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.

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.

Zizek's Ghosts

From Ghoulies and Ghosties,
and long-legged beasties,
and things that go bump in the night
Good Lord, deliver us!

Enter Banquo's Ghost.

Why do you dress me in borrow'd robes?


Had Derrida, Caputo and Keller never written a haunting, spooking word, Zizek would still spook us, haunt us, and go bump in the dark. Lately I've been quoting Macbeth wondering about his clothes. I'm spooked, as was Cawdor. While he never visits Shakespeare's play, Zizek does play on Macbeth's stage when he asks, che vuoi? Once poor Macbeth asks his famous question to the disbelief of his friend Banquo, he spends the rest of his life addressing his world from those robes he freely seeks and dons. It is irrelevant to Macbeth that he never wears those borrow'd robes legitimately. He becomes (or more accurately, tranforms or rewrites himself into), as Zizek might say, the very object of the desire of the other. All the rest spooks the castle.

Zizek uses several characters to illustrate the che vuoi. He especially likes the fantastically unlucky Roger Thornhill, who responds to the assertion that he is the spy George Kaplan, by becoming (some version of) George Kaplan (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd ed., Verso:London, 2008, 125. All subsequent (page numbers) refer to this edition). Though he never makes the conscious connection between che vuoi? and 'borrow'd robes,' the terms function the same way. Zizek's question, "why am I what you are saying that I am?" (126) is equivalent to Macbeth's question. Sometimes the result is comic, as in Hitchcock's North By Northwest, or Woody Allen's Play it Again Sam; but sometimes the result is tragic, as in Zizek's reading of the Antigone or his reading of the Annunciation through Rosetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini (126f).

Bearing in mind Zizek's commentary on film, pictorial art and fiction, I would like to briefly examine the Lucan Annunciation, and John's and Mark's Passion narratives to discover the event seeking release in the robing and disrobing that takes place there.


“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. [Luke 1:34;36, NIV]



Interpreted through the lens of Rosetti's painting, Zizek focuses on the implicit sexuality of Mary, but Luke's portrait is simpler: a Mary reluctant to be dressed in borrow'd robes. Regardless, the Lucan Mary takes on the mantle of the mother of 'the Son of the Most High' (1:32), as she moves from ecce to fiat. Mary becomes the object of desire of the Other; she dons the robes, and having asked 'why am I...', becomes she whom 'all generations' will call blessed (1:46-56). The price of blessedness is steep, though as her heart will be pierced by the cross.

“This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” [Luke 2:34-35]


Simeon's 'sword' is double-edged. In the Passion narratives, Jesus resists donning borrow'd robes, yet others, ghostly and haunting, disrobe in attempts to displace the object of their desire in their role as the Other. Caiaphas can't seem to disrobe fast enough, and tears his clothes off (Mark 14:63). The foregone conclusion takes on the shape of blasphemy against the established order, but the keriah betokens the loss about to occur. The loss is the loss of everything known about God, and the profoundest grief is laid bare before the assembly as if the rending of the cloth had rent Caiaphas's own heart asunder. Simeon's 'sign' of infamy has revealed the heart of the Sanhedrin.

The Roman prefect Pilate also wears his heart on his sleeve. He asks if Jesus is a king, that is, if Pilate's fealty should be paid to Jesus instead of Caesar; but Jesus rebukes him, refusing those robes, which must be transformed into the very mockery of royalty before Jesus finally dons them by force of royalty (John 18:33-38; 19:4-6). And yet, the rebuke sets Pilate's mind to free Jesus, and only failing that, can he settle on free himself of Jesus. At the Crucifixion, the crowds insist that Jesus don the robes of the God they create, but that God never appears, demonstrating that the emperor/false God has no clothes. The mysterious garments on Golgotha are gambled away into the Tradition.

In an interesting twist of time and place, the scantily clad young man who loses his garment in Gethsemane, runs off naked at the betrayal of Jesus, perhaps the last one to flee from the scene (Mark 14:51). The linens are displaced; they hearken to another scene, one not pregnant with disaster. They are properly placed as figura of the death linens (Mark 15:46). Robert Barron has suggested that the garment was baptismal garb, the sindon (σινδόνα ), which constitutes a double anachronism. The fleeing young man clearly has no clothes, so ill-fitting they apparently were.

Zizek's ghosts are not unlike Ibsen's; they are creatures of habit, predictable and haunting. Captain Alving demands to know why the living are George Kaplans, while the living remain complicit in the incest that is the syphilitic desire of the Other. Caiaphas, Pilate, the crowds make similar demands of Jesus, who finally demonstrates for them that there is, after all, no Big Other. Instead, the impossible excess insists itself into existence of saturated phenomena of the event that reveals the sublime (Zizek, 226ff). The very ambivalence and ambiguity of the un-named, un-interpellated, impossible: "[t]he Sublime is therefore the paradox of an object which, in the very field of representation, provides a view, in a negative way, of the dimension of that which is unrepresentable" (230). Here is Zizek at his most apophatic, making room for the un-nominated excess that lives between Vorstellung and Darstellung.

Spectral Christianity

Although the possibility remains that some of John D. Caputo's critics might dismiss his work as so much post-modern theosophy, I have found his work refreshing and authentic. I certainly have some difficulty with some of his strategies in The Weakness of God and The Insistence of God, but the movement from an apophatically derived humongous onto-theological entity to 'the event' is fascinating and compelling. Does Caputo pass for an atheist? of course; yet the creative gesture of dissolving the Tillichian 'ground of being' into vocative, middle-voiced insistence treats the problem of omnipotence in a very satisfying way.

Truth be told, omnipotence has never enjoyed an unassailable place in dogmatic theology. There are some things that God simply cannot do. Despite all the literary violence in the Old Testament, the God of theology cannot be the agent or source of murder or human sacrifice. He just can't do it, and that's the conclusion of the strong theology which Caputo critiques in his work. Though Caputo does not begin in dogma, he would rejoice in the theological discomfort with omnipotence as evidence of the haunting of orthodox theology by a radical, weak theology.

Caputo's 'hauntology,' as he calls it, does not originate with him. I would think that every theological punctuation finds its engine in a haunting. The council of Nicaea was no doubt haunted by what was tearing Constantine's Empire apart---the very nature of Jesus Christ (ah, those were the days when christology could disrupt an empire). The holy spirit spooked the council fathers into consubstantiality, and the rest is, as it were, history. The Second Vatican Council found itself spooked not only by Catholic dogma, but also by the palpable ghosts of the very flower of modernism: the Shoah . And, most recently, the extraordinary Synod of Bishops is haunted by St. Francis himself as it sets its agenda to address just what family and love really are in the post-modern world.

The Weakness of God is the more sanguine of the two works, as The Insistence of God is written with a healing black eye, and I have a greater affection for the former than the latter, perhaps because any  weak theology that I would adopt would not approach anything with a chip on its shoulder. Still, both works share a broad, sound intellectual underpinning that gives a voice, a language, to what may be coming in new theological gestures. The hopeful enthusiasm of Weakness emerges as the sobriety of a critique of speculative realism in Insistence. The relentless logic of development in Weakness, yields to some jagged insertions (e.g., Caputo's response to Zizek) in Insistence. Interestingly, I agree that Caputo sympathizes with much of Zizek's work, and even with Meillassoux (doesn't Caputo meet Meillassoux in the latter's perverse but brilliant piece, Spectral Dilemmas ?).

The problem of God and religion remains in Zizek, Caputo, Meillassoux and in the work of all the other thinkers Weakness and Insistence engage. Caputo's grand step away from God-as-ground-of-being, or even as Robert Barron has recently called God, "ground of contigency," provides fertile soil for dialogue, even with the so-called new atheists. I wonder how distant Sam Harris's 'spirituality without religion' is from Caputo's "religion without religion"; or perhaps the former's 'self-transcendence' is from the latter's 'insistence'? If Barron is right that serious theists call the unconditional, unconditioned ground of contingency "God," then, despite how metaphysical the sound of ground appears, the event of religion as response to God's insistence remains possible. Serious theists who acknowledge that the grounding of contigency is what religion calls the Creator of the Universe would seem to be open to scripture and religion as events harboring other events.