“Language for the Kabbalists is always mystical. It ‘reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world’. Speech reaches God because it comes from God. This belief is echoed, incidentally, but in a secular way, by the post-structuralist thought of people such as Jacques Derrida whose proclamation of a ‘new thinking’ holds that all knowledge and meaning depend on conceptual relations, notably language. There is nothing but the great net of language, no meaning outside the relations between words, no ‘I’ capable of being in truthful relationship with the world. We do not speak or use language; we are spoken or used by it. This is supposed to be a neutral quasi-scientific theory, a myth-free truth. But far from being myth-free, its claims for a superhuman language are an unconscious recapitulation of the Kabbalists’ primordial language. Yet, without the Kabbalists’ mystical and transcendent understanding, this king of deconstructionism denies any depths to art or heights to divinity. It is a debased image of Kabbalistic language, an arid form of determinism which may well turn out in the end to be trivial.

– Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, p. 118

See the Carl Jung quote elsewhere in the book: (link)

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