Death of the Flesh: The Way of All Flesh as the Calling of Religious Community

The natural disposition of the flesh rejects non-self. Auto-immune disease results from the flesh's self mistaking itself for non-self: the flesh rejects itself. Since I provisionally accept that the body can become diseased, but we always suffer in the flesh, the self never finds itself in the body. The self and the flesh form a unity. Immunology, though, occludes the possibility of any kind of dualism in this state of affairs.

When we declare the death of the body, the body, or parts of the body often remain viable; transplant medicine bases its project on this condition. Transplantation poses problems for the flesh, as it sets up a collision of two selves. The donor's self remains in the organ (the graft) that survives the death of its body, and when transplanted into the body (the host) of another imbued with flesh, self and non-self reject each other, in the clashes of host versus graft and graft versus host. The solution to this problem is to alter the host (and graft), via immune-suppression, so that it does not recognize non-self.

As we keep the matters of the self (or selves) in mind, we can return to death. That the body, or parts of the body remains viable, we continue to note that the body experiences disease and dying, but only the flesh experiences death. Dying of the body implies cessations of functions, shutting down of systems resulting from disease. But death never completely comes to the body until every process within it ends. Such is death for the body: absolute cessation of processes. I think HAL had it right as it flashed: "life functions terminated."

The flesh suffers, and it eventually suffers death. This death is the death of the self, as the flesh and self saturate each other: there is no room for another flesh or self: relationality, saturated with the flesh, in its very excess precludes another self in the same place. Self rejects non-self.

Which is the richer phenomenon, the living on of the body, with all its life-processes and genetic coding for more function and more life, albeit in the flesh of another, or the "living on" of the flesh and self, in their excess of relationality, after the suffering of death? We cannot speak here of an "afterlife," for otherwise we would not be speaking of a saturated phenomenon: we speak therefore of the life of the flesh, and the death of the flesh. The saturated phenomenon of the flesh achieves a negative certainty that the death of the flesh and death of the body are different phenomena. Better we should speak of something like an "afterdeath," or come up with a more robust understanding of death as it applies to the flesh. The reader should abandon this reflection now if she expects a discussion of 'consciousness after death' to ensue.

The event of death forecloses on disclosure. We defer any exploration of the relationship between self and consciousness. Instead we maintain the location of consciousness in the flesh and body of living creatures. So our question[s]: does the givenness of death constitute the self of the recipient in the phenomenological moment? Is that constitution fatal, or does it itself impart 'mortality?' Because we do not experience death as the death of our own flesh as a counter-experience, we are open only to the experience of the death of the other as death of the flesh. This is not to say that we do not have some experience of some aspect of death as our own, and in this regard, imaginative variations of the reduction can be in play; but because of the foreclosure of the event to us, that is, the necessarily incomplete 'reportage' of this event, the reception of death has no place to project itself.

If the flesh grounds Dasein's being in the world and its authentication through its being toward death, then at least one response of the self to the givenness of death is expectation. This is the way of all flesh: to receive formation of the self from the givenness of death, not in its lethality but in its invitation to authenticity, albeit in the manner of a special case of expectation: of advent and a messianism. The givenness of death calls the self into being, the self into a formation. The community, grounded in the experience of the self as the witness of phenomenality of the death of the other, arises in response to the same call.

The death of the other discloses terror or hope; if terror then a community of magic and superstition arises. If hope, a community of advent, of a messianism of an anonymous religion, an unthematic religion, arises. The former community is poised for a pantheon, the latter for Mashiach. The former is poised for rejection of non-self; the latter is poised for the self of the other as another in the flesh that is the image and likeness of my flesh. In this manner the phenomenality of death, the event of death, recapitulates the call of a community into the event of religion in each and every death; as the 'called' community recapitulates the givenness of death in the phenomenological moment. It is through religion that expectation, the response to the givenness of death, opens upon the possibility of revelation.

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.

Phenomenology and the Self: An Asymmetric Laterality of Phenomenality

In light of Jean-Luc Marion's critique, rehabilitation and appropriation of the Cartesian subject, especially as viewed through the lens of Christina M. Gschwandtner's discussion in her Reading Jean-Luc Marion ("Phenomenology of the Self"), I would like to revisit the relationship of the self to the given in the phenomenological moment. Previously, I have attempted to blunt the dialectical tension within the concept of 'polarity' of the 'self' and the 'given' which is prominent in the critique of Marion's work in this area, and I opted for a  more neutral notion of 'sidedness' or laterality, despite the asymmetry inherent in the relationship between either side of phenomenality. I have posited a concept of phenomenodynamics and phenomenokinetics (quite frankly, based on the analogy with the principles of pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics in medicine and drug therapy), where the former describes the effects on the given upon the gifted, and the latter describes the effects of the gifted upon the given.


Individuation and the formation of the 'self' are constituted by the 'given' in this moment. In order to maintain the utter freedom in which the given gives itself in its degrees of saturation, and to maintain the unconditionality and anonymity of any 'pure gift' or 'pure call,' there must be at the core of phenomenality a productive 'back and forth,' an oscillation (Schwebe, nach K. Rahner) between given and gifted that has the fortuitous effect of bringing the self into itself more fully, which increasingly opens the aperture upon the given which is always showing itself fully. The gaze of the viewing, receiving subject itself  remains  open to individuation, which is a response to the 'call' (i.e., interlocuted, interpellated), shaped by the given. Phenomenodynamically, the given opens into the subjectivity of a self that is always emerging, individuating it into something new. Phenomenokinetically, the widening  gaze of an emerging, individuating self opens the aperture upon the given. The nature of the aperture is problematic (is it 'really' a feature of the given, or of the gaze?), but practically speaking, in terms of the laterality of the phenomenological moment, the aperture seems to straddle either side, hence, it also seems to be constitutive of the relationality that inheres there.


This schematic flux of phenomenality has implications for how the given and gifted radiate their relationality. If the aperture works to show degrees of givenness, in which phenomena have the characteristic of presenting as simple objects or less saturated phenomena, or intuition-busting, intention-bending embarrassingly rich saturated phenomena par excellence, such types of givenness and saturation 'depend' on the recipient. The recipient/gaze cannot be constitutive of the unconditionality or anonymity of  the given, but only of how these enter experience. If I may bastardize Lacan's 'mirror stage' here, the glass dimly seen might be able to interrogate the gaze. Since one does not look into the face of the Gorgon and live, the gaze must either be reflected or refracted---the given is always privileged in givenness and objectivity (it 'is' there regardless of a gaze; it need not enter phenomenality).


Individuation, the gaze, the aperture, the given and the gifted play out upon a version of Lacan's mirror,  which for our purposes is a shape-shifting, property-altering, flexi-plexi-glass mirror. It distorts but it also represents; it reflects but also refracts the gaze; and behind the glass something beckons. The gifted can see its own image, but never in isolation: it is always upon the surface of the glass: it can see its wholeness as a differentiating flesh, but always surrounded by surfaces reflective and translucent, but never quite transparent. It sees, yet it sees within the possibility of being seen---interrogated, read, perhaps even received---loved. At times, it suspects that the mirror is a two-way mirror, like the one in police and FBI interrogation rooms. It might not be love at all.


This 'mirror' gives an account of saturation, which can be of several types, but certainly the icon and the idol. The icon saturates the intuition by bending the gaze through a translucency of the glass that allows for being seen (open to the other); the idol saturates through its massive reflection of the gaze back upon the subject, which knows its image is contextualized but declines the company and becomes isolated within a flesh that can only be seen by itself, and forecloses 'being seen' (solipsism). A self poised toward openness receives the gift as that gift individuates the subject and its gaze which can orient itself upon the aperture that determines the degree of givenness that can come into view, into phenomenality. The play on the mirror is a game of surfaces. The asymmetric laterality straddled by the aperture upon the given might add degrees of porosity of those surfaces into either side of phenomenological moment.