Peace, Advent and The Event

Advent reminds us of the great messianic tradition we have inherited from Judaism. The liturgical calendar embraces the kairos, the seasonality, the right-timeness of hopeful anticipation, the catching a glimpse of something approaching from the horizon. Liturgically, we come before God, love, joy and peace. Something’s coming, familiar and strange, known and as if unknown. If we let it free, it comes at us completely new. Something must be truly free so it can release itself, give itself.

The evangelist of Matthew’s gospel presents the Nativity as an event so surprising, so expectant and unexpected, that the earth alone cannot contain it, cannot bear it alone; and so he gives us its extension in the heavens, a supernova, a release of cosmic energy arriving just in time to herald an event of astronomical magnitude; yet more than just a herald, a light to the nations. 

Pax in terris. A righteous hope or a cruel joke for the holidays? Sometimes it seems the public sphere has lost its stomach for peace, hope and revelation. Here in the United States many of us prefer freedom from religion to freedom of religion, prefer to think religious things as if a 19th century child, something seldom seen and never heard. Where is the peace? Where can a sea of faith rest its head? When Motl Kamzoil asks, after hopefully suggesting that it would be a good time for the Messiah to come now, now that his community has been exiled from the shtetl, the Rabbi simply says, “we will have to wait for him someplace else.”

Where shall we wait for the Messiah? In our homes, in a closet, in a shrinking recess of our hearts? How will peace ever find its way to where it needs to be that way? Advent bears the progeny of divine love, of an irrevocable event of peace in the irrevocable event of the union of the human and the divine.

Advent speaks of and to interstellar and intrastellar happenings. Advent truly speaks to the heart, to the secret places, to the slivers of the smallest spaces. Advent also speaks in the larger spaces, in those places in desperate need of peace. It is a message of peace, and if something other than peace is heard, I suppose we’ve forgotten how to hear.

Hermeneutics of Plasticity in Marion's Approach to Givenness

And to continue with more preliminary remarks...



The primacy of givenness in Marion's phenomenology creates inversions not only in metaphysics but in phenomenology itself. The centrality of the horizon bends toward givenness itself, which decenters 'horizon,' the sine qua non of the phenomenological gesture. Givenness does not erase the horizon, but puts it in play, allows it to multiply into a play of horizons that have become more fluid than was possible in the traditional practice of phenomenology. This kind of plasticity of the horizon and the allowance for multiplicity cannot be limited to the horizon, as its thrust impacts on the recipient of phenomena in more tangible and practical ways.


When Marion speaks of the 'ontological status' of the gaze, he speaks of hermeneutics---he can only mean hermeneutics. The anteriority of givenness suggests that the modifications of the gaze, which modify the thing itself, are rooted in the given. The asymmetric laterality of the phenomenological moment locates plasticity on the side of the recipient. In Marion's concept of phenomenality, that which gives itself does so unconditionally and therefore even in the absence of the gaze of the recipient, though the modes of phenomenality---the modes of the appearance of objects and events---depend on the existential experience of the recipient.


If Marion's approach is to remain coherent, the approach must always stipulate the origin of the ontological status of the gaze: givenness---the given calls the gaze into being. The 'self' of the given 'inscribes' its hermeneutic upon the self of the recipient. This kind of inscription should be thought of less as writing than as a shaping or a forming of the receiving self, while all hermeneutical variations trace to Dasein.


Such inscriptions and formations locate the negative certainty within the phenomenological moment in the plasticity of the receiving self. Akin to Keat's 'negative capability,' this uncertainty marks an acceptance within the receiving self of such uncertainty, which enables it to remain open to givenness. This understanding problematizes the nature of the recipient and renders it vulnerable to the obvious critique of the romantic impulse, which conjures up the 'critic-as-artist' or 'critic-as-hero' (read hermeneut, recipient for critic here). Yet, the recipient engages in a poeisis, not necessarily of an 'overflow of powerful feelings' but of an experience of phenomenality whose gradations or degrees of saturation or objectness can be 'recollected in (the) tranquility' of a counter-experience (pace Wordsworth).


Marion always insists nearly everywhere that his phenomenology does not identify actuality but, instead, possibility; he famously insists on this distinction to distinguish theology from phenomenology as they regard the actuality and possibility, respectively, of revelation. Still, a theopoetics is what the recipient reports back from her experience. Depending on the hermeneutical variations inducted by Dasein and the modifications of the gaze as constituted by givenness and as modifying givenness, the recipient will report back about either an object or an event.


I must insist that the unconditionality of givenness requires all modifications of the given are a function of the modified and modifying gaze, which cannot alter the essence of the given, but the aperture of the gaze upon it. As the self, inscribed and formed by givenness, waxes in its plasticity, its modified gaze strengthens to lift a bit higher the veil on the given. Degrees of unveiling are enabled therefore by the given giving itself to the receiving self, in its hermeneutic of plasticity. This process of the gift giving itself---the event of the gift---is the hermeneutical event from the side of the recipient. These are, apparently, often the same event.

Spooking from the Horizon of Love

Christian mediaeval theologians and their Church encountered God on the horizon of being. Aristotle's approach to understanding the world lent itself to illuminating that encounter in which his categories and overall project of achieving wisdom ignited the religious imagination. Metaphysics discovered all that was discoverable about God. Before Aristotle, Plato enlightened the mind and located the realm of the highest. Certainly between these philosophers rested the hearts and minds of theology, a faith seeking understanding. When wisdom and understanding became insufficient for faith, the seams of theology became threadbare, as explanation and pure reason pushed the encounter with God off the horizon of being, and wisdom and understanding under the bus.

Finding it increasingly difficult to locate God in the categories of being and causality, mediaeval metaphysics became inadequate to the task of illuminating anything about God. Metaphysical concepts became mere shadows, ghosts that could only limp against the backdrop of the new and improved categories adopted, of course, from an Aristotelian approach, but now a presiding hegemony of ideas. The new illumination, the Enlightenment, offered transcendental categories governing the disciplines of thought. No longer filed under science, theology found itself within the category of ethics, designed to keep it out of politics and the scientific disciplines.

The enlightened mind no longer conceived of a God with whom an encounter on the plane of being could occur. The analogical imagination continued to grope for metaphysical concepts that could no longer bear the weight of its tasks; yet the experience of and from God did not wither away in this new state of affairs. God was still there, but not as another being among beings. Metaphysics had to be put aside because it was now suppressing the reality of God. God insists that he make an appearance, and the response to that insisting call could not longer configure the onto-theological God that was understood in wisdom by the Schoolmen.

The shift from understanding and wisdom to explanations and knowledge grounded in a sense of certainty threw God out with the bath water. He was dead to scientific inquiry---the thought police of the new order. God could not be located in the new frame of existence. He did not exist. Yet his inexistence could not contain his insistence. The insistence of God calls from the horizon of the perhaps, peut-etre. What calls? It calls. Freud's es? No, not that 'it.' It. The it that spooks. What it spooks? Oh do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.

Caputo has provisionally located the calling it in the "space between memory and a promise." Is this poetry or theopoetics? The spectral it that has dominated/haunted Caputo's recent thought, the divine insistence that calls for the event to be released from the harbor of the name of God, cannot call from the horizon of being; yet the call from an insisting God is clarion. The aporia of Caputo's "space" plays out on the horizon of love, which we have seen in Marion's 3rd reduction through his work in Being Given, God without Being, The Erotic Phenomenon, and In the Self's Place, defines love as more essential than being, and locates love anterior to being, which might very well be somewhere between memory and promise.

The hauntology of love, alternately the horizon of perhaps, or the horizon of love calls for a response as lovers call one another. For Marion, the  givenness of the divine as saturated phenomenon that calls with its pure call the emerging self, is purely self-given as that which loves before it is. For Caputo, the givenness of the divine is the insistence of God, calling unconditionally to be brought into existence. Either way, the it that loves an insistent and unconditional love, a love forgotten and forsaken, a haunting forgotten and forsaken love, loves the emerging self, a self insisted into relationality. What spooks is the love lost somewhere in the space between a memory and a promise. The it-love that loves to haunt our memories and our promises is the call, what Caputo has recently deemed an unheard call that nonetheless calls for a response, insists on the relationality that individuates the self in a constant creation of that self and its subjectivity which is always poised to make a space for it. That space is love and that love is God.

Viens, oui, oui

You know how they're going to come at you?
                                                                             ---Tom Hagen to Michael Corleone, The Godfather

'to come,' the verb, intransitive...
                                                       ---Lenny Bruce




Power and force come from a familiar horizon, in the trappings of the expected. The power of a word or the power of an assassination attempt rides on wings of sound and fury. Yet, God does not come in thunder and earthquakes and fire, but in a sound like a whisper; he does not come with an army or pomp and circumstance, but from the substance of ordinary life, and then thin and marginal.

^"The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” " [1 Kings 19:11-13, NIV]

Theophanies are always invitations to incarnation. The theophany on Mount Sinai in Exodus came with the fury of hair-raising, blood curdling thunder, but God was in the silent writing of the law into stone brought to the people by a weary Moses. Elijah gets another crack at it at Horeb, and gets it right. He does not understand the natural wonders of the earth to be the shekinah, but hides his face to the gentle whisper, the very presence of God. The real event harbored in the name of God comes from the weak force of an apophatically derived whispering breath, not the strong force of thunder and fire from the mouth of a dragon.

"an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus." [Matt. 1:20-21, NIV]

"...she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them." [Lk 2:7, NIV]

"My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest" [Jhn. 18:36, NIV]

God does not enter the city with an army, in a parade of pageantry; he comes on the margins of the city's own excess, crystallized, as from a saturated solution,  in the saturated phenomenon of a newborn. The incarnation is the event where the chiasm of the divine and human enters time and space. In the Annunciation, God insists and Mary brings God into existence, into the plane of immanence. Hence, the incarnation is the response to a call for the impossible.

"How will this be?" [Lk 1:34, NIV].

God comes at us unconditionally and undecidable in a dream, in the voice of an angel. In the Matthean and Lucan narratives theophany is accepted as incarnation, and the Synoptic transfiguration (Mk.  9:2-8; Mt. 17:1-9; Lk. 9:28-36) is the event of resolution of past and present, Logos written, and Logos made flesh. All 3 evangelists record a dumb-founded Peter, who responds in haste, not understanding what he is experiencing. On this high place/Mt. Sinai/Horeb theophany morphs into the incarnation of the Logos ratified by a disembodied voice emanating from a nebulous somewhere. Peter should have deferred his interpretation, which he  based on experience of his senses alone. The imperative to 'listen' that haunts the 'voice' is also aligned with Moses and Elijah, whose own voices were not always heeded. The Tranfiguration validates the entire tradition received by Judaism and handed down to Jesus and his contemporaries, with an eye to the future; but any supersessionism would be a poor reading strategy here. At least Peter gets that part right: 3 booths/tabernacles for three embodied voices.

These texts give religious voice to the event(s) harbored in the name of God, to his insistence from where one knows not. This insistence, and the event released in its response, grounds the contingency of theophany. The Christ-event, which signals something new suddenly upon us, is the existent of the theophany's beckoning. It's denoument is in the faint cry of abandonment on Calvary, an apostrophe to a dying God, and resurrection in the making.

Never Met a Physics I didn't Like

Astrophysics and particle physics meet in the concept of equivalence. Astrophysicists measure distance in terms of time (light years) and particle physicists measure mass in in terms of energy (electron volts). Certainly measuring distance in terms of time is not new (it's biblical) and for the people of today, measuring mass in terms of energy is something rather ho-hum.

When John Caputo asserts that physics is all the metaphysics we're likely to get, he does not mean to transpose the transcendental signifier onto the negotiations with the natural world. He is more likely arguing for the jouissance in physics (and all of science) with its awe and mystery as all the wonder the postmodern world can take. He seems already to be intuiting the conceptual equivalence of all the physics we're likely to get as well. There are no permanent gaps in the human understanding of the universe, and any God that would fill them is dead on arrival, and so Caputo's entire project: the weakness of a God without sovereignty whose insistence is the gap God opens in 'events.'

Stardust memories light the corners of any mind open to the event: if the 'penny drops' in  the 'AHA' moment that gives Neal DeGrasse Tyson goose-bumps--the realization that everything in the universe is made of the same stuff, the same stardust--that mind is beckoned by a call made from a telephone booth in scientific "truth," whatever that is, and responds to its insistence, which gets itself done (in the middle voice, Caputo would say) in what we are calling the 'event.' No theory of everything here: the nature of events is ruled by uncontainability. The very excess of truth is the moment of the event.

And no Begriff is large enough to manage the excess in such moments; not unless it is constantly regenerating itself from nano-second to nano-second in the flow of streaming events that recede into vast distances.

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.