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.

Spooking from the Horizon of Love

Christian mediaeval theologians and their Church encountered God on the horizon of being. Aristotle's approach to understanding the world lent itself to illuminating that encounter in which his categories and overall project of achieving wisdom ignited the religious imagination. Metaphysics discovered all that was discoverable about God. Before Aristotle, Plato enlightened the mind and located the realm of the highest. Certainly between these philosophers rested the hearts and minds of theology, a faith seeking understanding. When wisdom and understanding became insufficient for faith, the seams of theology became threadbare, as explanation and pure reason pushed the encounter with God off the horizon of being, and wisdom and understanding under the bus.

Finding it increasingly difficult to locate God in the categories of being and causality, mediaeval metaphysics became inadequate to the task of illuminating anything about God. Metaphysical concepts became mere shadows, ghosts that could only limp against the backdrop of the new and improved categories adopted, of course, from an Aristotelian approach, but now a presiding hegemony of ideas. The new illumination, the Enlightenment, offered transcendental categories governing the disciplines of thought. No longer filed under science, theology found itself within the category of ethics, designed to keep it out of politics and the scientific disciplines.

The enlightened mind no longer conceived of a God with whom an encounter on the plane of being could occur. The analogical imagination continued to grope for metaphysical concepts that could no longer bear the weight of its tasks; yet the experience of and from God did not wither away in this new state of affairs. God was still there, but not as another being among beings. Metaphysics had to be put aside because it was now suppressing the reality of God. God insists that he make an appearance, and the response to that insisting call could not longer configure the onto-theological God that was understood in wisdom by the Schoolmen.

The shift from understanding and wisdom to explanations and knowledge grounded in a sense of certainty threw God out with the bath water. He was dead to scientific inquiry---the thought police of the new order. God could not be located in the new frame of existence. He did not exist. Yet his inexistence could not contain his insistence. The insistence of God calls from the horizon of the perhaps, peut-etre. What calls? It calls. Freud's es? No, not that 'it.' It. The it that spooks. What it spooks? Oh do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.

Caputo has provisionally located the calling it in the "space between memory and a promise." Is this poetry or theopoetics? The spectral it that has dominated/haunted Caputo's recent thought, the divine insistence that calls for the event to be released from the harbor of the name of God, cannot call from the horizon of being; yet the call from an insisting God is clarion. The aporia of Caputo's "space" plays out on the horizon of love, which we have seen in Marion's 3rd reduction through his work in Being Given, God without Being, The Erotic Phenomenon, and In the Self's Place, defines love as more essential than being, and locates love anterior to being, which might very well be somewhere between memory and promise.

The hauntology of love, alternately the horizon of perhaps, or the horizon of love calls for a response as lovers call one another. For Marion, the  givenness of the divine as saturated phenomenon that calls with its pure call the emerging self, is purely self-given as that which loves before it is. For Caputo, the givenness of the divine is the insistence of God, calling unconditionally to be brought into existence. Either way, the it that loves an insistent and unconditional love, a love forgotten and forsaken, a haunting forgotten and forsaken love, loves the emerging self, a self insisted into relationality. What spooks is the love lost somewhere in the space between a memory and a promise. The it-love that loves to haunt our memories and our promises is the call, what Caputo has recently deemed an unheard call that nonetheless calls for a response, insists on the relationality that individuates the self in a constant creation of that self and its subjectivity which is always poised to make a space for it. That space is love and that love is God.

Haunted by the Holy Ghost

We live in post-gothic times.

Culture seems to shadow the shadows,  moving as a dark figure against a background of blurry darkness.

Everything is haunted by everything else. History haunts the present; the present haunts the future; the future haunts losses to come prefigured in the now. Things are lost and found in the luminous dark.

Hauntology is a word whose days are numbered, no doubt destined to become a ghost that haunts its haunts and itself. The tropes of spooky actions at a distance that spook the boredom of coffee spoons, books, and the past that falls out from old books onto the floors of the fleeting present, themselves hang on the clock of hackneyed figura. But for now, it spooks.

It spooks. So says the title of Caputo's recent magazine, It Spooks. I believe it does. Nowadays, everything is spectral. Even Caputo is haunted, not just by Derrida and hauntology, but 'from within.' How does one even begin to respond 'to an unheard call?' Without begging the question of 'response,' responding to something that gets itself heard, even if outside the senses, is couched in undecidability, the tension that makes binary oppositions oppositions in the first place.

In The Weakness of God Caputo offers an apology to confessional theologians for pointing out that their best work is a response to the ghosting of their texts. There is something waiting to be born in the texts of the Tradition, both biblical and post-biblical. Though I am not a theologian, I have discovered that I am a theological thinker, a person that lives a form of life open to the theological turn. That I am also Catholic seem often to be beside the point, but I am of a time and place, a quirk of history, and there is no getting around the tradition and discourse that has played an important part in shaping my consciousness.

Ghosting. I am actually thinking of the phenomenon of printed letters appearing to imperfect eyes. A blurring whose frame must be adjusted by a squint, a best squint. This experience is known to anyone whose had their eyes examined (what Chart, what "E"?). In any event, 'ghosting' is a useful metaphor here. Ghosting is not limited to what the eyes do when they confront a written text. It's about focus and focusing, about getting something to appear, even if a best squint cannot reduce all ghosts to clarity. It is about a process of reductions that allow vision to envision not only a clearing of the letter, but a focus on the ghost.

In a remarkable if not difficult work, Senses of Tradition (Oxford:NY, 2000), John E. Thiel presents a sound case for bringing the Tradition into focus in a post-structuralist version of allegoresis (non-unlike the premodern patristic exegesis that maddens the moderns). Thiel allows the Tradition to visit hermeneutics, and the clarity of dogma to take on a depth of a ghosting. Of course, he doesn't talk like that.

And I am not going to talk like Thiel here. I have suggested elsewhere in this blog, and fairly recently, of the givenness of the Tradition, of dogma. I have also commented on its plasticity. I am sympathetic to Thiel's instincts that such gifts are unconditional. And I accept biblical texts, patristic texts, magisterial texts (the tripartitie Catholic rule of faith) as unconditional gifts that call to be received,  calls unheard but calls insisting to be heard.

There is a reason for Catholicism's paroxysmal fear of the holy ghost. It fears it will leap out of the trinity and into a pneumatological life of its own, freeing up the rollers, shakers and quakers to speak in tongues that would drive St. Paul to put those scales right back on his eyeballs. We Catholics have something of a love-hate relation with the holy ghost: we really want the renewing of the face of the earth, but without the spooky stuff (I'm thinking of Robert De Niro doing his tongue rolling at the end of Cape Fear).

I am quite comfortable with my ghosted Catholicism, and I'm pretty OK with the holy ghost, too. Every sacred text must be blurred for the good stuff to happen, to appear. The reader might recall those computer-generated images that required the viewer to relax her eyes to allow an image to appear in "3-D." That is the physiological version of the phenomenological reduction. Nothing reductive informs this kind of reduction; there is nothing of "God is nothing more than the projection of the human," or "religion is nothing more that wishful thinking." The kind of reduction here has nothing to do with the last gasps of rigid modernity trying to dictate the parameters of what is real and true. This kind of reduction is more like a great chef transforming a liquid hodge-podge into a sublime sauce, a reduction, that brings an asparagus spear or a seared duck breast into focus. But I digress (and make myself a little hungry).

 Of course some of us will remain Mr. Pitt (Seinfeld), a little too eager to see but unable to get beyond the facial contortions that disfigure the apparatus and not the image.


You hide Your face, they are dismayed; You take away their spirit, they expire And return to their dust.You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; And You renew the face of the ground. Let the glory of the LORD endure forever; Let the LORD be glad in His works. [Psalm 104:29-31]


The holy ghost haunts sacred texts and imbues them with the uncanny ability to read the reader into bringing something into relief, something always there lurking, disponible, waiting to appear. The holy ghost is a spirit of integration and revelation. It blurs the letter, deepens it, and renews it from all the way down. Without the ghostly gesture, texts become dead letters, lost in a limbo without direction, without a hope of being received. Without the haunting apparitions that cause every letter to oscillate between its clarity and porosity, the letter is lost, collapsing into the dust in a valley of very dry bones.

The holy ghost is a spirit of freedom, of life, of movement. Letters, like dry bones, quicken with life and meaning in the presence of  the psalmist's "Spirit," and create a new space in a new face. The spooking that gets confessional theologians to read between the lines of dogma is the unheard call that gets itself called. Theologians attuned to the call write a new earth in the crevices of the letter. They free dogmatic concepts from their idolatry to resonate within the iconic gaze. Is this not what Aquinas did for his age, and Rahner for his? Is this not what Roger Haight, SJ, was about in his Jesus:Symbol of God? The Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith was certainly spooked! Haight's hermeneutics and his


 ...interpretation, however, does not in fact result in doctrinal proposals that convey the immutable meaning of the dogmas as understood by the faith of the Church, nor does it clarify their meaning, enhancing understanding. The Author's interpretation results instead in a reading that is not only different from but also contrary to the true meaning of the dogmas. [from the Notification]


Clearly Haight was haunted by dogmatic statements about the divinity of Christ, but so too was the CDF haunted by what divinity looks like when rewritten into a postmodern world. I wonder if Haight would have gone unnoticed if he had access to Marion's notions of saturated phenomena and the idol and icon. Certainly Jesus: Icon of God has its problems, but it might have saved us all from a very ugly scene in the life of the Church. but I digress again...

To say that I am comfortable with a haunted Catholicism does not imply a departure on my part from scripture, Tradition and the magisterium. I simply mean that to be Catholic is to be a Catholic at a given place and time and therefore recognize that eternal truths about God and Catholicism can never be written into any age as Absolute Truth. Sadly, simple confessional religion, with which Catholicism sometimes finds itself complicit, sometimes pulls the spirit from the letter, allowing things to turn to dust. That's a ghastly kind of ghosting. We need a complicated religion, a blurred, blurring, oscillating religion that shakes out the event from its letters. That kind of spectral Catholicism seems to me the very heart of a lived faith, a lived religion, a lived Catholicism.