Spirit and Body: Levinas on the Cusp of an Awakening of Religion

To arrive where you are, to get to where you are not,

You must go by a way, wherein there is no ecstasy.

---T.S. Eliot, 'East Coker'

Whether on the roads to Marion's Damascus of the saturated phenomenon or Falque's metamorphosis of finitude and the spread body, Levinas's ghostly philosophy lurks in the shadows of forethought. It sometimes seems that all contemporary French phenomenology seeks its origins in Descartes' cogito, the ego that constitutes the world, the ego that thinks its therefore and finds being. Certainly Marion begins here, as does Husserl, the one discovering the straw that breaks the backs of noema and noesis, the other discovering a more pristine and powerful intentionality. Falque, of course, does phenomenology, but bends it toward his own wits, a phenomenology even splintered and splayed open to a post-metaphysical metaphysics, thereby releasing the event of just what goes on between the Cartesian res extensa and the phenomenological 'lived body'.  Levinas, on the other hand, remains skeptical of ontology and intentionality, and his eyes and ears are drawn less to the therefore, and far more intently to the fore-there.  

Il y a. The Levinassian there is. The 'there' prior to the there that is indeed there, the fore-there, where therefore is not even a forethought, where Prometheus sleeps. Such is what comes to Levinas's mind. Levinas's is a ghostly thinking, not quite ghastly, yet open to horror, the night that crutches the insomniac's watch, the creepy indolence that paralyzes before being, and the instinct to retreat into alter[ed]-states of consciousness. Walpole and Shelly have nothing on Levinas. The gothic shades of dark that recede in the Levinassian landscape give proof through this night that Heideggerian ecstasy is a little late to the party of being: there is a hauntology prior to ontology, some more fundamental difference anterior to ontological difference. There is a haunting.

Before the ethics of Levinas's signature work, before the stark alterity and priority of the Other, this remarkable thinker has given us a preliminary study of his concerns, and certainly a critique of Being and Time. As a critique of ontological difference, Existence & Existents ( trans., A. Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1978, henceforth EE; page numbers in parentheses refer to this translation of the work 1st published in 1947 unless otherwise stated) stamps an indelible ethos upon what will later follow in his masterworks, Totality and Infinity, and Otherwise than Being. EE does not present a full-blown theory of the body, or a fleshed-out spirituality; but it certainly outlines an anatomy of consciousness, even a physiology of consciousness, that thinks the fore-there---that hypostasis precedes ecstasis, that position precedes being-in-the-world, that Being itself precedes beings. Do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.

Levinas makes haste to describe the there is (il y a going forward to honor the term's untranslatability, unless it appears as there is in Lingis's translation) as the thing unresolved by death, the irreducible term that remains insoluble in the liquidation of finitude. Il y a comprises the locus where subjective and objective existence merge and blur in the event of being (4-5). Indeed, "ontology...affirms that what is essential in human spirituality...is determined by a relationship...with...the nakedness of this bare fact" of Being (3), which "harbors something tragic" (5). The human spirit is always already encountering a tragedy. The merging of existents with existence takes place within the il y a, an otherwise than being that seizes us by the throat.

The maternal wellspring from which an existent gets itself born, or from which birth yanks an existent into existence, is not sufficiently anterior for Levinas; he searches more deeply into that nook, to "that event of birth in phenomena which are prior to reflection" upon any regional ontology (11). He thinks the matrix from which a maternal wellspring might spring. In this regard, he analyzes 'fatigue' and 'indolence', not as mere mental contents, but as modes of a relationship with being, and cleaving of (to?) being. These mental contents express a 'weariness' before existence, and mark the mode of 'refusal' or balking at the contractual terms binding an existent with existence; yet such a refusal marks not a reflection upon such terms, but a pre-reflective, unthematic encounter with, engagement of, immediate response to, a generic document, whose lines remain unread, but remains a threat nonetheless (11-12).

The markers of refusal, though placeholders of retreat or evasion, point to an engagement with being. To engage being, to commit to a contact and contract with being, comprises the act through which an existent enters existence: "If the present is thus constituted by the taking charge of the present, if the time-lag of fatigue creates the interval in which the event of the present can occur, and if this event is equivalent to the upsurge of an existent for which to be means to take up being, the existence of an existent is by essence an activity" (25). This upsurge goes by the name of hypostasis, and the contractual contact of an existent with existence forms a hypostatic union threatened only by time, by another present which can put the union asunder. The hypostatic union, a term Levinas never uses, creates the locus of spirit, of the event of spirituality, though he never formulates this event in quite this manner. Regardless, here, in the hic et nunc of taking a position from which hypostasis becomes an upsurge into Being, time coalesces into the sacrality of a most vulnerable moment.

Though a less reckless strategy would visit the preliminary ideas of EE upon Levinas's later work, the risk of visiting Levinas's more mature elements upon EE, at least with respect to vulnerability, and even the Other, might reward; for the heart of Levinas's philosophical 'spirituality' rests in the structures thought here in EE.  Only in the fore-there of reflection, in the unthematic arena of the pre-ontological structures of consciousness, can we find the disclosure of vulnerability prone to insomnia and horror that hypostasis is heir to. True, for the most part, the Other appearing in EE is a thematic Other, one already clothed, one whose nudity finds itself clothed by form (30). This nudity, already thematic, conceals the body, and only in a relationship with nudity itself do we experience the alterity of the Other (31).

The nudity prior to nudity, the fore-there of an 'undressed being' (31), begins the entry into the il y a, the consummation of being in the experience of night (52), where the 'rustling of the there is...is horror" (55) ushering in the vigil of the insomniac so passive that the night itself 'watches' (63). Only in such utter passivity can the unthematic contents of consciousness (69) take position, a stance from which an upsurge into being poises itself as hypostasis. From such states, such stases, such static asymmetry,  a 'base', a 'place', "makes the body the very advent of consciousness", unconcealed in the vulnerability of an unthematic version of nudity. The body locates consciousness as an "irruption of anonymous being" and "is position itself" (70). The spirituality of the body is the event of its position, and the moment of its present, the sacred time of the hypostatic union, where Being and being, existence and the existent, contract a merger, "a pure event of being" (71). "Position is the very event of the instant as a present" (70).

The event of being harbored in the hypostasis, the hypostatic union, "signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is," for "on the ground of the there is, a being arises...By hypostasis anonymous being loses its there is character" (83). Truly this is sacred ground consecrated by human spirituality through the posture of the body, the body taking its position in the instant of its present, and there is no time like the present, yet is "not the future above all the resurrection of the present?" (94). Though there can be no redemption of pain, "the movement of the caress" of the consoler transports suffering " 'elsewhere' " (93). Hope should not be spent on wiping away every tear or avenging every death, for the wages of pain simply move into an instant that follows an instant; rather the object of hope should be the future itself, where every instant of every present receives salvation.

Hypostasis is anterior to, prior to, more essential than any ecstasy leaping into an already thematic being-in-the-world. It makes its upsurge from a matrix otherwise than being, and, for the visually minded, it is the photo-negative of Heideggerian ecstasis, the mold into which such ecstasy pours itself into the world. The unthematic contents of consciousness create the vulnerability that only an unthematic Other whose utter vulnerability can transgress---as the Other in the Same; not that alterity of the Other homogenizes within such sameness, but as the disruption,  the roiling of the waters in the pool of the Same; the other is totally other, despite a family resemblance. The Other in the Same provides the site of an uncontainable human spirit, a spirit that only "the gravest sin" attempts to put on the clock,  in the time of trains and the sun (101). Though Levinas can think the coalescence, a congealment, of time, any reification of the spirit within the timebound shuts down the instant, desecrates the preciousness of the present that must be cherished, and positioned for resurrection.

Who is God for Jesus? The Saturated Phenomena and Coins of the Realm

To ask who God is for Jesus is to answer the question of the hypostatic union. To answer the question of the hypostatic union is to participate in the relationality of the human and the divine. The hypostatic union as relationality is what Christians call the Christ-event. To speak of the Christ-event is first and foremost to speak of the event: the event that haunts theology, philosophy and the very core of the conundrum some call the human person. I do not mean all these linkages to mime the hysterical syllogisms in Woody Allen's Love and Death. I mean them to get to the very heart of the event, which is risky business not without a sense of humor, a sense of haunting.


Caputo, Zizek and Marion all speak to the event. For Caputo, the response to the insistent call releases the event; for Marion, the pure call pulling a self into individuation constitutes the event; for Zizek, the 'frame' brings the event into focus. These are all big events, the main events in the circus of Being and becoming. I suggest that these events are the same event. The Christ-event is such an event. Its relationality oscillates between the human and divine, never resting in a moment in the between, but always in the creative space insisting and consisting in response. The divine is unconditional, a sovereign without sovereignty; the human interdigitating, placentalizing in its liminality, yet always gazing upon the iconic other. The event in incarnational---a person has emerged, a person whose insistence is not confused with its existence---a person in which logos is not confused with its flesh: person as saturated phenomenon.


Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's [cf.  Matthew 22:15-20; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26]


God's sovereignty is without sovereignty where Caesar reigns, and yet God's sovereignty subverts this Roman sovereign, so says a very subversive Jesus who has won the admiration of his challengers, if not their faith. Jesus presents a very different kingdom and kingship as he holds the coin of the realm in his hand, reads it, and brushes it off (the text is not explicit about whether Jesus holds the coin in his demonstration---I read the coin in Jesus' hand and fingers). This eventive sovereignty constitutes the hypostasis coming before the flattering voices bearing the coin; they present it to Jesus for unconditional and final judgment. That pronouncement overwhelms the intuition of his challengers and foils their intentionality: they marvel and move on---what is this flesh, this event; icon or idol?


The marvelous authority that pronounces upon the coin announces a Kingdom suddenly upon those who marvel. The authority of Jesus comes from a sovereignty that is powerless to liberate or evoke a tax revolt, yet poised to avert violence and secure the public peace unconditionally. Such authority derives from a kingship without kingship, certainly not a kingship alongside Caesar's. The Christ-event frames earthly kingship within the hand of something unconditional and without anything recognizable as sovereignty, even as the edges of the coin frame the image of Caesar. The weakness of God yields to the face on the coin as it devalues its commerce in the kingdom coming. The event is in the hand.


When I speak of a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' I mean to conjure Caputo's and Derrida's 'religion without religion.' I mean 'sovereignty in the second position precisely as they mean religion in that second position. I also read the pericopes of the tribute coin as presenting God's sovereignty within the context of Caesar's. The saturating unconditionality of Jesus' pronouncement is the very insistent call calling for a response in the event. In these versions of unconditionality the event is released in the marvelous bedazzlement that causes Jesus' challengers to retreat. If they retreat to challenge him another day that event is the idol; if marvel leads to metanoia, that event is the icon. The texts are silent; they do not pronounce on the event.


Instead, the pericopes of the coin embrace a haunting: the aporia of a Christ-event whose instantiation in the hypostatic union is the union of the human with a divine question mark after its sovereignty. The saturated phenomenon of the person of Jesus proclaims a kingdom whose sovereign's sovereignty is without sovereignty. Yet this sovereign has the audacity to call out an invitation to metanoia, to a self open to the call, poised to be created anew in a response. Such is the event of the emerging self whose response to the pure call is already anterior to the arrival of the subject. The very 'lack' constitutive of the self is that openness to the initiative of unconditional call from a sovereignty without sovereignty.


Caesar's realm is not the only realm whose currency is the coin.




“What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”


“From others,” Peter answered.


“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” [Matt. 17:25-27, NIV]

The collectors of the temple tax at Capernaum ask for a rendering from Jesus and Peter upon their arrival. They are not willing to extend professional courtesy at this moment: they want the whole copayment. In his perhaps most convoluted miracle, Jesus locates a rare fish, puts it on Peter's line, and provides payment in coin for the two of them. The fish's coin subverts the sovereignty of the temple itself by identifying Jesus and Peter as 'others.' The temple disowns their own by the tax itself. The tax visits the absurdity of the coin in the fish's mouth upon the temple tax and therefore upon the temple itself, for it lives by its commerce. The moment is high comedy and very risky business; the tax collectors are the butt of the joke, and by extension, so too the temple, financed by a coin coughed up by a fish (Matthew does not depict the actual transaction that Peter will make, but that does not deprive his community of the dark, grotesque comedy of the scene, which is left to the imagination. It is a scene not terribly unlike the scene where those juicy sandwiches are given to those cops in the rear of the restaurant in Casino).


Temple and kingdom of  'the kings of the earth' are subverted and contextualized within the advent of God's kingdom. The weak sovereignty of God is stronger than all the strength of the kings of the earth, as Paul might say (cf. 1 Corinthians). Such strength is not located within the grammar of earthly power, but within the unconditional subversion of that power. We have seen this kind of subversion elsewhere, as in the dialogue between the Johannine Jesus and Pilate.


By looking only at coins, a glimmer of who God is for Jesus already emerges. The symbols of sovereignty in the realms of the earth are what a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' is not. There is no image of God or Jesus on any coin; such would be meaningless in either kingdom of the world or of God. The commerce of the kingdom is love, and it has no face but the face of the other, who in the Gospels, has no face, except the one called by love into being. If the concerns of those concerned with subverting the norm are legitimate---if, for example, people like Phil Snider have concerns for a theory of homiletics (read: hermeneutics) that is not so lop-sided in its privileging of human action over divine initiative---then perhaps a place to begin is in the coin of the realm.

C is for Cyborg: The Repetition of the Christ-Event

Secularism despises religion because its identity is a repetition of the Church, theology, and even faith. The body of Christ has been rewritten as the body politic. Capitalist democracy repeats theology, government repeats the law and the prophets. Patriotism is the new fideism, and legislation is the new dogma. Needless to say, the human creature is God.

The quest for artificial intelligence, the creation of a sentient being from the dust of technology shall be secularism's crowning achievement. And the soteriology of this brave new world will be the cybernetic organism: C is for Cyborg. As AI seeks its maker, as all created things do, the maker will join with its creation in a profound act of solidarity as repetition of the hypostatic union.

This union will, as per usual practice, strive to mimic Christ, the God-man. The Cyborg will be united at the level of the person, hypostasizing two natures, distinct not blended, separate and not confused: machine entangled in flesh like a hybrid of a Hollywood Frankenstein and Crichton's Terminal Man. But this hypostatic union is no hybrid; it is something new and neo-orthodox. This creature will be loved, because for all intents and purposes, it will appear externally indistinguishable from the non-cyborg. The cyborg is made in our image and likeness,  and adorable. It will also be immortal, and the new hypostatic union will persist eternally. What shall I do to inherit eternal life [Luke 18:18]?

One way to definitively destroy the Church is to convince everyone it has been replaced with something better, something that includes all the good of religion and theology without religion and theology. What a marvelous disfigurement of the postmodern idea of 'religion without religion'!

This Hobbesian Leviathan will be the beast whose thirst can never be slaked, whose hunger can never be sated. It  will chase us to the northern territories to do what all magnificent creatures do: kill its creator so that they can be truly free. The Last Man will truly be a laughing stock, but this time not embarrassed by the ape, but an embarrassment to his cybernetic betters; for the cyborg comes not to save the world but to condemn it. A repetition with a twist, but one we can all see coming.

The Placental Turn in the Crucifixion

In my previous post, I referred to the hypostatic union as an event within the event of  the Cross. The term itself refers to the orthodox expression of the relationship between the nature of the human and the nature of God as they exist within the single person of Jesus, the God-Man. From a contemporary Catholic perspective the appearance of Jesus in history is an evolutionary development in the history of humanity and represents the beginning of the final phase of human development. It is an irrevocable event, an event horizon--a point of no return, anthropologically speaking. For Christianity, it is a trajectory within a process of theosis. 

Hybridity is a metaphor for the union of the two natures, not its genetic actuality; for there is no fusion of the divine and human elements into a new single nature, which is the actual phenomenon of a biological hybrid.  Still, I like the metaphor because it keeps the conundrum alive and permits the outrageous assertions of monstrosity in play. The metaphor allows for the indictment of the modern turn's hatred of the hybrid and its implied miscegenation. Modernism wants purity, certainty, predictability and its mode of operation is alchemy: its worst kept secret is its desire to turn base metal into gold. The postmodern critique lays modernism's desire bare.

The placental turn I took in describing the communication of idioms, the transferability of the predicates of God and Christ, contextualizes how Caputo's insistence and existence can operate in the event of the Cross. In his first discussion of insistence and existence (I, 14ff), Caputo asserts the chiasmic relationship between these terms, and speaks of their co-dependency. It's not just an 'intertwining,' what I have called interdigitation and evagination, but he seems to be asserting something much more transgressive, more parasitic in the relationship. So, in the context of bringing something into being, a birth, an insistence landing on a fertile substrate---a positive response to the call---the placental relation to the womb is descriptive. The hybridity within the temporary relationship between the pregnant uterus and fetal placenta provides a locus for a creative parasitism operative in the hypostatic union as it comes into being in the death of God on Calvary.

While the New Testament is already grappling with the idea of the Incarnation, is does not know of anything like the hypostatic union. That is an event that must wait for another epoch; that call from the Cross must wait to be heard. The desolation of the day between the Death of God and the birth of God struggles with "Lema Sabacthani" like Jacob wrestles with God through the night until at dawn, God cries, 'uncle', hineni, and Jacob awakens as Israel.

The way Abram awakens as Abraham,  Kephas awakens as Peter,   Yeshua awakens as Yahweh, the disciples awaken as Christians, The Way awakens as church, church awakens as Catholicism, Vatican I awakens as Vatican II, the way Catholicism awakens...finally awakens. 

Hineni. 

Me Voici.