Negative Certainties, Counter-Experiences, The Impossible and Saturated Phenomena

Some preliminary and very provisional remarks on the arrival of the English translation of Marion's Negative Certainties (trans. Stephen E. Lewis, Chicago Univ. Pr: Chicago, 2015) will record impressions of a first reading.  This book is either very easy or very difficult: I am simply uncertain.


Marion concludes 'the necessity of God's possibility' through 'the impossibility of God's impossibility' (69). This section, "Possibility without Conditions," achieves an alarmingly apologetic tone, mitigated only by his making a safe landing in Cusanus and the latter's posse ipsum. Marion does not succumb to unadulterated apologetics because he enfolds his argument in apophatic entanglement, which deconstructs metaphysical possibility and impossibility.  'The impossible for man has the name God...[H]ere we find the  fold of the impossible...of which the world, metaphysics, or perhaps even philosophy are capable of merely the slightest glimmer' (82).

I surmise that within these apophatic folds the nature of saturated phenomenon come into view through the lens of negative certainties via a counter-experience that experiences such phenomena as 'saturated' in the first place. Marion seems to be rewriting differance as negative uncertainty of the trace of (im)possibility. While it is impossible that saturated phenomena are impossible, our sense that they have truly entered experience is constituted by the uncertainty characteristic of their overwhelming the intuition and blinding the intention. We know we cannot know them as they are in themselves, but in a counter-experience of them, we know their saturation in its fullness but not its content. Of this reality we have negative certainty. In other words, we know a phenomenon is saturated when our certainty becomes negative.

Conversely (and implicitly), the relative poorness of phenomenon becomes apparent through its 'positive uncertainty' (Marion does not use this term, but he does deploy 'positive certainty' to characterize the certainty of scientific affirmations, p.4). Phenomenon that present as closer to their objectness neither saturate intuition nor foil intention. On the contrary, such phenomenon are the focus of pure science, which knows them through their characteristic of uncertainty that can be calculated or viewed by an observer. Positive uncertainty provide the courage that inscribes a curve through data points delimited by 'error bars'; it also allows for the understanding that some poor phenomena present themselves in one way or another, depending on the vantage point of an observer (this kind of phenomenon has been elegantly described in the famous double slit experiments).

Their may indeed be a kind of polarity between negative certainty and positive uncertainty. When we identify one or the other, we know we are either doing something like phenomenology or something like physics. Whether or not these poles are situated on a continuum or not remains open to conjecture, but should a continuum become an attractive model, degrees of saturation, givenness and certainty might play out on such a model.

Regardless, the implications for hermeneutics become clearer, especially regarding the interpretive approach to sacred scripture. The scriptures are not divinity itself, but are always already there to release the elemental event of revelation---the self-communication of God, regardless of such an event as being a saturated phenomenon (as such). We can speak about scriptural texts as they speak to us, not as the voice of God, but as the voice of an unconditional, anonymous call, a vocative 'pure gift' and 'pure call.' The saturated phenomenon of the call, the insistence of saturation, cannot preclude our deconstruction of the text, because the voice---the voice to which scripture itself is directed and already a response---is always in advent.

A Quick Note on an Emerging Synthesis of Marion, Keller and Caputo

In my recent post, "Evidence and Phenomena," I stumbled upon the notion that the horizons of phenomenology bear the stigmata of apophatic entanglement expressed in the trinity of implicatio, explicatio, and complicatio. 

Central to my understanding of 'stigmata' in this context, is the breathing involved in this 3-fold formulation. The inspirations and expirations in this rhythmic process have, well, implications. The 'inseparability' of the counterpoints of reality envisages the accommodations of place ( I might have said 'space' here at one time).

I am not suggesting that such horizons are elusive moving targets, but that a certain dynamism is at play that marks Keller's folds. In pneumatic motion, reality adopts distinct but ephemeral conformations that either allow or generate the conditions for phenomena to make their appearance. I am thinking here about how electrons achieve higher energy states which move them onto another plane, and how they eventually regain their more relaxed location, and in the process emit a particle of light, a photon: illumination. 

The photoelectric effect is an interesting reflection of other effects in the cloud of unknowing. The fleeting conformations in Keller's Cloud of the Impossible of apophatic entanglements allow or generate 'something' to break through. Perhaps this 'something' has existed before, but has slipped into inexistence (again the behavior of electrons popping in and out of existence in their orbitals is instructive).

In apophatic placing within entanglements, horizons form, deform, reform, as predicted in Keller's mystical cloud theory. This theory also has, well, implications for phenomenology. In the cloud, the phenomenologies of Heidegger and Husserl must be read through the neo-phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, whose phenomenological reductions are 'snapshots' of moments in the flux of horizons. Perhaps these reductions are informed by uncertainty, the interstitial ether of the cloud (what some poets have poetically called 'dark matter').

In turn, therefore, it might be profitable to read Marion through Keller, whose apophasis makes a place for his horizons. In this way we can accept his notion that God is beyond being, presented to experience on the horizon of Love, before he appears on the horizon of being.

The 'something' that lurks in potentiality in the dynamic foldings of the cloud, then can be actualized in the rift (gap) torn open by the very fabric of the cloud. This is a something that makes a gap, not something that fills the vacuum of a gap. There is no empty space in the cloud, just the potentiality of forming a place.

Reading Marion through Keller allows us to read Caputo, who is always reading. Depending on where we catch him in the folds, he is reading backwards or forwards with his God insisting to cut a gap into existence. But Caputo's insistence of God is somehow akin to Marion's seduction of God, both of which are embraced in Keller's folding trinity of God. The stigmata of these faces of God etch themselves upon the flexing horizons of a call insisting, of Love seducing, and of the embrace en-/un-/with-/folding.

This trinity of thinkers is caught up in the tri-fold cloud, and their synthesis reshapes the shape of reality (which is as protean as the cloud itself). In such a manner, a provocative ethics is poised for an appearance, an ethics that has a profound respect for what's happening in the cloud.

The Crux of the Crucifixion II

The meaning of Christ's abandonment can be disclosed only through the hermeneutic of the Cross itself. Crucifixion is humiliation, violence, death, horrific solitude untouched by any number of witnesses to this execution by the Roman state with the consent of the religious authorities. Narratologically, the execution is rooted in betrayal, betrayal of someone close and betrayal of religion itself; for it is better that one should die than the whole nation perish (John 11:50). Jesus could see it all coming, but it was not the occasion of his death, but the event that would be released, that moves the story to the Cross, which reads the occasion as the death of the religion that brings death to God: not 'a' religion, but the machinations of religion. We are not to read the Cross as the death of Judaism, but as the event of the death of the anthropomorphism and anthropopathism of God in all religion. The Cross cuts a vast apophatic space that negates the insinuation of the human into God, the space of not human being, not human feeling, in God.

Love is not a reification or a feeling. It is not a possession or an emotion. It is not something one feels but something that one does. It is like this for God when he is free from the human. God is, apophatically, not Love, but God loves. The very phenomenality of God presents to us on a horizon of Love before he can present to us on a horizon of Being. In a compressed synthesis of what concerns this blog lately, I suggest that Jean-Luc Marion's saturated phenomenon of revelation presents in Love, for God loves before he is; Catherine Keller walks us through the space of unknowning entanglements, bringing us to the call of the insistence of God, who through the enfolding and unfolding of the Cusanian cloud, enters John Caputo's plane of existence on the horizon of Being (God's call insists, that God might be). It is all 'spooky action at a distance,' it is real, and enfolds and unfolds everything that is real. We know its wholeness only by its nickname, "God."

The apophatic space cut by the Cross is the space of negation created by Christ's experience of abandonment. It is a vast and sacred space from which the human projections onto God are vacated, thereby releasing the event of God coming into view on the horizons that displace those that had prevented God from being God. It is the space of unknowing because it is the space God enters as he is in himself. He comes in the luminous darkness where we can see only dimly, for darkness had come over the land (Matt. 27:45).

Cut loose from the Big Other wrapped in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic 'borrow'd robes,' the abandoned Christ is left in the loving mercy that moves the Psalm. The Marcan and Matthean final, wordless cry, [re]unites Jesus to the Father, or so Luke would have it (23:46). It would be an injust theology of the Cross, were it to empower abandonment to Leave Jesus orphaned. It has been my contention that God witnesses the suffering of the Cross hypostatically: God's nature, united in the single divine person of Christ, witnesses to the suffering in the human nature in the closeness of solidarity. This solidarity redeems the human creature.

The Resurrection can never mean less than the total affirmation and vindication of the life and death of the Christ. His Sonship was so integral to his mission that the Cross would be absurd were Christ's forsakeness to eradicate the relationship with the Father. The Cross, therefore, does not read the abandonment of the human projections onto God as the abandonment of God as he is in himself, the God revealed in the Cross. After the evacuation of the human from God--the Big Other--there is remainder: the God who is.