The Death of God and the Necessity of a New Phenomenology

God died at least twice, once on the Cross and at least once in the crosshairs of Altizer's (et al.) theology of the death of God. Perhaps in the last word, these are not two but simply the one death of the God who abandons the plaintive voices in the psalms and the God who does not arrive at the Cross to satisfy the sardonic and sadistic demands of the jeering crowd echoing the 22nd Psalm. The death of the God of being necessitates a phenomenology of a God without being, or at least one that might give an account of revelation. Jean-Luc Marion's project recognizes the death of this God, this ontotheological God, and strategizes just how a transition from theology to theology might occur; and, yes, even  how a phenomenology of the 'analogy of being' can move into a 'being of analogy'---an analogy from finitude (logos) to an analogy from infinity (theos).

What concerns me here is not so much the niceties of a pious development of a new phenomenology that somehow remains faithful to Husserl, but how religious phenomena can make an appearance in a similar way non-religious phenomena make their appearances. There should be a methodological continuity coursing through these kinds of experience. The genius of Marion's approach gives unprecedented priority (which is not to say privilege) to givenness. I wish to commit the great sin of conflating theology with phenomenology ( John Caputo, in his "Hyperbolization of Phenomenology" [in Kevin Hart's Counter-Experiences] has already charged Marion with just that intellectual, academic transgression---sin---and his argument is very sound on its own terms; so what the hell). I want to look at the givenness of revelation. I use the lower case 'r' here to underscore that my discussion will focus on the provisional character of the actuality of revelation (or simply the possibility of revelation) as opposed to the strictly theological actuality of Revelation (upper case 'R') in order to respect this crucial distinction that Marion maintains through the body of his work.

From time to time I float the idea of the 'hypostatic union' and I wish to examine that a bit more in this post. So, now, a little religion.

The disciples see Jesus for the very first time in the resurrection appearances, in which he is no mere Jesus of Nazareth, but the Christ. It is only in the experience of the risen Jesus that the Cross comes into focus, and it is from the Cross, the very blood and water issuing from the side of Christ, that Jesus can be constructed in the narrative novelty that we have come to call 'gospel.' A genre needed to arise that would 'contain' the good news that God had died. Mark, the likeliest candidate for the status of the 'first to write,' appropriates a political method of communication (the announcement of the sovereign) to communicate another kind of news of another kind of son of God; the evangelium takes on another kind of good.

I have always been fascinated that all four evangelists, despite their distinctive christologies, view the Cross through the kaleidoscope of the 22nd psalm. Of the four evangelists, only Luke sidesteps a direct quote from the 22nd Psalm. Mark and Matthew quote the line of abandonment (22:1); all four allude to the 'casting of the lots' for the garments, while John only quotes the incident directly (22:18). That all four evangelists appropriate the Psalm tells of the importance of this type of psalm in the psalter: the psalm of the deafness of God. Lamentation and complaint in these such psalms bring the holiness of God into relief: "yet you are holy and enthroned on the praise of Israel"(3). In these psalms, and of course in this 22nd psalm, the deafness of God is not a contradiction, but accepted as part of the mystery of holiness. For the evangelists, the resurrection has re-presented the psalter's holiness of God after the abandonment of the suffering servant. The difference is that for the psalmist the transition from plaintive abandonment to the holiness of God rests in hope for God to come; for the evangelists that hope is fulfilled in the event of the resurrection in an enactment of the mystery of holiness.


For our canonical evangelists, the content of the form characterizes the new genre and distinguishes it from its antecedent. Only the experience of the resurrection could power such memory. That power drives the making visible of Jesus, who until the resurrection, was invisible. Memory brings Jesus into focus, allowing him to appear in the flesh. Apart from  the resurrection, such memories could become lethal; dead messiahs must stay dead, which up to then, was the way of things. To remember a failed messiah, one whose fate and memory was forever sealed by Roman sovereignty, was not about resurrection but insurrection, which leads to more blood and the numbing boredom of the banality of crosses.

But this Cross inaugurated a kingdom unknown to contemporary sovereignty; it is the crux of memory, Eucharistic, liturgical, political, phenomenological. As I used to say back in my apologetics days, the gospels answer the question, "who was that masked man?" Not masked in the sense of persona, but in the sense of the hidden, the yet to be made unhidden, revealed, and true. The Gospels discover the truth of a God with us. It reminds us of something forgotten, something lost in memory. The river Lethe washes away memory, but aletheia, is the washing away of forgetfulness; it is the discovery of something once known: it is the truth.

The resurrection washes away what was forgotten about the resurrected one. So who did the masked man think he was? He was who memory of him says who he said he was. The gospels are the evangelists' discovery of Jesus within the memory jogged by the first Easter morning (allow me the anachronism's logical privilege). 'The Father and I are one' (John 10:30). The Johannine statement of the identity of the father with the son is the first theological formality of what would later emerge as the hypostatic union.

So what could the hypostatic union mean for us today? If the ontotheological God died with good riddance, then to what is Jesus united? He is fully human and fully divine united at the level of the single divine person of Christ Jesus. So here is my maneuever: substitute revelation or the revealed (aletheia) for divine in the Chalcedonian formula and see what makes an appearance. We are bracketing off 'divinity' so that ontotheology doesn't come in through the back door of the phenomenological moment of the saturated phenomenon of Christ, the union of the visible with the invisible in the visibility of Christ. The hypostatic union then sees in the single revealed person of Christ the unity of revelation with existent human flesh. "I and the Father are one" tells us that in the person of Christ a living Jesus understands himself to be in perfect relation to revelation as Revelation.

The hypostatic union understood in this way constructs theosis (an abbreviation of theopoeisis) as the approximation to Jesus' own self-understanding as being the one whose self is that self in perfect relation to the givenness of revelation. Theosis then can never mean the actually becoming 'divine' (it never meant this), but rather approaching asymptotically Jesus' reception of revelation as adonne receiving donation, but now writ as Revelation, the theology. The hypostatic union then is a crystallization of a phenomenological moment---the precipitating out of an existing entity from a saturated solution (the saturated phenomenon of the givenness of Revelation). But instead of a counter-experience of a saturated phenomenon, we have the crystallized, sui generis, God-man.

Caputo's critique looms large over this kind of formalization. He persuasively locates the phenomenological moment not in actual historical occurrences, but in the event harbored in the biblical narratives. He rightly distinguishes the experience of the first followers of The Way, from the experiences of the communities for whom our evangelists write. For the former, he posits a phenomenality of  [the Holy] Spirit; for the latter, he posits the event of faith released from the sacred narratives. Yet the horizons for each of these seemingly distinct experiences blur and transgress each other. Caputo could not articulate just how the Spirit was at work for the first disciples because he had not developed his memory-constituted hauntology of It Spooks. He might after all meet Marion in the mutuality of the 'pure call.'

The conviction the first disciples had of the resurrection was certainly of a different character than the convictions of faith experienced by the later communities united by their gospels, but they were not of a different order. The phenomena each group experienced was different, but not the phenomenality of the event. The Cross was already memory for the first disciples at the time of the resurrection. But the power of the gospel narratives to suspend time brings a phenomenological immediacy to both groups, and the discovery that issues forth from the Cross is an aletheia that is indistinguishable for either. Alethos anesti.

Stealing Bodies

Medicine continues to come under fire for its dehumanizing gaze. The fire comes from everywhere: who has not indicted the medical gaze for its objectification of the human person? In the pages of this blog, the discussion notes that both Foucault and Marion have articulated the methods of medical surveillance that situate the person so that only the body comes into view, thereby suppressing the flesh and the wholeness of the person, and institutionalizing the gaze. In this sense, medicine still enacts the caricature of robbing graves, stealing bodies in order to focus the gaze. Indeed, the medical gaze no longer need wait until dark to enter misty graveyard: the gaze has achieved the uncanny ability to steal the body from the person, the body from the 'flesh' right in its own back yard: the clinic, the hospital, even the house-call.

Medicine can see nothing but the body in its biometric presentation. This mythos runs deep beneath troubled waters. Is medicine really that blind to suffering, seeing instead only dysfunction of 'normal' systems defined by 'normal' mathematical ranges? Is that caricature the straw man set up to fall, or at least receive the righteous arrows of indignation from journalism and medical 'philosophers?' Certainly medicine has undergone several transformations in the last 100 years, but the transformation that disfigures bios (a life lived) into zoe (bare-life) by removing the person from her home, her living environment, to the clinic, where the medical gaze sharpens its focus, is not even the most recent transformation, one Giorgio Agamben might call an act of medical 'sovereignty.'

If medicine has undergone a more recent transformation, one that has modified its gaze even further, it would be that political transformation that injured its eyes, disfigured its vision so that what it sees is only the person reduced to the body in the name of population-based healthcare. Governmental sovereignty has recreated medicine in its own image: a utilitarianism (I think here too generous a term) that views the demos as a homogeneous entity that can be managed only as a collective. Here, sovereignty exercises its prerogatives in the name of the collective in order to reduce lives lived to bare lives; it conscripts medicine to its own ends, medicalizing not only the people, but the law, ethics, and ways of living and being.

Jeffrey Bishop's The Anticipatory Corpse, for example, should be read as an indictment of medicine's complicity in the politics of the human body. Though subtitled Medicine, Power and the Care of the Dying, Bishop's study begins in Foucault and ends in the usurpation of the medical gaze itself by the machinations of amoral sovereignty. Wildly off base in his assassination of Palliative Medicine, Bishop visits his recurrent thesis that nonetheless gives us pause: sovereignty seeks legitimation through (medical) science, as it seeks to define and then politicize life and death.

Politically, who can fault the government for enlisting the experts at Harvard or the Institutes of Medicine, whose ethics are ostensibly irreproachable? Medical 'society' at its highest and most prestigious levels has dictated how medicine will be practiced in the 21st century. In collusion with big business interests, the best and brightest (credentialed as such) in medicine have wreaked havoc within the very site of medicine: the relationship between a physician and her patient. As corporate boards and company stockholders extract obscene wealth from the delivery of healthcare, hospitals and legitimate medical practices have attempted to provide care with ever-decreasing revenues, which have been diverted seemingly anywhere but where they are needed most.

Human beings suffer in the flesh, yet the 'business of medicine' has plucked out an eye of medicine so that it can see only the body---the business end of medicine has determined that it's just too expensive to see some things. The flesh, the locus of suffering, has become invisible, and only the body reduced to measurements comes into view. The gospel of the boardroom has made this the truth that sets wealth free. The complicity of medicine with the corporate-political juggernaut has stripped the relationship between providers of care and the receivers of care from the delivery of healthcare.

If elections are true reflections of the will of the demos, then is it unreasonable to conclude that the current healthcare situation is precisely the one the people themselves have permitted and shaped? Is the stripping of doctor-patient relationship more of a divestiture of a relationship that is more a remnant of a bygone era? If so, why all the complaints and self-righteous prose?

Hollywood's Dr. Frankenstein visits graves under cover of darkness to exhume bodies to be imbued with living flesh, a flesh envisioned by human ingenuity and enterprise. Stealing bodies is the good doctor's only recourse, as his design could not be countenanced by a brand of medicine bound by prohibitive ethics. This stealing of bodies steals bodies already bereft of the flesh. The contemporary Frankenstein, the melding of politics and medicine, steals bodies from the flesh of human beings whose integrity of personhood does not fit into the politico-medical model.

We know this monster, this 20th century beast and the very flower of 'modernism'. It is the monster that sterilized societies' 'idiots,' euthanized lives not worth living (or medically determined to be something less than living), and murdered the bios reduced to zoe that was determined to be an invading pathogen---a disease within the body politic---in the convenient genocides that are the 20th century's legacy to the 21st. The 21st century, our century, remains poised to resurrect the monster to do its bidding. Indeed the monster is not dead, only sleeping: talitha cumi.

The inconvenient truth of medicine's complicity with politics is as easy to ignore as other inconvenient truths. Great suspicion must meet the intersections of politics and science, medical or otherwise. The monster writes its metanarrative in small print, but shouts out its story from the gaudy billboards of consciousness.

Now And at the Hour of Our Death

No prayer comes as close as the Ave Maria does in embracing facticity and our being toward death. The one who prays this prayer petitions the mother of God to pray for the petitioner "now and at the hour of [our] death." Interestingly, the Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek, Slavonic) versions of the prayer are similar, though the Western version adds the final sentence, based presumably on the Tridentine catechism and ultimately on Chalcedon and Ephesus (the Eastern tradition already includes the theotokos in its prayer of pure praise). The Eastern Marian devotion shows little interest in the yesterdays, todays and tomorrows of death; but the Western version insists on an awareness of the now and then.

The gospel of Luke and the conciliar church interest me less here than the prayer's incorporation of quotidian life and the hour that unites human experience. The presence of finality in every moment of living points to the very thrownness and facticity of the human predicament. There is an admirable acceptance of finitude in the prayer, even as it embraces the manner of the Incarnation, whose prayerful celebration entangles every life and every death. In this sense, the prayer does not merely petition, it calls for authenticity: it calls for a life whose being toward death authorizes a 'good life' ordered to its constitutive finitude and the preciousness of time.

The human life chiasmically united to the divine life in the instance of the Incarnation binds the infinite with finitude in the moment of the Christ event. The divine witness to the body and the flesh in Christ sees these human elements in their distinctions of contiguity: the body and the flesh are related not paradigmatically but syntagmatically. Dying belongs to the body; death to the flesh. The dying of the body and the death of the flesh do not therefore establish some kind of absolute dualism, a structural 'either/or' but an relation of contiguity that resists attributing a presence to one but not the other, in a mutually exclusive manner. The affectivity of the self plays out at the juncture of the horizons of the body and the flesh, in the chiasm where they interdigitate but do not mingle.

The body and the flesh unite at the level of the person, at every now and every then, at every instantiation of the self. The very image and likeness of the divine in the human, even in the divine witness of that image and likeness that sees it as 'good' and authentic, sees goodness from its essentiality of love. The hypostatic union par excellence, the Incarnation, mirrors the hypostatic union of the body and the flesh, which, in turn, reflects in distance the Christ event.

The event of death is the potential of the sacralization of space and time. The event of death is always 'my death'; it is a counter-experience of death, of the death of the other, whose death is always imbued with illeity, the death that is the death of the third person. There is not greater love than this: to lay one's life down for a friend---to die for the other; to die in the place of the other's self. But can one be in the hour of death of the other? Levinas's notion of substitution would say no; for the face of the other already saturates the intuition with deontological imperatives toward the face, and the closest one can get to die for the other is 'thou shall not kill.' We may stand for the other against the killing of the body, but we are unable to enter the flesh--- substitution might lean toward a sacrifice of self, but that my-self merely serves my-self when it desires to experience the flesh of the other: I am helpless to make satisfaction for the other, which I may approach asymptotically only, because I can do nothing but satisfy my-self, my own need to embrace the ethic created by relation to the other.

But what if the relation to the other at the hour of the other's death is not a 'hostage situation,' as Levinas (Otherwise Than Being, "Substitution") suggests, but the opposite---kenotic? Does the sacralization of time and space at the hour of death of the other open into empathy, against holding the self's place as a hostage? Perhaps better to pose the matter this way: does the erotic reduction at the hour of death break from the other gripping me as a hostage, and turn me toward a kenotic self-emptying that makes a space for the other in me to experience his self's exposure within his flesh as a saturated phenomenon? And is this not the moment of authenticity brought about in being toward death? The erotic reduction, then, might make a claim upon the givenness of the (face of) other, who, in being seen with a gaze of love, does not hold itself, its illeity as something to be grasped, or hold the gaze/gazer hostage, but also empties itself to receive the gaze. The human other has at least the potential to transform the gaze of the lover, and this might be an instance where the asymmetry in the phenomenal laterality is mitigated by love and the formation of empathy.

The call from the Cross, the centerpiece of the Christ-event, gives voice to its pure call from the very givenness of the divine love that witnesses to the event from the chiasm within the hypostatic union. The Incarnation, celebrated in the prayer to the theotokos that also petitions for the authenticity to embrace the facticity of quotidian life, cuts a space in the fabric of being toward death. This space is the treasury of merit from which the kenotic space opens in the face of the other. That space of empathy has a name: love.

A Theme Song for Phenomenology(?): Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"

I have referenced Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" several times lately, and I would like to explore why the poem's textures and themes should invade the shores abutting currents in Catholic thought.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The poem enjoys recognition for its textures of sight and sound, historical allusions, and unusual structure. The poem's unity rests upon its visual of imagery of moon, moonlight, land and plain and upon its aural imagery of grating and withdrawing roar (turned into alarm and clash) and how those images interrogate its central theme of liminality.


The first stanza, structured like a Petrarchan sonnet, turning on "Listen!" advances the contrast between tranquil visions of 'glimmering' and 'gleams' in the octave and the music 'of pebbles' as they rhythmically sing their 'tremulous cadence' in their 'eternal note of sadness.' The liminal interface of the 'waves' with 'pebbles,' 'where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,' presents the borders of two worlds, two historical epochs. Present and past, space and time unite in their constitutive liminalities.


The second (sestet) and third stanza (octave) invert the Petrarchan form, and locate the 'turn' (volta), it would seem, in the octave (though the case for the sestet containing the volta can also work). If the 'sea of faith' turns from what 'Sophocles heard...on the Aegean' an inversion seems the likelier structure. The 'eternal' music of liminality, contends the voice in the poem, has bequeathed to us the Oedipus tragedies, representations of the 'ebb and flow of human misery.' There is nothing new under the moon or fullness of 'tide.' Mediterranean, English and French seas touch in the vastness of the contiguous waters that cover the earth, 'down the vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world.' Their unities both fetter and liberate, and conduce to love and war.


The final stanza, something of a odd (even truncated) villanelle, concludes the poem in 3 tercets with a jarring enjambment. The closing argument calls to love, and despite the possible presence of an auditor within the poem hinted at in the first stanza, discourages 'love' as a nickname for a lover present, hearing the voice of the poem. Instead, the strange villanelle is an apostrophe to love, eros.  Love, as the sonnet-villanelle structures strongly suggest, is the subject of "Dover Beach." The sonnet and the villanelle have always enjoyed the status of 'love poetry' in the Western tradition. Arnold makes good use of them in this poem.


The echoes of love and faith that play out in "Dover Beach" brush up against the erotic reduction. The voice in Arnold's poem laments the withdrawl of the 'Sea of Faith' into the 'ebb and flow' of the waters of the earth. This receding of faith, once 'bright' and 'full...round earth's shore,' marks a 'melancholy' retreat from the Victorian world which has beaten it back with something new. The 'darkling plain' where the poem's voice and love find themselves is the very facticity of their predicament. How can this lost voice be 'true' to love, and what would that look like (how would that appear) if not as the phenomenological moment where love gives itself, whose very giving and givenness finds the lost voice with its call from the anonymous grating of pebbles, shingles, and the high strands of phenomenality?

What's In a Name?

Juliet:
Deny thy father and refuse thy name...
...O, be some other name! What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet...
Romeo:
I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized (Romeo and Juliet, II,ii)




The hegemony of the name destroys life and love in Shakespeare's play. The patriarchy of the name game imbues the name with history and the tyranny of lineage, and the death of Juliet and her Romeo. Neither dramatic baptism, nor sacrament can withstand the tragedy of the name, can re-name a given name, can avert the tragedy of the name. In Romeo and Juliet, the ousia of the name is the stuff of tragedy and tragic irony. Re-naming is just not in the stars for these star-crossed lovers.

Hashem.

It's probably time Catholicism takes some responsibility for the name of God, or what's harbored in 'the name.' Hashem is beyond being, beyond the Exodus ontology (Ex. 3:14); Hashem is the event that this name harbors. Judaism has always known this point about the name, and reserves pronouncing the proper name of God for the rarest occasions, when the event harbored in the name is released as the event. Hashem harbors the saturated phenomenon in the name of God, the event of revelation, of God's self-communication, despite the saturation of that self.

Relationality is beyond family lineage. "Hello, we're the Christs; I'm Joseph. This is my wife, Mary, and this is Jesus." Neither is the Trinity about family. "Hello, we're the God: I'm the Father; this is my Son, and this is Ruach." There is not a single happy family in all of Shakespeare; even Prospero and Miranda cannot be said to prosper as a family. Names tend toward ruination; relationalities tend toward life.


God, theos, deus.


What have I accomplished in that list? Hashem...now there's an accomplishment. The tetragrammaton, lovingly substituted by Adonai, is best left as a placeholder for the name. Even 'Jehovah,' the name, the proper name, in itself, forecloses on the event apart from a liturgy of the event. God, theos, deus. These are code for the name or they are nothing. The rabbis tell me that "G-d" is a bizarre concoction, and cannot possibly do the work intended by such a hieroglyphic gesture; some rabbis tell me the gesture is just a 'fad.' If so, it's a long-lived one.


Theos, of course, gives us theism and atheism (and now it seems, even anatheism). Since theos accomplishes little or nothing, I can no longer imagine what 'atheism' and 'theism' are able to accomplish any more. The words seem to me the emptiest of signifiers, and by that conclusion I do not mean to deny their histories, their often violent histories. The words do signify in the past, but their future is dubious. What can the difference be between opposing empty signifiers, because, after all, that is what these terms do best: oppose. Both terms tell tales told by idiots and signify nothing. Even the blood spilled in their historical significations no longer signifies. Such blood is lost in the din of distant sound and fury. Sanguinity laps silently upon desolate shores; oed und leer das Meer.


There is no difference between atheism and theism; zero does equal zero, but that's all. In this blog I have referenced what 'serious theists' and 'serious atheists' think, but now it's time to get serious and call the game what it is: pure extortion. No one is really serious about the empty signifiers they have committed to. There can be no choice, after all, between evidence and phenomena:  they simply do not answer the same question, and the metaphysical blackmail that keeps propping up the choice races to surpass the desolation and bankruptcy of its offspring empty signifiers.


In the distant past when atheism and theism referenced the same onto-theological "God" the battles were joined and the blood invaded the secret shores of being, rendering green seas incarnadine. Now, as the 3rd phenomenological reduction to givenness has concluded metaphysics and has gone beyond that approach to reality, the onto-theology embedded there has also yielded to otherwise than being, leaving theism and atheism ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, mindlessly, purposelessly reaching, tearing, snapping for they know not what. The phenomenological self has once and for all surpassed the constituting Cartesian self whose only abode is solipsism. Oceanic metaphysics has strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel---its own project. Theism's only referent has been shown to have no clothes, and its negation, atheism, not only has no referent, but has lost its opposition. There are no longer any theists or atheists; seriousness has obviated these gamesters. They have been torn from a body of knowledge that no longer sustains them.


As the remnants of the theists and atheists continue to have at each other's empty set, hope rises from a sea of faith.


                      ...the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain

But what hope can this be except a ghostly, spectral hope in a

future yet to come? What solace is there really in the

irrationality of denying the existence of something that does

not exist? Is something so various, so beautiful and so new

as that which is to come really without joy, love, light,

certitude and peace? That something to come, so new,

beautiful and various, haunts memory and imagination. It is

the heart of a heartless world, that which quickens the pure

gift and the pure call,and it calls from a nameless place, a

place that cannot be named.