Emmanuel Falque and John Caputo: Martha and Mary Appear in Meister Ekhart

The resurgence of interest in mysticism in 20th century phenomenology, and its continuation into the 21st century worries and fascinates me. Both John Caputo and Emmanuel Falque (along with many other thinkers in the philosophy of religion) recognize an indebtedness to Heidegger's indebtedness to Meister Ekhart, while further incurring debt to the mediaeval mystic. I worry because phenomenology has a plasticity about it that enables its becoming all things to all people in cataphatic splendor and idealism, and I remain fascinated by its methodological edge that cuts to an apophatic and fecund space where an authentic realism takes root. Ekhart's sermon on Luke 10:38-42, the story of Jesus' visit to Martha and Mary's home, has entered the thinking of Caputo and Falque powerfully, and perhaps in complementary ways.




Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.  But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;  there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:38-42, NRSV)





Caputo begins with Ekhart's privileging of Martha over Mary, despite Jesus' remark that Mary, sitting at his feet, "has chosen the better part," an inversion of the traditional mediaeval embrace of the vita comtemplativa  over against the vita activa. Martha responds to the Jesus event in her midst with an urgent agency that makes a space for bringing into existence something that insists (The Insistence of God, 43-49).  She makes a space ready for a very physical and fleshly Jesus, whose bodily needs are as important as his spiritual gifts. She is, in a sense Jesus' partner. Mary, on the other hand, remains enthralled by the call, and unable to respond as a partner, but as one lost in the music of the calling voice, paralyzed by insistence.


Falque reads Ekhart to be embracing Martha as one who already understands the flesh as transformed in the Resurrection. Falque follows Ekhart closely as the latter reads Martha, in effect, as already having been at the feet of Jesus and as one already enacting the life of the spirit by engaging the necessities of the life of the body. 




Meister Ekhart...described, in the visit of Jesus to Martha and Mary..., a kind of prefiguration of our mode of being resurrected. Martha...has in fact a kind of superiority over her sister Mary. She doesn't stay there sitting (objectively) at the feet of the Savior and listening to him but lets herself be inhabited (subjectively) by him. She remains detached from him...because he is in her. (The Metamorphosis of Finitude, trans. G. Hughes, NY: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2012)




Falque's definition of resurrection as 'transformation' of the 'manner of living' in this world and this world itself as embodied in Martha,  seems to complement Caputo's move from insistence to existence, from a call of an event, to an agency responding to that call. The response to the call in Caputo's schema is analogous to the transformations of in Falque's, which in turn, are analogous to Caputo's advent of the Kingdom. It seems then that Falque would agree with Caputo's assessment of Martha:


We take as a model the agency of Martha, the wife who was a virgin. Martha acts, but she acts from the ground of the soul, which is one with the ground of God. that means she is an agent mobilized in response to a provocation, to an event, who gives existence to an insistence, and that existence takes the form of the most material and quotidian reality(Insistence, p.48).

The Folly of God: John Caputo's Tetragrammatology

It is unclear to me if John Caputo's The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Polebridge: Salem, OR, 2016) [F] is the final installment in a trilogy comprised of his earlier work, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event [W], and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps [I]. I am equally unsure that the last 3 books Caputo has published does not comprise some kind of valediction, as there is language in It Spooks, Hoping Against Hope and even F that is elegiac and valedictory. Perhaps these observations are nothing more than a recognition of Caputo's farewell to the academy, though he seems to pop up everywhere these days.

F is a brief volume that lays out Caputo's own (Tetra)Grammatology, in which he articulates the great themes of his previous work. In a nutshell, Caputo wants to leave a lasting impression of these four letters of deconstruction:

1. Anything culturally mediated is constructed.
2. Anything constructed is deconstructible.
3. Deconstructibility arises from any mediation, as inscribed spacetime ('from below') or from the 'pressure' of the undeconstructible itself ('from above').
4. Deconstructibility is constituted by conditionality, and undeconstructibility is constituted by unconditionality. (F, 23-29).

Hence, the call, the pure call that has captured the imagination of those enthralled by what's been going on in continental philosophy, unconditional and without sovereignty (cf. W), pressures 'from above' (but whence we know not), from undeconstructibility.

Unconditionality and undeconstructibility play out in the trace, the 'gramme' as Caputo states. The trace is what is already there, what already might be there, written before the letter is traced there. This is the locus of 'perhaps' (cf. I). The trace does a good deal of heavy lifting, for Caputo, and certainly for Derrida. Caputo repeats Derrida's grammatology in F (in his trilogy?) as a writing of a 'tetragrammatology' (my coinage, not in Caputo or F) of deconstruction, which is a way of making straight the path of the conditions for the release of the event (cf. W) which calls from the unconditional, anonymously.

After all this prolegomena to charity how can Caputo get it so wrong? How can he, after tracing the Protestant Principle  (after Barth's [ecclesia] semper reformanda) through the Jewish Principle (after Derrida's "semper deconstruenda"), let 'narrative time' lull him into misreading simul justus et peccator as an economy of a false gift, falsified by reciprocity? The sheep and the goats of Matthew 25 are pure Vorstellung, and they must not be read as a corruption of innocence (F, 119ff.). As I have argued elsewhere, all the parables and parabolic narratives (of which Matthew 25 is clearly one) are perlocutionary acts.

A more subtle hermeneutic allow for the possibility that the goats and sheep are the existential reality of the 'blessed of my father.' These actors in Matthew 25 are at once sheep and goats, and are liable to an act of faith and the justice to come already visited upon them. Caputo, then, has mistraced the trace in his reading into some imagined economy of reward and punishment. The sheep are traced into the goats, the goats into the sheep; and that trace is unconditional and without sovereignty---the goat-sheep in the 'blessed of my father' is undeconstructible. We must not, as Caputo warns (F, 126f), "confuse the unconditional (undeconstructible) with the conditional (deconstructible)." We must "[r]emember that in all this" (even when we appear in Matthew 25) "we play the role of the justus et peccator."


If W, I and F are a trilogy, then they certainly offer a vision of religion, not necessarily one 'without religion,' but one which itself is the trace that ghosts the letters in 'confessional' religions. The religion of the trace is the religion that is already traced in the insistence of the letter in all religion. Whenever the word is written, it is traced upon a form that comes from somewhere,  that can never completely be traced over, leaving a slight blur, a haze on the page that lets the words reverberate, that lets the already written come though the tracing of a letter. There is a quietude there, in the gentle beckoning of the trace, the call of the trace that quickens the letter of the word, and the word of the letter. It insists from above and from below, and even from the legacy of Caputo's tetragrammatology of the perhaps---the weakness, the folly and the insistence of God.

An Interlude: More Odds and Ends such as Tad DeLay, John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, and Even Graham Harman

It's not just Zizek that goes bump in the night, but he and Caputo, DeLay, Marion, and even Harman go bump in my head, which sometimes feels like a bump on my head. I have looked at Marion, Zizek, DeLay and Lacan in a recent piece on Marion's In the Self's Place, but now, as I read, Negative Certainties, with some of Caputo's 'projectiles' bouncing about, I am struck by how all these thinkers might interface.


Tad DeLay's freeing up Lacan's Borromean knot turns out to permit looking at the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic registers as a model for uncertainty. The play in this 3-ringed  circus that Lacan had already placed there, plays out further in DeLay's God is Unconscious, and in Marion's account of the saturated phenomenon as well. The non-intersections of RSI seem at the very least, analogous to Marion's non-simultaneity of the possession and manifestation of the gift.


While Marion seems to have little difficulty speaking of the sovereignty of the event, he never speaks of the sovereignty of the pure gift, or the pure call, in their spectacular unconditionality and anonymity: how like Caputo's weakness of God's insistence, and the anonymity of the call from the vocative order that haunts texts and confessional religion alike. Has Marion, in Caputo's view, cinched the saturated phenomenon, or has Marion slipped onto-theology through the back door on the saddle of the revision of the ontological argument, riding on the back of Cusanus (CN, 69)?


The distinctions and mode of distinguishing object from saturated phenomenon via Heidegger's analysis of the tool must intrigue Harman, who speaks eloquently on this matter in his discussion of Heidegger's metaphysics of objects (Tool Being, 2002); I wonder how he would read Marion on Heidegger's hammer, or his disposition of objects in light of the avoidance of undermining and overmining the object?


Catherine Keller certainly belongs in the title of this blogpost. Let me honor Marion this way: he should read Keller again. Such a rereading stands to illuminate.


End the interlude; Entr'acte.

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.

Evidence and Phenomena

I loved Bazooka Joe bubble gum and have the fillings and crowns to prove it. But the little comics tucked into each gum wrapper were precious. One little strip has been spooking me lately.

Bazooka Joe finds Mort searching for something in his living room. "Whatcha lookin' for Mort?"

"Oh, I lost my skate key in the basement," said Mort.

"Then why're ya lookin' in your living room for it?" asked B. Joe.

Mort replied, "because the light's better in here."


Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom [1 Cor. 22, NIV]

There is neither Jew nor gentile [ Gal. 3:28, NIV]



Somebody's always looking for something. The positivist wants evidence, but the Christian has an experience. The former demands empirical access, but the latter offers phenomenality.  The former looks into the categories of knowledge and the latter to the horizons of experience. The former looks for data on the plane of immanence for what the latter locates in what transcends immanence. The former looks with the illumination of pure reason, and the latter with the light of intuition. The Christian asserts it is irrational to look to the horizon of being for what is to be found on the horizon of love. The positivist asserts that if that which is sought is not to be found on the horizon of Being  (or at least the empirical world), the search is irrational and meaningless, if not absolutely and maliciously false.


Why do you look for the living among the dead? [Luke 24:5, NIV]


In 1980, Johnny Lee was looking for love in all the wrong places. The lyrics, in perhaps another form, go back further than that; but some folks continue to look for stuff, even in places the stuff is surely not to be found. This is a 2-way street; the recourse to what John Caputo calls 'blackmail' is deployed by those who find themselves locked in the self-imposed binarities of faith/reason; atheist/theist; theology/philosophy, etc. The infinite loop of extortion does not lead to stalemate, but to violence of one sort or another. And that kind of intellectual criminality has to stop.

Reflecting on Nicholas of Cusa's almost surreal, ecumenical, instinctual critique applied to the religio-political peregrinations of his day---his call for non-violent engagement with Islam--Catherine Keller has observed that


[t]he question of religious multiplicity is, of course, today posed altogether differently.  It cannot begin or end with any "one religion." The pluralism of both theology and politics rule out any discourse of unification...[I]t arises now, for instance, within a renewed discussion of the democratically appropriate role of religion in the public sphere [t]hat now envelopes the planet. And that world appears pervasively complicated not only by the troubled relations between the religions, but also between religion and secularism. [S]cholarship in religion might unsay religion, even as secular thinkers unsay secularism. (Cloud of the Impossible, 242-3)


Though Keller problematizes the inherent violence of religion (244-45), she points to the breathing room of saying and unsaying, on either side of the religious/secular binarity. Is this wishful thinking, or a description of nature of things? The blackmail inherent in binarities does seem to dissolve in the ebb and flow of enfolding, unfolding and folding together as each polarity takes the other into itself. This rhythmical, kenotic spacing through the slash---the accommodation of apophatic entanglement---the self-emptying of the one into the other opens into saturated phenomena.

Marion's icon and idol come into view in the nexus revealed in enfolding and unfolding. Resistance between the terms in a binarity results from the idolic gaze of the one upon the other. The response to the reflection is narcissistic, overwhelming and what Tad DeLay might identify as a perversion of, or a perverse relation to, reality (cf. God is Unconscious, 79). In the apophatic maneuver, the terms break through to the iconic other, allowing 'likeness and image' to unfold. Only through the idolic and iconic phenomena can a healthy reality present itself in its radical givenness; for, as Marion has provocatively asserted, the phenomenon gives itself (Being Given, 68). 


Keller's cloud, not unlike an orbital of probability, allows things to appear in a process of entangling---saying and unsaying, knowing and unknowing, insisting and existing. Phenomenological horizons themselves bear the stigmata of implicatio, explicatio and complicatio. It would seem that evidence for this trinitarian dynamic seeks its horizon of understanding in a givenness of res ipse loquitur glimpsed only in the folds where appearances come into truth. The drive to evidence must make room for phenomena, as phenomena evidence the horizons of experience of the real.

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.

The Call from the Cross

 "Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" [1 Cor. 22-24, NIV].

Paul could have barely calculated how his words would resonate today when theology must fend off secularism with one hand and rewrite the Cross in the postmodern world with the other. If the cross is not a scandal or foolishness for today's mind, many would find it at the very least peculiar. What kind of 'call' from the cross is heard today, from such a dim and remote past? Such a 'call' would have to be transhistorical to be heard in the din of the technological world, but what would make it so? Still, positivism's death knell to religion and faith is premature, and the cross limps through the desert of the real seeking out hearers of the 'call.'

This is a very strange kind of power here. The cross is the assertion of the secular power to keep the malcontents in check, and daydreamers in fear. Rome has no need to call anyone; Rome demonstrates, marches and executes the pax Romana. The cross is the symbol of Rome's reach, and of the impotence of its subjects. This power of the cross is of a different order.

A few years ago, John Caputo could write about The Weakness Of God, and the powerlessness of the cross even as the cross makes unconditional claims on those who respond to its 'call'. Certainly Catholicism is no stranger to a God for whom nothing is impossible that is real and possible, and a God who acts in the world through secondary causes, but Caputo's thesis does not hover over the palimpsest of Catholic theology comfortably. How could Caputo's theory of God be comfortable atop a theology of a triune God and dogmatics? No, that could not be the model.

Yet, a weak God and a weak theology does indeed speak to the postmodern world and post-structuralist thought. I am not certain that Caputo has not moved the theological dialogue forward in an authentic way.

Thought of as an event, the cross is a strategem within the Christ event. It is only through the lens of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus that the cross can 'call' at all. Were it not for the resurrection, for example, what would have become of his life? Would he not be yet another failed messiah? How does hearing the call make such a man the 'power' and 'wisdom' of God?

My next post will engage Caputo's work in depth and attempt a synthesis with Catholicism. Or maybe not. Perhaps several posts, or several series of posts, will be required to engage this provocative thinker. A response to the call of the cross is what God intends by his invitation through the event. This conundrum is a struggle worth pursuing. Deconstruction calls as well, from its position at the foot of the cross. Such calls demand a response from those who hear them, from those who see a signature.