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The Metamorphosis of Finitude.
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Showing posts with label
The Metamorphosis of Finitude.
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καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν
The Word become flesh and dwelt among us [John 1:15]
We live in the body and suffer in the flesh. Our bodies can be broken, maimed, dismembered, but our flesh is the modality of our very selves that takes upon it the weight of the of inflicted body. One need go no further than deafferentation pain, for example, phantom limb pain, to appreciate the distinction between the body and the flesh ( I discern no clear relationship between this observation and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the "phantom limb" and the "habitual body" however provocative the similar language). No body/flesh dualism inheres in this reality of a fixed tension within our diremptive experience of our lived bodies and our flesh; they are the obverses of the coinage of our finitude, and the flesh can suffer even where the body is not. The body is always in the present and the here; the flesh experiences not only the present, but the past and the future, in the here and there.
The flesh is redeemed and the body is resurrected in the transformation of finitude. The modalities of redemption and resurrection are suffering and death, respectively; for the flesh suffers death, and the body dies. The flesh suffers in the wholeness and integrity of the body, but the body might die in the absence of organs and appendages. Many discourses distinguish pain and suffering: legal remedies might compensate for both; medical treatments might be directed against both physical pain of the body and existential suffering of the flesh even without making such distinctions concretely.
The saturated phenomenon of the flesh is so because the self cannot be tweezed apart from the flesh. The relationship is one of immediacy, not necessarily one of identity, though thinking the flesh and the self as one and the same makes both intuitive and practical sense in a way that thinking the flesh and the body as the same does not. The flesh does not merely 'remember' the body; it lives the body as if it remembers the body. The flesh and the self live each other as if they were one and the same, though neither is reducible to the other.
Does the Incarnation give us a window upon the body, flesh and self through which the gaze approaches their givenness? Logos-sarx/logos- anthropos configurations do not reduce to, for example, the extremes of heterodox views, but can work in tandem to place the human creature within the relation to the Incarnation. As Emmanuel Falque has noted in The Metamorphosis of Finitude (NY: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2012), God the Father suffers in the Spirit what The Son suffers in the flesh through a process analogous to apperceptive transposition. The human creature lives this process out in the body and the flesh. Logos-flesh and logos-body open into a 'self' given to itself (the Myself), a self-givenness given through the flesh and the body.
The 'interpersonal,' and even the 'inter-Personal' (as Anthony Steinbock deploys these terms), orients the self, the flesh and the body toward the 'other.' The Incarnation, as religiously understood in Christianity, involves the union of the divine and the human in the unique person of Christ. If Falque has given us a valid point of departure, then the Logos-human union is already within the Father-Son-Spirit of the divine Godhead in the transpositions of the experience of suffering. I have suggested that the unique union of the Logos-Human, the 'hypstatic union', is chiasmic in its structure, and in this sense, I do want to connect with Merleau-Ponty's fascinating notion of the chiasmus of 'reversibility' in his Phenomenology of Perception ( trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, 93-108). Without diverting to a discussion of that work, I want to connect this 'reversibility' with chiasmic structures as noted in this blog, and certainly in John Caputo's work (cited elsewhere), and with the overall concept of 'porosity.'
If we take as analogy from above the suffering of the Father in the flesh of the Son through the Spirit, then the aperture of the gaze upon the human self, flesh and body widens (through an inversion of 'metaphysics') to free givenness to present in verticality and upon the 'personal' and personhood. Porosity speaks to the uncontainability of the event within categorical reality, and so it is only off the plane of the horizontal, 'natural' attitude, where such saturated phenomena appear--within vertical experience. The self-givenness within the flesh occurs then in an immediacy of saturation. The body, the lived body inhabited in and by the flesh, presents on the horizontal, and the flesh appears as a saturated phenomenon, in verticality, yet unified with the wholeness of the reality of life of the human person. It would appear that a surmise is in order: the resurrection of the body is a phenomenon of the horizontal, natural attitude; and the redemption of the flesh, one of vertical experience.
Another surmise is in order: these thoughts are unfinished, these reflections insufficiently reflected, these concepts inadequately mastered. A blog entry is not a publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and they are made provisionally, open to critique that might bring them along, or steer them down another avenue. These are mere currents is a sea of religious thought and experience. I remind myself of this (my) predicament from time to time.
Falque identifies the flesh as the site of transformation in his The Metamorphosis of Finitude, and in the process, sacralizes the flesh and medicalizes the body. The 'traces' or stigmata of finitude that remain in the flesh notwithstanding, the body is open in a way the flesh is not to alteration. "My flesh is that through which I experience my own body phenomenologically, and not the simple biological and molecular substratum that can be cured, or repaired, or modified" (MF, 136), or, in other words, medicalized. And yet none of this formulation denies "an insistence on the "resurrection of the flesh" (Leib) as a summing up of the lived experience of our bodies" nor does it "imply a denial of the reality of the substantial and material body in the Christian incarnation...It remains the case, however, ...that a total identification of the biological body with the resurrected body...leads to major aberrations" (137).
Aberrations indeed.
What is born of the flesh is flesh (Jn. 3:6). The flesh is born "to a world 'already there'---which I could naturally believe was there before me but which I have to recognize phenomenologically was born only along with me" (129). This birth does not enter the memory (past made present) of the one being born, though the event itself can be certified, witnessed, a birth certificate signed and issued by the physician (or just as commonly, by the professional midwife). Part of the business of medicine is to certify transitions of the body: as a physician, I have completed birth and death certificates, but I do not certify who has been born into finitude, or reborn into finitude metamorphosed. "What is true of birth, in the obscurity of the act of being born for the one who is born, is true also of the mystery of the act of being reborn for the one who is reborn" (129). What, then, precisely, is medicalized? The witnessing gaze of medicine 'sees' only the body, and it is a gaze of power, of science and knowing (see Foucault). The flesh, sacralized into phenomenality, and therefore into its manifestation (see below).
Nonetheless, as Falque argues, "I need witnesses of my flesh, for my birth certificate, but also for my rebirth (baptism and resurrection" (131). Only by such witness does my flesh have an 'origin' and only in this origin and this witness can one find the "clarity of giving birth" which "can be claimed analogically for rebirth and resurrection." Falque's notion of 'analogy' is nothing if it is not charged. It seems at times that Falque, after taking Marion to task for his attempt to invert the metaphysical impulse that moves from the finite to the infinite analogically (analogy from 'below'), that is, by shifting to the side of the infinite as it analogically moves to the finite (analogy from 'above'), he inverts the inversion. And it really seems to be an inversion, and not a subversion, of Marion's novel inversion, which seems to have to happen prior to the implementation of Falque's stratagem.
Still, medicine, seeing the body only, wants to 'hear' from the flesh. The distinction between symptoms and signs, what the patients subjectively experiences and what the medical gaze accesses, respectively, rests in relation among the self, subjectivity and the flesh. When the flesh cannot speak, only a witnessing gaze is in play. In the case of birth, the gaze alone certifies the event. This medicalization of the body allows the flesh to appear in itself and by itself, albeit in a glass dimly.
Of birth certificates and death certificates, of births and deaths, either certificate will do: births are deaths and deaths are births. Being born and reborn remain distinctly other matters. When we are resurrected, we are resurrected 'in' the Resurrected One, who shows himself of himself and of his own initiative. "The initiative of his appearance guarantees me against my own fantasies, insomuch as I receive him there and when I don't expect him: That is to say, the apparition comes from him rather than through me. Thus he is the phenomenon---exactly as phenomenon is defined" (146). Such guarantees against fantasies underscore "the real existence of this object" that presents to consciousness (146). "When the body withdraws and the flesh becomes manifest, it is then that he shows himself" (145). The phenomenological method that elucidates the phenomenality of the body and of the flesh, also causes the withdrawal of the medicalization of the body, and allows the flesh to 'speak' in its own voice. The medical gaze recedes into its witness and certifications, as it is unable to grasp what the flesh communicates; it does not, finally, hear the voice of the flesh apart from its gaze of the body: it hears only through the gaze. The natural attitude simply will not suffice in the moment of the metamorphosis of finitude.
Medically un-certifiable, un-see-able rebirth, "[t]he resurrection is not simply the manifestation, or the appearance, of another mode of presence of the flesh. It is also a disqualification, or rather a withdrawal, of the substantiality of the body" (144). With respect to the resurrected Christ and the empty tomb tradition, "[t]he objectivity of the disappearance (of the body) signals, then, the disappearance of objectivity (of all reified bodies in the resurrection)". And along with such disappearances, whether on the road to Emmaus, in the delivery room or prior to delivery to the morgue, the medical gaze and all its medicalizations, that it itself visits or that which is visited upon it, is itself perhaps reborn into objectiveness (Gegenstandlichkeit, nach Husserl), which then might make an appearance in the phenomenological moment.
Emmanuel Falque certainly passes for a Catholic, but The Metamorphosis of Finitude will not be receiving the imprimatur or nihil obstat any time soon. He might turn out to be one of those radical theologians John Caputo has insisted into existence; the phenomenology of the resurrection is a theopoetics par excellence, and quite possibly haunts the Catholic tradition with rattling chains of a monadological panentheism. There is great beauty in the spiritual suffering in the Father through the suffering of the Son in the flesh, yet this can be construed as 'making of God' in the image of Husserl. The consciousness of God, on His side of the Resurrection, sleeps in Falque's phenomenology and somnambulates the divine perichoresis: God is Unconscious, to resurrect Jacques Lacan through Tad DeLay's treatise of that title on the psychoanalytic of religio-politics. The Father must be waked as he is [cata]Falque'd, so that we can see if he stays dead, or if this death of God is the death of a conceptual idol (31); so we can see if God awakens from the Mitternachtslied's 'deep dream' of the Symbolic order to insist on his existence. In the meantime, God rests in the Real, calling all finitude to himself, into metamorphosis, into a new heaven and a new earth,within a new God and a new human, in a world transformed.
In The Metamorphosis of Finitude, Falque presents the flesh as always bearing traces of finitude (152). Indeed, we carry "indestructibly" within us both 'immanence and temporality.' I interpret Falque to mean here a necessary return to ourselves (in the flesh), regardless of our projects. Though he roundly rejects, in a rather spectacular way, Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' in favor of a rehabilitated 'resurrection,' Falque always seems to be suggesting that we always end up where we start, though we are transformed, transfigured and metamorphosed. It's almost as if, when we go to grandmother's house for Sunday dinner, as if when we leave at a certain time and traverse a certain space, that is, when we live through a time and a travelled distance, arrive, and then repeat in reverse, we never really left, at least not without a trace of never having left.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.[...]
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well... ('Little Gidding,' Four Quartets, V, TS Eliot)
Falque's reduction certainly leads us back, perhaps to the beginning, however transformed; perhaps to the historical critical bodily resurrection (e.g., R. Brown, J. Fitzmyer, etc.); perhaps to Stanley Kubrick's 'star-child'.
The metamorphosis of finitude begins and ends in finitude, and traces the resurrection of the flesh to traces of finitude finally transformed and transfigured. This flesh in MF is of a piece with the flesh in the work of Michel Henry (see CM Gschwandtner's Postmodern Apologetics? "Michel Henry: A God of Truth and Life" as well as her Degrees of Givenness) and Jean-Luc Marion. This "phenomenology of birth"... is a "way of talking about our resurrected relation to mankind as well as to ourselves" (128). We are born in the flesh in the world and in time, even in our worlding of our world. It is interesting that even here Falque avoids the flesh as a saturated phenomenon as overwhelming 'relationality;' yet as he argues, such avoidance is not a contradiction, but as a strategy to be taken as complementary (19).
There is world enough and time for the flesh, a lived body. That is a central point in the argument of MF. In order for a phenomenology of the resurrection to ensue, a commitment must be made to what is resurrected. And, if I may resurrect a concept that enjoyed some currency in this blog not so long ago, reshith also entails resurrection as a substrate in the creation. "The resurrection...must be placed...as the transcendental condition of every entry into Christianity...There is no (Christian) creation outside this new creation..."(24).
Emmanuel Falque's The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection (NY: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2012; first published as Metamorphose de la Finitude: Essai Philosophique sur la Naissance et la Resurrection, 2004), presents 'finitude' within the context of the 'preemptive right of the infinite over the finite' in modern philosophy and phenomenology (MF, 16-17). Falque rejects the notion that finitude has its origin in the infinite, the notion that finitude is a snippet of the infinite within its tracing of infinity. Hence, we, in our finitude, do not first see ourselves as some imperfect piece of the perfect, but first see ourselves as defined by our facticity, our being within the plane of immanence, which, for us is 'impassable' (not impassible). Heavily indebted to Heidegger, Falque proceeds from our thrownness, our birth into a Dasein whose future is foreclosed by death. How shall we think Falque's 'finitude' productively?
If infinity is like a 'line,' a vector extending in two directions infinitely, then finitude is like a 'line segment,' with its end points of birth and death. This segment does not actually come from any pre-existing line as defined in basic geometry, but as a thing foreclosed in a being whose ends are clearly defined. Finitude knows of nothing in excess of its endpoints; it knows only of itself. This 'positiveness of finitude' is independent of the finite 'insufficiency of man' and of the infinite ( the plenitude of God), and it alone shapes Dasein (MF 18). Still, we must continue to think of the segment as in some way detached (I use the term advisedly in light of this theological motif in Meister Elkhart) from the line. Indeed, Falque depends on the play of this relation as he interprets the Incarnation as finitude coming face to face with the infinite as the Logos interdigitates with the flesh.
The likeness of the line segment to the line plays out in the 'apperceptive transposition' of suffering of the flesh of the Son to the Father (MF 67-74). The image and likeness of the segment to the line is the affinity of the one to the other. This image and likeness though plays on the horizon of finitude and the plane of immanence (not a 'concept' of immanence). The analogy of finitude and the infinite derives then solely from the Incarnation, where the very finitude of Dasein rests in the perichoresis of Trinity, which does not threaten in any way the integrity of the divine life (MF, 88-90).
The resurgence of interest in mysticism in 20th century phenomenology, and its continuation into the 21st century worries and fascinates me. Both John Caputo and Emmanuel Falque (along with many other thinkers in the philosophy of religion) recognize an indebtedness to Heidegger's indebtedness to Meister Ekhart, while further incurring debt to the mediaeval mystic. I worry because phenomenology has a plasticity about it that enables its becoming all things to all people in cataphatic splendor and idealism, and I remain fascinated by its methodological edge that cuts to an apophatic and fecund space where an authentic realism takes root. Ekhart's sermon on Luke 10:38-42, the story of Jesus' visit to Martha and Mary's home, has entered the thinking of Caputo and Falque powerfully, and perhaps in complementary ways.
Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:38-42, NRSV)
Caputo begins with Ekhart's privileging of Martha over Mary, despite Jesus' remark that Mary, sitting at his feet, "has chosen the better part," an inversion of the traditional mediaeval embrace of the vita comtemplativa over against the vita activa. Martha responds to the Jesus event in her midst with an urgent agency that makes a space for bringing into existence something that insists (The Insistence of God, 43-49). She makes a space ready for a very physical and fleshly Jesus, whose bodily needs are as important as his spiritual gifts. She is, in a sense Jesus' partner. Mary, on the other hand, remains enthralled by the call, and unable to respond as a partner, but as one lost in the music of the calling voice, paralyzed by insistence.
Falque reads Ekhart to be embracing Martha as one who already understands the flesh as transformed in the Resurrection. Falque follows Ekhart closely as the latter reads Martha, in effect, as already having been at the feet of Jesus and as one already enacting the life of the spirit by engaging the necessities of the life of the body.
Meister Ekhart...described, in the visit of Jesus to Martha and Mary..., a kind of prefiguration of our mode of being resurrected. Martha...has in fact a kind of superiority over her sister Mary. She doesn't stay there sitting (objectively) at the feet of the Savior and listening to him but lets herself be inhabited (subjectively) by him. She remains detached from him...because he is in her. (The Metamorphosis of Finitude, trans. G. Hughes, NY: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2012)
Falque's definition of resurrection as 'transformation' of the 'manner of living' in this world and this world itself as embodied in Martha, seems to complement Caputo's move from insistence to existence, from a call of an event, to an agency responding to that call. The response to the call in Caputo's schema is analogous to the transformations of in Falque's, which in turn, are analogous to Caputo's advent of the Kingdom. It seems then that Falque would agree with Caputo's assessment of Martha:
We take as a model the agency of Martha, the wife who was a virgin. Martha acts, but she acts from the ground of the soul, which is one with the ground of God. that means she is an agent mobilized in response to a provocation, to an event, who gives existence to an insistence, and that existence takes the form of the most material and quotidian reality(Insistence, p.48).
