An Interlude: More Odds and Ends such as Tad DeLay, John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, and Even Graham Harman

It's not just Zizek that goes bump in the night, but he and Caputo, DeLay, Marion, and even Harman go bump in my head, which sometimes feels like a bump on my head. I have looked at Marion, Zizek, DeLay and Lacan in a recent piece on Marion's In the Self's Place, but now, as I read, Negative Certainties, with some of Caputo's 'projectiles' bouncing about, I am struck by how all these thinkers might interface.


Tad DeLay's freeing up Lacan's Borromean knot turns out to permit looking at the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic registers as a model for uncertainty. The play in this 3-ringed  circus that Lacan had already placed there, plays out further in DeLay's God is Unconscious, and in Marion's account of the saturated phenomenon as well. The non-intersections of RSI seem at the very least, analogous to Marion's non-simultaneity of the possession and manifestation of the gift.


While Marion seems to have little difficulty speaking of the sovereignty of the event, he never speaks of the sovereignty of the pure gift, or the pure call, in their spectacular unconditionality and anonymity: how like Caputo's weakness of God's insistence, and the anonymity of the call from the vocative order that haunts texts and confessional religion alike. Has Marion, in Caputo's view, cinched the saturated phenomenon, or has Marion slipped onto-theology through the back door on the saddle of the revision of the ontological argument, riding on the back of Cusanus (CN, 69)?


The distinctions and mode of distinguishing object from saturated phenomenon via Heidegger's analysis of the tool must intrigue Harman, who speaks eloquently on this matter in his discussion of Heidegger's metaphysics of objects (Tool Being, 2002); I wonder how he would read Marion on Heidegger's hammer, or his disposition of objects in light of the avoidance of undermining and overmining the object?


Catherine Keller certainly belongs in the title of this blogpost. Let me honor Marion this way: he should read Keller again. Such a rereading stands to illuminate.


End the interlude; Entr'acte.