The most recent encyclical letter of Pope Francis, Laudato si', is an exhortation of integration, of enfolding, unfolding and folding again. Had Keller's Cloud of the Impossible appeared after the pope's letter, the Cloud would have enfolded it in a tight embrace. The apophatic entanglements in each paragraph of Laudato si' expose the interrelatedness of the natures of the human and the non-human, of the living and non-living, and they link them within an inextricable matrix of an onto-ecology comprised of any number of sub-ecologies. Francis also seems to admit an uncanny object oriented ontology, wherein all objects are made of other objects and interact in a relationality of surfaces; for example, humans interact with their environments through their very embodiment (155).
Francis returns to a favorite theme of the 'common good,' which the encyclical defines as the totality of conditions leading to individual's and community's fulfillment (IV). The securing of the common good means securing it at all levels of the onto-ecological system, from non-human ecological systems to the human, societal and global. Hence, Francis, as his namesake before him, embraces all of creation, in all its chiasmic splendor and entangled intricacies declared 'good' by its creator. The integrity of the whole of creation must go all the way down and all the way through, and none of it, says Laudato si', can maintain its integrity without a commitment to each moment down and through (13 ff).
Laudato si' must be read by all concerned Catholics and other people of good will. The encyclical presents a moment, embarassing to some but a boon to others, that identifies a world and its people at the crossroads and a time for action. Some readers will misinterpret the simplicity of its presentation as quaintness or provincialism, but the encyclical's plainness should be understood as its desire to communicate its themes to a very broad audience. Laudato si' is nothing less than a call to interconnectedness, a call that haunts us all.
Perhaps comments to this blog, which has addressed the ecology of the home and stewardship of the earth before, pertaining to the encyclical will foster a fruitful dialogue about this most crucial opportunity presented by the pope.
Friday, June 19, 2015
Stormy Weather: Fear and Trembling on Land and Sea
Don't know why
There's no sun up in the sky
Stormy Weather
Rossini's William Tell, Beethoven's 6th Symphony, The Pastorale, Strauss' Alpine Symphony, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Arabian Nights, all contain storms to beat the band. As a metaphor, the storm is as old as the species homo sapiens sapiens itself. Storms are everywhere throughout time.
This Sunday, the lectionary presents Mark's version of a storm at sea.
A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” [Mark 4:37-8, NIV]
Fr. Barron has composed a comforting homily on the biblical passages for this Sunday. He presents as poetic a reading of the pericope as one is likely to find. I think he errs, though, when he presents the Church's sexual abuse scandal as a storm that challenges the pilgrim's course of the barque of Peter.
Though he has it right that the scandal is a great storm, a faith shaking moment in the life of the Church, he runs a great risk of offending the sensibilities of the victims when he externalizes the moment. As I have commented on the Word on Fire website, this storm is not something violent from without being visited upon the Church, but it is rather something violent from within the Church being visited upon the world.
The 'furious squall' results from the disease of pedophilia being visited upon the most vulnerable members of the Church, and from the cover-up of those criminal visitations by the power players, the leaders of the Church, whose short-sighted goal was to protect the integrity of the Church. These are the boat-rockers threatening the barque with drowning. The waves generated by the barque against the sea send repercussions to invade the shores and harbors within the Church's reach.
To the extent that the moral evil in the scandal in not intrinsic to the Church as the Mystical Body, Fr. Barron might still be grounded in a reality worth noting. The pericope, though, is about other business. The sleeping Jesus is one locked away from viewing the idle hands of the princes of the Church. It is a Jesus momentarily bound, closeted, in a futile effort to contain such a saturated phenomenon. When he awakes, he arises as the indefectability of the Church, as the renewing Holy Spirit that quells the storm.
The scandal is a powerful lens through which to read this Markan pericope, but it opens on a logic that inverts the loci of the storm metaphor. Taken as an element of a thorough allegoresis, the storm locates its source from an indefectable but corruptible boat whose rockers will either receive the Spirit or drown. The disciples, whose progeny sit at the table of the greatest challenge to our Church, could hardly have known how their ecclesial descendents would put Jesus to sleep while they convulse the sea of faith. They feared drowning, but could not imagine that their counterparts of today would hold children's heads under water.
There's no sun up in the sky
Stormy Weather
Rossini's William Tell, Beethoven's 6th Symphony, The Pastorale, Strauss' Alpine Symphony, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Arabian Nights, all contain storms to beat the band. As a metaphor, the storm is as old as the species homo sapiens sapiens itself. Storms are everywhere throughout time.
This Sunday, the lectionary presents Mark's version of a storm at sea.
A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” [Mark 4:37-8, NIV]
Fr. Barron has composed a comforting homily on the biblical passages for this Sunday. He presents as poetic a reading of the pericope as one is likely to find. I think he errs, though, when he presents the Church's sexual abuse scandal as a storm that challenges the pilgrim's course of the barque of Peter.
Though he has it right that the scandal is a great storm, a faith shaking moment in the life of the Church, he runs a great risk of offending the sensibilities of the victims when he externalizes the moment. As I have commented on the Word on Fire website, this storm is not something violent from without being visited upon the Church, but it is rather something violent from within the Church being visited upon the world.
The 'furious squall' results from the disease of pedophilia being visited upon the most vulnerable members of the Church, and from the cover-up of those criminal visitations by the power players, the leaders of the Church, whose short-sighted goal was to protect the integrity of the Church. These are the boat-rockers threatening the barque with drowning. The waves generated by the barque against the sea send repercussions to invade the shores and harbors within the Church's reach.
To the extent that the moral evil in the scandal in not intrinsic to the Church as the Mystical Body, Fr. Barron might still be grounded in a reality worth noting. The pericope, though, is about other business. The sleeping Jesus is one locked away from viewing the idle hands of the princes of the Church. It is a Jesus momentarily bound, closeted, in a futile effort to contain such a saturated phenomenon. When he awakes, he arises as the indefectability of the Church, as the renewing Holy Spirit that quells the storm.
The scandal is a powerful lens through which to read this Markan pericope, but it opens on a logic that inverts the loci of the storm metaphor. Taken as an element of a thorough allegoresis, the storm locates its source from an indefectable but corruptible boat whose rockers will either receive the Spirit or drown. The disciples, whose progeny sit at the table of the greatest challenge to our Church, could hardly have known how their ecclesial descendents would put Jesus to sleep while they convulse the sea of faith. They feared drowning, but could not imagine that their counterparts of today would hold children's heads under water.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Catholicism and Givenness: A Brief Introduction to an Idea of the Gift
The 'new' in the "new phenomenology" centers on the reappropriation of the 'gift' and the concept of event as elucidated in the work of Jean-Luc Marion (with constant reference to a ghosted John D. Caputo). Elsewhere I have characterized the new phenomenology as deconstructive, as it seeks to release the event and the eventiveness of phenomena that appear of themselves, unconditionally. Not then, on a horizon of being do phenomena, most notably the "saturated phenomena" make their appearance, but on the horizon of possibility itself (posse ipsum). Radical openness to the possible, and even the possibility of the impossible, begins in the phenomenological reduction that brings about the self in an 'other than' natural attitude (by which we mean an attitude constructed upon ad hoc judgements and prejudices which tend to confine the event---prevent the event---and the appearance of phenomena in their givenness). Catholicism, a religious mode of aiming the intentionality of consciousness toward the transcendent and the immanent, is a transhistorical phenomenology (instantiated in each Catholic consciousness) that opens up the natural attitude to God and (what Marion [Being Given, 239-40 and elsewhere] has called the "saturated phenomenon par excellence") the Christ-event.
The biblical books do not present a clear representation of the fluctuations of the self, the oscillations of relationality and individuality, or the play between the subject and the always emerging self. Though they know of creation, presence, absence, being and consciousness, they do not articulate 'givenness' as constitutive of the naming of the self. Nonetheless, the Bible's openness to creation, the good, history and God's actions in the world, suggests a space for givenness as a unitive force of nature.
The New Testament presents the Christ-event in terms of recognition, epiphany, transfiguration. It emphasizes 'reading' the signs of the times, what is present, what is presented as a 'gift' and it certainly has an uncanny way of saturating phenomena. Even the most casual reader of the Gospels is struck by the the presentation of those who do not know Jesus, who do not distinguish the sacred from the profane: the presentation of those who did not know or receive him (John 1:10-12). The Synoptic transfiguration pericopes display bedazzlement before the gaze of Jesus closest disciples, whose interpretation can only be gibberish. Such biblical warrants look to the reception of phenomena.
Givenness characterizes all types of phenomena, those that saturate the intuition and those that do not; indeed, phenomena that do not overwhelm the intuition by spilling out of their categorical silos remain open to such spillage and bedazzlement: such phenomena, for example, are the stuff of paradigm shifts in scientific models and modes of interpretation. The givenness of things 'calls' the subject through relationality of itself to the receiving subject, individuating it, thereby bringing the self into itself: relation---individual--selfhood. The call need not have a voice, coming from a vocative order as an invasion of the existential order. The call invites the aim of the intuition, the intention of a consciousness to 'see' something in its givenness as it is in itself. And both sides of this reduction (Caputo would recognize an undecidability here), through the relation established by a call received, come into view, into the horizon of being. this 'third' phenomenological reduction therefore locates the 'call' anterior to being, and relationality anterior to individuality. Certainly, Marion's most readable statement on this relation of self to the call can be found in his In the Self's Place:The Approach of St. Augustine. In this work, Marion reads the Confessiones through the language of givenness.
Everything is given. There are no prohibitions about what can enter the phenomenological process. Rocks, justice, God equally enter into phenomenology. Sheer givenness knows nothing of religion, spirituality, quantum physics; it does itself not distinguish the sacred from the profane. Such qualities can never emerge on either side of the reduction, but only in relationship between givenness and the emerging self and subjectivity. Nothing is a priori, and the process problematizes the a posteriori as well. Phenomena enter experience in defiance of sequence and causality. Givenness, then, is located in the chiasm, in the atemporal entanglements between the thing itself and the flux of the self.
There is a natural marriage between the universal character of Catholicism and the universality of givenness. Everything is given: creation, consciousness, God, history, life, death, salvation, the Tradition, dogma, Scripture, rocks, rain, and a starry night. Catholicism opens consciousness to the field of phenomena as an invitation to the dance; it is itself a hermeneutic of relationality within the Godhead, within the hypostatic union, and within the constitution of the self and the world. It is itself not the choreographer, but a choreography of grace and nature, of the sacramentality of the given.
The biblical books do not present a clear representation of the fluctuations of the self, the oscillations of relationality and individuality, or the play between the subject and the always emerging self. Though they know of creation, presence, absence, being and consciousness, they do not articulate 'givenness' as constitutive of the naming of the self. Nonetheless, the Bible's openness to creation, the good, history and God's actions in the world, suggests a space for givenness as a unitive force of nature.
The New Testament presents the Christ-event in terms of recognition, epiphany, transfiguration. It emphasizes 'reading' the signs of the times, what is present, what is presented as a 'gift' and it certainly has an uncanny way of saturating phenomena. Even the most casual reader of the Gospels is struck by the the presentation of those who do not know Jesus, who do not distinguish the sacred from the profane: the presentation of those who did not know or receive him (John 1:10-12). The Synoptic transfiguration pericopes display bedazzlement before the gaze of Jesus closest disciples, whose interpretation can only be gibberish. Such biblical warrants look to the reception of phenomena.
Givenness characterizes all types of phenomena, those that saturate the intuition and those that do not; indeed, phenomena that do not overwhelm the intuition by spilling out of their categorical silos remain open to such spillage and bedazzlement: such phenomena, for example, are the stuff of paradigm shifts in scientific models and modes of interpretation. The givenness of things 'calls' the subject through relationality of itself to the receiving subject, individuating it, thereby bringing the self into itself: relation---individual--selfhood. The call need not have a voice, coming from a vocative order as an invasion of the existential order. The call invites the aim of the intuition, the intention of a consciousness to 'see' something in its givenness as it is in itself. And both sides of this reduction (Caputo would recognize an undecidability here), through the relation established by a call received, come into view, into the horizon of being. this 'third' phenomenological reduction therefore locates the 'call' anterior to being, and relationality anterior to individuality. Certainly, Marion's most readable statement on this relation of self to the call can be found in his In the Self's Place:The Approach of St. Augustine. In this work, Marion reads the Confessiones through the language of givenness.
Everything is given. There are no prohibitions about what can enter the phenomenological process. Rocks, justice, God equally enter into phenomenology. Sheer givenness knows nothing of religion, spirituality, quantum physics; it does itself not distinguish the sacred from the profane. Such qualities can never emerge on either side of the reduction, but only in relationship between givenness and the emerging self and subjectivity. Nothing is a priori, and the process problematizes the a posteriori as well. Phenomena enter experience in defiance of sequence and causality. Givenness, then, is located in the chiasm, in the atemporal entanglements between the thing itself and the flux of the self.
There is a natural marriage between the universal character of Catholicism and the universality of givenness. Everything is given: creation, consciousness, God, history, life, death, salvation, the Tradition, dogma, Scripture, rocks, rain, and a starry night. Catholicism opens consciousness to the field of phenomena as an invitation to the dance; it is itself a hermeneutic of relationality within the Godhead, within the hypostatic union, and within the constitution of the self and the world. It is itself not the choreographer, but a choreography of grace and nature, of the sacramentality of the given.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Ghastly Hauntings
I'd like to respond to a little pushback to my "Haunted by the Holy Ghost," pushback that noted a certain vagueness to my appropriation of 'repetition,' as Caputo means it. I warn the reader that what follows is far more political than I intended or perhaps needs to be, but that's nonetheless how the challenge struck me, and how I've chosen to respond. If politics disturbs the reader, or if the reader doesn't want to risk being disappointed in me, I suggest ignoring this post.
I should have gone a bit further about what else is being repeated in our American culture lately---this is not really about religion per se, but it touches upon the salve of progress, that which enables the usurpation of religion by secularist-capitalist interests. Either side of the American political spectrum now speaks of income inequality. The right is just now entering the conversation and is giving voice to its newly found populism, while the left can't quite leave Robin Hood in the story books. Both sides are too modern, all too modern.
Either way, I should have added to my little litany of correspondences the new opiate of the people. While I am way too mainstream and centrist in my politics to be silly enough to embrace the values of any ideology, I would still say that while once religion played the opiate, now the illusion of participation in the grand capitalist narrative plays that role: move over God, and make room for Mammon----the IRA, the 401K, the 403B---the masquerade that regular people are really participating in global market forces.
I wonder if the deep secret of capitalism is its tacit acknowledgement that it has limits when it comes to generating wealth, limits as to how much it can produce, limits when it comes to a place at the table, limits to who can garner that wealth---that whatever does trickle down never reaches the poorest among us (despite a recent, mind-boggling suggestion that America's poor are the richest poor in the world). Perhaps the existence of the poor reassures the producers, the wealth generators, that capitalism is humming along, that the poor will always be with us and always require some version of a welfare safety net, so that neo-liberals and just plain liberals can sleep well in their do-gooding.
I am trying to avoid an overreach here, but is it un-American or un-Christian to ask if the middle class has been bamboozled into thinking that its supplying money to the real players (the poor cannot get into the game) in the market is a winning strategy for securing their own wealth for the future? Remarkably, even after the Great Recession---where the middle class donated its wealth to bailing out the greedy---the illusion dies hard. By now, most have recovered their devastating losses and are even showing a little growth; that's the brain-deadening wool over the mind's eye.
We all should be haunted by moral hazard but the secret of Mammon keeps telling people that it was the wind that knocked over that lamp. For all the talk lately of the redistribution of wealth, what forces have done more to shift wealth than those whose access to the market have provided opportunity for shaping economic tendencies and sentiment? These are the high priests of the new secular church, not those leaders whose well-intentioned but misdirected and impotent calls for 'fairness' vilify them in the face of a convincing illusion that retirement is secure---now that mega-capitalists have convinced us capitalist-wannabees to invest in the new faith. Part of the reason the markets pale when even a hint of rising interest rates (the price of money, which right now is dirt cheap) raises its ugly head is because the mega-capitalists don't like putting their own skin in the game, and would much rather play with others' money. They feed on the slumber-inducing illusion that everyone can get rich if only they invest in the system. Of course they have no problem leaving those investors (read: those saving for retirement) out to dry when things heat up. Their wealth is far more secure than any wealth in the opiates of the regular guy's stock portfolio.
Who will tell the middle class, the spinal column of America, when the mega-capitalists will make a move, when the wealth is about to flow out of the drugged slumber of the pack of wishes (some call it investment risk and market uncertainty) called a portfolio? Whose planned retirements will survive a 30-50% (or worse) reduction of personal capital when the mega's feel the need to declare that 'greed is good' and make a risky move (well not that risky---for them---we will resupply them with money)? How many hits to the spine can America take before its back is finally broken?
Capitalism, it seems, is the very best shape for an economy adopt, and liberal democracy is its best buttress. Yet the capitalist dream is no viable repetition of religion. It does not know of a future of hope, only a short-term foreseeable time of wishes and gains. Capitalism's time is a strike-while -the-iron's-hot kairos---a season to be greedy. The Church has critiqued an unfettered capitalism's amorality if not its malicious tooth-and-claw competition for wealth; the Church, in turn, has been criticized for creating a straw-man capitalism---that such an unfettered capitalism does not exist. Unfettered or not, our capitalism will do just fine in ignoring the poor, hoarding the wealth, while crushing the back of the American worker---whether she is flipping burgers, assembling a car, teaching in the classroom, or asking someone to say "ahhh" and "cough".
There is no obvious solution to the incestuous relationship between establishment capitalists and the political structures that assure them of a nice safe sandbox. I remain committed to the Catholic Church's principles of social justice---solidarity and subsidiarity. These principles, of a certain wisdom and grace for which I hope and pray, can guide the size of a democratic government and harness the appetite of a capitalist economy. The balance between them is a work in progress and a source of hope in a future where we await the capitalism to come, a democracy to come, in the balancing act of a justice to come.
Perhaps then those ghastly hauntings that go bump in the night of a good conscience will start a march into the light, and we all can get a little righteous sleep.
I should have gone a bit further about what else is being repeated in our American culture lately---this is not really about religion per se, but it touches upon the salve of progress, that which enables the usurpation of religion by secularist-capitalist interests. Either side of the American political spectrum now speaks of income inequality. The right is just now entering the conversation and is giving voice to its newly found populism, while the left can't quite leave Robin Hood in the story books. Both sides are too modern, all too modern.
Either way, I should have added to my little litany of correspondences the new opiate of the people. While I am way too mainstream and centrist in my politics to be silly enough to embrace the values of any ideology, I would still say that while once religion played the opiate, now the illusion of participation in the grand capitalist narrative plays that role: move over God, and make room for Mammon----the IRA, the 401K, the 403B---the masquerade that regular people are really participating in global market forces.
I wonder if the deep secret of capitalism is its tacit acknowledgement that it has limits when it comes to generating wealth, limits as to how much it can produce, limits when it comes to a place at the table, limits to who can garner that wealth---that whatever does trickle down never reaches the poorest among us (despite a recent, mind-boggling suggestion that America's poor are the richest poor in the world). Perhaps the existence of the poor reassures the producers, the wealth generators, that capitalism is humming along, that the poor will always be with us and always require some version of a welfare safety net, so that neo-liberals and just plain liberals can sleep well in their do-gooding.
I am trying to avoid an overreach here, but is it un-American or un-Christian to ask if the middle class has been bamboozled into thinking that its supplying money to the real players (the poor cannot get into the game) in the market is a winning strategy for securing their own wealth for the future? Remarkably, even after the Great Recession---where the middle class donated its wealth to bailing out the greedy---the illusion dies hard. By now, most have recovered their devastating losses and are even showing a little growth; that's the brain-deadening wool over the mind's eye.
We all should be haunted by moral hazard but the secret of Mammon keeps telling people that it was the wind that knocked over that lamp. For all the talk lately of the redistribution of wealth, what forces have done more to shift wealth than those whose access to the market have provided opportunity for shaping economic tendencies and sentiment? These are the high priests of the new secular church, not those leaders whose well-intentioned but misdirected and impotent calls for 'fairness' vilify them in the face of a convincing illusion that retirement is secure---now that mega-capitalists have convinced us capitalist-wannabees to invest in the new faith. Part of the reason the markets pale when even a hint of rising interest rates (the price of money, which right now is dirt cheap) raises its ugly head is because the mega-capitalists don't like putting their own skin in the game, and would much rather play with others' money. They feed on the slumber-inducing illusion that everyone can get rich if only they invest in the system. Of course they have no problem leaving those investors (read: those saving for retirement) out to dry when things heat up. Their wealth is far more secure than any wealth in the opiates of the regular guy's stock portfolio.
Who will tell the middle class, the spinal column of America, when the mega-capitalists will make a move, when the wealth is about to flow out of the drugged slumber of the pack of wishes (some call it investment risk and market uncertainty) called a portfolio? Whose planned retirements will survive a 30-50% (or worse) reduction of personal capital when the mega's feel the need to declare that 'greed is good' and make a risky move (well not that risky---for them---we will resupply them with money)? How many hits to the spine can America take before its back is finally broken?
Capitalism, it seems, is the very best shape for an economy adopt, and liberal democracy is its best buttress. Yet the capitalist dream is no viable repetition of religion. It does not know of a future of hope, only a short-term foreseeable time of wishes and gains. Capitalism's time is a strike-while -the-iron's-hot kairos---a season to be greedy. The Church has critiqued an unfettered capitalism's amorality if not its malicious tooth-and-claw competition for wealth; the Church, in turn, has been criticized for creating a straw-man capitalism---that such an unfettered capitalism does not exist. Unfettered or not, our capitalism will do just fine in ignoring the poor, hoarding the wealth, while crushing the back of the American worker---whether she is flipping burgers, assembling a car, teaching in the classroom, or asking someone to say "ahhh" and "cough".
There is no obvious solution to the incestuous relationship between establishment capitalists and the political structures that assure them of a nice safe sandbox. I remain committed to the Catholic Church's principles of social justice---solidarity and subsidiarity. These principles, of a certain wisdom and grace for which I hope and pray, can guide the size of a democratic government and harness the appetite of a capitalist economy. The balance between them is a work in progress and a source of hope in a future where we await the capitalism to come, a democracy to come, in the balancing act of a justice to come.
Perhaps then those ghastly hauntings that go bump in the night of a good conscience will start a march into the light, and we all can get a little righteous sleep.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Water and Wine: A Tincture of Time
The 4th Gospel (4G) has a logic all its own. The Logos, after all, becomes flesh, and has its way with words (certainly with the Word), and its way of destabilizing time and causality in its representation of a reality fleshed out with irony. In the Johannine world, picking up the phone causes it to ring, and adverbial signage yields to a theo-logic in which 'before' and 'after' live in the same moment.
The message of the Baptist is a message that time is out of joint, that the present is presence in which the past and future merge: "A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me" [John 1:30, NIV]. That man, Jesus, the word become flesh, will later say, "before Abraham was I am" [8:58]. The logic of 4G is the logic of a late mediaeval painting depicting 'before' and 'after' events, such as Adam and Eve at once basking in the Garden of Eden and being cast out.
This tincture of time, or better, atemporal time, even the causality-defying atemporal sequencing of events, sets up the wonderful Wedding at Cana [John 2]:
On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there,
The message of the Baptist is a message that time is out of joint, that the present is presence in which the past and future merge: "A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me" [John 1:30, NIV]. That man, Jesus, the word become flesh, will later say, "before Abraham was I am" [8:58]. The logic of 4G is the logic of a late mediaeval painting depicting 'before' and 'after' events, such as Adam and Eve at once basking in the Garden of Eden and being cast out.
This tincture of time, or better, atemporal time, even the causality-defying atemporal sequencing of events, sets up the wonderful Wedding at Cana [John 2]:
On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there,
and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.
When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, "They have no more wine." "Dear woman, why do you involve me?" Jesus replied. "My time has not yet come."
His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."
Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water"; so they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet." They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.
Then he called the bridegroom aside and said,
"Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now."
This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.
The salient features of the pericope (a parable given realism by the use of current time and place) include:
1. The 3rd day: the 1st and second decribing the testimony of John the Baptist and the gathering of the disciples.
2. The location of Cana in Galilee, and the family affair elements: Jesus' mother is there, demonstrating that the logos taking flesh is born of a woman.
3. The transfinalization of the water jars and their excess of contents.
4. The reversal of time in the sequencing of wine-events; the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom?
5. The identification of this reversal as semiotic and the birth of faith.
This second chapter of 4G follows Jesus, whom John has dubbed the 'lamb of God,' from his inaugural in the Prologue, through his distinction from John, to his identification as the one who baptizes with the holy spirit, someone already in the midst of the Pharisees. Things are happening very fast. Two of John's own disciples transition to God's chosen One [1:34], followed quickly by Peter, Philip and Nathanael. In head-spinning time compression, Jesus and his disciples are invited to the Wedding at Cana (which takes place on the 3rd day) where Jesus' mother awaits their arrival from Bethany.
The next scene is at the Wedding and in medias res. The is no more wine; the celebration is apparently in danger of winding down, or missing the mark of its purpose. Jesus' mother intercedes on behalf of the bridegroom or wine-steward, and approaches Jesus with the dilemma. Jesus' wristwatch is synchronized neither to his mother's or the wedding's. The dearth of wine is of no concern to either him or his mother, at least according to his understanding of his 'hour,' which he locates in the future. Yet it seems that mother knows best, for Jesus commands the servants to fill the empty ritual containers with water.
He commands the servants to take a sample from the brimming jars to the master of the banquet, whose astonishment prompts him to compliment the bridegroom: you have saved for last that which comes first. Far from throwing pearls before swine, the best wine will not be wasted on this crowd. The nearly endless volume of wine will not intoxicate, even though it is the best, and it might well lead to a palace of wisdom. That which has come after has surpassed what has come first, because it has come 'before 'in the 'after' of what the wedding has inaugurated. The brimming uncontainability of wine demonstrates the transfinalization of the jars as the vessels of the uncontainable event of the Messiah. The 'sign' at Cana is the saturated phenomena.
What issues from the ablutions of the past is the future of the Messianic banquet, a marriage not of heaven and hell, but of past and future. This is not therefore a moment of supersessionism, but of new self-understanding emerging from the phenomenality of the transformation of water into wine. Here in the language of Cana is the theo-logical moment, the birth of faith in the iconic event of Christ released from the ritual waters that are now become real drink, real wine. Here in the present time of the wedding, the 'before' and 'after' meet in the Christ already in the midst of everything, in medias res.
The historical kernel of the pericope is forever lost in the evangelist's sense of time and timing. Whether the Johannine community is privvy to an authentic tradition of a wedding in or near Galilee during the ministry of Jesus shall remain an open question open to conjecture. Still, 4G is after after something bigger than history; it want to locate the truth, the way and the life (not necessarily in that order). While the wedding at Cana might be simulacra to us today, it is Jesus' first foray into semiosis, or at least the Johannine Jesus' first foray.
The wedding at Cana depicts a Christ already in the midst of things, already upon the scene, shaping and being shaped by the discourse in which he moves. His own time moves the narrative of 4G while the narrative moves Jesus to move his own time. His hour remains in the future until the wine situation dictates otherwise. The brimming ablution jars take on water on one side of the event and spills out wine on the other. This sign is a semiotically reduced saturated phenomenon. Only Jesus, his mother and disciples know the legend by which the action must be read: they have the hermeneutic that allows the event to be released in the icon. For the master of the banquet, the bridegroom has merely held the best for last. At best, they are merely perplexed, and perhaps somewhat grateful (what Jean-Luc Marion might call 'bedazzlement'). For those who are open to the event, what issues from the jars is new time, a time of 'faith' and 'glory.' The messianic wine heralds the beginning of wine-tinctured time, even as it announces the second half of the celebration, lubricated with the best wine, a libation bereft of even an ounce of hangover. A new time within time.
At Cana, events release other events. The Messiah appears in the outflowing of wine, which iconically redirects the intuition of the disciples to the person centering the Christ-event, the logos dwelling with us. The wine lets their gaze pass into miracle, and into the divine within and through the icon. It is a saturated phenomenon that breeds another saturated phenomenon: the event. It is true, that the master of the banquet shares in a saturated phenomenon as well---that of the idol---the very excess of the best wine. But in this moment, his gaze is overwhelmed with only the idolic excess. It remains to be seen if that idol of excess will yield to the icon for him and those of his moment.
The historical kernel of the pericope is forever lost in the evangelist's sense of time and timing. Whether the Johannine community is privvy to an authentic tradition of a wedding in or near Galilee during the ministry of Jesus shall remain an open question open to conjecture. Still, 4G is after after something bigger than history; it want to locate the truth, the way and the life (not necessarily in that order). While the wedding at Cana might be simulacra to us today, it is Jesus' first foray into semiosis, or at least the Johannine Jesus' first foray.
The wedding at Cana depicts a Christ already in the midst of things, already upon the scene, shaping and being shaped by the discourse in which he moves. His own time moves the narrative of 4G while the narrative moves Jesus to move his own time. His hour remains in the future until the wine situation dictates otherwise. The brimming ablution jars take on water on one side of the event and spills out wine on the other. This sign is a semiotically reduced saturated phenomenon. Only Jesus, his mother and disciples know the legend by which the action must be read: they have the hermeneutic that allows the event to be released in the icon. For the master of the banquet, the bridegroom has merely held the best for last. At best, they are merely perplexed, and perhaps somewhat grateful (what Jean-Luc Marion might call 'bedazzlement'). For those who are open to the event, what issues from the jars is new time, a time of 'faith' and 'glory.' The messianic wine heralds the beginning of wine-tinctured time, even as it announces the second half of the celebration, lubricated with the best wine, a libation bereft of even an ounce of hangover. A new time within time.
At Cana, events release other events. The Messiah appears in the outflowing of wine, which iconically redirects the intuition of the disciples to the person centering the Christ-event, the logos dwelling with us. The wine lets their gaze pass into miracle, and into the divine within and through the icon. It is a saturated phenomenon that breeds another saturated phenomenon: the event. It is true, that the master of the banquet shares in a saturated phenomenon as well---that of the idol---the very excess of the best wine. But in this moment, his gaze is overwhelmed with only the idolic excess. It remains to be seen if that idol of excess will yield to the icon for him and those of his moment.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
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 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.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Truth
John Caputo's Truth: Philosophy in Transit cuts through the the politics of philosophy and gets right to a postmodern critique of modernity; if non-specialists have decided to read just one of Caputo's books, then this little pot-boiler gem surveys the themes that unify his recent scholarly work.
Here, in friendly prose and style, Caputo sets the stage for uncovering the power-play of the Enlightenment, and gives clear expression to some of the themes of this blog, most notably, how the modern turn takes knowledge hostage, and chains the brain to an empirical paradigm. Had I read this little treatise prior to writing several of my posts on modernity, its method and its politics, I dare say I would have had some better language for that task, not to mention a few good citations. Clearly Caputo has given his topic deep thought.
The book is a fast read, and that quality is thematic in itself: everything happens quickly in our world. It is not without some difficulties, but the overarching theme of hermeneutics over 'pure facts,' of interpretation over 'certainty,' of compelling readings over evidence and totality, render them mere venial sins. Caputo stands clear of the extortion absolutism and relativism always offer, and convincingly dispels the rumor that postmodernism is nothing but a grand relativistic schema. His call for a 'ceasefire' between atheism and theism, secular and religious, etc., exemplifies his approach.
This book will do a reader no lasting harm, and may even provide a window to Caputo's scholarly elaborations for those readers whose interest is piqued.
Here, in friendly prose and style, Caputo sets the stage for uncovering the power-play of the Enlightenment, and gives clear expression to some of the themes of this blog, most notably, how the modern turn takes knowledge hostage, and chains the brain to an empirical paradigm. Had I read this little treatise prior to writing several of my posts on modernity, its method and its politics, I dare say I would have had some better language for that task, not to mention a few good citations. Clearly Caputo has given his topic deep thought.
The book is a fast read, and that quality is thematic in itself: everything happens quickly in our world. It is not without some difficulties, but the overarching theme of hermeneutics over 'pure facts,' of interpretation over 'certainty,' of compelling readings over evidence and totality, render them mere venial sins. Caputo stands clear of the extortion absolutism and relativism always offer, and convincingly dispels the rumor that postmodernism is nothing but a grand relativistic schema. His call for a 'ceasefire' between atheism and theism, secular and religious, etc., exemplifies his approach.
This book will do a reader no lasting harm, and may even provide a window to Caputo's scholarly elaborations for those readers whose interest is piqued.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
The New Normal and Zizek's Event
Slavoj Zizek's recent work, Event (Melville House: Brooklyn NY, 2014), captures something essential in what the media would have us describe as 'the new normal.' The emergence of a new 'frame' which announces the arrival of something new (political, esthetic, religious, etc.) marks what Zizek calls the event, a concept greatly indebted to Badiou's notion. The book is also an extended love letter to Jela Kricec, journalist, intellectual, and Zizek's bride of 2 years (Event is dedicated to her, his 'event'). "There is, by definition, something 'miraculous' in an event (4)," and something even apparently theological, as the book opens and closes on the Trinity.
But it is the eventive miracle of love that makes Event one of Zizek's most personal, perhaps confessional, statements. One frame through which a reader can peer into the book's most important theme is indeed the 'miracle' of love: "when you fall in love, you don't just know what you need/want and look for the one who has it---the 'miracle' of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it" (118). And that is another essential theme of Event: one plays in the discourse within which one is shaped and shapes.
In typical fashion, Zizek utilizes an odd film, Strella, to illustrate the reframing of the family, as an event. The plot is dense (I have not seen the film nor could I access a trustworthy review, so I rely on Zizek's reputation as a consummate film critic), and involves a father (Yiorgios) who is imprisoned for murdering his own brother for sexually abusing Yiorgios' son. After a long prison term, he is finally released and seeks his long lost son, Leonidas. He spends his first night of freedom with Strella, a prostitute, but also a transsexual. Yiorgios is at first unaware of Strella's transsexuality, but upon learning of it, falls in love with her and continues the relationship, until the trauma of learning that Strella is in fact Leonidas, who was aware all along that Yiorgios was his father. The relationship is shattered, but the film closes with Leonidas/Strella taking care of a dead friend's son, and Yiorgios coming back into his son's and 'grandson's' life, establishing a "completely normal" family (168).
Interestingly, Zizek proposes Strella as a test of Christian family values and offers the obvious ultimatum: "embrace this authentic family of Yiorgios, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity."
Really, Zizek lobbing one in for Christianity? Of course, Zizek strongly advises that we bracket the father-son incest, allowing Yiorgios' "disgust" to empower the sublation. But even if we give Yiorgios a pass, how do you solve a problem like a Strella? Do we "resist the temptation to mobilize the psychoanalytic apparatus" (168) here too? Anyone, Christian or not, must want to understand something about Leonidas' deception and deliberate incest. Yet, Zizek is in love, and we must look at Strella through his gaze. Amor vincit omnia meets amor fati.
So does Christianity shut up here in Zizek's world and release the event or does it participate in 'the undoing of an event' (143 ff.)? The bishops have their work cut out for them next year as the Synod on the Family continues. Does Christianity know of the new normal, the new frame that constitutes the event of the family? Love in Zizek's world turns its gaze on the image of the heart of a family. In mythic terms, Strella rewrites the the final book of the Odyssey in modern Greek terms. Laertes, Odysseus and Telemachus standing battle-ready announces the political event of primogeniture; like them, Yiorgios, Leonidas/Strella, and the anonymous child stand upon the horizon of something new, buttressed on love, the miracle of love---if love in 'this' family is not a miracle, then there are no miracles. True, Leonidas seeks the father, Yiorgios seeks home, and they find what they need when they find each other in Zizek's event. Is love the only psychoanalysis, interpretation, Leonidas needs? Is love what will conquer the trauma in this family?
Zizek always disturbs us, haunts us. Having just completed a once-through of Absolute Recoil, which plays Deuteronomy to Event's Exodus, I would wager that Event is Zizek's book of love, and Recoil is his book of desire. I would say that his challenge to Christian family values is indeed a lob all to easy to hit out of the park.
But it is the eventive miracle of love that makes Event one of Zizek's most personal, perhaps confessional, statements. One frame through which a reader can peer into the book's most important theme is indeed the 'miracle' of love: "when you fall in love, you don't just know what you need/want and look for the one who has it---the 'miracle' of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it" (118). And that is another essential theme of Event: one plays in the discourse within which one is shaped and shapes.
In typical fashion, Zizek utilizes an odd film, Strella, to illustrate the reframing of the family, as an event. The plot is dense (I have not seen the film nor could I access a trustworthy review, so I rely on Zizek's reputation as a consummate film critic), and involves a father (Yiorgios) who is imprisoned for murdering his own brother for sexually abusing Yiorgios' son. After a long prison term, he is finally released and seeks his long lost son, Leonidas. He spends his first night of freedom with Strella, a prostitute, but also a transsexual. Yiorgios is at first unaware of Strella's transsexuality, but upon learning of it, falls in love with her and continues the relationship, until the trauma of learning that Strella is in fact Leonidas, who was aware all along that Yiorgios was his father. The relationship is shattered, but the film closes with Leonidas/Strella taking care of a dead friend's son, and Yiorgios coming back into his son's and 'grandson's' life, establishing a "completely normal" family (168).
Interestingly, Zizek proposes Strella as a test of Christian family values and offers the obvious ultimatum: "embrace this authentic family of Yiorgios, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity."
Really, Zizek lobbing one in for Christianity? Of course, Zizek strongly advises that we bracket the father-son incest, allowing Yiorgios' "disgust" to empower the sublation. But even if we give Yiorgios a pass, how do you solve a problem like a Strella? Do we "resist the temptation to mobilize the psychoanalytic apparatus" (168) here too? Anyone, Christian or not, must want to understand something about Leonidas' deception and deliberate incest. Yet, Zizek is in love, and we must look at Strella through his gaze. Amor vincit omnia meets amor fati.
So does Christianity shut up here in Zizek's world and release the event or does it participate in 'the undoing of an event' (143 ff.)? The bishops have their work cut out for them next year as the Synod on the Family continues. Does Christianity know of the new normal, the new frame that constitutes the event of the family? Love in Zizek's world turns its gaze on the image of the heart of a family. In mythic terms, Strella rewrites the the final book of the Odyssey in modern Greek terms. Laertes, Odysseus and Telemachus standing battle-ready announces the political event of primogeniture; like them, Yiorgios, Leonidas/Strella, and the anonymous child stand upon the horizon of something new, buttressed on love, the miracle of love---if love in 'this' family is not a miracle, then there are no miracles. True, Leonidas seeks the father, Yiorgios seeks home, and they find what they need when they find each other in Zizek's event. Is love the only psychoanalysis, interpretation, Leonidas needs? Is love what will conquer the trauma in this family?
Zizek always disturbs us, haunts us. Having just completed a once-through of Absolute Recoil, which plays Deuteronomy to Event's Exodus, I would wager that Event is Zizek's book of love, and Recoil is his book of desire. I would say that his challenge to Christian family values is indeed a lob all to easy to hit out of the park.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
The Confessions: St. Augustine on the Borromean Knot
Several texts have been folding, unfolding and folding together in my imagination lately: Keller's 'planetary entanglements' in her Cloud of the Impossible, Lacan's "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," and Marion's In the Self's Place. Happily, both Tad DeLay and Slavoj Zizek, two powerful apologists of Lacan and his work, have provided provocative lenses through which Descartes' cogito comes into focus in Ecrits and in Marion's examination of Augustine's Confessiones.
Zizek rewrites, in my reading, Descartes' infamous cogito, ergo sum, in his rewriting of dialectical materialism in Absolute Recoil (Verso: NY, 2014):
What if total knowledge entails inexistence, and existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? Such a paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term into the standard opposition between ordinary materialism...and subjective idealism---things exist insofar as they are unknown (209).
I read here a flux between thinking and being, a paradox resolving, or at least playing out, in an equilibrium reaction that flows in either direction---between reactants and products---depending on the presence of catalysts or other influences that favor one side the equilibrium. Neither side undergoes complete annihilation, yet undergoes aphanisis, a ghosting, an evacuation. The system here is certainly dialectical, even as Rahner might understand the term, but it is also a Schwebe, an oscillation that can never land on a midpoint between being and thinking, knowledge and existence. Hence, the system allows for a condensation of a subject. In this sense, the oscillations become a waveform that has potential for a phenomenological reduction in which something can make an appearance, even if that appearance must, paradoxically, also be a disappearance, not terribly unlike Luke's aphantos on the road to Emmaus.
Lacan's Borromean knot of the registers the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (RSI) provides a place for the play of aphanisis. Delay's discussion of the RSI in God is Unconscious is instructive, and his intuitions are very interesting.
The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real operate in a diachronic and synchronic fashion, that is to say, they cannot be entirely separated...[T]he three are not things qua regions of the psyche, and they are not meant to be understood with exactitude. Lacan's theory is always meant to be turned over and played with as a useful tool (8).
Lacan's triple register functions in synchrony. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are entangled in such a way that we cannot investigate one without invoking the other two. The unconscious should be analyzed as a language (17).
Delay has cited Ecrits here, in particular, "The Agency of the Letter," emphasizing that the unconscious is a language and the discourse of the other (16). I am more sympathetic to Delay's first insight that places RSI on 2 axes, than with his monaxial synchronic function; but I also embrace his suggestion of knotty entanglement of the RSI and a resultant spooky action at a distance.
Before letting Lacan speak directly to us from Ecrits, I now take the liberty of playing with the RSI 'as a useful tool.' The representation of the RSI as a 3-ringed circus, or a Borromean knot is helpful in grounding the observations of Lacan, Marion and Augustine. Taking as my point of departure Delay's flexible system of the registers, I want to re-imagine the RSI as regions in relationality that do not actually intersect, yet form a closed system, as a Mobius strip might be twisted, like a helix, into a knot, such that a single strand makes up the entirety. Further, the knot can be imaged as a looping track, something like a cloverleaf road work. There is a flexibility in the twists, such that the strand can be lifted into relief, like pulling on a slinky. There is no inherent overlap in the knot's structure, so that the are no actual Venn intersections, but if pulled out like a slinky, virtual intersections appear and can be viewed from above or below.
Keeping in mind this dynamic Borromean slinky-pretzel, Lacan's concepts from "Agency of the Letter" find a safe place to land, even as they are threatened by Zizek's aphanisis. Interestingly, Augustine haunts Lacan's essay. This hauntology will become clearer when we look at Marion's reading of the Confessiones, but Lacan is already in an Augustinian mood when he seeks to 'demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." that no language can 'cover the whole field of the signified (Ecrits, Norton:NY, 1977, trans. A Sheridan, p. 150; here referencing 'De significatione locutionis' of the De Magistro).
The word 'agency' in the title of Lacan's essay is the translator's choice, reflecting as it does Freud's 'agencies' of the ego, id and superego; but I prefer 'insistence' in place of 'agency,' mainly because of Lacan's own title in French (L'instance de la Lettre), but also because 'insistence' has nearly become a technical term for what John Caputo says God does, and for what Delay, following Lacan, wants the unconscious to do. We should therefore hold 'agency' and 'insistence' (and even instance in both French and English) in a dynamic tension of oscillation (Schwebe), if for no other reason than to keep things honest.
Lacan presents a rather passionate voice in "The Agency of the Letter" and that passion is amply demonstrated in his assertions for metaphor and metonymy.
...[I]f a symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea (175).
Though it is somewhat 'old hat' to view metonymy and metaphor as on the same axes as syntagm and paradigm, respectively, I shall not depart from that wisdom here. In fact, I want to allow symptom and desire to reverberate on our Borromean slinky-pretzel, with all deference to Jakobsen and Saussure (cf "Agency," 154). Paradigm, symptom and metaphor play out when we pull the slinky in a vertical axis, while syntagm, desire and metonymy play on a horizontal axis of the natural attitude.
Lacan asks, "[i]s the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric [sic], in relation to the place I occupy as a subject of the signified" but that question is "of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word 'thought' here. The play of metonymy is here the decision "to be only what I am," which is in "fact that I am in that very act." The play of metaphor is that "if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being...I lose myself in the process" (165 f.). "This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor...the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and lack of being...is played until...I ought to say...: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (166). Lacan introduces his own early version of aphanisis in this splitting 'game.' Yet, definitively, Lacan cedes to Freud: "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." I must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation" (171).
Reintegration, harmony and reconciliation form an essential grammar in Augustine's Confessiones. Though it is a great error to attribute a proto-cogito to Augustine, Marion has discovered Lacan's 'process' of the play of refusal to know or to be, to think or exist within the thought of the Confessiones. The heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Such restlessness is a process of praise, of relationality, of discovery, of oscillation, and aphanisis.
According to Marion,
confessio opens a space where the ego and its readers enter not only into a dialogue between themselves but especially into a place, where the charity of God can reach them. The model of the confessio, in fact, brings about a reduction of the natural attitude, which permits coming to the question of God, namely love. It therefore operates as an erotic reduction (In the Self's Place, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford Univ. Press: California, 2012, 54 f.).
In Augustine's hands, confessio as praise and reconciliation performs the phenomenological reduction that shifts from the simply mimetic to the semiotic gesture, in which the tension between being and knowing allows both the self and its place to appear. The waveform of Schwebe collapses in the relationality of the folding textures of the genre, bringing something new into focus.
Here is the crucial text that folds, Lacan, Descartes, Augustine and Marion into the reduction.
Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself...[B]ut he...observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself...[I]n thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself is saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside myself...[T]he cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself. (63)
Marion reading Augustine and Descartes uses language similar to Lacan reading Descartes and Freud. Though Marion seems to be describing something more static than Lacan is describing, Lacan's play of metonymy and metaphor merge with Marion's alienation and exile within Zizek's reading of Lacan's very dynamic aphanisis and the 'paradoxical relation' of being and knowing. In the disappearing of Marion's/Augustine's 'myself' in apophatic 'unknowing,' the myself/ego shifts from thought to being, whose expulsion is alienation and exile. Here, Marion seems to be putting on Augustine's lips (che vuoi?) Lacan's "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Ecrits, 166).
In the chemical equilibrium reaction analogy given above, there are, in the movement from thinking to being, knowledge to existence, only reactants in the oscillating flow favoring one pole or another. In the erotic reduction of divine love, the ego "can enter into the distance that opens me in the self's place" (99). It is not therefore finally in alienation, but in the vita beata, that only the oscillation that collapses, and not the distance that opens me. And here is where Augustine enters the roller coaster of the Borromean knot. If, as Lacan notes, the divine is located in the ineffable Real, it is through the syntagmatic, metonymic ride that the self can find its place there. But we can only see the self's arrival from above and below, through the paradigmatic, metaphorical, vertical axis, where knowledge and being are finally understood as not on a collision course, but on a gliding above and below each other, passing one another safely, to play again another day.
The threat of an actual aphanisis dissipates, for it has always been an illusion perpetrated against reality by certitude, which is the symptom playing out on the axis of metaphor. Augustine could have never felt the threat, as Marion magnificently demonstrates, because the oscillations of exile and alienation always collapse in the place of the self, on a horizontal axis, in the metonymy of desire, where the ego and the divine come into view through praise and reconciliation in the erotic reduction, and the saturated phenomenon of the univocity of love, the untroubled rest in the vita beata. This movement is, as Dante would later illustrate, a transition from the Imaginary into the Real, where Vergil cannot go, and only Beatrice can lead.
Zizek rewrites, in my reading, Descartes' infamous cogito, ergo sum, in his rewriting of dialectical materialism in Absolute Recoil (Verso: NY, 2014):
What if total knowledge entails inexistence, and existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? Such a paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term into the standard opposition between ordinary materialism...and subjective idealism---things exist insofar as they are unknown (209).
I read here a flux between thinking and being, a paradox resolving, or at least playing out, in an equilibrium reaction that flows in either direction---between reactants and products---depending on the presence of catalysts or other influences that favor one side the equilibrium. Neither side undergoes complete annihilation, yet undergoes aphanisis, a ghosting, an evacuation. The system here is certainly dialectical, even as Rahner might understand the term, but it is also a Schwebe, an oscillation that can never land on a midpoint between being and thinking, knowledge and existence. Hence, the system allows for a condensation of a subject. In this sense, the oscillations become a waveform that has potential for a phenomenological reduction in which something can make an appearance, even if that appearance must, paradoxically, also be a disappearance, not terribly unlike Luke's aphantos on the road to Emmaus.
Lacan's Borromean knot of the registers the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (RSI) provides a place for the play of aphanisis. Delay's discussion of the RSI in God is Unconscious is instructive, and his intuitions are very interesting.
The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real operate in a diachronic and synchronic fashion, that is to say, they cannot be entirely separated...[T]he three are not things qua regions of the psyche, and they are not meant to be understood with exactitude. Lacan's theory is always meant to be turned over and played with as a useful tool (8).
Lacan's triple register functions in synchrony. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are entangled in such a way that we cannot investigate one without invoking the other two. The unconscious should be analyzed as a language (17).
Delay has cited Ecrits here, in particular, "The Agency of the Letter," emphasizing that the unconscious is a language and the discourse of the other (16). I am more sympathetic to Delay's first insight that places RSI on 2 axes, than with his monaxial synchronic function; but I also embrace his suggestion of knotty entanglement of the RSI and a resultant spooky action at a distance.
Before letting Lacan speak directly to us from Ecrits, I now take the liberty of playing with the RSI 'as a useful tool.' The representation of the RSI as a 3-ringed circus, or a Borromean knot is helpful in grounding the observations of Lacan, Marion and Augustine. Taking as my point of departure Delay's flexible system of the registers, I want to re-imagine the RSI as regions in relationality that do not actually intersect, yet form a closed system, as a Mobius strip might be twisted, like a helix, into a knot, such that a single strand makes up the entirety. Further, the knot can be imaged as a looping track, something like a cloverleaf road work. There is a flexibility in the twists, such that the strand can be lifted into relief, like pulling on a slinky. There is no inherent overlap in the knot's structure, so that the are no actual Venn intersections, but if pulled out like a slinky, virtual intersections appear and can be viewed from above or below.
Keeping in mind this dynamic Borromean slinky-pretzel, Lacan's concepts from "Agency of the Letter" find a safe place to land, even as they are threatened by Zizek's aphanisis. Interestingly, Augustine haunts Lacan's essay. This hauntology will become clearer when we look at Marion's reading of the Confessiones, but Lacan is already in an Augustinian mood when he seeks to 'demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." that no language can 'cover the whole field of the signified (Ecrits, Norton:NY, 1977, trans. A Sheridan, p. 150; here referencing 'De significatione locutionis' of the De Magistro).
The word 'agency' in the title of Lacan's essay is the translator's choice, reflecting as it does Freud's 'agencies' of the ego, id and superego; but I prefer 'insistence' in place of 'agency,' mainly because of Lacan's own title in French (L'instance de la Lettre), but also because 'insistence' has nearly become a technical term for what John Caputo says God does, and for what Delay, following Lacan, wants the unconscious to do. We should therefore hold 'agency' and 'insistence' (and even instance in both French and English) in a dynamic tension of oscillation (Schwebe), if for no other reason than to keep things honest.
Lacan presents a rather passionate voice in "The Agency of the Letter" and that passion is amply demonstrated in his assertions for metaphor and metonymy.
...[I]f a symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea (175).
Though it is somewhat 'old hat' to view metonymy and metaphor as on the same axes as syntagm and paradigm, respectively, I shall not depart from that wisdom here. In fact, I want to allow symptom and desire to reverberate on our Borromean slinky-pretzel, with all deference to Jakobsen and Saussure (cf "Agency," 154). Paradigm, symptom and metaphor play out when we pull the slinky in a vertical axis, while syntagm, desire and metonymy play on a horizontal axis of the natural attitude.
Lacan asks, "[i]s the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric [sic], in relation to the place I occupy as a subject of the signified" but that question is "of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word 'thought' here. The play of metonymy is here the decision "to be only what I am," which is in "fact that I am in that very act." The play of metaphor is that "if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being...I lose myself in the process" (165 f.). "This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor...the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and lack of being...is played until...I ought to say...: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (166). Lacan introduces his own early version of aphanisis in this splitting 'game.' Yet, definitively, Lacan cedes to Freud: "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." I must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation" (171).
Reintegration, harmony and reconciliation form an essential grammar in Augustine's Confessiones. Though it is a great error to attribute a proto-cogito to Augustine, Marion has discovered Lacan's 'process' of the play of refusal to know or to be, to think or exist within the thought of the Confessiones. The heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Such restlessness is a process of praise, of relationality, of discovery, of oscillation, and aphanisis.
According to Marion,
confessio opens a space where the ego and its readers enter not only into a dialogue between themselves but especially into a place, where the charity of God can reach them. The model of the confessio, in fact, brings about a reduction of the natural attitude, which permits coming to the question of God, namely love. It therefore operates as an erotic reduction (In the Self's Place, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford Univ. Press: California, 2012, 54 f.).
In Augustine's hands, confessio as praise and reconciliation performs the phenomenological reduction that shifts from the simply mimetic to the semiotic gesture, in which the tension between being and knowing allows both the self and its place to appear. The waveform of Schwebe collapses in the relationality of the folding textures of the genre, bringing something new into focus.
Here is the crucial text that folds, Lacan, Descartes, Augustine and Marion into the reduction.
Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself...[B]ut he...observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself...[I]n thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself is saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside myself...[T]he cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself. (63)
Marion reading Augustine and Descartes uses language similar to Lacan reading Descartes and Freud. Though Marion seems to be describing something more static than Lacan is describing, Lacan's play of metonymy and metaphor merge with Marion's alienation and exile within Zizek's reading of Lacan's very dynamic aphanisis and the 'paradoxical relation' of being and knowing. In the disappearing of Marion's/Augustine's 'myself' in apophatic 'unknowing,' the myself/ego shifts from thought to being, whose expulsion is alienation and exile. Here, Marion seems to be putting on Augustine's lips (che vuoi?) Lacan's "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Ecrits, 166).
In the chemical equilibrium reaction analogy given above, there are, in the movement from thinking to being, knowledge to existence, only reactants in the oscillating flow favoring one pole or another. In the erotic reduction of divine love, the ego "can enter into the distance that opens me in the self's place" (99). It is not therefore finally in alienation, but in the vita beata, that only the oscillation that collapses, and not the distance that opens me. And here is where Augustine enters the roller coaster of the Borromean knot. If, as Lacan notes, the divine is located in the ineffable Real, it is through the syntagmatic, metonymic ride that the self can find its place there. But we can only see the self's arrival from above and below, through the paradigmatic, metaphorical, vertical axis, where knowledge and being are finally understood as not on a collision course, but on a gliding above and below each other, passing one another safely, to play again another day.
The threat of an actual aphanisis dissipates, for it has always been an illusion perpetrated against reality by certitude, which is the symptom playing out on the axis of metaphor. Augustine could have never felt the threat, as Marion magnificently demonstrates, because the oscillations of exile and alienation always collapse in the place of the self, on a horizontal axis, in the metonymy of desire, where the ego and the divine come into view through praise and reconciliation in the erotic reduction, and the saturated phenomenon of the univocity of love, the untroubled rest in the vita beata. This movement is, as Dante would later illustrate, a transition from the Imaginary into the Real, where Vergil cannot go, and only Beatrice can lead.
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