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Radhakrishnan would have accepted Derrida's view that language is relational and differential and it can never lead us to knowledge by coincidence or identity. Radhakrishnan, however, would have emphasised against Derrida the role of negative theology as a stage in man's encounter with the Absolute Reality. Derrida finds that "only infinite being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the name of God is the name of indifference itself. 17 On the other hand, Derrida himself has claimed that his strategy of differance is not any kind of ontotheology, For Derrida, "this unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach, God, for example."18.
If Being is without differences and if language is nothing but a play of differences, then language can not grasp reality as it is in itself. What Derrida shows is that the difference between differential nature of language and the differenceless fully present Reality itself is a distinction within language and thus any articulation of the difference between language and Reality is itself the effect of the play of differance within language. In the context of Heidegger's ontological difference, Derrida raises the following question :
"... are not the thought of meaning or truth of Being, the determination of difference, difference thought within the horizon of the question of Being, still intrametaphysical effects of differance ?19 For Derrida then even 'différance' remains with us as a metaphysical name.
III
Mysticism:
Differènce thus is not a negative theology. Even negative atheology is an accomplice of negative theology according to Derrida. In fact differance itself makes any positive or negative theology or any speech or writing possible; hence diffèrance is older than Being.
Habermas however points out that inspite of his deinals, Derrida remains close to Jewish mysticism. He quotes in his support Susan Handelman's similar interpretation :
"Derrida's choice of writing to Western logocentrism is a reemergence of Rabbinic hermeneutics in a displaced way. Derrida would undo GraecoChristian theology and move us back from ontology to Grammatology, from Being to Text, from Logos to Ecriture-Scripture". 20
Habermas observes that the motif of God that works through absence in Derrida is due to the Jewish tradition itself. Derrida's grammatology, according to Habermas, renews the mystical concept of tradition as an ever delayed event of revelation. 21
