The Call of the Spread Body: From Anamorphosis to Anagnorisis, A leading-in to a Recognition

In the last two posts to this blog I have tried to describe the experience of the suffering and dying body, which, in turn, has important implications for personhood, the human person, human dignity, and an ethics for caring for those at the end of life. At first, it seemed as though the spread body could be thought through the this is my body, and distinguished from the my body. Unfortunately, the New Testament texts of the words of institution of the Eucharist clamored with such interfering turbulence, little communication could be heard over such deafening noise. Methodologically, the body had to be thought more deeply, more phenomenologically, and somewhat differently: the this is my body re-emerges, not as the spread body as such, but as its voice, its unconditional call. The this is my body might return to this analysis of the spread body, but for now, I am subsuming that term into the 'call of the spread body'---the pure call of the spread body, the unconditional givenness that inaugurates its entry into phenomenality, from, by, through, in and of itself. The call comes from two lungs, of the person and of the body, which is to say, it comes unconditionally without sovereignty from something both pushed apart and pulled together. Illness and dying drive the engines of these bidirectional vectors,  which threaten the integrity of the body and the person.

Phenomenologically, I begin in my patient's body, a body threatened by life-limiting illness and dying itself. My patient's body is always the body of someone, a person; yet the very structures of such experience shout out for recognition and understanding that transcend the uniqueness of my patient.  Still, I begin with a particular person who has come to me because I have promised her re-humanization, to restore her humanity lost to the paradigm of the cure (itself a promise to restore her to the health of premorbidity, the time before the illness). I have promised her not cure, but care, care of her body and of her personhood, her self. Paradoxically, she comes before me as fully alive but dying. Her life, her personhood, is replete with history, a past and a present; but a personhood irreducible to her story without remainder. She is always in excess of what could be said---language could never complete her. Nonetheless, the narratives provide the interstitium of her person and her place, the matrix she moved and moves within as she was and is.

Illness throws the body centrifugally so that the spread body, pushed apart, becomes palpable, visible, smell-able; simultaneously a natural, primordial vector pulls it back toward the center, centripetally, in a struggle to maintain integrity. My patient as person is along for the ride, as her personhood is threatened by the same vectors. My patient's body is at a distance from itself, receding from itself. This spread body calls me to itself: it is a call that shapes how it gives itself from itself and positions me (tells me where to stand so that I can decipher, discern, see it) it relationship to it. Because this call is from this body, it is this body's own call, for itself from itself. Having no agency of its own, though, its only recourse to itself is to get itself done, through my agency in the event of rediscovery and recognition. I am not obligated by any sense of duty prior to the call. The obligation that arises is called for by the givenness of the spread body whose singular thisness, which is for, by, in the 'itself' of this body that unconditionally makes a claim on me.
But this call, while only from, of, by, in my patient's own body, is not solely for me. My experience of it is the structure of its experience for anyone with eyes to see, ears to hear, a body to touch. How does my agency, anyone's agency get the 'itself done' of my patient's body? This is the event, the event released: when I discover, recover, recognize, acknowledge the humanity and personhood before me, made to recede by the situation of the spread body in the hospice, the 'itself' getting itself done by my agency, finds in my agency of recognition and recovery its own self-recognition, recover, rediscovery. In conventional terms, this is 'healing'.


The key structures of the givenness of the spread body and its call are its directing of my gaze, for a [re]positioning and a recognition. When I speak of this positioning, the anamorphosis proper, "the aim here is to shift this gaze to the point of view...that, on the basis of which and according to the demands of this sudden phenomenon giving itself, would succeed in showing itself" (Jean-Luc Marion, in Givenness and Revelation, NY: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2016; p. 65; emphasis Marion's). "In this way, we better understand that the phenomenon can come at once from 'elsewhere' and from itself" (Marion, Being Given, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Pr., 2002, p. 124). In this instance, of phenomenalization, I provisionally place personhood 'elsewhere' and the spread body in the place of the call. Everything now in its place, my gaze, now oriented by the call of the spread body, its very thisness, intends what is intended by my patient's own gaze, looking back toward me, with unconditional purity of the call, calling for the release of the event of recognition: anagnorisis.

For now, I leave Aristotle's discussion of peripety and anagnorisis in the Poetics, and among the aesthetes; yet, in order to full explore the phenomenality of the call of the spread body, I will attempt to illustrate how 'recognition' works in those scenes where Odysseus makes his home-coming: for the anagnorisis called for by my patient shares similar structures. Of course, on the strictly mimetic (hence, ontic) level, Odysseus, the great tactician, with the assistance of Athena, steers events and the gradual unfolding of his identity until the catastrophe in the hall reveal him in his full regal stature. On the ontological level of Odysseus' movement from beggar to king, however, we are very much made privy to the tension of a beggar becoming a king again, in all its uncertainties and conditions. The chance that the beggar will remain a beggar threatens the return of the king.

With each unfolding recognition, first by the royal Argos, whose animality immediately connect him to Odysseus, through the recognitions of Eumaeus, Eurykleia, Telemachus, Penelope (who is the deal-breaker here, and whose steadfast love remains anchored to the royal bedpost), through the stringing of the bow whose plucked tone heralds the arrival of the Odysseus the king and bloody justice, the beggar is reunited to himself: personhood, identity is incrementally restored to the body of the king, now made whole, even renewed. Each successive recognition by others, brings Odysseus to recognize himself regained, made whole, in his former regal stature. Some may argue that these recognition scenes are charged with ambiguity, that perhaps not every character 'recognizes' Odysseus in the timeline I suggest; yet the stakes are high---recognizing the king in the beggar before the beggar comes into his own can be lethal business in Ithaka. A king must be kingly or he is not a king at all. The violence at Ithaka, the restoration of a king, is risky business, and is no stranger on the hospice, where bodies are under constant threat of violence, constant threat of being pushed further apart, splayed into unquenchable space. Those at the bedside, my patient's very own Eumaeus, Telemachus and Penelope, are invited by the same call---to my patient's return to Ithaka, the recognition of her own self in the recognition of others.

I do not direct, invoke, or otherwise prescribe the experience of recognition that my patient phenomenalizes. Recognition comes from her alone, and she alone makes use of the conversion of my gaze which she herself has converted, and my gaze, though constituting her wholeness which is for me, finds its way into her knowledge of herself and recognized as and for herself. I know nothing of her experience apart from my own experience of her self having an experience of recognition, recovery, and healing. I can know of her experience more concretely, as when she might tell me she feels more herself (if she can utter such words), or when she laughs or smiles. Or I might know this from a loved one, whose experience of being at the bedside of the dying becomes transformed, and perhaps informed by an ineffable hope, perhaps even in what Simone de Beauvoir, in her A Very Easy Death,  has called a 'miracle'.

The call of the spread body takes the shape of a whispered phrase, whose contours mouth this is my body, whose urgency gives and shows itself. By my being present at the bedside, the solemn givenness of my patient's spread body disposes and poises me to enter into the phenomenality giving and showing itself unconditionally. Without an agency of its own, a call alone invites me into to the event harbored in suffering organicity whose blood vessels, fluids, discolored skin gains a voice from its self-donation. The call comes from the elsewhere, the distance of my patient's self and from the nexus of vasculature and other (barely) human tissue. The bilocations of what is pulled and pushed in opposite directions converge in a single phenomenality that enters my experience of a unity under threat of dissolution and extinction into oblivion. Of the experience of being expanded and splayed, which belongs only to my patient, I know only of its call for recognition, which elicits acts of healing.

Eye of the Needle: Restoring Ecology and Economy at Home

In my last piece I moved from the recognition scenes in the Odyssey to the Lucan recognition scene that defines the resurrection. I want to move back to the Odyssey for a moment, to explore the ecology at Ithaka, and how the Earth Mother, Gaia, restores balance in the oikos, the economy of the home. As is my wont lately, I also want to begin Keller's Cloud of the Impossible. 

Civilizational ecophobia remains almost indistinguishable from the formative gynophobias. Let me venture the twisted thought that this entanglement is itself cause for green hope. For we admit that the is some systemic justice along the way, much certainly has shown itself in the rapid undoing of millennia of gender/sex arrangements. Gender---and now sex---are so tangled in our queerly eligible Earth that in resonance with an interreligious planetary their vibrant movements may do much to stir up a sustainable future. [Cloud, 282].


Keller gives the "Infinite Entanglement" a "noble nickname:" Gaia (281), after a fascinating discussion of the Gaia complex (268). Moving from Gaia to Book 21 of the Odyssey may seem an abrupt transition, but the restoration of the oikos at Ithaka involves the complicity of father, mother and son in the presence of the Earth Mother, who has been injured by
the disruptive and disrespectful desecration of Penelope's suitors: they have established an ancient 'ecophobia' and 'gynophobia' in Odysseus's hall. The king returns to restore order to his house by balancing its place in relation the Gaia.

The trial of the bow and the axeheads enthralls any reader of the Odyssey.

Penelope speaks:

I will set before you the great bow of divine Odysseus, and whosoever shall most easily string the bow in his hands and shoot an arrow through all twelve axes, with him will I go, and forsake this house of my wedded life, a house most fair and filled with livelihood, which, methinks I shall ever remember even in my dreams.”

Telemachus acts:

... he set up the axes, when he had dug a trench, one long trench for all, and made it straight to the line, and about them he stamped in the earth. And amazement seized all who saw him, that he set them out so orderly, though before he had never seen them. 




Odysseus strings the bow and shoots the arrow through the axe heads:

Odysseus of many wiles, as soon as he had lifted the great bow and scanned it on every side—even as when a man well-skilled in the lyre and in song easily stretches the string about a new peg, making fast at either end the twisted sheep-gut—so without effort did Odysseus string the great bow. And he held it in his right hand, and tried the string, which sang sweetly beneath his touch, like to a swallow in tone. But upon the wooers came great grief, and the faces of them changed color, and Zeus thundered loud, shewing forth his signs. Then glad at heart was the much-enduring, goodly Odysseus that the son of crooked-counselling Cronos sent him an omen, and he took up a swift arrow, which lay by him on the table, bare, but the others were stored within the hollow quiver, even those of which the Achaeans were soon to taste. This he took, and laid upon the bridge of the bow, and drew the bow-string and the notched arrow even from the chair where he sat, and let fly the shaft with sure aim, and did not miss the end of the handle of one of the axes, but clean through and out at the end passed the arrow weighted with bronze.


The orchestration of the three family members plays out in the music (sing in me Muse) Odysseus makes by plucking the string on the bow, which he had strung like a lyre. It is a song of a swallow, a song of death, a song of justice. Still ringing in his ears, the musical tone guides his hand and eye as he threads the needle with an arrow. What does Odysseus see in the alignment but Gaia awaiting justice! Telemachus has tilled the earth itself to set the axes, resting as they do in the breast of Gaia, propped up to embrace them. It is Gaia herself that sets the axes within her substance, giving a glimpse of her opening to Odysseus's eye. All these actants act very close to the earth. Even the great tactician sits when he shoots. Close to the earth indeed.

Many have already commented on the obvious sexual imagery here. The archer sees an aperture with the line of each aligned blade above and below, oriented is a straight line interrupted only by the round, receiving aperture. Is this a phallic adventure, or, perhaps a return to the womb, as Nicodemus pondered, or a quilting stitch that makes Gaia whole again, a stitch woven by a King married the the great weaver herself, Penelope? These three are very close indeed, this father-king, mother-queen and son-prince. Only in the unison of a note played on a single string can they conspire to rehabilitate the earth. We must imagine Odysseus not only sowing, but sewing. 

In this impossible cloud of a healing Gaia, it is impossible not to conjure Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and his essay, "Odysseus' Scar." The essay is arguably the most insightful discussion of the famous recognition scene that occurs just before Odysseus's surgical repair of Gaia's wound. Auerbach draws a provocative distinction between the Homeric text and biblical texts, in particular, the Abraham and Isaac pericope.

The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical---it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historical true reality---it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy...[T]he Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us---they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.

   Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority; because the stories are not, like Homer's simply narrated "reality." Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them[.] Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1953. 14-15.


Auerbach's protest against the autocracy of religion is at home in Keller's cloud of apophatic entanglement. It is the very secularization of religious code that perpetuates this "notion of sovereignty" that "sits enthroned amidst the desires and ruses of Western democratic powers" (Cloud, 259). The problem of history does not elude Auerbach either, as he notes the rise of National Socialism during the time of his writing of Mimesis (19), although he was not quite ready to articulate how religious autocracy provides a template for modern political history.

Politics, 'democratic powers' and Nazi Germany are rooted in a modern theory of the state rooted in theological concepts (Keller quoting Carl Schmitt, 259). The current ecological crisis that Keller fears will be deadlocked in acknowledgment and inaction finds a method for proceeding in Odysseus's bow: the restoration of Gaia is the restoration of home. We need to rewrite that grammar into contemporary terms, into policy that sustains peoples, governments and religions by restoring home planet earth by respecting the entanglements that fold human and non-human into a string that sings a swallow's song.

On a more political and ecological note, I would hasten to add that what neo-conservative politicians and neo-liberal economists call 'commerce,' I would call the rape of home planet earth. As Catholics we are called to be honorable custodians of the beauty and delicate balance in the ecology and biology of a living world. Indeed to see the beauty, harmony and balance in the world is to praise its creator and take responsibility for being reliable partners in the ongoing creation of the world.

While we do not deify the earth, the earth obliges us to respect it. The earth always asks us to come home, and that entails a certain Odyssean nostos. Odysseus can string the bow not because he is the strongest in the hall, but because he 'knows how,' applies wisdom, and accepts responsibility to Gaia, and of course, to Poseidon, who asks him to bring the sea to the inland earth.

The politics of ecology are not about winking to climate change, clean coal or fracking, but about aligning the human creature with the air it breathes, the food it grows in the earth, with good house-keeping. Perhaps we can take a page from the playbook of the first family of Gaia: Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus.

Resurrection as Recognition: Synchronicity in the Cloud

But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place. Some women from our group, however, have astounded us: they were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; they came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that he was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but him they did not see. And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures. As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther.  But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?” [Luke 24:21-32, NAB]



Luke's first presentation of the risen Jesus is incendiary. Somewhere between a hardened heart and a changed heart (between sklerokardia and metanoia), is a heart ablaze, burning within the release of an event, Jesus's own deconstruction of the scriptures. First Cleopas reads to Jesus, then Jesus reads to the two of them. Jesus ghosts the moment, and the disciples change their travel plans; they do not stay at Emmaus, but return to Jerusalem.

This is a strange recognition scene, especially when considered against the backdrop of such scenes in the Odyssey, in which Odysseus's presence becomes more and more palpable as the the elements of his identity incrementally allows him to shine forth. Here, the disciples' 'burning,' reaching its climax in the breaking of the bread, has an opposite effect on Jesus's appearance: he becomes aphantos (ἄφαντος), a shining 'back,' an absence, in a disappearance like light near a black hole.

The timing here is interesting for its vagueness. Does Jesus absent himself at his recognition or just after the recognition? The text implies something sequential: they recognize then he becomes aphantos. But what is the object of recognition---upon what does the disciples' gaze rest? The bread? The 'breaking' of the bread? The person of Jesus? The synchronicity here astounds us as the report of the women astounds the disciples, but the absence of any causal relation in the bread-break-recognition-aphantos strikes us as pure relationality. The acausal connections here are the stuff of the cloud. Without devolving onto Jung's spooked experience with Pauli and Einstein, it remains a fascinating observation that the concept of synchronicity is a response to quantum theory, which, as I have recently noted, is phenomenology. Keller recounts how such meaningful coincidences fold in the cloud (Cloud of the Impossible, 135). Enough: we will not be calling Ghostbusters. The risen Jesus ain't no spook, despite the initial misapprehension of the Jerusalem disciples (Luke 24:37).

The meaningful coincidences within this first presentation of the risen Christ in Luke's gospel occurs only in the unus mundus that resonates in the folds of reality. The resurrection that takes form in the synchronicity in Luke makes its appearance in quantum acausality: Jesus pops in and out like an electron in its orbital. The burning in the hearts is a response to the resurrection as the presence of the Word in the flesh allegorizing the words of scripture referring to himself. The words set hearts ablaze as they shine forth; the words themselves are ablaze. The saturation Luke creates here conflagrates the moment, which brings forth the disappearance of Jesus into his resurrection. 

The disciples are caught in the iconic gaze in the event of the resurrection. Their hearts change. They turn back, transformed, toward Jerusalem, where they see Jesus again, this time with a bit more presence. This appearance is of an entirely different character. The emphasis rests on the body. The concreteness of the experience moves the disciples to the coolness of praise. Luke gives us two views on the resurrection in his presentation of the experience of the disciples. In the white hot on the road to Emmaus, the disciples discover Jesus in the word. In Jerusalem they discover him in the promise (ἐπαγγελίαν ).

The calculus of Marion's reduction might help to resolve the apparent aporia of two senses of resurrection, "by lending themselves to the play of a crossed exchange of significations---thus firmly consecrating the distance within them" (The Erotic Phenomenon, 105). We are therefore not dealing with two distinct phenomena of resurrection, but a single "crossed phenomenon" of bi-directionality, "fixed by a single signification." The crossed phenomenon of resurrection plays at the junction of disappearance and appearance: the aphantos that coincides with the breaking of the bread and the recognition of Jesus as the risen Lord, crossed with the palpable appearance of Jesus as flesh and bone eating broiled fish in the presence of the disciples. If the reduction works to release the event, then the event must be released from the single signification of which disappearance and appearance are of a piece.

That formulation seems to obscure as much as it illuminates. The "play" of significations that really constitute a single signification and therefore a single (though 'crossed') phenomenon seems all play and little meaning. Yet, "a ghost has no flesh and bones" as the risen Jesus does (Luke 24:39). The re-enactment of the last supper at Emmaus unites all this play into Eucharistic phenomenality. The pre-disaster meal comes to the fore and folds the gaze of the disciples into the disappearance of one substance and the appearance of something new, palpable and real.

This reduction of the appearances of aphantos at Emmaus and the body of Jesus, hands, feet, body and bone at Jerusalem allow the crossed phenomenon of the resurrection to present to the experience of the disciples within the single signification fixed within the intuitions at work at the two locations. The experiences at Emmaus and Jerusalem are both rooted in Jesus's placing the deconstruction of the scriptures---the release of their messianism---within their understanding: "he opened their minds so they could understand" (Luke 24:45). The resurrection resolves in the Ascension, which relocates the risen Lord in Eucharistic memory, emblazoned there by the utter materiality of Christ's real presence in the presence of the disciples.

 Luke's was a very busy Sunday. The disciples, on this third day, had their hope fulfilled that "He was the one." The act of breaking the bread (lubricated by the messianic word) at Emmaus becomes a moment of synchronicity at Jerusalem: the mere report of this act to the"eleven" coincides with Jesus being in their midst (24:36). He takes them on another trip, this time to Bethany, where he bids them farewell; they worship him and return to Jerusalem where they praised God in the temple and awaited the arrival of the promised Spirit which will clothe them with power from on high (24:49). Burning hearts are encouraged to proclaim the Easter faith and bear witness to the stark and impossible reality of the resurrection.