No Greater Love: A Reflection on the Triduum

For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son...






οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ’ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον




(Please note an afterword below)

The gift of the Son defies any notion of giving on the side of being. Within being, the gift is wrapped as a ransom, a human sacrifice, a gift with all the strings that being can attach. The gift, what Christians call the Incarnation, does not unfold, finally, in being, in any ontological difference, in any fundamental or regional ontology. The aporia of the gift, this gift, can only unfold within the horizon of its givenness: love. Love bears the same structures of phenomenality as the gift. Love, like the gift, is an 'all or nothing' phenomenon. One does not love a 'little bit', partially, conditionally; whatever strong feeling of desire, affection or attraction might fall under the categories of love in a metaphysical system of prefabricated concepts, styles or fads, what we call here 'love' is nothing like such systems that pass for love in other contexts. The same holds for the gift: what is a gift if wrapped as a promissory note? The love we speak of here, the love of God, enjoys utter anteriority to being itself; love answers to its own givenness, prior to being.

The Incarnation---the Christ-event---by which we mean the nativity of Jesus, his life and ministry, his trials and tribulations, his judgment by the world, the way of the Cross and the Resurrection, while certainly historical and real, does not manifest itself in any fullness in justice within being. What on earth can the death of God mean in the rationality of metaphysics? Or for that matter, what does the impossibility of a God-Man, a Word-made-flesh, of any notion of a 'greater love', do within being if they do not first quicken in the priority of love, and its logic and rationality?

Try as we may, the Cross will always get twisted when we force it into ontology, into any metaphysics of presence, however rarefied a presence we can construct within systematic metaphysics. No rationale for the Cross plays out satisfactorily within the categories of being. No effort, however noble, or rational, or analogical gets us much past onto-theology's bugaboo: theodicy (0r at best, the onto-theological god that fell to his death off Nietzsche's tightrope). We have visited the notion of a theodicy without theodicy recently, and nothing seems to happen on the planes of theodical thinking; vectors of thought point outside such structures, but cannot escape them.

To begin to enter the logic of love, the unfolding of the erotic reduction and the release of the erotic phenomenon, all appeals to causality, empirical reasoning, and being itself must collapse; for love to appear categories and concepts must yield their place of honor in pure reason: the first critique has left the building. In the instance of this love we speak about now, we must allow the Father and the Son to appear, not within frameworks we have constructed for them, but as they appear to each other in the logic of love that can unfold in a practical reason. In the Johannine tradition "God is love". For God so loved the world, the logos gives up his life for a friend. Here begins the logic of love, and it provides the only lens through which to envisage the Father and Son in their face-off at the Cross. Only then can the gift of the Father and the Son manifest as the gift to the 'gifted', or the recipient---in short, to us.

What kind of fatherly love is this that allows the son to die? Why does the father not extricate the son, certainly a small task for the causa sui? The impotence of the verb 'to be' and references to causality underscore that what goes on in the Cross---the event harbored in the Cross---has nothing to do with being, and everything to do with what is prior to being: God loves before he is, and he so loved the world that only the release of absolute holiness through death and resurrection could ratify once and for all love's anteriority to all things related to being. Only the absolute abandon of the self without reservation, with absolute totality of self-emptying can the logic of love, in this case, the logic of the Cross, declare itself from itself, completely and irrevocably. The gift that gives its self, gives itself fully and with abandon to the recipient of the gift, the 'gifted', she who believes in order to see and to hear, she who receives kenotically, with an accommodating self-emptying, a making room for the gift. What is faith, what is belief if not a willingness to open oneself to the possible, to vacate a prejudice to make room for the truth?

This absolute abandon unites love and the gift. Love...gift. This is not really a sequence, for language does not allow representation of equality (or better, identity) here: love and the gift are not separate: they are the same, and as such they belie the differences among philos, eros and agape: for they are one and the same kenosis, the same event of kenosis. This is not the kenosis of Caputo or Altizer---the emptying of transcendence into immanence once and for all in the singular death of God. This is the kenosis of the univocity of love. The one and only univocal term---God loves as we love. We receive the gift in the same love in which it is given. We receive love, when it manifests against a screen of the structures of love.

Who is this friend, this beneficiary of no greater love than this? It is the other, the face of the other, the icon. The face that has me before I am even a self, before I am, in the elemental place that is otherwise than being. Are we helpless before the other? Is this even the right question? Can we then not also ask, is God helpless before the Cross? If these are the right questions, then they come from the seedbed of ontological difference, from being, as if being were absolutely prior, even prior to the nothing, prior even to the matrix from which the self is pulled by the horizon of being. But these are not the right questions, for this is the language of theodicy, theology's dead end and cause of death. To ask these questions is to force the uncontainable into a container.

Before God is before the Cross, the Father loves the Son. How does being fare before the absolute gift? If God is love, then this univocal love appears not merely as a love for the world but the selfsame love of the perichoresis within the immanent life of the Trinity. Being therefore has no standing before love, before the gift, before the kenotic movement that goes by the name, 'love'.

If faint strains of Jean-Luc Marion or Emmanuel Levinas echo in this little Lenten reflection it is because their work has entered my thinking, my seeing and hearing, through their signature ideas of the saturated phenomenon, the face of the other, alterity and the self-as-hostage, as these ideas gel across the shadow of the Cross (In another piece, I shall substantiate my gratitude to these thinkers in the more conventional form of citation). Catholic thinking places no premium on human suffering, a torturous death, or reciprocity of the gift. Instead, it offers its Tradition as a gift, and understands that gift within the absoluteness, the all-or-nothing, of love. What, ultimately, can this gift be, if not Christ himself?


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Afterword


I have heard, quite literally, from the four corners of the earth about the abysmal failure of this Lenten reflection. Perhaps in my haste to put something 'up for Easter' I have perpetrated both religious and philosophical sins. The gist of the critique runs something like this: the piece is too religious for something so 'phenomenological', and too phenomenological for something so 'religious'. Moreover, both the religion and phenomenology are suspect. I am grateful for the loyal readership and loyal opposition, and I should have exercised, in retrospect, better judgment in 'going ahead' with the piece. I will leave the piece up (it crossed my mind to delete it) for continued target practice, not that it didn't have enough holes in it already. I will chalk it up to a pitiful 'at bat', a strikeout, as it were.

We have all chosen to live and stay in the world, and so we exist with a ineradicable bond with existence itself. This piece was a distinctly wrong place to think existents and existence apart from one another. A logic of love and a propositional logic are not mutually exclusive; I do think it's difficult to think them simultaneously. To say that for one to appear the other must disappear misleads. To think the logic of love does not mean to leave one's brains at the door; the logic of love is no fantasy land.


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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?

NT Parables as Perlocutionary Acts: A Prodigal Son Returns

I have recently begun a discussion of how Jesus' parables place their characters within a type of vision, a type of seeing, which can open upon the saturated phenomena of the idol and the icon. By identifying the parables and parabolic language as an example of Marion's 'perlocutionary act,' this NT rhetoric can enter a phenomenological moment in the erotic reduction and then the reduction to givenness. The parables become songs of love that give themselves to the 'gifted' (or perhaps the 'devoted'-to-be). I will present the well-known 'parable of the two sons' through the lens of Marion's work to demonstrate how his phenomenological approach can release the event harbored in this familiar rhetorical device of the parable.

The parable of the 'Prodigal Son,' unique to Luke's Gospel (15:11-32), contains several elements that constitute the perlocutionary act.

¹¹ Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
¹³ “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. ¹⁴ After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. ¹⁶ He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
¹⁷ “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! ¹⁸ I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ ²⁰ So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
²¹ “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
²² “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴ For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
²⁵ “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ²⁷ ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
²⁸ “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. ²⁹ But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
³¹ “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. ³² But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” [NIV]




In the previous chapter (Luke 14), the evangelist had just presented a somewhat uncomfortable meal with some Pharisees in which Jesus was under intense scrutiny. At the meal, he spoke of healing on the Sabbath, and saving an ox or a child fallen in a well. His healing of someone meets silence. Who will break the tension? Finally,  "one of those at the table"(14:15, my emphasis) responds joyfully to the advice Jesus gives his host about hospitality. The grammar of the parable already leads back to what might be going on in the 'one.' Afterwards, when he is with the crowds, and again with the 'tax collectors and sinners' (Luke 15:1) Jesus discusses the needs of the one over the many (4-7; 8-9) through a reduction, and finally illustrates the event: the 'rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents' (7;10). 

The 'Prodigal Son' (through the prodigal 'one') speaks to the event of an inversion of reward, of what is due, and when it is due. In Luke 14, hospitality, outside the economy of reciprocity, had its reward in another order, the order of resurrection (Luke 14:14). The father's gift of hospitable reward in this parable is displaced from the order of expectation. Here, a change of heart is a matter of life and death, and a 'coming-back-to life' warrants the event of celebration and rejoicing. The father's hospitality can in no manner require reciprocity, for the prodigal has nothing because of his sin against God and his father (15:19;21).

Marion's own reading of this Lucan pericope focuses on property (and indirectly, expectataion) as instantiation of ousia (15:12-13). While his task in God Without Being is to displace metaphysics and being itself, he links the displacement of ousia with property in the prodigal's demand for cold cash (pp. 95-100). This is precisely how ousia works parabolically: as expectation, great expectations (pace Dickens and Pip), and an eye that looks to dispose of an inheritance. Indeed, a large portion of the family goods and property, translated into currency, is disposed of rather quickly as the very ousia that brackets itself into epoche is dissipated. These great expectations are the same for both sons, though one seems to prefer to wait a bit longer for the will to be read, even if he will complain that a little breaking of the family treasure would be welcome.

The second displacement of expectation begins in the fascinating verse in which the father recognizes his son from a distance. Makran (μακρὰν) often suggests very great distance (especially as it is appears in Luke-Acts) that would make such a recognition difficult, yet here it seems to describe a running distance, though a parabolic running distance. Given the situation, the father might not recognize his son, for example, by some article of clothing, as the son has become destitute, disfigured by ousia. He must have looked to the horizon every day in hope that his son would come over it so poised and ready he was to receive that moment, that gift; and so he does recognize him---see him--- from afar as his son returned, returned from the dead. Through overflowing emotions of hope and joy masked as a 'gut feeling,' esplangchnisthe, (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη), the prodigal son comes into view. Seduced by the very horizon of love, the father is overwhelmed, overcome in his very bowels, which constitute his reception of the gift that is the his son brought into being through love: the father's expectant hope and love produces the appearance of his lost son on the horizon of love---he comes into view as love pulls him into existence, from the dead into new life and new being. The existential horizon of the parable (itself pulled into being by love), the horizon of being and the horizon of love meet in the event.

Premonition or very good vision brings a saturated phenomenon into the experience of not only the father but also the auditor of the story. The devoted 'gifted' sees the 'return' as metanoia, and therefore as iconic. Clearly this is not the only response, as the older son responds with incredulity and perplexed anger. The splendor of his robed and ringed brother presents to his gaze as the bedazzling idol of ousia, and reflects his gaze back onto himself, and only onto his own bedazzled perception of deprivation and an experience of injustice. He presents his brother to his father as 'this son of yours' as not only a disowned brother, but as the faceless other, a face defaced and erased by wanton living and sin against the father. The elder brother still sees the younger as 'dead' and not 'alive again.' Metanoia is invisible to him, and his gaze has foreclosed on the icon that presents an offer, an unconditional gift, to see him---that he be seen by a change of heart, that a change of heart sees him as the accused direct object of the 'to see,' the refracted gaze bending back, leading back, toward him. The father says, in effect, 'look at yourself, everything you see is yours.' He then reorients his elder son toward the icon, inverting the elder son's rhetoric of distance and expectation: "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." The father directs his elder son to the face of the [br]other. In this reading, ousia can ride behind the chant of love, at least for a time, a time for celebration and the fatted calf. Ousia is reborn and rewritten after the song of the parable is sung, and love has uttered its lyric. Being always follows love.

The parable has therefore the same rhetorical thrust, the same perlocutionary (performative) action as the parable of the sheep and goats. It is an invitation to placing the self within view of metanoia, the pure gift, and within the phenomenological moment that releases the event of seeing the face of the other in love, with a gut feeling of compassion that sees the other viscerally, that sees the other as if it were within its very flesh, as if the gaze were coming from that flesh. This self is not only the self of  the elder brother who receives the invitation to the icon, but to Jesus' hearers of his words, those who stand in relation to the parable and its actors.

The Confessions: St. Augustine on the Borromean Knot

Several texts have been folding, unfolding and folding together in my imagination lately: Keller's 'planetary entanglements' in her Cloud of the Impossible, Lacan's "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," and Marion's In the Self's Place. Happily, both Tad DeLay and Slavoj Zizek, two powerful apologists of Lacan and his work, have provided provocative lenses through which Descartes' cogito comes into focus in Ecrits and in Marion's examination of Augustine's Confessiones.

Zizek rewrites, in my reading, Descartes' infamous cogito, ergo sum, in his rewriting of dialectical materialism in Absolute Recoil (Verso: NY, 2014):

What if total knowledge entails inexistence, and existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? Such a paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term into the standard opposition between ordinary materialism...and subjective idealism---things exist insofar as they are unknown (209).

I read here a flux between thinking and being, a paradox resolving, or at least playing out, in an equilibrium reaction that flows in either direction---between reactants and products---depending on the presence of catalysts or other influences that favor one side the equilibrium. Neither side undergoes complete annihilation, yet undergoes aphanisis, a ghosting, an evacuation. The system here is certainly dialectical, even as Rahner might understand the term, but it is also a Schwebe, an oscillation that can never land on a midpoint between being and thinking, knowledge and existence. Hence, the system allows for a condensation of a subject. In this sense, the oscillations become a waveform that has potential for a phenomenological reduction in which something can make an appearance, even if that appearance must, paradoxically, also be a disappearance, not terribly unlike Luke's aphantos on the road to Emmaus.

Lacan's Borromean knot of the registers the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (RSI) provides a place for the play of aphanisis. Delay's discussion of the RSI in God is Unconscious is instructive, and his intuitions are very interesting. 

The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real operate in a diachronic and synchronic fashion, that is to say, they cannot be entirely separated...[T]he three are not things qua regions of the psyche, and they are not meant to be understood with exactitude. Lacan's theory is always meant to be turned over and played with as a useful tool (8).


Lacan's triple register functions in synchrony. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are entangled in such a way that we cannot investigate one without invoking the other two. The unconscious should be analyzed as a language (17).



Delay has cited Ecrits here, in particular, "The Agency of the Letter," emphasizing that the unconscious is a language and the discourse of the other (16). I am more sympathetic to Delay's first insight that places RSI on 2 axes, than with his monaxial synchronic function; but I also embrace his suggestion of knotty entanglement of the RSI and a resultant spooky action at a distance.

Before letting Lacan speak directly to us from Ecrits, I now take the liberty of playing with the RSI 'as a useful tool.' The representation of the RSI as a 3-ringed circus, or a Borromean knot is helpful in grounding the observations of Lacan, Marion and Augustine. Taking as my point of departure Delay's flexible system of the registers, I want to re-imagine the RSI as regions in relationality that do not actually intersect, yet form a closed system, as a Mobius strip might be twisted, like a helix, into a knot, such that a single strand makes up the entirety. Further, the knot can be imaged as a looping track, something like a cloverleaf road work. There is a flexibility in the twists, such that the strand can be lifted into relief, like pulling on a slinky. There is no inherent overlap in the knot's structure, so that the are no actual Venn intersections, but if pulled out like a slinky, virtual intersections appear and can be viewed from above or below.

Keeping in mind this dynamic Borromean slinky-pretzel, Lacan's concepts from "Agency of the Letter" find a safe place to land, even as they are threatened by Zizek's aphanisis. Interestingly, Augustine haunts Lacan's essay. This hauntology will become clearer when we look at Marion's reading of the Confessiones, but Lacan is already in an Augustinian mood when he seeks to 'demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." that no language can 'cover the whole field of the signified (Ecrits, Norton:NY, 1977, trans. A Sheridan, p. 150; here referencing 'De significatione locutionis' of the De Magistro).

The word 'agency' in the title of Lacan's essay is the translator's choice, reflecting as it does Freud's 'agencies' of the ego, id and superego; but I prefer 'insistence' in place of 'agency,' mainly because of Lacan's own title in French (L'instance de la Lettre), but also because 'insistence' has nearly become a technical term for what John Caputo says God does, and for what Delay, following Lacan, wants the unconscious to do. We should therefore hold 'agency' and 'insistence' (and even instance in both French and English) in a dynamic tension of oscillation (Schwebe), if for no other reason than to keep things honest.

Lacan presents a rather passionate voice in "The Agency of the Letter" and that passion is amply demonstrated in his assertions for metaphor and metonymy.


...[I]f a symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea (175).



Though it is somewhat 'old hat' to view metonymy and metaphor as on the same axes as syntagm and paradigm, respectively, I shall not depart from that wisdom here. In fact, I want to allow symptom and desire to reverberate on our Borromean slinky-pretzel, with all deference to Jakobsen and Saussure (cf "Agency," 154). Paradigm, symptom and metaphor play out when we pull the slinky in a vertical axis, while syntagm, desire and metonymy play on a horizontal axis of the natural attitude.

Lacan asks, "[i]s the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric [sic], in relation to the place I occupy as a subject of the signified" but that question is "of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word 'thought' here. The play of metonymy is here the decision "to be only what I am," which is in "fact that I am in that very act." The play of metaphor is that "if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being...I lose myself in the process" (165 f.). "This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor...the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and  lack of being...is played until...I ought to say...: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (166). Lacan introduces his own early version of aphanisis in this splitting 'game.' Yet, definitively, Lacan cedes to Freud: "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." I must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation" (171).


Reintegration, harmony and reconciliation form an essential grammar in Augustine's Confessiones. Though it is a great error to attribute a proto-cogito to Augustine, Marion has discovered Lacan's 'process' of the play of refusal to know or to be, to think or exist within the thought of the Confessiones. The heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Such restlessness is a process of praise, of relationality, of discovery, of oscillation, and aphanisis.

According to Marion, 


confessio opens a space where the ego and its readers enter not only into a dialogue between themselves but especially into a place, where the charity of God can reach them. The model of the confessio, in fact, brings about a reduction of the natural attitude, which permits coming to the question of God, namely love. It therefore operates as an erotic reduction (In the Self's Place, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford Univ. Press: California, 2012, 54 f.).


In Augustine's hands, confessio as praise and reconciliation performs the phenomenological reduction that shifts from the simply mimetic to the semiotic gesture, in which the tension between being and knowing allows both the self and its place to appear. The waveform of Schwebe collapses in the relationality of the folding textures of the genre, bringing something new into focus.

Here is the crucial text that folds, Lacan, Descartes, Augustine and Marion into the reduction.

Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself...[B]ut he...observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself...[I]n thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself is saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside myself...[T]he cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself. (63)


Marion reading Augustine and Descartes uses language similar to Lacan reading Descartes and Freud. Though Marion seems to be describing something more static than Lacan is describing, Lacan's play of metonymy and metaphor merge with Marion's alienation and exile within Zizek's reading of Lacan's very dynamic aphanisis and the 'paradoxical relation' of being and knowing. In the disappearing of Marion's/Augustine's 'myself' in apophatic 'unknowing,' the myself/ego shifts from thought to being, whose expulsion is alienation and exile. Here, Marion seems to be putting on Augustine's lips (che vuoi?) Lacan's "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Ecrits, 166).

In the chemical equilibrium reaction analogy given above, there are, in the movement from thinking to being, knowledge to existence, only reactants in the oscillating flow favoring one pole or another. In the erotic reduction of divine love, the ego "can enter into the distance that opens me in the self's place" (99). It is not therefore finally in alienation, but in the vita beata, that only the oscillation that collapses, and not the distance that opens me. And here is where Augustine enters the roller coaster of the Borromean knot. If, as Lacan notes, the divine is located in the ineffable Real, it is through the syntagmatic, metonymic ride that the self can find its place there. But we can only see the self's arrival from above and below, through the paradigmatic, metaphorical, vertical axis, where knowledge and being are finally understood as not on a collision course, but on a gliding above and below each other, passing one another safely, to play again another day.

The threat of an actual aphanisis dissipates, for it has always been an illusion perpetrated against reality by certitude, which is the symptom playing out on the axis of metaphor. Augustine could have never felt the threat, as Marion magnificently demonstrates, because the oscillations of exile and alienation always collapse in the place of the self, on a horizontal axis, in the metonymy of desire, where the ego and the divine come into view through praise and reconciliation in the erotic reduction, and the saturated phenomenon of the univocity of love, the untroubled rest in the vita beata. This movement is, as Dante would later illustrate, a transition from the Imaginary into the Real, where Vergil cannot go, and only Beatrice can lead.

The Quantum Reduction, or Stapp, Marion, Keller, Latour and Caputo Lunching in the Faculty Lounge

Sometimes Quantum Theory (QT) posits that increments of knowledge result from a collapse of the intention of an observer who experiences the phenomenon of a wave function. Certainly QT posits more than this, but it asserts the integral part of the observer to affect (effect, too?) the system under observation, and the phenomena that present to the intuition of  the observer. Henry Stapp, for example, has discussed this notion in accessible language, and his process sounds so very much like Jean-Luc-Marion's neophenomenology's (NP) 'reduction.' The performance of phenomenology speaks directly to Stapp's assertion of the observer as 'agent,' as a participant in the quantum cloud whose agency is accounted for in the appearance of quanta, or the wave function itself. This function as function can be expressed symbolically as mathematics, but it does not take on meaning until a 'collapse' or methodological reduction sets the stage for 'something' to make an appearance. 

My interest in Stapp stems from his panel discussion at the UN in 2008 conference, Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness, a conference where my colleague, Christina Puchalski, MD, a thought-leader in Hospice and Palliative Medicine, was also a speaker. For me, Stapp, who at the time of the conference had just published his Mindful Universe, is more poet than  quantum mechanics specialist , which is how most scientists view him and his long and distinguished career as a physicist. 

I am also interested in how his work resonates with that of Marion, and Keller's as well. QT and NP might make for strange bedfellows at first blush, but in Keller's Cloud, it's all pure theopoetics, which is not to say, poetry. And Keller has no qualms about giving Stapp center stage in his Whiteheadian turn (Cloud of the Impossible, 142ff). Keller does not link Stapp's work with the general feel of continental philosophy of science, despite her minor engagement of Bruno Latour, but John Caputo certainly does not miss an opportunity to acknowledge Latour's release of Pasteur's microbes in the event of biology and the role of the investigator in creating swaths of reality.


...Latour will even go so far as to say that Pasteur's microbes were not 'there' before Pasteur, which is why nobody saw them. It is only after they meet Pasteur that they appear. Pasteur happened to them...It is not the case either that they are purely active and Pasteur their passive observer, or that he is purely active and they are passive products. Rather. both are actants, co-actants, in a collaborative process (PH, 145-47).  The Insistence of God, 203; Caputo citing Latour's Pandora's Hope [PH].


Caputo then immediately accuses Latour of committing phenomenology, a crime "as plain as the nose on Husserl's face." Crime is too strong a word (it's mine, not Caputo's), but Caputo is taking his last licks at the speculative realists, and this is perhaps why he misses the opportunity to take a second look, and observe that it was, after all, Marion's nose, which is where Marion's NP meets Stapp's quantum reduction, the collapse of the waveform so nicely epitomized in Keller's Cloud of the Impossible, and in Stapp's own description at the UN conference and in Mindful Universe. Caputo's accusation is brilliant and accurate, and emboldens me to make my own accusation: it's as plain as the nose on Caputo's face that Stapp is also doing phenomenology---quantum mechanics is phenomenology.

In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion ingeniously frees love (from Descartes, among others) to conceptualize itself in a series of elegant maneuvers, and deconstructs the metaphysical hegemony on love in the 'erotic reduction'. In a rather exhausting but exhaustive induction, Marion presents a series of questions that sequentially radicalize the 'erotic reduction' itself, whose edges attain the sharpness of a surgeon's blade that he uses to excise love from being once and for all. For now it must suffice to note that Marion, just as Stapp, steers the intention to draw out discrete phenomena from the fluidity of the cloud. By collapsing, reducing that which seems to subsume phenomena into a singularity (for example, a single, collapsing bar comprising area under a curve in integral calculus), the thing itself emerges as itself; and it emerges from the matrix of analogy into the place of univocity, from the analogical to the discrete quanta of reality, moving from the real to the hyperreal. Perhaps the physicists are right: reality is digital, and it appears discretely on self-generated horizons in the ipseity of givenness. For Marion love is the emergent, for Stapp, the particle (quantum from waveform); each emergent, then, is released in the event through an observer hearing its call.


The lover makes appear the one whom she loves, not the reverse. She makes him appear as lovable (or despicable), and thus as visible in the erotic reduction. The Other is phenomenalized in the exact measure according to which the lover loves him or her, and, as an Orpheus of phenomenality, tears him or her from indistinction and makes him or her emerge from the depths of the unseen. The Erotic Phenomenon, 80.



Love then reaches across time-space, and the lovers are inseparable, despite the separation of great distance; and the lovers are affected and effected by each other in their spooky entanglements. This sliver of a knowledge of love emerges from the phenomenological and quantum reduction. The procedure that directs intentionality has the effect of incrementally delimiting possibility itself. And while several years ago I was content to assert that 'information' is the reduction of possibility, I now want to admit that the reductions that decrease possibility create quanta of knowledge, yes, but not as possibility itself approaches zero, but the impossible itself.