to respect rather than
Jung and Derrida 103

obliterate 'her' nurturing properties. Culture needs to reawaken its ancient

form in cultivation.
Many non-monotheistic religions similarly place human beings in a vital
relationship to non-human nature. For example, animism, which is the
belief that the non-human is alive, and in some sense could open a dialogue
with human beings, has a three-fold presence on the margins of mono-
theism: in a pagan past not wholly eradicated by cutting down the sacred
groves, in non-western religions, and in New Age rituals.
Something so potently marginal is, of course, likely to be textual in the
material sense of writing, as well as in the larger sense of cultural systems of
meaning. I have already pointed out some of the traces of the Earth-
Mother in the Christian bible, with her material plurality and immanence
challenging the one God, one truth, logos of the Sky-Father. Yet any
examination of Christian history would similarly detect traces of an ani-
mistic conception of nature. Sometimes it is literally visible in the margins
of medieval manuscripts. Sometimes it is uneasily debated in those practices
liminal (so marginal) to Christianity such as alchemy.
What has been less recognised is the way that the tension between logos
and eros has been played out in practices of reading. As Christopher Manes
has pointed out, medieval Christian theologians were largely responsible for
producing the Sky-Father as logos by their method of reading biblical texts
for a singular transcendent truth. Through their exegesis, the material
world of the Sky-Father's creation becomes the symbol of a 'higher' truth,
rather than a sacred entity in itself.

Exegesis established God as a transcendental subject speaking through

natural entities, which, like words on a page, had a symbolic meaning,
but no autonomous voice. It distilled the veneration of words and
reason into a discourse that we still speak today.
(Manes 1996: 20)

In effect, animism, the many voices of nature and of the plural immanent
sacred, was removed to the one voice of the logos speaking through the
text. Animism of nature became textual logos. Indeed, modernity's rela-
tionship to texts is deeply animistic. Long ago, nature spoke to us, now
texts do. Casually we assert: 'the book says .. .'. In particular, the medieval
theological practice of reading texts for logos, truth transcendent of matter
(including textual matter), is bequeathed to the Enlightenment and science
as the textual practice for producing 'objective' knowledge. It sought a
singular, monotheistic logocentric voice from texts. On the other hand, the
inherent plurality of pagan animism also found a textual home in the arts
and literature in particular. Here I could speculate on a link between the
simultaneous intensification in medieval exegesis for the 'one truth' and the
eros-sponsored plurality of voices of authors such as Chaucer.
104 Susan Rowland

I am going to suggest that lung and Derrida are both aware of the need
to realign Sky-Father and Earth-Mother relations at a textual, mythical
and conceptual level. For lung, this project hinges upon his idea of syn-
chronicity (the conceptual), the myth of the trickster, and crucially, the
textuality of the numinous as the creative undoing of the rule of the Sky-
Father over texts in the widest sense of cultural signifying.
Through introducing logos and eros as key principles in the psyche, lung
urges a negotiation and exchange between them. His conservative weighting
of these two creation myths is apparent in regarding each principle as more
identified with one gender. Without such a traditional pinning down, lung's
idea of individuation would be seen to contain a radical deconstruction of
Sky-Father dominance over Earth-Mother immanence.
'Synchronicity' is lung's version of individuation for culture. He is
explicit that it is designed to give Earth-Mother or 'Nature' space to 'be' in
the ambit of modern logos science.

For [experimental science] . . . [t]he workings of Nature in her

unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded ... [W]e need a method
of enquiry which ... leaves Nature to answer out of her fullness.
(lung 1952a: 864)

For the purposes of this chapter I will simply define lung's concept of
synchronicity as a way of regarding events (psychic and extra-psychic) that
are not causally linked, as capable of being connected by meaning. Syn-
chronicity recognises coincidences of psyche and outer world as meaningful.
It takes reality seriously outside the mechanisms of cause and effect. The
cosmos is a web connected by more than the inert mechanistic charac-
terisation of it. Suggestively, lung refers to synchronous events as, 'acts of
creation in time', the on-going generative powers of nature, the Earth-
Mother (lung 1952a: 965).
Of course, the extent to which lung sought scientific credibility for his
concept of synchronicity is a measure of his desire to privilege the masculine
logos. On the other hand, his writing about the new science of particle
physics draws upon its apparently 'irrational' and immanent qualities; its
need to regard (feminine) matter as dynamic and animate.
lung's second way of cultural individuation lies in his treatment of myth
in general and of the trickster in particular. My argument here is that the
trickster, in all his protean animality and fertility, is the Mother-Goddess
in a guise suitable for lung's underlying gender politics. For example, he
is erotic in being a god(dess) out of whose body the world was created
(lung 1954: 472). Moreover, it is indicative that in his characteristically
'tricky' essay on the trickster, lung is able to locate 'him' both in non-
western religions and in medieval Christianity. The latter, at a popular
level, gives space to the trickster by absorbing many pagan animistic
Jung and Derrida 1 OS

practices such as an ass festival, when the animal was worshipped in church
(Jung 1954: 461-3).
For modernity, the trickster as mythical narrative has been de-natured
into the thinner, and altogether blacker image of the shadow, Jung says.
Such a move is both a symptom of modernity's psychic sickness and Jung's
opportunity to revise its symbolism upon traditional lines. It is a symptom
in that the loss of the trickster narrative means that 'he' no longer embodies
the same degree of psychic animation. 'He' can no longer effect the vital
social function of making visible the unconsciousness of the collective, so
subjecting it to conscious and ethical criticism. Without such a dynamic
internal resource, collective errors are ignored, because invisible to a logos-
dominated psyche that only recognises consciousness. Disregarded and
despised, unconsciousness turns black and evil, resulting in what Jung sees
as a typical product of modernity: the soldier who blindly obeys orders with
no capacity for his own ethical judgement (Jung 1954: 479).
Ultimately, the trickster reveals the ethical function of the Earth-Mother,
in enabling collective self-examination. She (as trickster here) is necessary
to forge a negotiation between logos-oriented modern consciousness and
unconscious psyche, especially when that unconsciousness is projected
onto others. Ethics means Earth-Mother and Sky-Father in a dynamic
relationship.
So if the trickster has given way to the shadow image, then modernity has
lost a valuable psychic resource for its ethical being. That, at any rate, is
Jung's diagnosis. Fortunately his diagnosis is his opportunity to add the
trickster image to his other collection of archetypal images: those of anima,
wise old man and self (Jung 1954: 485). Therefore engagement with the
unconscious shadow is but a prelude to 'higher' or deeper challenges
leading to the self image as saviour.

[T]he recognition and integration of the shadow create such a harrow-

ing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web
of fate.
(Jung 1954: 487)

Crucially, substituting trickster-narrative with Jung's own favourite indi-

viduation collection of images means that the trickster-goddess can be
slotted into a subordinate role in Jung's essentially Christian model for the
individuating psyche. The Sky-Father triumphs again over the largely
obscured Earth-Mother trickster. Feminine signifying is still wrenched into
the position of shoring up traditional masculine signifying. After demon-
strating such doubts with the hero myth, Jung allows him to re-emerge as
the chief mythical structure of consciousness.
On the other hand, the oscillation in Jung's psyche between images
pointing to Christian logos and mythical narrative incarnating eros-
106 Susan Rowland

relationship suggests Jung's inability to leave narrative behind. It is innate

in the on-going dynamism of individuation and is an incarnation of the
numinous presence of the Earth-Mother in his psychology. I use the word
'incarnation' here advisedly, because the myth-making quality of the psyche
is a weaving together of body, consciousness and unconsciousness. Narra-
tive and its numinous psychic enactment in myth is the way Jung's writing
goes beyond psyche-logos into psyche-logos and eros-mythos. Narrative
drives synchronicity as making meaning by incorporating irrational con-
nections, telling stories that in the act of telling put the human psyche as
immanent in nature and cosmos. So Jung's numinous has an aesthetic
component. It is reading reality aesthetically: the numinous tells a story
about the Earth-Mother and Sky-Father together.
For more on reading we need to tum to that other architect of mythical
re-individuation: Jacques Derrida.

THE MYTH OF DECONSTRUCTION

If the modem world's relationship with texts is animistic in hearing them

'speak' to us, then deconstruction intensifies that animism to an almost
chaotic degree. For deconstruction a text is a web of voices, a plurality that
is unable to maintain a singular logos or a one truth. In deconstruction,
'truth' in a text is immanent, so not abstractable as objective, singular or
coherent. Deconstruction thinks texts from within the realm of the Earth-
Mother.
However, just as the most devoted work of the logos Sky-Father builders
of modernity could not entirely eradicate animism and the Earth-Mother,
no more can deconstruction wholly abandon the logos. Like Jung, Derrida
wants to realign the creation myths. Unlike Jung, he is no social conserva-
tive. So his recognition of the impossibility, and even undesirability, of
living in just one myth is differently oriented to Jung's.
On the one hand, deconstruction's critique of 'presence' is actually a
critique of the Sky-Father's logos claim to stand supreme, eliminating all
others. For if meaning is to be fully present in a sign, there is required to
be a metaphysical source, exterior to the system of meaning-making itself,
which would guarantee such 'presence'. Such a logos (exterior 'sky' source),
is necessary for language to signify, yet deconstruction argues that it is itself
a product of that necessity. It is metaphysical in its unprovable exterior
status. So the perspective that deconstruction has of language is of a web
of signifying with no intrinsic 'outside', that has to give birth to some-
thing posited as 'outside' in order to work - the Earth-Mother myth of
sexuality is in the textuality. Deconstruction/Earth-Mother's perspective on
the logos is that it is a divine son who has 'forgotten' or 'repressed' his
sacred origin.
Jung and Derrida 107

On the other hand, modernity cannot simply discard logocentrism and

switch over entirely to Earth-Mother plurality and generativity. Although
the distinctions that structure rationality, such as that between form and
matter, are not as absolute as the logos pretends they are, deconstruction
does not do away with them. Rather meaning is shown to be disseminated as
the signified of a signifier proves to be another signifier, and so on. While
deconstruction offers a glimpse of a potentially endless dissemination where
the fertility of the Mother-Goddess is enacted in the animistic plurality of
matter in textual mode, the Sky-Father can still be detected in the impossi-
bility of completely undoing the signifier-signified relationship. Neverthe-
less, deconstruction reading texts (deconstruction as an activity), which
undoes the supposed unity of the reader, enters the body of the Earth-
Mother as her multiple 'acts of creation in time' make and unmake meaning.
So deconstruction also contains the realisation that culture needs more
than one myth. Logocentrism can be displaced as centre, but not wholly
replaced, in Derrida's realisation that, like Jung, both Sky-Father logos and
Earth-Mother eros are necessary for psyche and the collective. Indeed,
deconstruction embraces Jung's mythical thinking of the two creation
stories at the level of 'play'.

Derrida argues that we can never get 'outside' metaphysics in order to

undo it. Nevertheless it is utterly crucial to see that this statement
conceives of metaphysics as always open and dynamic. There is always
some play within any metaphysical concept ... Play in general is the
condition of metaphysics.
(Lucy 1997: 102)

Play here is a kind of'give' as in play of a rope within the rigidities of the logos
ideal. If it is not possible to do without logos, it is possible to deconstruct, to
exploit the playful trickiness oflanguage as immanence in the textual body. It
seems to me that Derrida's call to think the structurality of structure is
answered by Jung's treatment of myth as the 'play' of psychic energy; the
engine of the numinous. Deconstruction's myth is Jung's trickster.

JUNG FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF DERRIDA

At this point it is useful to return to Jung's stated position on the two

creation myths.

[I]t makes no substantial difference whether you call the world principle
male and a father (spirit), or female and a mother (matter). Essentially
we know as little of one as of the other.
(Jung 1961: 582)
108 Susan Rowland

Here Jung appears to be accepting the form/matter distinction and its

logocentric interpretation of Sky-Father forming inert feminine matter. Yet
at the same time these words offer the interpretation that the 'world prin-
ciple' is matter as mater, the Earth-Mother. What is indicative of his whole
attitude to the psyche, however, is his emphasis on the unknowable dimen-
sions of these creation stories. To Jung, his founding principle was the
unknowable nature of the unconscious psyche and its consequences for
claims to knowledge. If Jungian psychology has a metaphysical entity, from
the perspective of deconstruction, it is the dynamic function of the unknown
and unknowable. Such an epistemological base means that all human
knowledge, language and culture is relative to an unknown degree. In effect,
Jung's founding presence is a founding absence.
So far in this chapter I have concentrated on Jung, and then on Derrida,
from the position of Jung's treatment of myth as the structuring of the
liminal realm between form and matter. To tum around the angle of vision
and see Jung through Derrida is revealing. For deconstruction's reaction to
Jung's hypnotic metaphysical unconscious is two-fold. I am indebted to the
philosopher, Christian Kerslake, for help with the next part of this argu-
ment. On the one hand, it could be argued that the Jungian unconscious
represents an example of an undeconstructable logos. It is a metaphysical
'outside' that in its dynamism and unknowability enfolds the deconstructive
project itself. Such a version of Jung positions his metaphysical unconscious
as logos, as the forming principle itself, a cosmic Sky-Father. Or, as
Christian Kerslake puts it:

On this alternative, deconstruction itself would be superseded by the

Jungian insistence on the inherent ungraspability of the unconscious
(revealing a metaphysical residue that delimits deconstruction, or an
ultimately undeconstructable moment).
(Kerslake 2004: private e-mail)

But on the other hand, it could of course be argued that by virtue of it

remaining a metaphysical notion, the Jungian unconscious is eminently
deconstructable as Kerslake also points out (Kerslake 2004: private e-mail).
However, perhaps we can see that these alternatives are interconnected
aspects of a wider Jung-Derrida relationship (that a possibility beyond
either/or alternatives is to understand them as connected). For if Derrida
admits that deconstruction does not wholly banish the logos Sky-Father,
then, by admitting that the Earth-Mother trickster makes a web out of the
claims of the unconscious to transcendence, Jung also implicitly surrenders
the 'transcendent' nature of his claims to deconstruction. The deeper, under-
lying connection lies, I believe, in narrative, which, as myth, for Jung is his
equivalent of Derrida's dissemination.
Jung and Derrida 109

For Derrida, meaning is subject to slippage as signifiers lead to other

signifiers in a potentially endless sequence of deferral of a final fixed
meaning (which can only be bestowed by the logos). This is the trickster
at play in the body of the Earth-Mother where logocentrism cannot be
entirely rooted out. It is what Derrida means by not being entirely able to
think outside metaphysical oppositions such as form and matter.
For Jung it is myth that disseminates. Myth brings together Jung's
metaphysical unknowable unconscious with psychic signifying in images.
When Jung is in his more logocentric mood, desiring to shore up masculine
signifying of the Sky-Father, he has to extract images, such as shadow,
from mythical narrative such as trickster. Only such a move will enable him
to privilege Christian logos in his project of restoration.
A useful example in Jung's writing is his book, Answer to Job, which
weaves a mythical narrative deconstructing Christian transcendence while
not eradicating it (Jung 1952b: 553-758). In this fantastical biography of
the Judaeo-Christian God, Jung describes successive attempts at divine-
human relations as highly problematic. Finally, after the sacrifice of the
son, the immanent qualities of the divine remain neglected (Earth-Mother
eros too much obscured), and so tum demonic. An ignored immanent
irrationality takes on even more terrible material form in weapons of mass
destruction. Now the onus is on the human psyche to embrace eros, learn
the ways of the Earth-Mother, so that the irrational may be incorporated
into the body of the whole. No longer should the 'other' to rational
modernity be cast into darkness where Christian logos will construct the
daimonic as demonic.
God's irrational proclivities find their home in the creative unconscious,
and the insistence on unknowability and the subjective structuring of this
myth mean that god and goddess mutually define as well as challenge each
other. Myth is Jung's mediation between the realm of Sky-Father and the
generative properties of the Earth-Mother. Myth is the psyche as poten-
tially endless storytelling (Earth-Mother) and so stories yielding images
capable of bearing logos signification (Sky-Father). Without the images,
myth could have no meaning, no psychic signifying. Yet without the nar-
rative, myth would become iconic and allegorical producing static, logo-
centric 'truths' that repress the other or (m)other. So Jung's myth is the
liminal dance of the Sky-Father and Earth-Mother in the human psyche.

THE FRAME, THE TEXT AND THE SUBLIME

To continue my argument about the re-framing of god and goddess rela-

tions for modernity, I come to the numinous and that element linking both
myths: the son of the god(dess).
110 Susan Rowland

First of all, I would like to suggest that further understanding of Jung's

use of myth is available through comparison to Derrida's analysis of the
'frame'. For the frame, such as the border of a work of art on a wall, is
surely vital to the assumed opposition of form and matter. A frame borders
the inside and the outside of a work of art. It marks the limit of the art and
where the 'world' beyond it begins. But what of the frame itself? Is the
frame inside or outside? The assumption that a frame is unproblematic, that
inside and outside are self-evident logical distinctions, is part of the form/
matter distinction in Christian theology.

And the formality effect is always tied to the possibility of a framing

system that is both imposed and erased.
(Derrida 1987: 67)

In deconstructing the erasure of the frame, Derrida demonstrates the

possibility of seeing art as not marked off from the world. In that sense
again, there is no representation. Signs do not simply portray a reality 'out
there', for there is no unproblematic frame delineating representative sign
from represented world. Rather reality itself becomes textual: there is no
representation, there is only the weaving of texts against and within each
other. So rather than the art work regarded as transcendent of the world it
represents (by virtue of the frame), it is immanent in its burgeoning textu-
ality. Again, the animation and animism of textuality manifests the Earth-
Mother. And the notion of animism helps us understand that textuality
does not simply denote words. A greater mythical sense in deconstruction
would help its adherents perceive that linguistic animation is an aspect of
nature's animism, and vice versa. For example, the ecocritic Gary Snyder
argues that language itself is rooted in nature once humans are regarded
immanently rather than transcendent of natural processes (Snyder 2000:
127-31).
Again, this vision of the Earth-Mother in the deconstruction of the frame
does not mean that framing as an activity is entirely depleted. Indeed, it is in
the very problematics of the frame, not its discarding, that what Derrida
calls the sublime (after Kant) is to be found. If the frame marks off the
aesthetic from the extra-aesthetic such as theory or politics, thereby creating
that very division, then the sublime inheres in the frame as work, as activity
of separating and re-situating. The sublime is produced by the frame as
deconstruction (Lucy 1997: 181). To put it another way, the sublime is in the
negotiation between logos-oriented constructions of reality, such as history
and society as separate from art, and the eros counter to that separation, in
the textual negotiations of god and goddess that make up culture (in all
senses).
So I suggest that what is from the perspective of Derridean deconstruc-
tion, sublime, the frame as work between goddess and god, is from the point
Jung and Derrida 111

of view of Jung termed, 'the numinous', that produced by the framing

activity of myth as it engages the passions of its logos god and eros goddess.
Jung's numinous cannot be assigned to either the gift of the transcendent
god or the pure product of the immanent psyche within. It is a 'presence'
and a quality, yet sometimes synonymous with psychic energy. It is made
visible by myth acting as a frame. The numinous is framed by myth as a co-
producer of its consciousness altering effects, as an aspect of the endless
generativity of the creative unconscious.
Myth makes elements of the textuality of the psyche into the equivalent
of sublime works of art: pregnant with meaning that can never be wholly
absorbed into logocentric rational knowledge, yet neither wholly dissipated
in the dissemination of psychic signifiers. Where Derrida, emphasising the
goddess, offers the sublime, Jung, so often veering towards Christian logos,
welcomes the numinous.
And in this product, this emanation of work, in the antagonistic yet
mutually defining and sustaining embrace of two myths, the sublime/
numinous, is the absence/presence of the divine son.

THE TEXT AND THE MESSIAH

In order to look at the son-lover of deconstruction, its entire attitude to

history needs some examination. By problematising the convention of the
frame, deconstruction brings into question the assumed dichotomy of inside
and outside. The infamous aphorism that 'there is nothing outside the text',
is more properly that 'there is no outside text' since 'outside' is regarded as
an effect of textuality, not its precondition. So for Derrida, a text is not
an imitation of a presence, rather presence is an effect of textuality. (In
mythical terms, 'presence' and 'outside' are products of the abrasive yet
constructive dialogue of goddess and god, eros and logos.)
Such a position as Derrida's tries to keep the sheer immanence of textu-
ality within the frame of writing and thinking that is inevitably structured
through the logos; hence Derrida's increased attention to textuality as
texture, as weaving, textiles, cloth used in religious practices that incarnate
something of the body of the trickster.

You're dreaming of taking on a braid of a weave, a warp or a woof,

but without being sure of the textile to come, if there is one, if any
remains and without knowing if what remains to come will still deserve
the name of text, especially of the text in the figure of a textile.
(Derrida 2002: 313)

Here, in 'A Silkworm of One's Own', Derrida meditates on the textuality of

the veil, with its long metaphysical history of veiling and unveiling truth
112 Susan Rowland

(Derrida 2002: 309-55). This logos-oriented drapery is contrasted to the

Jewish prayer shawl, the tallith, in an attempt to think of another kind of
religious history. The textuality Derrida summons also undoes, decon-
structs or makes playful the logos separation between humans and nature
for it embraces 'the culture of the silkworm, and the quite incomparable
patience it demands from . . . the sericultivator' (Derrida 2002: 317).
Humans need to learn the culture of the silkworm.
No longer simply nature in opposition to culture, the silkworm teaches a
patience beyond that required for the spinning of its thread. Or rather, the
spinning of the silkworm is a natural practice that humans can guide, yet
not control. It therefore becomes 'culture' in which a text grows imman-
ently - through the bonding of humans with nature. This text is nature-
culture in playful deconstruction and so embodies a different relationship to
metaphysical logos notions of 'history', 'future' and 'events'.

Patience, yes, the culture of the silkworm, and the quite incomparable
patience it demands from ... the sericultivator. Where we're going ...
at the end of this time that is like no other, nor even like the end of
time, another figure perhaps upsets the whole of history from top to
bottom, and upsets even the meaning of the word 'history' neither the
history of a veil, a veil to be lifted or tom ... nor a theorem wrapped
up in a shroud . . .
(Derrida 2002: 317)

To follow the deconstruction of history here it is necessary to bear in

mind the immanent relationships posited between text and world. The
idea of 'events' as a reality 'outside' textuality, as something that is then
re-presented, belongs to the logos with its dependence upon framing as
unproblematic. According to logocentrism, events and therefore (metaphy-
sical) history itself, happen outside the text as a reality independent of
representation. The past and future are equally assumed to have a reality,
even a possible 'truth', prior to textual being.
However, the reality of past and future proves as troubling as that of the
frame. For surely the past is not 'real' in the sense of being materially
present, yet it is not wholly unreal either. Derrida gave the name 'spec-
trality' to the non-opposition of real and unreal, for he perceived that in the
cultural preoccupation with ghosts lay a practice of accommodating the
inherent problems in opposing real and unreal. Perhaps the deconstructive
logic of the spectre (neither real as a person yet not without an effect),
enables the binary reaVunreal to be produced and maintained.
Returning to Derrida's silkworm teaching humanity a textual patience
provides a glimpse of the special nature of that patience. For the worm
waits, might enable humans to wait, for something that would not consti-
tute a transcendent object.

-
~
Jung and Derrida 113

[B]ut another unfigurable figure . . . who comes to strike dumb the

order of knowledge: neither Known nor unknown, too well-known but
a strange form head to foot, yet to be born.
(Derrida 2002: 317)

The unfigurable figure is what Derrida calls the Messiah. Of course this is
not the transcendent Messiah of a proper name, a particular person, or
even a particular idea or theory. This is the Messiah of textuality with no
outside, no absolute truth to dwarf its generative plurality. This Messiah
must be waited for without the preconditions and assumed truths that
accompany waiting for the birth of a god in logos myths. Such a Messiah
will not 'unveil' truth or penetrate it like a hymen. Spectral Messiah is a
patient, participatory attention to the possibilities for a better future.

[Y]ou have to wait for the Messiah as for the imminence of a verdict
which unveils nothing consistent, which tears no veil.
(Derrida 2002: 314)

This saviour son will be what is known and unknown about the future: 'he'
will be incorporate in textuality so he will be the child and lover of the
goddess. In his deconstruction of the alive/dead binary, he will die and be
resurrected. The silkworm spinner from nature as co-creator of culture is
also a figure of the unfigurable (what humans can never finally 'know'
logocentrically), whole of textuality itself; a textual web in which all puny
human signifying is caught. The silkworm, serpent worm from the Garden
of Eden, is yet another image of the goddess. Evil serpent denying the
unchallenged rule of the transcendent god is the logos understanding of the
goddess. Derrida, by contrast, tries to angle his vision from within her
generative ever-weaving textuality - so offers up the silkworm.

The serpent first appears as a serpent mother goddess in the neolithic

era ... As the male aspect of the goddess was differentiated, the serpent
became the fertilising phallus, image of the god who was her son and
consort, born from her, married with her and dying back into her for
rebirth in unending cycle.
(Baring and Cashford 1991: 499)

Derrida's text-generating silkworm is a vibrant deconstruction of the

goddess as serpent 'other' to logos Christianity. Unable to go completely
'outside' the metaphysical thinking sponsored by the form/matter oppo-
sition of the Sky-Father, the patience of the silkworm is nevertheless an
inside and outside vision of the goddess. Keeping textuality immanent and
so keeping human beings as immanent within textuality, within the frame,
114 Susan Rowland

Derrida reinscribes the goddess myth of creation. Deconstruction pivots its

textual matter to wait without waiting for a Messiah-saviour, who will not
tear open the body of the goddess. It seeks a textual embrace rather than a
rupture. Such a son-lover is the messianic as hospitality, one which would
'open itself to an other that is not mine . . . my other, not even my
neighbour or my brother' (Derrida 2002: 363). For the goddess embracing
the son-lover, there can be no framing off of the other, no 'outside' text.

CONCLUSION: THE DIVINE CHILD

What Jung calls 'the numinous' and Derrida the 'sublime', inheres in texts
(of all kinds) produced by the struggle between the logos god and eros
goddess. Each structures the other in an encounter in the human psyche
that is both annihilating and generative. Since neither is able to finally
banish the other, it has been argued that both myths must be necessary for
consciousness (Baring and Cashford 1991: 669-70). Unfortunately, their
imbalance has resulted in the fragility of the modern psyche.
Jung and Derrida approach the same problem from different political,
cultural and disciplinary positions. Jung the conservative tries to smuggle
the goddess into modernity and believes in shoring up traditional masculine
symbolism. Derrida the radical aims to go as far as possible in rethinking
modernity from the perspective of the immanent goddess. Jung uses myth
as a language for deconstructing congealed oppositions and (somewhat)
liberating the irrational psyche. Derrida uses language more directly, yet is
also rooted in narrative (the spectral as ghost stories) and myth (the
Messiah as son-lover).
In this chapter I have not sought a so-called 'neutral' language to con-
trast the two thinkers. Rather I have tried to regard both as contrasting
perspectives able to look at each other. After all the numinous/sublime
means being within as well as without the textual or representative system
being used. For example, Jung too has his spectrality. He concentrated on
the psyche as that immediate realm of the neither real nor unreal, and
simi\ar\y regarded the spectre as its key denotation. (lung \ 940·. 161). ln.
lung's psyche the opposites born of the transcendent logos are decon-
structed in individuation. He powerfully imagines the two creation myths as
immanent powers within, connecting to realities/texts beyond. And syn-
chronicity is how Jung portrays god and goddess deconstructing the frame
of inside/outside the psyche. Within such deconstruction/individuation, the
child (framed by both myths) is the numinous harbinger of the future.

Since, however, the solution of the conflict through the union of

opposites . . . is moreover the very thing that the conscious mind is
looking for, some inkling of the creative act, and of the significance of
Jung and Derrida 115

it, nevertheless gets through. From this comes the numinous character
of the 'child'.
(Jung 1940: 285)

Crucially, Jung's numinous child is the offspring of the goddess as Mother

Nature (Jung 1940: 286). This child is the goddess's son-lover in that 'he' is
driven by the need for realisation, driven to become a 'hero' (Jung 1940:
289). Hence 'he' enters the realm of the Sky-Father and risks losing contact
with his Earth-Mother in nature. Jung's numinous is a reminder that both
myths must be respected in the psyche, lest modernity's love of oppositions
be 'realised' in terrible violence.
Both Derrida and Jung rethink god and goddess relations for modernity.
They differ. Where Derrida tries to remain within the immanent text of
the goddess, he has to acknowledge that the logos god remains present.
So 'there is nothing outside the text' is a momentary vision of humanity
immanent in the body of the goddess, as her web makes and remakes
reality. The sublime is produced by the struggle between logos thinking and
eros being in the endless ni-framing of the text.
Jung likewise manifests both god and goddess perspectives, emphasising
the former. His logos is his 'outside' to the goddess weaving texts of culture,
but it is a logos of the unknowable unconscious. Myth (such as the
trickster), synchronicity and the numinous are traces of the creative union
of god and goddess in the human psyche. If we try to think of Jungian
psychology largely from the perspective of the goddess (wholly not being
possible), we see another weave of immanent textuality. From the point of
view of the god we see an exterior metaphysical and undeconstructable
logos of Jung's unconscious, an undeconstructable residue, so superseding
deconstruction and the goddess.
However, Jung did not regard his psychology as belonging to either god
or goddess. Ultimately, his prime language was myth, and myth connected
to unknowable potential structures in the mind, archetypes. In positing a
biological causal connection, Jung refuses to surrender all logocentrism.
Yet in regarding his psychology, and modern science as a whole, as yet
another manifestation of those mythic structures that have shaped human
history, structures, moreover, rooted in what can never be definitively
known, Jung places his writing as also inside the textual web of the goddess.

Psychology ... operates with ideas which in their tum are derived from
archetypal structures and thus generate a somewhat more abstract kind
of myth. Psychology therefore translates the archaic speech of myth
into a modem mythologem . . . which constitutes one element of the
myth 'science'.
(Jung 1940: 302)
116 Susan Rowland

Jung knows, like Derrida, the patient cultivation of the worm. Both
thinkers, in the numinous and the sublime, reimagine the goddess and god
wrestling for the soul of modernity.

Notes
All references to Jung are to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1953-91). Edited
by Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated by
R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and
to paragraph numbers.
2 Rachael Steel (2004) has observed that Jung is concerned to separate out the
daimonic from the demonic.
3 I would like to pay tribute to the ground-breaking work of Michael Vannoy
Adams on Jung and deconstruction that has made this chapter possible.

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