A Quick Note on an Emerging Synthesis of Marion, Keller and Caputo

In my recent post, "Evidence and Phenomena," I stumbled upon the notion that the horizons of phenomenology bear the stigmata of apophatic entanglement expressed in the trinity of implicatio, explicatio, and complicatio. 

Central to my understanding of 'stigmata' in this context, is the breathing involved in this 3-fold formulation. The inspirations and expirations in this rhythmic process have, well, implications. The 'inseparability' of the counterpoints of reality envisages the accommodations of place ( I might have said 'space' here at one time).

I am not suggesting that such horizons are elusive moving targets, but that a certain dynamism is at play that marks Keller's folds. In pneumatic motion, reality adopts distinct but ephemeral conformations that either allow or generate the conditions for phenomena to make their appearance. I am thinking here about how electrons achieve higher energy states which move them onto another plane, and how they eventually regain their more relaxed location, and in the process emit a particle of light, a photon: illumination. 

The photoelectric effect is an interesting reflection of other effects in the cloud of unknowing. The fleeting conformations in Keller's Cloud of the Impossible of apophatic entanglements allow or generate 'something' to break through. Perhaps this 'something' has existed before, but has slipped into inexistence (again the behavior of electrons popping in and out of existence in their orbitals is instructive).

In apophatic placing within entanglements, horizons form, deform, reform, as predicted in Keller's mystical cloud theory. This theory also has, well, implications for phenomenology. In the cloud, the phenomenologies of Heidegger and Husserl must be read through the neo-phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, whose phenomenological reductions are 'snapshots' of moments in the flux of horizons. Perhaps these reductions are informed by uncertainty, the interstitial ether of the cloud (what some poets have poetically called 'dark matter').

In turn, therefore, it might be profitable to read Marion through Keller, whose apophasis makes a place for his horizons. In this way we can accept his notion that God is beyond being, presented to experience on the horizon of Love, before he appears on the horizon of being.

The 'something' that lurks in potentiality in the dynamic foldings of the cloud, then can be actualized in the rift (gap) torn open by the very fabric of the cloud. This is a something that makes a gap, not something that fills the vacuum of a gap. There is no empty space in the cloud, just the potentiality of forming a place.

Reading Marion through Keller allows us to read Caputo, who is always reading. Depending on where we catch him in the folds, he is reading backwards or forwards with his God insisting to cut a gap into existence. But Caputo's insistence of God is somehow akin to Marion's seduction of God, both of which are embraced in Keller's folding trinity of God. The stigmata of these faces of God etch themselves upon the flexing horizons of a call insisting, of Love seducing, and of the embrace en-/un-/with-/folding.

This trinity of thinkers is caught up in the tri-fold cloud, and their synthesis reshapes the shape of reality (which is as protean as the cloud itself). In such a manner, a provocative ethics is poised for an appearance, an ethics that has a profound respect for what's happening in the cloud.