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Prachi Wahi
3/26/2012
M. A (prev.) English
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Here, we would like to shift the attention towards William Blake’s notion of contraries
(not opposites), implying Derrida’s concept of “the coexistence of incompatible values” (34).
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake declares: “Without Contraries is no progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence” [PLATE 3]. In a similar tone, Derrida suggests the possibility of “The inversion of
repulsion into attraction” (32). The intimation is that, as Blake’s title denotes, Heaven and
Hell are to be married, united in a combining whole. Blake sees the conventional opposition
between the good and the evil as a religious construction by the institutional church, and
not a categorization by the Holy Scripture. Thus, the institutional church stands as a figure of
power and authority, dictating its codes on the common masses, where Christ is placed as
virtuous, good, angelic, and belonging to the Heaven; whereas Satan is seen as vicious, evil,
devilish, and belonging to the Hell. Blake, in a Derridean fashion, attempts to collapse and
brush aside this binary construction, and places them as contraries that are interchangeable.
Therefore, in a replacement of the command of moderation in the “heavenly” Book of
Proverbs in the Old Testament, Blake, in his “Proverbs of Hell,” dictates, “The road of excess
leads to the palace of wisdom” [PLATE 8]. The aim in both the dictations is the same –
search for truth, knowledge, and wisdom. The difference lies merely in the manner – either
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by way of moderation or excess. Here, one can identify how politics is at work behind these
two dictations. This is precisely what lies in the politics of friendship that Derrida tries to
expatiate on.
What Derrida and Blake both are trying to reach at is the rejection of an absolute
positioning, which is proved impossible due to the interchangeability. If mere attributes
such as Desire and Energy determine the evil, then Christ must be evil, because of His
energetic desire to help and save humanity; and if Reason is always the good, then Satan
must be the angel, because he acted rationally in his defiance against God. Similarly, today’s
friend could be tomorrow’s enemy. That is how the politics works.
Thus, the scheme of deconstruction works in order to illuminate that truth and
meaning should not be viewed as fixed, stable, indestructible orders, as Derrida reflects, “if
one must love truth, how will one love anything other than one’s own truth” (44). The
suggestion is to come out of the subjective realm into the world of plurality, where
knowledge should be gained through experience and investigation, and not by mere
authoritative dictation.
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Works Cited
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Dover Publications, Inc.