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the paradox in the ¤rst place.41 Quine’s understanding of the concept of antinomy helps to explain why the quali¤cation of “rhetorical” is apt, because antimonies are actually problems with our vocabularies or language, not with the “real world.” The traditional “antinomy” of Kant is about real-world conditions “out there”—what I am calling ontological or metaphysical conditions. To understand an antinomy as “rhetorical” is to recognize the contingency of truth and the social construction of reality, and hence to read contradictions about the “nature” of reality as epistemological or linguistic problems, not ontological or metaphysical ones. In other words, the rhetorical antinomy represents a productive mistake. In light of the examples of occult texts offered above, I submit that occult discourse is the result of a rhetorical antinomy between a belief (A) and an action (B). The belief is this: (A) spiritual knowledge is translinguistic, or “ineffable.” The action is this: (B) one can write and speak about spiritual knowledge. Again, here is the ghost of Plato’s famous ironic reversals at the end of the Phaedrus: Although writing is condemned at the end of the dialogue as being incapable of communicating spiritual truths (A), it is nevertheless the technology with which Plato attempts to impart spiritual truths (B).42 The rhetorical antinomy is thus aptly summarized by the following statement: “The Truth is ineffable, but let me tell you about it anyway.” This basic contradiction is at the heart of the so-called problem of mystic speech. What is unique about occult and mystical discourse, however, is that the rhetorical antinomy is believed to be an ontological problem— a problem with something “out there”—and that belief, in turn, generates the discourse (again, the antinomy is different from traditional, religious forms of invention because God’s truth is describable, and the model of describability is God’s authentic Word). A rhetorical worldview, of course, stresses the ®uid view of language mentioned previously—a sophistic understanding of meaning that Robert L. Scott termed “epistemic” in the late 1960s.43 Regardless of one’s stance on “the real,” the rhetorical view implies that nothing means outside human modes of representation and that “truth” is merely the product of sentences. The occultist, like Plato, believes in a transcendent truth that cannot be completely understood in human language; hence the problem of mystic or occult speech is erroneously viewed as an ontological problem. In actuality, the moment an occultist ceases to be silent about the matter of spiritual truth, the moment of the audible voice or the contact of pen to paper, calls forth what Paul de Man would term the “rhetoricity” of the antinomy: the notion of toward an occult poetics / 49 ineffability itself necessitates a rhetoric to express the negativity of ineffability. In other words, the fundamental premise, that spiritual truth is ineffable (A), requires the seemingly contradictory act of speaking or writing (B). What we have in occult poetics, then, is basically a generative contradiction. The rhetorical antinomy is invention by means of an illusory contradiction. Concluding Remarks: The Magic of Esoteric Language In this chapter I have further developed a generic feature of occult discourse, the compositional form of neologism as it is expressed in esoteric language. I ¤rst suggested that occult discourse is premised on a Platonic commitment to a translinguistic, spiritual realm as well as the idea that language is at best an imperfect copy of the truths of this realm. I then moved to characterize these commitments as constituting a “metaphysics of presence,” to use Derrida’s phrase, which in turn is based on the “¤xed” view of language. I argued that the ¤xed view was a mistake and that this mistake is responsible for a resulting rhetorical antinomy, or a kind of generative mode of invention in which the motivation for the location or creation of esoteric vocabularies is based on the necessary contradictions that result from a belief in the metaphysics of presence. Although the rationale behind the creation of given occult vocabularies will differ from one occult group to the next, all of them can be described, in general, as a consequence of a paradox: “The Truth is ineffable, but let me tell you about it anyway.” From an internal or sympathetic perspective, I mentioned that occultists , as well as the religious, typically employ one of two kinds of strategies: the prescription of silence (the way of the mystic) or the discovery or creation of a vocabulary or mode...

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