Ineffability Performance: Critique and Call

Abstract

Although Michael Sells's Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994) seemed poised to redirect the future of mysticism studies, fifteen years after its publication it has yet to receive an extensive critical analysis or positive structural implementation. This essay undertakes the former in order to prepare for the latter. After clarifying Sells's basic thesis that apophatic discourse performs ineffability through linguistic-rule violation, it offers two critiques of Sells's specific claims: apophatic discourse cannot violate (all) linguistic rules if it is to succeed at showing the ineffability of something; apophatic discourse does not therefore reenact an (absolutely) ineffable mystical experience. It then calls for an implementation of Sells's general method that turns from the overtired and intractable question about the ineffability of mystical experience to the analysis of both the grammatical techniques and rules by which ineffability is expressed and the intra-and inter-religious patterns that show up in these techniques and rules.The year 1994 witnessed the publication of a work that promised to transform the future of mysticism studies: Michael Sells's Mystical Languages of Unsaying [13]. Rejecting the category of experience, at least in name, Mystical Languages of Unsaying turned from the hackneyed question of whether mystical experience was really ineffable to the novel issue of how claims of ineffability actually get expressed. Here, Sells argued that certain mystics, recognizing the logical problems pertaining to flat assertions of ineffability, opted instead to "perform ineffability" through the violation of linguistic rules, thereby showing how some language in fact cannot articulate the "object" in question. Then, Sells Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/6/15 11:15 AM