Religion in Reason: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent De Vries (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9780367133610, 9781032283319, 9780429026096, 036713361X

Citation preview

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

RELIGION IN REASON METAPHYSICS, ETHICS, AND POLITICS IN HENT DE VRIES Edited by Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster

Religion in Reason

This book presents critical engagements with the work of Hent de Vries, widely regarded as one of the most important living philosophers of religion. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars discuss the role played by religion in philosophy; the emergence and possibilities of the category of religion; and the relation between religion and violence, secularism, and sovereignty. Together, they provide a synoptic view of how de Vries’s work has prompted a reconceptualization of how religion should be studied, especially in relation to theology, politics, and new media. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of religious studies, theology, and philosophy. Tarek R. Dika  is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of  Descartes’s Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science (2023) and the co-author, with W. Chris Hackett, of Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology (2016) as well as numerous articles on Descartes, Heidegger, and contemporary French phenomenology.  Martin Shuster is Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at University of North Carolina—Charlotte. In addition to many articles and essays, he is the author of  Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (2014), New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre  (2017), and  How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism (2021). With Anne O’Byrne he is the editor of Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World (Routledge, 2020).

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Augustine and Contemporary Social Issues Edited by Paul L. Allen God After the Church Lost Control Sociological Analysis and Critical-Constructive Theology Jan-Olav Henriksen and Pål Repstad Religion and Intersex Perspectives from Science, Law, Culture, and Theology Stephanie A. Budwey Exploring Theological Paradoxes Cyril Orji African Churches Ministering ‘to and with’ Persons with Disabilities Perspectives from Zimbabwe Nomatter Sande The Fathers on the Bible Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/religion/series/RCRITREL

Religion in Reason Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries

Edited by Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367133610 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032283319 (pbk) ISBN: 9780429026096 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Contributorsvii Introduction

1

TAREK DIKA AND MARTIN SHUSTER

1 Theology on Edge

16

TOMOKO MASUZAWA

2 Violence, Religion, Metaphysics

34

GWENAËLLE AUBRY TRANSLATED BY JACOB LEVI

3 Imagination, Theolatry, and the Compulsion to Worship the Invisible

50

ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

4 Theology’s Figures of Abandon: Revisiting the Topic of Original Affirmation

80

ASJA SZAFRANIEC

5 Theology as Searchlight: Miracle, Event, and the Place of the Natural

92

WILLEMIEN OTTEN

6 Are Miracles Possible?: Avicenna Revisited

108

SARI NUSSEIBEH

7 On Laws and Miracles ILIT FERBER

129

vi  Contents 8 Spiritual Exercises in the Age of Their Technological Reproducibility

139

ELI FRIEDLANDER

9 Violence Inside-Out: Staring into the Sun with Georges Bataille

156

SAMANTHA CARMEL

10 The Graft of the Cat: Derrida, Kofman and the Question of the Animal

177

SARAH HAMMERSCHLAG

11 Corpus Mysticum: Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hent de Vries

196

BURCHT PRANGER

12 Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory: John Rawls with Hent de Vries

215

ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE

13 Adorno’s Secular Theology

233

PETER E. GORDON

14 Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text

249

MIEKE BAL

15 Anti-Retractationes: On Inexistence, Divine, and Other

270

HENT DE VRIES

Appendix: List of Hent de Vries’s Works Index

375 392

List of Contributors

Gwenaëlle Aubry is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Centre Jean Pépin- École normale supérieureUniversité Paris Sciences & Lettres), Paris, France. Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, and video artist based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Samantha Carmel is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University, USA. Hent de Vries is the Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities in the Department of German, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at New York University, USA. Ilit Ferber is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Tel-Aviv University, Israel. Eli Friedlander is the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Professor of Modern Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor in the Department of History, Harvard University, USA. He is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and the Department of Philosophy. Sarah Hammerschlag is Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, USA. Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy in the Department of Government and International Relations and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor Emerita in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.

viii  List of Contributors Sari Nusseibeh is Professor of Philosophy and former President of Al-Quds University, Jerusalem, Palestine (Occupied Territories). Willemien Otten is the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, USA, where she is also Faculty Co-Director of the Martin Marty Center. She is Associate Faculty in the Department of History Burcht Pranger is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religion at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Asja Szafraniec teaches at Amsterdam University College, the Netherlands. Elliot Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Introduction Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster

University of North Carolina at Charlotte and University of Toronto

Religion Max Weber’s now classic essay, “Science as Vocation” contains a remarkable passage where he notes that: It is the destiny of our age: given the rationalization and intellectualization of the times, and especially given the disenchantment of the world—its loss of magic—the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life, into either the otherworldly realm of mysticism or the direct brotherly communities of individuals with one another. It is no accident that our highest art is an intimate one, not monumental; nor that today it is only in the smallest circle, between individuals, pianissimo, that something pulses corresponding to what once blazed through large communities as the breath of prophecy, fusing them together.1 Hent de Vries’s work has explored, updated, concretized, radicalized, formalized—not to mention also contested yet not wholly denied—Weber’s basic assessment and image. In an interview, de Vries notes that the title of his first book, Theologie im pianissimo (1989), was “an homage and gentle parody”2 of Weber’s phrase. From his first study of the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (the English translation and revision of Theologie im pianissimo), de Vries has shown how Weber’s thesis, bold as it may be, in fact only points toward a subsequent analysis of the relationship between religion and modernity. Religion’s positive content and actuality in its traditional or properly confessional, social, and worldly

1 Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020). 2 Victor E. Taylor, “Minimal Difference with Maximal Import: ‘Deep Pragmatism’ and Global Religion: An Interview with Hent De Vries,” Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory 11, no. 3 (2011), 1-19.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-1

2  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster aspects continue to retreat, becoming, in Weber’s words, ever more and more faint—pianissimo; at the same time, this retreat is inversely proportional to a certain dissemination of religion, because its content continues to be invoked, reused, redeployed, refashioned, reformulated, not to mention reviewed and reconstituted, in a variety of new sites ranging from the political to the ethical to the aesthetic (whether in the form of the drawing or redrawing of the public sphere, the qualification and understanding of reason and rationality, or the evolution and spread of new media and new technologies). It would not be too much to say that Hent de Vries’s work has offered a detailed and comprehensive map of this terrain, the first such cartographic exploration proposed exactly in a global context and with the requisite archival—if not archaeological and genealogical—depth. For de Vries, the cartographic domain of this register traverses several interlocking issues, all originating from the continuing possibilities and unavoidability of religion in the modern world. Cognizant and responsive to the idea common in the human sciences that religion is “an anthropological and social construct that could serve diverse, even contradictory purposes,”3 de Vries’s work instead stresses how “citations from religious traditions are … fundamental to the structure of language and experience.”4 In fact, involved here is a fundamental dialectical procedure, where “the endless, if also inevitably limited, refutations of religion’s truth-claims are so many reaffirmations of its ever-provisional survival, ad infinitum.”5 This leads in to a powerful image by de Vries, where “in religion’s perpetual agony lies its philosophical and theoretical relevance. As it dies an ever more secure and serial death, it is increasingly certain to come back to life, in its present guise or in another.”6 This prioritization of religion occurs amidst a broader discussion of and reflection on rationality, especially, at least in his earliest work, with an engagement with the work of Jürgen Habermas (as pursued in his The Theory of Communicative Action).7 It is impossible here to offer a proper account of Habermas’s theory of rationality, or of the various moves and countermoves involved in its decades-old elaboration. It is sufficient instead to note that Habermas aims to offer a theory of rationality oriented around a formal or procedural definition of rationality, where “communicative actions [of whatever sort or kind] always require an interpretation that is [already] rational in approach.”8 Such a theory, in de Vries’s words, already moves reason away “from essences or metaphysical substances and turns”

3 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1. 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Ibid., 3. 6 Ibid. 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 8 Ibid., 106.

Introduction 3 and instead toward “different formal structures that function as quasitranscendental—that is linguistic, pragmatic, in short enabling—conditions for human cognition, agency, interaction, judgment, and expression.”9 Again, without entering into all of the complex details, objections, and counter-objections to this view, it is important to note that de Vries shows how even such a purely formal or “secular” reason—one grounded in a commonly sharable language amidst standards putatively acceptable to everyone—there persists an unavoidable religious remainder. To see how this is the case, note that when Habermas claims that “all attempts at discovering ultimate foundations … have broken down,”10 there are several ways to respond. On the one hand, we might take it to be the case that there is some normative failure here, and that Habermas’s theory is thereby somehow not properly justified (this is the common line taken by a range of critics of Habermas).11 On the other hand, we might instead stress the extent to which this points beyond reason to something else, revealing in even a formal or procedural account of reason an unavoidable recourse to “the traces (of the other) of reason.”12 According to de Vries, evident in Habermas’s account is an inescapable religious or theological or—perhaps most accurately—a negative metaphysical dimension (termed so exactly because it cannot be properly described, but only hinted at or referenced—more on all of this shortly). Such a dimension can be acknowledged and discerned, for example, when Habermas makes recourse to metaphors to elaborate his formal account, as, for example, when he hearkens to an ultimate state of consensus that can never be reached; Habermas’s theory is thereby, according to his own self-conception, “still accompanied by the shadow of a transcendental illusion.”13 As we will see, this diagnosis is explored and multiplied de Vries’s work, ultimately raising “the question not so much of a comprehensive theoretical alternative but of how to comprehend the metaphysical and hermeneutic supplement at once required and denied by his theoretical matrix.”14 De Vries continues, noting that in fact: Such a supplement refers, rather, to a figure of thought and a faculty of judgment which both, finally, resist the simple equation of rationality with discursiveness, with the decidability of sharply delineated (cognitive, practical, and aesthetically expressive) validity claims, and

  9 Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 76. 10 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2. 11 For a summary and discussion, see James Gordon Finlayson, “The Persistence of Normative Questions in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action,” Constellations 20, no. 4 (2013), 518-532. 12 de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, 28. 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Ibid., 91.

4  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster with the force of the better argument alone. In this sense, my attempt to supplement the theory under consideration requires a radical modification, not just reinterpretation, of its paradigm of rationality; in other words, it demands an extension of its scope—even an extrapolation and extension of some of its central intuitions—that, I suspect, goes far beyond the limits Habermas himself would accept. With that said, this conclusion in response to Habermas’s work equally shows the necessity of distinguishing de Vries’s position from another recent, no less sophisticated approach to thinking about religion, notably the work of Charles Taylor, who also has been a critic of Habermas. (And it should be taken as given, furthermore, that both Habermas and Taylor might be seen as stand-ins here for broader trends in the study of both reason and religion.) In A Secular Age, Taylor criticizes a variety of stories that he terms “subtraction stories,” where human beings are alleged to have “lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”15 On such a view, the emergence of modernity or secularism is best understood “in terms of underlying features of human nature” being now laid bare or revealed, since they “were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.”16 Opposing such stories, Taylor proposes to understand the rise of modernity and/or secularism as ultimately “the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.”17 Taylor terms what emerges “exclusive humanism,” a worldview that he locates as developing from the 16th century onwards, first as an alternative to Christian faith, but then as a view that instead puts an end to “the naïve acknowledgment of the transcendent or of goals or claims which go beyond human flourishing.”18 Exclusive humanism is a view, however, that still allows for a range of options when it comes to belief and unbelief, thereby locating religion, in transformed shape, as a continuing possibility, even within an alleged secular age. The chief difference, according to Taylor, is that “unlike religious turnovers in the past … naïveté is now unavailable to anyone, believer or unbeliever alike.”19 What was once “adopted naïvely, that is, without the sense that there was an alternative,” now instead “has to be recovered in full awareness.”20 The “immanent frame” that emerges in modernity is “something which permits closure [to transcendence or a beyond], without demanding it.”21 Such 15 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 389. 21 Ibid., 544. Emphasis added.

Introduction 5 talk of recovery appears to share at least some ground with de Vries’s suggestion, pursued throughout his work, of understanding religions as the “material traces, residues, and sedimentations of an immensely extended, diversified, and deep-seated archive of the past—which is, in principle, an actualizable and thus potential future as well—whose resources we have barely begun to fathom, to realize, let alone to exhaust.”22 But there are important differences between Taylor and de Vries. The very process of recovery appears itself as at stake in the two conceptions, with Taylor suggesting that belief or unbelief is an option, one that is pursued or avoided (just to name two options). Shifts in this domain are described by Taylor as the idea that “one moral outlook gave way to another. Another model of what was higher triumphed.”23 According to Taylor, it was not a case where “a moral outlook” simply “bowed to brute facts.”24 In other words, there was some normative shift, albeit one affected and inflected by a complex, thick form of life or, we might even say, shape of spirit. 25 Such a description raises questions about how such a normative shift occurs for particular individuals, or indeed if it has in fact occurred at all as an option among others. After all, whether one believes or doesn’t believe is by no means optional for any particular person, rather you or I believe or we don’t; belief is oftentimes not simply one preference amongst others. For example, as one commentator notes, while “a great many people seem no longer at ease in the full-dress garments of religious commitment,” it remains the case that they cannot merely “cast them aside.”26 The multiplicity of serious contemporary faith possibilities—of whatever sort, from the sincere to the ironic, to the recovered or reinvented, to the reworked or reasserted, to everything else in between—renders the entire category of optionality a problem, still hinging on and asserting as it does the very sense of naïvete that Taylor alleges was exactly no longer an option.27 Related themes are explored in Asja Szafraniec’s “Theology’s Figures of Abandon (Traces of the Archive),” where Derrida is presented as a figure who forces us to rethink any naive opposition between the secular and religious, and in Peter Gordon’s “Adorno’s Secular Theology,” where Adorno’s aesthetics is harnessed as a site to think about Adorno’s complex

22 Hent de Vries, ed. Religion: Beyond a Concept (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2009), 68. 23 Taylor, A Secular Age, 563. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 565. On the analogy between these two, see Terry Pinkard, “Innen, Aussen und Lebensformen: Hegel und Wittgenstein,” in Hegels Erbe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). 26 Peter E Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s ’A Secular Age’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (2008): 655. 27 De Vries has himself made this point, see Hent de Vries, “The Deep Conditions of Secularity,” Modern Theology 26, no. 3 (2010): 392.

6  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster and dialectical relationship to these themes, asking especially after the relationship between art and religion. Furthermore, the continuing appeal of a variety of highly unreflective— not to mention regressive—projects, especially in the last few years, with the rise of allegedly defunct forms of fascism, populism, or authoritarianism, puts pressure on the very periodization that Taylor introduces. When Taylor stresses that it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God”28 earlier, we might wonder both about how true this was (given alternative conceptions of reality, whether in models of negative or apophatic theology to more ordinary possibilities for unbelief in earlier periods, including any number of alternatives to Christianity inside and outside of Western traditions). Furthermore, we might also ask about how true it is now, especially if we take seriously that contemporary modern political movements might not be seen as denying or avoiding the religious, but rather as themselves continuing instances of deep religiosity, of political theology, and/or deep irrationality.29 All of these points require more elaboration, a topic pursued more extensively in this Introduction and throughout this volume. For example, it can be noted that these broader trends and questions can also be addressed from differing methodological perspectives, as Tomoko Masuzawa’s “Theology on Edge” suggests by arguing that “theology was not a ruling discourse of the medieval university; rather, its cardinal achievements resulted from perilous and daring engagements with what was novel, alien, and potentially adversarial.” We can also ask broader questions about the role that theology and the philosophy of religion have played and ought to play in the contemporary university, as suggested in Willemien Otten’s “Theology as Searchlight: Miracle, Event, and the Place of the Natural.”

Religion and the Other To get a grip on these issues, note that a close reading of Minimal Theologies already reveals that de Vries is not a theorist of religion with a side interest in rationality, but rather a theorist of rationality (in both its “theoretical” and “practical” forms) for whom religion plays a central, constitutive role. His central thesis in Minimal Theologies is that the emphatic concept of reason—a concept of reason at once both sensitive to historical reality and yet capable of criticizing it in terms that are not simply borrowed from it—has two complementary dimensions, neither of which can be reduced to the other and both of which are necessary in order to successfully evade the pitfalls of

28 Taylor, A Secular Age, 25. 29 See the discussion in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1–91. See also Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage, 2008).

Introduction 7 historicism and positivism on the one hand, and classical metaphysics in its rationalist, idealist, or materialist forms on the other. The first dimension is negative metaphysics, which prohibits any representation of the absolute (be it the absolutely true, good, beautiful, or just) that would enjoy unrestricted validity and be immune to criticism. The second dimension is hermeneutic judgment, which, in concrete circumstances, nevertheless appeals to an absolute in order to evaluate singular states of affairs, but in a manner that is necessarily or constitutively aporetic, since the absolute has no positive content, and cannot be represented. Negative metaphysics and hermeneutic judgment constitute the heart of de Vries’s concept of rationality in Minimal Theologies, together illustrating why he regards theology and religion as an ineliminable part of it. As he puts it in a crucial passage: Negative metaphysics prevents us from positively or affirmatively anticipating, articulating, imagining, visualizing, or narrating such a figure of the successful life, prohibiting its conceptualization or figuration in theoretical, practical, or aesthetic terms alone. Yet we cannot consistently intuit – let alone maintain – a merely prohibitive idea of transcendence whose empty referent and ascetic strategy could never stand on its own or have the last word. Judgment, therefore, realizes the inevitable, necessary, and imperative instantiation of the other by way of an act or acknowledgement of concretization which signals incarnation and betrayal (divine speech and blasphemy, iconology and idolatry) at once. The negative metaphysical idea and the hermeneutic judgment are thus complementary or supplementary. Both together constitute what reason […] might mean in the present day and age. Broadly defined, the faculty of judgement […] designates our critical, selective use of a certain concept, figure, or gesture: both by identifying it as such and by putting it to work at a certain moment, in a certain context, and in a certain way. Formally defined, the idea of negative metaphysics enables us to keep options open and explains how we can return to earlier steps; it is the very principle of fallibility, of counterfactuality, and hence the necessary reminder that this particular use we have for concepts, figures, or gestures is not all or not-yet-it (i.e., true, adequate, good, just, beautiful, or sublime) when compared to the immeasurable standard that makes up the emphatic idea of reason: the infinite, the ab-solute, the other (or Other), for which the theologicoreligious tradition has thus far provided the most provocative and richest vocabulary.30 Theology and religion play a role in minimal theology, but it is not one that they do or can play elsewhere. Minimal theology is reducible neither to dogmatic or confessional theology (whose validity minimal theology

30 de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 110.

8  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster suspends in its pursuit in a rigorous “epoché,” to use the Husserlian term) nor yet to the human and social-scientific study of religion (whose methodological presuppositions it submits to an “epoché” no less rigorous).31 As de Vries puts it in Minimal Theologies, minimal theology is neither the “science” of God nor the science of “God.”32 Its origins lie elsewhere: specifically in reflection on the possibility of critical theory after the so-called “end” of metaphysics. The aim is to “show solidarity with metaphysics at the moment of its downfall,” as Adorno famously (and enigmatically) puts it in Negative Dialectics. This requires nothing less than conceiving the possibility of an “absolute” whose irreducibility to any positive representational content or empirical fact at the same time conditions the possibility of subjecting any and all such contents and facts to critique. The absolute is not some ineffable entity beyond being (as it is in various apophatic theologies), nor is it a regulative ideal (as it is in various Kantian and neo-Kantian transcendental philosophies), although it bears a certain affinity to both. For de Vries, the absolute is merely the formal place of a radical otherness whose ever-diminishing intelligibility is not inconsistent with a species of radical phenomenality and experience. And while it is undeniable that “the theologico-religious tradition has thus far provided the most provocative and richest vocabulary” in which the negative metaphysics of the absolute has been articulated, it is no less true that the absolute cannot be reduced to the representations determinate religious and cultural traditions impose upon it (be they Abrahamic or other). For all intents and purposes, then, minimal theology simply is all that the emphatic concept of reason can be after the so-called “end” of metaphysics. This opens up the possibility for philosophy of religion to ask about the compulsion to worship an invisible God, as pursued in Elliot Wolfson’s “Imagination, Theoloatry, and the Compulsion to Worship the Invisible.” The concept of reason articulated in de Vries’s minimal theology undermines (or deconstructs) every opposition between “reason” and “religion,” “faith” and “knowledge,” the “secular” and the “sacred,” “immanence” and “transcendence,” however sophisticated or subtle these distinctions may be.

31 By “epoché,” Husserl means to suspend (neither affirm nor negate) the presuppositions and theses of the human and the natural sciences in order to describe the phenomena as they are given in intuition. See Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014), §§27–32, 48–56. In De Vries, the epoché functions somewhat differently, and amounts to a suspension of presuppositions and theses about religion so that religion may appear otherwise than it does in both the “science” of God (theology) and the science of “God” (the social-scientific study of religion) as the minimally theological remainder of the secular reason mobilized in both the natural and human sciences, and indeed in philosophy. 32 de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, 51–67.

Introduction 9 This is why even Habermas, whose formal-pragmatic conception of reason as communicative action is arguably one of the most sophisticated such conception to have emerged since World War II,33 cannot, according to de Vries, dispense with minimal theology. As de Vries argues at length, Habermas’s theory of communicative action is premised on idealizing presuppositions that cannot be articulated in terms of the theory: “Habermas’s indefatigable emphasis on ‘the central experience of unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech’ cannot itself be theoretically – that is, argumentatively – articulated at all. Within both theoretical and practical discourses, as well as within theoretical and therapeutic critique, the motivation and ultimate grounds for argumentation cannot be conceived as argumentation.”34 De Vries later continues: “Habermas’s analysis of each of the three value spheres and respective types of value claims touches upon a ‘moment of unconditionality’ whose transcendence – albeit a ‘transcendence in immanence’ – it can no longer articulate in theoretical, practical, or aesthetic terms. Hence, his recourse to metaphor, to figural presentation of the ab-solute internal to each discourse. Negative metaphysics, we indicated, formalizes this inevitable appeal at the heart of all idealization, exceeding any presupposition, and keeps it open for an illimitable series of non-synonymous substitutions, each of which instantiates and betrays the idea in question.”35 De Vries’s critique of secular reason ought to be understood as general; Habermas’s conception of reason is only one among other such conceptions that fail, despite their best efforts, to dispense with a minimally theological remainder. Returning to the discussion above, it is exactly to the extent that minimal theology undermines any stable opposition between “religion” and “reason” that it pulls the rug out from under the feet of any theory according to which “religion” or “faith” can be regarded as “options” one can rationally choose or refuse to adopt in a modern, “secular age,” as in Taylor. For de Vries, the problem of religion is not the problem of “belief,” whether it be understood as a propositional attitude, affective disposition, or a way of life. Religion is but the historically and culturally privileged site of a negative metaphysics without which no emphatic or critical conception of reason is possible.

Religion and Violence De Vries demonstrates the enduring efficacy and importance of the religious archive—an archive that cannot be reduced to any one religion—in a broad variety of registers. (And it must also be noted, as it is in Sarah Hammerschlag’s

33 See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, originally published in German in 1981. 34 de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 123. The citation is from Habermas’s The Theory of Communcative Action, vol. 1, 10. 35 Ibid., 130.

10  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster “The Graft of the Cat: Derrida, Kofman and the Question of the Animal,” that religion is not the only archive.) Having demonstrated the role played by religion in even the most purportedly secular concept(s) of reason in Minimal Theologies and Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999), de Vries then turns his attention to a problem that has always been associated with religion: the problem of violence. For de Vries, the problem of violence is, in fact, inseparable from minimal theology, specifically in regard to his concept of “hermeneutic judgment.” As de Vries argues in the long passage from Minimal Theologies cited above, in minimal theology the faculty of judgment “realizes the inevitable, necessary, and imperative instantiation of the other” here and now “by way of an act or acknowledgement of concretization which signals incarnation and betrayal (divine speech and blasphemy, iconology and idolatry) at once.”36 Violence is the inevitable consequence of a negative metaphysics according to which the absolute or the other both must and cannot be “instantiated” or “concretized” in some way or other in each and every singular here and now. As de Vries argues in Religion and Violence, violence “affects the heart of religion in its most elementary and its most general features,” and this means that reason, whenever it represents the absolute (as it must), inevitably engages in a violence that is best understood in terms of the “idolatry, blasphemy, and hypocrisy” that are ultimately “unavoidable in the pursuit of divine names and belong to the religious and the theological – and, by analogy, to reason – as such. […] Without it, without the saying of the unsayable, without the negotiation with (and of) the absolute, nothing would be said or done at all. Nothing would be changed or saved; everything would be left up to the powers that be.”37 Violence is not an isolated topic in de Vries’s work, nor is his point to insist, in accordance with a highly suspicious representation of the Enlightenment by popular intellectuals, on how historical or positive religions cause violence, but rather to insist that violence must and perhaps can only be properly understood in religious, indeed minimally theological terms. Understood according to minimal theology, religion carries the risk of what de Vries calls the horror religiosus, i.e., a horror in which the ethical and the political are permanently exposed to the “the sovereign, absolute, and (from our finite and human point of view) absolutely arbitrary act of divine will,”38 a horror religiosus no doubt best represented Abraham’s sacrifice as interpreted by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, and which de Vries reads as central to any understanding of the ethical and the political. Abraham’s sacrifice dramatizes the structure of all ethical and political decision: “[I]n being responsive and responsible one must, at the same time,

36 Ibid., 110. Emphasis added. 37 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), xvi. 38 Ibid., 5.

Introduction 11 also be irresponsive and irresponsible,” indeed this happens as soon as one is responsive and responsible to one other to the exclusion of all others – an exclusion that, in the end, “is always unjustifiable.”39 The horror religosus, then, is not restricted to positive religion; positive religion indicates the structure of the ethical as such, which is that in being ethical I must also sacrifice the ethical: “The relation to the other demands that I sacrifice the ethical, that is to say, ‘whatever obligates me to respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.’”40 What Abraham shows is that “in every genuine decision the ethical must be sacrificed” merely in order to be itself (158).41 Thus, “[a]ccording to the paradoxical logic of responsibility and irresponsibility, the ethical becomes possible precisely in the disturbing possibility of its suspension,” and as such it once more “forbids, indeed precludes, all ‘good conscience.’”42 Here again, de Vries does not hesitate to demonstrate the minimally theological – in this case, sacrificial – structure of all ethical and political decisions, even the most purportedly “secular.” This raises deep questions about the very history of metaphysics in the West, a topic pursued in Gwenäelle Aubry’s “Violence, Religion, Metaphysics,” where she discerns a potential counter-trend in Aristotle’s ontology.

Political Theology and Miracles If the ethical “becomes possible precisely in the disturbing possibility of its suspension,” as de Vries argues in Religion and Violence, this is no less true of the political. De Vries’s analysis of the relation between religion and violence opens onto a broader horizon in which the concept of violence, however central, is only one among many in a series of concepts that determine the political (as a philosophical category, and as both related to but distinct from politics) in its broadest extension, including sovereignty, authority, law, justice, and democracy. Here as elsewhere, de Vries avoids simply repeating Carl Schmitt’s thesis in Political Theology that all “significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized political concepts.”43 This assertion remains incomplete when it is not properly analyzed and situated, and it is in any case ambiguous in Schmitt, who oscillates between an historical or genealogical and a purely structural or analogical interpretation of his own thesis about the relation between political and theological categories.44 This

39 Ibid., 175. Emphasis added. 40 Ibid., 159. The citation is from Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 68. De Vries describes this as the ethico-political “double bind” embodied in the “binding” of Isaac. 41 Ibid., 158. 42 Ibid., 10. 43 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 38. 44 See de Vries, Religion and Violence, 216.

12  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster ambiguity alone suffices to undermine any straightforward conception of the relation between theology and the political as one of, say, mere transfer of a concept from one discourse to another, a translation without remainder or modification, etc. A related theme is explored in Burcht Pranger’s “Corpus Mysticum: Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hent de Vries,” where a discussion of De Lubac’s work and the Eucharist is harnessed to think about the mystical (i.e., performative and, therefore, ultimately groundless) foundations of sovereign authority. Despite his openness to a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research on the theologico-political, de Vries’s preferred interlocutors fall in the line that can be drawn from Schmitt and Benjamin through de Certeau and Derrida. The problem of the political, de Vries argues, concerns the manner in which sovereign power or authority is instituted no less than the manner in which it is maintained or interrupted. The possibility of sovereign power cannot be separated from the performativity of the act whereby it establishes the legal order ex nihilo – “miraculously,” so to speak. Nothing before, within, or beyond the legal order can legitimate this performative (indeed, passionate or illocutionary) act. This performativity of sovereign power opens the door both to reactionary affirmations of the authority of modern nation states to suspend the legal order in order to restore the legal order in states of emergency (Schmitt) as well as revolutionary affirmations of the authority of the proletariat to suspend the legal order in states of emergency (or even to bring them about in a “general proletarian strike”) in order to redeem history in an act of “divine violence” (Benjamin). These possibilities are both equally open, and it is not self-evidently the case that the latter contains any less risk than the former (Derrida and de Vries). Whatever the case may be, modern political philosophy ignores the theological foundations of the modern concept of sovereignty at its own peril, indeed at the risk of “obfuscation of the essence of the political” itself.45 Here, it is God’s creation of the natural order and his ability to interrupt it via miracle that is paradigmatic. Drawing on Jacob Taubes (another interlocutor no less important than those mentioned above), de Vries argues that “the miracle, in its formal structure – or in its messianic logic […] – reveals the most general and fundamental trait of the political event.”46 Hence de Vries’s long-standing interest in the histories and possibilities of the concept of the miracle as a metaphysical, theological, and political category, 47 as explored in Sari Nusseibeh’s “Are Miracles Possible? Avicenna Revisited” (which discusses the possibility of miracles via Avicenna’s

45 Ibid., 245. 46 Ibid., 237. 47 See de Vries, Miracles et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 2019; Le miracle au coeur de l’ordinaire (Compiègne: Éditions Les Belles Lettres, 2019).

Introduction 13 metaphysics) and Ilit Ferber’s “On Laws and Miracles” (which discusses the relationship between miracles and the ordinary by means of David Hume’s work).

Media, Miracles, and Special Effects Equally tied to the theologico-political is de Vries’s long-standing interest in media, which can be located as an extension of the basic “fact that, in most of its historical formations, the concept of the political has always been contingent, if not upon the authority or the explicit sanction of a dominant religion, then at least upon a plausible translation and renegotiation of the central categories of this religion’s historical beliefs, its central rituals, and their implicit politics.”48 From this, we can note—as was already clear, say, to Kant in his writings on religion, that the “question of religion cannot be addressed without incessant reference to the categories and the realm of the public,”49 thereby making questions of media and new media perpetually relevant and central to any discussion of religion, to the extent that “religion transpires through the media.”50 The form that new media takes becomes central to understanding the way in which the relationship between religion and the public is navigated. For example, it is striking, de Vries notes, that the publicity and reemergence of global religion in the contemporary world (whether in the form of the global war on terror or in the dizzying and profitable heights of Christian evangelicalism) increasingly occurs in the modality of television, a media form that operates “mostly in the privacy of one’s home,”51 thereby already rubbing against the construction, pursuit, and elaboration of a public and its interests. Equally, this tension unfolds in other ways, from the ways in which religion invokes the mechanical (ritual, repetition, the rote) and the mystical (miraculous, ephemeral, non-repeatable) to the global and the local to the singular and the diffuse. Throughout, we find a “digital and cybernated” culture that is both “mobilized and exploited” even as it is opposed and “identified as the … major enemy target.”52 De Vries is very much influenced here by and engaging with Derrida, who suggests that “[n]o faith, therefore, nor future without everything technical, automatic, machine-like supposed

48 Hent de Vries, “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Sphere, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. 49 de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 64n40. 50 “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Sphere, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” 16. 51 Ibid., 17f. 52 de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 18.

14  Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster by iterability.”53 Derrida continues, noting that such oppositions— especially between faith and mechanism—should instead be “thought together, as one and the same possibility.”54 Derrida, and also de Vries, are here influenced by Henri Bergson’s remarkable concluding claim to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where Bergson asserts that “the essential function of the universe” is to be “a machine for the making of gods.”55 Bergson notes that the human being is the sort of creature who, in virtue of its strengths and weaknesses, “must use matter as a support if he wants to get away from matter,” or as Bergson sums it up, “the mystical summons up the mechanical.”56 De Vries notes, rightly, that while this has always been true, “new media never merely convey the same message,” rather they “bring about a qualitative leap and instantiate a certain supplementary ambiguity as well.”57 A conceptualization of miracles, which are oftentimes regarded as the exclusive objects of theology or the philosophy of religion, are thereby leveraged by de Vries as part and parcel of this same discourse, where he notes that, “thinking about miracles has never been possible without introducing a certain technicity and, quite literally, manipulation.”58 This point ought to be obvious, if only in thinking about the alleged veracity or lack of veracity of any particular miraculous event. De Vries further shows how the notion of a miracle and the ways in which this notion has been conceptualized can also help us understand certain contemporary phenomena, namely “the increasingly complex relationships between, on the one hand, the real events of daily life—whether private, public or political—events that are too often considered to be purely absolute and spontaneous, natural data—and, on the other hand, those [events] which fall within the domain of manufacturing, artificial and calculated, technological and media.”59 In this way, de Vries suggests we might draw a “common thread” between miracles and special effects.60 Work as historically wide-ranging, disciplinarily ambitious, and philosophically sweeping as de Vries’s requires more elaboration that can be provided in a short introduction. There are important themes that have

53 See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47. This is cited in de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 17. 54 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” 48. 55 Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra, Cloudesley Brereton, and W. Horsfall Carter (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1935), 306. Cited in de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 16. 56 Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 298. 57 de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 33. 58 Ibid., 24. 59 Hent de Vries, Le miracle au coeur de l'ordinaire (Paris: Encre Marine, 2019), 16. 60 Ibid.

Introduction 15 emerged as central for de Vries which can only be hinted at in this introduction. Most notable of these, for example, is the notion of spiritual exercises, a notion that de Vries inherits from Pierre Hadot, even as he significantly transforms it, or the notion of the ordinary, a notion that de Vries navigates by means of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. In differing ways, this topic of spiritual exercises is explored in Alexandre Lefebvre’s “Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory: John Rawls with Hent de Vries,” Eli Friedlander’s “Spiritual Exercises in the Age of their Technological Reproducibility,” and Samantha Carmel’s “Violence Inside-Out: Staring into the Sun with Georges Bataille,” each chapter discussing figures as diverse as John Rawls, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Glimpses of each of these topics should already be apparent from the present discussion: the notion of spiritual exercises—glossed minimally as a phenomenon that is meant to transform the self61—is always already implicated with any sense of the ordinary—as a phenomenon phenomenologically involved with locating any self within a broader form of life—even as both are involved in any conceptualization of religion. Both of these features of human existence are fundamentally and unavoidably involved with alterity, with the concrete encounter with and acknowledgment of an Other, explored and cited in de Vries’s work through dialogue with figures as diverse as Adorno, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Levinas, and Derrida (just to cite the most prominent). Their work is marshaled, in part, to prioritize the notion of hermeneutic judgment, which is the linchpin for locating the self within a form of life, potentially pointing the self always beyond itself. Given his multifaceted and expansive conception of reason, and its deep relationship to religion and materiality—not to mention the relationship between the two—it is not surprising that de Vries’s work has found currency and use in domains and disciplines that extend far beyond the academic discipline of philosophy. This is evident in Mieke Bal’s “Religion as Pre-Text, Art as Counter-Text,” where the work of Indian artist, Nalini Malani, is marshaled to think about the political power of art. One way to understand this influence is to highlight that de Vries’s work is not a mere academic exercise. De Vries’s work is throughout guided by “a quasimoral concern, whose ‘normativity’ is not governed by criteria, norms, imperatives, or rules and whose ‘moral point of view,’ far from being disincarnated, touches upon the amorality of … other domains.”62 Such an approach is as inspiring and compelling as it is necessary, and it is an enduring testament to de Vries’s work that it has decisively transformed how religion is understood in both philosophy and the human sciences.

61 Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), 87ff. 62 de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 111.

1

Theology on Edge Tomoko Masuzawa

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States

Pearls are calcareous concretions of peculiar lustre, produced by certain molluscs, and valued as objects of personal ornament. It is believed that most pearls are formed by the intrusion of some foreign substance between the mantle of the mollusc and its shell, which, becoming a source of irritation, determines the deposition of nacreous matter in concentric layers until the substance is completely encysted. The popular notion that the disturbing object is commonly a grain of sand seems untenable; according to Dr. Gwyn Jeffreys and some other conchologists, it is in most cases a minute parasite; while Dr. Kelaart has suggested that it may be the frustule of a diatom, or even one of the ova of the pearl-producing mollusc itself. The experience of pearl-fishers shows that those shells which are irregular in shape and stunted in growth, or which bear excrescences, or are honeycombed by boring parasites, are those most likely to yield pearls. (“Pearl,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, vol. 18 (1885))

There is much that is confusing and equivocal about theology in current parlance of the English-speaking West. Among academics concerned with the question of religion, there are deep differences of opinion— though the disagreements are often shrouded in silence, be it of a polite, insolent, or nervous kind—as to the nature of theology’s relation, if any, to religious studies, to the academic study of religion, and to Religionswissenschaft. To complicate the matter, there is no consensus as to whether these latter three terms—and there are some others as well—mean the same thing, or similar enough things, genealogically related things, or perhaps have no meaningful relation at all. In this turbid landscape appeared, in 2005, a very large volume called Minimal Theologies. As the title of its original (and not quite so large) German edition, Theologie im pianissimo, makes clearer, the minimal-ness signaled here is not about the magnitude of confessional claims or about the territorial expanse of theology as a field of knowledge. Rather, it refers to an infinite attenuation of theology’s resonance, a sound that does not die out. There is something about this diminution-without-end— traversing the negative space of the apophatic—that rings antithetical DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-2

Theology on Edge 17 to a mere softening or a moribund atrophy. It seems to imply instead a certain intensification of the nerves, demanding an all-out effort and straining of the ear, as it were, to catch the ever more rarified intimation of god language. Put prosaically, this is an advanced theology at its most ruthlessly modern, and as such, it defies almost all of the ready-made pigeonholes to which “theology” has been customarily assigned. In this essay, I aim to consider the import of Minimal Theologies—a treatise on and of theology—by placing it against the backdrop of the current state of discourse about theology. This, to be sure, is to apply a rather blunt instrument to measure this work of extraordinary subtlety, precision, and force. Exercises of this sort would not likely further the path of thinking blazed by the book or enhance the illumination it sheds. The point, rather, is to reflect on the state of neuralgic disorder that characterizes today’s discourse surrounding theology, just at the moment when talk of “religion” and “theology” has become rampant in a domain far beyond the academic trade guild of religious studies. A more immediate and specific aim is to recover an aspect of the material historicity of theology as a discursive tradition, and, possibly, to find a point of entry into a future reconsideration of the ways in which theology is positioned (or not) in relation to the study of religion. What has “theology” been in different moments in the history of the Latin West? How far back does its tradition date? To the Middle Ages, to the Church Fathers of late antiquity, or even to Biblical times? If these were indeed its exemplary instances, what did “theology” look like—with or without that particular moniker attached to it—in each of these historical moments? What has been the relation between theology on the one hand and what might be tolerably called “religion,” or more specifically the “religion of Christianity,” on the other? What about the relation between theology and the learned professions, or perhaps more specifically, institutions of higher learning? How have these relations changed over the past centuries? What factors observable in recent history have brought on the present condition where theology has now come to appear—as exemplified by the volume in question—in the form of apophatic minimalism? We may enter the deliberation through this last question. *** Confronted at the outset by theology’s extreme attenuation, an incidental reader of Minimal Theologies—say, an amateur philosopher with only a casual acquaintance with the field of theology1—might blanch. This could easily happen because, for one thing, there have been some

1 I could be described as one in any circumstance other than the present.

18  Tomoko Masuzawa very loud theologies around, especially in North America, so much so that we are often inclined to identify “theology” precisely with those emphatic, unapologetically assertive pronouncements; in other words, we are in the habit of calling it “theological” and “dogmatic” whenever we meet the kind of asseverations that appeal to higher authorities beyond the ordinary or ordinarily accessible, and on that account, purport to rise above all possible counter-arguments that might challenge them. And this may not be so far-fetched when we consider that, to bolster such claims for carte blanche legitimacy and blanket immunity from criticism, learned proponents of those vociferous theologies could refer to some well-known sayings attributed to one or another of the ancient Church Fathers, the best known of which may be: Credo non quod, sed quia absurdum est. 2 Whatever its original import, this dictum is often cited as a way of suggesting that improbability, or even absurdity, is no bar to religious truth-claims, when such claims are based on revelation or personal experience; and that, when push comes to shove, theology could revoke any routine procedures of the mundane sciences and even fly in the face of logic. These, to be sure, are not the only theologies that have been around. For the last two centuries or more, theologies of quite another sort, which generally aim to strike a more even tone, have been staking out a regular place in the modern university and, indeed, cornering sizeable territory in the ever-changing landscape of the modern learned profession. Theologies in this register—which we may call, loosely and collectively, academic theology—seem to be intent on enunciating at no higher volume than occasional mezzo forte. In any event, its voice is never meant to be shrill, and its style is to be marked by equanimity, not passion. Consistent with this ideal of mental and dispositional sobriety, academic theology refrains from demanding what Max Weber called “sacrifice of the intellect”; it does not require or recommend that one renounce either logic or scientific method. On the contrary, foremost among the public missions of academic theology appears to be to establish its own profile as a bona fide Wissenschaft, that is, as a distinct, coherent, and systematic knowledge-practice on an equal footing and, in theory, commensurate with other sciences. As such, academic theology on the whole claims to be predicated on the principle of sound reasoning, possessing a materially definable sphere of reality proper to itself, even if the question of what exactly constitutes that sphere may never be easily settled. Such, as it appears, has been the condition of

2 Max Weber, who quotes this in the last pages of his famous lecture, “Science as a Vocation” (1917), attributes it to St. Augustine, whereas today’s textbook accounts more commonly credit Tertullian. “Science as a Vocation,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 1–31, at 29.

Theology on Edge 19 theology that has taken up residence in the university at least since the nineteenth century. 3 The great range of discursive activities in academic settings that have come to be called theology, its long history, as well as the ever recurrent and multifarious attempts to systematize its copious contents, all these factors render it difficult to circumscribe just what should count as academic theology. That said, from a certain perspective, Minimal Theologies is undoubtedly a superlative example that stands at its vanguard; it marks a frontier of this genre, its extremity, the edge. At the same time, this treatise constitutes a class of its own. The vista it opens up is not of any familiar kind; some might say it is well-nigh unrecognizable. In effect, Minimal Theologies belongs to the genre of academic theology by virtue of exceeding it, by transgressing its boundaries. This paradoxical positioning, to my mind, offers more than one advantage. For, not only does it illuminate a new horizon of metaphysical thinking, but it also affords an opportunity to consider afresh the peculiar location and functionality of theology in relation to the longer and broader history of intellectual discourses in the Latin West. From this expanded perspective, the Middle Ages may be recognized

3 Its extent and diversity can be gleaned from any number of treatises that survey its history. While these historical accounts themselves may be variable, they typically inform us that the claim for theology to be a science—that is scientia, rather than sapientia, or “wisdom”—dates back no earlier than the thirteenth century, roughly the same time that the term theologia came into use more or less in its currently recognizable sense, and in the sense particularly associated with Christianity. (See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. Francis McDonagh [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976)] 7–14.) Despite all the credit that may rightly go to Aquinas and the tradition of scholasticism that he is said to have initiated—and despite the fact that his most important compendium is known to us as the Summa Theologiae (or “summary of theology”)—it seems doubtful, according to some medievalist historians, that either the concept or the term “theology” had any appreciable function for Aquinas himself. “The term theology is used in two fundamentally distinct senses: first, in the sense of what we could term natural or rational theology, but what Aquinas will designate as ‘first philosophy’; second, in the sense of what his later commentators will designate as dogmatic theology and what Aquinas himself refers to as sacred doctrine, the teachings of faith or simply Christian theology and ‘things which have been divinely revealed.’” John A. Mourant, “Aquinas and Theology,” Franciscan Studies, 16:3 (1956) 202–212, at 202–203. See also G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: the Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 29. A more meaningful place to look for the point of inception for academic theology in our sense of the term may be Schleiermacher, the first Dean of Theology Faculty at the newly established University of Berlin, and his brief but famous programmatic treatise, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811). (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, trans. William Farrer [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1850]). Cf. John M. Stroup, “The Idea of Theological Education at the University of Berlin: From Schleiermacher to Harnack,” in Schools of Thought in the Christian Tradition, ed. Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 152–176.

20  Tomoko Masuzawa as the point of origin for both academic theology proper and its institutional setting: the university. And it is to this latter endeavor—to revisit and reassess the positioning of theology in the history of the university—that this essay aims to make a modest overture. To be sure, wishing to make even a small dent in a subject as monumental as this might seem a preposterous ambition, immediately raising the question of why such a reconsideration is necessary in the first place. My grounds, admittedly, are not much more than a suspicion that we, the denizens of modern times, might be habitually inflating and therefore consistently overestimating the centrality, the power, and the hegemonic overlordship of theology in the premodern world, particularly when it comes to the Middle Ages.4 This suspicion first germinated while I was attempting to sketch a wide-angle overview of the curricular structures of the first universities that came into existence in the Latin West, that is, those emerging in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In brief, this glancing survey revealed two points of particular interest. First, among the oldest universities, Bologna and Paris, which are universally acknowledged to be the two most important prototypes, were very differently structured from the beginning and have never come to resemble each other since. Bologna was indeed a prototype for almost all universities emerging in those early centuries, whereas Paris was anomalous and nearly unique, with the exception of two English universities that came to be, in tandem, modeled after Paris. The University of Paris, which ceased to exist as such in the late eighteenth century, nevertheless left its indelible mark, as it eventually became the prototype for an overwhelming majority of the universities originating in the late medieval to early modern centuries, most of which were to be located in the north, particularly in the Germanic lands. Second, modern scholarship on the history of the university has hitherto focused heavily—in fact, disproportionately—on Paris and its progeny in the north. The impact of Paris is undeniable; for instance, it was the University of Paris that established the now-familiar configuration of four faculties, comprising one “lower” (Arts and Sciences) and three “higher” (Theology, Law, and Medicine); and it was Paris that originated the very idea, and the term “faculty.” And we have come to imagine this configuration as the ideal, if not universal, form in which all medieval universities were constituted. But historically speaking, Paris was an exception; other universities were quite differently structured. Bologna exemplified this other type, and it comprised, on one hand, a school of law (subdivided into civil law and canon law), and on the other, a school of medicine and the arts. Theology was not to be found within its precincts. 5

4 This impression of course is not original with me. See for example Bernard McGinn, “Regina quondam…,” Speculum, 83/4 (2008) 817–839. 5 I have discussed this matter at greater length in another essay, Tomoko Masuzawa, “Theology, the Fairy Queen,” Modern Intellectual History, 18 (2021) 1–24, at 13–19.

Theology on Edge 21 The upshot may be stated as follows: our overemphasis on the Paris and its progeny—we might call this a “northern prejudice”6 —has distorted our view of the medieval university and, in particular, our notion of the place (or not) of theology within it. As a way of working toward correcting this refracted vision and reorienting our perspective, we may begin by briefly rehearsing some aspects of the medieval university and the circumstances of its origination. *** The geographical location of the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was predominantly the western Mediterranean. Being the earliest and a numerical majority, these universities first emerging in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and what is today the south of France—i.e., region known as le Midi or Mezzogiorno7—reflected the historical circumstances of the university’s arising. By the same token, they may be said to embody its raison d’etre as an altogether new institution at this time, in contrast to those universities that came to be founded—usually by fiat of regional rulers—in the late medieval to early modern era.8 Among the defining attributes of the earliest universities, none is more important than its character as a self-forming guild, that is, selfgoverning corporations of masters (i.e., teachers) and scholars (students).9 Chartered corporations were in fact new and burgeoning societal entities in this period; they were novel entities made possible by legal principles and technologies derived from classical Roman jurisprudence,

6 This is not a recent phenomenon but at least as old as Gibbon, Kant, and John Henry Newman, to cite but a few of the most celebrated (but historically unfounded) pronouncements on the origin and the nature of the university. 7 The area includes such notable early university towns as Montpellier, Toulouse, and Avignon. Modern historians often unhelpfully categorize these universities as “French,” as we see for example in Hastings Rashdall’s highly influential three-volume work, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1895 (Oxford University Press, 1936). See vol II, pp. 115–210. We would do well to remember that this region belonged to the Mediterranean world and was politically distinct from the Frankish north until the fourteenth century, and culturally and linguistically different even longer. 8 See a series of maps included in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 68–74. 9 Exceptions in their mode of origination are, first, the University of Naples (1224) founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and, second, the studium of the Roman Curia (1245)—the first “university” in Rome founded through the efforts of a series of popes from Gregory IX to Innocent IV, all bitter rivals of the Emperor. Cf. Aleksander Gieysztor, “Management and Resources,” in Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages, 108–143, at 110–111. The subsequent development of these two universities, however, is said to have conformed to the character of other Italian universities. Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 41–64.

22  Tomoko Masuzawa itself a recently rediscovered and reactivated tradition in the Latin West. The rise of the university was therefore not only contemporaneous with but also structurally parallel and constitutionally akin to other developing self-governing communities, or commonwealths, which included various professional trade guilds, incorporated townships and free citystates, and, in the religious sphere, collegiate churches as well as certain new monastic and mendicant orders.10 As a corporation and guild of the learned, the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries enjoyed the status and privileges of an institution that was not only administratively but also jurisdictionally independent from both church and state. This relative independence and freedom that was characteristic of the early universities stands in sharp contrast to what the university was to become in later eras.11 When the position and the status of theology in the universities of those early centuries are comprehensively considered, it becomes immediately apparent that, with the exception of Paris (and the two English universities that followed suit), a faculty of theology did not exist. Being largely absent, then, theology was in no position to lord over other faculties. To be sure, it is probable that some sort of theological instruction was taking place in the vicinity of the university, either in the same municipality or, more likely, in some nearby monasteries and friaries; and that there was a degree of confluence, if not exactly cooperation, between the university and those who were instructing and being instructed in the monastic or mendicant orders, especially with regard to the more rudimentary or preparatory stages of study in the arts (i.e., so-called trivium and quadrivium). But such activities were at best institutionally peripheral to the university proper. As the Italian universities are the most typical in this regard, theological

10 Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150-1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially pp. 19–28. It may be kept in mind, moreover, that during this period the term universitas referred to selfformed political communities, or commonwealths, in all these forms, whereas the guilds of masters and scholars (i.e., “university” in our sense) were more commonly called studia generalia. Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1957; originally published in 1923), 4–5. 11 The contrast was greatest in comparison to those universities of late medieval and early modern founding. There is of course much to be said about this claim as well as about its corollary, namely, that the university’s relation to both church and state changed substantially beginning in the fourteenth century. A succinct and useful discussion can be found, for example, in Paolo Nardi’s chapter entitled “Relation with Authority” in Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens [volume I of A History of the University in Europe, general ed., Walter Rüegg] (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 77–107. The transformation that began in the Late Middle Ages became even more pronounced and radical in the early modern period, which can be observed in a parallel essay, also entitled “Relation with Authority” by Notker Hammerstein, in the volume II, the volume-specific title of which is Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800) (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113–153.

Theology on Edge 23 instruction was conducted not as an integral part of the university but outside of it, both physically and institutionally.12 It is therefore fair to say that, in the universities in their original condition—which on that account we may call with some justice quintessentially medieval universities—theology as a philosophical, metaphysical, and scholastic sort of learning, that is, academic theology as we understand it now was as yet largely alien to the new institution; it was yet to be integrated into the university curriculum, and there is no evidence, moreover, to indicate that those within the university during this period expected that a theology faculty should ever come to exist among them. This situation, however contrary to today’s pervasive assumptions, becomes readily understandable when we call to mind the circumstances of the university’s arising. *** What brought the university into existence? While modern historians are in agreement as regards the time—it is squarely in the twelfth century—their emphases vary when it comes to the question of principal causes or instigating factors. Some scholars attribute this development primarily to the overall societal maturity of the Latin West, thus stressing the factors internal to the West.13 But even in the eyes of such West-centric scholars, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the initial stimulus and, more substantially, the very content of university instruction came from outside. As the pioneering American medievalist of the early twentieth century Charles Homer Haskins definitively stated, beginning sometime in the eleventh century, there was a sudden and massive influx of new knowledge coming to the Latin West from elsewhere, primarily through two portals: on the one hand, Iberia, where Islamic and Jewish scholarship had been flourishing for centuries, and on the other, southern Italy (Sicily and Naples in particular) where the confluence of both Byzantine Greek and Arabo-Islamic knowledge and cultures had been particularly rich. All of that flooded in to create a situation where an entirely new sort of institution for higher learning

12 This is well documented by scholars who study the medieval universities in the western Mediterranean region, especially Italy. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Curriculum of the Italian Universities from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, vol. 4 (Rome, 1996; originally published in 1984), 75–96; Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. 13 This tendency is particularly strong among historians who concern themselves with the northern universities (in the sense discussed above). See for example Stephen C. Ferruolo, Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100-1215 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Alan B. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

24  Tomoko Masuzawa could not but arise.14 In short, all of the new sciences and philosophies that created the groundswell—from the knowledge of Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy to Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides, to name some of the earliest and the latest—were foreign and hitherto unknown to the Latin West, and none of them were Christian.15 In fact, as Dag Nikolaus Hasse observed in a recent study: It is a remarkable feature of the history of European universities that Arabic authors had an important place in the university for several centuries, especially in medicine, philosophy, and astrology. […] The students of universities of the Christian world read very few Christian authors… The bulk of teaching was on Greek and Arabic authors. The firm rooting of Arabic works in medieval curricula is the backbone of their long-lasting reception in the Latin West.16 If such a list of characters as mentioned above constituted the core curriculum of the university education, it is no mystery that theology did not immediately find a suitable place among them, let alone a ruling seat. For, what would this formidable procession of Pagan philosophers, Muslim infidel doctors, and benighted Jewish polymaths have to offer to benefit the knowledge and wisdom of the Latin Church? This being the general outlook of the university at its origin, it is entirely unsurprising that, for Christian theology to be integrated into the milieu of the university, there had to be considerable work of mediation—including the work of mitigation and neutralization of heterogenous and potentially inimical elements—before any of these ancient and foreign authorities could be rendered safe, salubrious, and productive. This process of mediation in fact did take place in the course of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.17 The main stage was Paris, and this 14 “So long as knowledge was limited to the seven liberal arts of the early Middle Ages, there could be no universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which did duty for an academic curriculum.” Charles Homer Haskins, Rise of Universities, 4. 15 Before this time, classical Greek knowledge had been systematically translated and comprehensively transmitted, nurtured, and developed in the largely Arabic-speaking Islamic world, particularly through the efforts of the Abbasid Caliphate from the late eighth to the eleventh century. See Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abb āsid Society (New York: Routledge, 1998); Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the ‘Abbasid Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 16 Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Successes and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) 17. 17 Regarding this gradual process of theology’s absorption of Arabic sciences and philosophies, see Etienne Gilson, The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), especially “Part 6: Early Scholasticism” and “Part 7: Theology and Learning,” pp. 235–324.

Theology on Edge 25 was owing to several reasons specific to the city and the region.18 In connection to this historic turn of events, moreover, the name of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) stands as a towering monument to the success of this synthesis and amalgamation.19 A brilliant Italian youth, Thomas, was first sent by his noble parents to the imperial University of Naples, which had been recently founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, known as “the Great” (he was also an arch-rival of several popes on multiple issues, including the Crusades), in order to promote the study of civil law. The young Thomas, however, defied his parents and, with the help of some wily Dominican friars, soon defected to Rome, and eventually to Paris, in order to pursue studies in theology instead. The historic outcome of this was nothing less than the birth of what has since been called scholasticism, the first academic theology proper. The essential formula for the transfiguration of the Greco-Arabic learning in the service of theology may be summarized thus: Aristotelian logic and metaphysics tailored to suit Latin Christian doctrine, with a little help from Averroes, but not too much. This turn of events, often dubbed the “Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas,” has been one of the most celebrated themes in the Latin Christian art, numerously represented by renowned European painters beginning in the early fourteenth century, that is, as early as the time of Thomas’s canonization. In some of the most monumental and wellknown versions—for instance, paintings by Lippo Memmi (ca. 1323), Andrea di Bonaiuto (1365–1367), and Benozzo Gozzoli (ca. 1471)—an oversized Thomas is typically flanked by Plato and Aristotle, with the “defeated” Averroes at his feet in variously dejected postures of ignominy, clutching his book of commentaries on Aristotle, or his book lying nearby, half abandoned. 20 In some later renditions of this picture, Averroes is no longer acknowledged as a critical conduit of the Greek greats but merely set among other heretics vanquished by the triumphant church over the centuries. 21

18 Marcia L. Colish, “Teaching and Learning Theology in Medieval Paris,” in Schools of Thought in the Christian Tradition, ed. Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 106–124. 19 Etienne Gilson, “Part 8: The Golden Age of Scholasticism,” in The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 325–383, esp. 361–383. 20 For a close analysis of these paintings, and particularly that by Memmi, see Joseph Polzer, “The ‘Triumph of Thomas’ Panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa. Meaning and Date,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorishen Institutes in Florenz, vol. 37, no. 1 (1993) 29–70. 21 For example, in the “Triumph of Thomas Aquinas” panel in the cloister of San Marco, Florence (fifteenth century), and a small panel by Giorgio Vasari, now dismantled. Cf. Liana de Girolami Cheney, “Giorgio Vasari, Saint Thomas of Aquinas and the Heretics in the Chapel of Pius V: A New Discovery,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture, vol. 39, no. 1 (2013), 111–133.

26  Tomoko Masuzawa

Lippo Memmi, Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Santa Caterina (Pisa)

Theology on Edge 27

 ndrea di Bonaiuto, Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, (detail), Spanish Chapel, A Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

B enozzo Gozzoli, Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas (detail), Louvre Museum

28  Tomoko Masuzawa This parade of images, monumental artworks located in prominent locations all, may impart an impression—a false one, as it turns out—that by the fourteenth century or so, the Muslim sage once so revered not only as an indispensable explicator of classical Greek science but also as an astute philosopher in his own right was thoroughly repudiated and castigated, as the Latins learned to get their own Aristotle, so to speak, “directly” from the Greek commentators, thus skirting the invidious Arabic mediation. In this picture—as represented in all of the above-mentioned paintings, but by Lippo Memmi in particular—the victorious Thomist theology is front and center, and the rays of theological enlightenment emanate from this center, while Thomas himself, or his halo, is showered with rays darting not only from Plato and Aristotle by his side but also from the higher Christian authorities, comprising the four Evangelists, Paul, and Moses, each holding his book (or tablet), the source of each ray; and finally, above them all, the multiple strands of golden light issue from the mouth of the Lord Jesus, the Word Himself. It is hardly necessary to mention that this was the theologians’ perspectives. However much we today may champion this image and presume it to be a representation of the mindset of the Middle Ages, there is ample evidence to suggest that the rest of the medieval world had other ideas. For one thing, it appears that scientists and philosophers—particularly those in the universities—went on to extol the learning and the virtues of the Arabic authors in general and Averroes and Avicenna in particular, for many more centuries thereafter. For, as Hasse has demonstrated with much specificity, well beyond the Renaissance period, the Latin translations of Arabic works continued to be reproduced, compiled anew, and sold in large quantities. Nothing testifies to the early modern appetite for those texts more vividly than the numbers of editions of those Arabic authors that were printed, with Averroes topping the list at 114 editions, followed by Avicenna’s 73, and 2 other physicians with similar numbers. “Altogether forty-four Arabic authors were available in Latin edition [before 1700],” observes Hasse, of which “the great majority of editions appeared before 1600.” These numbers— in comparison to, for example, Abelard’s one and Roger Bacon’s two editions—would be hard to explain away. 22 It goes without saying that the primary (if not exclusive) market for these books was the university and, in particular, schools of medicine and the arts. In addition to the extant statistics regarding early printed books, there remains the record of a number of university statutes that prescribed the reading of such Arabic texts, including Averroes, but especially Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine (originally completed in 1025), which is said to have “assumed a central position in medical education, especially in the dominant universities in the field: Montpelier, Paris, Bologna, and Padua.”23 This is as much to say

22 Hasse, Successes and Suppression, 7–27; quotation at 7. 23 Hasse, Successes and Suppression, 17–18.

Theology on Edge 29 that, despite the opinion of their colleagues in theology, the inmates of the University of Paris did not stop reading—indeed, never stopped requiring the reading of—the Arabic authorities. The medical historian Nancy Siraisi has shown that this practice of giving such weight to Arabic medicine was not limited to a few Mediterranean universities in the South but permeated much of the Latin West, and that the condition persisted well into the eighteenth century.24 Seen from this perspective, then, it is evident that the Thomist victory over Averroes the heretic was a matter relevant only to the theology faculty; the rest of the university—even in Paris—went their own way, little encumbered by the theologians’ opinions and, for the most part, it appears that they managed to avoid censure by the church. In sum, it was with reason that theology lagged behind other sciences in finding a foothold in the university. And it was no doubt in Paris that a theology faculty was first established, though, as with all other university corporations originating in this period, its exact point of origin is shrouded in the mist of pre-history. What is certain is that, by the time Paris’s first university statutes came to be written in the early thirteenth century, theology was counted among its four faculties. There is, however, much to cast doubt on the notion that it was preeminent. Why did theology make its way into the university in Paris? To consider factors at the infrastructural level, we may recall that, as much as a century before the legal establishment of the University, the city of Paris had been attracting numerous aspiring youths from all over the Latin West hoping to receive the best and the latest in theological education—or what we today would recognize as such, avant la lettre. We may surmise that this was largely due to Paris’s already well-established reputation as a hub of the most illustrious dialecticians and metaphysicians of the time who were teaching at the cathedral school of Notre Dame or in one or the other of the monastic schools in the environs. As the career trajectory of Thomas Aquinas was but one example, nearly all of the most renowned theologians of the period passed through the gates of Paris, some as teaching masters, and many more as students. Accordingly, this rare and conspicuous faculty of theology became a mark of distinction of the University of Paris, or even, according to the opinion of some within, its crowning jewel. But evidence abounds that this lofty reputation was not shared by their contemporaries elsewhere, or those belonging to other faculties in Paris, for that matter. Furthermore, it is well attested that few other universities—and none in the South—exhibited any inclination to incorporate a theological faculty into their premise. From our perspective today, it might seem rather puzzling

24 Hasse, Successes and Suppression, 19. Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); idem, History, Medicine, and the Tradition of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

30  Tomoko Masuzawa that no theology faculty emerged in any of the universities in Italy, that is, in the “pope’s backyard,” as some modern historians called it. But if the papal court in Rome was not eager to embrace theological instruction in the university, this was not because the church was indifferent to university affairs; far from it. It meant rather that the church’s primary interests and investments lay elsewhere in the university, as we shall see below. *** Momentous though the fresh infusion of Greco-Arabic sciences and philosophies was for the rise of the university, this was not the only impetus for its development. Arguably, even more important and, some would say more critical, was the rediscovery of the Roman legal tradition that was taking place around the same time.25 This turn of events, too, was not unrelated to the increased traffic with the East. To be sure, in some other circumstance, the recovery of classical Roman jurisprudence occurring in northern Italy— somewhere near Bologna, perhaps Pisa, as legends would have it—might be thought to be a matter more or less internal to the West, insofar as the ultimate source of this tradition was none other than the city of Rome and the Empire it came to rule. But the actual circumstance, and the historical course leading up to that moment in the eleventh century, had been such that there was no unbroken line of direct transmission between the ancient and the medieval in this regard. For, as we know, when Constantine I relocated the capital of the Roman Empire far to the East in the early fourth century, the center of the juridical operation of the Empire shifted eastward as well; accordingly, the imperial legal system continued to function and went on to accumulate its legacy for many more centuries in the East, that is to say, not in Latin-speaking Rome, but in largely Greek-speaking Constantinople. Meanwhile, in the West, the legal system of the Empire had seriously eroded, its jurisdiction irregularly fragmented, especially after the political demise of the western half of the Empire in the fifth century. It would be inaccurate to say that knowledge of Roman law had been altogether lost in the post-imperial West. On one hand, elements of the ancient legal system had worked their way into the formation of canon law, the all-important governing instrument of the emerging Christian church; on the other hand, Roman law (just as many other aspects of the Empire) exerted considerable influence in the development of regional secular laws—i.e., the so-called “tribal,” “Germanic,” or “barbarian” courts— which came to replace the imperial system in the West. That said, it is nonetheless indisputable that it was not these piecemeal adaptations by the “barbarian” West but the Byzantine imperial court system that not only

25 Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Theology on Edge 31 preserved but also carried forward the Roman legal tradition as a universal principle of justice. And it was the generations of Byzantine emperors presiding in this “new Rome” who periodically issued decrees ordering the systematization of laws and legal opinions accumulated over preceding decades and centuries. The most celebrated instance of this was the compilation by Justinian I, or what is known as Corpus Iuris Civilis, popularly and metonymically called “Justinian Code” (529–534). And it was this massive body of legal literature that, more than five centuries after its completion, the Latins came upon and adopted for their own use, to incalculable and lasting consequences thenceforward. It is therefore of little account precisely where or how a copy or copies of this compendium came into the possession of the Latins. Of far greater significance is the fact that what was then discovered in the West was this imperial document dating back to the sixth-century Byzantine court—which, to all concerned at the time, East or West, was still the Roman Empire—and that this literature was in some respects nearly as “new” and foreign to the Latins of the time as the knowledge of Aristotle, Galen, Averroes, or Avicenna. 26 The impact of the rediscovery of the Roman jurisprudence on the university—i.e., on the origination and immediate efflorescence of the university—was direct, massive, and multifarious. To begin, the robust function of sophisticated legal technology that was becoming available as a result of this recovery made it possible for the emerging population of teachers and students to organize themselves not merely as a voluntary collective but as a corporate body with specific rights and privileges. Though this process often took decades, sometimes even a century, it finally created the domain of learning and scholarship as an unprecedented, legally speaking, third realm of power, that is, as studium, sanctioned by, yet independent from, both church (sacerdotium) and state (regnum, or imperium). Today, we may hark back to this medieval legal principle, which rendered the university as the third realm of power, as a reference point or perhaps even a cornerstone of the concept of academic freedom. Ironically—that is, contrary to the assumptions of many moderns who are in the habit of thinking that things generally get better, freer, and more secular over time—this principle of academy’s institutional independence, mandated de jure (if not realized entirely de facto) in the earliest centuries of the university’s existence, would come to be seriously compromised in the centuries that followed. Laying legal grounds for its corporate status was an indispensable and foundational role that the revival of Roman law played for the cause of the university. This, however vital, was by no means all. A far more extensive

26 The point here is not to stress the “borrowed” nature of this body of knowledge, hence the “indebtedness” of the Latin West to elsewhere; rather, it was the newness and the prima facie alienness of this knowledge at the time of the Latins’ discovery that had the effect of challenging and transforming the status quo ante.

32  Tomoko Masuzawa material impact is plainly in sight. A glance at various statistical records from the universities of the twelfth and thirteen centuries would readily and incontrovertibly testify that by far the most preeminent faculty was that of law. A vast majority of medieval university students were studying law, that is, either canon law or civil law, or, not infrequently, both (doctor juris utriusque). When the two wings of the law are thus considered together, in almost all universities, the law faculty constituted an absolute, sometimes overwhelming majority. 27 On the whole, law professors were far better remunerated in comparison to all others, and the law graduates had the best and the most immediate prospects for lucrative and high-ranking employment. This was because the secular state courts at all levels—municipal, royal, as well as imperial—and, not least, the church itself needed, valued, and rewarded university graduates with legal expertise. It should come as no surprise, then, that among the most eminent prelates of the church— bishops, cardinals, and popes—there were far more canon lawyers than those with doctorates in theology. All this effectively meant that, in the new reality that dawned by the twelfth century, juridical wherewithal made any institution powerful, and therefore it was in the vital interest of the Latin church—which was then growing ever stronger and increasingly centralized, and at the same time in fierce competition with various secular state powers28 —to acquire as many well-trained jurists as possible, and at the same time, to curb the number of future lawyers who would enter into the service of emperors, kings, and magistrates. In short, at this turn of Latin European history, the emergent legal culture was veritably revolutionizing and galvanizing society in every sphere, and every arena where there was a body to exercise power. And the Latin Church, increasingly centered in Rome, had the ambition to become the greatest and the universal—that is, catholic—of them all. ***

27 “Every medieval university offered degrees in canon law. Because some acquaintance with Roman law was essential for canonists, moreover, most universities provided some teaching in Roman law, although not all offered degrees in it. Nearly all universities taught the liberal arts and many could boast a medical faculty as well. Very few, however, offered organized teaching in theology: Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge were the only universities authorized to confer theology degrees before 1300.” James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 244. It may be noted in addition that even in the Paris-styled University of Oxford with a relatively robust theological faculty—and in the country ruled by common law, where civil law therefore did not apply—the law faculty (canon and civil laws combined) outnumbered theology. Cf. T. H. Aston, “Oxford’s Medieval Alumni,” Past and Present, 74 (1977), 3–40, at 9–16. 28 Cf. Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Theology on Edge 33 In sum, there are broadly speaking two main reasons for the marginality of theology in the university of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One is that the very subject matter, or the intellectual tradition of theology as it had developed in the Latin West up to that point—which was essentially an ecclesiastical and monastic tradition—was fundamentally alien to the body of knowledge that caused the university to be established. This alienness and the consequent marginality of theology was manifest not only conceptually but institutionally as well, though with Paris as a conspicuous exception. Secondly, theology graduates were vastly outnumbered by others, particularly by lawyers. Moreover, the dominance of the legally trained over the theologically trained—not merely numerically but also in terms of their societal prestige—was an indisputable reality within the church organization itself. In effect, theology was marginal not only within the university but also in the church. To be outnumbered does not have to mean that the party of the numerical minority was thus negligible. It is at least conceivable that the scarcity of those with theological expertise might enhance their value precisely because of their rarity; such was indeed the opinion of some—perhaps most—of the Paris theologians, whose doctorate could be earned only after many years of study. (Posterity seems to have taken this claim of self-worth largely at face value.) But even so, it is difficult to deny, or ignore, all the other factors and senses in which theology during this period was peripheral and marginal. For better or for worse, theology dwelt, perhaps even thrived, on the edge. Was theology ever at the center rather than on the margin? Was there a time—some time before the fateful twelfth and thirteenth centuries—when theology reigned as the very font of knowledge and wisdom that governed the world, or at least when theology presided as an indomitable authority within the medieval sanctuaries of monasteries and the church? And was such an irenic felicity of religious life really a proper context for theology? It seems to me doubtful that to practice theology has ever been a matter of continuous, seamless rolling out of the undulating fabric of belief. Posterity may hold in high esteem an Abelard, a Thomas, or even an Ockham as an apotheosis of the Church Triumphant, now that they are blessedly mainstream and each secure in his position as an inexhaustible source of Christian truth. But for all we know, their lives were lived on the edge. Their victory as the paramount theologians of all time came posthumously; it was earned through a lifelong series of polemics and strife, mental as well as otherwise, some less irenic than others. From a historical point of view, then, it might be a mistake to try to comprehend the nature of theology by insisting on beginning with the image of its triumphs ex post facto. For, in real time, theology worthy of its name often—perhaps always—has dwelt in the outer zone of infinite danger, negotiating with some foreign agents, taking risks to contain unwelcome commotion, an intruder, or possibly, an enemy. That said, every once in a while, the struggle seems to result in a permanent asset, a gem.

2

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics Gwenaëlle Aubry

Centre National de la Recherche Scientific, Paris, France

Translated by Jacob Levi

The thought of Hent de Vries is traversed in its entirety by the question of violence. In the patient and disquieting formulations that are proposed in the trilogy comprising Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Religion and Violence, and Minimal Theologies, the dialogue with Jacques Derrida occupies a privileged position. The question of violence is articulated in the first place for de Vries and Derrida in terms of foundation, or more precisely what Derrida calls the “paradox” of foundation, namely, the fact that “the foundation of law – law of the law, institution of the institution, origin of the constitution – is a ‘performative’ event that cannot belong to the set that it founds, inaugurates, or justifies.”1 This is what Derrida names, in a double echo of Montaigne and Pascal, “the mystical foundation of authority.”2 De Vries in turn probes and deploys this motif, notably by demonstrating its relationship with Kierkegaard’s horror religiosus, Adorno’s horror (Grauen), and even Levinas’s “il y a.”3 Derridean deconstruction operates as the matrix which, over the long term and for multiple traditions, allows the interrogation and manifestation of this “‘outside’ and ‘exteriority’ – or, what comes down to the same, [this] deep-down ‘Inside’ and ‘interiority’ – that is [this] nondiscursive element or ferment that surrounds and pervades, enables and threatens the life of words and concepts, arguments and style” (Minimal Theologies, 545). While exploring this intimate other of reason, this collapsed foundation whose exposition is the best way to take apart its potentially catastrophic effects, de Vries accompanies Derrida’s reflection on the violence within the metaphysical tradition. The key text here is the critical commentary that Derrida consecrates to Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics,” a hermeneutic gesture which de Vries extends in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and Religion and Violence, and whose importance is even more

1 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 57. 2 Ibid. Cf. also “Force of Law,” 230. 3 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence, chap. II; Minimal Theologies, 556.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-3

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 35 essential in his own progression because Levinas was his first “hero.”4 As Derrida formulates it, Levinas’ project consists in restoring metaphysics “in opposition to the entire tradition derived from Aristotle,” and by connecting it to ethics, that is, to the “nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other” (“Violence and Metaphysics,” 102). This identification of metaphysics with ethics goes together with its identification with religion, insofar as the ethical and the religious relation are identically relation to transcendence. Identified as such, metaphysics, ethics, and religion are together in opposition to ontology, understood as egology and tautology, the primacy of the same, and the self, over the other. To characterize ontology in this way designates it as an intrinsically violent philosophy since, according to the extensive definition that Levinas offers, violence is precisely subsuming the other under the same.5 Derrida’s critical strategy consists in reinscribing violence in an economy. The first moment of “Violence and Metaphysics” already mobilizes, regarding and in defense of Husserl, the notion of “transcendental violence,” that is, the idea that the relation to the other is relation to another transcendental ego who constitutes the world in the same way as myself rather than being constituted by it, “the irreducible violence of the relation to the other” being, writes Derrida, “at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other” (128–129). In the second moment, entitled “Of Ontological Violence,” Derrida likewise objects to Levinas, this time in defense of Heideggerian ontology, that the thinking of being is the condition for ethics, and not its denial. “Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power,” writes Levinas in Totality and Infinity (46). But Derrida responds that the thinking of being, insofar as it is not intra-ontic, not a “first philosophy concerned with the archi-existent, […] is neither concerned with, nor exercises, any power. For power is a relationship between existents ( “Violence and Metaphysics,” 171). The comprehension of being rather conditions that of alterity, such that one must say that “ethicometaphysical transcendence […] presupposes ontological transcendence” (Ibid, 177). While the thinking of being is, for this reason, “as close as possible to nonviolence,” it cannot be said to be pure nonviolence. Because, writes Derrida, “like pure violence, pure nonviolence is a contradictory concept” (Ibid, 183). Once again, violence must be inscribed in an economy and conceived of as indistinguishable from the regimes of revealing, history, and meaning. We have taken this brief detour through a seminal text for Hent de Vries because we wish to propose a series of interventions intended to reinscribe in a history this triplicity of terms which is also central for his

4 Religion et violence, Preface to the French edition, 32. 5 On the extensive character of Levinas’ definition of violence, see: Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence, 124.

36  Gwenaëlle Aubry thought: violence, religion, and metaphysics. “In a history,” this means in an economy of ruptures and decisions, which is susceptible as such to reveal distinct metaphysical moments, rather than a linear and destinal movement of metaphysics. In this way, “the paradox of foundation” is clearly inscribed in the Christian theology of omnipotence, and more specifically, in the medieval distinction between absolute power and ordained power. Yet, this theological moment goes hand in hand with an ontology which is historically identifiable as well, and which asserts the identity of being and power. In other words, the founding possibility [possibilité principielle] of violence is not inscribed in ontology as such, but in a determined ontology. It is not certain that the Platonic moment of the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας (beyond being) – which, we will see, is invoked by Derrida as well as Levinas and Heidegger – offers an exit from this ontology: for while this formula opens the way for an overcoming of ontology as well as negative theologies, it secondarizes being only at the price of an elevation of power. The traditional opposition of ontology and henology must therefore be called into question because both are ultimately thoughts of power or “dynamo-logies.” But for this opposition, we can substitute another which operates between the thinkings of being (and/or the principle) with power, and the thinking(s) of being (and/or the principle) without power. As paradoxical as it might seem, such an alternative to dynamology is found at the source of the tradition against which Levinas proposes to restore the concept of metaphysics: that is to say, in Aristotle’s ontology, which, by dissociating being and the god of power, also escapes the fate of violence.

The Theology of Omnipotence and the Question of Foundation In “Force of Law,” echoing Montaigne and Pascal, Derrida names “the mystical foundation of authority” the fact that “the very emergence of justice and law, the instituting, founding, and justifying moment of law implies a performative force, that is to say always an interpretative force and a call to faith [un appel à la croyance]” (241). This reflection on foundation is connected to a reading of Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt and the distinction that it formulates between the founding violence of law and the preserving violence of law. It is the founding act of law [droit], of all justice and law [loi], which Derrida designates as structurally violent, or even as a “coup de force”: “the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law, to making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and previously founding law, no preexisting foundation, could, by definition, guarantee or contradict or invalidate” (Ibid, 241). The motif of the “coup de force,” or even of the inaugural “perverformative,” is developed in numerous ways by Hent de Vries. This is notably

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 37 the case for the chapter in Religion and Violence6 entitled (in reference to Michel de Certeau’s characterization of the mystic) “Anti-Babel,” which confers it a remarkable extension by connecting it to the concept of Setzung, understood both as the act of positing and in its relation to what is posited, to the “positive” in the sense of “positive law” or “positive theology.” From there, it is a question not only of reinscribing Setzung in the theologico-political “repertoire,” but also of formulating what appears as a guiding thesis for Religion and Violence as well as the two other volumes in the trilogy: the fact that “the turn to religion discernible in modern and contemporary philosophy goes hand in hand with a reassessment of the ethical and the political,” while remaining indissociable from “a concern with the possibility, the reality, or the risk and threat of ‘the worst.’ Hence, the preoccupation with violence: empirical and transcendental, human or divine” (Religion and Violence, 212–213). The theologico-political reinscription of Setzung in Religion and Violence passes through a reading of Carl Schmitt, and his definition of sovereignty as the decision of the state of exception. This latter definition manifests the constitutive paradox of authority as a principle of the law that is outside the law (but not illegal).7 Schmitt mobilizes two theological concepts here, the omnipotent God and the miracle: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. (Schmitt, Political Theology, 36) The concept of the omnipotent God is offered by Schmitt as the example of the “transfer” of the theological to the political; and the concept of the miracle, as one of the terms in an analogy which correlates the exceptional situation/jurisprudence and miracle/theology. Of these two theologoumena, it is first and foremost the miracle which captivates de Vries, up to his most recent developments.8 Schmitt’s reference to the miracle as a figure of the exception, as a rupture of the law due to a direct intervention of the first cause, would allow us to apprehend the “structural similarity” between the

6 See also: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 156. 7 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 12–13, 23. 8 See: Le Miracle au cœur de l’ordinaire.

38  Gwenaëlle Aubry political and the theological, insofar as their foundation is based on a “disruptive moment” (Religion and Violence, 221). Alongside this theological motif, de Vries also summons the distinction between creation ex nihilo and continuous creation, which is for him equally revelatory of the “paradoxical, indeed aporetic, structure” of the theologico-political insofar as the latter must pose “the continuation and sustained renewal of the order” founded by disruption (Ibid). For my part, I would like to call attention to the other theological concept mobilized by Carl Schmitt (and associated, in the first Political Theology, with the strong thesis of the transfer of the theological to the political, and not to the weaker thesis of a simple structural analogy): the concept of the “omnipotent God” and, more specifically, the distinction between absolute power and ordained power, which comes to modalize it beginning in the 13th century. Besides being more originary than the concepts of the miracle or creation ex nihilo and continuous creation (the concept of omnipotence grounds creation ex nihilo, like the concept of absolute power grounds miracle), these theologoumena might allow us to even more closely apprehend what Hent de Vries calls the “paradoxical structure” of the theologico-political. In its “standard usage,”9 the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata comes as a response to a double constraint: how can we conceive of both the freedom of God and the order of the world? Absolute power is omnipotence without the other divine attributes (wisdom, goodness, justice) and, as such, liberated from all law, logical, ethical, or physical. Considered de potentia absoluta, God can make A and not-A true at the same time, damn an innocent person, or modify the order that he himself instituted. It is in this sense that absolute power is posited as the principle of the miracle. An unbounded modality of power, potentia absoluta thereby installs as the origin a pure freedom, a God who is outside the law. Potentia ordinata, for its part, is the power considered with – and limited by – other divine attributes, particularly justice. The distinction between absolute power and ordained power was quickly understood to oppose de potentia with de iustitia and, as such, it was rejected by theologians who refused to admit that, in God, power can be separated from justice.10 Ordained power thereby comes to designate divine power as normed by laws and principles and connected to the order – particularly the natural order – which they determine.

  9 The formulation is from Eugenio Randi, Il Sovrano e l’orologiaio, chap. II. 10 The opposition of de potentia and de iustitia is already found in Origen, In Matt., 213, 17–22. On the opposition of power/justice as the matrix of the distinction between absolute power and ordered power, see: Boulnois, 86, n.32. The rejection of the distinction between potentia absoluta/ordinata is notably found in Bonaventure, in the name of the idea that a power that acts in a disordered manner (inordinate) would in fact be powerless: cf. Sent. I, d. 43, dub. 7.

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 39 The medieval distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinate can thus be formulated in Benjaminian terms as a distinction between the “founding” power of the law and the “preserving” power of law. Moreover, it makes visible the threshold between those powers, that is, the very moment of foundation as a free decision made by the absolute power which is exempted from the law and order, of the law and order which the ordained power will henceforth preserve. It therefore seems that, even more than that of miracle, it is the concept of omnipotence modalized in this way which allows us to conceive of the paradox of foundation: if the miracle refers to the rupture of order, absolute power designates its inauguration as the “coup de force,” “neither just nor unjust,” to use Derrida’s terms, which presides over law without being submitted to it. Absolute power thereby appears as the principle of law that is outside the law – a principle that is outside the law but not illegal, since there is no law that preexists it which it could break, or according to which it could be judged. This point is made explicitly in the formulation that Duns Scotus proposes for the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. This distinction is connected, according to modalities that we cannot further develop here,11 to a concept of contingency that is both radical and novel, which is based on a thinking of founding arbitrariness (the free choice made by divine will between two possibilities has no rationale except that will is will, nisi quia voluntas est voluntas).12 The Scotist interpretation of the distinction is remarkable in that it transfers it from the theological to the juridical field (from which it originally issues),13 applying not only to God but to “everything that acts with an intellect and a will”: through the distinction, Duns Scotus thus contrasts, for all rational and free agents, two ways of relating to the law. The agent who conforms to “valid law” acts according to ordained power; the agent whose action is “beyond or against the law” (praeter legem vel contra eam) acts according to absolute power.14 However, within this first opposition, there operates another which refers to the agent’s power (potestas): the meaning of the distinction varies depending on whether the relationship between the subject and the law is one of sovereignty or submission. For whomever has the power to proclaim law, absolute power is not disordained power, but the power of a new order. It is no longer the power to act against or beyond the law, but the power to act according to another law.

11 For a detailed analysis, see: Aubry, Genèse du Dieu souverain. On the distinction between potentia absoluta/potentia ordinata: chap. III; on Duns Scotus: chap. V. 12 Duns Scotus, Ord. I, dist. 8, p. 2; q. un., §299. 13 The distinction has its source in the mortis causa contract, where the term absolutus refers to the absence of a will, the term ordinatus refers to the declaration of the last will. See, on this point, Randi, “Potentia del conditionata ….” 14 Duns Scotus, Ord. I, dist. 44, qu. un., §3.

40  Gwenaëlle Aubry The Scotist interpretation of the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata thereby exhibits with particular clarity the constitutive paradox of foundation, as both founder of and exempt from the law, but also its definitional connection to sovereign power, both in its theological and political meaning.

… presbeiai kai dunamei The theological moment that we have just described conveys a founding thought of violence, understood in its Derridean sense as a “coup de force.” However, it can be associated not only with the violence of foundation, but also with violence understood in the larger sense defined by Levinas, as excluding and exclusive action: “Violence is to be found in any action in which one acts as if one were alone to act; as if the rest of the universe were there only to receive the action.”15 Indeed, the theology of omnipotence also conveys a thinking of the first cause as both exclusive and immediate, that is, capable of acting without the mediation of secondary causes (the miracle being exemplary of this capacity, insofar as it is a direct effect of the first cause). Once more, this characterization of omnipotence is explicitly formulated by Duns Scotus, who contrasts the veritable – that is, theological – concept of omnipotence with the inadequate concept – designated as “philosophical” – of “infinite power,” by defining omnipotence precisely as a power of immediate action, or action un-mediated by secondary causes.16 Yet, and this is what I would now like to underline, the theology of omnipotence is indissociable from a determined ontology, that is, an ontology of power or dynamology: this ontology identifies power with being (primarily with the first being), while redefining the very concept of power depending on whether it is applied to God or creatures. I cannot describe here in detail, as I have elsewhere,17 these different operations which span a long period of time and include different variations: let us just say that Thomas Aquinas’ gesture is decisive here. Aquinas asserts that there exists in all things a power of being (potestas or virtus essendi) which is arranged according to different degrees. In God, that is to say the first being, this power is total: “God, […] Who is His being, as we have proved above, has being according to the whole power of being itself” (Contra Gentiles I, 28, 2). It is this plenitude in God of the power of being which Aquinas

15 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 6. Hent de Vries cites and comments this passage in Religion and Violence, 125. 16 Ord. I, dist. 42, q. un. 17 On the correlative construction of the ontology of power and the theology of omnipotence, cf. Aubry, Genèse du Dieu souverain, passim. On Thomas Aquinas, chap. IV.

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 41 designates by the syntagma actus purus essendi. This knotting in God of power and being (“Deus est sua virtus,” De Potentia, q.3, a.7, resp.) involves a new thinking of being as well as a redefinition of power, which must be thought of as active in itself, such that its action requires neither passive power nor potentiality in order to operate: Aquinas thereby establishes a rigorous connection between omnipotence and creation ex nihilo (Summa Theologica Ia, q. 45, a1, sol. 3). But, in addition to divine power, the power of creatures must also be redefined: in response, the Thomistic concept of aptitudo, itself inherited from the Neoplatonic concept of epit ēdeiot ēs, identifies a power that is not only passive but also purely receptive – nothing more than the ability to receive the divine gift of esse.18 Therefore, like the violence of foundation, the violence defined by Levinas as exclusionary and exclusive action, such that “one acts as if one were alone to act: as if the rest of the universe were there only to receive the action” (Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 6), is also historically inscribed in the theology of omnipotence, as well as in the ontology – the dynamology – from which the latter is indissociable.19 Must we therefore say, along with Levinas (who, as de Vries notes, seems blind to the violence intrinsic to the religious20), that every ontology is an ontology of power? In this respect, would there be, much like a structural violence of foundation, a violence internal to the metaphysical tradition in its entirety? Or can we isolate within it a metaphysics, a singular moment, which offers an alternative or an escape from this fate? We know that, for Derrida as well as for Levinas, such a moment is indicated by the Platonic formula in Book VI of the Republic, ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida commentator of Levinas speaks of the “sun of the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας” as being for Levinas “the instrument of destruction for the phenomenology and ontology subjected to the neutral totality of the Same as Being or as Ego” (105). The Platonic formula becomes that of ethical “excendence,” understood as the “departure from being and from the categories which describe it,” thus suggesting the possibility of a metaphysics which is non-(or meta-) ontological.

18 On the concept of epit ēdeiot ēs, see, Aubry, “Capacité et convenance. La notion d’ epit ēdeiot ēs dans la théorie porphyrienne de l’embryon,” and “La doctrine aristotélicienne de l’embryon et sa réinterprétation par Porphyre.” On its role in the Thomasian doctrine of analogy, see: Genèse du Dieu souverain, 202–212. 19 Let us note, however, that this primary ontological structure which, in Aquinas, shares power between the omnipotence of the divine and the receptive power of creatures is doubled by a secondary structure which reintegrates an order of secondary causes of nature. On this “contest” of powers, defended by Aquinas notably against the doctrine of kâlam and the school of the Ash’arites, see: Genèse du Dieu souverain, 212–222. On the attempt by Duns Scotus to overcome the opposition of nature and violence through the notion of potentia nuda, see: Aubry, “Miracle, Mystery and Authority ….” 20 Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 5.

42  Gwenaëlle Aubry Derrida cites the ending of Totality and Infinity: “We thus encounter in our own way the Platonic idea of the Good beyond Being”; and he offers a commentary on “in our own way”: “which is to say that ethical ex-cendence is not projected toward the neutrality of the good, but toward the other, and that which (is) ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας is not essentially light but fecundity or generosity” (“Violence and Metaphysics,” 106). A bit further in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida will nonetheless contrast Levinas with Heidegger’s use of ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας21 to show that this formula, far from being an overcoming of ontology, can be understood as the formula of Heideggerian ontology itself. The ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας must therefore be understood as indicating not the excess over Being, but the excess of Being itself over beings – that is, ontological transcendence. From this, Derrida concludes that “the thought of Being could not possibly occur as ethical violence” (VM, 177). And he goes on turning Levinas’ own arguments against him by showing that, insofar as ethical transcendence remains intra-ontic and is identified with metaphysics, Levinas ultimately confirms Heidegger by returning to metaphysics as the forgetting of Being, and the occultation of the ontico-ontological difference. An instrument of the Heideggerian overcoming of metaphysics as well as of the Levinasian overcoming of ontology, the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας is also invoked by Derrida by its proper name. This is notably the case in another text that we have cited, which also has numerous echoes in Hent de Vries’ work: “Faith and Knowledge.”22 Here, the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας is associated with another Platonic term, this time issuing from the Timaeus: khôra. These two terms designate the possibility of an overcoming, no longer of metaphysics or ontology, but of religion in its positive, historical forms, as well as theology, an overcoming which would be a return to the condition of the connection, of religare, which Derrida also calls “the messianic, or messianicity without messianism” (“Faith and Knowledge,” Acts of Religion, 56). Yet, this “messianicity, stripped of everything,” is specifically called by the paradox of foundation. It appears, Derrida writes in terms we cited earlier, “wherever […] a purely rational analysis brings the following paradox to light: that the foundation of law – law of the law, institution of the institution, origin of the constitution – is a ‘performative’ event that cannot belong to the set that it founds, inaugurates or justifies. Such an event […] is the decision of the other in the undecidable.” The question is thus to find the trace of this foundation and “atheologize” it, in order to liberate “a universal rationality and the political democracy that cannot be dissociated from it” (Ibid, 56–57).

21 Derrida refers to Vom Wesen des Grundes and Introduction to Metaphysics, see respectively, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 182n84, 100n3. 22 See for instance Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, chap. II.

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 43 Thus, the different uses which Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida propose for the Platonic formula of the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας make it appear as the very code of overcoming, the key for all escape – beyond metaphysics, beyond ontology, beyond religion, as well as beyond the very opposition of religion and reason – insofar as it is associated, successively, with ontological transcendence, with ethical excendence, or with the paradox of foundation. Yet, a remarkable point must here be highlighted: in all of these usages, the Platonic formula is always abridged. 23 The text of Book VI of The Republic in fact designates the Good not only as ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας but as ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει ὑπερέχοντος, that is, “[…] far surpassing being in rank and power” (509b 9–10, my emphasis). Its transcendence is qualified: the Good is not only posed as beyond being, but also as beyond being by rank and by power (the Greek kai can also be understood as epexegetical, signifying “in rank which means in power”). In other words, the Platonic formula indeed poses an excess over being, but it is an excess of and by power. If the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας can be understood as an escape beyond ontology, 24 it is not beyond dynamology. On the contrary, the secondarization of being accompanies the elevation of power [l’exhaussement de la puissance]. This is how the formulation in Republic VI is interpreted and systematized in Neoplatonism. Plotinus’ first principle, the One-Good, is beyond being (the Intellect, both the first ousia and the first energeia), but it is also qualified as δύναμις πάντων, that is, “the power of all things.” Dunamis resists “the negative path,” that is, the different procedures of hyperbole and apheresis, of excess and negation, which govern Plotinus’ discourse on the OneGood. Furthermore, the concept of dunamis pantōn comes as a response to the dilemma of the principle, that is, the necessity to think of the principle at once as radically transcending its effects (this notably to counter the Aristotelian “third man” argument and to block an infinite regression), and as connected to its effects.25 In the principle, the power of all things is the very moment of its causality, which is precisely the moment of the fecundity and generosity (aphtonia) highlighted by Levinas and Derrida.26 This causal model is quite different from the one governed by the Christian concept of omnipotence. First, because the power of all things remains

23 Heidegger, in the passage from Vom Wesen des Grundes quoted by Derrida, does justice to the totality of the formula, but at the expense of a surprising substitution since he replaces the term “dunamis” with “hexis,” before interpreting hexis as “potentiality,” and then as “possible”: 182n84, “Violence and Metaphysics.” 24 This point is discussed by certain Plato commentators who consider that the parallel between the Good and the sun must be interpreted as signifying that, just as the sun is the cause of generation even while belonging to the domain of generation, the Good is the cause of being even while belonging to the domain of being: cf. Baltes. 25 On Plotinus’ concept of the “power of all things,” see: Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, chap. VI. 26 Cf. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 106.

44  Gwenaëlle Aubry subordinate to the Good, whereas, as we’ve seen, omnipotence can be posed as anterior to laws and values; next, because the power of all things is not connected to freedom, but rather posed as necessarily proceeding from the perfection of the principle, and presiding over a necessary production. The power of all things and omnipotence thereby determine distinct, even conflicting, metaphysical moments (Abelard was condemned in 1140 by the Council of Sens for defending a necessitarian model derived from the Neoplatonist aphtonia; and the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata is, in particular, intended to protect, against Abelard, divine freedom and the contingency of the order it founds). Beyond the differences we’ve highlighted, the position of the principle as power is nevertheless a common point between Plotinus’ moment and the Christian moment: the concept of power of all things is a response to the dilemma of the principle, the concept of omnipotence manifests the paradox of foundation. The permanence of power across distinct metaphysical moments – one of which, henology, is frequently invoked as an alternative to the other, onto-theology – must therefore lead to questioning historical sequencings as well as commonly accepted structural oppositions: henology and onto-theology are both dynamologies. But we must henceforth return to the question presiding over this opposition: if the ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας is not its formula, is there – and where to find – a metaphysical moment which escapes the fate of power?

Being – and God – Without Power As paradoxical as it might seem, such a moment can be identified at the source of the metaphysical tradition, that is to say, in the very philosophy against which Levinas proposes to restore its concept: that is, in Aristotle’s metaphysics. The latter indeed proposes an ontology which manages to think of being as well as the divine without power. In Book A of the Metaphysics, Aristotle emphasizes that his project involves both considering the good as the first principle, and identifying its proper mode of causality. He thus claims this gesture, whose paternity is ordinarily attributed to Plato and, precisely, to the position in Republic VI of the Idea of the Good as ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. But, according to Aristotle, Plato failed to isolate the causality proper to the good by falsely associating it with formal causality.27 Aristotle, for his part, will at once posit the good as principle, and designate its causality as being that of the act (energeia) and of the end (telos), and as being, as such, exempt from power, from the dunamis which Plato associates with the Good.

27 Cf. Metaphysics Α 7, 988b 11–16. To this we add that according to Aristotle, it is the One, not the Good, which, for Plato, is the first principle: cf. Eudemian Ethics, I 8, 1218a 20–21.

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 45 The instrument of this gesture – which consists in dissociating principle and power –lies in the invention of a conceptual couple given in Metaphysics E 2, 1026a 33-b1 as one of the principal meanings of being: in-potency [l’enpuissance] and in-act [l’en-acte] (δυνάμει/ἐνεργείᾳ). Whereas the classical meaning of the term dunamis as power has numerous uses before Aristotle, the concept of in-potency (which is specifically marked in Greek by the dative form, dunamei) is an Aristotelian invention, like the concept of energeia. The singularity of this conceptual couple often goes overlooked, due to its reduction either to the Platonic couple of matter and form, or to that of power and action. But – and this is an essential point – in-potency is not power, and act is not action. These two concepts are gradually elaborated over the course of the central books of the Metaphysics (ΖΗΘ), where they will supersede the concepts of matter and form, and those of passive power and active power. This work of substitution accompanies a movement of subsumption of the causal schema of efficiency, which distributes action between a passive power and an active power, under that of finality, which connects in-potency to in-act. In-potency is neither identifiable with active power nor passive power. Being in-potency is not being the possible subject of an action or a passion: the concept rather designates the very interaction of a passive power and an active power, as the principle of a change oriented by an end. In the same way, to be in-act is not to act, nor to be in movement, rather, for a determined being, it is to have attained the end which is also his good. Yet, Aristotle’s god, the prime unmoved mover, is designated as pure act, ousia energeia – and not, as is often said, as “pure form,” a syntagma which is absent in Aristotle’s texts. To describe it in this way suggests that it is always-already – that is, without prior movement – the end and the good. It also indicates that it is radically exempt from power as well as potentiality. The demonstration in Λ6 of the existence of a prime unmoved mover, the necessary condition for the eternity of movement, rests on this double negation: ousia energeia, the prime mover has no dunamis, and is not dunamei, it does not have power and it is not in-potency. Without power, it is nonetheless not powerless. It is endowed with an efficacy that we can call non-efficient; if it acts, it does so as the final cause, in a particular sense which Λ7 clarifies: the prime unmoved mover is not the immediate end of movement for other substances (which are composed of act and in-potency), but it is, as pure actuality, the condition for movement by which other substances realize their own end and good. Hence, we understand that Λ5 can designate in-potency and act as “principles [which] are the same by analogy” (1071a 3–5). The analogy must be understood here in the geometrical sense of an equality of relations: the relation of ousia energeia to substances composed of act and in-potency is the same as the relation of act to in-potency inside those substances. Just as the movement of every composed substance – which has in-potency as its principle – tends toward the act which is its end and its good, the condition of movement as a whole is a pure act which is the always-already realized good.

46  Gwenaëlle Aubry The conceptual couple of in-potency and act is therefore the basis for a unitary ontology, encompassing separated substance (god, or prime mover) as well as composed substances. From this brief description, which I have developed in detail elsewhere,28 we can draw several propositions related to the problem which concerns us here: •

•

First, the thesis I propose, which consists in a unitary reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, founded on the conceptual couple of in-potency and in-act, implies revising the interpretive translation, inaugurated by Suarez and extended by Natorp and Jaeger, according to which there is a contradiction, or at least a tension, between the ontological and theological determinations of “researched science.” We know that Heidegger in turn inherits this interpretation. He transforms the Aristotelian problem (or supposed problem) of the scission of ontology and theology into a symptom, to denounce it: metaphysics, in its Aristotelian origin, poses the question of Being by means of an irreconcilable division of beings. From there, the onto-theological apparatus comes to obscure the ontological question of Being through a theological construction, that is, through a theory of the supreme being or the supremely ontic. Thus, Heidegger’s characterization of the structure of metaphysics as onto-theology is a direct tributary of a split reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which, it seems, can be overcome by a unitary and ontological reading. In addition, the Heideggerian interpretation of the concepts of dunamis and energeia must also be interrogated. We know that in “Metaphysics as History of Being” Heidegger considers the translation of energeia as actualitas to be a privileged revealing of the history of Being: the effect of this translation-transition “from the Greek to the Roman conceptual language” (The End of Philosophy, 12) is, for Heidegger, that Being is no longer thought as “presence” but as the “product of an activity.” But Heidegger’s reading of energeia as presence conceals a fundamental trait of Aristotelian ontology: its axiological character. For Aristotle, energeia does not signify presence but real identity (in god) or realized identity (in composed substances) of being and the good. It is in an ethical context (fragment 14 of the Protrepticus) that Aristotle uses this concept for the first time in connection with dunamis.

Just like that of energeia, the Heideggerian reading of dunamis is curiously inflected: in the 1931 course on Metaphysics Θ 1-3, On the Essence and Actuality of Force, Heidegger reads dunamis as unequivocally signifying force (Kraft): Aristotle’s analysis reveals “the essence of force,” “being a force as such,” as residing in the “relation of the ποιεῖν to the πάσχειν: being a force is both as one—ὠς μία” (89).

28 See: Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, first part.

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 47 But this is not all: the Heideggerian reading of the transition from energeia to actualitas is in turn the subject of a critical reworking by Agamben. This reworking accompanies the elaboration in Opus Dei of an archeology of effectiveness and operativity, understood as the confusion – or resolution – of being in action. The decisive transition resides, for Agamben, in the translation of energeia not as actualitas, as Heidegger says, but even earlier, with the Latin Fathers, as efficacia and efficiencia. But at the same time, the Aristotelian distinction between dunamis and energeia is designated by Agamben as “the originary nucleus of the ontology of effectiveness” (58). This is why one of the central elements of Agamben’s philosophical enterprise consists in deactivating the Aristotelian apparatus of dunamis and energeia, by bringing to light another apparatus in Aristotle: marginal and only sketched, this apparatus does not connect power to action, but rather the “power not to” to argia29 – the opposite of energeia, the fact of being not at work but without work, without proper, assignable function. It is this apparatus, which is originally but also marginally Aristotelian, which Agamben will isolate and use against the central apparatus of dunamis and energeia, to deactivate the ontological “double machine” of power and activity, but also the juridico-political apparatus that connects constituting power and constituted power, violence and law, anomy and nomos,30 – and which also operates in the distinction between absolute power and ordained power.31 Yet as we have seen – and this is where we wanted to arrive – Aristotle’s central apparatus of in-potency and in-act already contains, within itself, an alternative model to the logic of force invoked by Heidegger in his reading of Metaphysics Θ as well as to the ontology of operativity which Agamben proposes to deactivate. Far from being the “originary nucleus” of the ontology of operativity, Aristotelian ontology instead proposes a completely different thinking of being, since, by considering it in terms of in-potency and in-act, it dissociates it from power as well as from action. We must therefore recognize, at the very source of the metaphysical tradition, a coherent ontology which escapes the onto-theological scission, and which contradicts Levinas’ affirmation that “every ontology is an ontology of power.” The ontology of power has its origin in a metaphysical moment that is

29 Agamben finds the Aristotelian sources for these respective concepts in Metaphysics Θ1, 1046a 30–31 and Nicomachean Ethics I, 1097b 28–30. 30 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 264–265; Homo Sacer I, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 63–67. On the relation between these different devices and notably between Aristotelian dunamis, absolute power, and constituent power, see: The Use of Bodies, 267, and Homo Sacer I, 42–49. 31 On Agamben’s reading of the distinction between potentia absoluta/ordinata, see also: The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 106–108, where it corresponds to the distinction of formal sovereignty/execution.

48  Gwenaëlle Aubry not originary but in fact, much later, that it to say in the medieval theology of omnipotence, where the possibility of violence is also foundationally inscribed. To the commonly invoked opposition between ontology and henology considered an alternative and an escape, we must henceforth substitute a different opposition: between the thought of being and/or the principle without power, and the thoughts of being and/or of the principle with power – that is, between Aristotle’s ontology and “dynamology,” in its different ontological and henological modalities. From here, we can reread the history of metaphysics differently, that is to say, recognize in it another economy, made of different ruptures and conflicts than those described by the traditional narratives – but also a veritable history, and not a fatum which, from its origin, would entirely and ineluctably condemn metaphysics to violence.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer, I. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, Paris, Seuil, 1997. ———. Le Règne et la Gloire. Homo sacer, II, 2, Paris, Seuil, 2008. ———. Opus Dei. Archéologie de l’office. Homo Sacer, II, 5, Paris, Seuil, 2012. ———. L’Usage des corps. Homo sacer, IV, 2, Paris, Seuil, 2015. Aristote. Metaphysica, ed. W. Jaeger, Oxford, University Press, 1957. ———. Ethica Eudemia, ed. R.R. Walzer, J.M. Mingay, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. Ethica Nicomachea, ed. I. Bywater, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970 (1894). Aubry, Gwenaëlle. Dieu sans la puissance. Dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin, Archéologie de la puissance I, Paris, Vrin, 2006; nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, 2020. ———. Genèse du Dieu souverain. Archéologie de la puissance II, Paris, Vrin, 2018. ———. «Capacité et convenance. La notion d’epitêdeiotês dans la théorie porphyrienne de l’embryon», dans L. Brisson, M.-H. Congourdeau et J.-L. Solère (ed.), L’embryon. Formation et animation, Paris, Vrin, 2008, pp. 139–155. ———. «La doctrine aristotélicienne de l’embryon et sa réinterprétation par Porphyre» dans L. Brisson, G. Aubry, et al., Porphyre. Sur la manière dont l’embryon reçoit l’âme, Paris, Vrin, 2012, pp. 47–67. ———. «“Miracle, Mystery and Authority”: A Deconstruction of the Christian Theology of Omnipotence», MLN, vol. 132/N°5, December 2017, pp. 1327–1350. Baltes, Matthias. «Is the Idea of the Good in Plato’s Republic Beyond Being?», ΔΙΑΝΘΗΜΑΤΑ. Kleine Schriften zu Platon und zum Platonismus, StuttgartLeipzig, Teubner, 1999, pp. 351–371. Boulnois, Olivier (ed.). La Puissance et son ombre. De Pierre Lombard à Luther, Paris, Aubier, 1994. De Vries, Hent. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Baltimore-London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ———. Religion and Violence. Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, Baltimore-London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001; trad. fr, Religion et violence: perspectives philosophiques de Kant à Derrida, Paris, Cerf, 2013.

Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 49 ———. Minimal Theologies. Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno & Levinas, transl. G. Hale, Baltimore-London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. ———. Le Miracle au cœur de l’ordinaire, Paris, Encre marine, 2019. Derrida, Jacques. «Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas», repris dans L’Ecriture et la différence, Paris, Seuil, 1967. ———. Force de loi. Le «Fondement mystique de l’autorité», Paris, Galilée, 1994. ———. « Foi et savoir », dans J. Derrida et G. Vattimo (ed.), La Religion, Paris, Seuil, 1996. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, ed. Balic, Vatican, 1950s, t. I-XII parus. Heidegger, Martin. Vom Wesen des Grundes, trad. fr «L’être essentiel d’un fondement ou «“raison”», dans Questions I et II, Paris, Gallimard, 1968. ———. Introduction à la métaphysique, Paris, Gallimard, 1967. ———. «La métaphysique en tant qu’histoire de l’être» dans Nietzsche II, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, pp. 319–365. ———. Aristote, Métaphysique Θ 1-3. De l’essence et de la réalité de la force, Paris, Gallimard, 1991. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1971. ———. Difficile liberté : essais sur le judaïsme. Paris, Albin Michel, 1963 et 1976. Platon. Res Publica. Platonis Opera t. IV, ed. Burnet, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1902. Randi, Eugenio. Il sovrano e l’orologiaio. Due immagini di Dio nel dibattito sulla "potentia absoluta" fra XIII et XIV secolo, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1987. ———. «Potentia dei conditionata: una questione di Ugo di Saint-Cher sull’onnipotenza divina (Sent. I, 42, q.1)», Rivista di storia della filosofia 39, 1984, pp. 521–536. Schmitt, Carl. Théologie politique, Paris, Gallimard, 1988. Thomas d’Aquin. Somme contre les Gentils, 4. vol., Paris, GF, 1999. ———. Somme théologique, 4 vol., Paris, Cerf, 1994. ———. Questions disputées sur la puissance- De Potentia- I, Questions 1 à 3, texte latin de l’édition Marietti, traductions et notes par R. Berton, Paris, Les Presses universitaires de l’IPC- Parole et Silence, 2011.

English Translations Used by Jacob Levi Agamben Opus Dei, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Λ, trans. Lindsay Judson (Oxford: Clarendon, 2019). Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [New York: Routledge, 2001]. Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion [New York: Routledge, 2001]. Heidegger, “Metaphysics as History of Being”, in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003]. Heidegger, Metaphysics Θ 1-3, trans. Peter Warnek, Walter Brogan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995]. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingus [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979].

3

Imagination, Theolatry, and the Compulsion to Worship the Invisible Elliot R. Wolfson

University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States Whoever repudiates idolatry is called a Jew. (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 13a) The invisible is a hollow in the visible, a fold in passivity, not pure production. … We must not look for spiritual things, they are only structures of the void—But I simply wish to plant this void in the visible Being, show that it is its reverse side—in particular the reverse side of language. (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible) The unseen suffers precisely from its continued nonappearance in any form and desires only access to a mode of appearance. (Marion, The Crossing of the Visible)

Regarding the well-known Jewish aversion to the iconic representation of God, Freud wrote in Moses and Monotheism, “Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one that has more significance than is at first obvious. It is the prohibition against making an image of God, which means the compulsion to worship an invisible God. … For it signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over senses; more precisely, an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.”1 The aniconism of Judaism and the consequent propensity to worship a God that cannot be seen—a crucial difference that Freud draws between Jewish monotheism and the Aten religion of the Egyptian pharaoh

1 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by Katherine Jones (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1939), p. 144. See Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 32–33. For a recent study that discusses the biblical context for the Israelite and later Jews aniconism, see Christoph Uehlinger, “Beyond ‘Image Ban’ and ‘Aniconism’: Reconfiguring Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Religion/s in a Visual and Material Religion Perspective,” in Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Contested Desires, edited by Birgit Meyer and Terje Stordalen (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 99–123.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-4

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 51 Akhenaten that allegedly influenced it2—are indicative of the intellectual subjugating of the sensual and the repudiation of the instincts. This depiction of Judaism, as Richard Bernstein noted, echoes the characterization in Kant’s Critique of Judgment of the sublime as the supremacy of the intellect over sensibility and his relating this to the Jewish ban on making graven images.3 From one vantage point, this triumph of spirituality—or intellectuality, as Strachey translated Geistigkeit4 —over sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) bestows on Jews an advantage, resulting in an exaggerated self-esteem, indeed, even fostering the infamous notion of chosenness or election amongst the nations, providing the critical mechanism to endure centuries of misfortune, keeping the scattered people together through study of the holy text, and also serving to curb brutality and the inclination to violence; from another vantage point, however, the Jew is disadvantaged as the neglect of the bodily senses leads to repression and the failure to cultivate the harmony of psychic and somatic activity, purportedly achieved by the Greeks.5 It is apposite to recall Daniel Boyarin’s observation that Freud’s “assumption that Judaism is to be characterized as a compelling renunciation of the senses (the mother) for the spirit (the father, phallus, logos), and that this renunciation has generated in the Jew, from the time of Moses, a sense of superiority with respect to the pagans, that is, a sense of profound well-being in a world that is hostile and threatening to Jews.”6 Boyarin surmises that Freud’s representation of Judaism as “a posture of severe self-control grounded in an endless series of instinctual renunciations” was as an effort to ward off Otto Weininger’s argument that the masculine/Christian nature of Kantian critical philosophy is foreign to the feminized Jewish psychic and moral constitution. The description

2 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 28. See Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 150–155. 3 Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, pp. 33–34. 4 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23 (1937–1939), translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 113. Concerning this term, see Joel Whitebook, “Geistigkeit: A Problematic Concept,” in Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion, edited by Gilad Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 46–64. For a brief but nuanced analysis of Freud’s theory of a pure Mosaic geistig monotheism, a religion of Bilderverbot, in tension with the religion of Yahweh, see Yvonne Sherwood, “The Hypericon of the Golden Calf,” in Figurations and Sensations, pp. 68–71. 5 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 147. In that passage, Freud references the rabbinic legend of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai requesting permission from the Romans to open an academy at Yavneh to study Torah after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. On Freud’s identification with this sage, see Richard L. Rubenstein, “Freud and Judaism: A Review Article,” Journal of Religion 47 (1967): 41; Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, pp. 34–35. 6 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 256–257 (emphasis in original).

52  Elliot R. Wolfson of Moses proffered by Freud is thus viewed as a “desperate grab for this Spirit (phallus) that Weininger had denied the Jew, a signifier of his profound need to ward off, not so much homoeroticism … but femininity.”7 The Freudian misreading of biblical Judaism as “an austere, desiccated, incorporeal renunciation of the senses” was occasioned, therefore, by a “dire need to be manly, to discover a manliness at the origins of Jewishness, Moses, and the Bible.”8 The supposedly feminine quality of Jewish carnality, including adherence to a law that is characterized by its passionate attachment to blood and flesh, is transvalued by Freud into a masculinist Geistigkeit or denial of the body itself. For our purposes, what is instructive is the nexus that Freud sought to establish between ascesis and aniconicity. The crucial passage from Moses and Monotheism can be linked to a comment Freud made in the preface he wrote in December 1930 for the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo. Admitting his ignorance of the language of the holy writ, his complete estrangement from the religion of his fathers, indeed from all religions, and his inability to share in the nationalist ideals of Judaism, he nonetheless insists that he never repudiated his people, and that in his essential nature he still identified as a Jew. Posing the hypothetical question, what is left for him that is Jewish, he responds, “A very great deal, and probably its very essence.” Although he could not express that essence clearly in words, he offers the prospect that in the future “it will become accessible to the scientific mind.”9 Freud states unequivocally that his book “adopts no Jewish standpoint and makes no exception in favour of Jewry,” but he harbors the hope that readers of the Hebrew translation will share in his conviction that “unprejudiced science cannot remain a stranger to the spirit of the new Jewry.”10 The essence of Judaism to which he alludes and which he claims for himself— even as he concedes that he is estranged from the religion of his ancestors— is the Jewishness determined by what he called in Moses and Monotheism “the progress of spirituality” (Der Fortschritt der Geistigkeit). The advance of abstract intellectuality over concrete sensuality is the true cultural significance of Mosaic monotheism, reaching an apex in the scientific mind cultivated as the basis of psychoanalysis.11 Freud’s monograph on Moses—and perhaps we could extend this to his work as a whole—can be read as a carrying forward of the Jewish Bilderverbot, the privileging of the interpretative interrogation of images over the sensory tangibility of the images themselves, an intellectualization that facilitates the disavowing of illusions by disfiguring the configuration of the nonfigural in configuring the disfiguration of the figural. Judaism’s monotheistic ideal fosters the possibility of disrupting the dominance of the

  7 Ibid., p. 257.   8 Ibid.   9 The text is cited in Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, p. 1 (emphasis in original). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. xi, 2, 88, 114.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 53 libidinal economy—that the divine cannot be reified as an object of ocular desire provides the theological rationale for the psychological release from the all-too-human pursuit of gratifying animal pleasure.

Theolatrous Recrimination: Invisible but Personal God In the remainder of this study, I would like to reflect philosophically on what it means to speak of a compulsion to worship an invisible God. To set the matter in stark terms, let us consider the observation of Simone Weil that “the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater—unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.”12 Given the correlation of atheism and idolatry, Weil’s labeling the majority of the pious as idolaters implies that they are atheists. I have discussed Weil’s apophatic theology elsewhere,13 and what is essential to note here is the contention that the way to avoid the stigma of idolatry is to worship the true God in his impersonal aspect. But how does one performatively execute this directive without denying the very impersonality one is supposed to uphold? True worship would amount to no worship at all, at least as it is theistically construed, a worship that would deflect all verbal, conceptual, and imagistic depictions of the divine. One might protest that since the assumption about the imageless nature of God is so pervasive, my question is hardly worthy of serious consideration. And yet, notwithstanding the ubiquity of this theological premise— so ubiquitous that it goes for the most part unexamined—its ontopoietic possibility is not as easy to comprehend as is tacitly presumed. It is well to recall that in Totality and Infinity, Levinas depicts the transcendence of the infinite other as “the invisible but personal God.”14 The positing of an invisible but personal God surely reflects Levinas’s phenomenological training, and especially the effort of Husserl to demarcate the contours of the given and the limits of visuality.15 I would propose, additionally, that

12 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, translated by Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 308. 13 Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. xix–xx, and see references to primary and secondary sources cited on pp. 266–267 n. 38. 14 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1969), p. 78. See the fuller analysis of this passage in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 140–141. 15 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), § 21, pp. 100–101, and see the comments of Joeri Schrijvers, Ontotheological Turnings: The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 212.

54  Elliot R. Wolfson this formulation could be traced to Hermann Cohen, who argued that Judaism assumes that God alone is being and thus is designated as “One Who Is Being” (der Seienden), which involves the “transformation of the neuter into a person.”16 Cohen acknowledges that this transformation “makes anthropomorphism unavoidable,” and that Jewish thought would have declined into myth had not the oral teaching emphasized from the beginning that the fight against anthropomorphism is “the very soul of Jewish religious education.”17 Despite the inherent danger of anthropomorphism, it is precisely imaging God as a person rather than as a neutral abstraction that is at the heart of the battle of monotheism against idolatry and pantheism, both of which collapse the distinction between God and nature.18 From God’s uniqueness (Einzigkeit), as opposed to oneness (Einheit), we may deduce the quality of incomparability (Unvergleichbarkeit), and this, in turn, “entails the distinction between being [Sein] and existence [Dasein]. … For existence is attested by the senses, through perception. On the other hand it is reason which, against all sense-experience, bestows actuality [Wirklichkeit] upon existence, discovers and elevates the nonsensible to being, and marks it out as true being.”19 The ascription of personhood to the nonsentient God is the corollary of the uncompromising intolerance for idolatry, which translates philosophically into erroneous anthropomorphic and mythological representations of the amorphous and imageless being. 20 For Levinas as well, there is an inextricable link between personhood and the invisible beingness of the divine illeity. Still we must ponder, how can we imagine an unimaginable being except as what cannot be imagined? How can a personable but perceptibly indiscernible God function as an object of religious faith and devotional practice? The suggestion of worshipping a deity so defined pushes phenomenology as the eidetic science that probes the intentional structures of what is given intuitively in consciousness to the limits of the phenomenological and demands of us to establish criteria for a postphenomenological phenomenology centered on the givenness of the nongiven, that is, the given

16 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, translated, with an introduction by Simon Kaplan, introductory essay by Leo Strauss, introductory essays for the second edition by Steven S. Schwarzschild and Kenneth Seeskin (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995), p. 41 (emphasis in original); Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, 2nd edition (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kaufmann Verlag, 1929), p. 48. The discussion here is drawn from the more detailed analysis in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 19–21. 17 Cohen, Religion of Reason, pp. 41– 42 (emphasis in original); Religion der Vernunft, p. 48. 18 Cohen, Religion of Reason, p. 42 (emphasis in original); Religion der Vernunft, pp. 48– 49. 19 Cohen, Religion of Reason, p. 44 (emphasis in original); Religion der Vernunft, p. 51. 20 Cohen, Religion of Reason, p. 57; Religion der Vernunft, p. 66.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 55 that is given as what is withheld from being given. Insofar as the invisible can be disclosed only as the event of presence in excess of and continually withdrawing from the spectacle of being present, we must be prepared to speak of a phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable. The invisible is not to be understood as a potentially visible phenomenon that is presently occluded, but rather as the nonphenomenal that makes all phenomena visible by eluding visibility. In Heideggerian terms, a debt that Levinas himself did not readily divulge, the notion of a personal but invisible God compels us to accord equal status to the unapparent as to the apparent, thereby challenging the foundational tenet of Husserlian phenomenology that each noetic act is correlated with a noematic object. The phenomenological reduction is not to be constricted to the hypothesis that something is considered actual only inasmuch as it appears in consciousness as what is given. On the contrary, just as being bestows itself in its refusal to bestow, and hence unconcealment is always also concealment, so being is manifest by manifestly not being manifest. Already in Being and Time, Heidegger opined that the self-showing (Sichzeigen) of a phenomenon coincides with a presence that does not show itself. “Appearance, as the appearance ‘of something,’ thus precisely does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something which does not show itself announces itself through something that does show itself. Appearing is a not showing itself [Sich-nicht-zeigen]. … What does not show itself, in the manner of what appears, can also never seem.”21 Of the various meanings that we can attribute to the word “appearance” (Erscheinung), the most crucial is “that which in its self-showing indicates the nonmanifest [Nichtoffenbare]—as what comes to the fore in the nonmanifest itself, and radiates from it in such a way that what is nonmanifest is thought of as what is essentially never manifest.”22 Nothing stands behind the phenomena, but “it is precisely because phenomena are initially and for the most part not given that phenomenology is needed. Being covered up [Verdecktheit] is the counterconcept [Gegenbegriff] to ‘phenomenon.’”23 Implicit in the final sentence is a central theme that informed all stages of Heidegger’s thinking: inasmuch as “concealment belongs essentially to unhiddenness” (die Verbergung gehört wesensmäßig zur Unverborgenheit), 24 untruth as un-disclosedness

21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a forward by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), § 7, p. 28 (emphasis in original); Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 29. 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, pp. 28–29; Sein und Zeit, p. 30. 23 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, p. 34 (emphasis in original); Sein und Zeit, p. 36. 24 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, translated by Ted Sadler (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002), p. 66; Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet [GA 34] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), p. 90.

56  Elliot R. Wolfson (Un-entborgenheit) is inextricably bound to the comportment of truth as disclosedness (Entborgenheit). 25 In his later work, Heidegger expands the paradoxical identification of self-showing as a form of not showing in his discussions of the phenomenology of the nonphenomenon, that is, the nonphenomenalizable event (Ereignis) of beyng (Seyn) as the clearing (Lichtung) of the unapparent (Unscheinbaren) that enables the appearing of all beings (Seiende) but which itself is nothing but the nothingness (Nichts) that evades appearance.26 Following the logic of the givenness without a given,27 the invisible can be said to appear only to

25 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 148; Wegmarken [GA 9] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), p. 193. For a more extensive discussion of the inseparability of truth and untruth in Heidegger’s thought, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 48–52, 130–131, and the list of other scholarly analyses of this topic on pp. 314–315 n. 106. See also Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 6, 131, 133–134, 140, 144–145; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 4, 17 n. 31, 266, 304–305, 324 n. 66. 26 My summation of Heidegger’s position is a collage of several passages from his oeuvre. For the expression phenomenology of the unapparent in the Zähringen seminar of 1973, see Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 80. On the description of the clearing (Lichtung) as the appearing of the unapparent in a letter that Heidegger wrote to Roger Munier on February 22, 1974, see Heidegger: Cahiers de l’Herne (Paris: L’Herne, 1983), pp. 114–115, and on the characterization of Ereignis as “the least apparent of the unapparent” (das Unscheinbarste des Unscheinbaren), see Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache [GA 12] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 247. For a more colloquial rendering of this expression as “the most inconspicuous of inconspicuous phenomena,” see Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 128. See the discussions of this dimension of Heidegger’s thought in Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, translated by Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 60; idem, The Visible and the Revealed, translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner and others (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 6–7; Schrijvers, Ontotheological Turnings, pp. 212–213; Wolfson, Giving, pp. 94–102, esp. 95–98. See also Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 67 and 85 n. 41. For a different view, see Andrzej Serafin, “Heidegger’s Phenomenology of the Invisible,” Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 6 (2016): 313–322, and see JeanLuc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 109–111, who compares and contrasts the Heideggerian Unscheinbaren and his own notion of l’invu as the invisibility assigned to the visible. 27 See Wolfson, Giving, pp. 236–246. My interpretation of Heidegger’s es gibt as the giveness-without-a-given parallels the characterization of the immanence of the phenomenal being-given as the given-without-givenness in François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, translated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 92–93, 98–101, 191–192. See also idem, Dictionary of NonPhilosophy, translated by Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013), pp. 44, 71–72, 165.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 57 the extent that it is precluded from appearing. Building on Heidegger, JeanLuc Marion avers on numerous occasions in his work that integral to the giving of the phenomenon is the refusal to give.28 From that point of view, “the finitude of the world shelters and concentrates an indefinite, nonconstitutable, saturating phenomenality.”29 What shows itself arises from the shadow of the invisible to the light of the visible, but in the showing of the nonshowing, the transparent visibility of the light illumines the opaque invisibility of the shadow. Withdrawing behind the bedazzlement it ignites, the saturated phenomenon renders the visible invisible by the excess of its diminution and the invisible visible by the diminution of its excess.30 Marion speaks of the “intensive magnitude” of the saturated phenomenon that makes it “unbearable for the gaze,” an unbearableness characterized as

28 See, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 116. Marion coins the term anamorphosis to name the identification of the phenomenon that gives itself and the gift that shows itself. See ibid., pp. 117, 119–131. On Marion’s notion of givenness as the paradoxical manifestation of invisibility contrasted with the conception of phenomenality as full visibility attributed (incorrectly in my opinion) to Husserl, see Claudio Tarditi, “Seeing the Invisible: Jean-Luc Marion’s Path from Husserl to Saint Paul,” in Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Sight, edited by Antonio Cimino and Pavlos Kontos (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 142–162. For a different approach to Husserl, and one more congenial to my own, see Sara J. Northerner, “From Edmund Husserl’s Image Consciousness to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh and Chiasm,” in Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception, edited by Duane H. Davis and William S. Hamrick (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016), pp. 97–123. 29 Marion, Being Given, p. 172. 30 Ibid., pp. 209–210. See Marion, In Excess, p. 112. On the phenomenon of bedazzlement, fashioned in Christocentric terms, see Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, translated by Stephen E. Lewis (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 53–70. Marion’s position on the invisible would be subject to the critique of the lingering Platonic privileging of the diurnal in Heidegger’s return to the pre-Socratic affirmation of the nocturnal offered by Sergey Dolgopolski, Other Others: The Political after the Talmud (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), p. 29: “Heidegger needs the light of the day, at least by denying it, in order to arrive at the primordial power of the night and of the nothing, which the lightning highlights and which being confronts. In short, in respect of the night of nothing without seeming, pre-Socratics are only possible after and by negating, Plato’s philosophy of the daylight” (emphasis in original). For an alternative reading of the relationship between shadow and light in Heidegger’s explication of Plato, see Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 131–153. My thesis is summarized on pp. 137–138: “The seeing of this shining—casting light on the shadow so that one apprehends the shadow as light—is the upshot of the hiddenness being exposed in the unhiddenness of the unhiddenness. … Having seen through the shadows, not as the adumbration of light but as radiance itself, the task of the thinker is to disclose the disclosure by exposing the shadowiness of the shadow and thereby remove the illusion that there is reality behind the appearance.” In contrast to Dolgopolski’s interpretation, I do not see that Heidegger’s embrace of the nocturnality of the nothing entails a negation of the Platonic daylight. On the contrary, for Heidegger, “illumination consists of expositing the radiance of the shadow as the shadow of the radiance” (Wolfson, The Duplicity, p. 161). On the shadow in Heidegger, see also Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 169, 321, 334 n. 205.

58  Elliot R. Wolfson bedazzlement, “which does not amount to not seeing, for one must first perceive, if not see, in order to experience this incapacity to bear. It is, rather, a question of something visible that our gaze cannot bear.”31 The glory of the visible that the gaze cannot bear is marked as the invisible seen as visually unseen and perceived as perceptually imperceptible. Blindness is thus true vision, and bedazzlement the lack of sight through which the finitude of being is experienced as the surplus of infinity.32 Pinpointing the paradox implicit in the phenomenological possibility of imagining an act of seeing that entails not seeing, Marion writes, “L’invu at once appears as the most appearing possible [le plus apparaissant possible], even the unbearable appearing [l’apparaissant insupportable] of radiance.”33 Ostensibly overturning a cornerstone of Husserlian phenomenology, Marion maintains that the “visible phenomenon only appears in piercing the fog of its invus.”34 The term invu denotes that which “cannot reach or yet reach visibility” but is all the while a “possible visible,” whence it follows that “the phenomenality accomplished by constitution gives rise, negatively, to a halo of invu around every phenomenon, in proportion to which it renders the phenomenon visible. … I will therefore conclude that all phenomenological constitution only produces a visible in showing as much invu.”35 Marion breaks with Heidegger to the extent that he is willing to invoke the phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable as a credible path that opens the space for considering the experience of the invisible as theologically defensible: “The so-called religious lived experiences of consciousness give intuitively, but by indication, intentional objects that are directly invisible: religion becomes manifest and revelation phenomenal. What philosophy of religion tends to close, phenomenology of religion could open. … In short, phenomenology would be the method par excellence for the manifestation of the invisible through the phenomena that indicate it—hence also the method for theology.”36 As Marion explains in a second passage, “The phenomenological method here is applied to theology only by reducing the revealed to the lived experience of the revealed, hence obscuring the revealed revealing itself. The phenomenological reduction provokes demythologization, and sola fides reduces revelatory transcendence to real immanence in consciousness. Although it believes, consciousness does not reach any transcendent (thus revealed) object but is nourished by the immanent lived experience of its solitary faith.”37 Just as in the experience of

31 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 36. 32 Ibid., p. 37. 33 Marion, In Excess, p. 69. On the concept of the unseen, see ibid., pp. 49, 109–113; JeanLuc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, translated by James K. A. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 25–29. 34 Marion, In Excess, p. 107. 35 Ibid., p. 109. 36 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, pp. 7–8. 37 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 59 love, the face of the beloved dazzles the lover in its invisible gaze, so theophany can be described by the paradox of an invisible gaze visibly envisaging the believer.38 Phenomenology sustains theology insofar as it illumines the “absolute mode of presence” that “saturates any horizon, all horizons, with a dazzling evidence. Now, such a presence without limit (without horizon), which alone suits givenness without reserve, cannot present itself as a necessarily limited object. Consequently, it occupies no space, fixes no attention, attracts no gaze. In this very bedazzlement, ‘God’ shines by absence. … The absence or unknowability of ‘God’ does not contradict givenness but on the contrary attests to the excellence of that givenness. ‘God’ becomes invisible not in spite of givenness but by virtue of that givenness.”39 It remains to be seen if this focal point of revealed theology, the apophatic affirmation of a divine presence that shines by absence40 —a superfluity of givenness that is the abandonment of being given, the phenomenon whose phenomenality is grounded in the appearance of not appearing, the nothingness of the object (un néant d’object),41 which Marion identifies more specifically with the Christological notion of the supererogatory love of charity as it relates to the incarnation and the kenotic humbling of the Son as opening the space where the gaze of the invisible other can visibly shine forth as the countergaze42 —is a plausible resolution to the phenomenological dilemma of positing an invisibility pulsating at the heart of all things visible.

Oneiric Figuration and Unmasking the Mask of Invisibility Even if we agree to the ontic plausibility of an invisible being, it is not so simple to ascertain the phenomenological accessibility of a personal being that is invisible, assuming, as we must, that this being is absolutely hidden

38 Ibid., p. 47. On the invisible gaze, see Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, pp. 80–82. 39 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 63. 40 On the eschatological presence of Christ experienced in the mystery of the Ascension as the absence of nonpresence, which is to be distinguished from the pure absence of a total disappearance, the withdrawal from bodily presence that engenders a more robust sense of presence transformed into the gift of proximity through distance, see Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, pp. 125–127, 137–140, 145–147, 151–152. 41 Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, p. 167. I have modified the translation. 42 Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 72. On pp. 73–74, Marion presents the example of seeing the face of the other through the transcendence of love as an illustration of Christian philosophy. The Christocentric bias is evident in ibid., p. 75: “The icon of the gaze of the other thus becomes an intelligible phenomenon starting with the invention of Christ as icon.” Compare Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, pp. 59–60, 68 n. 9, 121– 123, 141, 154–155, 164, 166–168. For a detailed criticism of Marion’s Christological interpretation of the phenomenological sense of givenness and the symbol of the gift, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 247–256. For an additional reproach of Marion, see Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 26–27.

60  Elliot R. Wolfson in its invisibility, an interiority that lacks all exteriority and therefore cannot be manifest phenomenally in the world, as Michel Henry educed from the esthetics of Kandinsky’s painting,43 elaborating on Husserl’s notion of horizontality, which presumes that every appearance includes a plurality of other appearances, whence we may deduce that not only can no appearance be apperceived in its totality but also that every apperception is at the same time a misapperception.44 The epistemological assumption that manifestation is inexorably a nonmanifestation induces an ontological disjunctiveness between transcendence and immanence that challenges the highly influential Platonic theory of mimetic resemblance as the play between visible images and their invisible models.45 Much more credible phenomenologically is what Merleau-Ponty called in the essay “The Intertwining— The Chiasm,” included in the collection The Visible and the Invisible, “the invisible of this world,” that is, the invisible that “inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being [l’Être de cet étant].”46 Merleau-Ponty’s notion of invisibility relates neither to a something nor to a nothing, that is, with or without essential or accidental properties, but rather to the nonphenomenalizability, that is, the epistemic condition of all phenomenality, the unseeing that enframes every act of seeing. The invisible is the other of the visible— the insentient exterior that is the interior of the sentient—and, as such, it presents itself as the “originating presentation of the unpresentable [presentation originaire de l’imprésentable].”47 As Merleau-Ponty put it another

43 Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 6–7. See as well Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited with an introduction by Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 127; L’œil et l’esprit, preface by Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 27. On the interface of the visible and the invisible in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the painterly practice of Cézanne, see Hugh Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 273–274. A similar view is expressed by Marion, Being Given, p. 52; idem, The Crossing of the Visible, pp. 25–26. See, however, Marion, In Excess, p. 68. 44 Dan Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 224. For a more extended discussion of the theme of horizon and the constitution of intersubjectivity related thereto, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique, translated by Elizabeth A. Behnke (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001), pp. 39–52. 45 Max Statkiewicz, “Resemblance: Play between the Visible and the Invisible,” Analecta Husserliana 75 (2002), 293–304. 46 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible followed by Working Notes, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 151 (emphasis in original); Le Visible et l’invisible suivi de Notes de travail, text edited by Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 196. 47 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 203; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 253.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 61 context, “Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it is given as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility [une doublure d’invisible] in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence.”48 To be present as absence, not as the absence of absence. The universe, on this score, is to be envisaged chiasmically as the invisibly visible specter of the visibly invisible.49 If we are to retain the language of transcendence in speaking about the act of visioning (voyance), 50 then it is not directed to an intelligible form or an incorporeal essence in an otherworldly realm but to the immanence of the lining of the invisible radiating through the perceptual and linguistic veil of the visible, 51 a transcendence of self that probes the depths within,

48 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” p. 147; L’œil et l’esprit, p. 85. 49 Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 40–41; idem, Giving, pp. 7, 99. The invisibility of the visible in Merleau-Ponty’s thought has been discussed by many scholars. I will here mention a select sampling of relevant sources: Martin Jay, “Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 143–185, esp. 172–173; Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern, second edition (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1998), pp. 120–124; James Philips, “From the Unseen to the Invisible: Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne Lectures as Preparation for His Later Thought,” in Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 69–88; Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, translated by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 162–167, 235–238; Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), pp. 71–81; Véronique M. Fóti, “Chiasm, Flesh, Figuration: Toward a Non-Positive Ontology,” in Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: Transforming the Tradition, edited by Bernard Flynn, Wayne J. Froman, and Robert Vallier (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), pp. 183–196, esp. 190–192; Claude Lefort, “Body, Flesh,” in Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy, pp. 288–290; Mauro Carbone, The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema, translated by Marta Nijhuis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 31–33; Glenn A. Mazis, Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016), pp. xiii, 226–230, 238, 245, 249–250, 252, 255, 261, 267, 297–298, 300, 314, 317, 321–323, 350 n. 59. On the phenomenological texture of the dream in particular as disclosing the invisibles of the visible, see ibid., p. 356 n. 56, and compare Glenn A. Mazis, “Matter, Dream, and the Murmurs among Things,” in Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, edited by Véronique M. Fóti (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996), pp. 72–89, esp. 81–86. 50 On the connotation of voyance as the means to become aware of the invisible of the visible, see Luca Vanzago, “Voyance: On Merleau-Ponty’s Processual Conception of Vision,” in Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Sight, pp. 121–141. 51 Carbone, The Flesh of Images, pp. 36, 67. Compare Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), p. 35.

62  Elliot R. Wolfson the trans-descendence, rather than a horizontal transcendence of self that reaches toward others and the world on the outside.52 Immanence is not the negation of transcendence but the nontranscendental that is neither immanently transcendent nor transcendentally immanent because it is transcendent on account of its immanence and immanent on account of its transcendence. The Husserlian background of Merleau-Ponty’s stance is attested in the following comment: Husserl speaks of interweaving, of the transgression of Ineinander . That is not a mixture of immanence and causality. It is the discovery of a third dimension, that of φ , that of Being—the living present as the connection of the present and past of an invisible, therefore as noneveloping unity of this “consciousness” and likewise noneveloping unity of history, a sort of identity at a distance, vertical.53 We can infer from the verticality of this third dimension—the temporal vortex of the living present wherein past and present of the invisible coalesce in a noneveloping unity that characterizes the interwovenness of the experience of the self and the experience of the other in the intersubjective space of belonging together, literally, being in one another (Ineinandersein)54 — that the horizonal generality of the insentient is configured carnally in the singularity of the sentient. “There is no longer a problem of the concept, generality, the idea, when one has understood that the sensible itself is invisible, that the yellow is capable of setting itself up as a level of a horizon.”55 In somewhat more technical terms, Merleau-Ponty writes that the event of

52 Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 131. 53 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl as the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 16. See Takashi Kakuni, “‘Ineinander’ and Vortex: On Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl,” Analecta Husserliana 58 (1998): 17–28. 54 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 267–268; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 315. On the Husserlian notion of the intersubjective Ineinander, see Dermot Moran, “The Ego as Substrate of Habitualities: Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Habitual Self,” Phenomenology and Mind 6 (2014): 27, 44; idem, “The Phenomenology of the Social World: Husserl on Mitsein as Ineinandersein and Füreinandersein,” Metodo 5 (2017): 99–142; Boris Pantev, “Communication Instinct: Husserl and the Embodied Temporality of the Social,” PhD dissertation, Ryerson University and York University, 2016, pp. 11–12, 107–108, 112–117, 134–136. The particular impact of this Husserlian idea on Merleau-Ponty is explored in Dermot Moran, “Ineinandersein and L’interlacs: The Constitution of the Social World or ‘We –World’ (Wir-Welt) in Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the We, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), pp. 107–126. 55 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 237 (emphasis in original); Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 286. See Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible, pp. 40–41.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 63 the order of the ontologically primary brute or wild being (de l’être brut ou sauvage)56 in the nature of the sensible world entails that “a given visible properly disposed (a body) hollows itself out an invisible sense—The common stuff of which all the structures are made is the visible, which, for its part, is nowise of the objective, of the in itself, but is of the transcendent— which is not opposed to the for Itself, which has cohesion only for a Self—the Self to be understood not as nothingness, not as something, but as the unity of transgression or by correlative encroachment of ‘thing’ and ‘world’ (the time-thing, the time-being).”57 The interaction of the visible and the invisible enunciated in this passage strikes me as a continuation of Merleau-Ponty’s comment in the introduction to Phenomenology of Perception about the invisibility of the background of objects in the visual field of the perceiver, a possibility that is lost to the mental blindness58 promulgated by the empiricist orientation to the phenomenal world. 59 The experience of the world is such that the invisible aspects of phenomena— emblematized by the proverbial object that is behind our gaze—are as certain as the visible ones. The point is rendered more overtly in the same work in the critique of the approach to the breadth and depth of sense experience: “What makes depth invisible for me is precisely what makes it visible for the spectator under the aspect of breadth …. The depth that is declared invisible is thus a depth already identified with breadth.”60 The overlapping of depth and breadth in the intersubjective evidentness of the world anticipates MerleauPonty’s ontology of the flesh, which he identified as the primordial presentness, Uerpräsentierbarkeit,61 that is, “what is originarily capable of being put on view.”62 The fleshliness of corporeity is predicated on the chiasmic interplay of the visible and the invisible, a pivoting between presence and

56 Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 250. For a detailed analysis of this theme, see Robert Vallier, “Être sauvage and the Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Schelling,” in The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature, edited by James M. Wirth and Patrick Burke (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013), pp. 121–148, and in the same volume, Josep Maria Bech, “Être brut or Nature: Merleau-Ponty Surveys Schelling,” pp. 149–186. 57 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 200; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 250. 58 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 27. 59 Ibid., p. 26 (emphasis in original). 60 Ibid., pp. 266–267. 61 The apparent neologism for the originary sense of presentness or representability—based on the more familiar term Präsentierbarkeit—occurs in a marginal note to the essay “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 135; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 175. 62 Henri Maldiney, “Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 62.

64  Elliot R. Wolfson absence, silence and language, an undercutting of the metaphysical dualisms of ideality and materiality, necessity and contingency, transcendence and immanence, being and becoming, activity and passivity, the oneiric and the factical, the virtuality of the real and the reality of the virtual.63 In a seemingly tautologous and trivial tone, Merleau-Ponty writes that “the world is the vision of the world and could not be anything else [le monde est vision du monde et ne saurait être autre chose].”64 Upon closer scrutiny, one discovers that the statement discloses the profound lucidity of the madness implied by the panoramic view of vision: on the one hand, seeing is substantiated on the basis of the existence of the world, but, on the other hand, the multifarious parts of that world do not coexist without the one who sees through the holes of the eyes and from the bottom of the invisible retreat from the visible.65 This, I suggest, is the intent of Merleau-Ponty’s tantalizing remark, penned on November 26, 1959, that there “is no metaphor between the visible and the invisible … metaphor is too much or too little; too much if the invisible is really invisible, too little if it lends itself to transposition.”66 The rejection of the metaphorical relation binding the visible and the invisible is to be understood as a dismissal of the more specific demarcation of metaphor as a mode of transference; there is no need for any such transference since we are not dealing with discrete realms that need to be bridged.67 On the contrary, just as Merleau-Ponty argued in the Phenomenology of Perception that we cannot think movement, since the phenomenal objects that presuppose movement conceal its truth from the scope of vision,68 so in the later work he concludes that the invisible appears in the viscosity of the visible world as that which does not appear, the given that is given as the ungiven barred from being given. The relation of the invisible and the visible is better elucidated from the homogeneous but not identical relation of the imaginary and the real in

63 Mazis, Merleau-Ponty, p. xiii. For an attempt to read Merleau-Ponty’s later writings as a critical reflection on metaphysics through the problematization of the traditional disjunctions between fact and essence, sensible and intelligible, visible and invisible, see Bernard Flynn, “Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche on the Visible and the Invisible,” in MerleauPonty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, pp. 2–15. On the implications of Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal and the virtual gleaned from Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on sensory blindness and the sighting of the sightless, see Edith Wyschogrod, “Blind Man Seeing: From Chiasm to Hyperreality,” in Chiasms, pp. 165–176. See also Marcello Vitali-Rosati, “The Chiasm as a Virtual: A Non-concept in Merleau-Ponty’s Work (with a Coda on Theatre),” in Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception, pp. 279–296. 64 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 75; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 104. 65 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 75; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 104. 66 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, pp. 221–222 (emphasis in original); Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 271. 67 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, p. 195. 68 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 280.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 65 the dream phenomenon.69 Specifically, the one who is attuned to what Merleau-Ponty paradoxically names the oneirism of wakefulness70 discerns that by examining the symbolic function of the dream one appreciates “the manner in which the sleeper is taken into it in order to absent himself, without absenting himself.”71 Within the landscape of the dream, the occlusion of self is what makes possible the manifestation of self; fluctuating between the presence of absence and the absence of presence, the identity of the dreamer dissipates in the sedimentation of the nonidentity of oneiric fluidity.72 Merleau-Ponty refers to this denial of self in another passage, somewhat counterintuitively, as the “narcissism of the dream, dictatorship of the visible, prerogative of seeing.” In the dream, accordingly, there is no real activity or “true doing,” only the simulated activity of “seeing doing,” that is, a mental state that is not a “consciousness of something with an element of distance, but all things [are] linked by their participation in my life as ambivalent. We allow in being without taking leave, we exploit bodily presence in the world in order to make a pseudo-world where subject and object are indistinct. [There is a] subject-object solidarity which is not that of noesis and noema, but that of the body and perceived world.”73 Oneiric visualization is a mode of perceptual consciousness that is “imperception qua perception,” that is, seeing things “on the condition of not constituting them.”74 What I perceive, I perceive on account of what I do not perceive, and hence every perception is, concomitantly, an imperception.

69 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), foreword by Claude Lefort, text established by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé, translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 152. 70 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, p. 152. The expression oneirism of wakefulness and the implied effort to view dreams as a modalization of life correspond to the hypothesis of my book on dream interpretation that the mandate is to awake from the dream that we are waking from the dream (Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 101, 274), based on the discernment that there is no epistemic or ontic basis to distinguish sharply between dream and reality, an archaic wisdom that in the course of the centuries impacted Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Islamic sensibilities. The affinity between my view and Merleau-Ponty is also evident in A Dream, p. 100, where I write that the dream, as a poem, “is a nonspatial space, a space that is neither celestial nor terrestrial, an opening of the imagination where the invisible is envisioned as the absence that is present as the presence that is absent.” A similar approach to the dream as a poetic calling that wells forth from and gives witness to the state between being and nonbeing where the possible becomes real and the actual ideal may be elicited from Heidegger. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 116–118. 71 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, p. 151. 72 On the dissolution and depersonalization of the oneiric self in the incarnate fold of the dream, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 74–90. I discuss Merleau-Ponty on pp. 81–87. See also Wolfson, Giving, pp. 112, 374 n. 174, and especially the passage from Nancy cited on pp. 374–375 n. 177. 73 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, p. 158. 74 Ibid., p. 159.

66  Elliot R. Wolfson Analogously, the invisible is concealed in the disclosure of the visible as the visible that is disclosed in the concealment of the invisible. In a fragment from November 1959, we read that the invisible “is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework [le visible a luimême une membrure d’invisible], and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar which is presented to me as such within the world—one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus [le foyer virtuel], it is inscribed within it (in filigree).”75 Again, we confront the utterly paradoxical nature of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the invisible as the Nichturpräsentierbar, the originary nonpresentable, which is present in the world as that which is not present. Insofar as the “visible is pregnant with the invisible,” we can conclude that “to comprehend fully the visible relations … one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible. … The other’s visible is my invisible; my visible is the other’s invisible … Being is this strange encroachment by reason of which my visible, although it is not superposable on that of the other, nonetheless opens upon it, that both open upon the same sensible world.”76 Invisibility permeates the field of the visible but in such a way that—as the example of the dreamer discussed above attests—the invisible is rendered invisible by being divested of its own invisibility. “The invisible is there without being an object,” writes Merleau-Ponty in January 1960, “it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the ‘visibles’ themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.”77 Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me state the obvious: inasmuch as there is no ontological—and certainly no ontotheological—status accorded the invisible, there is no transcendence transcendent to immanence and hence the purely transcendent is purely immanent.78 The transcendental field is identified as “a field of transcendencies,” and the sufficient reduction regarding the sphere of intersubjectivity “leads beyond the alleged transcendental ‘immanence,’ it leads to the absolute spirit understood as Weltlichkeit, to Geist as Ineinander of the spontaneities, itself founded on the aesthesiological Ineinander and on the sphere of life as sphere of Einfühlung and intercorporeity.”79 If we venture beyond the polarity of

75 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 215 (emphasis in original); Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 265. Compare Merleau-Ponty, Husserl as the Limits of Phenomenology, p. 24. 76 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 216; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 265. 77 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 229 (emphasis in original); Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 278. 78 For a concise survey of the different connotations of transcendence, see Michael B. Smith, “Transcendence in Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, pp. 35–46. Merleau-Ponty’s approach was influential in the shaping of my argument in the introduction to Wolfson, A Dream, entitled “Transcending Transcendence and the Specter of Invisibility.” See especially pp. 31, 40–41. 79 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 172; Le Visible et l’invisible, pp. 223–224.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 67 immanence and transcendence, we do not arrive at a transcendental other, even conceived as transcendental immanence, but rather we come to the absolute spirit of worldliness experienced as the mutual commingling and collective intentionality in the communalized timespace of empathy and intersubjective embodiment.80 Moreover, just as the invisible dons no ontic mask, and is thus truly nothing like consciousness,81 so the visibles experienced in the seemingly presentified world are enfolded in a core of absence, the emptiness at the heart of the suchness of being, the fecund negative, that is, the doubling of nothingness as the difference between identicals.82 As Merleau-Ponty explained in a passage written in May 1960, When I say that every visible is invisible, that perception is imperception, that consciousness has a “punctum caecum,” that to see is always to see more than one sees [que voir c’est toujours voir plus qu’on ne voit]…. It must not be imagined that I add to the visible perfectly defined as in Itself a non-visible (which would be only objective absence) (that is, objective presence elsewhere, in an elsewhere in itself)—One has to understand that it is the visibility itself that involves a non-visibility. … The invisible of the visible. It is its belongingness to a ray of the world.83 The sense of the invisible endorsed by Merleau-Ponty—corresponding, in my mind, to the Heideggerian idea of the phenomenology of the unapparent

80 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated, with an introduction, by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 255. The ideal of Ineinander is applied hermeneutically to the understanding of history in ibid., p 371. Compare the depiction of the “absolute reality” as a “totality of monads” characterized by “a unity of working-into and becoming-in-one-another” (eine Einheit des Ineinanderhineinwirkens und –gewirktwerdens), in Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjecktivität, Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928 [Hua 14], edited by Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 270-271. On the distinction between two modes of interacting, acting on one another (wirken aufeinander) and acting into one another (wirken ineinander), see ibid., pp. 268–269. And consider the especially poignant characterization of love in ibid., p. 174: “Liebende leben nicht nebeneinander und miteinander, sondern ineinander, aktuell und potentiell. Sie tragen also auch gemeinsam alle Verantwortungen, sie sind solidarisch verbunden, auch in Sünde und Schuld.” 81 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, p. 195. 82 Véronique M. Fóti, Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), p. 54. See Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 263; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 311. With regard to this understanding of the fold of being as the doubled-up nothingness, the emptiness that is the suchness of being, there is affinity between Merleau-Ponty and Mahāyāna Buddhism. See David Brubaker, “‘Place of Nothingness’ and the Dimension of Visibility: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Huineng,” in Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism, edited by Jin Y. Park and Gereon Kopf (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), pp. 155–179, and in the same volume, Glen A. Mazis, “The Flesh of the World Is Emptiness and Emptiness Is the Flesh of the World, and Their Ethical Implication,” pp. 183–208. 83 Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Visible, p. 247; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 295.

68  Elliot R. Wolfson discussed above84 —is not applicable to Levinas’s affirmation of an invisible but personal God, an ineffable alterity whose unqualified exteriority places it outside the horizon of visuality. I am cognizant of the fact that the trope of invisibility is used by Levinas, as he makes clear in Otherwise Than Being, both to depict the nonpresence of the Good,85 the event of

84 See above at n. 26. Merleau-Ponty’s invisible and Heidegger’s nothingness were already compared by Maldiney, “Flesh and Verb,” p. 67. See, by contrast, Michel Haar, “Proximity and Distance: With Regard to Heidegger in the Later Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy, p. 179. David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), p. 455, argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological interpretation of the human being’s luminous nature and his insistence that the task is not to conquer the invisible by the visible but rather to let it be seen as invisible can be viewed as a fleshing out of what Heidegger suggested with respect to the ecstatic sojourn of human beings in the openness of presencing. Compare the more extended comparison of the intersections of the visible and the invisible in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 170–215. The Heideggerian influence is palpably discernible in a note from September 1959 in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 201; Le Visible et l’invisible, p. 251. The passage expands on the conclusion of the chapter on temporality in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 457. On the compresence of the three dimensions of time and the passive synthesis of past and future in the field of presence, see ibid., pp. 438–442. And compare the passage from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit cited by Merleau-Ponty on p. 443, “Temporalizing does not mean a ‘succession’ [Nacheinander] of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future-that-goes-into-the-past-by-coming-into-the-present” (emphasis in original). In my own reflections on the nature of time, indebted to the Heideggerian hermeneutic, I have emphasized that the temporal flow is the return of the same in which the same is the replication of difference and hence the future is a retrieval of a past that has never been. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking,” in Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 143–144; idem, “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” in Before and After: On Time and Eternity in Jewish Esotericism and Mysticism, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 32–33; idem, “Recovering Futurity: Theorizing the End and the End of Theory,” in Jews at the End of Theory, edited by Jonathan Boyarin and Shai Ginsburg (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 295–297; idem, Giving, pp. 62–63, 197, 217, 243; idem, The Duplicity, pp. 107–108. It seems to me that this corresponds to the description of the “original past” as “a past that has never been present” in MerleauPonty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 252. Compare the discussion of the philosophy of Freudianism in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 270; Le Visible et l’invisible, pp. 317–318. 85 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 11. It is worth noting that the English translation omits the following comment that appears after the first sentence in the original French: “L’impossibilité de thématiser peut tenir à la bonté du diachronique” (Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974], p. 13), which may be rendered as “The impossibility of thematizing may reflect the goodness of the diachronic.”

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 69 being that is beyond the binary of ipseity and alterity, and to proclaim that subjectivity—the incomparable unicity of self that withdraws from essence and thus is without the identity of an ego coinciding with itself86 —cannot be essentialized or thematized. This bears affinity to Henry’s view that the manifestation of the absolute subjectivity of the ego can be designated by the oxymoron invisible revelation.87 This locution prompts us to ask again, what does it mean to speak of a revelation that is invisible? How can the unseen be seen and remain unseen? Conversely, how can the seen be unseen and remain seen? The matter can be illumined from the following passage: Transcendence rests upon immanence. The original truth is the true foundation. As the origin of transcendence, the original truth is the ontological condition for the possibility of all transcendental phenomena for which it constitutes the foundation. It is itself, however, a phenomenon, but in an irreducible sense, namely, insofar as it is an immanent revelation. The fact that the foundation is a “phenomenon” in the sense of a “revelation”, is that which confers upon this foundation its reality by giving it its moment of presence. Insofar as it has to do with the origin, presence is not that which is subordinate to a horizon of presence, neither is it the Being, which is in reality never present, of the horizon itself. This original ontological presence, which eludes the general conditions of Being, is that of the ego itself. The phenomenological Being of the ego is one with the original revelation which is accomplished in a sphere of radical immanence.88 It is beyond the confines of this essay to delve into the intricacies of Henry’s thought. It is crucial for our purposes to stress that the foundation for the ontological possibility of being—located in the transcendental life of the absolute ego—is not a transcendent phenomenon but “an immanent revelation which is a presence to itself, even though such a presence remains ‘invisible’. … Such an existence owes nothing to transcendence, rather it precedes it and makes it possible.”89 Henry’s statement that the

86 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 8; Autrement qu’être, p. 10. The influence of Levinas is conspicuous in Marion, Being Given, pp. 243–244. On the paradox of the saturated phenomenon of the face, see also Marion, In Excess, pp. 113–119, and compare idem, The Visible and the Revealed, pp. 73–74. 87 Zahavi, “Michel Henry,” pp. 230–231. The visibility of the invisible in Henry’s phenomenology has been discussed by a host of scholars. For instance, see Yorihiro Yamagata, “L’invisible chez Michel Henry et Merleau-Ponty,” Cartesiana 5 (1982): 5–25; Jean-Luc Marion, “The Invisible and the Phenomenon,” in Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought, edited by Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R, Kelly (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 19–39. 88 Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, translated by Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martins Nijhoff, 1973), p. 41 (emphasis in original). 89 Ibid (emphasis in original).

70  Elliot R. Wolfson methodological task of phenomenology is to be interpreted in light of a philosophy of transcendence90 implies that the phenomenological undertaking is meant to bring to light that which is hidden, to make manifest the nonmanifest, but in such a way that what is exposed remains obfuscated. In contrast to Levinas, the invisible is not antithetical to the visible; the non-dialectical opposition91 between the two presupposes a bond that militates against viewing them as antinomies.92 The “ontological structure of reality” is dependent on the “original mode” of disclosure, “according to which phenomenality phenomenalizes itself” as the “hiding of the essence.”93 Rejecting the premise that the constitution of phenomenality should be confined exclusively to a milieu of exteriority, a position that eclipses the insight that “the original essence of presence maintains itself outside the world and is in principle absent from it”—indeed, the original essence of presence is an absence that is willed and prescribed by that presence94 —Henry avails himself of the apophatic contention derived from Meister Eckhart that “revelation resides in non-knowing,” whence it follows that only one who is blind can see.95 Henry unearths from the teaching of the celebrated Dominican monk the phenomenological supposition that every phenomenon that appears manifests itself visibly as invisible. “That the revelation of the absolute essence resides in non-knowing and is constituted by it does not only determine the work of revelation as the original hiding which makes a failure of the enterprise of knowledge. Because this work is one of revelation, its determination in non-knowledge tells what the effective phenomenality of the essence is insofar as it does not manifest itself in the world and cannot be known, insofar as it does not have a face.”96 In consonance with Merleau-Ponty, Henry affirms the dialectical process whereby the invisible is inserted into the original ontological unity of the world such that it finds its phenomenological expression in the concrete modalities by which the arising of the world takes place.97 Even so, the invisible persists in its invisibility. “That which does not show itself

90 Ibid., p. 42. 91 Ibid., p. 455. 92 Ibid., p. 444. 93 Ibid., p. 379. 94 Ibid., p. 381. 95 The passage that Henry is interpreting corresponds to Raymond Blakney, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 941), sermon 22, p. 200: “Where there is nothing but One, nothing but One is to be seen. Therefore, no man can see God except he be blind, nor know him except through ignorance, nor understand him except through folly.” Compare The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, translated and edited by Maurice O’Connell Walshe, revised with a foreword by Bernard McGinn (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), sermon 19, pp. 140-141, and sermon 95, p. 460. 96 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, p. 437. 97 Ibid., p. 445.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 71 is the first moment of that which shows itself, its original determination and at the same time its limit-mode.”98 The invisible is the nonessence that is the formal and empty negation of the world, but this nonessence is the essence that manifestly conceals itself in the concealed manifestation of that world.99 The facelessness of the essence indicates that the “original revelation of that essence to itself, which is constitutive of its reality, is invisible. Because it constitutes the original revelation of the essence to itself and of its reality, the invisible is not the antithetical concept of phenomenality, it is rather its first and fundamental determination.”100 Subverting the principle of noncontradiction, Henry identifies the invisible as the principal determination of phenomenality, that is, what is not seen establishes the parameters of what is seen. The invisible is both co-extensive with the original essence and co-intensive with its effectiveness. This leads to the conclusion that “the invisible phenomenalizes itself in itself as such; it is phenomenon through and through, revelation and, even more, the essence of revelation. Night penetrates the essence of revelation as that which reveals itself in it as it is. Night is the revelation of the essence of revelation, it constitutes the effectiveness of its specific phenomenological content and defines it. … If negation included in the concept of the invisible is not that of phenomenality but determines the mode according to which phenomenality phenomenalizes itself originally and helps us conceive the concept, the claim of seeking the origin of all knowledge in the visible and its powers … loses its rights and is reversed.”101 The inherent nocturnality of the revelatory event—the original light of night associated with the authentic speech of poetry102 —allows Henry to give voice to the paradox, which we have already encountered, the invisible is the essence that remains hidden in the revelation that reveals itself.103 The essence remains hidden not because it is a transcendence that is either not revealed at present or is visible from another perspective, but because it can be revealed only as what is hidden from being revealed. “For the invisible is nothing which might be beyond the visible, it is nothing ‘transcendent’, it is the original essence of life such that, since it takes place in a sphere of radical immanence, it never arises in transcendence and, moreover, cannot show itself in it.”104 That which manifests itself is the phenomenological form of the transcendental horizon of Being and not the essence; to manifest, consequently, means to be the appearance of something “in such a way

  98 Ibid. (emphasis in original).   99 Ibid., p. 456. 100 Ibid., p. 438 (emphasis in original). 101 Ibid., p. 439 (emphasis in original). 102 Ibid., p. 442. 103 Ibid., p. 440. 104 Ibid., p. 453 (emphasis in original).

72  Elliot R. Wolfson that that which manifests itself in this appearance is not the thing of which it is the appearance, but merely refers to this thing as to that which does not show itself in the effective phenomenological content of the appearance itself. In this sense ‘to manifest’ signifies ‘to hide’ as well, or more precisely, to indicate something as differing in itself from the appearance which indicates it.”105 Henry disputes the view of Fichte that “the form always hides the essence from us” by noting that the “form of the horizon can be understood as ‘hiding’ the essence only insofar as the presupposition is made that it is precisely the essence itself which manifests itself in the form of this horizon. … For the ontological reality is not dissociable from the form in which it shows itself, since it is itself this form as such. The ontological reality of the transcendental horizon of Being is identical to the phenomenological content of this horizon, since the ontological reality of the essence is the pure phenomenological content in which it shows itself for what it is.”106 Inasmuch as the nonapparent cannot appear except as unapparent, we must conclude that every appearance of the ontological reality of the essence is a nonappearance.

Apophasis and the Icon of the Invisible Kierkegaard famously wrote in Works of Love, “a bird, if it is actually present, cannot be invisibly present any more than actual music can be inaudible … but God can be present only invisibly and inaudibly; therefore, that the world does not see him does not prove very much.”107 Needless to say, this sentiment has a long trajectory in Christian theology, derived, at least in part, from the language of Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Relevant as well, of course, is the reworking of God’s response to Moses in Exodus 33:20, “You cannot see my face, for no human shall see me and live,” in John 1:18, “No one has seen God at any time.” Additionally, and perhaps most tellingly for our purposes, Jesus is described in Colossians 1:15 as the icon of the invisible, the image through which one envisions that which has no image.108 The scriptural trope proffers the epiphany of the divine as the crossing of

105 Ibid., p. 240. 106 Ibid., pp. 240–241 (emphasis in original). 107 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong with introduction and notes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 203. 108 For a constructive theological analysis of this theme, see Kathryn Tanner, “In the Image of the Invisible,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2009), pp. 117–134. Compare the Deleuzian reading in F. LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 31–36.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 73 the visible and the invisible, to borrow the language of Marion,109 to see in the incarnate Christ the nothing to be seen. The unseen—in contrast to the invisible that is forever recalcitrant to entering into the domain of the visible and assuming the status of an apparition—is provisionally invisible, harboring the transgressive possibility of exerting its demand for visibility.110 In contradistinction to the idol that dispels the distance between the divine and its figural materialization, the iconic representation of the nonrepresentable—much like a painting111—embodies the paradox that the visible increases in direct proportion to the invisible.112 Exemplifying the insertion of the visibly invisible into the invisibly visible, the economy of the icon attests to the fact that the visible opens onto the invisible because the invisible constructs the irreal space of emptiness in which the visible comes to be seen in its invisibility. Phenomenologically translating the Christological insight—epitomized in understanding the Eucharist as the sacrament that concretizes the visible form of an invisible grace113 —Marion writes, “The visible only breaks forth into day constrained to finitude—crowned with an invisible by default, l’invu.”114 Along these lines, Marion describes the double mirroring of the icon and the worshipper as the invisible moving across the visible: “The gaze looks at the one who, in prayer [orant], raises his gaze toward the icon: the painted gaze invisibly responds to the invisible gaze of the one in prayer, and transfigures its own visibility by including in the commerce of two invisible gazes—the one from a praying man, taken through the painted icon, to look upon an invisible saint, the other the gaze of the invisible saint covered with benevolence, visible through the painted icon, looking upon the one in prayer.”115 The idea of an invisible God in Christian theology evolved not only from Jewish aniconism but from the apophaticism rooted in the Platonic emphasis on the One beyond being and hence beyond representation,

109 Marion, The Crossing, pp. 1–23. Compare idem, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 75; idem, Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers, translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017), p. 111. On the role of the icon as the place of the chiasma of the visible and the invisible in Merleau-Ponty, see Jenny Slatman, “Phenomenology of the Icon,” in Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy, pp. 197–219, esp. 199–201, 204–207, 212. See also Fóti, Tracing Expression, p. 45. 110 Marion, The Crossing, p. 25. 111 Ibid., pp. 9–10, 12. 112 Ibid., p. 10. See Marion, In Excess, pp. 113, 118–119; idem, The Idol and Distance, translated and with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2001), p. 9. 113 Marion, Believing in Order to See, p. 103. On the sacrament as embodying the double phenomenality of giving itself visibly as invisible and thereby signifying the insensible abandoned by and yet remaining within the sensible, see ibid., pp. 104, 107–108. 114 Marion, In Excess, p. 105. 115 Marion, The Crossing, pp. 20–21.

74  Elliot R. Wolfson an idea magnified both in Middle Platonism (especially relevant is Philo of Alexandria) and later Neoplatonism. There is a revered tradition in Christian sources that develops this emphasis and postulates that to attain a vision of the invisible it is necessary to purge the intellect of all concepts, images, and words. By leaving behind empirical data, imaginative modulations, and ideational constructs, the mind penetrates deeper until it achieves the ultimate vision, the seeing that is not seeing. Contemplation is a progression to what cannot be contemplated, to know that God cannot be known except as the unknown; the pinnacle of the mind’s ascent entails beholding the luminous darkness, in Gregory of Nyssa’s turn of phrase, an oxymoron that intimates that blindness toward the physical is true insight into the spiritual.116 Recent attempts to harness this apophatic tradition in order to create a viable postmodern theology, a post-theism, or a religion without religion, as it is sometimes called based on the language of Derrida, are variations on the compulsion to worship the invisible branded by Freud as uniquely Jewish. These theologies, which typically claim to circumvent the pitfalls of an ontotheological objectification of the deity, are not radical enough in their iconoclasm. The idols they erect may very well be idols of deidolization but they are idols nonetheless. Indeed, these apophatic theologies are guilty of preserving an invisible transcendence beyond the visible that defies the phenomenological presupposition of a phenomenality of immanence that would lead us to detect that there is no reality beneath the veneer of appearance, that being is nothing but the appearance behind which there is nothing but the appearance of being.117 The current attempts to salvage transcendence corroborate the suspicion of Daniel Colucciello Barber that “the opposition of immanence to transcendence requires not the rejection of theological discourse’s signification, but on the contrary a renewed expression of it. Of course, these names function differently, for they no longer properly represent the transcendent. Nonetheless, through their relay they re-express the desires heretofore captured in the transcendent by newly orienting them around immanence.”118 The residual of theological language persists most conspicuously in the continued deployment of figurative language that personalizes the impersonal transcendence—the infinite person

116 Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 2005), p. 217. 117 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Heidegger’s Apophaticism : Unsaying the Said and the Silence of the Last God,” in Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy, edited by Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 205. 118 Daniel Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011), pp. 26–27.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 75 of monotheistic dogma119 —and thus runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent, in Henry’s language, “the radically-other element in its fundamental foreignness to everything which takes on the form of Being-there, the non-face.”120 Surely, it is prudent to consent that we have no choice but to marshal the best metaphors available to us in an effort to imagine the essence of the nonessence that cannot be imagined. My work on the place of the imaginal in Jewish mysticism attests that I am well aware of the fact that from the human vantage point there is no truth without the semblance of untruth, no figuration that is not ipso facto a disfiguration, no formation that is not a deformation, no revelation without concealment, no way to depict what is beyond depiction but through the veil of metaphoricity, no seeing of the faceless but through the mask of the face.121 As our discussion above demonstrates, it is phenomenologically justified to regard the invisible as the essence of the visible, the nonmanifest that is manifest in the appearance of the nonapparent. From this we may infer that the nonphenomenon is not the absence of phenomenality but rather the phenomenality of absence, the light that is seen not only in but also as darkness. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that the post-theological theologies continue to ensnare the human mind in representing the unrepresentable through the production of images that, literally speaking, are false, and in so doing, the allure of an alleged absolute transcendence that is distinct from the surfeit of immanence is severely compromised. Simply put, the infinite as genuinely other cannot be experienced and certainly not discussed in its otherness. I thus concur with F. LeRon Shults’s assessment of the matter as it relates to the identity of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim coalitions, “Monotheism is

119 I am in agreement with the following remark of Lorenz B. Puntel, Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion, translated by and in collaboration with Alan White (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), p. 252: “To be sure, the word ‘God’ has been and continues to be connected with a great many different conceptual contents. At least for the most part, however, it has been and continues to be used to designate a person, no matter how that person is more precisely understood or articulated.” For a representative study of the trend I am criticizing, see John Panteleimon Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). 120 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, p. 454. I am here abbreviating my discussions in Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 27–33, and idem, Giving, pp. xx-xxvii. 121 See Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Mena ḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 25–27, 52, 64, 96, 99–100, 113, 114–129, 212, 245, 341 n. 166; idem, A Dream, p. 216; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 7, 107. On the inability to distinguish the face and the mask, see Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 146; idem, A Dream, pp. 41, 78, 313 n. 117; idem, Giving, pp. 153, 402 n. 520; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 68, 141, 305, 358.

76  Elliot R. Wolfson anthropomorphic promiscuity and sociographic prudery gone wild—taken (and applied) to infinity.”122 If we were to embark upon smashing the idols without political prejudice or psychological grievance, then the more fruitful use of the rhetoric of the via negativa would be to get beyond the anthropocentric bias and to undo both the masculine and feminine imaginaries that have informed our portrayals of the deity. A bolder apophatic theology—or perhaps atheology—should call for a wholesale iconoclasm, an uncompromising shattering of all idolatry, including icons of the aniconic. From the perspective of an absolute nothingness beyond existence and nonexistence, it is all the same difference, and hence the infinite nihility should not be imaginatively confabulated as either male or female. Resolving the symbolic inequity by erecting idols of the infinite—even if conceived in a nonsubstantialist way as the watery and fluctuating potentiality of the abyss123 —that are gendered as both male and female only compounds the problem by contributing to the creation of a cloud of darkness that shrouds the luminosity of the darkness in which all binaries, including the dyad of sexuated difference, are transcended, not in the coincidence of opposites but in the unmitigated erasure ensuing from the juxtaposition of the sameness of their disparity. To be sure, the delineation of the female as the site of alterity problematizes the hegemony of the masculine, and thus essentializing the feminine as the inessential, the essence that defies essentialization, has been a necessary step along the way of critical thinking. The apophasis of apophasis, however, demands taking the next step, which would not only thwart the reduction of the identity of the other to the same but also the amplification of the difference of the same from the other. The overcoming of the ontology of determinate difference and the valorization of indeterminate diversity can take root within the borderspace where there is no other because there is nothing but the other that in the absence of the same is not marked as other. Political correctness aside, apophasis should be as much a challenge to a theology of irreducible particularity124 as it is to a theology of reducible universality insofar as the one of which it speaks by speaking-not, as opposed to not speaking, is indeterminable in the modality of its infinite multiplicity. Here I follow François Laruelle’s admonition: “The transcendental or unifying (-unified) All will thus be ‘ontically’ indeterminable, that is, more rigorously, indeterminable in the mode of ontic multiplicity. This indetermination … is not decided in relation to beings

122 Shults, Iconoclastic Theology, p. 17. 123 I am here alluding to the position endorsed by Catherine Keller. See my critical assessment in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 228–230. See also idem, A Dream, pp. 27–29. 124 For a thoughtful example of the constructive trend I am criticizing, see R. Brad Bannon, “Apophatic Measures: Toward a Theology of Irreducible Particularity,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2015.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 77 in general, but only in relation to beings inasmuch as in general they are multiple and particular: to think the intrinsic variety of Being itself is thus not to wish to break its (necessary) relation to beings.”125 The wholeness of infinitude is constituted by the fragmentariness of finitude—what Laruelle calls the vision-in-one126 —and not by the principle of transcendence within immanence that would render the latter coherent as the corollary of the dialectical identity of identity and difference. In taking the step to reverse the ontological difference that effaces difference in light of the unifying difference that exacerbates difference, perhaps we commence to trespass the signposts of both patriarchy and matriarchy and thereby journey to the other side in relation to which there is no other. I am aware that the removal of all images from God, if maintained unfailingly, seriously compromises the feasibility of devotional piety. To deplete God of the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic embellishments decisively curtails the imagination’s ability to concoct the deity in personalist terms, a restraint that assaults the codependency of religion and idolatry discerned already in the eighteenth century by Moses Mendelssohn, who argued that religion must comprise mythical symbols as a complement to the criterion of reason.127 Contrary to what is commonly held to be the theological import of monotheism and the greatest contribution of ancient Israel and later Judaism to the history of religion, the turning toward God is not a turning away from idol images. The following description of Judaism from the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno can be taken as exemplary of this sentiment: “It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion.”128 The casting of Judaism as illustrative of an excessive aniconism by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School is warranted by their lack of concern with justifying the perpetuation of Judaism as a living community

125 François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to NonPhilosophy, translated by Rocco Gangle (New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), pp. 70–71. 126 François Laruelle, Theory of Identities, translated by Alyosha Edlebi (New York, NY: Columbia University Press 2016), p. 80; idem, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, pp. 39, 44, 165. 127 Gideon Freudenthal, No Religion Without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 19. 128 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 17. See Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002): 291–318; Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Polemic Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others, edited by Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 56, 62. See additional references in the following note.

78  Elliot R. Wolfson of practice and belief.129 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno commented that the biblical injunction against images translates philosophically into “an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith,” an atheistic confession dogmatically expressed as the “one who believes in God cannot believe in God.”130 Similar language was used by Adorno in the conclusion of the essay “Reason and Revelation,” “Therefore, I see no other possibility than an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once originally meant.”131 If, however, one were concerned with the socio-political survival and the spatio-temporal implementation of the religion, then it would be transparent that the vibrancy of faith is not sustainable without the veracity of deception. All propositional utterances about God, even apophatic statements of what God is not, are not only ambiguous and hyperbolic but also, literally speaking, fictitious as they attempt to describe linguistically the indescribable and to delimit conceptually the illimitable. If idolatry is understood as absolutizing the nonabsolute, then there can be no imagistic representation of God that is not an idolatrous relativization.132 Let me conclude by returning to where I started. The predominant sway of contemporary philosophical religious thought continues to confabulate the divine other through the prism of a personal being. One might argue that all bodily images, when thought in this manner, are not subject to the metaphysical incongruity between real and imagined; rather, as metaphorical, they occupy an intermediate space in which the imaginary is real and the real imaginary, since there is no reality apart from what is imagined to be real. The centrality of the exploitation of metaphor and narrative in this configuration highlights nonetheless the tenacity of the imagination and

129 On the presentation of Adorno’s thought as the critique of idolatry and the espousing of an extreme iconoclastic rejection of images, see Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, translated by Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 601–606, 629–630; Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 127–128. On viewing the critical theory of the Frankfurt school as a reformulated Jewish negative theology, see Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic Philosophy, Negative Theology, and Counter-Education,” Educational Theory 55 (2005): 343–365, and James Gordon Finlayson, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism,” Harvard Theological Review 105 (2012): 1–32. See also Martin Shuster, “Adorno and Negative Theology,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37 (2016): 97–130, esp. 102 and 120. 130 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. P. Ashton (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 401–402. 131 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford, introduction by Lydia Goehr (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 142. 132 Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, translated by Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 246.

Imagination, Theolatry, and Compulsion to Worship the Invisible 79 the theolatrous impulse that lies coiled in the crux of theism. Worshipping the one God without images was predicated on smashing the idols of the other gods, but if this one God were to be truly deprived of all imagery, including the image of a God that has no image, then there would be nothing not to see and, consequently, nothing to venerate as what cannot be seen. Invisibility itself would finally be reckoned iconologically as visible in virtue of its invisibility, a disrobing of the naked truth fully attired in the cloak of untruth.133 Insofar as visibility is commensurate to the garment in which the body is clothed, a denuded body is invisible and thus can neither evince nor conceal the secret of truth. On this account, the ultimate veil to lift would be the veil that there is an ultimate veil to lift; the final veil is the belief that there is a final veil. In a different terminological register, behind every mask is a face that is another mask. To unmask the mask, therefore, requires unmasking the masking of the unmasking. Apophatic theologies, as influential as they have been in forging a new synthesis of philosophy and religion, should be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis, what I have called an apophasis of the apophasis, based on the acceptance of an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify an unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at the hub of being, the negation devoid of the negation of its negation, a triple negativity, the emptiness of the fullness that is the fullness of the emptiness emptied of the emptiness of its emptiness. This I submit may be the final iconoclastic gesture, the realization, as Henri Atlan put it, that “the only discourse about God that is not idolatrous is necessarily an atheistic discourse,” since “the only God who is not an idol is a God who is not a God.”134 Can we imagine a more fitting fulfillment of the desire to worship the invisible?

133 On the epistemological difficulty of positing a naked truth, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 54, 260, 451 n. 242; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 5, 68, 305–306, 317, 324 n. 72. 134 Henri Atlan, The Sparks of Randomness, vol. 2: The Atheism of Scripture, translated by Lenn J. Schramm (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 346–347 (emphasis added).

4

Theology’s Figures of Abandon Revisiting the Topic of Original Affirmation Asja Szafraniec

Is it … untouched [indemne] by all religiosity? Perhaps. But by all “belief”, by that “belief” that would have “no place in thinking”? This seems less certain. [B]elief is the ether of the address and the relation to the utterly other. (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 97, 99)

One of philosophy’s oldest strategies for distinguishing itself from theology is not to deny that these two discourses are tainted by association— after all, they have always been entangled in a complex speculative dance—but to insist that philosophy came into its own by learning to critically assess its own premises, while theology remained irrationally bound to dogma. With this kind of a narrative, it’s a small wonder that philosophical attempts to link the two discourses are often seen as compromised from the start. The more so that the default philosophical understanding of theology remains hostage to an onto-theological orthodoxy largely unchallenged since Descartes, complete with the idea of the “objective reality” of a supreme God and all the paraphernalia of eternity, infinity, immutability and omnipotence. So, philosophy came to see itself as a discourse that can question its own foundations and theology as the one that can’t. Hent de Vries’ project questions the terms of this opposition, both by pointing out a leap of faith in those philosophical foundations and by imagining a theology free from any (residual) orthodoxy. But it also requires that one explicitly ask to what extent theology can be released from its own image—how a-theological it can become (not only beyond the onto-theological tradition but also perhaps beyond many of the dissident “heterologies” that always accompanied it). Can philosophy’s project to accommodate the irrational without succumbing to it be achieved at no cost to the irrational element in question? What must happen to religion for philosophy to be able—and willing—to turn to it? I will revisit the discussion of the original affirmation to see to what extent de Vries’ argument shows the destabilization of religion’s traditional self-understanding, and to argue that at least in some aspects of this argument, a further displacement is needed. DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-5

Theology’s Figures of Abandon 81 Much of de Vries’ discussion of the category of “religion” focuses on an element of engagement, in its etymological sense of engagement of faith or a groundless commitment (Cf. Montaigne’s engager sa foy) that is presupposed in, and accompanies, any form of expression involving language and thought. In Minimal Theologies, it takes the shape of an irrational element entering philosophical rationality that, Adorno insisted, it is philosophy’s task to absorb, “without thereby subscribing to irrationalism” (Adorno, Hegel, 108, trans. modified). In Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, it surfaces as original affirmation, through de Vries’ rereading, sometimes against the grain, of Derrida and de Certeau. And then, the topic of affirmation seems to reemerge, again in a different way, as the engagement of reason—the need for reason to claim itself in de Vries’ later work on Cavell. But what is affirmation? We know its general definition: before entering discourse, before becoming speaking subjects, we have always already said “yes” (de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 142; Derrida, How To Avoid Speaking, 3)—something has been “uncritically” assumed, endorsed or claimed—and this leap of faith, which is not due to a philosophical naiveté or a theoretical prejudice is understood to be presupposed in all reflection. This is Derrida’s definition but I will expand and modify it to cover a broader range of philosophical positions that may be seen as affirmative. Derrida’s (and de Certeau’s) examples of the “yes” in question range from a number of guises discussed in Christian and Jewish mystic texts, through Heidegger’s discussion of Gelassenheit, to the Nietzschean Bejahung. We could also add to them Stanley Cavell’s work on everyday “groundless” affirmations that shape the criteria of our judgments (and through this, our understanding of the world).1 These examples are far from univocal (even if Derrida subsumes some of their aspects under one common denominator). Derrida insists that his own version of the affirmation does not belong in the set of the versions he addresses—it is fundamental with respect to them. His definition of affirmation, “promise of memory and memory of promise,” reaches back to the earlier work on the primitive, pre-subjective experience of temporality that ushers consciousness into being (for there to be consciousness there must be a phantasmatic sense of self-presence; the latter can only be projected or believed since it is always mediated by memory which itself is split into time between the moment that is remembered—the “promise of memory”—and the moment of remembering—the “memory of the promise”). Back in the day of his work on Husserl Derrida called this leap over disjointed time at the origin of consciousness “transcendental temporalization” (Speech and Phenomena, 68/76), later adding the qualification “quasi,” to indicate the necessary element of fiction, of “as if” involved in the “deduction” of this point of origin (the idea of the origin is “contradictory”

1 Cavell is not mentioned in Derrida’s discussion, but this other point of focus in de Vries’ work not only belongs to the same spectrum but also shows what is at stake in de Vries’ engagement with theology. As such it useful to refer to it at times in what follows.

82  Asja Szafraniec because it cannot be given as such—there is no origin since it is divided—and because it is circular—each of the two “sources” refers back to the other one, the promise cannot be given without the memory and vice-versa [Of Grammatology, 61/90]). That’s why Derrida says that his version of the affirmation involves more than one “yes” (that of the promise and that of memory) which precedes “all presence, all being, all psychology of the psyche, and all morality” (A Number of Yes, 131). The context of fiction, fable and invention is inseparably connected to the questions of belief and credibility, which is one of the reasons Derrida’s discourse relies on the vocabulary of religion and more generally, faith. Is Derrida’s version of the “yes” theological or religious in nature? It has been objected that a commitment to theology and/or religion would be irreconcilable with Derrida’s critique of the idea of a sovereign God as related to the destructive logic of auto-immunity. The latter is a mechanism through which finite, vulnerable beings attempt to assure their survival by projecting a phantasy of “something worth more than life, which [is] above life” (The Death Penalty, 278), another life beyond life— perfect and unscathed; this phantasy of sovereignty, Derrida argues, introduces an economy, a sense of debt which can only be cleared through (self-) sacrifice. Hence, the desire of immunity paradoxically leads to life turning against itself. Derrida’s project must be then one of radical finitude and hence be incompatible with religion or theology. As with any assertion of incompatibility, its merit depends on the meaning of the terms whose potential for coexistence is being assessed. The emphatically unorthodox sense in which de Vries uses the terms “religion” and “theology,” wary not only of their onto-theological interpretations but also of the pitfalls presented by their more subtle negative-theological guises (such as the possible reintroduction of the onto-theological God by the back door) both recognizes their potential for violence and steers clear of the temptations of indemnity. But that also means that it must explicitly depart from what Derrida, following Montaigne, identified as the essence of religion—“preferring something else to life, at the cost of life” (The Death Penalty, 279). The main thrust of de Vries’ work on Derrida is not directed at the infinite, unscathed life but at an exploration of the infinite speculative effect of the theological (or heterological) archive permeating the works of western philosophy—and this commitment to infinite speculation is one shared with Derrida (I will return to this below). Consequently, the terms “theology” and “religion” in this project are thought “beyond a concept,”2 beyond the essence, i.e., as open to transformations and displacements, with an eye on the infinite morphing of the religious and its ability to inhabit ever new contexts and dimensions— including philosophy. If one takes Derrida’s original affirmation (and the

2 See also de Vries, Religion : Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Theology’s Figures of Abandon 83 other affirmations) to represent an affinity between philosophy and religion, it becomes necessary to ask about the latter’s evolution that was (would be) required to establish such a rapport (what would religion need to be like for the philosophical discourse to be able to concede the affinity?). What interests me is whether there is a threshold these descriptions may not cross—the threshold beyond which they are no longer religious or theological. To the detractors of the idea of the turn to religion there must be one—but, especially when it comes to Derrida’s commitment to the as yet “unthought” that keeps haunting our thoughts, such a commitment to definitional rigor seems to be somehow suspect. Derrida’s opening discussion of religion in the seminal “Faith and Knowledge” adheres a surprisingly traditional framework of phenomenological analysis. Religion appears in it either as an intentional content or as an intentional act, with the actual referent “bracketed out”—it seems to be just any activity within the field of consciousness. On the one hand, we have to do with an experience of some (irretrievable) intentional object of commitment (a privileged or “sacred” archetypical point of reference, even if empty, under erasure, infinitely suspended or displaced; or a quality associated with this point of reference). On the other, there is the intentional act itself—where it is the nature of the act rather than its object that determines a structure of relating reserved for nothing in particular (not only anything can be understood as the displacement of the archetypical object but also the archetype itself can take any given shape or form). This initial treatment of religion in terms of a mere phenomenon stands in a striking contrast to Derrida’s treatment of the “philosophical” cases of affirmation mentioned above. The latter are said to address that which exceeds the dimension of the phenomenal and makes it possible—the origin of consciousness itself, the world, historicity of being, etc. On this account, religion seems to be a mundane phenomenon encompassed by a wider and more fundamental framework disclosed by philosophical reflection. But is this really the case? On the one hand, the mentioned philosophical approaches all seem to concur that there is no absolute beginning of thought, so their fundamental character is the very thing that is in question. And on the other, it’s not entirely clear that Derrida’s account of religion (and in particular what Derrida calls “belief”) indeed needs to be seen as confined to the limits of the field of consciousness. Let us then focus on belief. After all, Derrida insisted that these two different kinds of experience described above—the sacred and the faith—are “two distinct sources or foci”—two veins of religious experience that are irreducible to one another and should not be confused (while conceding that this is almost invariably done [Faith and Knowledge, 70]) which is to say, the nature of the act does not need to be shaped by the nature of the object and one does not even need to entail the other. This makes it possible to disentangle the sacred from faith and focus on the latter path of inquiry. If affirmative philosophies (we may think of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Cavell) are taken to signal an affinity to religion, what do they have in

84  Asja Szafraniec common? One feature they share can only be described in the negative—they are not cases of a “merely” cognitive acquiescence to something that has been established or discovered to be true. The way in which they are not so is not uniform—there seem to be two orders of affirmation: in philosophers like Nietzsche and Cavell it takes the shape of passionate, affective, volitional, or in any case invested response to the world. This is the engaged “yes” of testimony and of the claim through which the world (and/or the self) is both affirmed and disclosed, the “yes” that says, both “so be it” and “believe me.” In Derrida and Heidegger, on the other hand, this type of a “yes” might be seen as a second-order affirmation, as it is in turn a response to consciousness seeing itself as grounded in a prior (first order) affirmation—a “pre-engagement” (The Number of Yes, 127)—that is unknowing, involuntary, forgotten, irretrievable (such as Derrida’s “double yes” discussed above). In this sense, both paths, though in a different way, exceed the lucidity of pure consciousness—one, because it precedes and destabilizes it, the other, because it originates from this destabilization and responds to it. So, for example, in Nietzsche, a secondorder affirmation (the authentic one, as opposed to the slavish commitment to a dogma, philosophical or otherwise) takes the shape of affective or volitional consent (the dice throw) and passionate investment (from playing along with the “cosmic play” of the world in Nietzsche’s early writings to the child’s sacred “yes” of Zarathustra),3 both of which are a logical consequence of his more fundamental disclosure of the disingenuous genealogy of truth whose illusory status we have forgotten or repressed. In Cavell (and Cavell’s Wittgenstein), a second-order affirmation takes the shape of the passionate arrogation of voice, rooted in a more fundamental disclosure of the involuntary, unconscious way in which we adopt a form of life, and of the insufficiency of rules when it comes to the judgment of reason.4 The object disclosed through these affirmations is the world. Nietzsche and Cavell focus mainly on the second order affirmation through choice, creation, (self-)invention, conceiving philosophy as invention rather than discovery of transcendental truths.5 Even when Cavell focuses on the form of life, he is interested in the extent to which everyday affirmations are in conflict with it or are not determined by it (and have a potential to affect it). By contrast, for all their efforts to show the intertwining of the transcendental and the everyday, Derrida and Heidegger tend to focus on the originary dimension. Heidegger’s focus on the originary assent to language is a case in point. His work on Zusage (accord, acquiescing, trust, confidence) circles around the idea that all thought begins with an involuntary assent to the proffered

3 Nietzsche explores the idea of the “cosmic play” in the unfinished Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 42. The idea of “Bejahung” (in its positive and negative sense) appears in many contexts but perhaps most poignantly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 55. 4 Think of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein’s famous affirmative insistence “this is simply what I do” (The Pitch of Philosophy, 15). 5 For Cavell on philosophy as invention, see, The Claim of Reason, 221–225.

Theology’s Figures of Abandon 85 word (Zuspruch), an assent preceding every question or doubt (Unterwegs zur Sprache, 175). Derrida calls it “a yes … presupposed by every language and every type of thought” (number of yes 127). Also Derrida’s own discussion of the topic of affirmation in Le nombre de oui tends to focus solely on the unconscious, involuntary, first order type—the “originary” affirmation, the “pre-engagement.” Everything we say or think (and everything else Derrida says—in particular the more engaged or testimonial work on animals, death penalty etc.) is seen as second order affirmations hinged on the first. The question is then, what is the nature of the originary affirmation? Derrida is careful to distinguish his own version of the pre-engagement (and would probably even avoid the word with respect to his own position) from that of Heidegger, that, while distinguishing it from philosophical naiveté or theoretical prejudice, Derrida addresses in terms of faith or even (he does not effectively exclude this) religiosity. Yet it is difficult to resist the impression that Derrida’s affirmation entails a similar attitude. When in the final pages of Faith and Knowledge Derrida turns to Heidegger’s ideas on belief, this is not only to point out that Heidegger does not practice what he preaches (Heidegger says that “belief [or faith] has no place in thought”— Der Glaube hat im Denken keinen Platz—yet his work poignantly relies on the vocabulary of affirmation [the already mentioned Zusage; the focus on “piety of thought”; the focus on testimony, Bezeugung] suggesting a “zone … of faith” in his thought). Derrida muses: That the movement proper to this faith does not constitute a religion is all too evident. Is it, however, untouched [indemne] by all religiosity? Perhaps. But [is this movement also untouched—A.S.] by all “belief”, by that “belief” that would have “no place in thinking”? This seems less certain (97) This attention to the locus of faith in Heidegger’s thought is revealing when it comes to Derrida’s own project (even though Derrida often seems to prioritize doubt before belief). Let me first note that Derrida hesitates—rather than simply excluding it—when it comes to attributing the term “religiosity” to the phenomenon he describes and that in any case he sees belief, religiosity and religion as belonging to a certain continuum. He does introduce a distinction between the three notions, but if faith is indeed an independent vein of religious experience— independent from any experience of the sacred—then it becomes difficult to distinguish between belief and religion. Religion must then be thought as a mere medium—a hospitable channel or a mechanism, not reserved to any one specific relation. Secondly, Derrida is clearly keen to explore the kind of belief that could not be avoided with a more critical spirit—he has just emphasized that he does not suspect Heidegger of credulity or philosophical naiveté. “Belief” that would have “no place in thinking” has two potential senses—belief that is not welcome in thought, i.e., one

86  Asja Szafraniec that thought must avoid or eradicate, and belief whose place is outside of thought, a belief beyond thought, a belief that occurs in a dimension preceding the distinction between truth and falsity. Turning to Derrida’s work, we have seen that the origin of consciousness in a primitive experience of spanning a disjointed temporality cannot be thought other than as a projection of fiction, hence, make-believe which in an obvious way raises the question of credibility. It was also consistently described by Derrida resorting to a terminology of a certain projected faithfulness of one “yes” to another (that of the promise and that of memory—the promise must believe it will be remembered, memory must believe it received what it was promised) before “all presence, all being, all psychology of the psyche, and all morality” (A Number of Yes, 131). Derrida states this explicitly in Faith and Knowledge: “This yes will have implied and will always imply the trustworthiness and fidelity of faith” (83). This is a groundless, pervertible and phantasmatic fidelity as the two instances of the double yes never meet, and even the most faithful memory will have betrayed the promise by the sheer fact of being distinct from it—a faithfulness of radical finitude. This fragile assumption of fidelity must be seen as “beyond thought,” which makes it akin to “belief beyond thought” diagnosed by Derrida in Heidegger and seems to effectively locate it in the dimension of the unconscious. Derrida’s concern with, and perhaps even hesitation about, the status of this unconscious belief persisted up until his final works, such as the Beast and the Sovereign seminar: “What does believe or not believe mean for the unconscious? What difference is there between believing and not believing for the unconscious? This is why I often venture to say that the problem of belief is still today entirely new” (Vol. II, 157). It will no doubt be objected that the promise in the original affirmation is represented by Derrida as subordinate to its own betrayal—it is a promise of fidelity that projects a phantasmatic unity over disjointed time and Derrida’s main design is precisely to reveal it as disjointed and unfaithful—to show that, at the origin, there is nothing to be faithful to, except this rupture—arguably, true responsibility is precisely this. I am not denying that. I am also not denying the violence with which belief spans itself over the rupture and asserts itself at the cost of what undermines it, nor the violence that may ensue from this, beginning with the violent and uncanny gesture of auto-affection or, we might say, auto-assertion—the “pre-potent dominance” that characterizes one of the incarnations of Heidegger’s Walten (i.e., the ultra-sovereign agency residing in the dimension of auto-affective spontaneity) (The Beast and the Sovereign, 281, Of Spirit, 98). But the phantasmatic projection of belief, which should not be confused with immediacy, is a necessary one—there would be no experience of time (the time would not be “given”)—and that means, no sensibility itself (no phenomena, no world “for us”), no survival or future without this projected fidelity (“no to-come without a covenant with oneself and a confirmation of the originary yes. No to-come without messianic memory and promise, of a messianicity older than all religion, more originary than all messianism” [Faith

Theology’s Figures of Abandon 87 and Knowledge, 83]). The pre-engagement of projected fidelity, phantasmatic as it is, cannot be discarded. (Derrida repeats Heidegger’s enigmatic warning that while Walten can hold itself back, “by holding it back it is all the more terrible and distant” [The Beast and the Sovereign II, 286].) Belief (a proto-belief) haunts time because it gives time (it is the structure in which temporal experience is born—one gives time to oneself “in passing extatically beyond oneself” [Of Spirit, 98]). Without this quasi-transcendental “experience” of temporality there would be no consciousness. Belief is a double-edged sword. It is a double-edged sword also in another sense, in that from its very inception it must also be understood as functioning within an economy of credit (an old German term from creditor is Gläubiger—believer), debt and speculation. The primordial promise of memory discussed above must be seen as a form of in incurred debt (to be cleared by the memory of the promise)—which places an economy of time and of survival at the heart of the quasi-transcendental experience of temporality. While belief is indispensable for consciousness and for there being a world “for us,” Derrida explicitly blames belief, this time in its calculating guise (belief as credit— credulity), for releasing the speculative drive of auto-immunity, leading in its gentlest forms to avoidance of life and at its most extreme to the bloodthirsty economy of damage and punishment, talionic law and death penalty (for Derrida, this is the religious root of the widespread support for death penalty in conservative societies). But even when it comes to the problem of belief surrounding the issue of death penalty, Derrida’s answer is not that we should abandon belief—instead, he asks “how to believe” (The Death Penalty, 168), suggesting that belief can only be redirected or reshaped. This resituating of belief in the structure of auto-affection and the critique of its inherent potential for violence cannot be read as a secularizing project (in which religion would be debunked as based in some fundamental and, it turns out, harmful, desire to overcome finitude). Derrida’s agenda is explicitly not to secularize religion—the idea of opposition between religion and secularism is “naive” (Paper Machine, 142). Even if every religion must be regarded as tainted by its complicity with the sacrificial effects of auto-immunity (Derrida says that this is the essence of religion [The Death Penalty, 279]), secularization is impossible because belief is quasi-transcendental—an indelible condition of our experience of the world. Tainted but indelible—how then to think religion? It sanctions violence because of its inherent economy of debt and sacrifice—a very Pascalian, calculated wager, that assumes a potential loss (including a real loss of life) in a hope of infinite gain. It might at first seem that Derrida’s critique should then be read as an attempt at de-economizing faith; an attempt to think faith without credit (belief but not credulity); to divorce faith from calculation. This faith would foster life in its finitude, without exorbitant hopes of transcending it, if not abandoning economy altogether then at least limiting it, tailoring it to the finite needs of finite life, without speculation on gain and loss. But Derrida has also shown that when it comes to the production of sense the distinction

88  Asja Szafraniec between the finite economy of the oikos “limited to the goods necessary to life” and the chrematistic speculation without limit is spurious—there are no finite systems of exchange and return (Given Time, 158).6 Besides, could Derrida himself give up the speculative impetus of his own writing—which included speculation on the theological (or heterological) archive (even if the purpose of “playing the market” of signs were “only” to produce the limitless unfolding of sense)? Even if he wished to, the logic of speculation is such that “the busier one gets liberating oneself, the more one pays” (The Post Card, 101).7 It is unlikely that Derrida would accept for the ideas or the “message” of his project to be distilled from the archive fever in which they thrive. Derrida’s self-avowed predilection for the secret has its source in the economy to which the secret gives rise—enigma is described by Derrida as a powerful source generating interest, hence, return (“the interest … comes from the enigma constructed out of this crypt which gives to be read that which will remain eternally unreadable, absolutely indecipherable, even refusing itself to any promise of deciphering or hermeneutic” [Given Time, 152, the emphasis is Derrida’s]). We can only conclude that he gladly partakes in this economy and has a stake in the interest—that he invested in it. We cannot but conclude that Derrida does not wish to abandon the pursuit of infinite speculation because, just like belief, it can’t be abandoned. Perhaps then it should be redirected, or reshaped? One strategy to achieve this would be to void the origin of speculation—the gift—of its potential for violence inherent in any system of exchange, calculation and return. Otherwise, Derrida says in Given Time, the “unrest” of the gift and the economy related to it “will never quiet down” (69–70). The only possibility for a gift not to initiate a circle of violent economy—i.e., to transcend the notion of debt and return—is for it to appear void—or fake. It must appear that there is no gift—even if there is one, it can only rightly be received in disbelief—or in forgetfulness. That means that the gift (if there is one) can only be received is in the phantasmatic dimension of the primary affirmation, where belief is “spectral, quasi-hallucinatory or unconscious.” Religion appears then to be a pure medium, a possessed vehicle, not related to any specific relation—a belief that accommodates disbelief, since “to believe is this strange divided state or this strange divided movement, quasihypnotic, in which I am not myself, in which I do not know what I know, in which I do not do what I do, in which I doubt the very thing I believe or in which I believe” (The Death Penalty I, 154).8

6 [A]s soon as there is … a sign—that is, différance and credit, the oikos is opened and cannot dominate its limit (Given Time, 158). 7 And the less one pays, the more one pays, such is the trap of this speculative (The Post Card, 101). 8 Believing, in sum, is not believing; to believe is not to believe. And the whole origin of religion, like that of society, culture, the contract in general, has to do with this nonbelief at the heart of believing (The Death Penalty I, 154).

Theology’s Figures of Abandon 89 It is not my intention to argue for the thesis of Derrida’s Marranism. After all, his abolishing of the distinction between the religious and the secular makes this a moot point—in this framework of thought Marranism and atheism must be truly indistinguishable. But if we were to look for a text supporting that often-voiced thesis, it’s likely that this would be a text where religion would hardly be mentioned—such as Given Time, where it is only in a footnote that Derrida speaks of the “false money of a true sacrifice” (69). While turning in its final part to a narrative of a debunked gift denounced as fake by the giver himself, Derrida announces that he will treat by elision everything else “that could be the object of infinite speculation” (164). We have, in other words, to do with a text on literature that is haunted by a reflection on religion—its focus is on the “place of belief or credit from which it [literature, but also ‘everything else’] is written or read” (150). The point of interest in this text—the sign that speculation never rests, and that even in the forgetfulness or denial of the gift there is interest, i.e., return—is precisely the self-effacement of the gift, its indecipherability, i.e., the possibility, inhabiting the denial of the gift, that the denial was a lie and that the gift was genuine. This dissimulation of the gift is for Derrida a condition of any true gift and forgiveness (150): “Ought [gift and forgiveness] not … deprive themselves of any security against the counterfeit, of any mistrust regarding counterfeit money, so as to preserve the chance of being what they ought to be, but ought to be beyond duty and debt?” (69–70, my emphasis). Returning to Derrida’s interest in speculation, are we to treat his own desire for infinite speculation as another version of a desire for indemnity? If not, it must be concluded that not every infinite speculation is subject to the logic of indemnity. There are thus two kinds of infinite speculation—the one beginning with the assumption of debt, in which economy of gain and loss is expected to yield a return in the form of (physical or spiritual) indemnity. And one beyond debt where, even if one also speculates9 on an enigma that is absolute and eternal (Derrida says that it is “eternally unreadable, absolutely indecipherable,” even though it is generated in an “essential superficiality” of “the too obvious” of an interaction between two finite beings [Given Time, 152]), one cannot cash in on indemnity. This second kind of speculative drive is for Derrida a condition of true discernment and a source of truly ethical conduct—one that is beyond duty understood as a form of debt (Given Time, 156) but rather opens up the dimension of the event, or— as de Vries would put it in his later work—the miracle.

9 Derrida points out that the same term [khrema] is etymologically linked both to the speculation and to the event (Given Time, 159).

90  Asja Szafraniec I have distinguished earlier on between two forms of affirmation—the passionate, engaged and affective response to the world in Cavell and Nietzsche, and the involuntary and irretrievable pre-engagement, conditioning any such response, typical for Derrida or Heidegger. But if there are types of infinite speculation in Derrida, the types I just sketched, there is also a choice between them—which suggests that they no longer occur in the dimension of the pre-engagement that is involuntary and cannot be reshaped. Derrida’s question “how to believe” posed again in the context of interest and speculation seems to confirm this intuition: the double-edged sword of the original affirmation requires engagement—faith must be watched upon. (“[Love] must keep watch [veiller]. It must mount surveillance upon sur-vival” [The Death Penalty, 283].) Unless we know how to enter forgetfulness. In Cavell, our unexpected, passionate responses to the world (secondary affirmations) feed back into the transcendental, “originary” and unconsciously received rules of language. Is there a similar way to tap into the resources of original affirmation in Derrida? It would be tempting to think that we can direct the proto-belief so as to speculate well, so that religion does not lapse into a Pascalian wager of indemnity. But can we feed a (craftily dissimulated) gift into the origin of our belief to reshape its economy at the source? When we look at these cases of groundlessness at which theology and philosophy are to encounter one another—phantasmatic belief, infinite speculation on a forgotten or self-cancelling gift—it becomes clear that “philosophy’s turn to religion” can only be asserted on the condition that religion proves open to becoming unrecognizable, radically different from its own selfconception. What would a religion be in which the gift can only be received as fake and which would seek to establish its archives in the “essential superficiality” of “the too obvious”? This is not simply a question of self-negation: renunciation, negative theology, kenosis of discourse are all negative qualifications by means of which religion exercises self-denial in order to reassert itself even more forcefully at another level, even if only through the very consistency of the form involved. And of course even atheism can be interpreted as a form of intellectual self-restraint that is not unlike the kenotic process. Rather, it requires a tendency that is much more protean in nature: a will to abandon itself, to change beyond recognition, substituting for itself forms of speculation that are, traditionally speaking, radically alien or at least indifferent to it (even if the commitment itself is not). In short, theology must do what it traditionally refused to do: accept not just “the transformation or displacement of its dogmatic core” (de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 57) but perhaps its reinvention. The shared feature of this transformation seems to be that the object of the disclosure is no longer God (or even the space left by the absence of God) but the world of finite beings. The corpus of beliefs must abandon itself to a novel, unacceptable reading—perhaps silencing the archives of the tradition, the sacred, and even silencing their empty shells— but without the loss of speculative gain.

Theology’s Figures of Abandon 91

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Hegel: Three Studies. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason : Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. ———. A Pitch of Philosophy : Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D.B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Trans. of La voix et le phénomène. Paris: PUF, 1967. ———. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. The Post Card. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ———. “Nombre de oui” in Psyché, Paris, Galilée, 1987, pp. 369–50 [Trans. B. Holmes, ‘A Number of Yes’, Qui Parle, Volume 2, No. 2 (1988), pp. 120-33]. ———. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Trans. K. Frieden. In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, eds. S. Budick and W. Iser. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989. ———. Given Time. Trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Trans. of Donner le temps. Paris: Galilée, 1991. ———. “Faith and Knowledge.” Trans. S. Weber. In Acts of Religion, ed. G. Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002. Trans. of “Foi et savoir.” In Foi et savoir: Suivie de le siècle et le pardon. Paris: Seuil, 2000. ———. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. ———. The Beast and the Sovereign. Trans. G. Bennington. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. ———. The Beast and the Sovereign. Volume 2. Trans. G. Bennington. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ———. The Death Penalty. Trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. de Vries, Hent. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ———. Minimal Theologies: Critiques of the Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. ———. (ed.) Religion : Beyond a Concept. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt a. M: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Chicago, IL: Regnery Publishing, 1962. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

5

Theology as Searchlight Miracle, Event, and the Place of the Natural Willemien Otten

The University of Chicago Divinity School, Illinois, United States Introduction Hent de Vries and I share in common that we were educated at more or less the same time in post-World War II Dutch academia and subsequently pursued a teaching career in the United States. In this article, I try to reflect on the besieged position of theology in the Dutch academic system. In hindsight, I conclude that, in both our cases, this besieged and even compromised position has not so much been a hindrance as a lasting inspiration for our intellectual development. Commenting on the association of miracle and event in Hent de Vries’ recent work, I use two examples from my own parallel premodern trajectory to highlight differences between our respective approaches, making some comments on the place of nature and the natural in theology along the way.

Theology and Religious Studies in the Netherlands The academic training of Hent de Vries took place in the theology faculty of the University of Leiden, culminating in degree work in philosophy of religion, while mine was conducted at the University of Amsterdam, with a focus on the history of Christianity. Our educational training did not only lay the groundwork for our later academic paths but it also shaped our collective outlook on the contemporary study of religion and, especially, theology. The roots of this collective outlook lie in the so-called duplex ordo-system that governed the study of religion and theology at all Dutch universities between 1876 and 2007. The Dutch government had embraced this double order in 1876. All theology faculties at major universities became by law outfitted with state chairs in a number of fields (notably Old Testament, New Testament, History of Religions, History of Christianity, and Philosophy of Religion/ Philosophical Ethics), while the Dutch Reformed Church and a number of smaller Protestant churches were granted the exclusive right to appoint the chairholders in Systematic Theology, which included Theological Ethics, and Practical Theology. Financed in its entirety by the government, the DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-6

Theology as Searchlight 93 double order referenced a unique merger of church and state at Dutch universities.1 Although the separate place of state subjects and church subjects has been identified with the – etic (state order) versus the – emic (church order), the relative proximity of the two spheres constituting a single faculty does in my view not bear out any kind of opposition. 2 Indeed, the system entailed that the chairs of the double order constituted one combined faculty of what was called “theology.” The state chairs were responsible for the undergraduate and graduate academic education, and the church-appointed chairs, organized in an in-house Protestant seminary, bore responsibility for the ministerial program, contributing only marginally to the academic programs. Reflecting a Schleiermacherian arrangement of theological education that included attention for other religions but left Protestant Christianity as the dominant perspective, 3 the combined order was the product of a near-century of laborious political debate about how to properly organize academic theological education in the Netherlands. The debate was needed because, after the secularizing and emancipating impulses of the Napoleonic era, the near-identity of academic religious study and Protestant ministerial training that had marked earlier times could not simply be reinstated. Following the restoration of 1815, therefore, the shape of academic religious education needed to be rethought and reconfigured. The attempt to pair greater religio-cultural openness with the demand of government oversight resulted in the 1876 duplex ordo-compromise, in which the hiring privileges of the Dutch Reformed Church were extended to other Protestant denominations: the Anabaptist and Lutheran churches had their seminary at the University of Amsterdam (where theology became a full faculty only after 1945, and the university itself was a municipal institution until 1971), while the Arminian or Remonstrant seminary was housed at the University of Leiden, founded in 1575 as the country’s oldest university. Attempts to incorporate the Catholic Church in this system did not suit the recent Catholic emancipatory agenda, which decades later, in 1923, would

1 On the immediate history leading up to the duplex ordo, see O.J de Jong, “Theologie als taak van staat en kerk,” in F.G.M. Broeyer and H. Noordegraaf (eds.), Duplex Ordo 125 jaar. Colloquium “Is de Duplex Ordo in de huidige vorm van deze tijd?’, 8 juni 2001 (Utrecht: Faculteit Godgeleerdheid, 2002), 12–30. 2 See for this view the report of the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences De toekomst van de theologie in Nederland (The Future of Theology in the Netherlands) (Amsterdam: Royal Academy, 2000), 17. 3 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen (1811/1830), Dirk Schmid (ed.) (Berlin and New York, NY: De Gruyter, 2002). Schleiermacher follows the European tendency to use theology as the label for the entire field of religious study, within which he differentiates among philosophical theology (divided into apology and polemics), historical theology (divided into exegetical theology, church history, and knowledge of contemporary Christianity, the latter subdivided into dogmatic theology and ecclesiastical statistics), and practical theology (church worship and organization).

94  Willemien Otten produce the Catholic University of Nijmegen, while to my knowledge there were no overtures to the Jewish community. Hence, the model of theological and religious study remained a broadly Protestant affair.4 While the duplex ordo-model, which was in effect until 2007,5 worked well for the better part of the twentieth century, polarization between religious studies-minded faculty and students and church-focused ones increasingly undermined the intellectual unity that the system tacitly presupposed. The context of a rapidly secularizing society made matters only worse. When the government’s contract with the Protestant churches expired right when the new bachelor-master model of education was introduced in the early 2000s, the latter marking the first serious curricular changes in theology since the universities’ founding, the ministry of education had an alternative. It offered the recently formed Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN), in which the Dutch Reformed Church had reunited with the nineteenthcentury Protestant Church of Free University-fame, the option to establish a post-baccalaureate Protestant Theological University. As in the case of the seminaries before, it came with full funding. The PKN accepted the government’s offer and withdrew from the state faculties of theology, which were not consulted in this process, terminating a 400-year tradition of cooperation virtually overnight.6 Since then, the study of religion and theology in the Netherlands has not thrived. Weighed down by the church’s institutional monopoly, the Protestant Theological University lacks a robust academic climate. Meanwhile, the state faculties of religion, deprived of their theological seminaries, have become incorporated into larger Humanities faculties where a lack of academic purpose and a dearth of incoming students leave them alternatively tolerated as an exoticum or isolated as a Fremdkörper.

4 In his article “University Education as a Mark of Ministerial Identity in Nineteenth Century Dutch Protestantism,” in J. Frishman, W. Otten, G. Rouwhorst (eds.), Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation. The Foundational Character of Authoritative Sources in the History of Christianity and Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 157–179, David Bos makes clear that Dutch ministers did not undergo the spiritual turn that marked German and English divines, but remained focused on academic education as the mark of their ministerial identity. 5 In 2001, the theology faculty of Utrecht University celebrated its 125th anniversary with a colloquium. See F.G.M. Broeyer and H. Noordegraaf (eds.), Duplex Ordo 125 jaar. Colloquium “Is de Duplex Ordo in de huidige vorm van deze tijd?’, 8 juni 2001 (Utrecht: Faculteit Godgeleerdheid, 2001). 6 Although the PThU was a new model of academic theological education, earlier tremors in the theological landscape made the change in hindsight not as sudden as it seemed at the time. For a broader view of the tensions among church, university, and society, the role of public theology, the problem of confessionalism and academic freedom, see M.E. Brinkman, N.F.M. Schreurs, H.M. Vroom, and C.J. Wethmar (eds.), Theology between Church, University, and Society (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003). As noted by Nico Schreurs on p. 120 n. 1, the volume title references David Tracy’s definition of the three publics of theology (society, academy, church) in his The Analogical Imagination. Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1981), 3–26. See also n. 16 below.

Theology as Searchlight 95 Hent de Vries and I only engaged in academic study on one side of the duplex ordo. Since both of us were never en route toward ministerial ordination, we never spent any length of time in the seminary, as the church tied the study of systematics (and practical theology) directly to ordination. That we nevertheless share a deep interest in constructive theology, an American term we both prefer to the German “systematics,” was brought home to me in the early 2000s. Hent de Vries held the chair of metaphysics at the University of Amsterdam at that time and I occupied the chair of history of Christianity at Utrecht University. Walking out of an academic meeting in Utrecht during a period of turmoil regarding the new bachelor-master system, we found ourselves discussing the possibility of creating a state chair in theology. If the church made good on its threat to withdraw from the state universities and abandon the duplex ordo, why should that not be an option? Pouring out our ideas in animated fashion, we both felt that, pace Schleiermacher, apology or polemics need not be the default mode for doing theology in a secular age. Instead of being considered a danger, could secularization not also be an aid in the revitalization of theology, waking it up from its seminarian slumber? Once institutional pressures were lifted, we could redraw the map of what had become an all too tightly controlled field. And, in a next step, we could position constructive theology in a such way that it would light a spark in the academy and kindle the imagination of religious studies more broadly.

Theology as Searchlight When I oversee the time since that spirited conversation, the conclusion seems warranted that theology has continued to be important for Hent de Vries, as it has indeed for me. Anyone familiar with Hent de Vries’s work cannot fail to realize that his trajectory, philosophical and humanistic on the outside, belies an underlying theological attachment, which seems to have become more pronounced over time. Yet theology’s importance for Hent de Vries is neither that of the familiar queen of the sciences, that majestic but misguided medieval image promoted mostly in Catholic circles, nor that of the tip of a religious studies pyramid, which is how it was sometimes portrayed in the Dutch duplex ordo -system. As the vast field that it is, religious studies has more than one center of gravity, as it stretches across many subdisciplines. Theology, especially when conceived as the area of constructive thought known in the United States rather than the system building of German provenance, is perhaps best seen as a kind of searchlight that allows one to tease out those instances when an all too reductive view of Western thought sets in, prematurely silencing religious views as antiquated or referring theological positions to the margins of a presumed secular academy. Whether such reductive moments manifest themselves in the philosophical sphere, where theological traces are often overlooked or missed altogether, as Hent de Vries’s work abundantly

96  Willemien Otten illustrates, or, in my case, in premodern historiography, where Christian texts can still fail to be recognized for the literary classics they are, is only one aspect of a widespread academic ambiance of secular presentism. For both of us, it appears that countering the active proliferation of misunderstandings is more important than warding off individual slights that hamper adequate comprehension. For the latter, individual corrections will do; the former requires an attitudinal sea change. Seen against this background, it is understandable that Hent de Vries’s work has focused on the role of the religious archive and, increasingly also, the Foucauldian apparatus or dispositif as a way to re-engage the religious past and mobilize its findings. He is eager to employ religious sources in current debates, not least because he admires their aspirational quality, and he does not hesitate to bring in religious concepts or tropes – love, forgiveness, and miracle – as a way to attend to the deep brokenness of our current age.7 Having mostly remained ensconced in the (premodern) history of Christianity, I have developed an eye for premodern authors whose contribution, especially when considered outside the Christian mainstream, might mitigate the all-too-ingrained confessional divisions that compartmentalize the history of Christianity. Surprisingly, I have become convinced that, for both of us, it is true that doing theology on the other side of the duplex ordo, that is, in an apologetic or polemic mode, would have prohibited its use, in the Augustinian sense of usus, as a searchlight, that is, as a site for imagination and intellectual experimentation. It is in part because we did not study theology in the duplex ordo context that we were intrigued enough to seize on it as a place of refuge in the methodological mire of procedures, formal protocols, and clinical regulations that map out contemporary academic study and often quell, rather than advance, serious religious debate. In fact, Hent de Vries’s impressive project The Future of the Religious Past embodies a persistent plea to keep imagination and experimentation in the driver’s seat of a future-oriented approach to religious studies that includes room for theology.8 But it should also not be underestimated how much Hent de Vries’s original work in philosophy

7 In this article, I engage Hent de Vries’ later work. I surveyed the following: his 2010 article “Fast Forward, or: The Theological-Political Event in Quick Motion (Miracles, Media, and Multitudes in St. Augustine),” in W. Otten, A. Vanderjagt, and H. de Vries (eds.), How the West Was Won. Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 255–280; Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World, H. de Vries and N.F. Schott (eds.) (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015); and his recent Dutch monograph Kleine filosofie van het wonder (Amsterdam: Boom, 2015). 8 Initiated by Hent de Vries as a project funded by the Dutch research organization NWO, it has resulted in a series of four volumes organized by the categories of words, things, powers, and gestures, which are preceded by a separate volume on religion beyond a concept. See for details of the individual volumes: https://www.fordhampress.com/series/ future-religious-past/.

Theology as Searchlight 97 of religion owes to his sensitive reading of broad swaths of the theological tradition, by which he departs from the philological scrutiny and philosophical skepticism that characterized Leiden’s liberal but also narrow theological tradition. Here the influence of Hendrikus Berkhof,9 Leiden’s moderate Barthian systematician and father of the theological position of the “orthodox middle” with whom Hent de Vries always had a good personal rapport, may well have played a role. His deep and longstanding interest in social and political theory is another contributing factor. Although my own trajectory has kept me much closer to the theological sphere, as I have always taught in a theology faculty or a Divinity School, through some reflections on our parallel intellectual paths I want to demonstrate how the absence of conventional theological training forced both of us to be more enterprising. Of course, there are differences between us as well. For, while I deeply share Hent de Vries’ allergy for the equation of rationalism and secularism, mine is not a call for a postmodern or post-secular theology, which is the direction in which I consider Hent de Vries’s work to have veered. My criticism, however, does not regard the issue of postmodernism or postsecularism per se as much as it regards the use of theology as searchlight. In my view, Hent de Vries can at times push the theological quest too far, that is, beyond the searchlight as a light that guides the way without ever settling on any circumscribed object. Such seems to be the case when, in recent work, he associates the category of miracle very closely with that of event. Insofar as events are ungraspable, and hence, by dint of their phenomenological nature, close to miracles, as one cannot structurally distinguish between the given and the gifted, Hent de Vries’s subtle reading of the miracle does indeed shed helpful new light on a stale traditional theological topic. Acceptance of the proximity of miracle and event is surely preferable, furthermore, to elevating miracles above rational scrutiny or relegating whoever experiences them to the category of fideistic acceptance. I am also not especially worried that the dividing line between what is theological and what is not may become blurred, for in a post-secular ambiance that is nearly unavoidable. But I am concerned that, through the employment of an amorphous archive, Hent de Vries maps a postmodern or post-secular approach seamlessly onto past theological views and practice. As a result, it can be unclear, for example, whether we are to see miracles (or events) not only under the aspect of signs (Augustinian signa) but also of things (Augustinian res, in Augustine reserved for the Trinitarian God). This makes the archive not just a repository from which to draw, which is indeed how Augustine thinks about signs, but risks turning collective cultural memory into a treasure trove

9 As many scholars of his generation, Berkhof wrote mostly in Dutch. Among his bestknown international works is Two Hundred Years of Theology. Report of a Personal Journey, transl. J. Vriend (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).

98  Willemien Otten of eclectic objects and experiences whose reified status fixates rather than propels us forward. On a deeper level, one might ask whether the identification of miracle and event does not preclude us from engaging in what we might call, in a variation on T.S. Eliot, “advancing progressively backwards.”10 While T.S. Eliot refers to our of age of progress negatively as one that is godless, which I do not want to dispute, I see as the positive aspect of his view the idea that the study of the past allows us to generate from its alterity new meanings and interpretations about received religion without the burden of any baggage but also, I submit, without any guarantee that they can assist us in approaching the future. Studying the past without submitting oneself to the logic of “advancing progressively backwards” makes the miracle, appropriated as postmodern event, lose the weight with which it is anchored in its context, whether a literary or a natural one. Differently put, the evanescence of the postmodern event, oddly not unlike the effect of essentializing scholasticism, risks canceling out the role of theology as searchlight, making the connection between miracle and event potentially a category mistake.11 The risk for such a category mistake becomes enhanced when there is the expectation, however subtle and even hidden, that by reorienting the miracle through the connection with the event, we can perhaps galvanize a new religious community around it. Elsewhere Hent de Vries has developed the notion of “minimal theologies,”12 through which he not just reassesses and recalibrates but, it seems, also aims to revive and renew religion in our postmodern and post-secular era. There is a risk that precisely the emphasis on minimalism, on event, on toned-down expectations, can be a way of relaunching these expectations, repackaging them

10 See the section under this title in B. Hellemans, W. Otten, and M.B. Pranger (eds.), On Religion and Memory (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013). The expression stems from one of the choruses in T.S. Eliot’s pageant play The Rock (1934), with music by Martin Shaw: But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards? 11 Hent de Vries’s Dutch monograph Kleine filosofie van het wonder appears to tend in this direction when the meeting of his partner in Jerusalem is paired with new hope for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. 12 See Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies. Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

Theology as Searchlight 99 spiritually rather than rationally, and thus failing to take into account the full, razor-like force of Elliot’s “Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god….what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards/in an age which advances progressively backwards?” In my own pursuit of theology as searchlight, parallel to but also different from Hent de Vries, I have found much wisdom, and an alternative to any implied nihilism in “advancing progressively backwards,” in Emerson’s musings on Christology. Already in his “Divinity School Address” from 1838, Emerson turns the tables on high church expectations by underscoring the humanity of Christ rather than his divinity. “Thus was he a true man. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man,”13 by which he comes to subtly use the traditional divinity of Christ as a way to enhance the dignity of our collective humanity. Emerson is particularly revealing in his essay “Experience” (1842–1844), begun shortly after the death of his son Waldo. Averse to any sentimentalism, he demonstrates a lucidity here that is as powerful as it is in the end ethereal, but that nevertheless has the same vigorous intention as the “Divinity School Address,” namely to exhort humanity not to use Christ’s divinity as a crutch for authentic selfhood. For Emerson, there is a bend to the arc of Christianity and, seeing along it, he warns us to be aware of its looming end. People forget that it is the eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint. Jesus the “providential man,” is a good man on whom many people are agreed that these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part, and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time settled, that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will attach to any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love.14 Rather than T.S. Eliot’s empty-handed state, what we have in Emerson is a sense of selfhood, planted in absolute nature, that is ungraspable, for

13 R.W. Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. I. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, A.R. Ferguson (ed.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 81–82. 14 R.W. Emerson, “Experience,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. III: Essays: Second Series, A.R. Ferguson and J. Ferguson Carr (eds.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 44. I pursue this theme further in my recent book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), especially in chapter 1 and the conclusion.

100  Willemien Otten ethereal, but that is not thereby evanescent, as we collectively animate it. It also calls for our constant vigilance through interpretation: Life is a string of beads, and as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius, but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism.15

Two Takes on the Miracle: Tertullian and Gregory the Great Keen on extending the notion of theology as searchlight in this Emersonian vein, and mindful of David Tracy’s insightful plea to be in conversation with the classics in a time marked by plurality and ambiguity,16 my own inclination is to see theology as a reciprocal conversation between past and present. The bidirectional nature of that conversation brings structure and movement to the archive, thereby precluding it from ever becoming consolidated – that is, being not just organized, but closable. With an image that allows not only for the encroaching of the past on the present but also for the encroaching of the present on the future, can we not trade in the archive for the working desk of the contemporary interpreter? Papers may be added or removed, but the vision that unfolds from it should not obscure whose desk it is. The image of a personal working desk rather than an impersonal archive prevents apophatic inklings, or minimal theologies, from waxing into apocalyptic utopias. It does so by keeping the emerging vision, forever suspended between fragment and monument, incremental and inherently temporalized. Below I will give two examples of a premodern take on the miracle that are connected only through my interest in them; they stem from my own working desk, so to speak. In this artificial alignment, their sequence forms a counternarrative of sorts about the miracle, which I tend to read not as event but as affirmation of the natural. I comment first on Tertullian’s Christology and Mariology and thereafter discuss a miracle found in

15 R.W. Emerson, “Experience,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. III: Essays: Second Series, A.R. Ferguson and J. Ferguson Carr (eds.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 30. 16 David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity. Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1987). For a more comprehensive assessment of Tracy’s work, see my forthcoming article “David Tracy’s Constructive Theology: Impressions, Contours, Conversations,” in Andreas Telser and Barnabas Palfrey (eds.), Beyond the Analogical Imagination. The Theological and Cultural Vision of David Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Theology as Searchlight 101 Gregory the Great’s Life of Saint Benedict. Subtext for both examples is the idea that incarnation, next to the resurrection the Christian miracle of miracles, is in the end not so much miraculous as natural, or better perhaps, hypernatural (rather than supernatural) insofar as it underlies and informs the natural. To introduce these premodern accounts, however, I need to hark back briefly to my own duplex ordo-days, in order to explain what has sensitized me to reading these miracles in the way I do. During my time at the University of Amsterdam, it was with Old Testament exegesis that I, like many of my peers, initially chose to engage. The Amsterdam School of Old Testament exegesis, nominally a state subject, was dominated by radical Barthians, according to whom a powerful reading of the Judeo-Christian scriptures could directly elucidate our present condition. Past tradition played no role and should be reconstructed only if needed and relevant. Chief enemy of the Barthian enterprise was the idea of natural theology, that is, any theological model whereby something approximating the divine or divine revelation emerged from or in connection with nature and, by extension, also from or in connection with human culture. In short, any project in which theology functioned as searchlight rather than sentencing judge was strictly prohibited. While I soon left behind the Barthian notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition emerging directly from scripture, its fully formed truth as the Word of God just waiting to be exegeted, there was another side to the debate I would confront soon after. That other side was the idea of a sacrosanct, unmovable classical tradition, in which Christian texts sprung up but did not truly seem to belong. The influence of this view was especially tangible in New Testament exegesis, in Amsterdam generally immune to the influence of dialectical theology, whose proximity to classical studies was wont to put Christian biblical texts in a de facto negative light, since they failed to meet the standards of classical literature. That they could be considered an integral part of an expanding and changing classical culture, in which Christianity was acting and not only acted upon, was a position I would develop only later. A chance encounter with Tertullian’s De carne Christi (On the Flesh of Christ), my first example, provided me with just the right testcase. Tertullian (Carthage, 155–220 CE) is widely known for his incredulous paradoxes, a staple of his rhetorical toolkit often connected with his perceived Montanism. I cite the following series from On the Flesh of Christ 5, which includes his best-known adage credo quia absurdum. The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.

102  Willemien Otten And He was buried and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.17 As Robert Sider has convincingly argued, this work of Tertullian’s departs from the traditional order of forensic rhetoric known from Cicero’s De inventione. Putting the so-called refutatio (of the opponent’s argument) before the confirmatio, the laying out of his actual point, suited Tertullian’s polemical approach.18 While I agreed with Sider’s position, my own take on Tertullian was in the end to push still further, as I came to understand the work as theologically rather than rhetorically motivated. I learned to appreciate Tertullian’s antagonistic approach, here and elsewhere, as a strategy in the service of a starkly eschatological agenda, whereby his attacks create the critical space he needs to make his theological points. Tertullian’s agenda in On the Flesh of Christ is crystal clear: he wants to bring out the reality of the incarnation, as a way to keep up the hope for Christ’s and, by extension, also his own resurrection; to do so he needed to emphasize that Christ underwent a tangible, human, fleshly birth.19 Lifting Tertullian’s rhetoric out of its Ciceronian straightjacket even more radically than Sider, I applied Marcia Colish’s notion of “redeemed speech” to it, by which she implies that the Christian idea of salvation also had repercussions for Christian language use.20 The key to Tertullian’s treatise was his embrace of the incarnation as a signum contradicibile, a sign to be spoken against, which is how the prophet Simeon describes Christ in the Temple in Luke 2:34. Harking back to Tertullian’s earlier rhetorical paradoxes, I concluded that Tertullian uses paradoxes only as crutches, which the real, tangible paradox that is the incarnation itself makes ultimately redundant. After all, as the incision that inaugurates the eschaton, the incarnation signals to the world that another reality has set in. Once

17 See On the Flesh of Christ 5.4. I have used the edition and translation of Ernest Evans, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation (London: SPCK, 1956), whose Latin text and translation can be found here: http://www.tertullian.org/works/de_carne_christi.htm. For a more detailed analysis of Tertullian’s argument in this treatise, see W. Otten, “Christ’s Birth of a Virgin Who Became a Wife: Flesh and Speech in Tertullian’s De carne Christi,” Vigiliae christianae 51.3 (1997): 247–260. 18 See R.D. Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 33. The confirmation begins where Tertullian connects the incarnation with Christ’s taking flesh from a virgin. See also Otten, “Christ’s Birth of a Virgin,” 248–249. 19 I was much aided in constructing my argument on Tertullian by my simultaneous reading of John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version (New York, NY: Fawcett Crest, 1986). In it the protagonist, a Barthian professor at Harvard Divinity School, works through a midlife crisis as a crisis of the flesh. All the while he is reading Pelagius and especially Tertullian, whom he credits with a much shrewder judgment of human nature than Karl Barth. 20 See M.L. Colish, The Mirror of Language. A Study of the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (rev.ed., Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

Theology as Searchlight 103 grasped, and confirmed through conversion culminating in baptism, this truth dissolves the need to engage in further paradoxes; instead, it instigates and sustains a new frankness of speech among Christians. My theological reading did not fit the standard Ciceronian interpretation, not even Sider’s amended one. Tertullian introduces the signum contradicibile only toward the end of his treatise in the so-called amplificatio (chapters 17–23, the signum contradicibile is mentioned in ch. 23), a part by classical standards considered devoted to a restatement of earlier points. The reason that Tertullian lands his knock-out theological punch so late, only in ch. 23, is that he needed to settle another paradox first, one brought on by Isaiah’s prophecy of Christ’s birth. To reinforce the reality of Christ’s incarnation, Tertullian wanted to uphold that Mary conceived as a virgin (Is. 7:14), but in doing so faced the criticism that, since virgins do not ordinarily give birth, she must have delivered as a wife. At stake was not Mary’s perpetual virginity, which is an issue of later historical relevance, but the veracity of biblical prophecy, whose undermining would discredit Christ’s human birth and hence the incarnation. Since it was crucial for the incarnate Christ to have experienced a real human birth, Tertullian stipulates that Mary gave birth as a nupta, a married woman. 21 Yet how could her womb have been opened, when she had had no intercourse with Joseph? Here Tertullian comes to embrace a conclusion that is as ingenious as it is hypernatural as he argues that Christ’s exiting Mary’s body is what de facto opened her womb. We acknowledge, however, that the prophetic declaration of Simeon is fulfilled, which he spoke over the recently-born Saviour: Behold this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against (signum contradicibile; Lk. 2:34). The sign here meant is that of the birth of Christ, according to Isaiah: Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign: behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son (Is. 7:14). We discover, then, what the sign is which is to be spoken against - the conception and birth of the Virgin Mary…. But with us there is no equivocation, nothing twisted into a double sense. Light is light and darkness darkness. Yes is yes and no is no…. She who gave birth really gave birth, and although she was a virgin when she conceived, she was a wife when she brought forth her son. Now, as a wife she was under the law of the opened body, whereby it was immaterial whether it was on account of the power of the male coming in or going out: the same sex opened her womb. 22

21 Interestingly, Tertullian does not seem to care about Mary’s perpetual virginity. Yet he may have been worried about her decency, which is another reason why it would be important for him to portray her as a nupta, a married woman. 22 On the Flesh of Christ 23.1–4.

104  Willemien Otten Tertullian’s is a remarkable case of solving one miracle, God becoming human, by adding another, Mary becoming a wife through giving birth to Christ. In the process, he validates both, as it were, by proclaiming Christ’s incarnation to be real because his birth was fully human and, though novel, nevertheless fully natural. The resistance in the scholarly literature to such a direct theological reading of Tertullian has been vigorous, whereby Mary’s deflowering through Christ’s birth is considered especially objectionable. It has even led the editor of the respectable Sources Chrétiennesedition to state that Tertullian lost his good sense here. 23 Of course, read in this hypernatural way, the effect of incarnation is that it brings about greater clarity and efficacy of speech. Indeed, Tertullian concludes as much in his final chapter: “…that soul should be no other than the soul which is so-called, and flesh no other than the flesh which is visible, and God no other than he who is preached.”24 My analysis of Tertullian’s case shows him not so much to be a rhetorical extremist as a theological consequentialist. Yet that conclusion should not distract us from the real problem that his brief treatment here is meant to illustrate, namely that early Christian texts are often misjudged when we evaluate them by the formal standards of classical rhetoric alone. If they don’t measure up, as was the case here, their theological character is judged to present us not only with a cultural but also a moral aberration. The various editorializing comments on Tertullian’s well-argued position clearly bear this out. 25 Tertullian exposes us to another case of theological consequentialism when he consoles a group of martyrs who await their execution in prison by stating that at least they need not fear arrest anymore.26 As in the case of On the Flesh of Christ, this example similarly hinges on his taking seriously the new era that Christianity has inaugurated. Rather than considering the time after the incarnation as the in-between time, therefore, to use the Pauline, messianic terminology that Giorgio Agamben and others

23 There is a finer point at work in Tertullian’s need to uphold the truth of Is. 7:14, which says that the virgin conceives and bears a son. The Valentinians seized on the discrepancy in the Christian reading of this text to discredit Christ’s human birth. J.P. Mahé, editor of the Sources chrétiennes-edition, considers Tertullian’s radical solution going too far in defending himself against the Valentinians, as he loses his good sense here. See J.P. Mahé, ed., Tertullien. La chair du Christ. Tome I, Sources chrétiennes 216 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1975), 55–56. The English editor Ernest Evans speaks of Tertullian’s “appalling bad taste,” see Ernest Evans, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation, 180. 24 See De carne Christi 24.1. 25 See above, n. 23. 26 I deal with the case of Ad martyras (To the martyrs) in my article “Tertullian’s Rhetoric of Redemption: Flesh and Embodiment in De carne Christi and De resurrectione mortuorum,” in Studia Patristica. Vol. LXV. Proceedings of the 16th Oxford Patristics Conference, Vol. XIII: The First Two Centuries; Apocrypha; Tertullian and Rhetoric; From Tertullian to Tyconius, Markus Vinzent (ed.) (Louvain: Peeters, 2013), 341–342.

Theology as Searchlight 105 have tended to universalize, 27 Tertullian sees the time after the incarnation, or after baptism for Christian converts, as full-out eschatological time, in which one has entered a new era and Christians should be able to converse with each other in direct terms. In contradistinction to Peter Brown and others, I see Tertullian’s rhetoric not as betraying the unease of a prophetic gerontocracy or the rigidity of Montanism, which is how his North-African texts are often read, but as projecting a radical eschatological vision whose intrinsic need for actualization rejects any and all compromise. In Tertullian, we have an extreme case of the miracle being hypernaturalized, of nature being pushed to the theological max to yield a cogent interpretation of a scriptural prophecy that seemed open to contradiction. This allows me to make a first step toward describing how I see the miracle, namely as the incision of the transcendent into the historical. The miracle does not transform the historical by hovering above it but becomes fully integrated with it. This leads us quite naturally to Gregory the Great (Rome, 540–604 CE), for whom the miracle is neither that of the paradox nor that of the hypernatural. What he gives us instead, as we will see, is the total collapse of the miraculous into the natural, a miracle that is a non-miracle, so to speak, and therewith perhaps the deepest miracle of all, insofar as it allows for the working of reality to be seen as itself miraculous, and as such suffused with incarnation. The story is simple enough. In the second book of his Dialogues, in which Gregory relates the life of Saint Benedict through episodic stories, we read a story about a young boy in the monastery. Here is Gregory’s account from Dialogues II.24: One day one of his monks, a little boy who loved his parents more than he should have, left the monastery without a blessing and set off for their house. On that same day, as soon as he reached them, he died. The day after he had been buried, his body was found thrown out of the grave. They buried the body carefully once more but the following day they found it thrown out again, unburied as before. Then they ran in panic to the feet of father Benedict and begged him amid much weeping to be kind enough to bestow his grace on the boy. At once the man of God gave them, with his own hand, the communion of the Lord’s body, saying, ‘Go and place the Lord’s body on his chest and bury him like that.’ As soon as this was done, the earth retained the boy’s body and did not throw it out again. 28

27 I am referring here to the general argument of Agamben’s The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, transl. P. Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 28 I have used the translation found in Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives (London: Penguin, 1998), 192. The Latin original can be found in Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi, II.24, A. de Vogué (ed.) (Paris: Edition du Cerf, 1979; SC 260), 210–212.

106  Willemien Otten The story is brief yet dramatic. In a captivating vignette, it presents us with the monastic virtues that Saint Benedict embodies, especially obedience, against which the boy who loved his parents too much had clearly sinned. This is no sentimental story, as the monastic profession and all of its demands are taken deadly seriously. The punishment that the boy receives upon his transgression, i.e., death, is grave as it is, yet his demise is apparently not atonement enough for the earth to be ready to accept his body. Nature shows itself to be noncompliant, as we see the earth spit out his body. This even happens twice. It takes the intervention of a divine emissary, Benedict, whom Gregory steadfastly calls “the man of God” (vir Dei), likening him to Old Testament prophets like Elijah, to make things right. To do so Benedict switches into a priestly role, becoming elevated above the ordinary lay status of his fellow monks. He gives the boy’s parents the host and tells them to bury the body again after placing it, i.e., the Lord’s body, on their son’s chest. This time, the earth is finally satisfied. It is indeed a non-miracle that we witness here: the restoration of normalcy and the renewed commitment of the earth to doing what it ought to do, that is, accepting a body for burial. The above is how I have always read this miracle story from Gregory’s Life of Benedict, 29 namely as a reverse resurrection story where proper burial is what truly matters. But upon rereading it this time through the lens of Hent de Vries’s work, the way the miracle is constructed struck me as even more ingenious than was evident before. First, the story presents us with a very tangible chain of custody, as the host, that is the Lord’s body, goes from Benedict’s own hand, the hand of the divine prophet or monk priest, through that of his parents to the chest of the dead boy, the disobedient young novice, linking earthly and heavenly procreation. In that sense it is also an incarnation story, or better a transmission-of-incarnation story, with the eucharistic host standing in for the Lord’s actual body. It is not only speech that needs to be redeemed, but the earth as well. Yet even the addition of the liturgical dimension does not fully exhaust the richness of this vignette. It is relevant to note that this miracle is found in a work of Gregory’s known as the Dialogues, consisting of four books, the second of which is the Life of Benedict. The concatenation of episodes in which the actual Life of Benedict consists, for there are only vignettes here and no overarching narrative, are told in the form of a dialogue, a back-and-forth between

29 As I indeed did in my article: “Ideals of Community in Late Antiquity: John Cassian and Gregory the Great on Communicating Sanctity,” in G. de Nie, K.F. Morrison, H.L. Kessler, and M. Mostert (eds.), Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Papers from “Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible: 400-1000” (Utrecht, 11–13 December 2003) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 132–134.

Theology as Searchlight 107 Gregory telling his heroic stories about Benedict and a certain Peter, a one-man chorus who gives us his comments in response. We find the same pattern after this story. But it is not Peter’s reaction, which is one of typical utter stupefaction, that should capture our attention here but rather Gregory’s summarizing assessment of the miracle. This is how Gregory, addressing Peter directly now, ends this episode: GREGORY:  You

can appreciate, Peter, what merit this man possessed in the eyes of our Lord Jesus Christ, seeing that the earth itself threw out the body of someone who did not have Benedict’s grace. PETER:  I certainly can. I am utterly amazed!30 The restored normalcy I have stressed in my interpretation and continue to see as the key to unlocking the actual story is apparently not the highpoint for Gregory. The true miracle for Gregory, whose medieval outlook shows him to be very different from Tertullian, is the earth spitting out the body of someone who did not have Benedict’s grace, the earth’s rejection, in other words, of someone who had defied the saint. That miracle, that of the earth’s solidarity with and defense of the saint, as I have to conclude with a bit of a confession here, is indeed best seen as an event, a truly ungraspable occurrence that, in Gregory, happens at night and is not witnessed by anyone. But its incarnational subtext is unmistakably felt, as Gregory wants his readers to become physically attuned to the need for the presence of the saint in their own lives. With that confession, I can only encourage Hent de Vries to continue on his own path, even as I travel mine, waving our theological searchlights in the way we best see fit, in the shared understanding that as long as there remains room for incarnation in our post-Christian and post-secular understanding of the religious, in the end, the miraculous and the natural cannot fail to meet, may well converge, and can perhaps even collapse, the one into the other.

30 The Latin edition reads as follows: “Perpendis, Petre, apud Iesum Christum Dominum cuius meriti iste uir fuerit, ut eius corpus etiam terra proiecerit, qui Benedicti gratiam non haberet. Petrus: Perpendo plane et uehementer stupeo.”

6

Are Miracles Possible? Avicenna Revisited Sari Nusseibeh

Al-Quds University, Jerusalem, Palestine

Preliminary Remarks The term ‘miracle’ invokes many meanings, the question whether and how they (or even normal events) are possible always lurking in the background. At one end of the scale, some of these meanings are figurative and mundane, such as retrospectively calling the despaired of but eventual arrival of an uncle to a wedding ‘a miracle’. He will later explain the series of lucky circumstances that made his timely arrival possible. At the other end of the spectrum the invoked meaning is ‘metaphysical’ – not just extraordinary, but supernatural, or one that defies a natural explanation altogether, such as raising someone from the dead, or – as in the Muslim narrative – God speaking directly to Moses, or dictating the sacred ‘Book’ to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Typically, at this end of the scale, God or some divine logic has to be invoked as an explanation of what is considered naturally impossible – something that defies or runs counter to the laws of nature. There is a third, sweeping but ambiguous meaning that may be agreed upon by all, and is drawn from considering what one might with Hannah Arendt call ‘the infinite improbabilities’1 from which the whole universe and – circuitously – any one of its components arose. When thought of as applying to the whole wondrous chain of the universe this meaning is ‘neutral’, in that it can be invoked both by those who wish to insert God into the picture as well as by those who would simply note the wondrous hand of chance. Arendt’s infinitude of improbabilities not only implies an infinitude of possible variations to this universe, but more strongly within that infinitude the preponderance of improbability. But, however, we understand this we must nonetheless recognize that a ‘fallacious’ inference (from ‘all’ to ‘each’) may often be hidden here if it is claimed the blooming of this rose in springtime is a miracle insofar as it is a component of that wondrous

1 Arendt, Hannah. “What is Freedom?”, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by P. Bachr (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-7

Are Miracles Possible? 109 causal chain. In the case of the first two meanings of miracle what justified the appellation was the specificity of the circumstance of the occurrence (the uncle’s fortuitous arrival or the raising of Lazarus from the dead). In contrast, what we here most likely think of when we call the blooming of this rose ‘a miracle’ is the entire wondrous causal chain – not, that is, specifically the blooming of this rose in springtime. After all, we expect roses to bloom at that time of year. Indeed, at the level of the rose, or any one of nature’s particular events, probabilities are inversed, each occurrence bearing with it a perfectly explicable causal process that renders the application of the description ‘miraculous’ to it – in the terminology of probabilities – idiosyncratic. Were someone therefore to insist that the blooming of the rose is nonetheless a miracle we must understand them to mean perhaps that it is so in a derivative or secondary sense, that is, in abstraction of its slot in the actual causal chain in the universe, and/or if it is considered from the perspective instead of is being alike in nature to the infinitude all that comprises this chain’s possible variations. Thus – we could be told – imagining the blooming of this rose in total abstraction from its particular slot in the universe – in total isolation of what came before it and led to it – one can surely imagine an infinitude of variations, making this particular configuration of the occurrence infinitely improbable, and therefore miraculous. Alternatively, it could also be argued that an occurrence in nature can be seen as a miracle not when it is considered as a constituting part of the chain but as a product of it: that, assuming the first act (creation) to have been a miracle then any following occurrence must by virtue of that first act be a miracle as well. This may circumvent a fallacious inference but it requires us to accept the assumption that there was indeed a first act, or that a first act was possible. Also in the same vein, it could be argued that each natural occurrence is a miracle in that there are innumerable reasons – such as an unforeseen and sudden explosion in the universe – that could have prevented it from happening. Strictly speaking, however, both approaches to explaining this interpretation of miracles are problematic. Concerning the ‘abstraction’ approach, arguably all it allows us to infer is that each thing that exists only does so insofar as it is part of a chain – that nothing of itself vouches for it to be there in the first place, or to be there the way it is! Thus, abstracting one thing entirely from its actual context may theoretically allow one to consider ‘that thing’ as an indeterminate object, indeed much more likely not to exist as to exist as itself. Except that it is not such an indeterminate object (and therefore a miracle) as itself in the actual world! All that one is entitled to infer on this approach is to appreciate that objects that exist are of themselves only possible – not that they are miracles but that they are not self-made, and that they do not by themselves provide us with an account for why they exist or exist the way they do. More will be said on this in due course. Turning to the second approach perhaps the argument can be made that the term ‘the universe’ is

110

Sari Nusseibeh

a general term, describing this or any other possible universe, and therefore this rose or any other item in an alternative universe instead of it, including a universe where that sudden explosion occurs, thereby making it be this rose indeed a miracle. But it is not readily obvious how sound this argument is. In arguing for the eternality of the universe Aristotle maintained that any matter from which the universe (i.e., any universe) can be imagined to be composed must already be the matter from which this (or the) universe is composed. This is quite an important statement – that what is meant by the universe is the set of everything, actual or imaginable, or that it is an all – therefore, a particular. 2 Whatever we may think of (including that explosion) is perforce part of this all. In saying this he seems thereby to make out a distinction between, say, ‘the sun’ as a general term which could be said of many, or which could describe a variation of this sun, and ‘the universe’ which singles out only this universe as a resolution of all the possible variations imaginable of everything, including the sun! While this distinction theoretically allows us to imagine an infinitude of possible suns, it denies the actual possibility of the universe being other than what or how it is, making it – and therefore this sun – unique, and singular as a necessitated resolution of all the afore-imagined possibilities. The very notion of possible alternatives, or worlds, as well as that of the ‘infinitude of improbabilities’, becomes meaningless in this interpretation. As do miracles if thought of as unaccountable ‘swerves’ or ‘departures’ from predestined existential paths! Already, then, we are made to note the close connection between the notions of miracle and possible. Leaving that aside for the moment, we must make room yet for a fourth – one might for now call it ‘modest’ – meaning of ‘miracle’, this time associating it with human agency, where ‘likely consequences’ of a given state of affairs are upturned against all odds by sheer human will, often associated with what seems at the time to be an unconventional – even illogical – vision, conviction, or idea, as when a company on the verge of bankruptcy is suddenly turned into a profitable business by a total turnaround of its management’s policies and decisions; or as when a pianist who suffered a severe hand injury recovers her proficiency through faith in herself, sheer will and constant practice. The idea behind looking at this as a miracle is that it constitutes a ‘break’ or ‘departure’ from an apparently foreordained causal chain, and it emphasizes as it does so the role of human agency, stretched, so to speak, to its extreme limit. These, then, are some of the meanings of the term ‘miracle’. It may seem at first sight that the first and last examples are somehow dissociated from the second and third, but it can be shown that at a deeper level they are in fact inseparable. Their inseparability revolves around our understanding of

2 Aristotle develops his arguments here (De Caelo) partly in the context of his argument against Platonic Forms. See, for example, 278a,24-278b,7.

Are Miracles Possible? 111 what being possible is, and whether, therefore, miracles of any kind of the four examples are possible, or what we mean by this if they are or we consider them to be so. The fourth example in particular deserves our attention, as it is in such cases that we stand in awe before and celebrate seemingly impossible (or, at the very least, highly improbable) human achievements. Of course, not all of us believe in the same meanings of the term, but once something happens – even if only some would agree to its being a miracle – then all of us are bound to agree that, strictly speaking, what happened was possible (one way or another, including making the impossible become possible) for it to have happened! However, the matter is different before something happens: if knowledge about the future is in general questionable, it is surely more so about someone’s claim that some miracle (e.g., the pianist’s recovery of her proficiency) will happen. Indeed, the pianist’s defiant application of herself to recover her former skills – typically based on wanting that to happen coupled with a strong belief in herself that she can make it happen – will often run counter to what many people around her may rationally expect will happen. Here, then, alongside the issue of future possibility (whether something will happen) another theme that runs along our earlier examples qua future or extraordinary events that we must consider is that significant subjective role played in the fourth example by wanting and believing. Believing strongly that something will happen can sometimes be a necessary condition for making it happen. In this sense, while we may be doubtful about attributing knowledge to the afore-mentioned pianist concerning her future we can nonetheless appreciate her faith in herself and her ability to overcome the injury to her hand and to recover her former proficiency. We realize it is her faith or strong conviction (not just a passive sense of hope) that motivates her to apply herself to achieve what might otherwise seem like an impossible outcome. Unlike our second and third examples where faith in God and His/Her power are invoked to make us understand how the unlikely might happen, the fourth example invokes faith in human power. It is in this sense that we can consider this type of faith a secular faith. Essentially, this is the faith a human individual or group may have in being able to steer themselves away from a highly probable course of events – to cause a swerve in what seems an inevitable future. In pondering this power of faith from a political perspective – specifically, whether and how a seemingly far-fetched peace in my part of the world can happen – I invoked the concept of miracle in some of my writings3: the human

3 See, for example, my What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard, 2011), pp.179ff., where I invoked the notion of secular faith as the necessary condition for making peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In the context, a two-state solution may seem like a miracle if it were to happen. People often ask, Is a two-state solution to this conflict possible? Some will say it is highly improbable. Yet others, that it is inevitable! These conflicting descriptions of what is posited as a single thing make it a highly incoherent entity. Insofar, it may therefore be more an object of belief/faith than of knowledge.

112

Sari Nusseibeh

power to bring about what otherwise seems to be an ‘impossible’ or far-fetched outcome. Without necessarily discounting God’s role I argued that secular faith, as opposed to faith in God – but drawing nonetheless on some of the latter’s main features, such as faith in an afterwar reality that can be brought about by human will and ability to transform existing political paradigms – could make peace in our part of the world happen! This was a call for people to assume the power they inherently possess over their own destinies. In one of his writings, Hent de Vries expanded on – indeed, perhaps rearticulated – my argument in a way that fitted it into a wider context, sometimes drawing on references to an early Islamic and medieval literature from which I drew much of my inspiration.4 Surveying these references (which de Vries acknowledges to lie outside his immediate scope of scholarship) I felt a need to further expand on the theme of possibility and future events in that literature, including miracles, specifically by trying to ‘dig deeper’ into one of its major actors – Ibn Sina (Avicenna) – in the hope that I can cover more thoroughly that early tradition where the seeds of my argument lay.5 The following, then, an earlier version of which was a lecture delivered at Harvard, was in part inspired and should in retrospect be seen as a tribute to de Vries’s inquisitive analysis of the Islamic component of my writings on the subject. +++++++++++++++

4 Hent de Vries, “Une ‘Nouvelle Conception Des Miracles’ – Partie 1,2”, in Une philosophie a l’epreuve de paix: Penser le conflit israelo-palestinien, edited by L. Nusseibeh, A. Alterman, H. Cohen-Solal (Edition Mimesis, 2016). In his comments, de Vries picks up my views from various writings, including, from Once Upon a Country (FSG, 2008) and my Tanner Lectures at Harvard: “Of Hedgehogs, Foxes and Swans”; and “Of Folly, Faith and Miracles”, printed in the Tanner Lectures on Human Values 29 (Utah, 2011) pp.35–72. In these lectures, I make use of and compare between the views of Hannah Arendt (see above) and Isaiah Berlin, especially on the subject of the role of the will in human action: Berlin tries to reconcile between his view of a determinist world on the one hand and human responsibility (and, therefore) culpability on the other by holding on to the meaning of a free will in psychological terms. Arendt, in contrast, views free will as an instantiation of a political act in public space, thereby presenting the political actor as a ‘creator’ of ‘miracles’. For Berlin, the question always concerns the choice I have of whether to act this way or not; for Arendt, this question is always resolved by an appeal to what she calls ‘principles’, which are the moral motivations that articulate the will I have to do this in particular. In this context, she invokes faith in what the political actor is able to do. The reader will find that my reading of Avicenna makes him out to correspond in his view with that of Arendt, at least at the level of how to understand the human will. Differences of course remain, importantly at the level of Arendt’s ‘principles’, which are ‘given’ as moral ones from her point of view, but are left as ‘instincts’ or ‘wants’ to be morally refined from Avicenna’s. 5 The reader will find I have collated here Avicenna’s views from his various writings, often without substantiating them with direct quotations, references or explanations. This has been done in order to try to give a ‘reader-friendly’ general interpretation of his philosophy. A more substantive analysis of these views can be found in my Avicenna’s al-Shifa: Oriental Philosophy (Routledge, 2018).

Are Miracles Possible? 113

The Possible and the Potential One of the first questions that confront us when considering the pianist’s example is whether her act of will (as a resolution of different choices) was itself possible, that is, one which as a choice might or might not have occurred. Did it, perhaps, have the potential to occur before occurring, and was it in this sense possible with regard to occurring or not occurring? We can see how such a question bears on a number of issues, not least being the close connection between the two notions of possibility and potentiality. Aristotle’s remarks on this subject became food for thought for philosophers after him. In contending that whatever exists in fact had the potentiality to do so Aristotle had in mind to distinguish between two totally different arguments, one to show it was impossible for matter to have come into existence from nothing, but must have required pre-existing matter in which to inhere – that matter, in other words, was eternal. The second – totally different – project was to explain change in nature: how something can produce change in something else, or itself be such as to undergo change from one state into another. Fire can burn wood, and wood can be turned into ash by being burnt. Both burning and the ash presuppose potentialities or natural dispositions – the nature of fire to cause burning in wood, and the nature of wood to be turned into ash. He added, however, that it couldn’t be the case that everything that exists had the potential to exist before actually existing, since that would mean that nothing at all would exist, given that potentiality simply means the possibility of either coming to exist or not.6 Commentators, among them the one-time head of the Peripatetic school, Alexander of Aphrodisias, with whose writings Avicenna was familiar, and who was critical of Stoic determinism, took Aristotle to have meant that having the potential to exist precisely means that something is possible of existence before actually coming to exist, in the sense that it could come to exist or not. (Miracles would thus have to be included in this category.) One serious problem this interpretation raises – and which will be discussed further below – is the ontic commitment to ‘fuzzy’ objects that do not yet exist, as well as those that will never exist! What sense is there in

6 Aristotle addresses the issue of capability and potentiality in his Metaphysics, Bk.7, Ch.7. As this and other writings of his filtered down to the early Islamic epoch, often accompanied by his early and later Greek commentators, it was only natural that different interpretations, reflecting different philosophical ‘biases’ or positions, became issues of contention among philosophers. Of particular relevance in this context is the treatment of modalities by Alexander of Aphrodisias (active in the late 2nd and early 3rd century CE in Athens) and his line of thinking on the one hand, and Avicenna on the other. Avicenna’s treatment of the subject (the position and scope of the modal operator) pervades his treatment of logic and metaphysics and reflects more generally his overall theory concerning God and the world. For a more elaborate analysis of this subject, see my Avicenna’s al-Shifa.

114 Sari Nusseibeh entertaining such objects? This difficulty is compounded when we are asked to explain why one fuzzy object becomes an actual one, and why another does not; or, more generally, when we are asked to explain the different types of relations that hold between objects, whether between the fuzzy objects themselves, or between fuzzy objects and actual ones, or between one actual object and another. All of this could of course be done, but at the expense of admitting different sorts of causal relations between objects, ideas or events (fuzzy or not) that reflect the different sorts of intrinsic qualities these objects, ideas or events are claimed to possess. We are led, in other words, to seeking natural qualities or meanings in all these objects that will explain for us why the relations between them hold the way they do, some being necessary or more necessary than others while others not at all. Necessity, then, comes to be defined in natural terms, very much underwritten by a commitment to some kind of essentialism – that objects or ideas are naturally or of themselves interconnected with one another in one or another type of relation or not at all. In this view, not only are relations admitted such as those between a something that does not yet exist (e.g., going to school later this morning) and a something that follows that (e.g. crossing a certain road to get there): more importantly, also included will be what we then have to consider are natural causal relations, such as between fire and burning. But is the relation between these really causal or is it just sequential? If causal, would it not make sense then to extend this relational approach governing natural objects to logical and conceptual ones? In sum, would we not on this approach have to view necessity as a natural feature of the world we know, as inherent in it as are the essential qualities of its objects? For Avicenna, the configuration of the world was entirely different. For him, necessity was first and foremost extrinsic to the world and its objects. He did not believe that natural or conceptual objects possessed intrinsic qualities that made them of themselves geared to having relations with one another. He believed all such objects to be ‘neutral’ in themselves, not intrinsically geared to being in relation with things other than themselves, any relation therefore holding between them ultimately coming about as a result of an external – indeed, ultimate – cause. He therefore thought ‘possibility’ must not be defined in terms of the ‘fuzzy’ notion of ‘potentiality’, but in terms of the distinction between it on the one hand as an entire causal chain of existence, and necessity as the cornerstone of that causal chain on the other. Far better, in other words, to explain possibility, or what exists, in terms of the necessary. What these two opposed approaches to the meaning of ‘possible’ are – possible as potential and possible as the counterpoint of necessity – and their implications on what an act of will means, and whether miracles are possible, will hopefully become clear as we proceed. Alexander’s contention raises the question: what sense exactly is there to posit a potential something, whether object or event, that has not come into existence, and may not even do so? To clarify, this question not only

Are Miracles Possible? 115 concerns those so-called objects or events which are existents-in-awaiting, so-to-speak; it also concerns objects or events which are counterfactual – that is, objects or events which in fact exist, but which are then posited in different circumstances than those that are actual. Isn’t the contemplating of such an object or event ontologically meaningless? Or does it make perfect sense to posit such an object in advance of its coming into existence, as well as retrospectively in lieu of such a past event or object? This question – of enduring philosophical interest – and the specific answer Avicenna gave to it, proved to be of critical significance for his philosophy as a whole. While it bears on the larger issue of the universe as a whole – whether this existed potentially before coming to exist in fact – it also bears on matters related to identity, as well as to divine and human agencies. Let me rephrase the issue in terms that may be more down-toearth and challenging to us: is there sense in the sentence ‘I could make you coffee’ only once I actually make it – despite its grammar – and no intelligible ontic commitment implied by it before or if I don’t make it? Or does it have ontic sense in advance or irrespective of whether I make it or not? In the first view, that of Avicenna, only what actually exists – actually making the coffee – is considered possible. If I don’t actually end up making it, my making of it is not possible, though I may think it is, as I express this in the subjunctive being used. In the second view, my making of it implies it was actually possible before my making of it. But this second view may be extended so as to include what could have come into existence, but did not – for example, as expressed in the sentence ‘I could have done such and such, but chose not to’. Ontic categories in this sense could thus cover both the potential which comes into existence and the potential which never does – those that could come to exist and those that could have but did not. Avicenna attributes this extended meaning of ‘possible’ to Alexander or some follower of his. To make the challenge clearer for us, the matter not only concerns the unfulfilled act of making the coffee, but more fundamentally the intelligibility of positing myself as the maker of it – the intelligibility, therefore, also of positing God as the maker of a world not yet made! This last inference may sit well with classical religious doctrine, but not with Avicenna who believed, in an Aristotelian vein, that God and His/ Her creation are co-temporal. In God’s case, the infinitude of possibilities of the existential chain is not potential but instantaneously resolved into all that is. Envisioning God in a potential reality, or as a potential creator, therefore does not make sense. But while it may not seem that way surely it cannot make sense for us either: true, from our perspective of a gradually unfolding reality, possibilities seem to abound, thereby encouraging us to think that envisioning potential situations is perfectly logical. However, if the chain of existence is already set then envisioning ourselves in potential situations entitled ‘possible’ ceases to be meaningful. In particular, surely positing myself in a past, present or future counterfactual situation ceases to make more sense than positing God in such a situation!

116

Sari Nusseibeh

Aware of the different contexts in which Aristotle treats potentiality and possibility, and wishing not to confuse between them, where Avicenna introduces mention of the term ‘possible’ he does so in the context of other modal expressions. There he concedes a common meaning for it that may be misunderstood as implying an ontic commitment – in a sense, then, in favor of the second view: a commonly-held view of ‘possible’ – he tells us – is what is thought of as not being impossible. Avicenna leaves us to understand that this common meaning for it may be mistakenly understood as an existential affirmation of what is talked about – as if to assert, that is, that there is something which does not exist (yet) that is not impossible. However – we are to understand – considered scrupulously when used this way, examples such as ‘I could make you coffee’ or ‘I could have read that book yesterday’ should only be understood as meaning that such contemplated but non-actual situations – taken as a package, so to speak – are not impossible ones, rather than as meaning that these exist as not impossible but potential occurrences. The distinction is fine, but the idea is that one denies here the impossibility of some entire contemplated event – inclusive of its subject – rather than affirms its existence or the existence of its subject as one that is possible in a potential sense. It should be seen alike to interpreting the sentence ‘unicorns do not exist’ as saying it is not the case that unicorns exist, rather than as saying, incomprehensibly, there exist things such that these are unicorns and such that these do not exist. Here, similarly, it would make no sense to say there exists something such that it does not exist and such that it is not impossible. Thus, to contemplate a possibility in this non-impossibility sense – Avicenna gives us to understand – is simply to deny that it is, or was, impossible for me to make coffee rather than to assert the existence of my making of it as having, or having had, the potential of coming to be. This may be all what people commonly have in mind when using subjunctives: not seriously affirming the existence of such objects or events – or even themselves – in some metaphysical world, but as denying the impossibility of their existence in this world. (Strictly speaking, Avicenna would apply this analysis indifferently to human as well as to natural ‘possible futures’, thereby ignoring Aristotle’s important distinction between them.) It may help us perhaps to think of the distinction Avicenna makes here as one between denying that the prepositional clause ‘... that I make coffee’ is impossible on the one hand, and asserting about me in some possible world that I make the coffee. By saying that the common usage of possible is its negation of the impossible – and by interpreting this in the manner I have just done – I don’t believe that Avicenna was presenting an argument; he was simply suggesting this might be all what people commonly using the word are committing themselves to – or are warranted to commit themselves to – when they use it. A more formal meaning of the term, he tells us, one that in contrast is used by logicians or philosophers, makes ‘possible’ out to mean what is not necessary.

Are Miracles Possible? 117 This leads us to consider the first view – Avicenna’s. By implication we are to understand this is not a common view, but a special meaning he wishes to give the word ‘possible’ in this context. But as we shall see we should perhaps understand it as a refinement of the so-called formal meaning he tells us is given it by logicians. This is that the making of the coffee, once made, is not something that comes about by itself. It is in this sense – that it is not self-made but required something other than itself to come to be made – that it is possible. Besides this telling us that whatever is possible in this sense is necessarily caused by some other thing – that possible strictly implies a causal necessity – this meaning of the word also tells us that something is possible if it is already there, in actuality. From our vantage point, we can only tell it is possible once we see it to have occurred. But not seeing it as having occurred is not reason to deny that if it is possible then it must exist, somewhere in time. Before seeing it, strictly speaking, we cannot tell what is possible – what will be caused to be made, or what lies in the future. Later, as I shall point out, he uses this indeterminacy in our own minds to define what he thinks the word truly means. For now, sticking with his interpretation of the formal definition of the word, his point is that it does not make sense to posit something as possible, alike to what we do when we refer to something actual in our world in preparation to saying something about it. Without existing as a determinately instantiated something at some time, it cannot even be assumed there is a subject (a me, for example) in view about which anything can be said, including that an event is possible with respect to it! There is an important proviso to this (rather radical) viewpoint which Avicenna has in mind, and which I will briefly point out later. According to the second (Alexander) view, in contrast, my making of the coffee was (meaningfully) possible before making it, whether I end up making it or not. Clearly, besides bearing on the meaningfulness of whether and how potential objects, events or persons can be entertained as existing as possible entities, what we mean by possible also importantly bears on the related issues of capability (can) and of choice (‘could’, or ‘could have’): on the second view – which many of us might feel more inclined to go along with – ‘I could make you coffee’ surely means I can if I choose to, meaning the possibility of its being made or not being made by me exists, or that both my making of it and my not making of it are undetermined but real outcomes, having equal ontic status, and my decision will determine which of these two outcomes it will be. ‘I could have made you coffee’ similarly posits the existence of the ‘real’ me as one who did not make the coffee after all. Thus to deny – with Avicenna – the meaningfulness of the possible as a potential (as what exists, or existed potentially), and the meaningfulness of me in such a potentiality, would seem at first sight to deny our ability both to do something we can do and to make (or to have made) one outcome occur as a result of our choice. Indeed, while some of us might concede that potential events in general are of a dubious ontic character, it might still

118

Sari Nusseibeh

seem to be going too far to claim that even the subject-terms in the relevant sentences under review also somehow fail of reference, or have oblique reference, especially when, as in the examples mentioned where self-reference is used, the whole idea is to express what we as human agents are capable of doing in the world. This – whether we can determine an outcome that is not predetermined, or how we come to bring it about it if it already is – is one major issue that clearly lies behind the dispute over what is possible. I will address this issue – together with Avicenna’s proposed solution for it – in due course. The second and more encompassing issue, however, has to do with what exists, or what one can count as existing: Avicenna adopts the meaning of possible as that which makes sense only insofar as objects actually exist, but not insofar as there are such things as potential objects. However, while this view rids the world of one kind of events and objects – those that might exist or have existed – it perforce refills it with all that has existed and will exist, regardless of whether we happen to know these. As said, our lack of knowledge of what will exist in the future does not change from the fact that whatever will exist must also be possible – indeed is already in this sense actual. This confounds our understanding of future statements. By denying that ‘I could make you coffee’ describes a possible event in the potential sense, we are compelled to distinguish between such a sentence when I do not eventually make the coffee, and when I do: it is only in the latter case – pegged to its actuality in the future – that such a sentence would be meaningful and have a determinate truth-value. In contrast, pegging it to me as it is in the first example, and as one might express this by saying there is a possible world in which I make the coffee, becomes meaningless and therefore devoid of a truth value altogether – unless, as already said, it is formulated as the negation of an impossibility. In other words, it is only when such a sentence describes an actual event in the future that the singular term in it can be considered rigid – retaining its reference to the subject to which it purports to refer. It is important to realize here that this referential rigidity is meant in Avicenna’s case to disallow rather than to explain discourse about possible worlds. However, this rigidity holds from our perspective, Avicenna tells us, only if and when we happen to be able to peg that sentence to the conditions in the space-time continuum that satisfy its actualization, or truth – as someone who might know all events on earth and in the skies and their natures, for instance, would come to understand how everything in the future will occur!7 Otherwise, from our vantage point, we cannot tell what value that sentence has, and as already said, the idiom ‘I could make you coffee’ is then better understood as negating a future impossibility, or a counterfactual past one, rather than as affirming

7 See Ibn Sina, al-Ilahiyyat 2 of al-Shifa, edited by M. Musa, S. Dunya, S. Zayed (Ministry of Culture, Cairo, 1960), p.440,ll.2-4.

Are Miracles Possible? 119 the possibility of an actual event. Indeed, in holding the view that future singular statements reflect an indeterminacy in our minds and are either (strictly) meaningless or determinately true, Avicenna was not only parting from Alexander but, more seriously, he was perhaps reading much further into Aristotle than how ‘the philosopher’ might have wished to be read. I mentioned a proviso with regard to the question of reference in the context of possibility before, and perhaps this is the best place to try briefly to explain it: while as I already said positing a particular in a possible world in the potential or counterfactual sense according to Avicenna is ontologically meaningless, he at one point gives us to understand that – in contrast – some terms retain the rigidity of their designations across what we might describe tentatively here as ‘parallel worlds’. What he had in mind were referents that could have or could be contemplated as having different states, but only on account of the fact that they do not exist in the first place except in those states. Thus, referencing them in any one of those different states would be positing them as themselves. The examples he gives of these are general terms (e.g., Human Being) and abstract nouns (e.g., Blackness). The point he makes here is based on his theory that these are primary materials that do not exist as items that are independent of how they are instantiated in nature or in our minds, nor do they exist therefore as items that of themselves determine how they come to be instantiated. Blackness may be instantiated in this table and that, but neither does it exist independently as itself nor is there anything in it that determines the existence of this or that table, let alone that determines that this or that table be black. But since blackness does not exist except as this or/and that blackness we do not transgress his possibility rule by envisioning ‘it’ in different states. This may help explain the use of the expression ‘parallel worlds’ above. Since such items are always modulated rather than pure objects of reference we perforce will find ourselves positing them in one or another modulated state or instantiation whenever we wish to posit them as objects of reference. In a sense, their designations therefore remain rigid across a spectrum of different states, as peace between two countries at war can have different forms, or the peace one of these countries has in mind can be different from the peace the other country has in mind. The designations in this case are rigid because no one instantiation has exclusive claim to being their referent. As already explained, the case by contrast was different when Avicenna dealt with situations where I might wish to posit myself as a potential maker of coffee, or, by extension as an extreme example, Netanyahu, say, as an Israeli leader who wishes to concede sovereignty over East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Simply, I and Netanyahu are pure objects of reference, with exclusive claim to our respective designations, and not being anything as objects of reference other than our actual instantiations as ourselves. To shift the reference to us (by ‘tinkering’ with our actuality) would be to lose sight of us – meaning that the designation no longer would stick to us.

120

Sari Nusseibeh

Avicenna’s theory runs counter to how ‘rigid designators’ today are understood and used in the context of possible worlds. In his case, the statement ‘Netanyahu could have lost the elections in 2013’ – here using a proper noun as a designator – does not actually pick out Netanyahu (in a possible world)! Likewise, it would make no sense to posit this black object as a white or yellow one, as it perforce wouldn’t be itself. But unlike these cases, once we contemplate or posit such a thing as human being or blackness (in themselves) then we either would be contemplating something vacuous, about which nothing positive or negative could be said (Locke); or we would be contemplating a modulated instantiation of these, in which case whatever we say about them will perforce be constrained by whatever mode we posit them to be in – such as being this or that particular human being, simply an idea in our minds, or a function of light reflection in matter. In each of these cases, our referents would be the instantiations we posit, simply on account of the fact that – in any one of these examples – the it in question would be nothing but that posit. The reference to it is in this sense rigid. We are here led to understand that the primary material Avicenna talks about could have been instantiated differently (by God) from what they have been – although, once instantiated as this and that then matters are settled and it would no longer make sense to posit them in different states; but that they also come to have different instantiations in fact, specifically those of them that constitute the working material (ideas) in peoples’ minds: thus, the blackness or peace I have in mind can be different from the way someone else thinks of them. This ‘parallel worlds’ model (peace can have different meanings in different peoples’ minds) interestingly allows for the intelligibility of choices people have and make in the intellectual realm – that ‘given facts’ about the world can be expressed by different discourses or logical models – the proviso remaining, of course, as to how to understand choice in such a predetermined framework (see below). The general distinction Avicenna makes in the context of reference reflects his more general view – stated simply – that individuals in our world lie at the bottom of the logical ladder, presupposed therefore by general concepts. These concepts are our means to individuate, but in individuating we necessarily zone in on very specific characteristics. Particularizing blackness (for instance, as this black table), or human being (say as Netanyahu, or myself), perforce zones in on specific subjects such that trying to abstract these from their actual specifications and to replace them by others becomes tantamount to abstracting them from the picture altogether. We no longer would be talking about them, or about the actual things that exist. Understandably, one may be more inclined to accept Avicenna’s point here when faced with examples such as positing Netanyahu as someone prepared to concede sovereignty over Jerusalem than when positing myself as the maker of coffee. But he would argue that the principle in the two examples is the same – that in neither case would it make sense to presume

Are Miracles Possible? 121 to be talking about the real individual who exists. That is why the possibleworld idiom where this concerns particulars in our (sublunar) world smelled of trouble for him. However, turning to the supra-lunar world where each one of the heavenly objects such as the sun is also a particular, we find that Avicenna uses a different approach to interpreting possibility and designations: here we find him claiming that the designator (e.g. ‘the sun’) is a general (rather than a singular) term that happens to be true of only one object. It could therefore pick out other suns or it could pick out this sun under different circumstances. Its designator, in other words, is rigid, unlike the designators of particulars in the sublunar world, and more like the designators of blackness and peace. It may be that his conclusion here was determined by his outlook that heavenly bodies are eternal, but nothing in themselves determines the fact and nature of their existence. While the possibility exists for them to have been different, they are in fact set in the manner they exist. (Contra Aristotle, he believed topographical configurations of the earth are subject to change – islands can suddenly arise in the seas, or mountains can disappear!) Therefore, while ‘the sun’ was a general term, it happens in fact to single out only one particular. In sum, Avicenna allows for an ‘open instantiations’ – or ‘parallel worlds’ – model for primary material such as blackness or Human Being, but an already closed model for heavenly bodies. In contrast, he denies either meaning for possibility in the case of particulars in the sublunary world (each is just a single instantiation, with a singular claim as that instantiation to its designation). This significantly seems to leave him committed to one version or another of fatalism at the level of persons or individuals, or at the level of actions (what sense there is in speaking about our free will). This is the point I wish to highlight in the rest of this essay, but some more background explanation may still be necessary. As the reader may already surmise Avicenna’s choice from among others for the meaning of ‘possible’ – that whatever is possible exists – is motivated by his more general contention that whatever exists is possible in itself, save for that which is self-made, or whose cause for existence is itself – what Aristotle eventually described as the Prime Mover, what Avicenna called the ‘necessary of itself’, and what Leibniz would later describe as the self-sufficient principle in the universe. But one has to be careful here in order not to conflate between these. It is important to stress here that Avicenna’s principle is introduced as a compound principle of thought, combining what he tells us are primary conceptual elements/ideas, namely, existence, necessity, unity and the relative pronoun. These are the building blocks of thought, so to speak. The inclusion of the relative pronoun in this package may seem strange at first, but its role can quickly be seen to be necessary as a non-predicative connective combining these primary ideas together, as these might come together in our minds as ‘the necessary that is existence’, and ‘the existence that is unique’ – in advance of reaching the mental stage, yet, of asserting there to be a relation between these. These

122 Sari Nusseibeh combined ideas now become our primary conceptual principles. We are to surmise that these are a basic standard or measure against which all our thoughts about existence (our assertions) must be set, and without which all such thoughts cannot make sense. Indeed, the so-called possible of itself – what we come across in the world as what required something other than itself to have come to exist – can only begin to be fully comprehended as a concept when set against and as seen in the light of the more basic concept of what exists necessarily, or of itself rather than of something else. In other words, ‘possible’ comes to be properly understood in light of its being what is not necessary – what he already told us was the special meaning given it by philosophers. But ‘is not necessary’ in turn presupposes both being and necessity as more primary concepts, or the being that is necessary as a more primary principle. For Avicenna, in other words, the very fabric of our thought presupposes the idea of the primacy of God. Although there is some scholarly disagreement about the matter – and even about whether Avicenna purports to provide a ‘proof’ whatsoever for the existence of God – I do not believe that Avicenna falls into the ontic trap here, or purports to use the above argument as proof for God’s existence. His discourse is to do with cognition. But he does give us to understand that, in like manner to our conceptual structure, but apart from our thoughts, it is reasonable to believe that the reality grid must also be set out such that, since all that is possible exists, each of itself being not necessary, and therefore of necessity caused by something other than itself, then all existential slots are already – so to speak – spoken for, or predetermined, occupying their place in a web of intricate and necessary causal chains that must rest ultimately on the necessary of itself, such that no empty places are left for a potential object or event. Nothing is suspended in mid-ontological air, awaiting to be determined. This grid extends into the future – if there is one – as it does into the present and past, which is why, as already said, some future singular statements in the indicative mood have determinate truth-values. The entire grid is possible with respect to itself, but necessary with respect to its principle, very much in the way its parts are to each other and ultimately to that principle. Avicenna’s view jars with that of the free-willist Alexander, but also with that of Leibniz and others within Avicenna’s own milieu who try to keep a wedge in their worldview for contingencies – where human beings, as well as God, could uninterruptedly make choices, and thereby interfere with events in the world. Indeed, Avicenna’s picture does not leave the Principle, or God, with any leeway for contingent action. It is true the world without Him would not have existed, and that its existence in this sense is therefore possible. But its existence as it has been, is, or will be, is necessary insofar as it is caused by, and proceeds from him. He cannot make changes in it, any more than we can change having made coffee. The very idea of a divine miracle here – as an event that is not already predetermined as part of the run of things from a divine point of view – loses all meaning. Of course, nothing in this fabric

Are Miracles Possible? 123 of nature prevents what we think of as miracles from happening: those perceived to be such in our eyes only being part of the possible, or of what exists in actuality across time. This is what Leibniz – indeed, many people – would disagree with. Surely, God can interfere in the world anytime of his choosing, in any way he wants. Leibniz is only cited here, by the way, because of his having seen eye to eye with Avicenna on the contention that this happens to be the best of all possible worlds. This raises a question about contingencies that I will mention toward the end of this essay. Besides God’s potency, however, and the meaningfulness or otherwise of divine miracles as we perceive them, the picture Avicenna provides clearly bears on the meaningfulness of human agency. How, then, does Avicenna explain the meaningfulness of our own acts? First, is it reasonable to believe God can change his mind if we prayed for His/Her mercy? But second, would it make sense (for the pianist, for example) to envision what might seem at first sight to be an impossible objective for herself but to have the faith necessary in her own ability to bring it about? Aristotle told us that prayers and future singulars have no determinate truth-values. Avicenna tells us that both of these kinds of acts are meaningful, and indeed, some are even determinately true. But how, then, can we account for the meaningfulness of our own acts, or our faith in ourselves? Avicenna’s answer seems to lie in the simple answer that while the future is fixed, we (in contrast with God) in general have no way of knowing what that future holds – which, after all, is what he tells us the real meaning of possibility is: we therefore do not know that God’s mercy and our prayer are not causally linked in the foreordained order in the first place, or that the saving of a child from drowning is not causally linked with our decision to save her. But is that enough to give meaning to our agency? Does it not simply leave us with no incentive or will to move from our chairs? Avicenna’s challenging account leaves much to be explained, but I think he would argue as follows: even if I (as a rational being who has grasped his overall theory) have no way of knowing whether the child is doomed to drown, or be saved, it is reasonable for me to think that, seeing I am the one person around who is in a position to do something about it, and that what will happen must in any case be caused by an external agent, that what will happen to the child will in all likelihood be the result of my own action or lack of it, since (I know) neither eventuality (the saving or drowning) will be brought about by itself. It stands to reason, therefore, for me to think that my action or lack of it may well be the proximate cause of whatever is foreordained to happen. I may be wrong, of course. And of course, I may also be aware that how I decide to act is foreordained by some external agent. But, besides the reasoning involved, what stands out as a determining feature in this situation is what I feel I want or should do – which of the two eventualities I wish to see happening. This is an instinctual rather than a moral imperative. I am not unaware that even this – what I feel I want to

124 Sari Nusseibeh do – is also preordained. Even so, my want carries the day. It is this want that makes me go ahead and do what I do. In like fashion I am unsure whether I will pass or fail the test, but based on the kind of reasoning already explained, and all things considered, I come to believe the chances I will pass if that is a preordained outcome will be greater if I prepare for it than if I do not. Again, it is my wanting to pass that makes me go ahead and do the rationally requisite preparation in the hope that this will be the proximate cause for passing. Of course, it may be preordained I will fail anyway. This account of action that partly has emotion or instinctual want and partly reason or rational calculations as its components thus seems to provide a sufficient explanation of what we mean by determining an outcome through our actions, and what it means for our actions to determine outcomes. It also satisfies one intended meaning of the idiom ‘I could do X’: that for the outcome O to occur there is reasonable ground for me to believe my action A will be the cause of O – an outcome I want and that will prompt me to act. If O does not occur as a result of A then all that means is that this wasn’t to be, while if it occurs then I will have been that external and proximate agent to have caused it to occur. And whichever occurs would then be the one that is possible, having been caused. But neither will be a potential object or event lurking, so to speak, in some mysterious ontic dimension before one of them occurs. Does ‘I can if I choose to’ lose its meaning here? Not if we understand this to say that I believe the determined outcome (e.g., the making of the coffee) will be brought about if I wanted it to be brought about, rather than to say one outcome out of two potential ones that have not yet been determined by my choice will be so brought about. This, notwithstanding the fact I may be wrong on both counts. Likewise, when the subjunctive is used in non-personalized contexts (e.g. a war could break out), all this means is that we do not yet know whether that is foreordained or not. As already explained, this does not foreclose the meaningfulness of human agency in the manner above-described, or the so-called wants and actions associated with these or consequent upon them. In effect, the functional motivation here is wanting, or my will to act, which – hand in hand with my mental calculations – explains what an act of choice is. But if it was an act of choice then wouldn’t it have been possible (to return to our initial question in this essay) for me not to have acted that way if my will had been different? Indeed, does not explaining an act of choice this way bring back in the dreaded existence of a potential object of choice? Because surely, it could be argued, my ability to choose X implies my ability to choose otherwise; or, more elaborately, that ‘I could do X’ implies the embedded disjunction ‘either I want/choose X’ or ‘I do not want/choose X’. In turn, this implies (as in Alexander’s potential objects) that there is an X – e.g., the saving of the child – which has not occurred which I either want or do not want. We therefore stand before two kinds of objections to

Are Miracles Possible? 125 Avicenna’s thesis here – that two outcomes are possible depending on what my will is, and that there is an existential affirmation of something I want, and something I do not want, whichever outcome I choose. There may be different ways to deal with these objections but Avicenna’s response in the relevant passage in his Metaphysics where he deals with this issue in the context of potentiality as capability is elliptical and brief, and may perhaps be expounded on as follows8: first, he tells us it is true that ‘I could do X’ (the capability of doing X) is typically presented as meaning that I can both do X and not do it (or: I can either do X or not do it, rather than as just meaning that I can do it). In other words, it implies a binary option. However, Avicenna comments, this interpretation would seem true only if we dissociated between ‘I can do it’ on the one hand, and the will and choice embedded in ‘can’ on the other: if this dissociation were made then ‘I can do it’ will certainly seem to reflect the capability or potentiality sense in the respect meant by the binary (disjunctive) interpretation. However, another way to consider the meaning of ‘I can do X’ is to view the capability implied by the relevant verb as one which is fixed to the object identified. Once we understand the declaration as one where this is the case then the ‘capability’ implied would not involve a binary interpretation, but will instead come to be understood as being part of the meaning of the verb, and the sentence can then be understood as a conditional, where doing that specific X is conditionally associated with a fixed intention or will to do it (I can do it if I want to). In other words, rather than abstracting the capability and will implied in the sentence from the specific object identified, associating them with that object allows the sentence to have a single rather than a binary interpretation. Capability is reflected in this interpretation in the relation I assert between my will and its object. (He briefly explains a ‘fixed will’ as one that remains fixed to its object, rather than as one that is a passing whim at a certain time; and as one which is so either because it is of itself ‘fixed’ to its object or just happens to be so.) By arguing this, Avicenna tries to retain meaning to ‘capability’ where only one future path is prescribed.9 Returning to the (initial) binary interpretation he now continues to argue that ‘I could do X’ should therefore be interpreted or understood as a conjunction of two conditionals (as if to say if I want X I will do it, and if I don’t want X then I don’t) – where, that is, the act in question is conditional in either case on the presence of the will. He believes that this interpretation circumvents the aforesaid dissociation between capability and object, typically expressed by a disjunction: ‘I could do X’ should not

8 Ibn Sina, al-Ilahiyyat, p.172,l.13-p.173,l.12. 9 Interestingly, this argument recalls the distinction Arendt makes (see n.4 above) between a psychological understanding of will (where this is always presented as a choice between doing X or not doing it) and an ‘instantiated’ expression of will (where a specific X to be done is singled out as an object the agent is capable of doing).

126

Sari Nusseibeh

be understood to mean the disjunction ‘either I want it, in which case I do it, or I do not want it, in which case I don’t do it’. In this interpretation, clearly, the wanting or the will is undetermined rather than fixed. (i.e., the want or will fall within the scope of the disjunctive operator [either/or], making the wanting or the will rather than the act optional – as opposed to making the act conditional upon whether there is a want or will). Furthermore, he says, his ‘conjunctive’ interpretation also avoids the (existential) predication embedded in the disjunction formula. While he does not elaborate his point here it is obvious that what he has in mind is that in the disjunction formula there is an it predicated of me in both sides, once positively and once negatively (I want it, or I do not want it). That same it then is (presumably) envisaged as either coming into actual being or not depending on whether I do it or not. This interpretation of ‘I could do X’ would be what the proponents of equally possible but undetermined outcomes wish to prove – either X or not X. But that, Avicenna says, is not what ‘I could do X’ means. It does not express an indeterminacy of wants – that I either want it or not. Asserting my ability to do X here simply asserts the ability to do X if I want it (if I want X then I can do it, and if I do not want X then I can refrain from doing it). This is a conjunction of two conditionals, Avicenna tells us, in neither of which there is a predicative assertion – the grammatical forms of these in antecedents and consequents notwithstanding, and in both of which the real assertions are those of the conditionals themselves. Treating these forms as predicative assertions with a subject certainly implies there is an X which we want, or where, that is, we assert the existence of that X. However, what we assert in conditionals is the relation between antecedent and consequent, not the existence of the predicate of a subject. Another way of understanding what Avicenna had in mind here is to consider the distinction between ‘There is an X, such that X is what I want’ on the one hand, and ‘For all things x, if there is an x such that I want x, then x is something I can bring about’ on the other. The relevant X here, or my making of the coffee or the saving of the child, becomes in this formula an un-instantiated object (the variable ‘x’) whose instantiation is conditional upon the specification of my want. Otherwise, to think of it as a predicate in this context would be to misconstrue the different manners of assertions in statements (predicative and conditional). In this way, Avicenna denies the equal ontic status of two undetermined outcomes that may be understood by an act of choice and maintains the relationship he holds to exist between willing and acting on the one hand, and a determined outcome on the other. I must add that Avicenna’s analysis here had God in mind as much as our own acts. Regardless of how we assess his argument Avicenna’s overall point is clear: he proposes to replace a fully libertarian (or Alexandrian) position by one that might be regarded as compatibilist. While his fatalistic view simply disparages the classical notion of free choice or will, his account of

Are Miracles Possible? 127 reason (how we think) and emotion (what we feel) arguably reintroduces sufficient meaning into the acts we undertake to do in a predetermined world. The two accounts complement each other extremely well: a probabilistic theory of knowledge (belief) being reinforced by a ‘psychological’ theory of action (want). ‘Believing’ as an epistemological as well as psychological disposition lies at one end of a spectrum the other end of which can terminate in faith. Psychologically, wanting to save the child from drowning, or to regain my dexterity at playing the piano, or indeed, to prevent a war from breaking out, can also develop into a strong belief – a faith in myself – that I can actually make a difference to what will happen. Indeed, belief underlies Avicenna’s entire theory of knowledge, making it an epistemological rather than a verification theory (our beliefs about the world being falsifiable). At its extreme end, Avicenna invokes faith – this time, more clearly, in God’s Providence – as the underpinning of all our claims to knowledge, whether about the future, present or past – indeed, about the correspondence between our world of thought and the reality grid. Paradoxically, perhaps, rather than being a disincentive to the acquisition and development of knowledge, this overall thesis leaves the door open for a constant evaluation of our knowledge – claims, and incentivizes us to do what we feel we want, or – in this case – should or ought to do, as I shall point out in a minute. But what if our foreordained wants are all bad, or evil? Does it make sense then to be punishable for these? Two elements define Avicenna’s theodicy: the distinction between the parts and the whole, and the negative definition of the bad as the absence of good. With respect to the parts – such as my want to hurt someone, or such as a volcanic eruption – the resultant action or event can be described negatively as parts not having any good in them. It is with respect to the whole that the good permeates. The presumption here – however, tenable or untenable we might feel this to be – is that the good of the whole is not constituted by the numerical sum of the good(s) of its parts; rather, it is a balancing resolution of the positive and negative characteristics of those parts. Of course, this puts into question the conventional matter of resurrection and of reward and punishment. Avicenna was justifiably criticized by critics who saw the implication of his views in this matter. Maybe a final interesting comparison to make is that while Avicenna and Leibniz shared the view that this is the best of all possible worlds, Leibniz – as said – wished to maintain a room for contingencies: that God could make changes, that our supplications may influence Her/His decisions and that we could freely choose what to do. Hence, reward and punishment in the afterlife were an important part of his system. Avicenna, in contrast, couldn’t envisage a best world that could be made better by any adjustments to it, whether those effected by God or those by us. How could a perfect maker fail to make a perfect world? In terms of final judgments – if we take those seriously – Leibniz’s view makes more sense than Avicenna’s.

128

Sari Nusseibeh

How else can we be answerable in an afterlife for what we do? More immediately, how can we be answerable in this world for what we do? I am not suggesting this latter question cannot be answered, but it is a challenge that has to be met by Avicenna, or by those holding his viewpoint – the emphasis as he saw it perhaps needing to become, given our lack of knowledge of how the future is laid out, on educating for ‘the good wants’ – on making our instinctual imperatives moral – and punishment being viewed only as part of this, rather than as desert.10 ‘Moral education’ may thus explain Avicenna’s choice to include chapters about religion and prophecy toward the end of his Metaphysics. But it is not just moral education that comes to assume an important role in Avicenna’s philosophy but faith: faith, that is, not only in God and His/Her Providence but also in ourselves – in our wills as determinants of our acts and in ourselves – a secular faith to determine futures (miracles) that might look impossible to achieve in the run of things. In terms of what ‘best’ implies – again, if we take this seriously – Avicenna’s view seems to make more sense than Leibniz’s. As said, how can a supposedly best layout of the world be made better by possible adjustments to it (whatever we take ‘possible’ to mean)? In this frame, then, the only ‘true’ miracles that can happen are those we have the faith in ourselves to make happen.

10 While Arendt’s ‘principles of action’ are moral, in Avicenna, they as ‘wants’ or instincts can be both good or bad. Hence the need in his theory for moral education.

7

On Laws and Miracles Ilit Ferber

Tel-Aviv University, Israel

When Saint Augustine speaks of miracles, he describes them as events that exceed our expectations: extraordinary, astounding occurrences that not only have we never encountered but also that we never thought possible. Some miracles cause wonder (a man flying), others gratitude (a sick person healed by extraordinary means); we hope for certain miracles, whereas others lie beyond even our wildest expectations. Miracle, indeed, derives from the Latin miraculum – the object of our wonder, which originates from the verb mirar (to wonder), and the adjective mirus: something like impressive or amazing, always standing contrary to our expectations (based, in turn, on our previous experience). There is, then, no miracle without wonder or, perhaps, without the desire to explain such wonder away, to understand it.1 It is, to put it somewhat differently, an event at once undeniable and impossible. According to Augustine, miracles affect us because they are “strange and difficult” and marvelous in the way they exceed our expectations and then adds that “they would not be marvelous if they were familiar.”2 With this interesting remark, Augustine makes an important differentiation separating what we take to be a miracle, an event whose cause is invisible or unclear, with effects so striking so as to be unbelievable, from what is “simply” beautiful. The emergence of springtime, with all its beauties and marvels and profuse blossoming of nature, would be experienced as an astounding, overwhelming miracle were we to see it for the first time. However, we know,

1 Hent de Vries, Miracles, Events and Small Wonders, trans. Irit Bauman (Resling, 2018 [in Hebrew]), p. 64. This is a translation into Hebrew of the original Dutch version: Kleine filosofie van het wonder [Philosophy of the Miracle: A Short Introduction] (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2015). 2 St. Augustine, “The Usefulness of Belief,” in Earlier Writings, trans. John H.S. Burleigh (Westminster Press, 1979), p. 320, quoted in Hent de Vries, “Fast Forward, or: the Theologico-Political Event in Quick Motion (Miracles, Media, and Multitudes in St. Augustine),” in How the West Was Won: Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, Eds. Willemien Otten, Arjo J. Vanderjagt, Hent de Vries (Brill, 2010), p. 259. On the central role Augustine plays in the philosophical and theological history of miracles, see ibid., pp. 255ff.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-8

130  Ilit Ferber through repeated experience, that spring comes every year at around the same time, even after the longest and coldest winter. Expecting its arrival, we are therefore not surprised by its appearance; it does not overwhelm but rather reassures us with its soothing periodic regularity and the pleasure inherent in its harmony with our expectations. Augustine emphasizes that spring is no less than a marvel for that (in many ways, it is more marvelous than the experience of a blind man regaining his sight) but, having already experienced the change of seasons and its reliable annual recurrence, we invariably expect to see it again year after year. Augustine’s choice of examples here is, of course, intentional: he highlights not only spring as one phase of the recurring cycle of seasons but also the alteration of night and day, and he mentions phenomena and sensations that we usually treat as obvious or mundane, such as “the beauty of light, colour, sounds, odours, the varieties of flavours.” That we are not surprised or overwhelmed by them does not mean that they are easily understood, for, he asks, “What is more obscure than their causes?” Augustine’s answer is that this obscurity is “because we are continually aware of them.”3 Augustine here binds up what is recurring and therefore habitual, with the hiddenness of its uniqueness. We cease to notice what is always there; the familiar causes us to forget, to oversee.4 There is something surprising about Augustine adopting such a starting point, and this is precisely why his definition is so intriguing. We might well expect Augustine to approach the miracle and its explication from a religious point of view, or for it to emerge out of a discussion of the relationship between the appearance of miracles and the proof they offer of God’s existence. However, the beauty of his explanation lies in its origins not in the question of belief but rather in the question of knowledge and experience, or, in his own terms, from the intersection of miracle, expectation and awareness. Theological elements come together here with epistemological ones, more specifically with an epistemology strongly couched in sense-perception and in immediate experience. For Augustine, then, at the heart of the question lies not so much the actual event and its empirical feasibility or even conceivability (how is it possible that a beautiful flower can grow out of a small, condensed seed) but rather the miracles’ relation to our ordinary, everyday experience of the world. This formulation brings to mind another thinker who was preoccupied, and in similar ways, with the question of the miracle: David Hume.5 There is much to say about these two different yet strangely similar figures. For

3 Augustine, ibid., ibid. 4 De Vries, “Fast Forward,” pp. 259–260. 5 De Vries mentions Hume in several places in the context of his discussion of miracles. See especially Miracles, Events and Small Wonders, pp. 79–82; Religion and Violence, pp. 224–225. See also Antony Flew’s instructive discussion of Hume in “Miracles,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed. Paul Edwards (The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, 1967), pp. 346–353.

On Laws and Miracles 131 my purposes here, however, let me emphasize but a single component: both Augustine and Hume view the miracle on the background of habit and familiarity or what we usually refer to as laws. Moreover, for both, the appearance of the miracle does not violate our laws (as it is usually considered, at least intuitively) but are rather mutually dependent on them: to put this briefly (I will elaborate in the following pages), God’s works, for Augustine, always obey to the laws according to which he has himself created the universe; for Hume, however surprising and even overwhelming at times miracles might be, there exists no fixed, a priori laws of nature according to his epistemology, and thus miracles can never, and in principle, transcend such laws. For both Augustine and Hume, then, there is no violation of laws and no appearances of the impossible. And even more importantly for my argument here, there is a similar implication suggested by both thinkers: miracles and laws appear together and are dependent on each other. There is no possibility for a miracle without there being laws, and vice versa.6 The story, however, has to be fleshed out in greater detail. Before I continue with my reading of Hume, a few words on the context of de Vries’ work on miracles and why I believe Hume is crucial for it. In what has now been an almost 20-year-long philosophical journey (which began already in his Minimal Theologies7), de Vries keeps returning to, reaching out and, most importantly, searching for the innermost kinship between philosophy and religion and, more specifically, he addresses the question of the return of the religious in secular modernity. The problem, obviously multifarious, cannot receive a full account here. But one of its most evident aspects is worth mentioning: it is what de Vries describes as the “contradiction between the premises of a ‘secular’ modernity that promises autonomy and universalism and the heteronomous and particular nature of religious doctrine which marks a tension within this contingency.”8 At stake for de Vries is to tackle the intricacy of the kinship between philosophy and religion without falling into a simplistic oppositional structure in which belief and the religious element boil down to be the “other” of philosophical thought, a picture featuring the classical yet reductive

6 Two other important texts in this tradition are John Locke’s “A Discourse of Miracles,” in Writings on Religion, Ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 44–50, and Chapter 6 (“On Miracles”) of Benedict de Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 81–96. See also de Vries’ discussion of both thinkers in Miracles, Events and Small Wonders, pp. 80–86, 142–143, 188–189, 232–234. 7 Hent De Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). This book is an elaborate, extensively revised version of Theologie im pianissimo: Zur Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas (J.H. Kok, 1989). 8 Hent De Vries, “Of miracles and special effects,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 50 no. 1-3 (2001), p. 46.

132  Ilit Ferber struggle between the rational and non-rational. For de Vries, the religious is never a mere privation of the philosophical. The problem at hand is not philosophy’s relationship to religion, whether and how it criticizes it, or the ways it distinguishes itself from the powerful grip of belief. It would also not concern solely the important difference between philosophical thought and religious belief, their strange agreement or distinctive loving antagonism, or: the question of how, when and why philosophy seems to be turning or re-turning to religion, or even turning against it. The title of one of de Vries’ most profound books – Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999) – can serve a key here to his alternative view. More than asking how, when and why philosophy seems to be turning or re-turning to religion, or turning against it, “turn” in the title suggests the importance of asking what this term in fact means. For De Vries, the crux of the matter lies in a genuine grasping of what kind of space opens up when we, rather than constructing an either-or, oppositional structure, instead pose the question of “turning.” To do so is to mount an exploration of the “turn” itself: the special bending of philosophy toward religion and the religious, a bending that is anything but mere antagonism. It is in that sense that de Vries’ thought goes beyond the problem of the possibility of secularization, or the “beyond” of the religious that always, in a strange way, occupies with it the same space. What is at stake, then, is the turn or the bend, which implies, first and foremost, that philosophy and religion share, even if they sometimes explicitly try to deny it, a world. De Vries addresses this intimate form of relationship when he writes elsewhere that the idea of the “turn to religion” implies an attempt to situate thought in an impossible position: that which is at once the closest to and the furthest from what we call the religious.9 I take this idea of a shared space, at once close and distant, to be an important internal paradox in de Vries’ preoccupation with miracles.10 I take de Vries’ interest in miracles to be more than simply an element in his comprehensive project. Miracles are not just examples: their configuration

  9 See Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. xiii. 10 De Vries’s work on miracles is scattered in different places in forms of book, lectures and article. Besides the Dutch and Hebrew editions aforementioned, let me mention three other of his relevant publications on this topic: Miracles et métaphysique. Six Leçons, trans. Lucy Bergeret (Presses Universitaires de France, 2019); “Of Miracles and Special Effects,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 50, no. 1–3, (2001), pp. 41–56; “Causes for Wonder: Religion, Media, and the Miraculous,” in Medium Religion: Faith, Geopolitics, Art, Eds. Boris Groys and Peter Weibel (ZKM Center for Art and Media & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011), pp. 106–117; See also de Vries’s discussion of Kant on miracles and political theology in Religion and Violence, pp. 223–236. The comprehensive exploration of the topic is planned to culminate in three volumes on the subject with the tentative titles: (1) Of Miracles, Events, and Special Effects, (2) Miracle Workers of the Eleventh Hour, and (3) Out of the Ordinary: Moral Perfectionism, Religion, and the Case for Deep Pragmatism.

On Laws and Miracles 133 expresses an important component of the relationship de Vries’ structures between philosophy and religion as a whole. Consequently, the point of de Vries’ study of miracles is not so much an attempt to prove the possibility or evince the impossibility of miracles, nor is it to examine the potential of the miraculous on the background of the question of belief or the validation of the existence of a divine power of intervention. What is at stake rather is the relationship between the miraculous event and its “other,” or what seems to make it an impossibility: laws. This has to do with the interconnectedness between the law’s invisible certainty and the miracle’s impossible appearance. Taking De Vries’ project seriously, we should formulate the problem as follows: what would it mean to speak about miracles not as mere oppositions to or violations of the law, but rather as appearances that can only be given in relation to it. Put in terms of philosophy’s “turn” to religion: how are we to think of miracles as turning toward the laws, addressing them, rather than merely performing a violation. I would like to take this intuition as my lead and develop it by looking more closely at the “Of Miracles,” section X of David Hume’s “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.”11 This section, famous for being Hume’s most explicit refutation of the possibility of miracles, is usually thought of as making up part of his philosophy of religion. The section’s first part is devoted to an account of knowledge and the certainty thereof, with an emphasis on the strong empirical basis of Hume’s epistemology, which provides different degrees of assurance: “A wise man,” he writes, proportions beliefs and evidence (continually balancing facts and opposite experiments), taking into account that such judgements “cannot exceed” what we call “probability.”12 Only in paragraph 12 does Hume lay out his argument regarding miracles, and more important for my own argument here, miracles and laws. A miracle is “a violation of the laws of nature,” he writes, and “nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature.” Hume’s examples here are drawn from obvious instances: it is a fact of experience that all men must die (and even if one dies young or healthy, the event is still considered part of the regular course of human life); however, were a dead man to come back to life, we would be witnessing an event never before observed, an occurrence that would therefore be taken to be a miracle.13 11 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford University Press, 1999). It is not my intention (nor my expertise) to engage in any polemic argument with Hume’s many fine interpreters. For more detailed, scholarly readings of Hume and miracles, see especially Anthony Flew, Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (Thoemmes Press, 1997); Robert J. Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael P. Levine, Hume and the Problem of Miracles: A Solution (Kluwer Publishers, 1989); John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (Oxford University Press, 2000). 12 David Hume, Enquiry, p. 170. See also Chapter 13 of C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, in which he criticizes Hume’s position (Harper Collins, (1947)). 13 Hume, Enquiry, p. 173.

134  Ilit Ferber This leads Hume to the second part of section X, where he enters the debate on miracles more explicitly. In this part, he examines the question of testimony (the only type of source available to the Church) and analyses various cases such as those of Vespasian (who cured a blind man) and Cardinal De Retz, who reports of a man who restored his amputated leg by “rubbing holy oil upon the stump.”14 Hume ends with his famous contention that “no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature.”15 Instead of posing the question of the miracle as one of belief, Hume allows us to think about miracles in epistemological terms, which makes the matter – for him – a question about the nature of experience as such. To fully grasp Hume’s move here requires linking it to his arguments about the sources and nature of human knowledge, developed most clearly in his account of causality. To put this briefly and somewhat baldly, Hume taught us, with what was later famously referred to as his “fork,” that our human knowledge can be divided into two distinct types of sources, later known as the fork’s two “teeth”: relations of idea and matters of fact.16 When it comes to our knowledge whose source is the empirical “matters of fact,” as he calls it, our reason cannot identify a causal connection that is external to the mere sequence of the events as ascertained by reasoning. In other words, we have no access to a higher set of rules or a priori laws of nature from which we can deduce an underlying causal connection between matter-of-fact events occurring before our eyes.17 Hume explains this with his usual elegant style in section VIII of the Enquiry. There, he convincingly demonstrates the intricate ways the mind is inclined to replace mere accidental (albeit repeating) sequences of events with what it is tempted to think of as a law: “after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe, that it will exist.” He adds that the connection made here by the mind (and not by nature, or, for that matter, by God) is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or “necessary connexion.”18 Hume makes a point here of emphasizing that this necessity we find is not a product of reason (which here lacks a sufficiently strong basis) but is rather a construct of our imagination and results from our psychological

14 Hume, Enquiry, p. 179. 15 Hume, Enquiry, pp. 183–184. 16 This distinction is presented in section 4 of the Enquiry, pp. 108 ff. 17 Hume, Enquiry, especially part II, section 7: “Of the Idea of Necessary Connection,” pp. 134–147. 18 Hume, Enquiry, pp. 144–145 (my emphasis).

On Laws and Miracles 135 inclination, even desire, to find unity in nature. The power of our mind and imagination (which is actually what is at stake here) forges these forms so strongly that we almost feel forced to understand the sequence as the effect of a factual, undeniable cause: “We suppose, that there is some connexion between them; some power in the one, by which it infallibly produces the other, and operates with the greatest certainty and strongest necessity.”19 It is in fact we who want to find a causal connection linking two merely sequential events. However, this process is fed not only by desire and by the imagination: for Hume, there is an even stronger force operative in the mind, that is, habit: “They acquire, by long habit, such a turn of mind, that, upon the appearance of the cause, they immediately expect with assurance its usual attendant, and hardly conceive it possible, that any other event could result from it.”20 Our mind creates a reassuring habit that keeps skeptic inclination at bay when encountering the wonders of the world; causality, then, is a law not of nature but of man or, to use the term in the title of Hume’s treatise: human nature. When we see an event and expect a second event to reliably follow it (as it always has before), the inevitability we feel is derived from our own habituation and not from an intelligible necessity of reason. On the face of it, it seems that if we follow Hume’s path, we are obliged to claim that there are no natural, a priori laws and hence no potential for a miracle that could violate them. That is, if the miracle is a violation of the law and no law exists, it would follow that no miracle is possible. My claim is, however, different. According to Hume, it is we who produce our own laws, which are ultimately a projection of our habituated mind. The law is therefore crafted (by way of memory, and of habit), rather than being revealed in its actualizations. This assertion has wide, I would even say radical implications. Taking this back to section X of the Enquiry, it becomes clear that Hume’s move is not as simple as it may first seem. For Hume, the problem does not lie wholly in the credibility of witnesses and testimonies about violations of natural laws, but rather, in the very idea that the law might be violated in the first place. Hume’s crucial emphasis is that it does not suffice to see the miracle as a mere violation of the law or as a deviation from it; this would limit our ability to “see” what is truly miraculous, namely, the ways the law and its violation exist, and can only exist, in tandem. Here Hume explains that there must be “a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.”21 Thereafter Hume’s account of miracles remains entangled with that of the law, that is, a law of experience, an empirical law constituted solely on the basis of our own experience. In this way, Hume transforms the religious problem of the miracle and

19 Hume, Enquiry, p. 144. 20 Hume, Enquiry, pp. 140–141. 21 Hume, Enquiry, p. 173.

136  Ilit Ferber the verification of those testifying to it into an epistemological problem that demands that we think of miracles together with the law rather than opposed to it. As I read Hume, miracles are perplexing, surprising disruptions to the usual sense of our being. Having no place in our history of experience, lacking an identifiable cause, miracles strike us and force us to see things differently, see them as different than they had been, different than we are used to experiencing them. On the one hand, the miracle counters our most basic intuitions and habits even while, on the other, it presents itself as indisputable. It stands there, right before us, as if to mock the stability of our beliefs and presuppositions about the world. Therein lies Hume’s suggestive implication: there is something about the appearance of the miracle that exerts a compelling force upon us, inducing something in us that I would call a sensitivity to an ever-present, albeit sometimes, unnoticed potential. It would therefore be more faithful to Hume if we think of the miracle not in terms of a violation of the law, that is, not as what is given in a mutually exclusive framework with the regularity of habit. Rather, the miracle would be more accurately considered a challenge to our habit and natural epistemological expectations (rather than reasonings). This leads me to an argument that Hume does not hold explicitly but, however, is strongly suggested here: Hume’s understanding of the nature of human knowledge in fact summons the miracle, calls upon it to appear. This conception is starkly different from other philosophical or scientific systems or reasoning that would go a long way to obstruct this possibility, which harbors within it the potential to undermine the entire system by way of a deviation from the rule. For Hume, the appearance of the miracle constitutes a unique openness of his own epistemological system. Curiously enough, as I point out here, this openness should not be understood as a weakening of the authority of the law or the potential of the miracle. It is not that for Hume miracles are impossible (or impossible to prove) but rather the opposite. If we take his arguments regarding the role of habits of mind in causality, we should be able to claim not only that miracles are possible but even that they are necessary. It is the impossibility of the law that enables the ever-present possibility of the miracle. Hume opens a door to thinking about potentiality that is free of the law, external to the force-field of the lawful. Miracles are consequential not so much because of what they reveal or make possible, but rather because their appearances help to cultivate our ability to notice them. Not the miracle itself, but rather the world in which the miracle is possible comes to be the center of its appearance. Moreover, making room for miracles means that we allow a widening and an enrichment of our world: we allow it to be different. To be a world

On Laws and Miracles 137 that is more about potential than about actualization or the actualized “best of all possible worlds.”22 In order for miracles to appear, we need to be attentive to them, to develop a way of being open to encountering the extraordinary. More importantly, this attentiveness to the unusual is always already a new way of listening to the ordinary, to what is always already there. This relates to the way in which de Vries poses the miracle as a question of today, or rather, what it means to write, or read, a book about miracles today, in this world that seems as far removed as can be from one of miraculous interventions. In his discussion, the miracle is no longer encircled by its biblical or mystical contextualization but is brought close, as close as it can get, to our own lives and worlds and the implications it might have in the world. This comes up concretely in the wide array of de Vries’ examples: from water coming out of the rock to Obama’s speeches, from special effects in The Matrix to Chesley Sullenberger’s miraculous safe landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River, also known as “the miracle on the Hudson.”23 This variety is important, not only because it succeeds in revealing the discussion of miracles to be relevant to our own lives today, but because with it, de Vries points at something essential about the nature of miracles as such: their implications lie not merely in the incredible event itself – but in the potential such an event carries with it. The potential of the miracle demands a deeper, aberrant perspective from us, a viewpoint different than our linear, one-dimensional view on time and space, or cause and effect. According to de Vries, miracles and the belief in miracles offer a different way to perceive the only reality we have and have ever had: as a deeper, more elastic space of possibilities. 24 I would like to add a final remark on violation and its relation to violence (another major theme in de Vries’ work). The miracle is not only magical, healing and beautiful but also, necessarily, a form of violation, of violence. For something extraordinary to appear, it has to contravene the ordinary, the habitual. Something has to be broken, betrayed. We have to sink into a certain measure of melancholy and anxiety and even experience a sense of betrayal so that the richness of the wonder can emerge.

22 By using this phrasing, I recall Leibniz’s work on miracles and the best of possible worlds. See especially his Theodicy, Ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E.M. Huggard (Yale University Press, 1952). 23 De Vries, Miracles, Events and Small Wonders, pp. 15–16. The emergency crash was given this title by New York State Governor David Paterson in an interview. The event was the topic of numerous documentaries and movies (including one directed by Clint Eastwood), and countless news articles. Interestingly, Captain Sullenberger himself was quoted saying that the hand of God was involved (ibid.). 24 De Vries, Miracles, Events and Small Wonders, p. 17.

138  Ilit Ferber The miracle is therefore no mere destruction of the uniformity of laws and our belief in them – it is rather a strangely rich way in which we can view the law and reenter that which we believed to be as stable as can be. When Hume thinks the miracle, he is not so much interested in the possibility or impossibility of proving its appearance and thereby proving the existence of God – he sees it, rather, as a new way into the law, into what there is, stable, ever-there. It is about turning the actualized into potential, or finding the potential in what had seemed to be, in its actualization, so closed-off, sealed. The miracle is something like, in that sense, a phenomenological reentering into the ordinary. There is here in Hume, despite the stark lack of religious belief, great hope, which is what miracles are all about.

8

Spiritual Exercises in the Age of Their Technological Reproducibility Eli Friedlander

Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Introduction1 In a famous letter to Gershom Scholem on the interpretation of Kafka, Walter Benjamin writes that “Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that lie far apart and are determined on the one hand by mystical experience … and on the other by the experience of the modern city dweller … the most recent of experiential worlds, was conveyed to him precisely by the mystical tradition. This of course, could not have happened without devastating occurrences …” (Benjamin, 1994, 563–4). Nothing can seem more far apart than the “experience of the modern city dweller”, and the mystical tradition. And yet, the task of articulating the elliptical unity of experience of our “most recent world”, precisely demands holding to these two separate foci. It requires, as Hent de Vries puts it, a “double vision”. Those categories and teachings belonging to the religious past do not reach us anymore as part of a living tradition. They are not transmitted as an accepted wisdom of generations that would assist us in making sense of this modern world. That language can no more be said to be, unproblematically, one’s own. We are hearing, or overhearing, what comes from a distance. Benjamin marks that by saying that Kafka is “eavesdropping” on tradition. It is to this archive of meaning that Hent de Vries turns in his work. His use of the term “archive” to characterize the repository of that past echoes with Benjamin’s reference to “devastating occurrences”. In deploying a range of terms belonging to that archive (from the distinction between “miracula” and “mirabilia”, miracles and wonders, to spiritual exercises, occasionalism, virtualities and apocatastasis), Hent de Vries takes up the task of giving that spiritual

1 This research was supported by a generous grant of the Israel Science Foundation.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-9

140  Eli Friedlander space a renewed life in the midst of a world of special effects, sensational media, globalization and mass consumption: “Miracles” he writes “have not disappeared from the world. They still, and even increasingly play a significant role, a role which we still don’t grasp, only because we are lacking the conceptual resources and required representations” (de Vries, 2018, 20, my translation from Hebrew). My essay draws primarily on Hent de Vries’ recent book Le miracle au Coeur de l’Ordinaire, and on its inflection of the notion of spiritual exercise in relation to the concept of miracle. In the first part, I discuss de Vries’ complex “excursus” on Benjamin in that book. In the second part of the essay, I will follow up on some of the implications of de Vries’ reading of Benjamin’s “thought-figure” entitled “Practice”, from the “Ibizan Sequence”. Finally, I will suggest how practice, exercise and wonder appear in a new configuration, in a space permeated by technology, by considering briefly Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”.

Part I: The Heart of Practice Hent de Vries seeks to recognize anew notions that belong to the archive of the religious tradition, such as “miracle” and “spiritual exercise”, as they apply in the conditions of the modern world, at the heart of our ordinary. This striking task poses immense challenges and difficulties of different orders, which de Vries addresses systematically in his writings. A grammar of spirituality that has its source in the ancient world and is further developed in Christanity is brought to bear on the form of our modern world. The space of life in which we are to recognize anew the pertinence of those religious terms is transformed by, among others, the massive presence of technology and media. Such notions must then be thought of as alive, not despite the presence of technology, but rather at the heart of it, as making sense of the experience of our world. Presumably, the translation of the form of antique spirituality to the modern technological world would not only involve the problematization of the spiritual, but also of notions such as exercise, training and practice. In his excursus on Walter Benjamin, in Le Miracle au Coeur de l”Ordinaire, de Vries addresses these questions by bringing together two different moments of Benjamin’s writing. He considers Benjamin’s famous opening “thesis” from “On the Concept of History” a notoriously hard to interpret parable of the chess-playing automaton, whose moves are guided by a hunchback dwarf hidden in the apparatus, and which is supposed to teach us the relation of historical materialism and religion. So as to gain an entry point into the enigmatic thesis, Hent de Vries suggests reading it together

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 141 with a short story that Benjamin published in 1935 entitled “Rastelli tells” [Rastelli Erzählt]. Since it is less known than the parable of the chess-playing automaton, let me begin by summing up the story: As its title indicates, it is attributed to the famous juggler Rastelli, who tells of a legendary predecessor of ancient times sought by the powerful Sultan to come and demonstrate his skill at the Court in Constantinople. His whole show consisted of one act alone which he performed with a ball that would dance around him, responsive to his gestures, as though miraculously defying every law of nature. Unbeknownst to all, a small dwarf, who never traveled with the juggler for fear of being seen with him, was hidden inside the ball. Attuned through long years of practice to the master’s every gesture, the boy would guide the ball in harmony with his movements by way of a set of springs. On the occasion of the appearance before the Sultan, the juggler’s performance with the ball, accompanied by his flute playing, was particularly amazing. The juggler’s slow dance, harmonized with the movements of the ball, culminated in the ultimate gesture of mastery, in which while playing the flute, the juggler raises his arm and “the ball, obeying a last, long trill, settled on his fingertip with a single bound”. It is only upon exiting the palace that the juggler met with a messenger who could not reach him in time before the performance, and who delivered an urgent note from the dwarf: “Dear Master” it read “you must not be angry with me. Today you cannot appear before the sultan. I am sick and cannot leave my bed”. The parallels between the chess-playing automaton and Rastelli’s tale are striking, starting from the suggestion that in both cases, what appears miraculous is initially due to a “trick”, the presence of an aide or a dwarf assistant, hidden, inside the chess table, or inside the ball. In the one case, the dwarf is described as an “exceptionally fine, graceful and swift little creature”, while in the other case, he is a distorted, hunchback dwarf. There is also another striking difference between the two texts: In the story of Rastelli, the ultimate performance takes place, unbeknownst to the juggler, without the dwarf actually being inside the ball. Thus, it is something of a miraculous performance. Can the chess-playing automaton similarly take a life of its own? And what would it be for Religion to take a sick leave and have historical materialism win all of its own? In de Vries’ reading of the story, what is initially stressed is the importance of the moment of practice or exercise. The act of the juggler and the dwarf in the ball took “long years of practice” to develop. It is only against the belief of the power of such diligent exercise that one can envisage the trick turning into a true wonder and believe in the magical success of the performance without the aid, in the unbelievable

142  Eli Friedlander mastery. 2 So initially, the story opens the possibility to think of the miraculous occurrence, the wonder, as it is present in a space of exercise and practice. We are led to believe in the immeasurable force of exercise. The wonder presupposes the very harmony created between the master and his aid, through the long years of practice. It is this relation between two apparent opposites, the formation of habit through practice and the singular event, that Hent de Vries wishes to further develop by way of a related text of Benjamin’s, from his “Ibizan Sequence”, a thought picture entitled “Practice”. The fact that in the morning the pupil knows by heart the contents of the book he has put under the pillow the night before, that the lord inspires His own in their sleep, and that a pause is creative – to make space for such things to happen is the alpha and omega of all mastery, its hallmark. This, then, is the reward before which the gods have placed sweat. For work which achieves only modest (mäßigen – moderate) success is child’s play, compared to what is summoned up

2 Rastelli’s story refers to a juggler of the past. There was in fact a famous, rather incredible, act that was somewhat similar to the one described in the story. It was performed by the Rumanian juggler Leon Rauche whose stage name was La Roche. In his act, called “La Bolla Mysteriosa”, or “The Wonder Ball”, a hollow 2-foot steel ball would ascend, apparently of its own accord, a narrow24-foot spiraling ramp and then descend just as perilously. At the end of the act, LaRoche would emerge from the sphere to reveal that he had in fact been propelling it by constantly shifting his center of gravity. La Roche performed in Paris at the end of the 19th century before joining the Barnum & Bailey circus. According to the theater scholar John Stokes, these Paris performances might have been an occasion for Oscar Wilde to witness the act, for Stokes reports that Wilde was telling, at the time, a story involving a magic ball (Stokes, 1996). That story was never written by him but was repeated and recorded by several of his acquaintance. One of them, Franck Harris, a biographer of Wilde and a notorious journalist and magazine editor, published in 1901 the story under his own name adding to its title “The Irony of Chance” the parenthesis (after O.W.). In the story, an inventor by the name of Mortimer, influenced by the theories of Ernst Haeckel, creates a living ball from a fusion of different inanimate materials. Mortimer gives public displays of the amazing behavior of the ball on various occasions, but it does not always respond to the prompting of its creator. To assure the outcome, of what he for himself knows to be a true wonder of nature, Mortimer resorts to a trick. And so the story goes: “I cut an opening in the ball and got a little boy who could enter it and move it as he liked from the inside. It took me only a week or so to construct the mechanism”. After a performance, Mortimer is challenged by a member of the audience to show the inside of the ball. Already, resigned to being revealed as a fraud, Mortimer suddenly sees the boy who was supposed to be at the ball arriving backstage: He could not participate at the performance since his grandmother has been taken ill.   The story, interestingly, refers not only to Oscar Wilde as its source but actually mentions at a crucial moment another storyteller who was the inspiration for Mortimer to open up the magic ball and arrange it with a mechanism that could have been activated by a child inside. That idea came to him from a story of Edgar Allan Poe. I assume that the reference is to Poe’s account of Maelzel’s chess-playing automaton.

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 143 (herbeiruft) by luck. This is why Rastelli’s stretched-out little finger attracts the ball, which hops onto it like a bird. The decades’ worth of practice that came before does not mean that either his body or the ball is “in his power” but, it enables the two to reach an understanding behind his back. To weary the master to the point of exhaustion through diligence and hard work, so that at long last his body (Körper) and each of his limbs can act in accordance with their own reason (Vernunft): this is what is called “practice”. The success is that the will abdicates its power once and for all inside the body (Körper), abdicate in favor of the organs – the hand, for instance. This is why you can look for something for days, until you finally forget it; then one day, when you are looking for something else, you suddenly find the first object. Your hand has, so to speak, taken the matter in hand and has joined forces with the object. (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 591) Here it is Rastelli himself, not the legendary juggler of ancient times, who is performing wonders with the ball, moreover succeeding without any mention of a hidden aid. One can begin to appreciate the force of the notion of exercise (and its spiritual character) by conceiving of the way it cuts through a number of ways to think of the relation between theory and practice. While emphasizing throughout the practical side of such exercises, de Vries distinguishes it from established forms of practical reason, whether Aristotelian, Kantian or Utilitarian. Indeed, the very notion of exercise with its attendant notion of “practice” suggests a form of “work” that brings about the formation of habit of the body, rather than a schema for actions directed by ends or a rational principle. Exercise as training would so to speak remain endlessly within the sphere of means. Practice might indirectly relate to a goal, but in itself it is solely concerned with rehearsing a series of steps. An accomplished musician doesn’t practice by playing a whole piece, but by repeating phrases or transitions. Exercise looks to the small, never to the whole articulated by an end. This repetition of the partial bears on our concept of mastery and its relation to the will determined by ends. Such mastery must be distinguished from “having power over someone or something”. The master does not have either the ball or his hand in “control”. Indeed, exercise precisely releases the hand and the ball to “reach an understanding behind his back”. As de Vries emphasizes: “The ball is never under the influence of the power of the master or of the assistant, as if power was no more a rule of the game. Rather the internal rationality of the disciplined ‘training’ of the body is suddenly supplanted and reoriented by the abdication of the will” (de Vries, 2019a, 98). Indeed, as the end of the thought picture suggests, true mastery lets the unconscious or involuntary intelligence of the body take over. de Vries reminds us that it is not just the amazed disbelief of the Sultan and his public at the court in Constantinople that is at issue in the story.

144  Eli Friedlander Indeed our wonder is itself wholly dependent on how we respond to the story. And the practice of storytelling is itself such as to face us constantly with the question “trick or truths?” A story, as Benjamin notes in “The Storyteller”, is free of explanations. It opens itself to a multiplicity of takes, or of retellings. de Vries suggests a number of possible elaboration of what Rastelli’s story keeps open (for instance, “the tale does not exclude the possibility that the dwarf is inside the ball and has feigned to be absent” [de Vries, 2019a, 108]). This multiplicity in the space of transformations of the tale ultimately leaves precisely the question of whether a “true” wonder has occurred unresolved. At least we cannot adduce any proof from the material at hand. Indeed, “… we do not know with any security and certainty, that is based on clear and determinate criteria – and neither is it intuitively or emphatically evident – whether we have a true miracle or a fabrication – such as for instance an optical illusion – which would have duped us, the public, as well as the juggler” (de Vries, 2019a, 106). It is against these considerations that the end of Benjamin’s story, which is part of the frame of Rastelli’s tale, acquires particular importance in de Vries’ reading: “‘So you see’, added Rastelli after a pause, ‘that our profession wasn’t born yesterday and that we too have our history – or, at any rate, our stories’” (Auch wir unsere Geschichte haben-oder wenigstens unsere Geschichten) (Benjamin, 2002, 98). Supposedly, this history of juggling will take the form of tales of legendary performers, the patron saints of the trade. But this ending also brings together the telling of stories (Geschichten) with the craft of history (Geschichte). It is suggesting one more connection between the story of Rastelli and the first thesis of “On the Concept of History”. Our response to the tale emblematizes something essential to our relation to the past. Even if we have “at our disposal” the archive as the reservoir of religious concepts on which we draw so as to recognize the presence of the miraculous in our world, it does not mean that such archive determines for us unequivocally the meaning, or truthfulness of what we seek to interpret. There would be no objective criterion to decide, whether or not an occurrence is a wonder or not: “We do not know what or who draws the strings first, literally and figuratively speaking. We cannot trust appearances – nothing of what is seen is what it appears to be, or rather nothing needs to be what it appear to be. It all depends on our will and our capacity to perceive things, that is, it all depends on how we use our imagination to see one aspect rather than another, but equally to see moments of grace (general or special), turns of luck and good fortune, through which the archive grants us its gifts” (de Vries, 2019a, 110 my translation). One might say that just as it is undecidable in the story whether trickery or miracle is at play, so we will not have criteria to determine, in our relation to the archive, whether what is recognized is mere fantasy or truth. The two aspects co-exist: “Miracles, the belief in miracles and miracle makers are not historical signs that presume to provide a unambiguous proof or a trustworthy testimony, based on weak empirical grounds. They are

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 145 contingent circumstances and extraordinary gifts that fall into our hands, and gives us the possibility, the power and the instruction for doing something weighty in some cases … or that stand out without any further reason …” (de Vries, 2018, 178). There is in this conception of the miraculous a close connection between the transformation of our relation to the contingent and an occasion to be taken up. The mode of appropriation is internal to an occurrence being an event, without cause or reason. It is the moment of the calling, internal to the miraculous, that Hent de Vries insists on, when following Stanley Cavell he writes that what we call it, is our call.

Part II: The Presence of Mind in the Body The “thought picture” entitled “Practice” is part of Benjamin’s Ibizenkische Folge, translated into English as “Ibizan Sequence”. Folge can also be translated as “succession”. Both in thinking of a sequence and of a succession, we have the implication of one after the other (as in a series). And for sure, one of the central issues of these thought pictures, as well as of the form of writing in thought pictures, is to problematize both causality and consequential relations that depend on the scheme of succession or the sequential. But the advantage of using the term succession is that it allows us to draw a connection with “success” (Erfolg). This is all the more important since one of the central themes of the “Ibizan Succession” is precisely the transformation of the understanding of success as achievement (that is in terms of a series of means and ends) into the success conjured by chance, as fortune. Hent de Vries argues in his reading that the thought picture “Practice” transforms our understanding of mastery, from an idea of control based on the force of the conscious will to the practice that would ultimately let the hand and the ball harmonize, without either side taking over or being subordinate. Note further how it is suggested that it is the organ, the hand, rather than the whole body, which harmonizes with the ball. For sure, the hand is not severed from the body, but there is a suggestion that it does not appear merely as serving a purpose of the body conceived through the unifying power of the will. When we conceive of an organ in terms of various functions it can perform, we think of it as subordinate to the unity of a will and desire. But how can practice release the organ to something like an independent mindful life dissociated from the centralized control of the body?3 3 One should, in another words, distinguish between practical reason that is manifest as the unity of conscious will, and the highest or unconditioned in life, that cannot be the object of willing. Consider in this context the remark: “Every unlimited condition of the will leads to evil. Ambition and lust are unlimited expressions of will. As the theologians have always perceived, the natural totality of the will must be destroyed. The will must shatter into a thousand pieces. The elements of the will that have proliferated so greatly limit one another. This gives rise to the limited, terrestrial will. Whatever goes beyond them and calls for the (supreme) unity of intention is not the object of the will; it does not require the intention of the will” (Benjamin, 1996, 114).

146  Eli Friedlander For sure, exercise plays a part in the opening of such a fit between hand and ball, but another moment is necessary. de Vries, following Benjamin, also underscores the dimension of exertion that is implicit in exercise taken to the limit: “… the master-juggler and the aid both interiorized the logic of ‘the alpha and omega of any mastery’ which is pushed to an extreme, until it yields its special effect” (de Vries, 2019a, 98). This pushing to the extreme is introducing exhaustion into the picture. “To weary the master to the point of exhaustion through diligence and hard work, so that at long last his body (Körper) and each of his limbs can act in accordance with their own reason (Vernunft)”.4 The exhaustion resulting from taking exercise to its limit calls for rest. Rest would not be, as we would intuitively conceive of it, the mere opposite of the effort of exercise, but rather it allows the crowning of exercise by the unprecedented performance.5 In another of the “thought pictures” in Ibizan sequence, Benjamin addresses in related terms our intuitive opposition of habit and attentiveness. We might think that what is done by habit is not done attentively. The formation of habit would involve mindless repetition, which we distinguish from mindful, concentrated attention. Moreover, habitual activity can be performed without devoting thought to it, as it were in distraction. And yet the habitual has an attentiveness that is not merely opposed, but rather belongs, to it. Here too, what is required is a pause: “But even habit has its complement, and we cross its threshold in sleep. For what comes to us when we dream is a new and unprecedented attentiveness that struggles to emerge from the womb of habit” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 592). Unprecedented attentiveness that belongs to the habitual exercise is, so to speak, the wonder brought about by the mediation of sleep. This is also why the thought picture “Practice” begins with sleep. The passage relates exercise and the divinely inspired success, but importantly, through the opening of a gap by sleep. More generally the question is how to recognize the place of a pause in realizing the full force of practice. It is as though sleep is a state in which organs can acquire and express their independence. 6 Sleep dissociates corporeality from the

4 Benjamin uses the term Körper to refer to the body over which the will has abdicated its controlling power. This term must be read in contrast to “Leib”, as those notions are understood in Benjamin’s “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem” (Benjamin, 1996, 393–401). 5 The moment of rest can be compared to the idea of disinterestedness that is central to the kind of attentiveness that harmonizes with what is judged to be beautiful. 6 The astonishing power of the body released from the conscious control of the will is a theme that is well known in the consideration of mesmeric sleep. Benjamin adopts some of these ideas in his account of the dream character of the corporeality of the collective: “The situation of consciousness as patterned and checkered by sleep and waking need only be transferred from the individual to the collective. Of course, much that is external to the former is internal to the latter: architecture, fashion, – yes, even the weather – are, in the interior of the collective, what the sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are inside the individual” (Benjamin, 1999, 389–390).

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 147 “central control” of the conscious will.7 Through sleep, the organ is released to a deeper fit with the world, to a fit with that which is the ground of conscious intention. 8 Now, it would be possible to express the difference between action and the activity of the organ opened through the pause in the action by means of the concept of gesture. A gesture is defined by a pause in an action: “The more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain” (Benjamin, 2003, 305). Thus, to take well-known examples, one could think of a raised fist as a threatening gesture that would be constituted by pausing in the midst of the act of hitting. Yet, this example precisely brings out the difficulty with a simplistic conception of the relation between gesture and the arrest of action. For if the pause is external to the act, the gesture can at most be a bodily movement that symbolizes the preconceived goal of the action. It would not serve the dissociation from the space of directed action

7 Benjamin is concerned throughout the “Ibizan sequence” with the idea of opening a space in what is an all too tight structure of action and striving. This theme is developed in different variations from making “space for precious objects”, to the necessity to introduce the smallest crack in punctuality “His life’s way seemed to have been smoothly paved, and there was not even the smallest crack for time to run out of control”. Similarly, in the thought picture entitled “Politeness”, Benjamin conceives of politeness as allowing a breathing space in the inflexibility of conventions and laws that belongs to morality or the struggles for existence. And in the thought picture entitled “Downhill”, Benjamin considers how shattering and the catharsis of feeling it can bring about, which requires not just the shock but also the space of a pause: “Do those who assure us after every theater premiere or every new book that they were ‘shattered’ really wish to tell us that something inside them has collapsed? Unfortunately, the phrase that stood firm beforehand will also stand firm afterward. How could they allow themselves the pause which is the precondition of collapse?” The exertion of climbing up a hill is such that when then going downhill, feeling the body accelerating under its own weight, we have the opening that produces the shattering: “Anyone who has climbed a mountain on his own and arrived at the top exhausted, and then turns to walk down again with steps that shatter his entire body – for such a person, time hangs loose, the partition walls inside him collapse, and he pushes on through the rubble of the moment as if in a dream. Sometimes he tries to stop but cannot. Who knows whether it is his thoughts that shatter him, or the roughness of the way? His body has become a kaleidoscope that at each step presents him with ever-changing figures of the truth” (Benjamin, 1999, 593). 8 The problematization of success and failure appear importantly in Benjamin’s discussion of Kafka: “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing; it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream” (Benjamin, 1994, 566).

148  Eli Friedlander and the opening a deeper fit to the world.9 To think the force of gesture properly, it must emerge, as it were, from the unconscious exercise of life. It is only in that context that the dissociation from the achievement of a goal yields the significant gesture.10 Rather than achievement of an objective by force of will, we need to think of exercise and the rest that belongs to it as opening a space in which a fortunate fit with the world can manifest itself: “It is a deeply rooted prejudice that will is the key to success. This would be true enough it success concerned only the individual – if it were not also an expression of the fact that the individual’s life intervenes in the structure of the world as a whole” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 589). When it comes to agreeing with the world, fit is not accounted for in terms of an effective relation between two sides that makes them correspond. Rather, harmony is affinity without either cause or reason. It expresses that both sides belong to a higher unity, and only by virtue of each partaking in it, can they be found to be in harmony. Such harmony is not constantly and automatically in view. It is rather internal to its concept that fit has occasions to manifest itself. An opportunity or occasion is neither objective in the nature of things, nor is it subjective, that is it belongs to the space of planning of the I. Taking an opportunity is a moment of presence of mind or, more precisely, of presence of mind in the body. That is, exercise allows there to be occasions for the manifestation of this fit, or for the mindfulness of corporeality, for the performance in which we can recognize of the mind to be present in the body. One may speak here of an occasionalist account that challenges the idea of an effective causality of the will.11 The occasionalist idea of God being the warrant of

  9 Consider in this context the thought picture “The Compass of Success” (in German “Windrose des Erfolges”) in the Ibizan Succession. The individual can have various convictions that he pursues by setting himself purposes and achieving them to some degree. But fit is indifferent to achievement or failure, as well as to holding or giving up every conviction. In other words, fit to the world can be manifest in constant failure. His model is for Benjamin the fortunate existence of Charlie Chaplin. 10 These considerations bear on various contexts in which the concept of gesture plays a role in Benjamin’s writing. In general, these are cases where the very idea of a successful action is problematized to the extreme, as in Kafka’s world. Thus in his essay on Kafka, Benjamin writes: “Each gesture is an event – one might even say a drama – in itself. The stage on which this drama takes place is the World Theater, which opens up toward heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of a stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture”. Benjamin further suggests the possibility of adopting a constructive approach to the exploration of the background of human activity. Thus he writes that “Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings” (Benjamin, 1999, 801). 11 In his recent book Miracles et Metaphysique (de Vries, 2019b), de Vries devotes a long discussion to occasionalism, primarily in Geulincx, and its relation to the manifestation of the miraculous.

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 149 the fit between the corporeal substance and the thinking substance is in no way productive if we assume without further ado an automatic parallelism. Mind and body are one sub specie aeterni, but their harmony for us is a matter of recognizing occasions to realize.12 To further bring out the way in which presence of mind in the body has a close connection to occasion and fortune, I want to briefly consider Benjamin’s reflections on gambling. Benjamin asserts that “the structure of success is basically the structure of gambling” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 146). Success is not achievement but depends on “understanding the language in which luck makes it arrangements with us”. This is a language one needs to relearn and clearly distinguish its grammar from the external standpoint on the contingency in chance articulated through the prism of probability and statistics: “… in the grammar of success, chance plays the same role that irregular verbs do in ordinary grammar: It is the surviving trace of primeval energy” (SWII, 146). The gambler is one that is open to this kind of “energizing”. Wanting belongs of course to gambling and yet the pleasure of gambling can be detached from purpose, interest or even wish. “It is obvious that the gambler is out to win. Yet his desire to win and make money cannot really be termed a ‘wish’ in the strict sense of the word” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 145). One should distinguish a sense of winning measured by gain, from the victorious feeling of being graced by fortune: “A condition of victory: the enjoyment of the trappings of success as such. A pure, disinterested enjoyment, which proclaims itself best when someone just enjoys success, even if it belongs to someone else, and especially if it is ‘undeserved’. A pharisaical self-righteousness is one of the greatest obstacles to advancement” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 145). Deserved gain has a reason, and it is undeserved success that is the best sign of the presence of luck. Benjamin speaks of “the winner’s highly remarkable feeling of elation, of being rewarded by fate, of having seized control of destiny” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 298). Moreover, happiness is not in the amount of gain, but in the way in which it came to the winner, in “the fact that money and riches, otherwise the most massive and burdensome things in the world, come to him from the fates like a joyous embrace returned to the full”. And just as the gambler’s highest pleasure is not the actual gain, the factor of danger “arises not so much from the threat of losing as from that of not winning. The particular danger that threatens the gambler lies in the fateful category of arriving ‘too late’, of having ‘missed the opportunity’” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 298).

12 Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” suggests a connection between storytelling and history through the figure of the chronicler, the history-teller. The medieval chronicler is the occasionalist historian. He takes a story to be the telling of an occurrence as an occasion for a manifestation of the permanent higher forces at work in history. In its religious exemplar, this is the way in which the story will be a fragment of the pattern of salvation history.

150  Eli Friedlander The dissociation from the sphere of calculation and gain is also evident in Benjamin’s description of the gambler’s embodied mindfulness, which is utterly distinct from behavior directed by consciousness. The psychophysiology that belongs to the character type of the gambler is summed up in Benjamin’s use of the term “presence of mind” meaning the presence of mind in the body’s gestures. The gambler’s presence of mind is the possibility of reintroducing “intelligence” or mind into the sphere of reaction that overtakes our responses. We have in the innervation that governs the movement of the gambler something that parallels for Benjamin the status of involuntary memory. The involuntary is to be sought in the particular form of innervation governing his responses. Benjamin gives as an example of such energetic discharge, the way in which the true gambler puts his bets at the very last moment, showing thus presence of mind at the moment of danger, of missing one’s opportunity. “What is decisive” Benjamin writes “is the level of motor innervation, and the more emancipated it is from optical perception, the more decisive it is” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 147). One could also say that Benjamin seeks both to distance mind from the primacy of self – consciousness that governs the will, as well as to release motor reaction or reflex action from its “behavioristic” moorings (understood deterministically through the structure of stimulus-response). The mindful response betokens a “presence of mind”. But presence of mind is not explained in terms of having a certain capacity inside, so to speak. It is rather a mode of bodily comportment: “The question is not whether mind is present” Benjamin writes “or what form it takes, but only where it is. … only the body can generate presence of mind” (Benjamin, 1999a,b, 147).

Part III: The Theological in the Technological The figure of the gambler introduces nevertheless a difficulty into our account. For one could argue that there is no dimension of true exercise or a weight of accumulated practice in gambling. Indeed, gambling is a form of experience depleted to a minimum of significance. The gambler is of importance in part as a figure for acting in the condition of the poverty of experience that Benjamin diagnoses in modernity. Isn’t he craving the strong sensation, the coup of the roulette, so obviously independent of any previous one, unrelated to past experience? Do matters of exercise, fit, fortune, rest and harmony have a place in a space permeated by technology? This is, as we argued, one of the major questions raised in drawing a parallel between Benjamin’s first thesis of “On the Concept of History” and Rastelli’s tale. The hunchback dwarf is a master chess player, implying long years of practice at chess, and yet this mastery appears, at least, wholly dissociated from the practice of the interaction with the mechanical apparatus. It is not suggested that there is any particular difficulty required to translate the

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 151 move in the dwarf’s mind into a movement of the automaton. Would there be room to conceive of training that yields wonders in a world of technology? What is our concept of practice, exercise and the attendant idea of spiritual exercise in the world of technology? What is it to find theology hidden in technology? (TEcHnOLOGY – at least the letters are there). Isn’t the development of technology precisely correlative with the decline of a world in which the patience of apprenticeship, i.e. training, internal to craftsmanship is so patently destroyed? Benjamin referring himself to a powerful passage of Paul Valery suggests how the layering of experience, over years of practice and patient craft, is no more an effective presence in our modern world: “Valery speaks of ‘the perfect things in nature, flawless pearls, full-bodied, matured wines, truly developed creatures’, and calls them ‘the precious product of a long chain of causes similar to one another.’… ‘This patient process of Nature’ Valery continues ‘was once imitates by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of transparent layers are placed one on top of the other – all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated” (Benjamin, 2002, 150). Benjamin associates the loss of the form of life in which experience counts also with the decline of storytelling as a mode of transmission of tradition. So that not just Rastelli’s virtuosic juggling, but also his ability to recount the past, might be a trade on the verge of disappearance. And can another, new form of art, film, say, take up, albeit transformed, the role of storytelling in the constitution of significance experience? In turning in conclusion to Benjamin’s rich and complex essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, I will focus on how the space of practice is opened by the technological apparatus, that is by the camera, and, in particular, how it makes manifest the intelligence of human corporeality and its fortunate fit with the world. Consider to start with how Benjamin describes the capacity of the camera to dissociate the gaze from the unity of the body governed by consciousness (the acting body) and bring out the gestural corporeality of the human body. In the contrast, he forms between the theater actor and the film actor, Benjamin argues that the former always acts out of the unity of living presence, by entering into a role or character. The film actor, in contrast, is submitted to the camera, which can reveal in his actions the gestures that escape intention. We can find in the work of the camera something that is similar to the release of the organ (the hand in the case of Rastelli) to its own life. The camera can divide the active unity of the human body governed by purposes and “focus” or reveal a world of gestures in the apparently familiar action. These gestures are all too ordinary but appear to us as utterly significant: “Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we

152  Eli Friedlander have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods (Verfassung – conditions)”. “Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed (durchwirkt) by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (Benjamin, 2002, 117). That unconscious should primarily be understood as the corporeal ground of consciousness. It would be a particular manifestation of the bodily and its belonging to the world that is more fundamental than our intentional directedness to objects.13 Consider further that in our discussion of Rastelli, practice and exercise were conceived as necessary for a virtuosic performance, a feat of juggling. But with the camera, the wonder-provoking gesture is discovered at the heart of the repetitive practice in which our most ordinary bodily habits are formed. The corporeality that is the ground of our conscious dealings is recognized in the habitual. In other words, the space of practice is not identified as the specialized endless exercise of the genius juggler, but rather in the life of the collective and the repetitive exercise that belongs to the constitution of the form of that life. Moreover, what we identified earlier on as the necessity of rest at the heart of exercise that is internal to the manifestation of corporeal intelligence, the release from purpose in action is opened here by technology itself, by the automatisms of the camera. For sure, this division of the unity of the human practice might sound very close to the problematic division of labor that reduces work to a measurable task that is poor in significance. The division of labor goes hand in hand with the introduction of performance tests and the attendant treatment of contingency through statistics that would leave no room for fortune. The film actor is also subject to tests, to what is called screen tests. These are tests of the actor’s presence to the apparatus. “The film actor performs not in front of an audience but in front of an apparatus. [It] … is a test performance of the highest order” (Benjamin, 2002, 111, translation modified). Yet, here as Benjamin points out, the alienating character of the performance test is reversed overcome. The screen test is testing the performance of the actor, but more specifically it tests how the actor shows on screen. The key to the dialectical reversal then is that the screen test makes the capacity to be exhibited as such, that which is to be tested. “Film” Benjamin writes “makes test performance exhibitable, by making a test of exhibitability itself” (Benjamin, 2002, 111). In other words, the film actor is open to the division of his living presence by testing. He relinquishes the unity of auratic, unified theatrical presence and submits to the cinematic

13 Compare this to Stanley Cavell’s account of the power of film to let the world be viewed.

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 153 technology. The actor suffers the fragmentation of his bodily presence by the camera or the editing process, in ways that, structurally at least, are analogous to the alienation produced by an extreme division of labor. But, since what is tested is how one shows on screen, the actor also brings forth that which testing procedures in general occludes exhibitability. The actor excels precisely by taking up testing by the technology of film and reversing its significance in his radiant cinematic presence. His excelling at being shown means that he exhibits a coherence of another order, or that he is as it were capable of integrating the discontinuity inflicted by the cinematic technology into a new intense corporeal presence: “To accomplish [this test performance]” Benjamin writes “is to preserve one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus. Interest in this performance is widespread” (Benjamin, 2002, 111). If one calls technology in its social use “the apparatus”, the performance of the actor allows us to envisage his fascinating cinematic presence as a triumph over the apparatus: “… the majority of city dwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories, have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus. In the evening these same masses fill the cinemas, to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph” (Benjamin, 2002, 111). The cinematic technology does not serve the mastery of nature but allows us to envisage a new fit, a naturalness in our habitual existence in the world. In Benjamin’s account of the involvement of the camera in creative processes, technology does not take over, or rules over, nature. For Benjamin, the question is precisely how through this new form of art, nature and in particular the natural in the human are revealed anew. Film can give us the blue flower in the land of technology.14 Insofar as it is the traditional role of art to provide us a view of original, higher nature, film will achieve that by way of the involvement of technology, that is through the involving of the camera in revealing to us what is natural in our experience.15 Film is something of a training ground for the relation of its public to the pervasive social apparatus. The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily (Benjamin, 2002, 108).

14 Benjamin echoes in the essay the blue flower of Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the ultimate object of the spiritual quest revealed to Heinrich in a dream. 15 Film belongs to what Benjamin calls “second technology”: “The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay. This applies especially to film”.

154  Eli Friedlander Film not only reveals the human figure anew but also opens for us the space for playful fit with our life surroundings: The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus. Film achieves this goal not only in terms of man’s presentation of himself to the camera but also in terms of his representation of his environment by means of this apparatus. On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieus through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of play [Spielraum; translation modified]. Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris. (Benjamin, 2002, 117) The esthetic education allowed by film need not be conceived in the traditional terms, say the way Schiller articulated this idea. At least it would not demand the laborious introduction of the individual to the circle of culture that is presumed necessary for esthetic experience. Nor would it require particularly high contents to be expressed, but rather film provides the masses with insight into the everyday that is their own. Terms such as “insight” or “understanding” should be used with care. For even though film is a visual medium, we need to understand this training, in relation to our bodily habits and thus as strictly speaking not to arise out of contemplation: “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means – that is by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually – taking their cue from tactile reception – through habit” (Benjamin, 2002, 120). There is an intelligence that arises from habits, and therefore is in some sense, emerging not from concentration, but in distraction: “Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction first proves that their performance has become habitual. The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception” (Benjamin, 2002, 120). The expert judgment of the ordinary is not developed in isolated concentrated reflection. The expertise of the masses is rather characterized by the figure of the distracted critic. This is conceivable only when we transform the space of concepts such as work, play, exercise, body, consciousness, habit, fortune and occasion. Even as the ritualistic function of art disappears (what Benjamin calls

Spiritual Exercises in Age of Their Technological Reproducibility 155 the loss of aura), the present essay follows Hent de Vries in suggesting that the transformation at the heart of the ordinary, by way of technology, is made possible by drawing on the archive of religion.

References de Vries, H. Miracles, Events and Small Wonders (in Hebrew), Tel Aviv: Resling, 2018. ———. Le Miracle au Coeur de l’Ordinaire, Paris: Les Belles Lettres – Encre Marine, 2019a. ———. Miracles et Métaphysique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019b. Benjamin, W. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910-1940. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———. Selected Writings. Vol. 1 (1913-1926). Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1996. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999a. ———. Selected Writings. Vol. 2 (1927-1934). Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999b. ———. Selected Writings. Vol. 3. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Stokes, J. Oscar Wilde, Myths, Miracles and Imitations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

9

Violence Inside-Out Staring into the Sun with Georges Bataille Samantha Carmel

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Georges Bataille’s 1943 Inner Experience (L’Expérience intérieure), a work whose ambition and complexity have been occluded by its fragmentary, repetitive, and even exasperated style of expression, was widely dismissed at the time of its publication as a mystical work of null philosophical import; a performative contradiction at best. Torn, as Jürgen Habermas claimed, between mysticism and an unshakeable commitment to rational discourse,1 his ambivalent engagement with Christian mysticism has been diagnosed as a symptom of postwar exhaustion with politics—2 an attempt to find fleeting solace in the retreat to interiority, the lived significance of which is nullified in the very act of transcription.3 These critiques notwithstanding, the text’s labyrinthine and contradictory appearance belies an impressive abundance of pioneering insights: it is at once a godless guidebook of spiritual exercises for achieving ecstatic states, a powerful critique of the traditional criteria of philosophy’s legitimate subject matter, and, as will be the focus of this essay, it expresses through its exercises an alternate conception of the ethical. In what follows, I explore how it is precisely the exercise that is most repellant to traditional understandings of the ethical that gives rise to Bataille’s consummate ethical experience; through fleeting emancipation from work, universal law, social mores, thought, time, indeed, the symbolic order in toto, the individual experiences their own singular, absolute value in a moment of pure presence. This alternate expression of the ethical through an exercise that engages violence is not a substitute for universal moral law (Kantian Moralität) or the “project” structure of human life Bataille derides in the text. It is rather a complementary or supplementary

1 See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” Situations, (Paris, Gallimard, 1947), 143–188 and Jürgen Habermas, “Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille,” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987), 211–237. 2 Amy Hollywood, “‘As Beautiful as a Wasp’: Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille,” The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 92, No. 2 (1999), 220. 3 For a refutation of this interpretation of Inner Experience as a turn towards individualism and away from community, see Amy Hollywood, pp. 219–222.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-10

Violence Inside-Out 157 ethics that avoids antinomial collision with universal morality in virtue of its fleeting and subjective status as an exercise; a mode of self-relating, as opposed to a continuous, intersubjective moral practice. To clarify the paradoxical way in which a certain kind of ethical practice and violence interact in Bataille’s text, I turn to Hent de Vries’ analysis of these themes in his volume Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida.4 In the text, de Vries offers a conceptual framework that clarifies the logic whereby critiques of “violence” in philosophy and religious thought – in its myriad formulations – necessarily assume a certain violence of their own, succeeding only when they “turn violence inside out […] turning good violence against bad or the worst violence.”5 Bataille’s text instantiates a particular permutation of this dynamic, but one that is modified by the episodic nature of his means of critique, which assume the form of subjective exercises, “inner experiences.” To this end, I show how the violent imagery that constitutes the principal example of his exercises in Inner Experience attempts to provide the subject with temporary solace from Bataille’s own idiosyncratic conception of another, ‘better’ kind of violence, in a movement of thought that pins the former against the latter in a progression that finally leaves both behind.

“Inner Experience” Bataille’s Inner Experience addresses a post-religious readership – the anesthetized subjects of postindustrial, bourgeois society – seeking to guide them beyond the strictures of discursive reason to ecstatic modes of experience. He sees in the writings of Angela of Foligno, Saint John of the Cross, and other Christian mystics the potency of religious exercises, animated by their intensity of conviction, in propelling its practitioners into ecstatic states of presence in the throes of which the subject–reduced to nothingness before an unthinkable God–momentarily escapes the instrumental and futural orientation of work, thought, and language. The text, revised and reissued in 1954 as the first volume of his subversively titled tripartite series, Summa Atheologica (La Somme athéologique),6 repurposes methods of Christian mysticism while stripping them of their religious postures, understood variously as testimonial, devotional, penitent, dogmatic, or ascetic in nature. His ambition in the text is, broadly speaking, to rehabilitate elements of mystical experience for a godless age and to demonstrate the philosophical pertinence of such experience. Both in its capacity as a spiritual guidebook and in the philosophical significance it ascribes to these

4 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 5 Ibid., 137. 6 The English translations used for this essay are based on this later 1954 edition.

158  Samantha Carmel experiences, the work fits squarely within the tradition of philosophy characterized by Pierre Hadot as “spiritual exercise,”7 to whose work de Vries has drawn attention and further cultivated in recent years.8 Among the most challenging features of the text is Bataille’s engagement with violence, and transgression more broadly, as the primary path to “inner experience” – his term for ecstatic experiences comparable to (and inspired by) the transitive states accessed by Christian mystics. However, in his endeavor to reach the limits of human experience, Bataille’s exercises disavow all forms of dogma that delimit the directions this experience might take through the ascription of meaning or function: “I wanted experience to lead me where it was leading, not to some end given in advance.”9 Despite his admission to following “with fierce rigor a method in which Christians excelled,” Bataille’s stated goal is to transcend subservience to all goals (life as a “project”) in a “journey to the end of possible man.”10 The end point of inner experience cannot consist of some relation to the divine or “Other” – however devoid of predication. Indeed, it cannot yield any signifying content whatsoever.11 The ‘limit experience’ Bataille describes empties only at the site of “non-knowledge” [lenon-savoir].12 Bataille is insistent throughout the text that, while non-knowledge is not “ineffable” and can be discursively situated in relation to philosophy, the experience itself “reveals nothing and cannot be the basis of belief […]”13 She who has undergone this kind of experience cannot announce in her ecstasy that she has seen God, the Absolute, “the depths of the world,” but can only aver “what I have seen escapes understanding,” since, according to Bataille, such concepts as “God” and “the Absolute” are tantamount to “categories of Understanding.”14 Bataille’s exposition of inner experience is equally concerned to argue for its significance vis-à-vis discursive reason itself. Taking Hegel as his primary opponent, he argues that it is to the great detriment of philosophy

  7 Just as Hadot’s interpretation of the Greeks reimagines the philosopher as a practitioner of the endeavor to understand “things as they are” – who lives in conformity with this wisdom through exercises of self-transformation, while dwelling in a society that functions in disharmony with this wisdom – Inner Experience is doubly faithful to Hadot’s conception, both in its formulation of exercises that momentarily disclose a cosmic view of the whole, and in its critique of theoretical philosophy’s exclusion of nondiscursive experience. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Trans. Michael Chase, (Oxford & Malden, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1995), 58.   8 The first version of this essay was originally occasioned by Hent de Vries’ Fall 2013 Johns Hopkins University seminar, entitled, “Spiritual Exercise: Concept and Practice.”   9 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 9. 10 Ibid., 14. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 Ibid., 9. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Ibid., 9–10.

Violence Inside-Out 159 that such experience is placed outside its limits, which occurs the moment Phenomenology of Spirit designates the ascent to the concept the genesis point of “knowledge,” and knowledge, in turn, as the single-minded object of philosophy. Yet, even while elaborating the manifold paths to non-knowledge, Bataille affirms that in the very act of writing, he seeks to integrate inner experience into rational discourse: “Knowledge is in me, I understand this for each affirmation in this book, linked to these steps, to these movements […] Knowledge is in no way distinct from myself: I am it […]”15 And yet, his text does not substitute for experience itself. While knowledge is contained within “existence,” existence still remains irreducible to it: “[…] this reduction would demand that the known be the goal of existence and not existence the goal of the known.”16 Bataille’s critique of Hegel calls for a broadening of the scope of his philosophical project, a reversal of the primacy afforded to “knowledge” over “existence.” Under the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s seminal 1930s lecture series on Hegel’s Phenomenology, Bataille muses that upon his revelation of history’s consummation through the attainment of Absolute Knowledge, and the attendant passage into “the state of empty monotony,” Hegel must had felt himself as having “become dead.”17 Bataille’s rhetorical goal in such passages is unmistakable: affective states, desire, and the yearning for movement are symptoms of Absolute Knowledge’s incompleteness; the surplus of existence over knowledge. Inner Experience thus challenges the restriction of philosophy to the pursuit of knowledge without ever rejecting it. It offers a correction of omission, demonstrating that non-knowledge must be understood as a significative concept that is produced out of the conceptual delimitation of “knowledge.” On this point, Derrida writes, “There is only one discourse, it is significative[…]”18 Any apparent opposition between meaning and non-meaning must take place within the confines of meaning itself. For this reason, when Bataille installs “non-knowledge” at the center of inner experience, this gesture is far from mystical wordplay. It is a rigorous observation of the differential nature of language,

15 Ibid., 112. 16 Ibid., 112. 17 Ibid., 111. Bataille himself reports having felt similar sentiments in the wake of Kojève’s lecture series, which exerted considerable influence on him despite his reservation. In a tormented 1937 letter to Kojève, he articulates the plight of the post-historical subject, or “negativity out of work.” That is, the persistence of desire after the consummation of history, when it can no longer be directed towards any distinctly human, historical action: “the open wound my life is – this alone constitutes the refutation of Hegel’s closed system.” Georges Bataille, “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel…”, The College of Sociology (1937–1939), ed. Denis Hollier, Trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 90. 18 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 261.

160  Samantha Carmel according to which any criteria of knowledge produce and give meaning to that which stands outside this criteria as “not knowledge.” In concluding his critique of Hegel along lines of completeness, Bataille turns to a distinction in which we can glean the ethical current that runs through the text. “Even with the (incessant) completed circle” – that is, a circle that is inscribed with the “blind-spot” of non-knowledge, correcting Hegel’s omissions – “nonknowledge is end and knowledge means […] poetry, laughter, ecstasy are not means for other things. In the ‘system,’ poetry, laughter and ecstasy are nothing, Hegel hastily rids himself of them: he knows no other end than knowledge.”19 Bataille emphasizes the thought-dissolving or, in the case of poetry, meaning-destabilizing capacities of such phenomena as ends-in-themselves, suggesting an ethical gravity that inheres in the subject’s release from subservience to ends of all kinds, or “project.” Whereas “knowledge ‘works,’ […] poetry, laughter, and ecstasy do not.”20

“Project” Throughout Bataille’s text, “inner experience” is counter-posed to its conceptual adversary, which Bataille terms “project.” This idiosyncratic concept is more legible when placed in the broader context of Bataille’s life-long fascination with early anthropological accounts of indigenous cultures, in addition to the Christian mystical traditions that receive extensive treatment in this work. 21 Exemplified by pervasive phenomena such as the dynamics of profane and sacred, festival, sacrifice, and potlatch,, such practices cannot be understood with respect to any of the guiding criteria through which theoretical philosophy, economics, or bourgeois conceptions of utility have typically sought to understand human behavior as productive or rational. On the contrary, these practices exhibit the inverse of these principles: they are gestures of waste, transgression, and unproductively expended energy that initiate a temporary suspension of the normatively regulated symbolic order through the transgression of profane law, the destruction or “wasting” of wealth, time, human energy, the communicative functions of language, and even life itself. 22 With constant reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, in Bataille’s view these Dionysian tendencies coexist alongside rational, productive, law-conforming behaviors, but with an ethical function “rational” activity lacks.

19 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 113. 20 Ibid., 113. 21 On this fetishistic fascination in the Western philosophical tradition, especially the theme of sacrifice, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Unsacrificable” A Finite Thinking, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003). 22 The dichotomy in Inner Experience between the structure of “project” and transgressive activities of waste is treated comprehensively in Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. I, II, III, (Cambridge and Brooklyn, Zone Books, 1991).

Violence Inside-Out 161 Bataille also dwells at length on the potential for “sacrifice” to serve as the perfect inverse operation of project. He writes, “The opposite of project is sacrifice. Sacrifice falls into the form of project, but only in appearance.”23 That is, when it participates in some exchange, offering, or testimony. “[…] where only the result counts in project, in the sacrifice, the act concentrates value in itself. Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later; sacrifice has the power to contest everything in the instant that it takes place, to summon everything, to render everything present.”24 While religious forms of sacrifice retain the structure of project insofar as they are directed towards the production of a result, Bataille’s reading of the deeper significance of sacrifice for purposes of inner experience inheres in its temporal distinctiveness; its capacity to concentrate value in the moment of destruction itself. As an instantiation of the sacred, its significance is contained within the precise moment of its occurrence, leaving behind nothing but the tremors of an extreme, transgressive experience. He attempts to extract this autotelic dimension of “sacrifice” for his own variety of inner experience. Bataille’s pining for the lost experiential potential he ascribes to indigenous cultures, mysticism, and the religious logic of the profane and sacred, is not merely a nostalgic or even quasi-fascist yearning for experiential intensities so ubiquitous in European thought in the decades preceding the publication of Inner Experience. 25 While Bataille no doubt sees aesthetic value in the diversification and intensification of human experiences for its own sake, he is equally concerned to persuade his readers of inner experience’s ethical significance. Obviating suspicions of the text’s mystical superfluity to ethical thought, Bataille stakes this argument on moral philosophy’s alleged internal consistency. Gestures of waste, destruction, and transgression, in their fleeting, transformative effects on the subject, consummate the prevailing order of instrumental rationality – an approximate analogue to his concept of “project.” Bataille argues that the instrumental structure and futural orientation of life as “project” presupposes a moment of presence that is infinitely deferred by thought, language, work, indeed, all manner of rule-following and goal-oriented activity. “Project” instantiates a “paradoxical way of

23 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 137. 24 Ibid., 137. 25 This phenomenon, palpable in movements as diverse as Italian Futurism and the Weimar Republic’s “Conservative Revolution,” is eloquently described by Max Weber in his warning of the growing pining for Erlebnis, and his observation of the reversal of value ascribed to “living,” blood-and-flesh “experience,” over the lifeless “concept,” in his seminal 1917 address “Science as a Vocation.” Also See Nitzan Lebovic’ account of this phenomenon in his book on conservative and fascist currents of Lebensphilosophie, seen chiefly through the figure Ludwig Klages. Nitzan Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics, (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

162  Samantha Carmel being in time” by “putting existence off until later.”26 Even “To speak to think to joke” he insists, “is to evade existence. It is not to die, but to be dead; everything is suspended, life is put off.”27 Inner experience, as momentary release from project, means nothing less than to finally live through the strategic interruption of this infinite deferral. Just as the conceptual delimitation of knowledge gives rise to, as Bataille argues, an equally philosophically relevant “non-knowledge,” a necessary consequence of the prescription of “rational” and productive human behavior as teleological or referential in structure is the simultaneous production of the inverse of these concepts, which in turn generate categories for human behavior that do not conform to these principles. The latter informs the fundamentally transgressive basis of Bataille’s exercises, which transform the religious category of ‘the sacred’ into transgression and ‘the profane’ into the normatively regulated symbolic order. Lacking any theological commitments – the awe-inspiring authority of the divine that would serve as the basis of transcendence – in Inner Experience the revolt against the symbolic-social order itself becomes the basis of an experience that echoes the effects of the sacred.

Violence Turned “Inside Out”: Mystical Experience and “Dramatization” Despite open hostility to Christianity and the Mystical tradition in the opening chapter “Critique of Dogmatic Servitude,” Inner Experience exhibits throughout an ambivalent relationship to mystical experience, at once taking great pains to distinguish itself from the salvational or testimonial stance of Christianity, while periodically conceding that the experiences described by the mystics in their writings exceed the dogmatic presuppositions from which they originate. Bataille turns particularly to the writings of Saint Angela of Foligno: When God is seen in darkness it does not bring a smile to the lips, or devotion, fervor, or ardent love; neither does the body or the soul tremble or move as it does at other times; the soul sees nothing and everything (nihil videt et omnia videt); the body sleeps and speech is cut off […].28 Quoting Meister Eckhart’s pronouncement that “God is nothing”29 and Saint Angela of Folignia’s exclamation “oh unknown nothingness”30 in the

26 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 51. 27 Ibid., 51. Bataille’s italics. 28 Ibid., 106. 29 Ibid., 10. 30 Ibid., 106.

Violence Inside-Out 163 throes of her death, Bataille confesses that such experience perhaps differs only nominally from his own, since “God” has been evacuated of virtually all positive content. “It is difficult to say,” he writes “to what extent belief is an obstacle to experience, and to what extent the intensity of experience overturns this obstacle.”31 While Bataille’s assessment of Christian mystical experience remains equivocal, he insists on the broadened horizons afforded by his presuppositionless, atheological starting point. To the extent that concerns of salvation and resolving the problem of human suffering remain catalysts for the construction of the divine, God serves a determinant function that is deeply inscribed in the project structure of the symbolic order – both in its negative theological iterations and in those of positive religion: “[…] the apprehension of God, even without form or mode […] is a stop in the movement that brings us to the most obscure apprehension of the unknown: of a presence that is no longer distinct in any way from an absence.”32 Bataille’s transcendence offers no consolation, no love, communion, or deliverance to a higher order of meaning – however indeterminate – that rescues lower orders. His inner experience obliterates the very relationality to which any configuration of religious or mystical experience is bound. That Bataille’s exercises assume the guise of transgression, even violence, show their kinship with the logic of the sacred, which is expressed through the initiation of ruptures with the profane world. Indeed, despite his critique of “Dogmatic Servitude,” Bataille’s exemplary exercise is an exacting study of procedures through which Christian mystical practice can transform the profane order, opening the immanent sphere of “project” – discursive meaning, social mores, emotion, etc., to points of extreme ambiguity that coincide with the moment of transcendence. Variously described as “a field of coincidences,”33 a place of “penetrability,”34 or “reversal,”35 Bataille discerns in this temporary suspension of or coincidence of opposed meanings in moments of religious ecstasy and the profane/sacred dynamic a profound insight into the constitution of the symbolic order. Mystical states of rapture and ecstasy, expressions of testimony and devotion to the divine, are indissociable from imagery and acts of violence that mark navigation between profane and sacred worlds – a dynamic de Vries has described succinctly in relation to Abraham’s binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 as the “proximity of the best and the worst.”36,

31 Ibid., 106. 32 Ibid., 10. 33 Ibid., 5. 34 Ibid., 5. 35 Ibid., 93. 36 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 11.

164  Samantha Carmel In this religious schema, a field of ambiguity opens up, according to which the ordinary meanings assigned to violence and the transgression of moral law become expressions of the highest devotion to the divine. But in Bataille’s text, this “devotion” is replaced by the commitment to escape project and, in what amounts to the same thing, to access sovereign experience, freed from the limits of a socially constituted order. Bataille’s exercises thus attempt to press this reversal as far as it can go. Renouncing any external point of authority (God, the Other) that stabilizes reversal as a consistent, law-abiding operation, Bataille’s symbolic order/transgression – his ersatz profane/sacred dynamic – push reversal to its limit, giving way to a slippage in the total intelligibility of experience. In light of Bataille’s fascination with the symbolically ambiguating, self-dissolving potential of mystical experience – and the role of violence and transgression in this activity – we are drawn to ask: by what methods does Bataille attempt to simulate and exceed the effects of the sacred in its absence? The text’s central exercise focuses on the method of “dramatization,” a term and practice he borrows directly from Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius directs his pupils to imagine the scene of the crucifixion.37 Through the projection of the image of Christ’s agony, the pupil transcends himself as he is transported to the Calvary and delivered to the anguish of observing the mutilated body of Christ nailed to the cross. Writing of Saint Ignatius’ pupils, Bataille explains, “He desires to get out of himself by deliberately dramatizing this human life. Before having shattered discourse within him, he is asked to project the point about which I have just spoken. Jesus agonizing is the point. It is only through this projection that one attains non-discursive experience.”38 This procedure of concentration on an image of dramatic violence is devised to interrupt internal dialogue and preoccupations in the world of project through the triggering of “non-discursive experience.”39 Bataille counters the suggestion that without belief, Ignatius’ dramatization becomes impossible, arguing instead one need only be able to project some “extreme point,” an object that can serve as the basis for an attitude of solemnity or seriousness.40 This procedure of dramatizing existence, Bataille writes, is the only way “to get out of ourselves. We would live

37 On this point, Peter Tracy Connor rightly asks, “what is more Bataillean today than the image of the mutilated, naked body crucified in transcendent abjection?” – and this profoundly violent image of torture to which the entire world is inured, it should be added in relation to the discussion of “reversal,” is Christianity’s crowning emblem of divine love. Peter Tracy Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 111. 38 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 120. 39 Ibid., 120. 40 Ibid., 17–18.

Violence Inside-Out 165 isolated and boxed in. But a kind of rupture—in anguish—leaves us at the limit of tears: then we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an ungraspable beyond.”41 It is surely no coincidence that the sole examples of dramatization are scenes of extreme violence. One questions, even, whether Bataille’s discussion of “dramatization” does not deliberately avoid stating overtly the restriction of its efficacy to violent imagery. On this point he writes only, “I had recourse to upsetting images.”42 In his own use of the exercise of dramatization, Bataille substitutes for the crucifixion a photograph of a condemned Chinese man undergoing the excruciating execution method of death by a thousand slices. Bataille devotes several pages to the contemplation of this man on whose agony he gazes: dismembered, his torso and face flayed, encircled by his executioners and ogling spectators alike, his gaze directed upward, Bataille writes of his peculiar “beauty.”43 “Something escapes me, flees from me, fear robs me of myself, as if I wanted to stare into the sun, my eyes slip.”44 Though we can have no doubt Bataille succeeds in fixing his gaze to this horrific image, his allusion to the “slip” of his eyes suggests that something nonetheless eludes him. He is unable to take in the image entirely, to fully absorb its significance, as a consequence of its blindingly excessive violence. The severity of this photo as Bataille’s chosen “extreme point” registers with such intensity that it explodes any framework of intelligibility within which the image could meaningfully represent what it literally depicts. Bataille is overwhelmed, exceeded by the image, as if it were repellant to or unaccepting of his gaze. That he sees beauty in this image rather than cruelty, suffering, or attunement to the historical, juridical, and cultural context in which this scene of torture took place alerts us to an alteration in the symbolic framework within which Bataille takes in the image – an alteration produced by the “extreme point” itself. Writing of his “love” for this man, a love devoid of “the sadistic instinct,”45 Bataille explains that the man’s communication, not of his “pain,” but “the excess of his pain,” gives rise to precisely what Bataille seeks in the exercise of dramatization: not to take pleasure in the image, “but to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.”46 This staging of imagery of violence is not, Bataille insists, a glorification of violence, a matter of sadistic pleasure, or an endorsement of violent action. Rather, in making sense of the use of violent images in the generation of inner experience, Bataille’s account suggests that the excessive nature of the image’s

41 Ibid., 18. 42 Ibid., 120. 43 Ibid., 120. 44 Ibid., 120. 45 Ibid., 12. 46 Ibid., 122. My emphasis.

166  Samantha Carmel violence obliterates within him any meaningful framework within which the image would be assimilable as what it most concretely is in a historical, moral, cultural, or juridical sense. The spectator is thrust into a realm of symbolic disordering, precisely at the sight of imagery that would strike us as most triggering of particular emotions, values, and sensitivities that are attuned to basic moral intuition. As a spiritual exercise, dramatization thus deploys the most extreme representations of the codes regulating the meaningful appearance of the everyday world in order to suspend and exceed those meanings. His metaphor is thus apt: transgressive imagery of such magnitude has the propensity to blind, dissolving the subject’s discursive framework of intelligibility. Yet, if Bataille’s own practice of Saint Ignatius’ “dramatization” is to be truly distinct from its religious counterpart, it must ultimately leave behind and disavow the image that catapults Bataille to his ecstasy; it must be a catalyst or enabling condition that is ultimately exceeded through the intensity of inner experience, which is intended as a “journey to the end of possible man,”47 and not as total absorption in or commitment to some externality for its own sake (for instance, God, the Other). Elaborating this dynamic, Bataille writes, The movement of knowledge prior to ecstasy is ecstasy before an object […] and if I suppress, after the fact, the object–as contestation inevitably does–if for this reason I enter into anguish–into horror, into the night of non-knowledge–ecstasy is near and, when it arises, ruins me further than anything imaginable.48 The ecstasy of which Bataille writes is occasioned by, only to be later thrust beyond, the violent point utilized by dramatization. Having reached the state of “non-knowledge” or “night,” the “extreme point” is left behind. “This object effaces itself and the night is there […] Contemplating night, I see nothing, love nothing. I remain immobile, frozen, absorbed in IT.”49 This phenomenon is well illustrated with reference to Kant’s discussion of sublime in the Critique of Judgement. 50 Just as in the experience of the sublime, the object of tremendous magnitude exceeds the understanding’s capacity to represent the object as a totality, so does the moment of “reversal” in meditation on the violent image’s abjection involve an exceeding of the subject’s ability to symbolically register the image’s meaning. 51 While there is no analogous deliverance to a

47 Ibid., 14. 48 Ibid., 124–125. 49 Ibid., 125. 50 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). 51 Ibid., 134/§25.

Violence Inside-Out 167 higher faculty, as in reason’s aiding of the understanding, there is a limited similarity with the role of reason in relation to the dynamically sublime. 52 Through the symbolic order’s suspension, the image ruins in Bataille “that which is opposed to ruin.”53 The subject that is capable of experiencing the suspension of the meaning of death is not unlike the Kantian subject that experiences the triumph of the supersensible faculty of reason over the material dominion of nature – with the conspicuous (indeed, ironic) difference that it is not reason that effects this transcendence, but the suspension of all discursive thought. The “excessiveness” of this imagery, Bataille writes, leads to an altered perception of the world, indeed, “of what the world sovereignly is.”54 The disappearance of any symbolic framework through engagement with the scene of violence yields an effect comparable to the reversal Bataille ascribes to the sacred. However, in this case, absent any divine constant or mediating “outside” term, one cannot speak of the stable operation of inverted meanings in the view of something higher.55 Instead, the ambiguating movement hinted at in reversal is deprived of any stabilizing force, and meaning is pushed to its limits; there is no slippage from a profane to a sacred discourse, only a “shattered discourse.”56 In light of Bataille’s engagement with a violence that dissolves the very symbolic framework within which violence is registered as such, we may turn to de Vries’ account of a related phenomenon: the “transcendental violence” of the concept in the work of Immanuel Levinas. De Vries writes, Transcendental and other (mythical and sacred, empirical and ontic) violence, secretly correspond, if only because the former—while expressing itself through the power of argument and the force of the concept—could be said to neutralize, elevate, displace, and guard the latter. Here one totality or identity comes to substitute for another, sublating the frenzy and anxiety that stigmatize the first into the tranquil serenity that is the trademark of the second […] Nonetheless, the latter still cast their shadow across the former, haunting it with possibilities that cold reason declares obsolete or would prefer simply to forget[…]57

52 Ibid., 145/§28. 53 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 122. 54 Ibid., 122. 55 By “stable operation of inverted meanings,” I mean, for example, the theological backdrop that can symbolically convert a criminal act such as murder a pious act of sacrifice. 56 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 120. 57 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 125–126.

168  Samantha Carmel Bataille’s method for the neutralization of project in the exercise of dramatization seizes on just this “secret correspondence” and the nexus to which it gives rise. Just as “project” – and the “power of concept” along with it – comes to mask or otherwise sublate empirical violence, Bataille’s study of the sacred equips him with an awareness of the reciprocal powers of empirical violence against transcendental violence. The propensity of sacred, mythical, or empirical violence to “haunt,” even effect a reversal of the tranquilizing concept’s effects, is put to work in Bataille’s peculiar method of what may be understood as enlisting one violence against another violence. Such a reading of Bataille’s exercise, and the deeper meaning of what is actually at stake in the escape from project, can be seen as an exemplification of de Vries’ observation that “Critiques of violence are not without violence […] They are successful only if they turn violence inside out, if they are somehow violent in turn, turning good violence against bad or the worst violence.”58 Retaining de Vries’ vocabulary of empirical and transcendental violence, then, Bataille’s exercise attempts an appropriation of the hidden potential in empirical or sacred violence as a strategy for the transcendence of his own conception of transcendental violence, namely, life as the deferral of life in “project.” As we have seen, however, Bataille’s use of empirical violence is not ultimately what it immediately appears to be, summoning it, rather, only to dissolve both forms of violence – the violence of discourse and the “upsetting image” to which he had recourse. Moreover, all of this mobilized not merely in service of a dissolution of the framework within which any violence can appear; rather, the latter is a fundamental component of a certain experience of the ethical in the form of an absolute presence – the sovereign subject emancipated from all restriction, subjection, and submission to the symbolic order.

“Project” as Transcendental Violence Bataille’s paradoxical use of violent imagery in his exercises as the means to a certain instance of the ethical is further clarified through a deeper exploration of de Vries’ account of “transcendental” and “empirical” violence. In what sense, we may ask, does “project” entail a kind of violence for Bataille? Here, comparison to Levinas’ critique of the concept in de Vries’ Religion and Violence serves as a useful analogy. Levinas’ “concept,” de Vries explains, is distinguished from empirical violence, as an a-priori, “transcendental violence,” which is expressed through the concept’s pretention to totalize, engulf, and fully represent an otherness that is ultimately irreducible:

58 Ibid., 137.

Violence Inside-Out 169 Thus, violence can be found in whatever narcissistic strategy the self adopts to capture, thematize, reduce, use, and thus annul or annihilate the other. Violence can likewise be found wherever some otherness engulfs or seizes upon the self and forces it to participate in what it—in and of itself and, precisely, as other—is not […] As the only exception to this rule, Levinas seems to present the absolute relation to the absolute, the one that withdraws, by its very definition (or rather infinition) from every totality, from all identity, and, ultimately, from all being […]59 The abstract form of violence Bataille articulates as “project” is similarly legible in terms of the “transcendental violence” de Vries describes here as Levinas’ aversion to the difference effacing effects of the concept. The violence of project, however, exceeds Levinas’ conception insofar as all forms of imposition, address, etc. originating outside the subject, and thus any relation to the Other, are considered—from a particular vantage of the ethical—violent limits imposed from without in light of the subject’s habitually denied and deferred “pure” experience of the self. Levinas, it seems, would discern transcendental violence in the ecstasy Bataille identifies with the escape from all modes of violence and, indeed, which forms the cornerstone of Bataille’s crowning ethical experience. For Levinas, de Vries writes, violence is also present in the overpowering that occurs wherever the self is dissolved, swept away in passion, enthusiasm, “fear and trembling” before the sacred. But since this diagnosis of violence hinges on the assumption of an intervening, external agency, Bataille’s inner experience bypasses the very relation upon which this “violence” is predicated. Bataille’s exercises are defined by the exclusion of any agency, power, Other, law, etc. originating outside the subject. There is only the subject’s self-confrontation through the purging of all externalities; the methodical collapsing of the symbolic armature that props up the intelligible world, and violence along with it. Bataille’s exercise escapes the logic of both empirical/ religious/sacred violence and transcendental violence by utilizing what we may deem the third form of violence; a violence whose sole purpose is to collapse the very conditions under which any violence whatsoever is intelligible. While Bataille does not explicitly describe the total dominion of “project” as violence, his characterization of its repressive, subjugating effects on human life amount to a certain conception of violence. The suspension of the present through the subject’s subordination to future-oriented ends, general laws, codes of social conduct; forced entry into the regime of work and productivity, insertion into the endless movement of language and thought; in short, the comprehensive subjection of contemporary life to the structure of goal or teleology, are expressed as effects of coercive, externally imposed forces, to which all human beings, insofar as they participate in a society,

59 Ibid., 125–126.

170  Samantha Carmel are submitted. Bataille sees in this submission or subordination of human beings to rules, goals, laws, and language – without denying their necessity – a devaluing and degrading of the individual through hierarchical subordination to external principles that efface the individual’s singularity and deny them “life,” conceived as an experience of presence. This amounts, in Bataille’s own words, to a state of “being dead,” of life “put off.”60 Thus, contrary to Levinas, since for Bataille the daily activities of the subject are entirely determined by externally imposed and inherited phenomena, emancipation from violence of this kind cannot come about through the relation to an Other. The experience of the self at “the limits of the possible” must assume the form of ecstasy, in the sense of ek-stasis: a stepping outside of and total evacuation of the self; a self that, in its sovereignty, can only emerge when purged of its constitution as a social subject.61

The Ethics of the Singular and the General As we have seen, in violent imagery, the subject can experience a fleeting moment of presence, through the arresting of time, law, meaning, the dictates of economic activity, self-preservation, etc. Through this momentary “shattering of discourse” within the subject, the ever-presupposed moment of presence proper to all teleologically structured activity and thought – which reduces human beings “to a function”62 – can be realized in an autotelic moment of presence. Though this essay has focused only on Bataille’s meditation on a violent image, it nonetheless follows from the logic elucidated throughout Inner Experience that the destruction of human bodies, wealth, meaning, in short, all transgressions of rule, custom, or law, are means of expressing the absolute value of each, singular, human life. To this Bataille ascribes absolute value, or rather, he presents such transgressive action as absolute demonstrations of the individual’s value. This ethical status of this experience can be metaphorically articulated along two axes: spatially, in the assertion of the individual’s hierarchical superiority to the general, and temporally, as an ecstatic moment of pure presence. “The level of morality” Bataille writes, “is the level of project.”63 This inclusion of universal moral laws in “project” – which, as I’ve argued,

60 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 51. 61 This is not to suggest that Bataille’s inner experience is a pure individualism devoid of implications for community; on the contrary, he imagines a silent community forged of just this experience, which can be promulgated and shared, though this theme exceeds is beyond the purview of this paper. 62 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 276. 63 Ibid., 137.

Violence Inside-Out 171 constitutes for Bataille an idiosyncratic conception of violence – should no doubt give us pause. It is certainly bewildering or troubling if we are to consider laws that aim to provide the grounds for peaceful human coexistence “violent” in some capacity. Perhaps, one is inclined to think, we ought to be skeptical of any account of violence that reaches such exaggerated heights of abstraction as to contradict simple common sense and basic moral categories.64 To this point, de Vries notes that despite Kant’s unmitigated condemnation of Abraham’s binding of Isaac as a blasphemous transgression of moral duty, entry into the order of Moralität in the first place is only possible through a sacrifice of its own: “the concept of duty and thus of the moral law remains unthinkable without invoking some notion of sacrifice. Kant does so quite literally, by speaking of Aufopferung, albeit self-sacrifice, a sacrifice of the natural self.”65 Indeed, de Vries shows that Kant’s own writings testify to the double-edged sword of Moralität that Bataille’s concept of project throws into stark relief. Universal moral law is, of course, a necessary ethical paradigm for human communities. Bataille’s critique of project, and Moralität along with it, thus shines a light on what must be interpreted simultaneously as a necessary mode of ethics and, from the vantage of an alternate conception of the ethical, as a kind of violence. Conversely, as we shall see, just as Bataille’s articulation of an obverse ethical thought attempts to rescue what is lost, violated, or suppressed, by the ethics of Moralität and submission to project, it is not without a certain (qualified) violence of its own. However, it’s paramount to note that the role of transgression and violence in Inner Experience are distinguished by their “virtual” or “subjective” status, both in the particular example of dramatization and more throughout the text. The ethical significance and role of violence in “dramatization” as a method for the subject’s escape from “project” must be assessed specifically in its capacity as exercise. While the disturbing moral predicaments that emerge from the subject’s suspension of universal moral law are clear, in Bataille’s text it is precisely the presentation of this insight in the form of exercises that imposes limits on their reach into a shared world of intersubjective action, preventing the possibility of a crude return to empirical violence. The distinction between an empirical, world- and life-altering action, as opposed to the subjective effects of exercise, is illuminatingly rendered in de Vries’ discussion of the binding of Isaac. Writing

64 For more on the sense in which such expanded concepts of violence as once “intensify” and “trivialize,” see Hent de Vries illuminating discussion of this problematic in Chapter 2, “Violence and Testimony: Kierkegaardian Meditations” in Religion and Violence, particularly pages 126 and 177. 65 Ibid., 155.

172  Samantha Carmel of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the binding of his son at God’s command, de Vries explains “Abraham transgresses the order of the ethical, in Kierkegaard’s eyes the validity of and respect for a universal law or generality, Kantian morality (Moralität) […] what ties us not only to formal or abstract rules but also to family, neighbors, friends, and nation […] the basic principles that govern every human community.”66 What thus amounts to a crime vis-à-vis “the ethical” order is, in the ascent to the religious, “a movement to infinite”67 – a decision in the most profound sense. This act of faith is only “authentic” for Kierkegaard insofar as in undertaking it, the necessity of two equally legitimate orders are affirmed – the religious and the ethical. It is only insofar as Abraham remains accountable to the ethical, precisely through his forsaking it, that his actions can carry their sacrificial, testimonial significance with respect to the religious order. 68 Although Bataille by no means advocates for acts of violence, his conception of “inner experience” distinctly maps onto de Vries’ account of Kierkegaard’s concept of the religious. Just as for Bataille some normative symbolic order or law is necessary to yield the transgressive – and thus transcendent – results of inner experience, so too does Abraham’s ascent to the religious require the transgression of the ethical order, identified here with universal moral law. However, what are understood by Kierkegaard as the separate and hierarchical spheres of the religious and ethical are implicitly understood by Bataille as two distinct conceptions of the ethical: the universal and the singular, or the rule and the exception (the sovereign individual who emerges through the suspension of project). Both the ethics of the law and of the exception are presented within a Janus-faced framework. They are flip sides of one and the same ethical tradition, which de Vries describes – referring to the problematic in Jacques Derrida’s work – as a “double bind”:69 “Being responsible demands a double response or allegiance to the general and the singular, to repetition and to the unique, to the public sphere and to the secret, to discourse and silence, to giving reasons as well as to madness, each of which tempts the other.”70 Indeed, as de Vries here describes it, one can only act in fidelity to one side of the ethical in any single action, capitulating to project at the expense of the sovereign self, or else sacrificing project to generate the ecstasy of inner experience. But, as we shall see, Bataille’s exercises, qua exercises, manage to avoid this antinomial dynamic.

66 Ibid., 152. 67 Ibid., 152. 68 Ibid., 156. 69 Ibid., 157. 70 Ibid., 175.

Violence Inside-Out 173

Action, Exercise, and Responsibility De Vries’ analyses of ‘minimal theological’ engagements with violence under the pretense of the ethical involve experiential elements proper to the religious stance: faith, testimony, obligation, etc. 71 That is to say, features of religious agency absent from Bataille’s attempt to forge a godless path to inner experience. The comparison of the themes of violence and the ethical in Bataille’s text in relation to figures such as Kierkegaard and Levinas thus gives rise to the question of whether Bataille’s attempted substitutions for the transformative experiential effects of Christian mysticism – motivated as they are by a certain yearning for experience, rather than conviction – can carry the ethical and political significance de Vries reads in the binding of Isaac, or in Levinas’ violence-subverting-violence; whether Bataille’s exercise amounts to a “genuine ethico-political act.”72 Indeed, when the paradoxical ethics of Bataille’s exercises are set in relation to Abraham’s sacrifice, it is doubtful that they can carry the same weight as a “genuine act” or “decision.” The binding of Isaac, de Vries writes, demonstrates what it takes to assume responsibility for an absolute command. His passion when faced with the sacrifice of his son, his anxiety at having to sacrifice his love, is the example set for every decision once and for all[…] Abraham shows that in every genuine decision the ethical must be sacrificed. Morality ought to be suspended ‘in the name of ‘an ab-solute duty or obligation that is always ‘‘‘singular’’’ and for which the name—the proper and most proper name—would be ‘God.’73 While Bataille’s conception of the elevation of the singular individual through inner experience affirms—along ethical rather than religious lines—the Kierkegaardian act that transgresses the universal for the sake of singular, the “thought-experimental” nature of Bataille’s exercises delimit the reach of their ethical import. Though its effects on the self (if we take seriously Bataille’s testimony) are “real,” they nonetheless retain a virtual quality. Because this articulation of the ethical assumes the form of exercises that occur on the level of thought, or through symbolic manipulations of reality, they do not possess the stature of “action,” “responsibility,” “decision” that characterize Abraham’s binding of Isaac. They remain symbolic, fleeting, even if they leave lasting effects within a kind of psychicalsymbolic economy of periodic relief from the obverse ethics of the universal

71 For an extensive treatment of this theme, see Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 72 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 10. My emphasis. 73 Ibid., 158.

174  Samantha Carmel or “project.”74 It’s for this reason that we rightly call Bataille’s rituals in Inner Experience “exercises” and not continuous codes of conduct, “actions” with lasting, external consequences for a shared social world. Geared as they are toward subjective experience, Bataille’s inner experience does not ascend to the level of action, genuine decision, or responsibility because it disavows any external relation to an Other, instead engaging only the individual’s capacity to temporally evacuate within themselves the external world of project.75 While the status of Bataille’s engagement with violence/the ethical qua exercise arguably imposes limits on its ethical reach, his (temporary) reconstitution of the ethical in the suspension of project deepens the sense in which Abraham’s sacrifice becomes, as Derrida claims, the model for our everyday actions: Derrida suggests that every action takes place by ignoring—and thus […] by violating—others […] To say adieu, if only for an instant, to the ethical order of universal laws and human rights by responding to a singular responsibility toward an ab-solute other—for example, the other par excellence, God—implies sacrificing the virtual totality of all innumerable others.76 This bidding adieu is comparable to the suspension that occurs in Bataille’s meditation on torture, and yet, because it is merely a mental exercise, it has the virtue of “ignoring” and “violating” others only on the level of thought. The limited reach of Bataille’s reconstitution of the ethical within the framework of “exercise” or “inner experience” thus also comes with clear advantages. The individual’s absolute value is asserted, but without attendant violations of “humans rights” or “universal laws” in a shared, intersubjectively experienced reality. Bataille’s doubling of the ethical through dramatization represents, within limits, an instance of the aforementioned “double bind” that de Vries attributes to Derrida, a simultaneous “allegiance to the general and the singular […]”77 But because his instantiation of the ethics of the singular against the general assume the form of exercises

74 This observation does not efface the weight or significance of inner experience, but delimits its region of operativity, even if we are convinced (as Bataille surely is) that the fleeting ethics of self-transcendence he formulates is a necessary counterpart to the habitual, universal ethics of the human community that prevails in the realm of civilization or “project.” 75 Bataille is the first to admit to the fundamentally episodic nature of inner experience, which must always return the subject to “knowledge, activity, work.” Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Stuart Kendall, (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2014), 113. 76 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 159. 77 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 175.

Violence Inside-Out 175 – transformative movements performed by the self on the self78 – Inner Experience offers the therapeutic advantages of respite from the world of “project” and the rule of the general without the risks or flirtations with empirical violence.79 In other words, “dramatization” does not carry the responsibility of a “genuine ethico-political act,” but by the same token, it registers the ethical domain of the singular without antinomial collisions. These merits of Bataille’s ethical vision in Inner Experience notwithstanding, we are still left with the unresolved question that haunts all philosophical attempts at deploying “good” transcendental violence against all manner of “bad” violence:80 the question of their efficacy, indeed, pertinence vis-à-vis the empirical violence that is our shared, lived fate.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Continuum Books: 1987. Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience. Trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share, Vol. I, II, III. Cambridge and Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1991. Connor, Peter Tracy, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference. “From Restricted to General Economy.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. De Vries, Hent, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Trans. Geoffrey Hale. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. De Vries, Hent, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

78 With this expression I echo Pierre Hadot’s formulation of “the foundation of every spiritual exercise” as something that chiefly establishes “a relation of the self to the self.” Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Trans. Michael Chase, (Oxford & Malden, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1995), 90. 79 The ‘virtual’ or subjective status of Bataille’s engagement with violence and his fascination with extreme modes of experience at once ties and radically separates him from fascist and proto-fascist thought’s endorsement of regressive action. For illuminating discussions of such cases of bad-faith regression from the lessons of Enlightenment morality, see Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Theodor Adorno’s account of “artificial regression” in his essay “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, (New York, Continuum Books, 1987), 118–137. 80 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 137.

176  Samantha Carmel Geroulanos, Stefanos, “The Anthropology of Exist: Bataille on Heidegger and Fascism.” October, Vol. 117 (Summer, 2006), pp. 3–24. Habermas, Jürgen, “Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille.” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life. Trans. Michael Chase. Oxford & Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1995. Hollier, Denis (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937–1939. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Hollywood, Amy, “‘As Beautiful as a Wasp’: Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille.” The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 219–236. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgement. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lebovic, Nitzan. The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nancy, Jean-Luc, “The Unsacrificable.” A Finite Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Un nouveau mystique.” Situations. Paris: Gallimard: 1947, 143–188. Sloterdijk, Peter, Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays on Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mill. Routledge, 2009.

10 The Graft of the Cat Derrida, Kofman and the Question of the Animal Sarah Hammerschlag

University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois, United States We are linked via a faith that cannot be eliminated by any erasure in any discourse and by any narrative. (Hent de Vries)

Hent de Vries does not read Jacques Derrida’s work, as some others have, as a variant of negative theology, noting that “the intention to enumerate the agreements and differences between deconstruction and negative theology…is a promise that can never be fulfilled.” He does point, however, to the recourse that Derrida must nonetheless make to a religious vocabulary, even if only as parody. The point is to remind us that reason cannot do without the religious archive, its resources for describing alterity. As de Vries suggests in the closing to Minimal Theologies, quoting Derrida, “the appeal to the other…prior to every proposition—whether as promise, prayer, praise, celebration” always precedes speech “to which it has never been present a first time.” A text, which attempted to erase the faith, the promise, introduced by the address, would, he concludes, be “the very specter of the worst, of violence become absolute.”1 But what if the other, my addressee, or the one by whom I am addressed, the one who sees me, or by whom I am seen, is not a specter of the divine, not even the back of God, or a vision too bright to see without a veil? What if, rather, the one before whom I stand naked is an animal, a cat? Derrida asked this question in The Animal that therefore I am. This work, which has been taken as a landmark for Animal Studies, began in 1997 as a series of lectures at the intellectual retreat Cerisy-la-Salle. It was the third décade (ten-day conference) devoted to Derrida’s thought, and its title “The Autobiographical Animal” was clearly chosen as a counterpoint to the first on Derrida’s work 17 years earlier entitled “The ends of Man.” I bring it in here not only to ask whether the question of the animal decenters the question of minimal theology; but I raise it also to find a way

1 Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 632.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-11

178  Sarah Hammerschlag to think with de Vries about what it entails to say that “the appeal to the other…prior to every proposition—whether as promise, prayer, praise, celebration” always precedes speech. My task here is to concretize this claim, to consider one of Derrida’s actual addressees and how her particularity inflects the text and impacts both of their textual afterlives. Derrida’s series of speeches at Cérisy had numerous addressees, most obviously those who were present at the event. They gathered on a series of days that included Derrida’s birthday to pay homage to his corpus and its themes. The address thus begins by expressing gratitude to those friends who had returned once again, who had attended the two earlier décades honoring him in 1980 and 1992. He thanks Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Marie-Louise Mallet who were both present and makes reference as well to Jean-Luc Nancy, who was ill and unable to attend. “To those I have just named,” he says, “I owe so much that the language of gratitude is insufficient.”2 He then goes on to thank his hosts and indeed to subordinate the content of what he has to say to its function as offering, as a means to “express my thanks.”3 It is a ritual, a formality, a gesture, that no doubt exemplifies de Vries’ point. But Derrida soon introduces another—if not interlocutor, then, perhaps at least, the one to whom he “seem[s]—but don’t count on it—to be dedicating a negative zootheology—the aforementioned cat,” before whom Derrida admits to feeling shame, embarrassment, this cat who sees him naked, “face-to-face.”4 To de Vries’ point, Derrida’s invocation of the shame of nudity recalls the scene of original sin in Eden and the role of the snake in this scene will return in later explorations such as Rogues and The Beast and the Sovereign seminar. By referring to a “negative zootheology,” it also playfully references the tradition of commentary which had by the late 1990s already developed around the speculation of the nature of Derrida’s use of theological discourse, and to which de Vries work would contribute. To set all this up Derrida must, however, contend with another other, a specter whom he imagines to be watching over him, a friend in this case, who also attended the first décade on Derrida’s work in 1980, who in fact collaborated with Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida on the series La philosophie en effet beginning in the early 1970s: the only one of the four missing from Derrida’s original remarks of gratitude: Sarah Kofman. Kofman too was a philosopher and a contemporary. While only a handful of her books have been translated into English, she was the author of over two dozen. Nonetheless Kofman has not received the international readership of many of her contemporaries. She is grouped sometimes with the French feminists but is not given the same reverence as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva. Much of the scholarship on her

2 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am (New York, Fordham UP, 2008) 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 5.

The Graft of the Cat 179 work addresses her memoire, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, about her experiences as a Jewish girl in hiding during the war, the daughter of a rabbi killed at Auschwitz. She wrote widely not only on philosophy and literature, works on Freud and Nietzsche above all, but also on Auguste Comte, E.T.A. Hoffman, Plato, Socrates, Kierkegaard and others. Kofman was not at his third décade because she had taken her own life nearly three years earlier on October 15, 1994, Nietzsche’s 150th birthday. Derrida contends with Kofman at Cerisy, he says, to distinguish his own meditations on a cat from hers in Autobiogriffures published some 20 years earlier, written as a commentary on E.T.A Hoffman’s 1819–1821 The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr: Nor is this cat who looks at, concerning me, and to which I seem—but don’t count on it—to be dedicating a negative zootheology, Hoffman’s or Kofman’s cat Murr, although along with me it uses this occasion to salute the magnificent and inexhaustible book that Sarah Kofman devotes to it, namely Autobiogriffures, whose title resonates so well with this conference. That book keeps vigil over this conference and asks to be permanently quoted or reread [Il veille sur elle et demanderait à être cite ou relu en permanence].5 This is the only mention of Kofman in the text. It might seem hardly worthy of note, given its brief appearance amidst other literary references to cats: Montaigne’s, Rilke’s, Buber’s and Lewis Carroll’s, among others. Despite his words of praise for it here, Derrida does not devote time and effort to reading Kofman’s text as he does to animal references in Descartes, Levinas, Lacan and Heidegger. There are reasons to believe, nonetheless, that we should take seriously the notion that Kofman’s book “keeps vigil over” the conference, that Kofman’s absence haunted Derrida and indeed the work itself. It also raises the possibility that her text could affect his, that despite Kofman’s absence, her text could have the last word. Kofman and Derrida’s relationship commenced nearly 20 years earlier when Kofman wrote to Derrida looking for a new thesis director after the death of Jean Hyppolite in 1968. Soon after she began following his courses. From the beginning, it was not an easy friendship. In the same letter, after requesting his guidance, she offers a critical interpretation of Derrida’s conception of Platonic maieutics, calling into question Derrida’s interpretation/translation of ton eidota in “Plato’s pharmacy.” The archive attests to Derrida’s reaction to Kofman’s claim that it is less a matter of knowledge than of learning. In red, he wrote “non” in the margins. Nonetheless the friendship clearly progressed. One can track

5 Ibid., 7.

180  Sarah Hammerschlag both its growing intimacy and the irruptions of its storms in their correspondence. What began as a formal inquiry developed into a friendship, one in which the anxiety, however, seems to have been fairly one-sided. In numerous letters, Kofman apologizes for her behavior or wonders about what she perceives to be Derrida’s slights. At one point in 1977, Derrida wrote to her, asking her not to be bitter about his comments on one of her manuscripts, and counseling her to go more slowly, not to give in to the desire to divest herself of her thoughts so quickly, to let go of a need to produce with urgency, a need he suggests that they shared in common. She responded that in addition to this need, which she admits they shared, she also writes out of love, for others, for those she esteems, to exist for those others. Without her writing, she confesses, she fears that she would no longer be of interest, would disappear. 6 It is clear from her texts that she sees Derrida as one of the—if not the—most important of those interlocutors about whom she worries of their losing interest in her. From the moment of first contact, her work is in constant conversation with his. In her first monograph on Freud in 1970, The Childhood of Art, she uses Derrida’s notion of the trace to discuss Freud’s dream interpretation. In 1971, her first version of Nietzsche and Metaphor appears as an article in the same volume of Poetique as Derrida’s “La mythologie blanche,” with the note that the text was first presented in Derrida’s seminar. The first footnote in fact to Autobiogriffures: Du Chat Murr d’Hoffman (1976) is to Of Grammatology, setting up her book as a meditation on some of Derrida’s themes, by virtue of its very title. By this time, Kofman had already developed something of a strategy in relation to Derrida. While she consistently acknowledges the influence of Derrida’s vocabulary on her project, she also aims to show that the technique of deconstruction long preceded him, is already at work in Freud, in Nietzsche and indeed in E.T.A Hoffman. In Nietzsche and Metaphor, for example, she suggests, at least by inference, that Derrida’s own concept of undecidability, as well as his notion of deconstruction is already Nietzschean. Not only does she use the term “déconstruire” for Nietzsche’s process, but also she credits Nietzsche with a form that thrives off of the function of dissemination in its capacity to transform the text, to undermine the status of author.7 By 1973, Kofman had written her first essay properly on Derrida and in 1984 published the volume Lectures de Derrida, which also

6 Ginette Michaud, Isabelle Ullern, Sarah Kofman et Jacques Derrida: Croisements, écarts, differences (Hermann: Paris, 2018) 212-214. 7 See Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor,116; Nietzsche et la metaphore, 168.

The Graft of the Cat 181 included two others. Even as she wrote about him, however, she nonetheless disputed the characterization of herself as one of his disciples.8 In Derrida’s corpus the references to Kofman are far fewer, scattered sparsely throughout. In Éperons (1978) Derrida acknowledges in two notes his indebtedness to Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche, but in the text itself he says only that he “owes a great debt” to “certain readings, in launching a new phase in the process of deconstructive (i.e. affirmative) interpretation.”9 He cites her book Camera Obscura and her work on the fetish in Specters of Marx (1993). After her death, he makes reference to her work and her trauma more explicitly.10 In the end, it is Derrida who survived Kofman and thus it is he who recorded the story of their friendship. Despite missing her funeral, he wrote a eulogy for Kofman which he delivered in 1996 for a “journée d’hommage” in her honor and then published subsequently with additions in 1997.11 In this untitled piece, which appeared for the first time, only with his name in Les Cahiers du Grif, he offers not only a reading of her work, but also of her life and indeed of their friendship.12 He describes their first encounter in a reference that might, with some poetic license, refer to the same incident as her letter: More than twenty years ago, Sarah came to see me for the first time, already in order to tell me, among other things, that she protested or

  8 “I worked in total isolation until 1969…My later reading of Derrida allowed me to generalize the type of reading I had done in isolation on these two authors. At that time there was a fascination on my part that introduced a certain mimeticism into my writing, which I think I have done away with now. So I have never been a ‘disciple’ of Derrida in the proper sense of the word; our real encounter was marked by a collaboration on a book series.” Sarah Kofman, Shifting Scenes, 108.   9 See Ginette Michaud, “Jacques Derrida lecteur de Sarah Kofman,” Sarah Kofman et Jacques Derrida, 33 for more on the nature of these notes. 10 For more on these citations and Derrida’s omissions see Michaud, 38–41. In his 1975– 1976 course Life Death [La Vie La Mort], Derrida dedicated his reading of Nietzsche’s concept of dissimulation and the metaphor of the key to Kofman, in homage to Camera Obscura. The courses however were not published until after Derrida’s death. It is a conversation that resonates as well across their conversation at “The Ends of Man” conference, when Derrida claims that Kofman has claimed to have found the key to Glas. 11 Isabelle Ullern reports that according to François Boullant, a friend of Kofman’s, some early version of the essay was given at Kofman’s funeral. However, Peeters reports that Derrida was in New York when she died and did not attend. It is possible that someone read a version of the text for him at the ceremony. See Ullern, 78. 12 The essay is untitled in all three published versions. While this has been interpreted as a means of effacing her presence, placing his name where hers should be, it can also be interpreted as a reference to what it was to be without her, without a “heading” a Kopf. Kofman writes about the genealogy of her name in “Tomb for a Proper Name,” Kofman, Selected Writings, 248–249. See Ullern, 78. See Les Cahiers du Grifs 3 (Spring 1997), 131–165.

182  Sarah Hammerschlag objected to something I had ventured in “Plato’s pharmacy.” Everything thus begins with this scene.13 It is clear here that for Derrida what is important is the “scene” and not the content. It is a theme that he develops throughout the essay, as a way of describing what he calls their “impossible friendship.”14 Throughout our entire friendship, during decades of work and shared concerns, we protested, sometimes even against one another, right up until the end, and I catch myself still protesting. I catch myself still making scenes before her, as I said earlier, and I smile over this, while smiling to her, as if over a life in reconciliation. And when it comes to scenes, I have to say that I will never be able to make as many as she; I will never catch up.15 The description of Kofman as the one who made the scenes is very much the version of their relationship provided by Benoit Peeters in his biography of Derrida. Peeters describes her as a nuisance to Derrida, someone he was often working to avoid, portraying her as “fragile, childish, terribly thinskinned,” someone who “turned every incident into a crisis.”16 But Derrida says a bit more in his homage, suggesting that he too is “still making scenes [faire encore des scenes]” even after her death, he finds himself making scenes before her. There is a sense in which even the eulogy could be understood as him making a scene, or at the very least playing out her most potent criticisms of him. For if Kofman had a consistent critique of Derrida, often subtly made, it was that he could not give up a stance of mastery, could not relinquish control, could not fully give his text over to the other as offering, either the one who has come before or the one who comes after. One might say of Kofman that it was to her own detriment that she did the opposite, wrote commentaries on others, often attributing what could be claimed as her insight to those she was reading.17 At one point, she named this strategy of reading a form of “tenir parole,” a keeping of the words of the other. If for Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals the human

13 Derrida, Les Cahiers du Grifs, 152; “Introduction,” Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007), 22. 14 Ibid., 134; 4. 15 Ibid., 152; 22. 16 Benoit Peeters, Jacques Derrida, 475. 17 Penelope Deutscher has written elegantly about this feature of Kofman’s work in “Oscillations: Sarah Kofman and Jacques Derrida on Fetishism,” In Gegenwart des Fetischs (Berlin: Verlag Turia, 2014), 181–200. See also, Hammerschlag, “A Poor Substitute for Prayer,” in Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion,Literature and the Religious Imagination (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2021).

The Graft of the Cat 183 being is the promise-making animal, that is to say the one who can hold a word, a feature he identifies as a detriment to a more healthy forgetfulness, for Kofman, in contrast, the promise-making animal holds the words of others, letting them speak. In so doing, she writes, one also “prevents the power of killing, that is to say one delays, or holds back the return of Auschwitz.”18 Kofman’s highlighting of the drive to mastery runs through her corpus, she names it as an animating feature of philosophy going back at least to Aristotle. Just as Aristotle subordinates metaphor to concept, so he subordinates his predecessors to his authority: a function analogous to that of natural hierarchy which, in the Politics, he declares sets master over slave, father over child, male over female, Greek over barbarian. This is no mere analogy: On the one hand the concept as literal ‘proper’ sense as opposed to figurative sense is kurion, ‘the propriety of a name utilized in its dominant, master, capital sense’: the master word that dominates other derivative or merely metaphorical senses. On the other hand, only the master, the father, the man, the Greek has the right to the word, to speech, to the logos.19 The violence of the political hierarchy that naturalizes the forms of power under which it operates is, she suggests here, inseparable from the philosophical apparatus that endorses it and encodes it with the aura of truth, it is also inseparable from the critique of the literary that sets the mechanism in motion. Meaning can only be established as proper if an improper counterpart is designated. What supports the hierarchy and thus the truthtelling of the philosopher is the prioritization of the proper. “All the rest is empty literature.”20 Kofman’s point in making this statement in Freud and Fiction [Quatre romans analytiques] (1974) is to show how Freud has himself failed to disentangle himself from the philosophical understanding of truth. She never makes this charge against Derrida, and she is herself dependent on Derrida’s essay “White Mythology,” for the argument, as she establishes in her footnotes, but there are moments in which she suggests that even Derrida is not exempt from the desire to best those who came before him. It is a tendency she associates with a phallic anxiety. The drive to prove to oneself that one possesses the phallus can only operate by contending that someone else does not. While Derrida, as Kofman points out, does not

18 “Interview with Sarah Kofman” Le Monde, April 27–28, 1986. 19 Kofman footnotes Derrida’s White Mythology heavily here, crediting him as her source for understanding the status of metaphor in Aristotle’s work. Freud and Fiction, 10. 20 Ibid., 12.

184  Sarah Hammerschlag privilege psychoanalytic vocabulary in any way that would give it priority as an explanatory mechanism, Kofman—and here is their fundamental difference—finds in Derrida the resources to “save” psychoanalysis from “a metaphysical recuperation” which amounts in her own work to an interrogation both of the desires that drive not only her philosophical projects, but also that of others. Thus, she says at the close of her first essay on Derrida, “Un philosophe ‘unheimlich,’” “Derrida more than Freud, learns what a father means [veut dire], that one can never finish killing the father and that to speak of the logos as father is not a simple metaphor.”21 Thus, Kofman simultaneously gives Derrida credit for the insight that guides her method and uncovers in his work the drive to mastery that marks how he plays the game. This approach is most explicit in her essay for the first décade on Derrida, in 1981 on “The ends of Man,” which she gives on Derrida’s famously difficult text Glas. Kofman titles her text “Ça Cloche,” playing on Derrida’s title, in which “ça” may refer to Derrida’s text, but is also homonym with Sa, the term running through Glas as an abbreviation of Savoir absolu— Hegel’s absolute knowledge, and already a homonym in Derrida for the French translation of Freud’s Id. While Glas means knell—as in death knell, cloche, translates to something like “rings awry.” The image of the bell runs throughout both Derrida’s and Kofman’s text as an image for oscillation—the clapper clanging on two sides, which is exactly what Derrida contends the fetish produces in Glas—“the oscillation of the subject between two possibilities.”22 Kofman gives Derrida the credit for having developed in Glas a generalized fetishism and describes the project as one of grafting “Freud’s text onto the text of metaphysics.”23 It is this move, she suggests, which “makes it possible to unsettle the metaphysical categories,” initiating “an oscillation between a dialectic and an entirely other logic.”24 Yet at the same time, she asks the question, “to what ends?” How is Derrida getting himself off here? How is he taking credit for what has come before him, following in the long line of philosophers of which Aristotle is the exemplar? Would not it be the height of mastery “to erect two columns, to claim to always uphold a double discourse, to have one eye crossing the other so as to let nothing escape?”25 Kofman makes this claim even more explicitly in a footnote to Enigma of Woman, a text on Freud’s drive to mastery. The question then is when is a supplementary column an image of compromise or undecideability and when does it function as a mechanism of aggression, a master discourse to

21 Kofman, Lectures de Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1984), 114. 22 Derrida, Glas, 211. 23 Kofman, Ca Cloche, 82. 24 Ibid., 83. 25 Ibid., 88.

The Graft of the Cat 185 end all master discourses? The latter is the case when it becomes a generalizable logic, a speculative trajectory, Kofman suggests. If Glas can be read as developing out of Freud’s text a theory of a “generalized fetishism,” then Derrida is implicated in this critique. At Cerisy, after her presentation, the question becomes, which one of them, Kofman or Derrida, is playing the game better? According to Derrida, it is Kofman who is attempting to master Glas. In the question and answer period after her paper, he insists on defending his text from her charge: “Can the passage of Glas on fetishism in Freud constitute the key to the text?” he asks. 26 On the one hand there is not in Glas one but two textual analyses on fetishism, in the two columns, a duplicity that counts. On the other hand my effort was not to privilege any point of access [point de passage]. I resist thus a gesture that would constitute itself as a key to the text. 27 Kofman counters Derrida in a manner which is indicative of the dynamics of their relationship. “Generalized fetishism, is not for me either a transcendental key,” she responds. “But in rereading Glas, from that point of departure, many things became clearer. And it does not seem to me that one could do the same work beginning with Hegelian fetishism, except if, already, as you do, one reads Hegel through Freud.”28 While this might seem at first like a defensive response to Derrida, it is also a rebuke. His assumption that Kofman was herself claiming to provide a transcendental key misses for Kofman what is essential to what it means after Nietzsche and Freud to read, to constitute an argument. It entails a perspective, a point of departure. As Kofman makes clear in all her texts, her lens is marked by her own drives and indeed by her own trauma. She goes as far as appending to her texts accounts of her own auto-interrogation, reports of her own nightmares. 29 Derrida’s resistance to Kofman’s reading is indicative then of his own inability to forgo his position as master/ author of the text, both because he insists on correcting her reading and because he presumes as philosophical the very stance that her work consistently calls into question. In so doing, the exchange itself confirms the central question of her reading—How is Derrida continuing to get off in the text? How is he both denying and performing his own will to mastery?

26 By this time, the theme of the “key” has already become one bandied between the two. See note 10 above. 27 Les Fins de l’homme, 113. 28 Ibid. 29 See in particular the second part of Comment s’en sortir.

186  Sarah Hammerschlag While the eulogy marks the first and only text that Derrida devotes to Kofman, there are ways in which it too could be read to both perform and deny his will to mastery. In the eulogy, Derrida takes it upon himself to tell the story of their friendship, to publish a piece on her in which it is his name that appears instead of hers and to use the occasion to meditate on his themes of the moment. His final move is to take the joke with which she concludes Pourqoui rit-on? her book about Freud and humor, which she attributes in fact to Theodor Reik, and describe it as a joke that they “told each other,” making it finally an emblem for their friendship. Kofman concludes her work this way: Finishing this book today, September 25, the day of Yom Kippur, I cannot resist peddling finally this Jewish joke told by Theodor Reik: “Two Jews, long-standing enemies, meet at the synagogue on the day of Great atonement. One says to the other: ‘I wish you what you wish me’ And the other replies, giving tit for tat: ‘Already, you’re at it again?!’” By way of conclusion, let’s let laughter have the last word.30 In Derrida’s hands, neither laughter nor Kofman have the last word but the joke becomes a means to meditate on some of Derrida’s favorite themes in the period, the impossibility of the gift and the impossibility of forgiveness. We could read this as a moment in which he co-opted her for his purposes, a chance to rehearse his usual themes, but if we take the joke as our guide, it is also a repetition of the performance that marked their friendship, a renewal of it, a chance for him, “already” to go “at it again.” It is Derrida also in his eulogy who encourages the reader to seek out “the small signs” of his conversation with Kofman across their “respective publications.” These remains are little more than elliptical greetings, sometimes just a wink; they remain to be interpreted by anyone, including myself, for I am not always certain from where I stand today that I am able to decipher them.31 This claim for Derrida might itself be part of what it means to make a scene, but on another level, it also provides a refutation of her criticism of him, a way even of making an offering of himself to her.

30 Kofman, Pourquoi rit-on? Freud et le mot d’esprit (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 198. 31 Derrida, Sarah Kofman (Paris: Descartes & Cie Les Cahiers du Grif, 1997), 134. Derrida, “Introduction,” translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, 3.

The Graft of the Cat 187 He continues, in the eulogy: I have spent the past few weeks rereading certain of Sarah’s texts with the feeling, the certainty even, that for me everything still remains to come and to be understood. But there is no longer any doubt: such testimonies survive us, incalculable in their number and meaning. They survive us. Already they survive us, keeping the last word— and keeping silent.32 Kofman herself, almost as a ritual, as a part of her “tenir-parole” consistently refused to have the last word, almost always, leaving it to another. The question guiding my own investigation, my own taking up of Derrida’s gauntlet, is whether there was a way for him to turn the tables on her, to somehow leave to her the last word, even from the grave. When Derrida says in L’Animal que donc je suis that Kofman’s Autobiogriffures “keeps vigil” over the conference, the sentiment recalls his point in the eulogy. The nature of dissemination, its form of survival, entails the continuous unfolding of their conversation. Could he have set it up, by virtue of making one more scene at the décade, that it was in fact she who had the last word, if only by virtue of how her own text on the animal speaks back to his? It is worth noting, first of all, some of the more subtle ways in which Derrida’s 1997 “L’animal que donc je suis” crosses paths or “winks” at Kofman’s from 21 years earlier. Both open by citing from Montaigne’s musing on his cat in “Apology for Raymond Sebond.”33 Both consider the question of how the line between human and animal protects the human’s sense of sovereignty, how this division protects the human being from confronting the power of his drives. In the first few pages, Derrida even mentions the notion of Nietzsche’s from On the Genealogy of Morals that the human is a promise-making animal, the “tenir parole,” which Kofman, working against the grain of Nietzsche’s own text, described as her hermeneutic principle. Yet, in some very clear ways, Derrida’s 1997 discourse on the animal seems to exemplify Kofman’s critique of him, particularly his desire to best his predecessors. The remainder of Derrida’s discourse is divided into three parts given over ten hours, which addresses philosophy’s failure since Descartes “to be seen by the animal.” As evidence of this failure, Derrida reads closely Descartes’ Meditations, Kant’s Anthropology, fragments from Levinas and Lacan. Then in the final improvised session, he treats

32 Ibid. 33 In Kofman’s text Montaigne’s question, “how does man know the secret internal stirrings of animals” appear as an epigraph. Derrida, L’animal, 21; Derrida, The Animal, 6.

188  Sarah Hammerschlag Heidegger’s seminar from 1929 to 1930. One of the pervading themes of the work is that the strong differentiation of human from animal in the history of philosophy belies the very distinction that it marks out between the rationality of the human and the bestiality of the animal, in so far as this strong division is itself a battle “against the animal,” in “a sacrificial war that is as old as Genesis.” But in describing this war, in showing that his predecessors have all failed to consider what it is “to be seen by the animal,” Derrida himself seems to be in a bit of a cock fight. Kofman’s Autobiogriffures:Du chat Murr d’Hoffman had taken up many of the same themes over 20 years earlier. Given all the overlaps, Derrida’s brief mention of Kofman could be read as the failure to fully acknowledge a debt. For Kofman had already asked in 1976 how the marker drawn between the human and the animal, by Descartes among others, protects the unity of the concept of the human being, “le nom de l’homme.” Kofman too is interested in showing how unstable this division is and how it props up the fiction of self-sovereignty. However, Kofman does not take it up from a space of reflexivity, nor through her own autobiography. Rather she comments on a fiction, one posing as an autobiography: E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. The novel is by all accounts a strange book. Published in 1818, quite late in Hoffman’s career, it alternates between two texts: Murr’s coming of age story and the life of the composer Johannes Kreisler, a structure (or lack thereof) maintained by the conceit that the autodidact cat, who first taught himself to read and then began writing in secret, used another book, the biography of Kreisler as his blotting pad. The printer then “accidently” printed both together, so that the final product switches back and forth between the two narratives, cutting from one to the other in what feels like random breaks. It is, one can say with assurances, a book with its own oscillating structure, one that swings dizzily from one pole to the other. In choosing to write about it in 1976, Kofman, no doubt, wanted to show both that the work of thinking about text as graft [greffe], preceded Of Grammatology (1967), and that the impact of an oscillating text as that which exposes as ruse authorial sovereignty, revealing “the headless head,” preceded Glas (1974). Hoffman’s book, Kofman writes, “comes to destroy the volume,” by “breaking the traditional frames of reading.” It is a “bastard biography which blurs the boundaries between humanity and animality…effacing the signature of the proper name and the unique author.”34 It is a book too about the possibility of literature—even among the romantics—to “deconstruct the theological concept of the book, of the author, of the original genius, father of his work.”35

34 Kofman, Autiobiogriffures, 75. 35 Kofman, Autobiogriffures, 17.

The Graft of the Cat 189 In Kofman’s book, however, it is not she who is claiming to unearth this nexus of connections, it is not she who upsets the philosophical divisions between animal and man, revealing it as a fiction, it is not even Hoffman. Rather it is Hoffman writing as his own cat, Murr. The cat is already a machine of citations from Tiek, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Schlegel, among others. The whole thing is then mediated by a fictional editor, who tries to make of the work something coherent, tries to expose all of Murr’s plagiarism of other writers, promises to restore missing pages of Kriesler’s biography and finally to supply a forthcoming final volume that never appears. Thus, by the time we read Autobiogriffures, the grafting and ventriloquizing is at least four levels deep. And it is the animal characters in the text that are able to reveal from their perspectives, the way that human science, behind hollow and high flown [creux et romflants] words, such as “instinct,” hides its ignorance…human science far from being knowledge is a system of quasi-paranoid projections, a product of resentment and jealousy that allows men to exercise mastery. Their reason, of which they are so proud is a system of secondary rationalizations.36 But it is the multiplication of perspectives through fiction that allows the confrontation of the animal and the human perspective. Kofman describes Hoffman’s book as already “the grafting of life onto literature,” in its citational structure. The effect of which, she suggests, is “to efface the signature of the proper name.” The contrasts between Derrida’s text, composed over 20 years later, and Kofman’s text so clearly on the same themes are sharp. Derrida’s text is a philosophical treatment of the theme of the animal, a reading and critique of the role that the animal has played in the history of modern philosophy. It is at the same time an autobiography—straightforwardly both a meditation, his, perhaps the first, to begin from the experience of being seen by a cat, naked, erect. It is also a resumé of his works, his exploration of how the theme of the animal, of sovereignty, of autoimmunity had already surfaced in his corpus from “A Silkworm of one’s Own,” to “Faith and Knowledge,” Rogues, and Àdieu to Emmanuel Levinas. He takes the décade as an opportunity to consider his own corpus and gives the address before an audience, at a conference honoring his work, on his birthday. Kofman’s text, on the other hand, is a reading. It stays close to a single text and credits that text, its plurivocity, its ventriloquism, its fictionalized portrayal of the very act of autobiography for the undermining of the concept of human self-sovereignty. Her text, thus, by virtue of repeating

36 Kofman, Autobiogriffures, 23–29.

190  Sarah Hammerschlag much of what is in Hoffman’s book is itself a tissue of citations. In one light, it might be read as an attempt to read Hoffman through Derrida’s Of Grammatology. At the same time, however, when Derrida’s 1997 text on the autobiographical animal is read in light of Kofman’s reading of Hoffman, if Kofman’s work is in fact seen as keeping vigil over the conference, if we answer the demand that her book be reread and quoted in relation to what Derrida’s own work professes, then Derrida’s own autobiographical discourse might seem to be guilty of the “illusory narcissism” that appears so manifestly in the confessions of Hoffman’s cat, who is himself emulating Rousseau’s Confessions. In the process, it would be the confrontation of these two texts that creates a parody exposing the animal desires, the violence, the mania of the autobiographical animal, in this case, Jacques Derrida. Could it be that this is Derrida, indeed, making a scene, allowing Kofman’s own work to call him out, even after she is gone? After all, what could be more narcissistic then subjecting an audience to ten hours of yourself speaking as a way of celebrating your birthday?37 What could be more narcissistic then taking the occasion to survey what you have already accomplished, where other great thinkers have failed. What could be more self-serving than asking in front of a crowd: “Mais moi, qui suis-je?” Of course as Derrida points out, this puts him at the end of a long line of philosophers, thinkers and writers who have done the same. Ecce animot, that is the announcement of which I am (following) [que je suis] something like the trace, assuming the title of an autobiographical animal, in the form of a risky, fabulous, or chimerical response to the question “But as for me who am I (following)?” which I have wagered on treating as that of the autobiographical animal. 38 Like Hoffman’s tomcat, Derrida is asking the question not only of Rousseau’s Confessions, of Augustine’s, but also of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. In that sense, he is also following them. Is he not also then following Hoffman’s tomcat, and thus also following Kofman’s own text on Hoffman? He is grouping himself with a whole list of autobiographical animals, “that sort of man or woman who, as a matter of character, chooses to indulge in or can’t resist indulging in autobiographical confidences.” Kofman herself

37 According to Derrida, it was actually 12 hours. “‘I inflicted a twelve-hour lecture on them!’ He wrote, with some pride to his friend Catherine Malabou,” Peeters’ reports in his biography Peeters, Derrida, 484. Other sources suggest the lecture was closer to ten hours, Peeters, Derrida, 484. 38 Derrida, The animal that therefore I am, 48.

The Graft of the Cat 191 was, in the end, one of these as well, writing too of the desire for and the shame of the act.39 The same year when she published Autobiogriffures, she also published a brief essay entitled “‘Ma vie’ et la psychanalyse.” “I always wanted to tell the story of my life,” she begins. And then describes the undoing of that desire “to master” her life in analysis, which she calls “foolish and unfaithful,” and its replacement with both a fear and a desire to spill her guts, to shit them out, to “establish an exchange that might transform le ‘caca’ en or.” When she finally did write Rue Ordener Rue Labat, she was consumed by an overwhelming depression and her suicide followed within the year. According to Benoit Peeters’ biography of Derrida, Kofman took it as a final slight that Derrida did not respond to her memoire. It was a slight that her partner Alexander Kyritsos found unforgivable, according to Peeters, even in light of Derrida’s eulogy for her. While it is not our place to adjudicate between them, I wonder if it isn’t possible to at least imagine that Derrida’s narcissistic performance wasn’t itself a kind of offering to Kofman, a way, if not of asking for forgiveness, of giving her the last word, allowing her to be the one with the punchline in the joke that they shared, the one to say, “Already, you’re at it again?!” Although published three times, Derrida’s eulogy was left untitled in each edition, such that it was only his name that appeared rather than hers. While this has been interpreted as a troubling elision, an effacement, Derrida’s insistence on calling attention to it in his opening, naming all the things he could have called it, might point us in another direction, once again to Autobiogriffures.40 Headings, Kofman points out in this text, are “the equivalent of signs posted in fields or at the entrance to houses bearing the inscription ‘private property.’” When Derrida writes in his eulogy that he feels that to title his essay would itself “be somewhat indecent,” would “imply the violent selection of a perspective, an abusive interpretive framing or narcissistic reappropriation,” this too may be another wink to Autobiogriffures.41 The fact, however, that in refusing to give the essay a title, the essay nonetheless reverts to the name of the author, that the law of property exerts itself nonetheless, is not an accident either. If Kofman calls out the implicit relation between headings and a concept of sovereignty endemic to the West, Derrida reveals how sovereignty returns even when you try to cut off its heading. Derrida’s homage recalls as well what Kofman says about the form eulogy in Autobiogriffures, “[in] their conventional and hypocritical character… they provide an opportunity to show off the orator’s talent rather than to

39 Kofman, Sarah Kofman, 172; Selected Writings, 250. 40 Ullern, Kofman lit Derrida, 84. 41 Derrida, Sarah Kofman, 1. Derrida, Cahiers de Grifs, 131.

192  Sarah Hammerschlag show concern for the deceased.”42 Derrida, one might conclude, was thus playing his part, all the better to set himself up. It is also in this text that Kofman, citing Derrida, describes the function of the “Avant-propos.” The function of all prefaces is to shield, to protect against the “dissolution, the scratches of writing…a discourse of assistance, to deny the clawing of the text, its erasure.” Is it any accident that Derrida’s eulogy serves as the “Introduction,” to her Selected Writings? Kofman’s point, however, is that that the authorial preface in Hoffman’s Tomcat Murr is always already a parody of the form. Behind the appearance of the gentleness of the cat who knows how to have velvet paws, behind ‘the divinity,’ of the genius, are hiding the claws of the animal, who knows well how to reveal his true nature to anyone who wants to deplume him, disposses him.43 In Kofman’s reading, Hoffman’s text, by virtue of its insistent doubling, is able to reveal the animal aggression behind the ordered façade, to reveal that rational discourse is itself the work of an animal. If Derrida is himself performing such a role, the role of the master thinker, the philosopher, the friend, the cat, it is Kofman’s doubling gaze that can dispossess him. Is it too much to imagine that he set up The Animal that therefore I am so that it calls for the vigilance of Kofman’s text? He says in its opening pages, “that book keeps vigil over this conference and asks to be permanently quoted or reread.” Kofman closes her own volume describing the nature of Hoffman’s strange hybrid text as a “writing,” which too has a doubling vision, which like Medusa freezes “or captures [entraîne] man and cat in the derision of laughter, this ‘shaking of the diaphragm,’ which nature has refused the cat Murr, who, despite his seriousness, like man, still knows how to laugh.”44 It was a text in which she truly manages to let laughter be the last word and, when keeping vigil over Derrida’s text, manages, like Hoffman’s own, to turn the very stand-off between man and cat into a parody. One can imagine, at least that in establishing its vigil over his text, Derrida wanted to actualize the joke that each tells in their own way, so that she can shake her head one last time and in pointing out his irrevocable drive for mastery, make it a scene in which they both bowl over, laughing.

42 Kofman, Autobiogriffures, 89; Kofman, No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffies, 3. 43 Kofman, Autobiogriffures, 147 44 Ibid.

The Graft of the Cat 193 Postscript: But can we really leave them here, in on the joke together? Isn’t it just a little too neat, the tie up to a zany romantic comedy? In the spirit of the postscript, a tradition that links Derrida, Kofman and indeed Hent de Vries together, I want to turn back again to de Vries’ 2005 appendix to Minimal Theologies. In rereading it to write this essay, I was struck by its final invocation of the “figure of evil” in its closing lines. “A text in which such erasure would be complete would be, precisely, a ‘figure of evil [figure du mal] the very specter of the worst, of violence become absolute,” de Vries concludes.45 Derrida did not stop thinking about the animal after 1997, nor about the capacity of literature to unsettle the theological conception of the book, nor even, perhaps about his own inability to cease from asserting his phallic authority. de Vries points us with this reference to Rogues [Voyous], one of Derrida’s last finished projects before his death. In its opening pages, Derrida explores the slippage between the terms of the oath [serment] and that of biblical “figure of evil [figure du malin]” the snake [serpent]. Must the snake signify as a figure of evil? He asks in the first section of “The Reason of the Strongest.”46 In so doing, he also puts de Vries’ point another way, perhaps, it is not that there are some texts that welcome the other, that point beyond themselves to the divine. Instead it is in the very nature of textuality that even “the figure of evil” can always be reread otherwise, the text cannot but help welcome the other, in this case the animal, not as symbol, but as vulnerable being, whose vulnerability shows itself in the very ease with which it is killed. In Rogues, Derrida concretizes this point by referencing D.H. Lawrence’s poem The Snake, describing the poem as “a scene of hospitality,” reinterpreting that paradigmatic “figure of evil” exactly according to the capacity of a poem “to inflect differently a dominant interpretation—whether of the Bible or another canonical text.”47 I could return to it here to suggest that religion can never be isolated as the archive that Derrida could not do without. But that, I think, is not ultimately the point. The point of the poem, as I understand it, is to suggest that whatever the capacity of the address to the other, its capacity to divest the violent drive to mastery of its sting, it will never quite be enough, for the simple reason that we cannot, it turns out, raise the dead. In the end, the encounter will always have been missed, and the scene in which Kofman

45 Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 634. 46 Voyous, 23, Rogues, 5. 47 Ibid. For more on this poem, see also session nine of Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud, eds. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago press, 2009), 236–250.

194  Sarah Hammerschlag and Derrida laugh together one last time must remain only a fantasy. For although Lawrence in the poem is able to reinvest the snake with a different meaning, a different resonance, to describe him like a “guest” who had come “in quiet,” he cannot undo the violence of the very gesture that sends the creature “like lightening” back “into the black hole, the earth lipped fissure in the wall front.” As Derrida put it, quoting all but the last line of the last stanza, “And so I missed my chance with one of the lords/Of life/ And I have something to expiate.”48

48 Ibid. Snake A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there. In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me. He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently. Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second comer, waiting. He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. The voice of my education said to me He must be killed, For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous. And voices in me said, If you were a man You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, Into the burning bowels of this earth? Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt so honoured.

The Graft of the Cat 195 And yet those voices: If you were not afraid, you would kill him! And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth. He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to lick his lips, And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face. And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned. I looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. I think it did not hit him, But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste. Writhed like lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination. And immediately I regretted it. I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education. And I thought of the albatross And I wished he would come back, my snake. For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again. And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate: A pettiness.

11 Corpus Mysticum Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hent de Vries Burcht Pranger

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The work of Hent de Vries is bent on extension rather than on succinctness.1 His trilogy Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Religion and Violence, and Minimal Theologies amounts to more than 1600 pages while the pages of his edited volumes run into the thousands extending a unique hospitality to his fellow scholars all of whom, without necessarily agreeing with every tittle and jota of his views, felt sufficiently drawn to his work to participate in his ‘project.’ The very fact that de Vries’ forthcoming book on miracles will consist of three volumes does not suggest any slowing down or shrinking on his part. Ever since Hent de Vries and I met in the early nineties of the last century and became colleagues and friends, I have, admiringly, been intrigued by this prolific, intellectual energy as well as by the enigma of its underlying rationale, the more so since my own work was governed by a sustained focus on the verbum abbreviatum/the shortened word. Occasionally we discussed our stylistic differences without succeeding to solve them. Quite the contrary, each one of us envied the other: Hent wishing to be less wordy and more concise, I myself desired to be less dense and more expansive. Evidently, we never swapped. Yet behind our different writing styles lurks a shared interest in brevity, or rather, in the intertwinement between brevity and digression. Thus, in my book on Augustine’s concept of time and eternity, 2 I dealt extensively with the shakiness and the digressive nature of human language and thought which can only be assessed as such if one realizes that each and every movement of the human mind is in the grip of time that ‘passes through a point.’ For his part, Hent de Vries’ digressiveness seems to be

1 This volume is a tribute to Hent de Vries, but I also want to express my gratitude to Willemien Otten. The three of us have been fellow travelers for a long time and I am happy to incorporate in this article for and about Hent de Vries ideas and suggestions I owe to Willemien Otten’s Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). 2 M.B. Pranger, Eternity’s Ennui. Temporality, Perseverance and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-12

Corpus Mysticum 197 held together, kept going, and interrupted by what he calls the notion of ‘the mystical postulate.’3 If I am not mistaken, this notion covers all other terms de Vries uses to bring out the foundational forces of language and thought from Angelus Silesius’ mystical ‘Yes,’ to Carl Schmitt’s state of exception, the negative theology, and, more recently, the miracle.4 Without arguing that all these phenomena come down to the same, I think it is safe to assume that we have a foundational continuum of sorts here, notwithstanding its disruptive nature. Another feature of de Vries’ work is his own, idiosyncratic use of religion. Religion being the focus of his work, de Vries is not primarily interested in ‘positive’ religion but rather in its tropes and figures, which, in their turn, may be helpful in revealing deeper and often neglected dimensions of human thought.5 It is hard exactly to assess the status of this particular use of religion and an earlier attempt of mine to do so was squarely rebuffed by de Vries.6 Discussing the chapter on Heidegger’s ‘formal indications’ in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion—a chapter I much admire—I turned de Vries into a full-blown Heideggerian because of his formalization of human existence, including religion. Although, admittedly, I failed to characterize de Vries’ discourse adequately, I still think a kind of formalization of religious language is undeniably present throughout his work. Yet, as a historian of Christianity, I feel disinclined to counter that ‘formalization’ with any so-called concreteness of which the professional researcher of religion, both past and present, would be the sole possessor. For that our professional historians have been too self-indulgent with regard to the status of their material, or, as de Vries likes to call it à la française: ‘the archive.’ It is this very notion of ‘archive’ that may offer the opportunity to question de Vries concerning his use and selection of religious material and, as a result, enable us, rather than countering his discourse, to come closer to understanding it. If a better understanding appears to induce criticism, so much the better since its purpose will be to come a bit closer to the phenomenon of religious language, whose depth and status, so Hent de Vries and I both realize, we will never be able fully to grasp.

3 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence. Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 287–92. 4 A pre-taste of the upcoming three volumes on miracles can be found in: Hent de Vries, Kleine filosofie van het wonder (Amsterdam: Boom, 2015), and Hent de Vries, Miracles et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019). 5 Chapter 3 of Religion and Violence describes the preceding two chapters as being about the relationship between ‘positive religion, based on historical revelation or testimonies thereto, and the discipline—the concepts and arguments—of philosophy’ (211), whereas, the chapter dealing mainly with Kant, the non-philosopher would find it hard to find much positive religion here. 6 M.B. Pranger, “Reden über die Religion,” in Krisis, Tijdschrift voor Empirische Filosofie 1, 4 (2000), 18–25; for de Vries’s reply, see 42–3.

198  Burcht Pranger If we take a closer look at the mystical postulate in de Vries’ archive, it does not come as a surprise that it mainly consists of the notions mentioned above such as silence, the affirmative yes, the Ur-cry, negative theology, and state of exception. Since, at an early stage, de Vries’ ‘turn to religion’ came to include ‘political theology,’ institutions have become part of the problem those notions are supposed to express: the foundation of that which precedes language, thought, and society. Yet it was not always thus. Although the notion of ‘political theology,’ coined by Carl Schmitt in 1922, is relatively old, it is interesting to see how someone like the ‘young’ Michel de Certeau, who plays a prominent part in de Vries’ work, still sees mysticism in contradistinction to the Church as an institution.7 As for de Vries, in Chapter 3 of Religion and Violence, ‘Anti-Babel,’ he provides a powerful survey of the Setzung from Carl Schmitt’s ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (216) to de Certeau’s volo as a ‘volition out of which speech is born’ (258), followed by discussions of Derrida and Benjamin. The common denominator is, in the end, the miracle of language’s origin expressed in Benjamin’s ‘in the beginning-no beginning’ (266).8 There is no end to the ways in which this beginning and Setzung can be expressed, played with, and presented in their apophatic and cataphatic guise, at least to the outsider, who is faced with the paradox of the ‘beginningno beginning’ as the mystical postulate of the origin of language. Now my question to Hent de Vries does not primarily concern the problem of where all of this begins but where—and whether—it ends. Are there any limits to his own prolific musings rooted in the seemingly limitless ways in which the miracle of beginnings can be expressed? By way of experiment, I would like to present Hent de Vries with another miracle, the miracle par excellence, the Eucharist, which does not figure prominently in his work. Yet the Eucharist has played a prominent role in the origins and development of political theology—an idea developed in Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous The King’s Two Bodies. Unfortunately, most of the interpretive emphasis has been on the political implications of this transfer of the Eucharist as corpus mysticum to the Church and next to the

7 Cf. Michel de Certeau, “Du Saint-Cyran au Jansénisme, conversion et réforme,” in Christus. Cahiers spirituels, 10 (1963), 399–417. De Certeau chides Saint-Cyran for his anti-institutional behavior and a lack of ‘pastoral and ecclesial experience’ (409). Perhaps it is easier for a political historian to stay detached with regard to ‘institutions.’ In the case of De Certeau, I have always felt that the force of the institutional, in his case the Roman Catholic Church, kept haunting him lending an ambiguity of sorts to his fable mystique. Cf. my article on De Certeau, “Quelques remarques historiographiques concernant le principe d’individuation,” in Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift, 35, 2 (1981), 7–31. In fact, the same obtains, as we shall see, to De Certeau’s fellow Jesuit Henri de Lubac. 8 In this article, I focus on Hent de Vries himself, separating him, so to speak, from the philosophers whose thought he both discusses and incorporates in his own thinking.

Corpus Mysticum 199 body politic. In this article, I will focus on the Eucharist proper as the center of the universe as well as on the efforts of the eminent historian of theology, Henri de Lubac, to rediscover this central meaning of the Eucharist before it lost its privileged status as corpus mysticum. Before I can get to the corpus mysticum, however, I have to discuss de Lubac’s view of nature and the controversies surrounding it. Little do historians of political theology realize that the transfer of the Eucharist as corpus mysticum from the altar to the Church and thence to the state is inextricably intertwined with changing views of nature in that period. Only against this backdrop can one understand the irony that the loss of Eucharistic intimacy represented by the corpus mysticum resulted, at least in my view, in the transformation of the Eucharist into a mere miracle generating a host of Eucharistic miracles in the process. Thus, the intimate smallness of the bread and wine on the altar was amplified ad infinitum, losing its foundational compactness in the process. If this sounds like a problem of positive theology, my affinity with Hent de Vries’ way of thinking is too great to accept such an assessment. Within the parameters of his own thought, I would like to submit to him the following question: what are we to think of a primordial phenomenon that, once upon a time, was no miracle at all yet, in its tiny appearance, was to be located beyond the boundaries of language and time while guaranteeing the beginning and end of creation and, by implication, of speech? Generally speaking, twentieth-century theology has not been kind to nature. The great protestant theologian, Karl Barth, for instance, spent much of his energy drastically severing any natural connotation of faith, thus undoing the broad scope of Scheiermacherian universal nature as the playground for both the human and the divine on the one hand and the curse of the Thomist and neo-Thomist analogia entis on the other. According to Barth, in neither case, justice is done to the sovereignty of the divine. This neglect of nature more or less continued in the second half of the twentieth century with a strong focus on social issues and the preoccupation of progressive Catholic theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx with religious anthropology: Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (1959). It was and is only conservative Catholics who stuck and stick to nature with their biologico-religious defense of ‘life’ meanwhile narrowed down to its beginning (abortion) and end (euthanasia).9 Only recently did Pope Francis make good on the promises implied in the choice of his papal name by replacing, in his Laudato Si, those limited dealings with nature with a focus on nature as the object of human care. Its phrasing deserves special attention. Not only does this document testify to the Franciscan

9 The loudness of the debate often conceals the fact that this fascination with the beginnings of life is of a recent date. Cf. Garry Wills’ learned op-ed in The New York Times, June 27, 2021, “The Bishops Are Wrong about Biden-and Abortion.”

200  Burcht Pranger project symbolized by the pope’s name. It also refers, albeit implicitly, to the Patristic link among nature, incarnation, and Eucharist as rediscovered by one of the most prominent representatives of another twentieth-century theological movement, the so-called nouvelle théologie,10 Henri de Lubac. Thus, the following passage from Laudato Si is more than reminiscent of de Lubac’s famous (though disputed) Corpus Mysticum, l’eucharistie et l’Eglise au moyen age (Paris: Aubier, 1944): It is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation. Grace, which tends to manifest itself tangibly, found unsurpassable expression when God himself became man and gave himself as food for his creatures. The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours. In the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved; it is the living center of the universe, the overflowing core of love and of inexhaustible life. Joined to the incarnate Son, present in the Eucharist, the whole cosmos gives thanks to God. Indeed the Eucharist is itself an act of cosmic love: “Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world” [Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen]. The Eucharist joins heaven and earth; it embraces and penetrates all creation. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration: in the bread of the Eucharist, “creation is projected towards divinization, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself. Thus, the Eucharist is also a source of light and motivation for our concerns for the environment, directing us to be stewards of all creation.11 Interestingly, the two most exalted phrases in this passage, ‘Yes cosmic …’ and ‘creation is projected towards divinization’ being penned by de Lubac, are taken from John Paul II’s Orientale Lumen, from a pope, that is, who, though known to be an admirer of de Lubac’s, was not particularly prone to have the authority of the institutional church mellowed by the priority and the dynamics of a noninstitutional Eucharist. In passing it should be noted that, in Laudato Si, the Jesuit Pope displays scarce interest in historical ressourcement. In the beginning of the document, he goes out of his way to mention his predecessors, whereas, contrariwise, we meet

10 The term was not coined by the ‘new theologians’ themselves but by their opponents, in particular Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP and Charles Boyer SJ. See Henri de Lubac, Mémoire sur l’histoire des mes écrits (Paris: Cerf, 2006), 62. 11 Pope Francis, Laudato Si (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), paragraph 236, 171–2.

Corpus Mysticum 201 Thomas Aquinas only thrice, accompanied by short references to John of the Cross, Vincent of Lerins, and Basil the Great. And of the modern—not so modern—thinkers it is Romano Guardini who takes pride in place. Yet this particular quote from de Lubac, mediated by John Paul II, stands out for its lyrical centrality in Laudato Si, more powerfully so than the references to St Francis, highlighting the Eucharist as the center embracing heaven and earth, the cosmic principle par excellence that, by striving toward the holy wedding feast, redeems the brokenness of creation on its way. The radical tenor of this passage is only surpassed by an oblique reference to Teilhard de Chardin, this time with Paul VI acting as an intermediary: ‘The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things.’12 All this may sound familiar to the modern Patristic scholar, who, consciously or not, cannot fail to be educated by de Lubac and his fellow travelers and, perhaps to a lesser degree, to all post-Vatican II theologians. But then one should realize that, if Bergoglio, still in the guise of an Argentinian Jesuit, had published his Laudato Si three-quarters of a century ago, he would almost certainly have been scorned for this powerful presentation of the Eucharist as guardian of the cosmos without much prior institutional support of the Church. In fact, Teilhard was slighted for his salvific view of the cosmos as was his admirer and friend de Lubac for his view that man was naturally ordained to reach out for the divine. Both Jesuits were reprimanded and humiliated (Humani generis, 1950). True, after having been silenced for a period of more than ten years de Lubac was rehabilitated just in time to play a prominent role at Vatican II. His friend Teilhard, however, was kept in limbo to the present day although openly and approvingly referred to as well as quoted by the pontiffs Benedict XVI and Francis. In the following, I propose to discuss the Eucharist of nature and the nature of the Eucharist focusing on the various tensions—to put it mildly— that occurred once this dynamic, cosmic dimension of the Eucharist was diminished and when the latter was either, in an almost invisible process, slightly displaced or constrained; displaced in the direction of institutionalism or constrained, paradoxically, by its elevation—or extension—to the supranatural. In fact, following the shifting positions of the Eucharist, I will focus on the ‘nature of nature and supra-nature’ with the Eucharist being in the center of a centrifugal process of displacement away from the dense presence of the Eucharist as the condition for its lending sense and dynamics to nature, toward supra-nature—a process that, in yet another paradoxical fashion, enhanced both the force of the Church as institutional power and the rise of individual devotion. As for the Eucharist, de Lubac himself has coined its development with the famous phrase in his Méditation sur l’Eglise: ‘It is the Church that makes the

12 Laudato Si, paragraph 53, footnote 53.

202  Burcht Pranger Eucharist but it is also the Eucharist that makes the Church’13 —also a favorite quote of John Paul II by the way. Clearly, the two phrases are not on a par as becomes abundantly clear from de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum. It means that, broadly speaking, in the First Millennium (up to the twelfth century) the Eucharist has made the Church and vice versa; in the Second Millennium, the Church had made the Eucharist, although de Lubac, cautious as ever, fills up his discourse with plenty of quotes from Patristic and medieval sources so as to defend both the disjunction and conjunction of nature and supra-nature in one breath. One of the reasons for this quite unique blending of subtlety and cautiousness is, of course, the fact that the Church is never really out of sight; it all depends on what the subtle mind of our author really wants to convey to the reader, openly so or with a certain reservatio mentis. Yet, as we shall see below, this very subtlety and cautiousness did not do the trick of concealing the revolutionary implications of de Lubac’s intentions. Nor did it succeed in protecting him from vicious attacks and long-lasting humiliation. Let us first, then, examine de Lubac’s thesis in his Corpus Mysticum. The long and short of that story is that, although the Church is called the body of Christ by Paul, there was nothing mystical about that. For over thousand years, the term mystical body was the exclusive denomination of the Eucharist, without any ecclesiastical connotation.14 When, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Eucharist became at once more and less mystical—less so because of the increasingly real and realistic presence of Christ (called corpus verum rather than corpus mysticum), and more so because of the increasingly miraculous nature of real presence, culminating in the doctrine of the ‘transubstantiation’—the mystical part was transferred to the sole possessor and executor of this mysterious sacrament, the Church. A second extraordinary feature of this story is the fact that corpus mysticum as designation of the Church, in spite of its mystical ring, came to symbolize the Church in its longitudinal, organizational shape (with the pope as the head), without any mystical connotation other than the perpetuity of the institution guaranteed by its head. As is well known, the usefulness of this notion for secular political purposes has not escaped the attention of political historians. Thus, Ernst Kantorowicz, in his classic study The King’s Two Bodies, admits to having ransacked de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum in order to extend that notion in its institutional sustainability to the body politic. ‘Whereas the corpus verum, through the agency of the dogma of the transubstantiation and the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi, developed a life and mysticism of its own, the corpus mysticum proper came to be less and less mystical

13 Henri de Lubac, Méditation sur l’Eglise (Paris: Aubier, 1954, third edition), 113. [all translations from the French are mine]. 14 In the light of this view the enthusiasm of John Paul II is all the more puzzling since, as far as the institutional authority of the Church is concerned, he belongs squarely to ‘the second thousand years.’

Corpus Mysticum 203 as time passed on, and came to mean simply the Church as a body politic, or, by transference, any body politic of the secular world.’15 Well put, as far as I am concerned, in spite of the fact that, unsurprisingly, Kantorowicz’s thesis remains controversial, not only with regard to the question whether there was indeed a real, historical shift in the status of the body politic, borrowed from the religious notion of corpus mysticum. It also plays its part right in the center of American, conservative politics insofar as one of the principle theorists of the Trump administration, Steve Bannon, draws his inspiration for his va banque view of politics, among others, from the conservative political theorist active in the Nazi period, Carl Schmitt. It is against this love of upheaval that Kantorowicz, while living in exile in the United States, emphasized the quiet, political continuity as represented by the corpus mysticum.16 Regardless of the question of there being a real cause and effect in the jump from the religious to the political,17 historically speaking Kantorowicz’s use of de Lubac does have a point insofar as it reinforces my argument of the displacement from the ‘natural’ Eucharist as corpus mysticum, that is, as a religious center, toward the institutional and the individual. Kantorowicz may have been daring where de Lubac, out of fear for discrediting the transubstantiational essence of the Eucharist, could not fully speak his mind or, more probably, was not in the position to draw the—possibly dire—consequences of his own historical discoveries. It is not impossible that one of those discoveries, drawn to its conclusion, would have laid bare an empty ‘mystical/ non-mystical’ preeminence of the Church as the keeper of eternity’s mysteries that has guaranteed its survival up to the present day. If so, that would shed light on the image of the Church as ecclesia triumphans, so popular in the Baroque period, in a seamless—and, it should be added, bizarre—embrace of heaven and earth, quite different from the Lubacian/Patristic cosmic joy

15 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1997), 206. Chapter 5 (193–259) deals with the theme of the corpus mysticum. Chapter 6 (314–72) discusses the theme of ‘the king never dies.’ Although the book has enjoyed wide acclaim and praise ever since its publication in 1957, it should also be noted that it has been heavily criticized. Robert E. Lerner, in his biography of Kantorowicz, sums up some of the critical reviews in his chapter on The King’s Two Bodies: Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz. A Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917), 344–58. The reviews of two eminent British historians R.W. Southern and Beryl Smalley were particularly scathing. I myself am inclined to attribute this vehemence, in part, to the gap between Kantorowicz’ German-American scholarship and the British disdain (at the time) for theorizing in the field of history. 16 See Lerner’s biography of Kantorowicz. 17 Inevitably, there has been collateral damage in this transition from the religious to the political. Jennifer Rust, in her illuminating article ‘Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and de Lubac,’ is right to emphasize that, in the older views of the corpus mysticum, the communal dimension was not lacking. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (ed.), Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 102–23.

204  Burcht Pranger and embrace once again celebrated in Laudato Si. Transferred and applied to the state, the notion of the corpus mysticum could also shed light on the equally dubious nature of the triumphant king ‘who never dies.’ Le roi est mort, vive le roi. Analogously—again, regardless of the question whether we have a real move from cause to effect here—it is undeniably true that the shift from the ‘automatic,’ transubstantiational change of bread and wine into the body of Christ to the feast of Corpus Christi was accompanied by an increasingly individual devotion. Another paradox: with the Eucharist doing its own work in the middle, both the institutional Church and the individual devotee might have found themselves in an iron embrace from which neither could set itself free. Ironically, before the medieval champion of nature par excellence, Francis of Assisi was able to sing his Canticle to the Sun, this lay person’s first calling was ‘to restore my Church.’ Another irony: in order to legitimize his efforts this lover of nature turned to the very same pope, Innocent III, who also sanctioned the doctrine of transubstantiation at the fourth Lateran Council and, more generally, stands out as one of the great enforcers of the Church’s institutional authority. Little did the pope realize— or did he?—that it was the new Mendicant Orders, and in particular the Franciscan Order, that were to contribute to the individualization and, it should be added, the urbanization of devotion. As the present pope knows all too well, that implied, in St. Francis’s days as well as—mutatis mutandis— in modern times, a sustained struggle between the increasingly institutional and authoritarian nature of the Church and the ever-extending Eucharistic devotion flowing from the new miraculous automation in the guise of the transubstantiation.18 With this observation, we are back at the beginning of our story: nature losing out to institutionalism on the one hand and individualism on the other. Thus, St Francis’s ‘naturalism’ was squeezed out, so to speak. Both individual devotion and the institutional Church having turned into an urban affair, nature was shut out altogether. Of course, in the thirteenth century, there had been a Roger Bacon, albeit without a conspicuous follow-up, and a Petrarch. But as for the latter, the famous account of his ascending the Mont Ventoux which seems to culminate in a description of a marvelous view from the top, ranging from Lyon and Marseilles to Aigues Mortes, proves to have no other function than relentlessly turning the soul’s gaze inward bringing out a truly Augustinian appreciation of nature: ‘People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested.’19 And, as if the

18 See my discussion of this theme in: M.B. Pranger “L’eucharistie et la prolifération de l’imaginaire aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” in ed. A. Haquin, Fête-Dieu (1246-1996) (Louvainla-Neuve: Publications de l’Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1999), 97–117. 19 Augustine, Confessiones, book 10.7.15; trans. Henry Chadwick, Saint Augustine. Confessions (Oxford, OUP, 1991), 187.

Corpus Mysticum 205 internalization of this visual excursion is not enough, Petrarch finishes off the entire panorama with a final blow in the shape of Seneca’s: ‘for there is nothing greater than the soul.’20 As we have seen, in spite of St Francis’ idiosyncratic (that is, noninstitutional) devotion to nature, de Lubac’s rediscovery of the Eucharist as the corpus mysticum embracing the cosmos, had to acknowledge that somehow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this cosmic embracement impoverished or, to put it more bluntly, came to an end. Paradoxically, the introduction of Aristotle into theology during that same period greatly contributed to this diminishment. The paradox lies in the fact that Aristotle—think of his Physics—is all about nature, albeit it is not at all in a Franciscan shape. Francis’ original view of nature is difficult to assess but it certainly lacked the abstract status of Aristotle’s and Thomas of Aquinas’. For the human mind, this Aristotelian tenor of theology means, in terms of knowledge, that there is no direct access to the divine. Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu. Unsurprisingly, nature claiming its own rights, supra-nature became the exclusive domain of revelation and the divine and, subsequently, the keeper and dispenser of sacraments. Over the centuries, enormous amounts of intellectual energy have been spent by the scholastics in order to prove that, appearances notwithstanding, the relationship between nature and supranature was not problematic at all, and that, with respect to the past, nothing had changed; all of which, inevitably, resulted in Aristotelian-Thomist rereadings of the ‘first thousand years’ which—surprise!—turned out to confirm in retrospect the Thomist view of nature and supra-nature. And although, during the Renaissance, there was plenty of Platonism around, AristotelianThomist theologians such as Cajetan and Suarez narrowed their focus down to an increasingly intricate defense of the status of nature and supra-nature, entertaining the seemingly incongruous view that the two were, so to speak, simultaneously married and living apart together. It is hard for us—two or three generations removed from de Lubac and the other scholars of the nouvelle théologie—for scholars they were!—to have an inkling of the daunting task he and his fellow practitioners faced. Although de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum did raise some alarm—enough, indeed, for se Lubac to mention it in the preface to the second edition as a foreboding of a ‘new storm which rages in the theological clouds’ with the publication of his Surnaturel in 1946—he still found himself in relatively safe territory because in those first thousand years, so eloquently described in Corpus Mysticum, Aristotle had not appeared on the horizon yet and, as for any Aristotelian rereading of those earlier views on the Eucharist, de Lubac dealt with so many sources—mostly manuscripts—so unfamiliar to

20 The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives/selections in translation, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948), 36–45 = The Ascent of the Mont Ventoux.

206  Burcht Pranger his critics that they were utterly out of their depth when it came to launching an attack. Yet attacks were in the making. Precisely, during those budding years of Patristic studies, the status and boundaries of religion were a serious, problematic issue in Catholic theology and subject of a serious controversy between conservative Thomists in the Vatican (in particular, Thomist theologians such as Charles Boyer and Réginald Garrigou Lagrange) and our ‘new theologians,’ the entire affair focusing in the end on one single person and one single issue: the Augustinianism of Henri de Lubac. Thus far this debate has been discussed either as an inner-Catholic problem or, as in John Milbank’s The Excluded Middle, as the illustration of a Radical Orthodoxy with de Lubac playing the foundational part of a theological Heidegger or Wittgenstein.21 In my view, neither option does justice to the complexities of de Lubac’s thought, which, in his case, could be rephrased as the complexities of his reading of Augustine. Nothing reassuring here as if the appearance of Augustine or Augustinian influence would be of any help in clarifying problems. We are rather confronted here with what I would like to baptize the curse of influence—and if posthumous Augustine can be called a master of anything, it is of creating the longevity of that very curse. But why Augustine? While, as de Lubac knew full well, ‘out of line’ thinkers from Origen to Teilhard de Jardin and Joachim of Fiore were, as it were, ‘safely’ condemned and, therefore, in the absence of any theological threat, somehow easier to write about to the extent that there was no need to either defend or attack them, Augustine was a different matter altogether. As such, it does not come as a surprise that de Lubac, after exploring Eastern theology, turned to Augustine, the Augustine, that is, of the desiderium naturale: ‘spirit is the desire for God.’ As a man of the cloth, however, and a Jesuit for all that, de Lubac, who authored more than 40 books, was reticent when it came to his inner self. No soul-searching Augustine or Petrarch here, or an outgoing lover of nature like St Francis. Admittedly, de Lubac published his Mémoire sur l’histoire des mes écrits. But, as the title already suggests, what we get is a brief summary of his writing life without any motivational clues, followed by an extensive and solid dossier regarding the various cases and controversies. Yet, tellingly enough, there is a long chapter on Teilhard de Jardin that testifies to an unextinguished fire smoldering in de Lubac’s soul. I shall come back to this issue after my analysis of de Lubac’s Augustinian excursion. As for that excursion itself, so much is clear that de Lubac, in his own view at least, had to tackle the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Augustinian theologians in order to get to the proper Augustinian view. This attack very much looks like an effort to detonate in advance the ire that was to befall him when it would become clear that he could not avoid joining the seventeenth-century Augustinians in condemning the Thomist excesses

21 John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Suspended Middle (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

Corpus Mysticum 207 concerning the status of nature. Nor would the accompanying attacks on the Augustinians suffice in concealing and protecting de Lubac’s own deeply felt Augustinianism of intense, comprehensive, and cosmic desire. The difference with de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum could not be greater; on the one hand, the dynamic and unconstrained power of the Eucharist and, on the other hand, the clever o so clever attempt to do justice to nature in its human and divine fullness in the face of the ecclesiastical constraints hovering over it. But let me first sketch out the history of the problem. In 1946, de Lubac published his Surnaturel, Etudes historiques (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne),22 a book that was taken up again, summarized and clarified in later works such as Le mystère du surnaturel (1965) and Augustianisme et théologie moderne (1965). If the latter title suggests the reconstruction of an Augustinianism pure and simple, the reader is in for a surprise since the book opens with a vehement attack precisely on Augustinians such as Baius (1513–1589) and Jansenius (1585–1638). Here already I would like to highlight the importance of tone and tenor that in essence do not differ from that of de Lubac’s opponents who were waiting in the wings. This type of polemical openings goes back to a long tradition of doctrinal debate in Catholic theology in which, due to the claim of conducting a rational disputation, the theologian who is found to be wrong, is bound to look less intelligent, much like Anselm of Canterbury’s stultus who appeared to be utterly stupid in denying the existence of God. Whilst for Anselm, attacking the fool was part of an intellectual game, later controversialists became one-dimensionally serious. Following this line of attacking others before propelling one’s own—sometimes closet-revolutionary—interpretation, de Lubac chooses an easy target, Baius’ view of man’s prelapsarian state. Because for Baius, in the state of innocence, grace is so natural and, as a consequence, sin a mechanical rather than a dramatic defect, postlapsarian grace runs the risk of being naturalized—not unlike a medical recovery—as well: ‘Pélage du paradis terrestre.’ What is left of the supranatural power of grace after sin? As for Jansenius, his language is less naturalistic. His Augustinian literalism encouraged him to express himself exclusively in terms of the Master. Here the adiutorium sine quo non from Augustine’s De correptione et gratia takes on the guise of sufficient grace, which helps prelapsarian man to persevere in preventing his free will from deflecting from the state of innocence (the posse peccare) comparable to the way in which man needs food in order to stay alive. Quite a lot of freedom indeed and no supernatural grace at the horizon. de Lubac branded this stance as follows: … It is always, whether fully expressed or indirectly, the same initial error with regard to the issue of Adam’s state, governed by the same error with regard to the role of grace in relation to free will. Ultimately,

22 Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel. Etudes historiques. I am using the annotated edition published by Desclée de Brouwer in 1991.

208  Burcht Pranger it is an error with regard to the supernatural itself, with regard to the mystery of divine adoption. It is always, whether acknowledged or not, the naturalistic thesis: created nature is considered perfect in itself, not necessarily beyond all divine support (Baius and his followers precisely demand such support), but beyond this relationship with God that opens it up and raises it up above itself. That rigid logician Jansenius is the only one to have pushed this thesis to the extreme, either in its principle or in its consequences. His supralapsarian ‘optimism’ determined his practical pessimism and he has taken to the letter’s Paul’s word: “Liberated from sin, you have become slaves of justice” without noticing in the same manner the correction immediately added by the Apostle: “I am speaking in the manner of man because of the weakness of your flesh” (Romans: 6:18–19). It is on the ruins of nature, once master of itself, that God’s grace reigns today (68–69). 23 As a result of this prelapsarian optimism, Jansenius loses sight of the unity of grace that governs the subtle and intimate relationship between God and man before and after the fall. Instead, we are furnished with an adiutorium/auxulium quo in the shape of a violent, invincible grace that, driven by the utter loss of innocence, eradicates the restoration of the will, as indeed will itself, and replaces it by a delectatio victrix (the victorious joy) that ‘turns love into a cupidity in the reverse’ (75). The very intimacy between nature and grace (reminiscent of Augustine’s interior interiore meo) seduces de Lubac to formulations that got him into trouble. In a lyrical last chapter he sums up the desideratum naturale of the supranatural which implies that ‘spirit is therefore the desire of God. The entire problem of spiritual life will be to unchain that desire and next to transform it: radical conversion …’ (483). But if that desire is natural, is not the desired gift a matter of demand (exigence)? Not exactly, although it would be equally wrong to make it a matter of mere ‘velléité,’ indecision. ‘The spirit does not only desire God himself, but God such as he “cannot not be” [a phrase reminiscent of Anselm’s Proslogion], God giving himself freely through the initiative of his pure love. To take up the word “demand” in a new meaning, let us say that, far from being a lesser demand, it is an “exigence de plus”’ (484). The subsequent attacks on de Lubac concerned precisely this intimacy between nature and grace, gift and desire, and the threat of the supranatural as a matter of demand rather than of free gift. Here the issue of pura natura loomed large; natura pura being the hypothetical assumption that God could have created man in a natural state within a natural horizon, in puris naturalibus, and it was pure nature that became the battle cry of de Lubac’s opponents. In order to safeguard religion as the realm of supranatural grace,

23 In the following pages references without a title refer to Surnatural.

Corpus Mysticum 209 a ‘secular’ area was required, however hypothetical, to make the latter shine at all. As always—that is, as of the days of late Scholasticism and neo-Thomism as sealed by Vatican I—squeezing everything into supranatural religion was a nonstarter since it undermined the efficiency of grace which seamlessly coincided with the efficiency of the sacraments which, in their turn, seamlessly coincided with the supranatural power of the Church. It was de Lubac’s sin, then, by ignoring the hypothesis of the pura natura, to have been excessively religious. As mentioned above, a Kafkaesque process (a virtual, not a real one) dragged on over a period of 14 years just to evaporate into the thin air of Vatican II. Meanwhile de Lubac had to bide his time while on the one hand his detractors succeeded in having him, short of condemned, in any case, marginalized. In the meantime, he was suspended from his teaching duties at the Catholic Faculty of Theology in Lyon. At the same time, his supporters in Rome (among whom the cardinals Bea and Montini, alias the later Paul VI) were too bashful—or, should one say: did not have the guts?—to speak out, certainly not after the publication of Humani Generis (1950) in which the nouvelle théologie was, if not condemned, then certainly criticized (albeit obliquely—a fact that was in itself indicative of the confusion inside the Vatican with different factions fighting for the support of Pope Pius XII whose private thoughts about this conflict remain obscure to the present day). 24 Once his own man as pope, Paul VI did not become any firmer with regard to matters of nature. For so much was clear after the disappearance of the controversy over pure nature that, as if parodying de Lubac, nature was ever more imbued by the sacred so as to have its immoveable moral structure written in stone. Supreme irony indeed: with the concept of pure nature gone, nature and supernature increasingly merged as did morality and religion, leaving no room for the ‘natural’ to function, if not independently, then alongside the supranatural. In fact, the battle against the pura natura turned out to have been fought in vain. While Vatican II indeed produced a diminishment of a kind in the pomp and circumstances of supernatural sacramentality, the Church’s grip on the ‘natural’ only increased, as proved by the abovementioned focus on the dogmatic-biological nature of the problems surrounding the beginning and the end of life. It was with good reason that Pope Francis, right at the beginning of his pontificate, counseled to move away a bit from this biological obsession and ‘talk in context’ about

24 Cf. While refraining from taking a public stance, Montini sent de Lubac private notes of encouragement. See Mémoire, 77. As for the anonymous and phantom-like nature of Humani Generis, de Lubac refers to quite a bizarre story, told to him by his friend, Etienne Gilson, about a conversation between Anton Pegis of the Pontifical Institute of Toronto and one of Lubac’s principle opponents in Rome, Charles Boyer SJ, who pointed out to Pegis “all the passages in Humani Generis that targeted De Lubac.” Mémoire, 127.

210  Burcht Pranger these aspects of nature, and, preferably ‘not all the time.’25 Another irony was added to this one: each and every member of the nouvelle théologie movement, whether old (de Lubac) or young (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger) all of whom were not so long ago considered dangerously modern, sided with Paul VI’s turn to ‘natural’ conservatism (as in Humanae Vitae of 1968), their language taking on the polemical vehemence and tone against modernity both inside and outside the Church that had not so long ago been the hallmark of their opponents. Among other things, one wonders: why, as in the case of de Lubac, having taken so much trouble to admire and defend someone like Teilhard de Chardin with his broad view of nature or—for that matter—Patristic mavericks such as Origen with his comprehensive view of cosmos and nature converging into the point zero of the incarnated Christ (Teilhard) or into the apokatastatis pantoon/the restoration of everything (Origen)? Did not de Lubac’s rehabilitation in fact come down to a Pyrrhus victory in which, subterraneously, the old Thomistic template with its iron grip on both the natural and the supranatural continued to live on? Or to turn the question around: once freed from the threat of pure nature, were its former opponents, for all their resourcing in the past realms of undivided nature and creation under grace, up to the task of upholding the force of nature, sacred and profane, in the present time? With John Milbank, I think of de Lubac as someone who was utterly brilliant. His was not, however, the brilliance that laid the foundations for a Radical Theology or, for that matter, a theology of any kind. For that, he was just too broad, too tormented also, too besieged by the paradoxes of his humanism and his religion. In my view, what we have to confront here is a blurred humanism on de Lubac’s part reflected in a superior writing style and sudden, shrewd psychological insights that, as in an iron embrace, at once allowed him to stare into the potential abysses of an Augustinian position he was on the brink of making his own and, with a little support of his Catholic framework, flatly to deny or reject those abysmal dimensions. Generally speaking, de Lubac’s characterization of Augustine with its emphasis on the continuity of grace and nature looks like an ‘EasternPatristic’ one; in a sense, it betrays his love of Origen. What, then, does he make of the famous passage from De correptione et gratia with its clear distinction between grace before and after the fall, the adiutorium sine quo non and the adiutorium quo? Let us look at Augustine’s own phrasing in De correptione et gratia: First there was the freedom of will, the posse non peccare (the power not to sin). The new immortality will be much greater: non posse mori (the inability to die). The first one was the power to persevere, the

25 “A big heart open to God,” interview with Pope Francis in The Thinking of Faith. The Online Journal of the British Jesuits (2013), 8.

Corpus Mysticum 211 power not to leave the good. The new freedom will be the bliss of perseverance, the inability to leave the good. 26 Emphasizing the unity of grace de Lubac smooths over the split between the two states elevating the entire episode of the non posse non peccare up to the eschatological level of eternity rather than time—God’s point of view, in other words. In fact, de Lubac derides those who are puzzled by the question of the precise realization of grace as auditorium quo, quoting Tauler about those who did not understand Eckhart: ‘He talked to you from the point of view of eternity, you have taken him to talk from the point of view of time’ (65). Meanwhile, ici-bas the elect is given grace and perseverance. In other words, they are supported by the adiutorium quo, but God knows how to describe that state in terms other than the usual ‘activities’ of the Catholic faithful throughout the ages: praying, and trusting the sacramental efficacy of grace. The full sight of grace in its unsuspended state is hidden from view, however, not in its sacramental efficacy but in its undisguised presence. In my view, we have a serious lapsus here in de Lubac’s reading of Augustine, even though, admittedly it goes a long way back in history. If his strong point is to have emphasized the unity of grace—whose unfolding would have been less problematic in the Greek Fathers—he fails to take account of the fact that Augustine’s grace functions under the aegis of eternity and time, which can be distinguished but not cut loose one from the other. Thus, notions such as predestination (not discussed by de Lubac) and perseverance abound with eternity, so to speak, to the extent of not being able to pause before the gates of time. In fact, while temporality is shot through with eternity, it is another question altogether whether we have the semantic tools to give linguistic and intellectual shape to that presence. It is quite astonishing to see how de Lubac brushes off those who do not distinguish between the points of view of time and eternity as if such a switch can be made effortlessly and without having a look at Augustine’s own handling of that pair. This lapse is all the more painful if one realizes that for Augustine eternity’s pressure (predestination!) is felt at all times. Unless one manages to produce a more humane and dynamic view of this pressure on time, creation, and, not least, the manifestation of eternity— something James Wetzel and I myself have tried our hands on27—nature in Augustine is either a trompe l’oeil or a monster. A trompe l’oeil, since as Adolf von Harnack remarked already, any distinction between a minor grace before the fall and a major grace after the fall and, by implication, between the posse peccare and the non posse mori is bound to be Pelagian at heart.28 A monster,

26 Augustine, De correptione et gratia, chapter 12, PL: 44:936 (=Patrologiae Cursus completus series Latina, ed. J.P. Migne). 27 James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: CUP, 1992); “Time after Augustine,” in Religious Studies 31 (1995), 341–57; M.B. Pranger, Eternity’s Ennui. 28 Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932), 216.

212  Burcht Pranger if predestination, carrying rejection inside itself, would be the sum total of nature in its entirety as the unreconciled counterpart of Origen’s apokatastasis pantoon, all face-saving divisions and subdivisions notwithstanding. The history of Christian controversy is one of distinctions, timeless by nature, in the early debates already about the Trinity and the nature(s) of Christ, but to an excessive degree from the Scholastic period. De Lubac was no stranger to that tradition as we have seen above when he accused Baius of making the wrong distinction between nature and supra-nature, not to mention his own distinction—unaccounted for—between time and eternity. For someone who has written extensively about the fluidity of distinctions between the senses of Scripture29 and the subtle distinctions inside and outside the corpus mysticum, such literalness would seem to be a bit out of character. Admittedly, part of de Lubac’s battle against the defenders of pura natura upholding a distinct difference between nature and supra-nature was directed against counterproductive distinctions. But, alas, he refrained from questioning the nature of distinctions as such. For that, the institutional pressure on the unity of the Church governing and preceding each and every distinction made by its faithful, intellectual, and mystical members, was just too strong. There is no denying, however, that the distinction between the two natures in Christ, for instance, is in a sense a ‘fake’ distinction that, in order to function within an institute, first has to be assessed within the dynamics of the corpus mysticum. From that mysterious requirement, it follows that quasi-philosophical distinctions such as Eriugena’s four divisions of nature are equally ‘fake’ yet utterly functional headed as they are by nature’s supreme unity and nothingness. And, to jump to the Scholastic period with its distinctions that were so useful within the confines of logical argumentation, the Allzermalmer Eckhart comes to mind whose encompassing force of unity was utterly devastating with regard to the sustainability of any distinction, and, subsequently, of the sustainability of any institution or individual, or for that matter, nature, although it was there that any beginning and end was to be found. In conclusion, I want to return to the Eucharist of ‘the first thousand years’ as the corpus mysticum and as such the guarantee of nature in its width as well as in its atomic smallness. Here too we have distinctions of sorts in the guise, for instance, of the three corpora of Christ, his earthly body, his heavenly body, and his body on the altar. Yet it is his body on the altar that, in the Eucharist, makes Him present, lending life to the cosmos and the Church. As was his wont, de Lubac set up a cover operation to mark the change in status in the Eucharist by highlighting the shift from the corpus mysticum in the Eucharist to the Church as corpus mysticum, thus signaling awareness of the problem without dealing with it intrinsically. By that, I mean that, in my view, de Lubac did not dare to draw the ultimate conclusion from this shift: the fact

29 Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964).

Corpus Mysticum 213 that the doctrine of transubstantiation that accompanied this shift from altar to Church, was, operationally speaking, the opposite of the corpus mysticum, losing that glorious status for sound, historical reasons. Rather than the subtle, dynamic, and unfathomable center of the universe, the Eucharist turned into an automation, an oyster closed in on itself. As mentioned above, this emptying out of the Eucharist as corpus mysticum strengthened not only the institutionalization of the Church, but it also gave rise to the individual devotion that was triggered, as it were, by the empty, awesome, and claustrophobic sacrality of transubstantiation. Next, individual devotion grew into individuality as such—a phenomenon with which the Church, for understandable reasons, has never come to terms. The central theme now came down to the centrifugal effect of both institutionalization and individualization caused by the diminished status of the Eucharist as corpus mysticum. Mirrored against the corpus mysticum in its enhanced status, this miracle of substance extended into a limitless proliferation of (Eucharistic) imagination. As a consequence, this new transubtantiational mechanics of the Eucharist did not only send ‘mystical’ nature into exile. It also created a sea-like void in the process. All this resulted in the second ‘thousand years’ in which the Church made the sacrament. Sadly, de Lubac’s intellectual efforts to reestablish the freshness and dynamics of the corpus mysticum were severely undercut precisely by the tenacity of those second thousand years with their fusion of ecclesiastical authority, faith, and learning. Here we face the trompe l’oeil of the Baroque. The triumphant Church, blending heaven and earth, revolved around its own axis meanwhile keeping up appearances of there being a nature and supra-nature of infinite proportions. In fact, however, in spite of endless intellectual controversies, this glorious Church could not account for any distinctio (ir)realis between nature and supra-nature, and, as a consequence, no distinction was able to survive. If de Lubac had only had the courage to confront Pascal rather than Baius and Jansenius, he would have been forced to come out of his hiding place. Instead, he was constrained by an institution that, suggesting cosmic width and breadth, was left with a miraculous body on the altar. Surrounded by the void of abundant imagery, that petrified body, having lost its status of corpus mysticum to its sole possessor, the Church, had meanwhile given up on the mystery of nature.30

30 I am talking about the intrinsic doctrine of transubstantiation here and I do not want to diminish the Eucharistic exuberance and joy of Laudato Si mentioned above. That very exuberance, as another part of what I have coined Eucharistic proliferation, leaves the paradox unsolved of the transfer of the Eucharist as corpus mysticum from the altar to the Church and its subsequent status during the second thousand years. In my article ‘L’eucharistie et la prolifération de l’imaginaire aux XIe et XIIe siècles,’ I have argued at length how, in my view, the Eucharist as transubstantiation both mechanized the change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and caused the Eucharist to close in on itself, thus triggering the exuberance of Eucharistic devotion. From a more ‘organic’ point of view, however, this self same development can be seen as a deepening of preexisting material.

214  Burcht Pranger What about Hent de Vries? As mentioned above, this article, in which proliferation and brevity play a major part, is meant to ask him a question. This question comes down to the following. What are we to think if the corpus mysticum as body politic, however hypothetically, returns to its origin: the Eucharist proper? In other words, what will happen if, taking on the guise of a historian, we go back in time and find full religion rather than its formalized mystical traces as well as its miracles? Part of the answer is easy: with Hent de Vries, I would doubt whether ‘full or positive religion’ ever existed. Yet the question remains: if the Eucharist is not a miracle but a corpus mysticum, how do we assess it, or, for that matter, how do we assess history including its foundational principles such as the Eucharist if those principles refuse to answer to or fit in with de Vries’ mystical postulate?

12 Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory John Rawls with Hent de Vries Alexandre Lefebvre

University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

John Rawls (1921–2002) gave very few interviews over the course of his career. Although he was the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, he was widely admired as the most modest as well.1 To mark the occasion of his retirement in 1991, however, he accepted an invitation from his students. 2 Together they covered a wide range of topics on his life, work, reception, and teaching. But in Rawls’s own draft copy of the interview, included with his personal papers and open for view at Harvard University, he adds a fascinating section that does not appear in the published version. Upon answering all the questions the students asked, he notes down a few “Questions They Didn’t Ask Me” and plays the role of both interviewer and interviewee: Questions They Didn’t Ask Me There were lots of questions they didn’t ask me in the HRP [Harvard Review of Philosophy] interview. Some of those they could have asked I’ll answer here: HRP (as imagined):  You never talk about religion in your classes, although

sometimes the discussion borders on it. Why is that? Do you think religion of no importance? Or that it has no role in our life? JR:  … On the role of religion, put it this way. Let’s ask the question: Does life need to be redeemed? And if so, why; and what can redeem it? I would say yes: life does need to be redeemed. By life I mean the ordinary round of being born, growing up, falling in love and marrying and having children; seeing that they grow up, go to school, and have children themselves; of supporting ourselves and carrying

1 Frazer, “The Modest Professor,” Gališanka, John Rawls, Pogge, John Rawls, 1–27. See also any of the several obituaries and tributes written by journalists, colleagues, friends, and students. 2 Rawls, “John Rawls: for the Record.”

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-13

216  Alexandre Lefebvre on day after day; of growing older and having grandchildren and eventually dying. All that and much else needs to be redeemed. HRP:  Fine, but what’s this business about being redeemed? It doesn’t say anything to me. JR:  Well, what I mean is that what I called the ordinary round of life – growing up, falling in love, having children and the rest – can seem not enough by itself. That ordinary round must be graced by something to be worthwhile. That’s what I mean by redeemed. The question is what is needed to redeem it?3 It may be surprising to hear Rawls raise these kinds of concerns. The main question associated with his work is the following: how is it possible for an institutional order to be just? And the theoretical framework and concepts that he developed to address it have since passed into the vernacular of political philosophy. But throughout his career Rawls’s wrestled with an equally fundamental question: how is it possible for a human life to be worthwhile?4 Sometimes, it is true, the context for this question is dark, as when he wonders whether, in light of the evils of human history, “one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth?”5 Most often, however, the unspoken setting is rather more mundane, as is the case in the addendum to the interview: it is everyday human existence, “the ordinary round of life,” that needs to be elevated in order to be redeemed. Elevated and redeemed by what? This chapter examines the answer Rawls gives in his masterpiece, A Theory of Justice (1971). I argue that his signature concept from that work – the original position – can be interpreted as a “spiritual exercise” designed to help people in liberal democracies to work upon, transform, and ultimately redeem themselves. To guide my investigation, I rely on Hent de Vries’s forthcoming Spiritual Exercises: Concepts and Practices. As well as serving as a superb overview of the idea of spiritual exercises from classical to contemporary times, his book demonstrates the political salience and urgency of spiritual exercises for our own turbulent times. Given that Rawls develops spiritual exercises within a wider theory of social justice, and given that our own contemporary liberal democracies are in dire need of rejuvenation, there is no better text than Spiritual Exercises to address the challenge of how we – as political selves, yes, but so too as individuals – are to maintain grace and openness, indeed liberality, in the face of a world that seems intent on displaying its opposite.

3 Rawls, “Questions on Reflection.” 4 I borrow Pogge’s formulation of this question, John Rawls, 4, 26–27. See also Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 310–314. 5 Rawls, Political Liberalism, lx.

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 217

The Rawlsian Sage In Spiritual Exercises de Vries treats a characteristically wide range of authors and thinkers, spanning philosophy, religion, and literature. The star of the book, however, is Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), the French historian and philosopher who revived an appreciation of philosophy as a “way of life.” For readers unfamiliar with his work, Hadot advanced two major claims over his career. The first is that ancient philosophy, as well as select traditions of modern philosophy that consciously follow in its footsteps, understood philosophy as an existential option and commitment to a specific way of living one’s entire life. Philosophy, on this view, is not primarily a theoretical discourse, which we moderns all too quickly assume it to be; it is, instead, a certain way of living and seeing the world (which theoretical discourse helps to bring about). The second claim Hadot makes is that ancient philosophy is itself comprised of “spiritual exercises,” which are practices and techniques by which an individual becomes a philosopher and brings about a comprehensive change in his or her way of living. These can be physical (such as dietary regimes), discursive (such as dialogue and meditation), or intuitive. The crux of Hadot’s interpretation of ancient philosophy is that philosophical discourse is itself a spiritual exercise – one conducted in dialogue and instruction, as well as through solitary meditation – to reorient one’s way of life and become a living, breathing philosopher.6 We will discuss these themes with Rawls and de Vries in a moment. But I begin with another key concept of Hadot’s: the sage. The figure of the sage is important for Hadot because it is crucial to ancient philosophy. In a nutshell, in antiquity wisdom is a mode of being, and the kind of being who is fully and completely wise is called a “sage.” Each school of philosophy has its own sage – for example, Socrates for Platonism and Stoicism, Epicurus for Epicureanism – which philosophers (that is, members of the schools who love and pursue wisdom yet are not always equal to it) strive to imitate. The sage serves as a kind of regulative ideal that determines the philosopher’s way of life: he or she is always happy, always identical to him or herself, always and only interested in true and important things, and naturally, always unattainable.7 He or she is also the ideal figure who unifies the various spiritual exercises of philosophical schools. Though they may never reach that height, the sage inspires philosophers to a certain style of life. It might sound like a bizarre question, but is there a sage to be found in Rawls’s philosophy? For readers of Rawls, the very suggestion will raise red flags. The figure of the sage seems perilously close to a philosophical

6 See especially Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? and Philosophy as a Way of Life. 7 Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 220.

218  Alexandre Lefebvre position he took pains to avoid: perfectionism, insofar as it requires the state to dedicate greater liberty and resources for certain individuals, “on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value.”8 More generally speaking, the sage just seems like something we should not expect to find in Rawls. After all, the standard interpretation is that he is primarily concerned with deriving moral principles and legal rules to establish the constitutional and political framework for a just society. Following Paul Weithman, let us call this a “rights-based” interpretation of Rawls.9 Advanced by such readers as Ronald Dworkin, it consists of placing Rawls in a long line of political philosophers who identify the core feature of liberalism as a basic right, or set of rights, to equal concern and respect.10 If we take Rawls to be a rights-based thinker, it is indeed fruitless to go looking for the sage. But what if there is another way to read him? I do not mean to downplay the importance of equal rights for Rawls. He did not enshrine it as the first principle of justice as fairness for nothing.11 But following interpretations of Rawls by such thinkers as Weithman, Arnold Davidson, Andrius Gališanka, and Susan Neiman I take Rawls to be a “conception-based” (and not a “rights-based”) philosopher.12 By this, I mean that for him the real foundation of a liberal democratic society does not lie in the rights and rules it legislates but in the conception of the person (according to early Rawls) or citizen (according to late Rawls) it upholds and promotes. Basic rights and constitutional rules are simply institutional measures to express, defend, and promote a particular conception of the person and citizen. Consider a striking passage from an article by Rawls, the sentiment of which is found throughout A Theory of Justice as well: “When fully articulated, any conception of justice expresses a conception of the person, of relations between persons and of the general structure and ends of social cooperation. To accept the principles that represent a conception is at the same time to accept an ideal of the person, and in acting from these principles, we realize such an ideal.”13 Strictly speaking, there is no personified sage in Rawls’s writings, no charismatic equal of Kierkegaard’s Socrates or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. (Interpreters of Rawls have argued that he himself, i.e., Jack Rawls, was the living embodiment of his philosophy, but that is a different matter.)14 Yet we can see that the “ideal of the person” he outlines here plays a similar role. The idea is that by acting on principles

  8 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 289. For a book length critique of perfectionism from a Rawlsian perspective, see Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection. See also my “Cavell and Rawls.”   9 Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, 11–12. 10 Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 185–222. 11 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 266. 12 See especially Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, 11–14, 13 Rawls, A Kantian Conception of Equality, 254–255. 14 See Nagel’s touching eulogy, “Remembrances of John Rawls.”

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 219 of justice we become a certain kind of person and realize a particular ideal of the person in ourselves. And that makes his ideal of the person sage-like for two reasons. First, like the sage, the ideal of the person is precisely that: an ideal. “Accept[ing] the principles of justice,” as Rawls laconically puts it here, is no mean feat; it entails wholehearted commitment to justice in everyday life that perhaps only heroes and saints can aspire to. Second, and again like the sage, the ideal of the person is ideal in the sense of being attractive, that is to say, a model for a desirable kind of person to become. Why it is attractive will be a key topic in this chapter. For now, however, I simply propose that reading Rawls as a “conception-based” thinker brings him into the orbit of Hadot and de Vries’s work on spiritual exercises. Rawls is more than a democratic theorist working out the right arrangement of rules, laws, and institutions for liberal polities. He is a philosopher – a lover of wisdom – showing us a way of being in the world, suggesting why it is rewarding, and admitting that it is difficult.

Spiritual Exercises In this chapter, I set out to demonstrate that Rawls’s most famous concept from A Theory of Justice, “the original position,” is best understood as a spiritual exercise, one designed to help people living in liberal democracies become the sage-like “ideal of the person.” First, however, I need to state more clearly what a spiritual exercise is. In an interview, Hadot provides a nice short definition. “I would define spiritual exercises,” he says, “as voluntary, personal practices meant to bring about a transformation of the individual, a transformation of the self.”15 There are four criteria here, each of which must be satisfied for an activity to count as a spiritual exercise. Spiritual exercises are voluntary and freely taken up. Spiritual exercises are personal, such that one’s own person is a matter of care and concern. Spiritual exercises are practices, meaning that they are regular activities. And spiritual exercises are transformative, the goal of which is to alter the person practicing them. By way of example, picture yourself a Stoic, circa late second century. Your first exercise of the day would be a premeditation, in which you mentally rehearse potential difficulties of the hours to come so as to bear them when they happen. Marcus Aurelius, emperor that he was, braced himself daily with these words: “Today I will be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”16 In the same vein, you could add a negative visualization, in which you imagine you lose everything that you love and hold dear, so as to contemplate impermanence. After these solitary exercises, you might later meet and dialogue with a friend

15 Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 87. 16 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.1.

220  Alexandre Lefebvre or teacher, which for Stoics were occasions for spiritual activity.17 Maybe the conversation dwells on physics and your place in a rationally ordered cosmos; or maybe discussion steers toward ethics and the need for coherence in your wider pattern of actions – either way, you acknowledge your place within a larger whole and remember the need to harmonize with it.18 Finally, to finish the day and prepare for the next, before bed you examine your conscience to observe where your thoughts and deeds fell short of a philosophical ideal, and then reflect on how to become worthier of the events, both “good” and “bad” (and appreciating the fundamental revision Stoicism performs on these terms), that have befallen and will befall you. My extended example is not by coincidence drawn from antiquity. That is Hadot’s specialization and he made it his life’s mission to demonstrate that spiritual exercises are the core of all major schools of ancient philosophy. Now and then, he offers suggestions and sketches as to how modern authors (such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson) inherit this tradition and design their own spiritual exercises.19 He also wrote a late book on Goethe that situates him in the long line of ancient, Christian, and romantic spiritual exercises. 20 But for the vast majority of his writings, Hadot is firmly anchored in ancient history, philosophy, and philology. Needless to say, de Vries is a great admirer of Hadot. But the opening move of Spiritual Exercises is to unshackle spiritual exercises and propose a vast expansion that goes beyond any limits that Hadot might have set. Here is how de Vries puts it: Spiritual exercise, I claim, can be brought back and interpreted as a single “structural concept,” whose terminological variations, as well as existential and political reverberations across different ages, traditions and cultures, is a source and resource of a multiplicity of liberatory or, more precisely, transformative practices. Their inspiring examples no less than cautionary tales reveal special moments and have their proper momentum. And it is this temporal dimension of their instant and instance, not to be confused with their historical context, role, or reception that is relevant to their present meaning and force: a significance and effectiveness that is virtually global in our times, but, perhaps, always was. 21

17 Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 22–38, 146–171. 18 Hadot, The Inner Citadel, 243–307. 19 Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, 253–270, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 9, 96, 125–128. 20 Hadot, N’oublie pas de vivre. See also his short book on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein et les limites du langage. 21 De Vries, Spiritual Exercises, 7. Page references to Spiritual Exercises are from the advanced manuscript draft Hent de Vries kindly shared with me.

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 221 Spiritual exercises may have originated in ancient Greece, and then incubated in Rome and early Christianity, but there is no reason to confine our attention to these times and places. Nothing bars us from opening up cross-civilizational perspectives to investigate spiritual exercises in world religions and non-Western cultures. And de Vries positively encourages us to experiment with designing spiritual exercises for our own present-day needs. That is why he characteristically speaks of spiritual exercises as “generic and generative.”22 This dual quality is the source of their power and enduring relevance: spiritual exercises can be creatively adapted to new contexts (generative), without ceasing to recognizably be spiritual exercises (generic). To be clear, Hadot would not have opposed any of these suggestions. He often observes, for example, how what he calls spiritual exercises can be found in Buddhist and Indian philosophy.23 Moreover, as Arnold Davidson reports in his Preface to Hadot’s interviews, “We had innumerable discussion about, and Hadot was passionately interested in, the ways in which the notions of spiritual exercises and philosophy as a way of life could be applied and extended to unexpected domains.”24 Yet however much these possibilities intrigued him, the fact remains that Hadot only occasionally extends his analyses of spiritual exercises beyond the ancient world. De Vries takes the fateful step in that direction and will help us to build a bridge toward Rawls. But perhaps the reader is wondering: why Rawls in particular? Even if you are willing to entertain the possibility that we can find spiritual exercises in his work, that does not address the more basic question of why we should bother doing so. What value does it bring? Allow me, then, to provide a brief justification.

The Original Position as Spiritual Exercise Start with the big picture. Liberalism is the philosophical foundation that has underpinned most developed democracies for decades. Yet over the past several years, it has faced a series of challengers going by the name of populism, authoritarianism, nativism, and nationalism. The world, it seems, has turned its back on the doctrine of individual rights, social equality, and rule of law that was so widely celebrated only a decade ago. 25 How can liberals respond to this challenge? There is, of course, pressing need for renewed defense of core liberal legal and political institutions, such as rule of law, individual rights, an independent judiciary, and division of powers. Yet there is also an opportunity for an ethical defense of liberalism. As an excellent history of liberalism concludes, “Liberalism, there

22 De Vries, Spiritual Exercises, 30–55. 23 See, for example, the volume inspired by him, Fiordalis, Buddhist Spiritual Practices. 24 Davidson, Preface, xii. 25 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, Deenan, Why Liberalism Failed.

222  Alexandre Lefebvre are those who say, contains within itself the resources it needs to articulate a conception of the good and a liberal theory of virtue. Liberals should reconnect with the resources of their liberal tradition to recover, understand, and embrace its core values.”26 I could not agree more and here is where I would like to inject Rawls into the conversation. We have heard him say that by acting from a set of principles we become a different person. But he is not talking about just any principles (or persons). His moral and political philosophy centers on principles that members of liberal democracies already accept and affirm in their considered judgments.27 This point is crucial. At the heart of Rawls’s thought is a simple and guiding intuition. He has faith that most members of liberal democracies believe in the idea that society is and should be a fair system of cooperation over time from one generation to the next.28 This isn’t a view that Rawls imposes on his readers, but one he finds embedded in the political and background cultural of liberal democracies and embodied in its institutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole architectonic of Rawls’s philosophy aims to clarify, systematize, and secure a conception of society as a fair system of cooperation, and crucially, the corresponding self-conception of persons and citizens that comes with it. Coming back to the question, then, of why we should care whether spiritual exercises can be found in Rawls’s work, we can venture an answer: because a great many of us already accept the principles and aspirational self-conception that his spiritual exercises are based on. Think of it this way: today, the academic and publishing industry is booming with “ways of life” type books. Authors are reaching to such thinkers and traditions as Ptolemy, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Baruch Spinoza, Adam Smith, Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Emma Goldman, Cynicism, Existentialism, psychoanalysis, modern physics, and countless other sources for spiritual meaning and direction. I have no objections to this trend. I’ve even contributed to it with my own work on Bergson and on human rights.29 But what if there was a model and guide for living that many of us already widely accept and which is ubiquitous in our own liberal democratic cultures? That is why I suggest Rawls is pertinent, even urgent, for us today. We don’t necessarily have to reach for distant texts and traditions for a solid alternative for how to live in the modern world. A model is all around us in our own public and background culture. Read in this light, then, Rawls systematizes a perspective that we already have of ourselves and our world, and he provides spiritual exercises to help us realize it.

26 Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, 277. 27 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, xviii. 28 This thought is most succinctly expressed in Rawls’s Justice as Fairness (5–8), which is itself an accessible introduction to A Theory of Justice. 29 Lefebvre, “Human Rights as a Way of Life, and Human Rights and the Care of the Self.”

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 223 It would take a book-length study to catalogue, analyze, and expand the different kinds of spiritual exercises found in Rawls’s work. In addition to the original position, suitable candidates include reflective equilibrium, public reason, and the roles of orientation, reconciliation, and utopic thinking that Rawls identifies with political philosophy. For now, I confine myself to the original position, which Rawls describes as a “thought-experiment” – or spiritual exercise, I will contend – designed to help citizens of liberal democracy to understand and select which principles of justice should regulate the basic institutions of their society.30 Inspired by the social contract tradition, he claims that the principles of justice selected from the perspective of the original position are the terms that regulate the basic institutions of society as a fair system of cooperation between free and equal persons. But what exactly is the original position? Since spiritual exercises are a practical business, it is best to address that question in a pragmatic vein: how do we, here and now, do the original position? Well, it is a reflective exercised practiced on your own. Let’s take it step by step. Step one, imagine that you are with a group of people. But there is a crucial twist: neither you, nor anyone else in the group, know their own identity. You don’t know your sex or gender, social class, religion, ethnicity, talents, conception of the good, or anything else that might differentiate you from other people. As Rawls famously puts it, you are situated behind the “veil of ignorance.”31 Okay, you might say, now what? The spiritual exercise continues with step two: it is up to you, along with all these imagined people who do not know anything about themselves either, to select and agree upon the principles that will regulate the fundamental institutions of your society. Your job, in other words, is to specify the terms of fair social cooperation without being influenced by any positional or partial factors. You are to imagine yourself as a free and equal person, deciding alongside other free and equal people, which principles will govern you. Clearly, the original position is a hypothetical exercise. There is no question of convening citizens at the town square. In a sense, then, nothing happens as a consequence. Polities are not committed by thought-experiments. Nor are real and numerically distinct people deliberating together and changing minds (again, the original position is a hypothetical, not a discursive space of communicative action). Yet at the same time, everything happens: sincerely and repeatedly practiced, an entire worldview can change. Witness the moving final lines of A Theory of Justice. In the following sections, I will explain the specific ways that the original position can be transformative. But it is important to state up front how powerful and total

30 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 14–18, A Theory of Justice, 102–168, Hinton, The Original Position. 31 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 118–123.

224  Alexandre Lefebvre it has the potential to be. To use a favorite term of de Vries’s, Rawls is talking about nothing short of a conversion of one’s way of life: Finally, we may remind ourselves that the hypothetical nature of the original position invites the question: why should we take any interest in it, moral or otherwise? Recall the answer: the conditions embodied in the description of this situation are ones that we do in fact accept…. Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.32 Earlier I gave Hadot’s definition of a spiritual exercise as a voluntary, personal practice meant to bring about a transformation of the individual. The original position satisfies the criteria in letter and spirit. It is voluntary and there is no obligation to take it up. It is personal in that it is a device of self-clarification that we adopt on ourselves and our social world. It is a practice that can be consciously and regularly adopted. And it is transformative, indeed magnificently so: purity of heart, grace, and self-command are all to be won. In the coming sections, we will return to the specifics of this passage, but here I want only to make what I hope is by now an obvious point. The original position is no mere thought-experiment, if that means testing a hypothesis or gauging the consequences of a point of view. It is a spiritual exercise, equal to any proposed in antiquity.

Why Enter the Original Position? Rawls has just given us a very strong – extraordinary, even – list of reasons as to why we as individuals might want to practice the original position as a spiritual exercise. We will discuss these in a moment with de Vries. But first, it is important to appreciate how, from a certain self-interested perspective, unattractive and even irrational the original position might appear. Put it this way: the purpose of the original position is to ensure a level playing field for society. That is what the veil of ignorance is all about:

32 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 514.

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 225 to remove any positional advantage, whether due to natural contingency or social accident, that might skew the terms of social cooperation in a particular direction. But say that, in the real world, you are an advantaged member of society. Say, to speak directly, that like me you are a white, upper middle class, able-bodied heterosexual male in a Western capitalist liberal democracy. Why, from a strictly rational and self-interested point of view, should I entertain a point of view (i.e., the original position) that would bracket my positional advantage? In the present state of affairs, I definitely enjoy more than my fair share of what Rawls calls “primary social goods,” which include rights and liberties, opportunities, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect.33 The system is working out fine for me. Disgraced or not, a remark by Louis C.K. is painful apt (in fact, his disgrace only confirms the remark). On whether it is better to be black or white in the United States, the answer couldn’t be clearer: “I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better, who could even argue? If it was an option, I would re-up every year. ‘Oh yeah, I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ve been enjoying that. I’ll stick with white, thank you.’”34 To suspend knowledge of my whiteness – or maleness, or upper middle classness, and the rest – in reflecting on which terms of social cooperation to affirm would be positively irrational. This same observation can be translated into Rawls’s own terms. In setting up the thought-experiment of the original position, he makes an important stipulation about the motivation (the psychology, if you like) of persons in the original position. He assumes that persons in the original position are mutually disinterested and not bound by moral ties to one another. Each is out to secure the most favorable terms of social cooperation for someone who, thanks to the veil of ignorance, does not know their own position.35 The reason why Rawls builds in this stipulation is not relevant for us (it has done with his desire to build his own theory of justice on weaker assumptions about human motivation than utilitarianism does). But the consequence certainly is: for he makes the selection of the principles of justice from within the original position a matter of rational choice. 36 Persons within the original position are in the same situation as the individual who gets to divide a cake on condition that he chooses his piece last. The cake is divided evenly out of self-interest, not altruism. Hence the reason why Rawls calls his theory of justice “justice as fairness”: the name does not mean that justice and fairness are the same thing, but that the principles of justice are agreed to in a situation that is fair. 37

33 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 78–81. 34 Louis C.K., “Chewed Up.” 35 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 12–14. 36 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 15, 221. 37 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 11.

226  Alexandre Lefebvre My point is that no relatively advantaged member of society would ever choose to enter the original position if he or she were thinking like a person in the original position. That is not an objection to the original position but a clarification about what it is trying to accomplish. Rawls is not trying to get us to think more like persons within the original position. Most of us are all too adept at rational self-interest. His goal is to get us to want to become the kind of person who wants to adopt the perspective of the original position. The original position, after all, is by definition a limiting point of view: it incorporates moral conditions that are reasonable to impose on the choice of the principles of justice. Given that, Rawls needs a persuasive explanation as to why ordinary people in liberal democracies – advantaged and disadvantaged alike – would want to adopt it. Why, negatively speaking, is it so bad to be the kind of person who refuses to think about social cooperation without knowing where they and their friends stand in it? Or why, positively speaking, is it so good to become the “ideal kind of person” that I said earlier doubles as the Rawlsian sage? De Vries is an invaluable guide on these questions. Rawls, as we know from the final paragraph of A Theory of Justice, certainly believes that he has convincing reasons. But the benefit of reading Rawls alongside de Vries is to draw out the significance of the original position for our own times. Rawls can sometimes be, well, too Rawlsian, and I worry that the wide human interest of his ideas can get lost in the technicality of his work. Engaging him through the tradition of spiritual exercises that de Vries so skilfully treats allows us to see the forest for the trees.

The Original Position and Impartiality We have heard de Vries call spiritual exercises “generic.” The notion of spiritual exercises, he argues, can be interpreted as a unifying “structuring concept” in that it spans different traditions and cultures, yet keeps on being actualized in different ways.38 Hadot appears to feel the same way. In an interview, he even suggests that, at the end of the day, a single attitude underlies any and all spiritual exercises. It consists in a choice – “a fundamental philosophical choice” – to overcome “the partial, biased, egocentric, egoist self in order to attain the level of the higher self. This self sees all things from a perspective of universality and totality, and becomes aware of itself as part of the cosmos that encompasses, then, the totality of things.”39 The original position falls into this category. To conclude, I will briefly sketch three features of the original position that stem from an aspiration to impartiality. Each feature is based on an observation by de Vries that extends Hadot’s analysis of spiritual exercises.

38 De Vries, Spiritual Exercises, 7. 39 Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 86.

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 227

First Feature: Engagement and Disengagement A favorite spiritual exercise of Hadot’s, which he examines in ancient and modern contexts, is “the view from above.” It consists in ascending, whether literally or in the mind’s eye, to a perspective that can take in the totality of reality.40 The reality in question can be physical or moral, but the essence of the exercise lies in the willingness and effort to pass from our limited and often self-centered point of view to a wider more universal perspective. “I have always rather liked,” he remarks, “the saying of a Chinese philosopher who holds that we are like vinegar flies trapped in a vat; one must get out of his confinement to breathe fresh air in the world.”41 Clearly, the view from above captures something of the sub specie aeternitatis perspective of the original position. But the interpretation that de Vries gives of impartiality is closer to the mark. Rather than see impartiality as gained through spatial distance, he interprets it in terms of commitment and detachment. In every spiritual exercise, there is, according to de Vries, an essential aspect of disengagement: a willed separation and distanciation from the world. But far from being a telos or final state, such disengagement paves the way for fuller immersion and participation. The spiritual experience’s and exercise’s opening gesture of absolute disengagement – absolving itself from the world as we find it but have not yet made it or own – is merely the preparatory training for a proper (i.e., serious, sincere, resolution, and effective) engagement to follow: a propaedeutic or prolegomena in abstract discursive and, often, negative terms and a concrete and, often, positive engagement that is never total or final since it must continue to operate under a different aegis, an eternal aspect or otherwise atemporal and anachronistic vision, that calls it out, that is, forth and back, to its immemorial origin.42 The original position is an exercise in and of letting go: of our own all too dear contingent position, together with the whole texture of attachments (to family, friends, profession, church, and country) wrapped up with it. But the goal, of course, is not to extract oneself from social ties as an isolated individual (that is only what misguided critics think Rawls say). Nor is it to distance oneself from the morality of our own time. Quite the opposite: the purpose of the exercise is to take a deeper dive into that morality and not permit ourselves to be distracted or buffered by our social position. We plunge ourselves, if you like, into the idea that society should be a fair system of cooperation. If we do so regularly, and if we cultivate what

40 Hadot, N’oublie pas de vivre, 87–162, see also During, “Ce que Gagarine a vu.” 41 Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 137. 42 De Vries, Spiritual Exercises, 47. See Chapter Four, “The Essential.”

228  Alexandre Lefebvre Hadot would call a “real” rather than “notional” commitment to it, we find ourselves exposed to, and perhaps eventually committed to, the principles behind our own most considered judgments.43 And that is transformational. We disengage from our social position; we reengage with our social position; and in that ever-renewed activity, we become impartial.

Second Feature: Wonder and the Everyday A theme that Hadot returns to time and again in his writing is perception, specifically the desire to regain a rich and “naïve” perception of the world that would break away from the artificial, habitual, and conventional. This could even be seen as the guiding thread of his life and thought: from his precocious experience in childhood of “oceanic” oneness with the world, to a fateful exam question on Bergson for his baccalaureate, right up to his final book on nature in antiquity.44 Philosophy, for Hadot, does not exactly begin in wonder. Practiced over the course of a lifetime, philosophy is what can return us, for brief and privileged instants at a time, to a state of wonder. Rawls does not discuss the natural world in his writings. But the question of human nature – and especially our moral nature – is front and center in A Theory of Justice. In an important section (§40, “The Kantian Interpretation of Justice as Fairness”), he argues that the original position amounts to a point of view “from which noumenal selves see the world.”45 The reason why, of course, is because it separates the wheat from the chaff: by screening out social and natural contingencies the original position allows our nature as free and equal moral persons to shine through, such that we apprehend our social and political world, fellow human beings, and ultimately ourselves under this aspect. And that, Rawls believes, is a cause of wonder and hope. Of wonder because, we recover a naïve perception of ourselves that pierces through the accumulated happenstance of our empirical existence. And of hope because that naïve perception itself redeems everyday life. The original position is not a hermitage away from our empirical lives; it is a perspective that we can adopt in everyday life on everyday life for everyday life. Recall here the very first words I cited from Rawls in this chapter, from the unpublished “Questions They Didn’t Ask me” addendum to his interview: “[By redemption] what I mean is that what I called the ordinary round of life – growing up, falling in love, having children and the rest – can seem not enough by itself. That ordinary round must be graced by something to be worthwhile.”46 The original position is precisely such a means – or rather, a

43 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 277. 44 Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 6, 125–126, The Veil of Isis. 45 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 225. 46 Rawls, “Questions on Reflection.”

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 229 spiritual exercise – of grace. It is the practical technique Rawls devises to help us inhabit the everyday in the right way. Building from Hadot’s work on naïve perception and wonder, de Vries emphasizes the return to the ordinary and everyday in Spiritual Exercises. In part, this is due to his debt to Stanley Cavell, for whom the therapeutic vocation of philosophy consists of returning words and thoughts to everyday life. But more generally, returning to the ordinary is one half of the activity of any and all spiritual exercises, no less privileged than the moment of rupture. As de Vries puts it: “Snapping out and zooming in – or, effectively, snapping back, after the inaugural estrangement and wonder that its choice and decision revealed to it – defines the format and rhythm, ancient, medieval, early and late modern, that the philosophical ‘way of life’ assume. It is the sole and narrow, if also uncertain, path one must take and that may very well reveal the all too familiar, common and habitual, ordinary and everyday world one had just (and justly) left as strange and wondrous as well.”47 It may seem misplaced to evoke these thoughts in our discussion of Rawls. What, after all, could be less full of wonder – of futurity and imagination – than liberal democracy today? At a time of resurgent populism, lassitude and irony are in the air. But reading Rawls alongside de Vries has the potential to change our mood. For if we appreciate that the principles of justice that underlie our liberal democracies are the ones that our “noumenal selves” would select, two emotions may come to grip us. The first is wonder and appreciation that we live in a world that, to some degree at least, corresponds with the moral aspirations we set for ourselves. The second is anger (righteous indignation, truly speaking) that we may be on the verge of veering away from it.

Third Feature: Global Consciousness I conclude with an explicit and persistent criticism de Vries makes of Hadot. It concerns how Hadot characteristically links religion to ritual and social practice, whereas spiritual exercises are aligned with personal choice and individual practice. The consequence of such a move, says de Vries, is to discount the political and collectively transformative power of spiritual exercises: It is precisely this association of the religious with the social, on the one hand, and of “individual commitment” with spiritual exercise, on the other, that, paradoxically, prevents Hadot from bringing out the proper social and, a fortiori, public and political aspect and element of spiritual practices to the fullest. It is almost as if he had boxed in the

47 De Vries, Spiritual Exercises, 56. See Chapter Five, “From Religion to Wild Mysticism.”

230  Alexandre Lefebvre concept of spiritual exercise in a practice that remains, if not limited to the “sage” and the saint, the hermit or mystic, the poet and existentialist, then at least modelled after the ancient schools with their dialogical relationship between teacher and pupil, spiritual director or confessor and the one being guided or confessing, while also cautioning that – since we cannot go back to the times in which, say, the ancient academies and medieval monastic communities flourished and were a viable option – there is no real possibility to restore them integrally or sincerely.48 De Vries’s criticism is that Hadot failed to fully explore what mattered most: the enduring and even urgent relevance of spiritual exercises for the present day. The sociological contexts for the original spiritual exercises in philosophy and religion are mostly long gone. Universities are not Philosophical schools; and in the secular West, at least, religious communities and practices have transformed beyond recognition since the time of Ignatius of Loyola. Hence the reason why de Vries takes exception to Hadot’s almost exclusive attention to the social, religious, and pedagogic contexts of bygone eras. For all his philological and historical attentiveness, Hadot ignores the contemporary conditions – in terms of both challenges and opportunities – in and through which spiritual exercises could be reinvented. To remedy this deficit de Vries updates one of Hadot’s privileged spiritual exercises. The “cosmic consciousness” of the Stoics is revamped throughout Spiritual Exercises as “global consciousness” for us moderns. This is a brilliant and much-needed move. In bringing the cosmos back down to earth, de Vries explores an entire terrain that, while absent in Hadot, is critical to their shared projects. Economic globalization, mass markets, social media, the network society, climate thinking, the Anthropocene, global history, and global religion all come into play as the next horizon for spiritual exercises. And here I’d like to make room for Rawls too. For the soulcraft of the original position is precisely of this kind: the self-cultivation of an impartial, truly global soul ready and willing to be worthy of the demands of liberal democracy. On this issue, and despite his comparative neglect of political issues, a remark Hadot makes in an interview is apt. Building on his observation that objectivity is both a scholarly and spiritual virtue, he states, “One must get rid of the partiality of the individual and impassioned self, in order to elevate oneself to the universality of the rational self. The exercise of political democracy, as it should be practiced, should correspond to this attitude as well. Self-detachment is a moral attitude that should be demanded of both the politician and the scholar.”49 Rawls would agree wholeheartedly. In fact, he wrote the book on it.

48 De Vries, Spiritual Exercises, 183. See Chapter Six, “Political Spirituality.” 49 Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 167.

Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory 231

Bibliography Davidson, Arnold. “Preface.” The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I Davidson, Second edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Deenan, Patrick. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. During, Élie. “Ce Que Gagarine a Vu: condition orbitale et transcendance technique.” Esprit, no. 433 (2017): 59–67. Dworkin, Ronald. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Fiordalis, David V, editor. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path. Berkeley: Mangalam Press, 2018. Frazer, Michael. “The Modest Professor: Interpretive Charity and Interpretive Humility in John Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 2 (2010): 218–26. Gališanka, Andrius. John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life. translated by Michael Chase, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ———. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. What Is Ancient Philosophy? translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. Wittgenstein et les limites du langage. Paris: Vrin, 2004. ———. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008. ———. N’oublie pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercises spirituels. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008. ———. The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I Davidson. translated by Marc Djaballah. Second ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Hinton, Timothy, editor. The Original Position. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Lefebvre, Alexandre. Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. ———. Human Rights and the Care of the Self. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. ———. “Cavell and Rawls: Modern Political Thought.” Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism, edited by Paola Marrati, London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Louis C.K. “Chewed Up.” 2008. general editor, Image Entertainment. Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. translated by A. S. L. Farquharson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Nagel, Thomas. “Remembrances of John Rawls.” Hum 48, Box 42, Folder 15. Harvard University Archives., 2002. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

232  Alexandre Lefebvre Pogge, Thomas. John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Quong, Jonathan. Liberalism without Perfection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rawls, John. “John Rawls: For the Record.” The Harvard Review of Philosophy 1, Spring (1991): 38–47. ———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. A Theory of Justice. Revised edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “A Kantian Conception of Equality.” Collected Papers, edited by Samuel Freeman, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 303–358. ———. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001. ———. “Questions on Reflection: Harvard Review of Philosophy Interview, Hum 48, Box 42, Folder 12.” Harvard University Archives, 2003. Rosenblatt, Helena. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. de Vries, Hent. Spiritual Exercises: Concepts and Practices. Forthcoming. Weithman, Paul. Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

13 Adorno’s Secular Theology Peter E. Gordon

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Adorno was not a partisan of religious renewal, nor was he in any straightforward sense a religious philosopher. That this point needs to be stated in such bold terms may suggest that we have come to a moment in the philosophical reception of his work when presuppositions that once seemed self-evident now require renewed scrutiny. The philosophical case for “secular faith” in a recent book may serve as further motivation for such a reconsideration, insofar as Adorno makes a relatively brief appearance there in a contrasting role as a thinker with an essentially “religious” conception of human life.1 Just what this rather improbable verdict might mean the context of that book’s arguments will not concern me here. 2 Rather, in this chapter, I wish to confront the question of how religion actually does figure in Adorno’s philosophy, and if we can definitively answer the question as to whether Adorno was essentially a “religious” thinker or a “nonreligious” one. The immediate and most obvious response is that it is a question mal posée. It is entirely possible to read Adorno as a secular, or, more specifically, as a materialist philosopher even while conceding the more nuanced and dialectical point that he permitted himself to draw upon certain theological insights for materialist ends. This dialectical characterization of Adorno’s thought should lead us to discard the dualistic prejudice that secular thought has no place for theological concepts and

1 Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2019), 325. 2 For a longer assessment of Hägglund’s venturesome arguments, see Peter E. Gordon, “Either this World or the Next,” in The Nation (23 September, 2019)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-14

234  Peter E. Gordon must remain wholly indifferent to religious themes. 3 Rather, it should prompt us to acknowledge that Adorno subscribes to a dialectical model of secularization, especially though not exclusively in his understanding of art.4 In homage to the felicitous title of the book by Hent de Vries, we might say that if certain sonorities with a provenance in theology remain audible in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, they suggest nothing more than (but also nothing less than) a theology in pianissimo. 5 They do not fatally compromise but only complement the overwhelmingly secular and materialist character of his thought. In this essay, I want to pursue this line of argument by fastening on what we might call a dialectic of secularization in Adorno’s theory of art. My discussion of this problem must of necessity encompass Adorno’s philosophy in its fullest scope, but for reasons of focus and precision, I wish to pay close attention to only a single and somewhat unusual essay that Adorno wrote during his period of exile in the United States, an essay which he first published in English in the Kenyon Review (1945) under the title, “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today.”6 Before I turn to the details of the lecture itself, a preliminary explanation seems in order. The essay is of particular interest, I would suggest, not least because it encapsulates a great many of the themes of Adorno’s theory of aesthetics, but it does so in a plainspoken style that may have been intended as a concession to an American readership, who, the writer may have assumed (unfairly perhaps) would have been ill-prepared for a more rigorous exposition in dialectical thinking. Although its style may strike us as occasionally reductive or even distortive when compared, for example,

3 The literature on Adorno and theology is extensive. Among the most important English-language monographs are Christopher Craig Brittain, Adorno and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2010); Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. G. Hale (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology” The Harvard Theological Review Vol. 95, No. 3 (July 2002), pp. 291–318; Deborah Cook, “Through a Glass Darkly: Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Adorno Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 2017), pp. 66–78; Martin Shuster, “Adorno and Negative Theology,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016), pp. 97–130; James Gordon Finlayson, James Gordon, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism” Harvard Theological Review Vol. 105, No. 1 (2012), pp. 1–32. Also see Peter E. Gordon, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020), esp. ch.3. 4 See Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. trans. Brian McNeil. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). 5 Hent de Vries, Theologie im Pianissimo & zwischen Rationalität und Dekonstruktion Die Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas (Studies in Philosophical Theology) (The Netherlands: Peeters Publishers, 1989). 6 Adorno, “Theses on Art and Religion Today,” Kenyon Review Vol. 7, No. 4 (1945), pp. 677–682. Republished in Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992), 292–298.

Adorno’s Secular Theology 235 to the forbidding language deployed by the author in his incomplete and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), the very simplicity of its statements might also serve as a helpful overture into the more challenging argumentation that the author pursued elsewhere. In length, the essay is rather brief: it consists in nothing more than seven distinct “theses” that address the historical and present-day relationship between religion and art. Adorno admitted to his readership that the presentation of his essay in this broken format meant that he could not fulfill the philosophical requirement of logical completion. “I am fully aware,” he writes, “of how unsatisfactory these fragmentary theses are.”7 But we cannot regard this merely as an admission of failure since we must recall that elsewhere in his writing Adorno defends the fragment against the systemizing ambitions of traditional philosophy. As early as the 1931 inaugural address at Frankfurt, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” he declared that thought can no longer claim to enjoy the power that would be sufficient “to grasp the totality of the real.”8 In an era characterized by pervasive social antagonism and conflict, the arrogant ideal of the philosophical system must yield to the form of the essay that would not seek to comprehend reality as a rational whole but would instead “penetrate the detail” and “explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality.”9 A similar point is made in “The Essay as Form,” where he suggests that the non-totalizing form of the essay can be compared to “the behavior of someone in a foreign country” who must read without a dictionary and learns the meaning of terms in “constantly changing contexts” rather than with fixed meanings. A form of presentation that forgoes the rigors of the system will release thought into “open intellectual experience,” even if it must pay for this freedom with “a lack of security that the norm of established thought fears like death.”10 Along with Walter Benjamin (whose own posthumously published “theses” on the concept of history and may have furnished Adorno with a model for his own “theses” on art and religion), Adorno was adept at the anti-systemic form of thinking with the particular that he called, in Negative Dialectics, the “micrological glance [der mikrologische Blick].”11 Admittedly, one might ask if there is not a certain irony, or even an outright contradiction, between Adorno’s stated wish to set philosophy free onto the terrain of “open intellectual experience” and his readiness to impose constraints on his own thinking by summarizing his claims in the form of “theses.” The catechism-like format suggests a closed statement of principles rather than open

  7 Adorno, Theses, 297.   8 Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 23–39; quote from 23.   9 Adorno, The Actuality of Philosophy, 39. 10 Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 91–11; quote from 101. 11 Adorno, Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften 6 (Suhrkamp, 1997), 400.

236  Peter E. Gordon experiments in thought.12 The essay, however, expressed an impulse that was, in Adorno’s words, “the exact opposition of the theological.”13 I will leave this concern aside for now and will return to it briefly at the conclusion. In what follows, I wish to focus on two distinct claims in the “Theses.” First is what one might call (1) the “secularization-of-art thesis,” namely, that even if we can partly concede the controversial suggestion that, in a prior historical epoch, religion and art once cohered in some kind of archaic unity, this syndrome of the aesthetic and the religious no longer obtains today; and, furthermore, that any attempt forcefully to resurrect this unity under current social-historical conditions of irreversible rationalization can only yield atavistic and potentially authoritarian specimens of aesthetic-religious kitsch. The second claim, a dialectical response to the first, expresses what one might call (2) “the thesis of a secular theology,” namely, that once we have accommodated ourselves to the dissolution of the primal unity of religion and art, we can nonetheless identify modes of modern aesthetic experience that successfully recapitulate the essence of what was once promised in religion without, however, indulging in the illusion of a regression to pre-secular conditions. The enormous challenge of Adorno’s “Theses” is to understand how he could simultaneously endorse both of these claims. Namely, we must try to appreciate the dialectical reasoning by which Adorno believed could embrace (2) the theological element in modern aesthetic experience without violating (1) the premises of his own account of the secularization of aesthetics.

The Secularization of Aesthetics Adorno understands the history of art as only one component within a multifaceted process of disenchantment. Much like Walter Benjamin, he presupposes that originally art and religion were bound together within a unified experience of sacred meaning. “The oldest artworks,” wrote Benjamin, “developed in the service of a ritual, first magical, then religious.”14 It was Benjamin’s view that the “auratic” character of the traditional artwork was conditional upon its embeddedness in ritual or cultic forms and that, well

12 Elsewhere Adorno contrasts the “closed” dialectic of German idealism with his own recommendation of an “open” dialectic. See Adorno, And Introduction to Dialectics. Christoph Ziermann, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. (Polity, 2017); see esp. Lecture 3 (30 May, 1958), 21. 13 Adorno, The Essay as Form, 107. 14 In German as Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,“ (1st and 2nd versions), in Gesammelte Schriften. Band I, 2. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds. (Suhrkamp, 1974): 431-508. Quoted here from the third edition, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version) in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4 (1938-1940), Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 251-283; quote from 256.

Adorno’s Secular Theology 237 into the modern era, one can still discern traces of the artwork’s religious origin. The archaic origins of aesthetic experience in magical or religious practice persist well into the bourgeois era as a “secularized ritual” (säkularisiertes Ritual); the aura has not yet disappeared even in “the most profane forms of the worship of beauty [auch noch in den profansten Formen des Schönheitsdienstes].”15 For Benjamin, the persistence of the aura was not only an aesthetic but also a political problem. Overcoming the worshipful and submissive posture of bourgeois aesthetic experience was in his view a correlative to the overcoming of bourgeois society, since a proletarian revolution could be achieved only if the masses understood themselves no longer as passive spectators but as active participants in the collective construction of both aesthetic and political experience. Adorno did not share Benjamin’s sanguine opinion regarding the dissolution of the aura. “Aura,” he wrote, “is not only—as Benjamin claimed—the here and now of the artwork, it is whatever points beyond its givenness, its content; one cannot abolish it and still want art.”16 The persistence of the aura could not be dismissed merely as a residual and atavistic force that inhibited the modern subject from recognizing its own agency. It was also a sign of the artwork’s singular power as a sign of possibility. “Even demystified artworks,” Adorno explained, “are more than what is literally the case in them.”17 The attempt to dissolve the aura entirely and completely would not result in art’s revolutionary emancipation, it would merely end in the “de-aestheticization of art [Entkunstung der Kunst].”18 Notwithstanding this crucial disagreement, however, Adorno was essentially in agreement with Benjamin regarding the claim that art is traceable historically to magical and religious contexts. Modern aesthetic experience, for Adorno, is best understood as the ultimate fruit of a secularization process. Crucial to his argument is the further claim that, despite moments of pathological regress, this process exhibits a strong unidirectionality, since the secularization of aesthetics figures as merely a single vector within an overdetermined and multifaceted socio-historical process of secularization: The lost unity between art and religion, be it regarded as wholesome or as hampering, cannot be regained at will. This unity was not a matter of purposeful cooperation, but resulted from the whole objective structure of society during certain phases of history, so the break is objectively conditioned and irreversible.19

15 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version), 256. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota, 1998), 56. My emphasis. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 56 18 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 56. German quoted from Aesthetische Theorie, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 6: 73. 19 Adorno, Theses, 292. My emphasis.

238  Peter E. Gordon Adorno’s argument regarding the secularization of art is primarily though not exclusively sociological. “Unity of art and religion is not simply due to subjective convictions and decisions,” he explains, it was due to “the underlying social reality and its objective trend.” Such a unity was to be found only “in non-individualistic, hierarchical, closed societies.”20 But such conditions no longer obtained even in Greek antiquity, when the individual had secured some measure of political and economic distinction in relation to the social whole. “The present crisis involving individuality and the collectivistic tendencies in our society does not justify any retrogression of art to a stage which comes earlier than the individualistic era,” Adorno warned, nor could it justify any attempt to subject art arbitrarily once more to bonds of a religious nature: “The individual might still be capable of having religious experiences. But positive religion has lost its character of objective, all-comprising validity, its supra-individual binding force. It is no longer an unproblematic, a priori medium within which each person exists without questioning.”21 From a purely sociological perspective, then, the secularization of art must be seen as a historical phenomenon whose beginnings are traceable to the most archaic phase of human history. The archaic origins of aesthetic secularization become further evident once we turn aside from purely sociological considerations and begin to reflect in a philosophical manner on the intrinsic nature of the artwork itself. “Both objectified religion and art,” Adorno explains, “are from a very early age equally the product of a dissolution of the archaic unity between imagery and concept.”22 Monotheistic religion emerges as an assault on mythical representation and insists on the separation between the divine idea and its sensual form. This specific claim regarding the philosophical significance of monotheism also appears elsewhere in Adorno’s work, most prominently in the co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment, where monotheistic religion is credited with having introduced the logic of symbolic exchange in the practice of sacrifice, preparing the ground for the possibility of economic exchange in capitalism. 23 An analogous separation between idea and form can also be found in aesthetics. Art in the proper sense, Adorno claims, only emerges as a distinctive mode of experience once it is possible to distinguish analytically and phenomenologically between object and medium, that is, between a) the idea and thing that is to be expressed and b) the manner in which it is portrayed. Once this separation

20 Adorno, Theses, 292. 21 Adorno, Theses, 292. 22 Adorno, Theses, 293. My emphasis. 23 “The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic.” Quote from Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6.

Adorno’s Secular Theology 239 has occurred any regression to the naive stage of primal unity becomes impossible. This is the case, Adorno explains, “[e]ven during periods which are supposed to have secured the utmost integration of religion and art, such as the Greek classical century, or medieval culture at its height,” since these are periods in which any apparent unity between religion and art was largely “superimposed” and “repressive.”24 Adorno adds the further thought that “art … always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions, religious and others.” He therefore concludes that “wherever the battle cry is raised that art should go back to its religious sources there also prevails the wish that art should exercise a disciplinary, repressive function.”25 It is worth noting that Adorno’s philosophical insight into the distinction between image and concept indicates a further if subtle point of disagreement with Benjamin. Although Benjamin did not take the time to develop the claim, his own arguments regarding the auratic qualities of the artwork even in the bourgeois era suggest that he considered the dissolution of the aura to be a purely modern phenomenon: only under conditions of technical reproducibility (with, e.g., the invention of photography in the later nineteenth century) would the unity between sacred and aesthetic experience begin to break down. Adorno dissents from Benjamin when he suggests that the organic bond between art and religion was compromised well before the modern era, since their separation was already presupposed through the very distinction between concept and image. “The notion that art has broken away from religion only during a late phase of enlightenment and secularization,” he concludes, is therefore “erroneous.”26 Adorno felt that the thesis regarding the secularization of art had strong implications for all efforts to restore sacred meaning to modern art. Because originally religious values no longer enjoy the comprehensive authority they once did in archaic life, any attempts to reintroduce religious values into art would therefore carry the taint of a modern individualism that was incompatible with religious experience in the original sense. “Such a reversion,” Adorno warned, “would necessarily bear the hallmarks of the individualistic age itself: it would be essentially rationalistic.” The results would be an artificial and forced union between two phenomena that had broken irrevocably apart long ago. “Any attempts to add spiritual meaning and thus greater objective validity to art by the reintroduction of religious content,” Adorno concluded, “are futile.” From an aesthetic perspective, the consequences of such a union could only appear as a kind of profanation, applying religious images to mundane phenomena: “Religious symbolism deteriorates into an unctuous expression of

24 Adorno, Theses, 293. 25 Adorno, Theses, 293. 26 Adorno, Theses, 293.

240  Peter E. Gordon a substance which is actually of this world.”27 To illustrate this forced union, Adorno spoke of the “pseudomysticism” of Rilke’s poetry; he also alluded to Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.” Although his hostility to Stravinsky’s music is well known (as for example in the vigorously polemical Philosophy of New Music), it was atypical for Adorno to indict Stravinsky for promoting a pseudo-religious aesthetics.28 But in the “Symphony of Psalms” Adorno found that “the religious attitude assumes the air of an externally enforced and ultimately arbitrary community.” This coercive union between religion and aesthetics is “manipulated by individualistic devices behind which there is nothing of the collective power which they pretend.”29 Adorno’s hostility to modern religious aesthetics, then, is conditional upon a socio-historical view that sees secularization as a fait accompli. This view bears a close similarity to Max Weber’s sociological account of disenchantment according to which the gradual attenuation of religion as an all-encompassing force for all domains of human experience has resulted in a differentiation of value-spheres (economic, political, familial, aesthetic, and so forth), each of which operates in relative autonomy from the other and no one of which can claim ultimate authority. For Weber, rationalization and disenchantment go together: with the rise of formalized procedures in all social institutions, religion begins to lose its coordinating power and it retreats into the “irrational” space of optional and private belief.30 Much like Adorno, Weber warned that under such conditions, the attempt to “invent” or “force” a “monumental” style into modern art would likely result in “miserable monstrosities,” and, if one were to try to contrive “new religions without new and genuine prophesy,” he feared that “something similar would result, but with still worse effects.”31 Adorno’s harsh commentary on modern attempts to simulate the antiquated union between religion and aesthetics bears a strong resemblance to the Weberian critique of all attempts to revive old modes of religious community in contexts of social disenchantment. But Adorno nonetheless differs from Weber in at least one crucial respect: unlike Weber, Adorno is

27 Adorno, Theses, 294. 28 See Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 29 Theses, 294. 30 On Weber’s theory of secularization, see Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entzauberung der Welt. Sechs Studien zur Max Weber (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). For the claim that Weber did not wholly embrace a theory of secularization, see Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (London and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). For a lucid summary of Weber’s understanding of religious rationalization (namely, the process of rationalization within and by religion) as a preparation for modern secularization, see Martin Jay, Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 23. 31 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–158; quote from 155.

Adorno’s Secular Theology 241 willing to entertain the thought that, even while we should reject the forced union between aesthetics and religion, this is because such attempts violate a deeper and persistent continuity between them. His reasoning confirms the dialectical principle of a continuity across discontinuity. We must condemn the modern condition in which religious phenomena become objects of commercial sales in literature or film; for in such instances, religions are “cheaply marketed in order to provide one more so-called irrational stimulus among many others by which the members of a calculating society are calculatingly made to forget the calculation under which they suffer.” Adorno disapproves of such marketing strategies, but not only for sociological reasons. He also believes that they dishonor a certain continuity with religion: “Against this sort of thing [the marketing of religion], art can keep faith to its true affinity with religion, the relationship with truth, only by an almost ascetic abstinence from any religious claim or any touching upon religious subject matter. Religious art today is nothing but blasphemy.”32 This argument is striking, as it would seem to suggest that Adorno has further and decidedly non-Weberian motives for defending modern art against any regressive and forced reunion with the sacred values from which it emerged long ago. Namely, Adorno is also or even primarily keen to preserve that element in art that he identifies as its “true affinity with religion.”33 It is this deeper quality in art, its “relationship with truth,” that Adorno considers a sign of something genuinely “religious,” though he feels that this religious element can only persist if we strenuously resist all efforts to bring art and religion into an “extorted reconciliation.”34

Art as Secular Theology Although Adorno insists on the “sharp distinction between art and religion,” and sees this distinction as an irreversible consequence of sociohistorical processes, he is no less keen to insist on the fact that the disenchantment of art cannot reach a point of absolute fulfillment without resulting in the wholesale dissolution of art. “Every work of art,” he writes, “still bears the imprint of its magical origin.”35 Unlike Benjamin, Adorno does not wish to dissolve this magical or religious trace. The magical trace that remains in the artwork is a sign of its aesthetic truth, without which the artwork could no longer succeed as art: “[I]f the magic element should be extirpated from art altogether, the decline of art itself will have been reached.”36 In

32 Adorno, Theses, 294, my emphasis. 33 Adorno, Theses, 294, my emphasis. 34 On this theme, also see Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’s Realism in Our Time,” in Notes to Literature, Volume 1. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, trans. (Columbia, 1991): 216-240. 35 Adorno, Theses, 296. 36 Adorno, Theses, 296.

242  Peter E. Gordon the Aesthetic Theory (as quoted above), Adorno writes in an explicit rejoinder to Benjamin that one cannot abolish the aura and still want art. In the “Theses on Art and Religion,” this appeal to the aura gains a further specification, and we are told that even works of high modernism retain an auratic power that speaks to the endurance of something in them that Adorno is not embarrassed to identify as “theological.” This dialectical gesture—the wish to retain what is theological in modern aesthetics even under social conditions of disenchantment—may strike us as highly perplexing. At the very least, it seems clear that Adorno is using the term “theological” in a rather unusual sense without implicating him in any dogmatic claims regarding the existence of a divine being or other articles of conventional faith. At the same time, however, it also seems clear that Adorno is not using the term “theological” in a merely metaphorical sense, since, if this were all he intended, then the entire excursus on the survival of religion in modern aesthetics would have little justification. When he insists on the survival of magic or religion in modern aesthetics, he means this in a quite literal way. On this point, Adorno is emphatic: “As firmly as I am convinced that the dichotomy between art and religion is irreversible, as firmly do I believe that it cannot be naively regarded as something final and ultimate.”37 But then just what is the precise nature of the “theological” element that has survived? To cast some light on this problem, it may prove helpful to invoke an analysis from the late historian of science Amos Funkenstein, who introduced the seemingly paradoxical notion of a “secular theology” in order to explain the emergence of new scientific and philosophical theories in the early-modern era.38 In his masterful 1985 study, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, Funkenstein strenuously objects to the vulgar understanding of historical progress according to which the scientific revolution succeeded in effecting a radical break from the theological explanations that preceded it. Instead he argues for a subtle and more dialectical continuity between theology and early-modern science, whereby concepts that had previously been operative as qualities of the divine were refashioned into qualities of the mundane world. The concept of providence, for example, was not merely discarded; instead it was transposed from the divine to the human sphere and became an instrumental term in the emergent eighteenthcentury philosophies of history as developed by thinkers such as Vico and Kant. Funkenstein identifies similar transpositions of theology in other domains of inquiry, for instance, in early-modern scientific explanations of the cosmos (associated with Newtonian physics) that appealed to the theological concept of divine omnipresence and omnipotence.

37 Adorno, Theses, 297, my emphasis. 38 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Adorno’s Secular Theology 243 Although the particular cases that Funkenstein examines in his book are not of relevance here, his more general account of the dialectical continuity between theological and secular concepts merits further comment. To characterize the conceptual formations that emerged in the early-modern era as an application of religious to non-religious phenomena, Funkenstein uses the provocative term “secular theology.” Concepts that, in the medieval world, were of specifically theological provenance had gradually, by the seventeenth century, emancipated themselves from their otherworldly and divine referent, and thereby became available for a new application that was no longer oriented toward the description of God. This was still somehow a theology, though in a novel and rather peculiar sense. The scientists and philosophers in question (Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Hobbes, Vico, et cetera) were laymen, not professional theologians, and their eyes were fixed on matters mundane, not transmundane: Newton was a physicist, Vico a philosopher of history. But they were nonetheless highly attuned to theological questions and they were fully aware of the fact that their scientific and philosophical inquiries proffered new answers to old questions. Their theology was also secular, however, in the important sense that it was a descriptive and explanatory knowledge that was “oriented toward the world, ad seculum.”39 Funkenstein’s book does not claim to be comprehensive—it focuses on only a handful of theological concepts—but it serves as an exemplary study of “the secularization of theology.”40 Taking some interpretative liberties with the term, it may prove helpful to understand Adorno’s arguments regarding the persistence of a “theological” moment in modern aesthetics as a species of secular theology. To be sure, the differences are considerable. Historical analysis is not philosophical analysis: as a historian Funkenstein only meant to identify a transitional phase in the development of the early-modern sciences. Adorno, by contrast, adopts the critical and retrospective stance of a late-modern philosopher who has seen the catastrophic historical outcome of those forces first unleashed by scientific developments associated with the Enlightenment. Such differences, however, need not deter us, as they merely underscore the degree to which Adorno remains true to his dialectical understanding of all historical processes. If he warns against all mythologies of “progress” and insisted on history’s dialectical character, this is no less true for his understanding of secularization, a term he uses sparingly but in highly suggestive ways.41 Although he feels that secularization was irreversible (in the sense that he claims that there could be no sure

39 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 3. 40 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 4. 41 Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models, 142–160. For an analysis of Adorno’s concept of progress in relation to Foucault and the critique of a colonialist perspective in critical theory, see Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017).

244  Peter E. Gordon path that could lead us back from the differentiated complexity of a secular society into the relative simplicity of the sacred social whole), he also believes that the sociological-historical phenomenon of secularization does not describe a linear and progressive dynamic that simply sheds its religious inheritance as it moves forward in time. It is this dialectical conception of secularization that permits him to see that the history of aesthetics cannot be contained with facile or triumphalist narratives that would characterize the dissolution of the aura as a stage in the gradual unfolding of freedom. Instead he believes that modern art must somehow both cancel and preserve what it has inherited from theology. This idea—that the history of aesthetics must be conceived as a secularizing dialectic—gives us license to speak of Adorno’s secular theology. “Art,” Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory, “is a stage in the process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world.”42 This means that art involves rational techniques by which its materials are subjected to methodical manipulation and mastery. But it is no less the case that “art’s magical heritage [ihr magisches Erbe] stubbornly persisted throughout art’s transformations.”43 This persistence is not something that can be lightly cast aside, nor should one anticipate the dissolution of this “enchanted” element with enthusiasm, since this element is a sign of that in the work of art which points beyond what is merely given in a self-affirmative social reality. Adorno conceives of this anticipatory and critical moment in the artwork as a distinctively this-worldly and aesthetic quality that nonetheless bears the mark of art’s theological heritage. On the one hand, art can no more dispense with this heritage than it can sustain it without rational transformation. “The contamination of art with revelation would amount to the unreflective repetition of its fetish character.” On the other hand, “The eradication of every trace of revelation from art would […] degrade it to the undifferentiated repetition of the status quo.”44 “The theological heritage of art,” he concludes, “is the secularization of revelation [die Säkularisation von Offenbarung].”45 It is this idea—that art possesses the power to point beyond the world as it is given—that I propose to call Adorno’s secular theology. Once again, it is crucial to note that this secular theology does not amount to any kind of straightforward affirmation of theology as such; it is indeed secular in the important sense that it acknowledges and fully embraces the historical breakdown of traditional religious society. The logic of this secular theology is irreducibly dialectical. Rather than confirming the independent validity of religion, it secularizes concepts that once belonged to religion in the precise sense that, even as it negates religion as an independent power, it also reorients this power towards the non-religious domain of the aesthetic. 42 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 54. 43 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 54. 44 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 106. 45 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 106. My emphasis.

Adorno’s Secular Theology 245 In the “Theses,” Adorno illustrates the idea of a secular theology with some observations concerning Proust’s multivolume novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. The specific skill that is evident in Proust’s work is an especially poignant illustration of an artwork’s power to capture the particular details of life without subsuming these particulars under concepts. Art in this respect resembles a Leibnizian monad, insofar as it has no “windows” or immediate, causal relation to the world beyond it but it nonetheless “represents the universal within its own walls.” Like a monad, a successful work of art does not “make concepts its ‘theme.’”46 Presumably what concerns Adorno is the risk that art would be debased into the mere instrument for the conveyance of extrinsic ideas or messages, an error that he associated with didactic or “agitprop” works such as Brechtian drama but also may partly explain his hostility for Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin’s poetry, readings in which the poetry is misconstrued as an aesthetically indifferent vehicle for a purely philosophical content.47 Rather than serving as the forum for the display of universal themes, the artwork as Adorno understands it achieves its true universal validity by concentrating all of its attention on the particular. “Only by reaching the acme of genuine individualization, only by obstinately following up the desiderata of its concretion, does the work become truly the bearer of the universal.”48 Proust exemplifies this aesthetic achievement because, in his works, one witnesses a “concentration upon opaque and quasi-blind details.”49 Proust’s skill represents (in Adorno’s words) “the materialization of a truly theological idea.” His glance at men and things is so close that even the identity of the individual, his “character” is dissolved. Yet it is his obsession with the concrete and the unique, with the taste of a madeleine or the color of the shoes of a lady worn at a certain party, which becomes instrumental with regard to the materialization of a truly theological idea, that of immortality.50 Here, then, we see the hallmarks of Adorno’s secular theology. By fastening all of his attention on the particular and the concrete, Proust succeeds in capturing a universal truth about human life without indulging in specious generalities that would only invalidate this truth with the illusion of a false immediacy. The particular concrete is also the evanescent: Proust wishes to retain and recall details in mortal life that are of course destined to decay. Remembrance is an exercise in secular redemption in that it holds fast to these details and strives to secure their permanence against all of the powers of forgetting. This is a

46 Adorno, Theses, 297. 47 Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, Vol. 3, ed. R. Tiedemann (New York: Columbia UP, 1992): 109-49. 48 Adorno, Theses, 297. 49 Adorno, Theses, 298. 50 Adorno, Theses, 298.

246  Peter E. Gordon materialization of immortality in the precise sense insofar as it tries to honor in material terms the longing that was once expressed in the theological idea, without, however, retreating into an atavistic metaphysics. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno returns to this notion of immortality and explains why it holds such importance for his own conception of a genuinely materialist philosophy. In Christian dogmatics, he writes, “the awakening of souls” was inseparable from “the resurrection of the flesh,” and this yearning for bodily rather than merely spiritual life was “more consistent” than a merely “speculative metaphysics.” Efforts in philosophical apologetics that seek to obscure this yearning would rob from Christianity what was “best” in its teaching. Hope, Adorno explains, does not mean hope for a metaphysical salvation as a disembodied soul; rather, “hope means corporeal resurrection.”51 In this interpretation of theology, the materialist moment in Adorno’s thought comes to the fore. It would be absurd, of course, to imagine that Adorno actually adheres to the doctrine of corporeal resurrection in the literal sense. One cannot ignore the epigram from Epicharmus that he selected to stand at the head of his 1956 study of Husserl, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: “Mortals must think mortal thoughts.” That Adorno assigned some importance to this epigram is evident insofar as even a decade later in his lectures on negative dialectics he paused to quote it once again. In a characteristically dialectical gesture, however, Adorno offers a further comment: “We should add, perhaps, that only in the categories of the finite, or to follow Epicharmus, only by speaking of mortal thoughts, can immortal thoughts be grasped, whereas every attempt to comprehend transcendence in other categories is doomed from the outset.”52 Although he does not wish to embrace the thought of immortality in any literal way, he reads the religious promise as an extravagant but indispensable hope for a world in which death and suffering no longer play a defining role in human life. He therefore tries to give a materialist reading of a theological concept. I would suggest that this is the meaning of his wellknown dictum from Negative Dialectics that, in the modern era, metaphysics has “slipped into questions of material existence.”53 These philosophical considerations can assist us in understanding why Adorno praised Proust for sustaining a “truly theological idea,” even while he also embraced Proust’s role as a novelist of secular modernity: it was Proust, Adorno writes, who, “in a non-religious world, took the phrase of immortality literally and tried to salvage life, as an image, from the throes of death.”54 But, Adorno hastens to explain, Proust achieved this salvaging of life over death not by seeking a metaphysical transcendence of death but

51 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, “Nur ein Gleichnis,” 391-394 52 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics (Polity, 2008), Lecture 8 (2 December 1965): The Concept of Intellectual Experience, 80, my emphasis. 53 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, “Metaphysik und Kultur,” 358-361 54 Adorno, Theses, 298, my emphasis.

Adorno’s Secular Theology 247 instead “by giving himself up to the most futile, the most insignificant, the most fugitive traces of memory.”55 What Adorno most admired in Proust, then, is the novelist’s unrestrained commitment to “micrology” as the refuge of metaphysics in a post-metaphysical world.56 By fastening all of his literary attention on even the slightest details of quotidian life, Proust succeeded in redeeming material existence in all of its boundless significance against the overwhelming fact of death: “By concentrating on the utterly mortal, he converted his novel, blamed today for self-indulgence and decadence, into a hieroglyph of ‘O death, where is they sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’”57

Conclusion In this essay, I have argued that Adorno (1) fully accepts the secularization of aesthetics in the sociological sense, namely, he endorses the view that art only emerged as an autonomous value sphere when it succeeded in emancipating itself from its archaic bond with magic and religion. However, I have further argued that (2) the emergence of autonomous art for Adorno does not entail the thoroughgoing dissolution of the auratic element that aesthetic experience inherited from religion. Rather, the aura persists as a religious trace even while it undergoes a “materialization” into secular experience. Modern art is secular but also religious: it honors the “theological idea” of bodily resurrection even while it subjects this idea to a materialist transformation. This dialectical conception of art represents what I have called Adorno’s secular theology. In his analysis of art as a secular theology, Adorno sustained a remarkable consistency right up to the final years of his life. In the concluding pages of Negative Dialectics, he returned to the example of Proust in discussing what he called “metaphysical experience,” as documented in the poignant and irreducibly concrete happiness associated with village names such as Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, and Monbrunn: “What metaphysical experience would be,” Adorno writes, can retain its validity even for those who resist equating such experience with “religious primal experiences [religiöse Urerlebnisse].”58 Such a metaphysical experience would turn away from mere universals to embrace the particular in all of its concrete specificity. To grasp “what is authentic in Proust’s portrayal,” Adorno explains, “one must be enraptured at that one spot, without squinting at the generality.”59 Adorno associated this emphasis on the concrete and the particular as a materialist transformation of the happiness once promised

55 Adorno, Theses, 298. 56 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, “Selbst-Reflexion der Dialektik,” 397-400. 57 Adorno, Theses, 298. 58 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 366. 59 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, “Glück und vergebliches Warten,” 366-368

248  Peter E. Gordon in religion. His conception of “metaphysical experience” was intended as an explanation as to how this religious promise might still be fulfilled even under the conditions of a wholly secular life.60 In concluding, I feel it is crucial to repeat the basic point that Adorno’s concept of a secular theology does not betray a concession to dogmatic religion or a return to religious metaphysics in its original form. What Adorno called “open thinking” cannot ever find rest in a stabilized metaphysical principle, let alone a final and metaphysical truth. This already confirms the basic point that Adorno strenuously resisted any kind of theological certitudes and took special care to keep his distance from all religious dogma. Here we might better appreciate why Adorno was keen to avoid any misunderstanding as to the secular character of his own thought and recommended “an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith.”61 Although he was willing to speak of art as the “secularization of revelation,” this does not imply that he was prepared to endorse revelation in the religious sense. Unlike the category of a secularized revelation in aesthetics, the category of a genuinely religious revelation stands as the antipode to what he called “open thinking”: it suggests that, no matter how freely and how far our human thoughts may be permitted to roam, eventually they must come up against what is revealed from beyond as something that is a brute and incorrigible given. It was this feature of theology more than any other that Adorno seems to have found unacceptable. In his remarks on “intellectual experience” (geistige Erfahrung) in the 1965 lecture course on negative dialectics, Adorno warns that the “concept of intellectual experience always contains the possibility of what might be called a spiritualization [Spiritualisierung] of the world.” Such a spiritualization would turn the object of experience itself into something “spiritual” (geistig) and thereby furnish it with the illusion of metaphysical justification or incorrigibility. But a philosophy that takes the form of a negative dialectic must resist the longing for any final validation that would manifest itself as a revealed truth. In its very finality, the notion of spirit betrays the freedom from material bondage it seemed to promise. Such considerations would seem to confirm that even while he was willing to appeal to theological concepts, Adorno was not in any meaningful sense a religious thinker, not least because his negative-dialectical thinking ultimately evades the dualistic and facile demand that we choose between what is either religious or non-religious: “Whoever believes in God, can therefore not believe in Him.”62

60 See Peter E. Gordon, “Adorno’s Concept of Metaphysical Experience,” Ch. 35 in A Companion to Adorno. Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky, eds. (Blackwell Publishers, 2020): 549-564. 61 Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” in Catchwords: Critical Models. Henry Pickford, trans. (Columbia University Press, 2005), 142. 62 Adorno, Negative Dialektik 10; Nur sin Gleichnis, 391–394.

14 Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text Mieke Bal

ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Musings on a Common Ground “I paint, therefore I am,” Indian artist Nalini Malani has been quoted to have said, stating her lifelong commitment to that particular art form. But her formulation rings a bell. The Cartesian phrase sounds philosophical, doesn’t it? There is a good reason for that philosophical bend. While working “in” painting, her art is devoted to a relentless exposure of and resistance to violence. Violence cannot be tolerated. In India, that violence is often committed on the pretext of religious rivalry. Hindu nationalism against Islam. Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, one of the democratically elected dictators, to invoke the paradox of the current state of the world, supports, and indeed, encourages violence in the name, or under the pretext, of religion. Malani will not have it. That is her philosophy. What can a painter do about, or against, violence, other than representing it? This runs the risk of repetition; of inuring us to the effect of the horror, in the way television does by showing us night after night the destructions waged by ongoing civil wars, for example. Or simply wars, as the current one destroying Ukraine. A destroyed city with hungry and abandoned children on the run: it has become an “ordinary” view. If the representation of violence in art is futile, then, or even damaging, how else can art address this tenacious problem?1 These thoughts are circling around what my interests have in common, what I share, with both Hent de Vries and Nalini Malani, and admire in their work. This is, to begin with, the serious engagement with earlier thought. We cannot help but think of Adorno when pondering how to address and resist violence in art. And Adorno’s thought is extensively discussed in Minimal Theologies (2005). Adorno is one of those philosophers who is known in the wider field of the Humanities, although how well he is known there remains to be seen. As we know since Adorno’s famous 1949 indictment of making and enjoying poetry “after Auschwitz,” what

1 On Malani’s work against violence, see Huyssen (2013) and Bal (2017).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-15

250  Mieke Bal I call modesty is a crucial issue in our relationship to representation. This statement has often served to provide a simplistic view that can only lead to iconophobia, and its official guise of censorship. In order to counter that quick fix and establish a relationship between philosophy and art, allow me to present the Adorno quote from his philosophical prose in the form of poetry: Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. (2003, 162) Instead of over-citing without engaging, the status of this fragment as poetry helps to denaturalize its facile exploitation for a simplistic if meaningful ethical guideline. The “verses” are bound by enjambment, the artful breaking up of words that normally belong together; here prepositions and their complements – with, of, to. Poetry is a form of discourse one can learn by heart as well as complicate and read aloud in musical cadence and tone. Reading poetry is usually slower and more detailed, with equal attention to every word. But that does not entail a slavish admiration and agreement, as Hent’s style of extensive quotations followed by problematization demonstrates. 2 Here, in this “slow philosophy,” it also entails the need to consider its sequel, where the philosopher gives the reason for this severe indictment: he refuses to make sense of what doesn’t make sense. Such sense-making is wrong because it would be honoring violence with semiotic access; and to take pleasure, in other words, in making a potentially pornographic use of the suffering of others (15). In a later text, Adorno wrote: After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. (2000, 361)

2 A symptom of a negligent, even abusive attitude of scholars can be seen in the fact that so many quote or mention this Adornian position without properly referencing it, and taking it out of context. That context happens to be a devastating indictment of cultural studies and critique. What a coincidence! Philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker recommends reading of philosophical texts that is both slow and problematizing (2017, 29). Reading it in that way is a useful direction for use of Hent’s work. For an excellent theory of poetry, see Culler (2015).

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  251 The violence implied in the word “squeezing” stipulates that semiotic behavior can be as violent as actual violence. The verb intimates that language is material. This is so because it is performative: it has consequences in that its utterances affect the addressee. The verb “to squeeze” recurs when Adorno explains that his refusal to condone such renderings is its potential pornographic use: “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed out from it” (2003, 252; emphasis added). It is this pleasure, the sheer possibility of it, that Adorno calls “barbaric.”3 However, the flip side of Adorno’s call for modesty is the risk that it be taken as a forbidding taboo that makes the violence invisible. It is against this taboo that French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman spoke out in his short treatise, which is a plea for attention to even the vaguest Auschwitz photographs: “in order to know, you must imagine,” as his opening sentence has it. And in order to relate to others we do need to know, and when full knowledge is impossible we still must try to approximate, encircle, see, or feel it. That is what it means to imagine. That is why the imagination is so important. This, in turn, is why art is important; offering the visual imagination something it images. Taking the element “image” of the imagination, turning it into an active verb that allows a middle voice, and thus bringing it to the viewer, both body and mind, is the material practice through which art matters. Malani’s work makes the case for this importance of art.4 Art can contribute to facilitating such exercise of the imagination in a way that binds the intellect to the affect, so that understanding implies both and the two domains can no longer be separated. Adorno, in fact, had already written as much, in the same essay where he retracts his earlier prohibition: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. (1973, 362; emphasis added) These passages imply the question of political art. Still today, the question of political art sits right in the middle of these two positions; not between, but immersed and mired in both. For, this is not the binary opposition it is usually taken to be; the middle is not empty. It is a very busy space.

3 See Butler (1998) on the performativity of language and the pain it can cause. For a useful, nuanced interdisciplinary study of barbarism, see Boletsi (2013). 4 Boletsi also wrote a brilliant article about the middle voice as a concept for political art today (2016).

252  Mieke Bal The questioning of, and resistance against binary opposition is another common ground between Hent’s work and mine; probably the most important one. Modesty, and the need to speak and hear, show and see: both of these positions move, struggle and tangle in that middle. As the cultural critic Andreas Huyssen phrased the question in his catalog essay for Malani’s latest shadow play, also against the background of Adorno’s position: How can human pain and social suffering, past and present, be rendered visually in such a way that its representation nurtures and illuminates life, rather than indulging in aesthetic stylization, voyeuristic titillation, or succumbing to fatalism in the face of mythic cycles of violence? (2012, 52) Without putting this dilemma on the table, readers of this volume might wonder why I am contributing to it. I am unable to write “about” the work of Hent de Vries, only “with” it. In awe of the breadth and depth, the solid documentation and the keen intelligence, I can hardly address it specifically. For, in the first place, I am not a philosopher, although sometimes people assume I am, because much of my work concerns “theory.” I do have an interest in Descartes and struggle against the way he is constantly dismissed for reasons of erroneous reading – or no reading at all – of his work. To begin with, that over-cited phrase that Nalani boldly picks up to bind philosophy as the discipline of thinking to art as a practice of making but is invariably misinterpreted as stating the separation of mind and body. For me, it means the opposite: if I think, there must be a body, a “me,” that does the thinking. Nor do I know much of theology, even though my work on the Hebrew Bible has made people assume I do. But I did not read the biblical narratives for their theological content, not ever. All I did was unpack the assumptions in the general reception of those stories, which more often than not were and are based on assumptions leaning on binary oppositions. What is not enough recognized is that such oppositions are so tenacious for a reason. They create order in our chaotic world. That can be taken as a positive. Even the firmest religious believers will endorse that logic, since the beginning of the Hebrew bible presents creation as just that: creating order in chaos on the basis of binary opposition. The creation separates; that is its essence. But it goes wrong in the second step, which simplifies the two groupings to single poles, opposing them. And then, worst, these two poles are hierarchized: one comes out on top, the other at the bottom, in the negativity that is; according to logic, vague. This becomes clear in the subsequent filling in of such oppositions with value judgments, such as the idea that “later” means “inferior,” even though the deity itself created humanity last. This facilitates, and wrongly seems to justify the millennia-old derogatory view of women, although the very name Eve, Hawah, meaning life or life-giving, is closer to that of Yahweh, in sound and in meaning, than

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  253 the name Adam, congenial with the dust from which he was shaped. Slow reading would have helped here.5 This brief self-presentation is meant to show that I have hardly anything in common with Hent’s work, as far as disciplinary background is concerned. But when he and I started to work together, we developed an interdisciplinary program. This required an eagerness to transgress boundaries coupled with a strong sense of methodological responsibility. We discussed this extensively, and this is how a mutual opening into each other’s primary interests came about. We became intellectual friends – a concept that refers to an intellectual attitude that offers an alternative to the more habitual attitude of “trashing” versus unqualified admiration – another one of those damaging binary oppositions. I can say that the primary reason is that Hent and I share one common passion: the lifelong battle against binary thinking. In the introduction to his edited volume Religion and Media, he uses the telling phrase “the most pernicious of all binary oppositions” (29, emphasis added) and my agreement with this judgment is the ground of my participation in this book.6 In many of his studies from the last two decades, Hent has explored, in the sense of detailed critical readings, the philosophical arguments for and against religious and secular culture, always critiquing the binary opposition between them. I just mention Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999) Religion and Violence (2002), Minimal Theologies (2005), all published during the time when we were colleagues and together founded ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) – a research institute that has been celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2019 and has grown into the largest of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. In these and his other books, he relentlessly returns to the traditions of philosophy, catching them out on contradictory positions, and, most importantly, on ambiguity in the distinction between the sacred and the secular. Here, too, Malani’s use of words resonates: she titled an early shadow play “The Sacred and the Profane” (1998). These ambiguities result in cultural effects and even political ones – today as much as in the old days we like to think of as “past.” It is those of today, the contemporary, that interest me most.7

5 For my somewhat unorthodox interpretation of Descartes, see information about my film and installations, http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/reasonable-doubt/, and the article about that project, “Thinking in Film,” 173–201 in Thinking in the World, ed. Jill Bennett, London: Bloomsbury (2019). For my interpretations of stories from the Hebrew bible, especially the creation story, see Bal (1987), the final chapter, and for my comparative cultural analysis of the biblical and the koranic stories of one of the most misogynistic stories, that of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, Bal (2008). 6 On interdisciplinarity in the Humanities, see my book on the subject (2002). 7 On the principles of ASCA, best consult the first two ASCA Brief publications (1997, 1998). For a very succinct programmatic summary, see a video on my website, top of right-hand column of this page http://www.miekebal.org/about/.

254  Mieke Bal And then, the ambiguity. I so abhor the predominance in culture and thought of binary opposition that this is the simple but decisive idea along which I wish to place my own work; all of it. And from my interest in art as a cultural tool for political argumentation and effect, I raise the following question. How is it possible that the “turn to religion,” as Hent called it in his 1999 book title, has led to exceedingly violent dictatorial regimes before our eyes? On a very basic level, I hold binary thinking at least in part responsible. The lessons drawn from Jacques Derrida and in his wake, from Hent, that complicate binary opposition and even argue that such oppositions are by definition logically untenable and politically damaging, insidious, pernicious, have not reached the new dictators of the world. The abuse of religion as pretext – in the double sense of ante-text and disingenuous excuse – to continue to rule countries with violence and even give that mode of government a fresh start in the twenty-first century, “works” because people have an easier time dividing everyone and everything in opposites than having to figure out what matters. The divided loyalty between a religious adherence and nationalistic loyalty makes citizens less resilient than they could be if they let go of binary opposition. I will examine some artworks by Malani in view of horrors committed with constitutional support by the current “democratically” elected Indian government. Through that analysis, I will make the case for a renewed resistance against binary thinking as the basis for a political art that is no more “about” politics than this essay is “about” Hent’s work, but rather “with”: politically effective, operating in that busy middle between Adorno and Didi-Huberman. There are other possibilities than the literal, or figurative, representation of violence, and Malani, a brilliant and astute “political” artist in the sense I have been exploring in various projects, has invented some of those. Her primary solution is taking on board and integrating, as an artist, the fact that the process of art in its live relationship to its audiences is an indispensable element of that relationship. Artworks come to life when they are being seen. Exhibiting art inflects the artworks, showing them in a specific light. To place one artwork next to another makes a difference to both; the juxtaposition adds layers of meaning, based on the “sideways effect” of metonymy. The curation, thus, is part of the work, and vice versa. In the case of political art as I see it, this role of curation is crucial. Let’s first consider not if, but how Malani’s art is political. As one critic has formulated it lucidly in an online essay: … intensely political, but this politics is not available to the viewer in terms of the straightforward declamation of manifesto. It appears instead in the form of embodied meaning, intrinsic to the artist’s formal devices and offered up in immersive, visceral experiences where the viewing gaze and body is fully implicated in a transaction with the artist’s provocations. Sambrani (2004, n.p.; emphasis added)

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  255 The noun “transaction” is comparable to “translation”; as in “acting” (trans-acting) or “carrying through” (trans-lation), from one context to another. The artist Malani “translates” in more complex and multi-layered ways than one would think possible. The concept of translation can also explain how two colleagues with such different backgrounds and interests as Hent and I can together work toward a context in which such differences are constructive of new approaches, rather than hindrances to collaboration. In his famous essay “The Task of the translator,” Walter Benjamin has definitively changed the concept of translation. He wrote: “While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds” (1968, 75). The quotation comes from his essay on translation, not metaphor. That essay, in line with his more straightforwardly philosophical musings on language, takes an explicit position against the idea of translation as derivative. Hent discussed these and other texts in terms more focused on (Jewish) mysticism and the “mystical postulate” than those I will use here, although mysticism is not to be neglected as the bottom line of Benjamin’s vision of translation (1992).8 Benjamin’s essay proposes a philosophy of language in which the translation serves not the original, but the liberation and release of its potential, which he calls “translatability” and which is located in that which resists translation. Although his essay abounds in organic metaphors, essentialism, and a terminology of purity, the gist of his philosophy of language through translation can be seen, retrospectively, as a critique of the very logocentrism Derrida has so effectively undermined. The “pure language” that translation is called upon to release in the original is – far from the core of truth of the hermeneutic tradition – located nowhere more precisely and more definitively than in the folds that envelop it. Elsewhere, when describing the task of the critic, Benjamin uses equally baroque imagery to upgrade the function of the critic compared with that of the commentator (the philologist). In this case, the image is fire. Fire and fold: two images that refer language to the domain of visuality, and philosophy to the – baroque – esthetic. Images, moreover, that are central to the work of two philosophers of our time, John Austin and Gilles Deleuze, doubtlessly among the most influential in the cultural disciplines.9 This squares with what I am presenting here: work of visual art that philosophizes, translates, and counters. This combined polemical and intellectual attitude in work that is exuberantly visual bears on the kind of art Malani

8 On Benjamin’s philosophy of language, see de Certeau (1982, 1986) and Derrida (1982, 1987). For example, Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) foregrounds the link between mysticism and translation on an additional allegorical level. 9 Benjamin discusses the task of the critic in the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, quoted by Hannah Arendt (Benjamin 1968, 5).

256  Mieke Bal produces and fits the “slow philosophy” that problematizes. Here I will look at one of her recent works, a 2016–17 series of paintings produced in the context of “The Rebellion of the Dead,” her retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2017–18. The concept underlying the exhibition is the circularity of violence and, due to the liveness of art, the present tense. This is not a topic or thematic unit, but an intensely complex, yet coherent, intricate collaboration between form, mode of painting, historical recall, and actuality.

Circular Blindness The architecture of the exhibition consisted of an entrance, with a wing on the right and one on the left. The middle space was immediately filled with active, working art, which visitors cannot avoid taking in before choosing to turn either left or right: the shadow play Remembering Mad Meg (2007). From inside the middle space, the spine of the exhibition, consisting of that shadow play, the left and right spaces became like the pages of a three-dimensional open book. This crucial form of the exhibition gave the visitor freedom and foregrounded the openness of the artworks – they do not impose meanings but offer them for reflection. In their complexity and multiplicity, they will not, even cannot impose a single thought or a political one-liner. Visitors turned either right or left through the openings in the walls – traversing, and being affected by the shadows-and-projections. On the right is a film diptych with the promising title Utopia, devoted to an idealistic but never realized housing project for the “New Bombay,” by India’s greatest architect Charles Correa (1930–2015). This early work engages the broken promise of Indian Modernity. The promise was of decent, one-family housing for everyone. The broken promise produced more slums. In a sense, this failure to fulfill the promises on which the new state was built is the founding violence that underlies all others.10 Given my inclination to be most interested in the contemporary, and my left-leaning politics, I turned left. The statement about exhibiting, and/or exposing (playing with the French vs. English word “exposing”) implied in this open-book set-up is this: chronology is but one concept, or syntax, showing how the artist has developed her work. But it is not the only one. The visitor’s freedom to choose between going left or right is key to the conception of curating that is practiced here. Moreover, time, especially the time of violence, is circular. Due to the circularity in Malani’s work, elements of the early work return in later pieces, and, in the artist’s curatorial concept, vice versa. For, the reverse also held: many aspects of the most recent works, especially allusions to Correa’s utopian project, will return in the earlier work that visitors turning left first will see at the end. This

10 For extensive information on this and the other works of the exhibition mentioned, see the catalogue (Malani 2017).

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  257 circularity in the oeuvre, as well as in the exhibition as a whole, reflected, or rather, materialized the circularity of history; giving the lie to linear chronology with its “presentist” arrogant evolutionism.11 Here, another common ground with Hent’s work comes up: my interest in the contemporary, not as opposed to the past but as the ground on which the past can be taken on board and made relevant again. This is congenial with Hent’s refusal of all those old oppositions that claim that public expressions of religion are of the past and belong not in the public but in the private domain. All through the work I know, but especially in his introductory essay to the collective volume Religion and Media, he makes a strong case against that illusory relying on “modernism” as an alleged surpassing of what came before. Throughout Malani’s exhibition, the idea of broken promises of modernism was embodied by the predominance of circular movements. This circularity began right away, in the video/shadow play Remembering Mad Meg from 2007/11, responding to Flemish Old Master Pieter Breughel the Elder’s anti-war painting (“anti-war” in my interpretation of it) from around 1562. This can hardly be taken to reject or ignore the past, nor to extoll the present as “beyond” anything, let alone violence. It is also the circularity of history itself, where violence and destruction keep returning. The title of the work that was exhibited for the first time in this exhibition, All We Imagine as Light, sounds poetic. But don’t be fooled: in line with poetry, and in collaboration with the hanging, the title’s beauty entices visitors to sit down and take the time to contemplate the work so named. Sitting down: this is my current conviction about museum display, and not just because older people get tired from standing and walking. Everyone does. But it is an artistic issue, which implies a very different temporality of viewing. Giving time, to obliquely wink at Derrida, is a mode of viewing that facilitates a dialogic attitude. Part of this is also low hanging. The sitting visitor can look the artwork in the face. I have experimented with this principle in an exhibition I curated in the Munch Museum in Oslo.12 As the artist explained, the then-new work in this first side-room was inspired by poetry. But the work also refers to recent and still ongoing (state) violence in the allegedly democratic country of India, one of the many current new dictatorships that pass for democracies – a passing facilitated by the binaries about religion mentioned above. The violence referred to is just one example of the circular recurrence of violence

11 With “presentism” I indicate an attitude that considers the present as the (utopian) end of chronological development. I analyze the art as it was curated, because this is an important point concerning the present tense of art. Malani always curates her work together with Johan Pijnappel. 12 See the book that accompanied the exhibition (2017). The benches and low-hanging strategy was very successful and has since been taken on by some but not enough other curators.

258  Mieke Bal and destruction. In the context of the ongoing dispute (since the 1947 Partition) over Kashmir between Pakistan and India, fueled by that between Hindu and Muslim communities, police shoot – note the present tense – young, teenage protesters not with water guns or tear gas but with pellets, leaving many of them blind for life. Malani painted six large tondi – again that circular form – and an 11-panel painting. The latter alludes to her earlier work “Unity in Diversity” (2003). She painted these in 2016/17 during these events of police, hence, state violence that deprived innumerable teenagers of their eyesight. Teenagers who are not able to see the paintings made in their honor, to remember their horror. Unity in diversity: the promise-slogan of the post-colonial, democratic state, to which the persecution of the Muslim population has given the lie from day one. That older work was based on the renowned nineteenth century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma’s “Galaxy of Musicians,” with the overt theme of nationalistic unity displayed through the garb of 11 musicians from different parts of India seemingly playing in harmony. Another broken promise. In addition to anti-binarism and a rejection of evolutionism, a third aspect I share with Hent is a sense that things are in movement, not static. The room in which the painting hung constituted a theater of images that do not move but show and solicit movement. Darkened and with the walls painted black, the paintings were lit to create bright interruptions of the darkness literally as well as figuratively. This also makes them appear to protrude, coming forward from the darkness. Concretely staging the Caravaggesque “colour perspective” – wherein dark colors recede and bright colors push forward – this curatorial decision of lighting additionally enhanced Malani’s rejection of linear perspective, along with other Western dogmatic artistic practices such as easel painting. The former colludes with a colonizing gaze that encompasses a wide view while remaining itself hidden in objectifying innocence. The latter colludes with the capitalist appropriation of art as commodity for the wealthy. But more importantly, this lighting performed what the artist-curator aims to achieve in her work: to make the invisible visible. Together, these positions implied in the hanging itself are political-philosophical. Foregrounding this is my way of also foregrounding the tight connections between philosophy and the material reality in which it seeks to intervene. Hent’s insistent interest in media demonstrates this (de Vries and Weber eds. 2001). In addition to the tension between flatness and depth within the images, this spot-lit presentation yields another level of depth. Seated, the viewer will want to see them all, and this creates the paradox of immobility mobilized. Eyes flit from one panel to the next, actively making sense of the unity in the diversity of figures, scenes, objects, and words. While viewers sit facing, or confronting the 11 panels (Figure 14.1), the large tondi on the side walls keep luring the eyes. They make heads turn, hence, upper bodies move. There is, in addition, a recurrence of figurations as well as color that activates the sitting spectator. Thus, it is a “reverse-cinema” where still images make viewers move while inviting still sitting. These works demand, and need, durational

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  259

Fig. 14.1  All I Imagine as Light, 11-panel painting, 2016–17

260  Mieke Bal looking to achieve the “filmic view” that characterizes Malani’s work. It also plays strongly on the present media culture.13 The cinematic, mediatic esthetic is quite visible in the 11-panel painting, where figures move from frame to frame. True, it is not possible to construct a clear narrative from these figures cut-in-half. The ambiguous combination of the cinematic and the stillness of the images added to the experience of what the images make visible an exhilarating sense of freedom, to which the seating also invited. This sense of freedom to look wherever one wishes, placing attention in whatever order in the circular composition, galvanizes viewers into sharper political awareness. It turned out that circularity with its dark side also has a bright side. Hence, regardless of what each viewer does with it, in what political direction it takes them, that electrifying effect itself is these works’ performative force. But to make that clear, we need to look at some details. Detailed looking, in fact, is the condition for the effect to take hold. Such looking is indispensable to approximate the weaving of a social fabric from which violence can be banned. A conditio sine qua non for this is to see it. And, to side with Hent on this, something happens that seems like a miracle.14

Viewing in Detail: Miracle-Making Each visitor will stop at certain panels, or details. No concrete violence is visible anywhere in the series. Yet, it is invoked everywhere and thus made visible to our imagination. Imagine one is caught by one of the six tondi, arbitrarily selected perhaps, or solicited by only a detail you pick up right away. I went for the one titled after its first line of text, “You Needed to Perfect Me.” The enigmatic words inscribed follow the upper arc of the circle: “At a certain moment I lost track of you. You needed me. You needed to [gap] perfect me”, (Figure 14.2). Like its neighbors, the image is both flat and full of details that invoke, and technically miraculously make, three-dimensionality. The flatness is enhanced by the shiny surface and the round form that takes distance from the traditional rectangular canvas one of the elements of Western painting Malani declines. But even the flatness itself is ambiguous. The artist “reverse-paints” on a transparent support, Mylar, Lexan or glass. As a paradoxical but crucial consequence, a sheen covers the image while maintaining perfect transparency. Analogous to the mirror image of the reverse-painting technique, the sheen becomes a mirror. It “covers” the paint with reflections in which the viewer sees herself in 3D-depth, unable to disentangle herself from the scene yet also unable to get close. This is the materiality of the work’s political performativity,

13 “Filmic view” is a term developed by Johan Pijnappel in a very illuminating essay on Malani’s work, mainly earlier work, including multi-pale paintings. 14 See de Vries and Weber (eds.) 2001, 23–29.

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  261

Fig. 14.2  You Needed to Perfect Me, 2016

its capacity of act, to change the viewers however slightly. As a result, each of us who were “with” these paintings, as if with social interlocutors, took our place in this history of the present. The round form is also enhanced by the composition of the three primary figures: three women. From bottom to top: one looks like a young girl; one, let’s say, could be the mother who literally backs her up; and above, turned 90 degrees in another kind of movement, we see the figure of an older woman. She seems to be grabbing her head as if in despair, her gesture causing the gap in the text. The younger and the older one are quite close to the frame; all three are close to the picture plane. Overlapping as in photographic double exposure, these three figures with their grim facial expressions tell of separation (“I lost track of you”). Formally, they are constituted of three different flat planes; there is no unified composition. “At a certain moment” is the historical, real version of the opening line of fictional fairy tales, “Once upon a time.” To the far-away, elsewhere and “elsewhen” of that consoling genre the artist substitutes the harsh reality

262  Mieke Bal of here-and-now. This is one of the ways the work is politically responsive. The words speak of the instantaneousness of an event that has such durable consequences. It has no “happily ever after” ending.15

Painted Words Image and Philosophize The words in the tondo also raise the question of who is “I” and who is “you” here. These words have no dictionary meaning; they only function in a particular situation of speech. Malani thereby foregrounds a performative situation of looking. Each viewer can feel addressed and recognize the first person as somehow implicated in something violent – here, a separation, of which we don’t know the cause. That unspecified “you” is the form of address that is typical of poetry, a discourse from which the work’s title had been derived. In Malani’s painting, words, especially poetic ones, matter. She takes language as seriously, in its materiality, as she takes paint, and painting. The background foregrounds the three-dimensionality, an effect of depth in tension with the flatness that states the image’s status qua image. That flatness is important, intimating that there is no attempt to deceptive make-believe that would entice passive viewing. In other words, there is no attempt to seduce us into that “willing suspension of disbelief,” as the eighteenth-century English poet Coleridge so insightfully phrased his conception of fiction. No fiction, then, but harsh reality; a reality not represented, but presented, for reflection, in the double sense of that word. Depth is also created by scale. Once seated and taking – or giving, as Derrida would have it – our time, we see a host of smaller figures and the scenes these evoke. Somewhere on this plane, two smaller figures stand on a platform, leaning to the left, suggestive of classical sculpture – possibly an allusion to (the iconography of) Niobe, who lost her children to violence. This back-story seems plausible in view of the main, larger figures and the words. It depends on the viewer, on what he or she sees in it. For “you” and “I” constantly changing places need that mobility in order to exist. In Malani’s work, such an allusion would be entirely plausible. Avoiding exoticizing and its condescension while enhancing the global circularity of violence, Malani equally engages Western and Eastern mythology. A thought of Niobe would strengthen the connection between Western viewers, and those events the painting alludes to that are specific to the Indian history of modernity also presented. This becomes relevant in view of the edge of the frame. We are pointed in that direction by a pyramidal figure, which looks like a subaltern woman desperately clutching her head. On the lower right, we can hardly miss a meticulously painted structure of cubes. These evoke Malani’s early film

15 The witty and useful concept of “elsewhen” was proposed by Nanna Verhoeff (2006, 13).

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  263 work Dream Houses that was also in the exhibition, as one wing of the diptych Utopia, from 1969 to 1976, mentioned above. The Escher-like cubes could signify either houses, when seen with depth; or a clean tile floor, when seen as flat. The upper ones crush the woman figure below them. They seem to push against all three women. Here, I submit that the ambiguity itself is miraculous. This stylistically different element produces one of the compulsions to move the eyes, perhaps the body. For, it recurs in other panels and in most of the tondi, a repetition that one saw from the corner of the eye. This is part of the circularity. Take the one with the circular text, “One day the streets of the world will be empty. From every [gap] tomb I’ll learn all we [gap] imagine as light.” Beginning with that ominous prediction as yet another allusion to the fairy-tale going awry, when “Once upon a time” becomes a specific day, this text ends on the title of the entire series. In that second sentence, the words “tomb” and “imagine,” bringing violence and the imaginary search for alternatives together, receive a pause; a verbal stop-motion animation. In yet another oeuvre-immanent allusion, this materialization of stop-motion recalls that genre that Malani also practices, in her ongoing experimentation in and search for the movement in images of painting, traditionally conceived of as still, motionless. In “One day,” the cubes are larger, and on their left, they overlap a bit with another form that the utopian housing project takes, of a more finished architectural structure. The large (male?) figure, there, looks out of a window, so that the architectural structure seems completed. But his look cannot reach the outside, obstructed as it is by a large, poisonous-looking cloud (Figure 14.3). This ambiguity of the cubes/tiles and architecture we then also recognize in Desire, a work with no sentence but seemingly disconnected words: “desire, greed, mend, rupture, connect, power, hide, heal,” words that alternate separation and connection. There, the structure is also on the left, stretched out. It is on the right side in the tondo “Your Perfect Enemy.” The possibility to recognize that persistent allusion to modernist architecture underlies the miracle of three-dimensionality produced in flat painting. It is one of many enticements to move the gaze around the picture’s surface; and to see it recur enhances the seriality of the paintings, which is an element in the implementation of circularity on all levels if the work. This architectural idealism that inaugurated Modernity in India and that was the subject of Malani’s earliest moving images, or animation, keeps rearing its head, in protest against its broken promise. Once noticed, visitors will move from one tondo to the other and, in the process, see the figures to which the architecture forms a background of disappointment and despair. In “You Needed to Perfect Me,” the allusion takes on historical duration when we see in front of the cubes a small, subaltern woman on her knees; below, another sculptural shape

264  Mieke Bal

Fig. 14.3  One day the Streets of the World will be Empty, 2016

might invoke the Descent from the Cross, a Pietà, or another scene of a mother holding an adult dead or wounded – or blinded – child. Who the I and the you are in the personalizing text must remain unspecified, so that the many you’s who find themselves in that situation of separation can all find symbolic shelter and recognition in this image, as well

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  265 as in its neighbors, becoming an I in the exchange between first and second person. The head of the middle woman is exactly in the center of the circle and is circular itself. It looks a bit like a cat, an animalistic tendency that Malani insinuates in other works as well, expressing connections among living beings far removed from the politics that hurt these figures so. She looks sideways and up, as if addressing that “you” who needed to perfect her; or as if “listening to the shades” who the I and the you are in the personalizing text, to cite the title of an earlier, 2008 project of Malani’s – the shades of what she has been expelled from.16 What could these shades be? She may be listening to Cassandra, on whom that earlier work focused: the doomsayer from Greek mythology, to whom no one paid heed. A child perfecting her mother, by the demands children make on their parents? The sentences “You need me” and the following “you needed to perfect me” suggest the times of motherhood, wherein the child develops from neediness to critical autonomy. The child that the middle figure is protecting has such an old face, looking in the same direction, that it already seems to have surpassed that second phase. The different position of the older woman expresses an irremediable separation by means of the turn of the tondo that, due to its large diameter, becomes a wheel of fortune, ready to spin. When mother and daughter become separated, this lifelong learning process of mothering is halted, destroyed. But the verb “to perfect” can also refer to the utopian housing project symbolized by the cubes with their neatly (“perfectly”) delineated three-dimensionality built up of blue, ochre, and white. The “losing track” alludes to the broken promise of a humane existence. Like the other ones in the room, this painting revisits, or re-views, forms of violence: violent separation, the destruction of family bonds, belying the promises of peace (after Partition) and the promise of a way out of subhuman existence (the housing project). This denunciation is all the more forceful as the I – you discourse and the accumulation of women figures speak a highly personal, intimate language, even though its tentacles spread a very wide net. Like the flat-3D dynamic, that brings the work so close to the idea of a miracle, its subtle palette of, primarily, ochre and blue in all their nuances, gives expression to both the beauty of the painting and the confinement of the figures, locked up in a circular, no-exit situation. This is the force of Malani’s political art: it is not about a particular political cause but produces an affective intensity that, when ruminated for some time, makes it possible to live the beauty and see the horror, as well as vice versa: beauty as glue. The painterly quality and the circularity of form collaborate with the curatorial low hanging and providing of seating to make that glue work, so that viewers, too, can re-view, that is,

16 Listening to the Shades is an artist book, published in 2008 by Robert Storr, and inspired by Christa Wolf’s rewriting of the classical myth of Cassandra.

266  Mieke Bal recognize and revisit, and apply the critical sense of reviewing. Thus, they are encouraged to become more active in rejecting the violence all around the world.

Miracles Do Happen My use of the words “miracle” and “miraculous” in this brief visit to an exhibition is an obvious allusion to Hent’s work on miracles. For him, the miracle is a tool to break open the binary not only between religious and secular, and between public and private, but also, that between the very idea of the miracle and the technical media, or more broadly, the technique that is indispensable for miracles to happen. The word “religion” has its roots in the Latin word for bonding. I recognize the importance of religion as a social and political phenomenon, but beyond that, my interest parts ways with Hent’s focus. Yet, I think or hope he would see the point of using those words, not lightly, but in order to focus on an aspect of religion that stretches wider into the social-political domain, whether bound to religion or not. He writes very specifically about miracles: … the suspicion that the special effect should be understood against the backdrop of the religious tradition, in particular, the miracle, and that the miracle has always been characterized by a certain “mechanicity” or technicity. To speak of special effects in terms of miracles means at least two things. First, it implies that one must generalize the applicability of the world of religion – its concept and imaginary, its semantic and figural archive – to include almost everything that, at one time or another, has set itself apart from religion […] The magical and the technological thus come to occupy the same space, obey the same regime, and the same logic. … I allege this passage to put forward a convergence between Hent’s work and mine that, somewhat implausibly at first sight, can make the case my analysis of Malani’s work has tried to build. What is for Hent religion, is for me the social, anchored as it is in the political. The word “religion” has its roots in the Latin word “religare” for bonding and that holds for both views. If it has not become clear enough so far, my parting ways with Hent in my nearindifference to religion does not mean that I find the reasoning wrong.17 If I put “social” where Hent puts “religious” and we suspend the issue of religious versus secular, an opposition Hent’s work has so relentlessly undermined, we can find a common ground in the values that human societies either hold or neglect. The miraculous three-dimensionality of Malani’s

17 The quoted passage comes from the introductory essay in de Vries and Weber (eds.), 2001, 28.

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  267 two-dimensional paintings demonstrates the importance of art in that other three-dimensionality, of the mobility and performativity of art where freedom does not contradict persuasion, thanks to the temporary restraint Deleuze put on the semantization of affect. Here lies the importance of the emotional neutrality-in-intensity of the affection-image. This is precisely what affect is: intensity without particularizing expression, enabling the viewer to experience the affect on her own terms. Only then can affect be relational, the experience of art be subjective, and art work politically. For, only then can viewers be simultaneously affected and left free to exert their own agency. Deleuze defines it in Difference and Repetition as a qualitative difference within the sensible (1994, 182). Importantly, there is a subtle temporal discrepancy involved here: one between perception and understanding. Deleuze adds that intensity can only be grasped, or felt, after it has been mediated by the quality it creates (182). Affect, and art’s capacity to generate and deploy it: this I consider miraculous in that social sense.18 I have just recently been compelled to use the words “miracle” and “miraculous” in a situation of my own experience where social values produced the “special effect” that, for me, is nothing short of miraculous. Here is a short story. For two years, I had been planning, with French actor Mathieu Montanier, to produce a 16-channel video installation based on Don Quijote, bringing the classical monument of Spanish literature to the present. But it was impossible to realize the project. For, due to various circumstances of categorial exclusions, I was not eligible for any form of funding. The budget, modest because counting on lots of friends, was still impossible. Until three things happened. One: the curator of an exhibition of my video work in Murcia, Spain, was able to fund making the first one of 16 scenes as part of that exhibition, as a future-oriented alternative to the idea of a retrospective. Second, a Swedish university in Växjö where I had done some lectures and met brilliant and wonderful colleagues, sponsored the making of the last three scenes. And then, the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, my academic home until mandatory retirement hit, came up with 10% of the (modest) budget. The result of these various gestures of generosity, and the solidarity that was their motor, was the making of the complete work in just five months. This seems impossible, financially and technically. Yet, it happened. This is no less than a miracle. No religion, but something that might fall under that “almost everything” Hent is willing to allow in that rubric. In a time that the “neo-liberal”

18 Due to limitations of space I must restrict this brief ending to Deleuze’s first articulation of affect. More on affect in a recent volume edited by Alphen and Jirsa (2019). For a lucid explanation of the philosophical thrust of cinema in Deleuze’s studies of it, see Marrati (2008). The most succinct formulation of Deleuze’s three types of “movement-images” is in Deleuze (1986, 66–70).

268  Mieke Bal (neither neo nor liberal, but so-called) university is, as it has been rightly stated, “capitalist on the outside and Stalinist on the inside,” the values I have here experienced are social, and in their stark difference from the ruling mores, political. I am convinced they are also intellectually, academically productive. Yes; together, with no official religion in sight, perhaps just a belief in social bonding through art, I consider what happened a miracle.

References Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (1974). London: Verso (2005) [1951]. ———. Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and translated by Rodney Livingstone et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (2003). ———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York, NY: Continuum (2000). ———. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (1997). Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington, IL and Indianapolis, IL: Indiana University Press (1987). ———. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2002). ———. Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (2008). ———. In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz (2016). ———. Emma & Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic. Oslo: Munch Museum/Brussels: Mercatorfonds; Yale University Press (2017). Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken (1968). Boletsi, Maria. Barbarism and Its Discontents. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (2013). ———. “From the Subject of the Crisis to the Subject in Crisis: Middle Voice on Greek Walls.” The Journal of Greek Media and Culture, 2, 1: 3–28 (2016). Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York, NY: Routledge (1997). Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2015). de Certeau, Michel. La fable mystique, I, XVI-XVII siècle. Paris: Gallimard (1982). ———. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (1986). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press (1994) [1968]. ———. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press (1986) [1983]. Derrida, Jacques. D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée (1982).

Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text  269 ———. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée (1987). Didi Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (2008). de Vries, Hent. “Anti-Babel: The “Mystical Postulate” in Benjamin, de Certeau and Derrida.” Modern Language Notes, 107: 441–477 (1992). ———. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press (1999). ———. Religion and Violence. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press (2002). ———. Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press (2005). ———. Of Miracles, Events, and Special Effects: The Politics of Global Religion in an Age of New Media (2001). de Vries, Hent and Samuel Weber (eds.). Religion and Media. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (2001). Huyssen, Andreas. “The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory.” In Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, 46–59. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz (2012). ———. William Kentridge, Nalini Malani: The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory. New York, NY: Galerie Lelong/Milan: Charta (2013). Malani, Nalini. The Rebellion of the Dead/Nalini Malani: la rébellion des morts. Rétrospective, edited by Sophie Duplaix. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/ Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz (2017). Marrati, Paola. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (2008). Pijnappel, Johan. “Utopia: Nalini Malani’s Rediscovered Films from the Period 1969-1976.” The Moving Image Review & Art Journal, 4:1/4, 2: 198–215 (2016). Sambrani, Chaitanya. “Apocalypse Recalled: The Historical Discourse of Nalini Malani.” http://www.nalinimalani.com/texts/chaitanya.htm (2004), n.p. van Alphen, Ernst and Tomáš Jirsa eds. How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill |Rodopi (2019). ———. ASCA Brief: Visions and Voices of Otherness. Edited by Mieke Bal, Thomas Elsaesser, Burcht Pranger, Hent de Vries, and Willem Weststeijn. Amsterdam: ASCA Press (1997). ———. ASCA Brief: Intellectual Traditions in Movement. Edited by Mieke Bal, Thomas Elsaesser, Burcht Pranger, Beate Roessler, Hent de Vries, and Willem Weststeijn. Amsterdam: ASCA Press (1998). Verhoeff, Nanna. The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (2006). Walker, Michelle Boulous. Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution. London, Bloomsbury (2017).

15 Anti-Retractationes On Inexistence, Divine, and Other Hent de Vries

New York University, United States

It is therefore a necessary consequence of the physical and, at the same time, the moral predisposition in us—the latter being the foundation and at the same time the interpreter of all religion—that in the end religion will gradually be freed of all empirical grounds of determination, of all statutes that rest on history and unite human beings provisionally for the promotion of the good through the intermediary of an ecclesiastical faith. Thus at last the pure faith of religion will rule over all, “so that God may be all in all” … The leading string of holy tradition, with its appendages, with its statutes and observances, which in its time did good service, become bit by bit, dispensable, yea, finally, when a human being enters upon his adolescence, turn into a fetter … [T]he very form of a church is dissolved; the vicar on earth enters the same class as the human beings who are now elevated to him as citizens of heaven, and so God is all in all.1

Philosophy, there is no doubt, is more than the theoretical act of looking back now and then, here and there, just as it demands more, for that matter, than the parallel act of perennially stepping back. Moreover, it requires much else besides surreptitiously overstepping its purported epistemic, linguistic, and pragmatic boundaries by vainly announcing or proclaiming a future completely unlike the present. For all its restlessness, philosophy remains, first of all, the art—or, more precisely, the practice and discipline—of living now. Skeptically and speculatively, philosophy, understood as a “way of life [manière de vivre]” as Pierre Hadot reminded us, is the instruction or method, not so much of looking askance, but rather of cultivating an optics, characterized by a studied

1 Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed., Wilhelm Weischedel, Band 7 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 785, 802; Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in idem, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57–215, 151, 162.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-16

Anti-Retractationes 271 and naïve gaze, as if seeing things for the first and, perhaps, last time. Such an outlook directs or reorients itself with a fresh, keen, and unexpecting eye to what went unnoticed so far or for the most part, indeed, to what eluded our ingrained and common perceptions. Put differently, its uncovers or rediscovers whatever it “is”—or, as we will see, more exactly, “inexists”—that might yet arrive in our lives as well as in those of all others (whether dead, alive, or as of yet unborn) with whom we share a world, a past, present, and future. Alternating and, perhaps, mingling the ordinary and the everyday as well as more momentous or eventful struggles we face, on the one hand, with reflection or meditation, wherever and whenever called for, on the other, the proverbial life of the mind—the vita contemplativa as well as vita activa—consists, first of all, in a near-absolute snapping out and zooming in, that is, in disengagement and reengagement, followed by repeats of the same. And the latter rhythm is reiterated not only ad infinitum, but ad maiorem gloriam Dei, if one so chooses and, perhaps, cannot but choose. One way or other, this highest or ultimate Referent, while not a telos or mere asymptotic approximation, keeps coming up and “comes to mind [vient à l’idée]” (as Emmanuel Levinas once aptly put it), for both good and for ill. Hence, the quasi-perennial nature of the theological and theologico-political questions that haunt us continually (or should concern us more). In this light or, alternatively, under this shadow alone, philosophy espouses and expresses seriousness and sincerity, down-to-earth materialism but also spirituality, just as laughter and horror, a sense of comedy no less than tragedy, go a long way as one mounts and descends its sinuous paths, climbing out of the cave, only to be sent back in, time and again. No one ever claimed this was easy or obvious. After all, “omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt [all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare],” as Spinoza put it convincingly, concluding his metaphysical system, the Ethica, whose “practical philosophy” and “optics” showed us one way alternating the mysticism and mechanics of modern thought and the life it espouses as well as the polity it infuses with truth and veracity.

Stepping Stones and Stumbling Blocks What I greatly appreciate about the lucid introduction and solid, thought-provoking contributions to this volume or, as one says, Festschrift to whose much-admired editors, Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster, and distinguished group of authors I am infinitely grateful, feeling deeply honored, humbled, and forever in their debt, is that none of the summary accounts of these contributors’ own latest thinking, including their more pointed interventions in response to mine, are, strictly speaking, about what I have endeavored in previous writings (imperfect and incomplete as

272  Hent de Vries these latter have remained so far). Rather, all of them are astute observations and probing interpellations in their own right. Without exception, they sincerely engage and seriously argue with the interpretative readings and argumentative claims I have found reason to make on different occasions, prompted by various concerns but with an overarching interest always firmly in mind. 2 The fourteen contributions to this volume, spearheaded by the editors’ substantial introduction, do so in identifying and further developing several guiding motifs and moments, call them moods and modes of thinking as well as demonstrative threads, just as they rightly pick up on all too many loose ends that persist. Moreover, they often proceed in more constructive ways than I have been able to come up with and formulate clearly so far. I take these critical commentators’ historical elaborations and systematic precisions as offering numerous helpful suggestions and extending varied invitations to revisit and revise what were only seemingly or, at best, tentatively established points, each of them made in the provisional form and incomplete series of observations, intuitions, and chains of reasoning that reveal themselves now not merely as necessary stepping stones but also—and, often, more significantly—as potential stumbling blocks for my overall project (if we can call it that). With this acknowledged, my present rejoinder will surely not be up to the task that I am somewhat relieved to relegate to a later, hopefully not too distant, moment when more systematic reflection and renewed study, on my part, may finally provide me with the necessary competence and confidence to respond more directly and fully to the generous comments and queries. 3 This said, my current and, no doubt,

2 And one wonders, does one ever do anything but occasional work, stringing coincidental encounters with authors and texts, motifs and discourses, passions and practices, together until they acquire a logic, indeed, necessity of their own? Moreover, can one weave such patterns of words and things, sounds and silences, gestures and powers ever together in the story of a life, one’s own, as it were? The first no doubt, the second much less so. 3 There have been other noteworthy responses and critical rejoinders on earlier occasions, not included in the present volume, which I have been privileged to receive and addressed at the time. I will mention the dossier with extensive responses to my work up to that point in the Dutch journal Krisis: Tijdschrift voor empirische Filosofie, with contributions by Anton van den Harskamp, Harry Kunneman, Herman Philipse, and Burcht Pranger (December 2000), and also the dossier with helpful remarks by Monique Roelofs, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Casey Haskins, and Joseph Margolis, in the dossier on “‘The Turn to Religion’: Dekonstruktive Erwägungen zur ‘Wiederkehr des Religiösen,’” collected in Religion nach der Religionskritik, ed. Ludwig Nagl (Vienna: R. Oldenburg Verlag – Akademie Verlag, 2003), 263–318. Other constructive responses I have found useful as well. I am thinking of Amy Hollywood’s Acute Melancholy and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 11 ff. The latter study references and further develops an earlier friendly response to my work, namely by the late Tyler T. Roberts, in his Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

Anti-Retractationes 273 future thoughts on the matters brought up in this volume should probably not be seen as retractationes (i.e., retractions) so-called. Instead of retractions—and “instead” is one meaning of the prefix “anti-”—I seek to do something else. To make this clear from the start, my chosen main title, namely “Anti-Rectratationes,” not only deliberately echoes and parodies my earlier “Anti-Prolegomena,” with which I had opened, first, Theologie im pianissimo but also my revised and expanded Minimal Theologies (anti-prolegomena, which I, likewise, do not regret).4 My title, for what it is worth, also stubbornly signals that it seems, to me, vain to (want to) retract anything one has dared or felt compelled to say—especially, write and publish—at some point before. Not only would one surely not find the courage, much less muster the needed energy, seriousness, and sincerity of a St. Augustine, in his Retractationes, as he re-traversed all of his writings and found fault with some, here and there; but it also seems futile (again, somewhat vain) not to stand by one’s words, not to let the latter simply speak and vow for themselves, to be what Euripides’s Hippolytus calls “my bond,” fateful as this may further turn out to be. And where not merely minimal but maximal theological claims and statements are resolutely—perhaps, unwisely—made, the stakes couldn’t be

4 These “Anti-Prolegomena” were in part an effort to find a niche in Jürgen Habermas’s formal pragmatic framework so as to spell out the need to revisit the “actuality [Aktualität]” of Theodor W. Adorno’s thought, which the second and third generation of the Frankfurt School seemed to have sidelined in part. I returned to this only much later in my “Global Religion and the Post-Secular Challenge: Habermas’s Recent Writings and the Case for Deep Pragmatismin,” Habermas and Religion, eds., Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Craig Calhoun, and Eduardo Mendietta (New York: Social Science Research Council and Polity Press, 2013), 203–229. In his response to this all too rudimentary essay, Habermas, who had very kindly acknowledged receiving a copy of my first book and dissertation Theologie im pianissimo in 1989 and, at the time, immediately invited me in writing to speak in his seminar (which, I now deeply regret, I never took up and did), understandably bristled at my suggestion to explore the metaphysical notion and pragmatic dimensions of so-called “depth.” To more fully justify its point or counterpoint, I now believe, would require an in-depth and preparatory discussion notably of the second magnum opus Habermas published recently, building on previous collected essays on religion and naturalism, namely the massive, two-volume Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. Band 1: Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen Band 2: Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019). With enough available time, I hope to make good upon that claim elsewhere and revisit the arguments propounded in Chapter 2 of Minimal Theologies, under the heading “A Possible Internal and External Differentiation of Habermas’s Theory of Rationality.”

274  Hent de Vries higher. 5 To the logic of “all in all” there belongs inevitably one of “all or nothing.” Moreover, reparative amendments, patching up a host of several imperfections, like epicycles to a failed or incomplete system, never did anyone much good, be it philosophically and aesthetically or morally and politically. After all, they come with the pretense of perfection or completion, the illusion of having gotten it finally right, this time around. Lastly, antiretractationes, like anti-prolegomena, are not merely reactive in their efforts to undo dogma and dispel doxa; rather, they do something else, thereby healthily countering and neutralizing the historical tendency and psychological impulse to revise and reinvent at all costs, to begin anew, from scratch, as it were. As said, more than critical notes or even friendly amendments, the contributions making up this generous volume, without exception, single out themes as well as reasonings I have had the privilege to think about, write down, and publish. In several instances, they take them up at points at where I, all too often, left off, unable or, at times, hesitant to pursue them still further. The editors and contributors find also new paths of thinking in directions for I which did not yet find the imaginative resources, much less conceptual strengths, to go—or go on—on my own. Needless to say, this is genuine progress, the sole measure of something truly learned, a gift and instruction, and, hence, more than maieusis, to recall the Greek, Socratic practice on which so much of Western thought has long remained premised, ignoring as well as suppressing the voices of others. As Emmanuel Levinas was consistent in emphasizing throughout his phenomenological and so-called confessional writings,

5 For this motif, borrowed from Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus, see my “Must We (NOT) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smits (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 90–118. That we are simultaneously held captive and freed, surrounded, carried, and haunted by words, idioms, and concepts not or no longer of our choosing is undeniable and must be affirmed. One is reminded of Emmanuel Levinas’s striking Biblical no less than phenomenological insight: “The impossibility of escaping God, the adventure of Jonas, indicates that God is at least here not a value among values. (I pronounce the word God without suppressing the intermediaries that lead me to this word, and, if I can say so, the anarchy of its entry into discourse, just as phenomenology states concepts without ever destroying the scaffoldings that permit one to climb up to them.) The impossibility of escaping God lies in the depths of myself as a self, as an absolute passivity. [L’impossibilité d’échapper à Dieu—l’aventure de Jonas (et je prononce le mot Dieu sans supprimer les intermédiaires qui m’amènent à ce mot et, si je peux dire, l’anarchie de son entrée dans le discours—tout comme la phénoménologie énoncé des concepts sans jamais détruire les échafaudages qui permirent de monter jusqu’à eux)—l’impossibilité d’échapper à Dieu (qui, en cela au moins, n’est pas une valeur parmi d’autres) gît au fond de moi comme soi, comme passivité absolue.]” (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998], 128; Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978], 165).

Anti-Retractationes 275 true knowledge—including the knowledge of the truth, of the good, and of beauty—comes to us from a “dimension of height,” thus offering an altogether different “scene of instruction” than the one that the modern Cartesian recital of feigned skeptical doubt bequeathed to modern epistemology in its failed and vain “quest for certainty.” Levinas was absolutely right: there is very little one can come up with all by oneself and, to preface the remaining propos of this epilogue and rejoinder in different words once more, processing and fully assessing that “very little”—that is, making it clear and productive not only on one’s own terms but also, if possible, for the greater benefit and common good of many or all—is even much harder still.

Philosophy’s Turn Not so long ago, in October 2019, I was kindly invited to a conference, held at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The alibi for the occasion I was given was the 20th anniversary of my book Philosophy and the Turn to Religion whose program and ambition I, personally, continue to think of as lying still very much ahead of, rather than long behind, me (and, hence, as an agenda, a given set of things-yet-to-do, rather than a result, as the latter concept suggests, or a past that is fixed, a completed task, a project that is passé, over and done with). After all, wasn’t there always something to add on and had my insistence, in its companion volume, Minimal Theologies, on necessary “supplements” to Critical Theory not stipulated as much? Moreover, as one says, habent sua fata libelli. Even the return to original intentions and ambitions at the time of writing, supposing one could so much as recall and reconstitute them after so many years, would not really matter to the ulterior fate—read: the reception and, perhaps, effective history—of the work in question, assuming it had made any impact and/or could still do so in years ahead.6 There was no alternative but to weave its tapestry further, untying its unintended knots, draw out and reuse cords that had ended up being tangled.

6 I don’t think I ever confessed in writing that the book’s eventual title was, in fact, its planned subtitle, whose original full title was Adieu: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. On the very day I handed the printed manuscript to the then Director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, Willis Regier, my host, Neil Hertz, then Director of its Humanities Center, asked me to be a respondent to a recent book by Jacques Derrida at an upcoming panel during the latter’s visit to Gilman Hall, as an Associate of the Center. As I opened the envelope with the proofs of the book, its title struck with an ambiguous feeling of shock and recognition: Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas. Not surprisingly, Derrida had put his finger on the guiding motif in this author’s work. Whatever else it may be, moving toward God is moving away from every preestablished conception—image or idol—of Him. Needless to say, I dropped the planned title, Adieu, whose French idiomatic version and polysemy I had deliberately intended, but was made to realize soon was also somewhat awkward for an American Academic Press, and, hence, I decided to let the now all too ambitious, if nicely programmatic, original subtitle, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, stand on its own.

276  Hent de Vries Again, such corrective process would have to fall short of retractationes, properly speaking. If anything, its approach would be affirmative rather than negative, an endeavor not to falsify but verify, in the sense of making things true—in yet a different Augustinian spirit, this time, of veritatem facere, “to do truth”—such that one could see and set things aright that were, in principle, virtually or, say, implicitly and in obliquo, already there. While the Divinity School’s invitation was certainly flattering, it was also bittersweet and somewhat daunting, in fact, the more I thought about it, even deeply sobering. It just made me wonder: had I made any progress, whether in that, my first English-written, book or ever since? Or also: was there, perhaps, just one serious question one could hope to belabor in one lifetime, if one got that lucky, but not many different ones, let alone all of them at once? And, if so, what might that question or those questions be exactly? With the benefit of hindsight and, one hopes, some more acquired knowledge and wisdom, which tentative or provisional answers, if any worthy of that all too definitive name, had Philosophy and the Turn to Religion’s proposed line of inquiry prepared, if not produced, in the end? After all, the most challenging questions and compelling “answers” in both philosophy and theology, I knew all too well, are only very rarely verifiable, much less falsifiable, strictly empirically or rationally speaking (although, as said, the aim of veritatem facere, “making truth,” at least since St. Augustine, certainly remained their unstated and ultimate aim). The multifaceted interventions at the Chicago colloquium and, a fortiori, those collected in the present volume together continue to summon me to make this much clearer, more than I am able to do here. Rather than summarizing the respective propos of the latter contributions, as the editors have already admirably done in the introduction above, I will borrow from their variegated suggestions somewhat freely, if only intermittently, to drive home my overall point, insofar as I can restate or reimagine it at present. As I would now claim again, with the benefit of hindsight, this overarching and ongoing theme or concern is that of “inexistence.” The important thing to note here is that “inexistence” is not to be confused with non-existence, that is, negativity, pure and simple. The term conjures neither absence nor apophasis. If anything, “inexistence” connotes a counter-factuality, more precisely, virtuality, which is best approached indirectly. Before introducing this motif and the motivation to revisit it head-on, a brief reminder of what may have been its lengthy preparation in writing, itself long in the making, seems in order. This much is clear: what was at stake in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and its companion volumes (notably the two monographs, Minimal Theologies and Religion and Violence, but also, come to think of it, the several edited volumes with their often quite extensive systematic and programmatic introductions) was a certain observed as much as strategically advocated, cautiously and provisionally entertained, “turn” of philosophy—and, first of all, of academic philosophy—to

Anti-Retractationes 277 “religion,” at once narrowly and broadly conceived. This “turn” was undertaken, assessed, and evaluated, not just in terms of metaphysical— read: dialectical and phenomenological, skeptical and analytical, even speculative—considerations and implications, as formulated and investigated in and beyond the domains of professional philosophy, both in so-called Western and non-Western thought, but also pragmatically, that is, with concerns and elaborations of an ethical and a political nature firmly in mind! To be more specific, these books’ more than historical or genealogical attention to the phenomenon and lived experience of “religion” was directed or redirected, first of all, toward what (for lack of better terms) might be called its archive and apparatus. These somewhat technical terms are not mere synonyms.7 In fact, I use them as theoretical and practical opposites in order to differentiate between the unfathomable virtual source, resource, or repository of religion, on the one hand, and its normatively, that is, socially, politically, and juridically determined forms and institutions, on the other. As in de Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between le système de la langue and la parole, the archive is, therefore, not to be understood, first and foremost, as a physical archive (with reports or records of its oral transmissions, written documents, established dogma or encyclicals, etc.), but as the unlimited, immemorial, that is, not yet actualized or, for that matter, no longer actualized virtual modes of possible and as of yet impossible existence; in short, of all acts that could, in principle, be realized at any moment, without reason or cause. The archive, in other words, conjures a universal or truly global, admittedly abstract realm of infinite potentialities or virtualities, whose eventual and effective role remains to be determined by present and future generations of both individuals and collectives. The apparatus, by contrast—following a terminology introduced by Michel Foucault and dating possibly back to early Christian incarnational and Trinitarian conceptions of divine economy (i.e., of “positive” and revealed religion, including the providential administration of the world that charts its historical course)—is the concrete, delimited materialization or sedimentation, contextualization, and framing or “setting apart” of religion’s de facto modes of

7 On the second term, see my “Die erste Mediatisierung: Oikonomia und Apparatus in Religion und Theologie,” in Dieter Mersch and Michael Mayer, eds., Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Vol. 7, Special Issue on Mediality, Theology, Religion, ed. Johannes Bennke and Virgil Brower (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 23–61; and, for the English version, my “Divine Economy: Notes on the Religious Apparatus,” in Glenn Dynner, Susannah Heschel, and Shaul Magid, eds., New Paths: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson (Pittsburgh: Purdue University Press, 2023).

278  Hent de Vries existence, in other words, of its discourses and rituals, customs and habits, traditions and institutional practices, rules and norms. 8 As I will use the term, “religion,” although often exclusively associated with this latter social and moral aspect of apparatuses—or seen as “closed” and “static,” as Henri Bergson would say in his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion])—pertains just as much to the first mentioned virtual and archival realm (which is instead “open” and “dynamic,” to cite once more Bergson). In other words, “religion” is the best descriptive term for the archive’s immemorial past that is recalled, prompted, and reactivated not only by the great mystics and their actions alone (as Bergson and, before him, William James seemed think), but also on all occasions that call for reflection, action, and more.

8 As Sarah Hammerschlag wisely reminds us in her beautiful interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s missed encounter with Sarah Koffman’s autobiographical writings, in L’animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am), “religion can never be isolated as the archive that Derrida could not do without.” The long parade of animals which I recall responding to almost in disbelief, as I heard Derrida present the two-part lecture during the second “décade” devoted to his work at Cérisy-la-Salle, makes it all too clear that a whole other archive of “the other” was, is, and will always remain “out there,” just as it was, is, and will always be among—and internal to—the discursive and narrative, canonical and apocryphal traditions or imaginaries on whose resources and repositories we cannot but rely and which Derrida taught to read anew. At the time, I was reminded of Levinas’s “Bobby” and of the profound meditations tucked away in the remainders of the philosophical fragments of Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) devoted to cruelty toward animals and to the exemplary lessons that, in this context, can be learned about our vulnerable creaturely nature. As Adorno quipped, in Negative Dialectics, in the meditation on “Freedom,” one should, perhaps, aspire to having lived as not such a bad animal after all, leaving no doubt, elsewhere in that book, that children are taught all there is to know about culture by its treatment of animals. In Hammerschlag’s words: “it is not that there are some texts that welcome the other, that point beyond themselves to the divine. Instead it is in the very nature of textuality that even the ‘the figure of evil’ can always be reread otherwise, cannot but help welcome the other, in this case the animal, not as symbol, but as vulnerable being, whose vulnerability shows itself in the very ease with which it is killed.” As to the wider implications that Hammerschlag directs our intention to here—insights further developed in a range of important studies, notably The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)—there is no way around, let alone of fully salvaging, “evil” ever. Yet it certainly seems that certain “figures of evil” lend themselves to different, almost opposed interpretations and appropriations. This motif of “ineradicable evil,” which remains a possible rendition of Kant’s radikal Böse, or, in the Kierkegaardian idiom, of horror religiosus, is precisely what my Religion and Violence sought to put to into perspective, and this in an beyond “religion” so-called. But then, Hammerschlag’s point is well-taken, for while religion is not “the” or only archive that Derrida revisits and remobilizes, there is a negative metaphysical and deep pragmatic sense in which I take it to merit privileged treatment, for now, at least. Neither art nor literature, morality or law, I almost everywhere assume, has the same wealth of sources and resources, for good and for ill.

Anti-Retractationes 279 This said, in its very historical experience, in its individual and political spiritual exercise, way of life and mode of existence, “religion” keeps these two “sources,” domains, or aspects, precisely, in and off balance. Far from keeping scores on either side of this divide, religion (with and without quotation marks, as it were) relates one and the other, just as it relegates one to the other. It does so ad maiorem Dei gloriam, as the motto of the Societas Jesu would have it, and this ad infinitum, with neither end nor result. Even its eschatological or apocalyptic conception of truth, that is, the postulation of and preparedness for the very redemption of each and all (the apokatástasis pantôn [ἀποκατα ́στασις πα ́ν των] or restitutio in integrum, as we will see), the ultimate—and ultimately utopian—solution, once and for all, to our predicament is one that could itself, in turn, be contested, become unrafeled, and come undone.

The Predicament of Predication The Chicago event, it eventually turned out, was also set up as a so-called Continental Philosophy Workshop. When I realized this, upon receiving the final programming, I was, I admit, even more apprehensive, not least because the argument in the book under consideration, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, was in my, perhaps naïve, view not at all beholden to a specific—historical and supposedly geographically regional—philosophical school of thought, much less to some presumably unified method of thinking. This is not to deny that the book documented, as all publications do, the limitations of one’s education up that point. And while one thinks of oneself as less bounded than one may actually be or, with the best intentions and all the resolve one can muster, still ends up being, it was and remains my firm conviction that across and well beyond the worn-out, unproductive as well as largely fictional divide between “the two cultures” of Continental, German-French dialectical or phenomenological thought, on the one hand, and its apparent antipode, which would be presumably Anglophone, insular, and transatlantic, in any case analytic and post-analytic pragmatist philosophy, on the other, relatively independent strong arguments for a perceived and/or desired “turn to religion” could and should be made. Indeed, this, I was and remain convinced, could be undertaken not only (exclusively or even primarily) in speculative, materialist, critical theoretical, or hermeneutic and poststructuralist terms, but just as well with resolutely conceptual, linguistic, logical and moral perfectionist intuitions and methods right by one’s side. Moreover, if any modern “transformation of philosophy,” to cite Karl-Otto Apel, there was, it had to steer clear from—and, indeed, venture well beyond— the structural contours of either subject-oriented or intersubjective, that is, transcendental or formal pragmatic paradigms of critical thinking. And yet, in doing so and whether still framed in toto or in part by so-called Continental or analytic philosophical assumptions or premises, even a radically alternative or critically transformative mode of inquiry, elucidation, and demonstration

280  Hent de Vries would be unable to fully distance itself from the historical, classical and modern concepts and arguments, methods and metaphors, but also images and gestures, prayers and praise, whose predicament of predication (discursive and other) remains written all over these respective attempts at escape. Put bluntly, probably there is no such thing as post-metaphysical thinking, as long as one takes the range and referent of the term “metaphysics” widely and broadly enough, as one certainly must (and always already does). And for all this unfathomable, inexhaustible depth, metaphysics and its virtual archive, epitomized by the term “religion,” is no less relevant in its resolutely—at once downto-earth and loftier messianic—experiential significance and pragmatic force. Put differently and in terms drawn from one of Stanley Cavell’s most profound and lasting insights, in his magnum opus The Claim of Reason and elsewhere, it is the so-called “truth of skepticism,” the simple and, at times, deeply disturbing “fact” that our epistemic and otherwise normative “criteria” can and must “disappoint” us, which explains the always possible returns of— including the scholarly turns to—“religion.” And the latter comes with genuine truth claims no more and no less than with constant distortions, that is, with expressions of faith as well as fanaticism, all of which are joined at the hip.9 After all, the conditions of possibility and possible actuality of the best and the worst, including everything in-between, are fundamentally the same.10 As a consequence, there was and is no other option and, in fact, never a better occasion than to engage in an ongoing process or practice of verification—vertitatem facere or making true—in which all too apparent counterfeit meanings that had seemingly lost their value, might yet be turned into common currency, while being tossed up and flipped around. In this practice or exercise of thought, there can be no doubt, they remain exposed to processes of re- and devaluation as old and new markets of commerce and

  9 Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006), 63–67; After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 45–48. 10 I have argued this elsewhere extensively. Suffice it to say here that, ethically and politically speaking—in view of what I call deep pragmatics, for lack of a better expression— even though everything is, in its absolute and necessary contingency (to follow up on the thesis of After Finitude) a “miracle” in principle or essence, in metaphysical parlance, not everything is always and everywhere de facto taken and lived or realized as such, in this spirit. Yet I would want to insist that we are more responsive and responsible in our thoughts, actions, and judgments to the extent that we recognize and appreciate by way of (admiratio) more and more things as genuine or quasi-miracles, as true events, that is. This is why an enlightened form of messianism and, even further, apocalypticism, counter-intuitive and ill-advised as this may seem, at first glance, is in the end, when all has been said and done, de rigueur, just as mysticism and, indeed, spiritual discernment help us sharpen our understanding as to what concepts and practices are idols and idolatrous, myths and ideologies, instances of dogmatic metaphysics and fanaticism, and which ones need not be as they absolve themselves from the very axioms and postulates, norms and maxims of these latter, more ominous counterparts. One only overcomes the worst of religion with the best of its elements.

Anti-Retractationes 281 communication will necessarily force them do as well. Nonetheless, when and where this happens, they may yet give in—or, indeed, give way—to countervailing tendencies and spontaneous pressures, here and there. Along the way, the name and concept of the scriptural and metaphysical “God” may well have acquired too much determinacy for His own good and genuine sovereignty, and more than His declared unnameability and default semantic indeterminacy (also as an “unknown” or a “hidden” God) would have seemed to permit. Translating and transposing God, risking conceptual and figural as well as political idolatries left and right, either fundamentally betrayed or gradually shifted the meaning and import of what His name—or merely the word ‘god’—once also stood for. At the same time, as Levinas made a point of emphasizing, God could now enter discourse and conduct even (or especially) there where His name was no longer even mentioned or where His very being or inexistence was no longer so much as a theme.

From Call to Total Recall These were matters of a deeper and broader metaphysical, ontological, even logical nature, then, whose normative, ethical, and political implications and reverberations were of no lesser and, perhaps, even greater relevance. Indeed, how these matters impinged on questions of law and of institutions—and, as a matter of fact, of policy, in its most wonkish of connotations—was, in the end, what interested me most. “Contemplation” and “struggle,” after all, needed to go hand in hand and only thus yield real life and worldly effects that each one of them, taken in isolation—that is, idealistically, as a pure form of meditation, or realistically, as brute opportunism—would most certainly fail to produce. The most abstract and speculative disengagement could and should only serve an ever deeper and broader engagement, whose immersion and inescapable entanglement in the world and its current affairs remained, however, always on call and, hence, as such, at each and any moment, stood under the critical aegis of an epochal total recall, of sorts. Such, in rough outline, it seemed to me, had to be the very nature and structure of a newly conceived theologico-political occasionalism, with and without the Biblical or also metaphysical God (the God of Abraham, Izaak, and Jacob as well as the God of the philosophers and the savants), thus casting a different light on Blaise Pascal’s famous bon mot, in the Pensées, while also suggesting that, in divine matters, the question “to be or not to be?” was not “the” central question at all. This said, the invocation rather than determination of the reference in question, in other words, not merely the philosophical but the political and juridical acknowledgment of the predicament of this predication, as the very standard and measure for all others, made all the difference in the world and its increasingly global affairs. The controversial debate surrounding a constitutional invocatio Dei, in the context of the Treaty to establish a Constitution for Europe (now essentially moot, as the overall proposal was vetoed by the French and the Dutch and,

282  Hent de Vries hence, never ratified), is a case in point. And so was the discussion (again, notably in France and The Netherlands) around the educational and governmental advantages of a publicly established and adopted—up- and down-gradable— religious canon, detailing so-called “religious facts” in the modern or even “laic” state, thus principally as well as tactically or strategically espousing the model of a “reverse breakthrough,” when and where necessary.11 All these controversies—and others could be easily added—should be seen against the backdrop of the protracted efforts at revisiting the ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary articulations of “political theologies” well beyond their ecclesial and confessional origins and antinomian analogues. Each of these elements in the larger archive of religion has its conceptual as well as practical limitations, marked as it inevitably is by forms of exclusion that make it stand in the way of more inclusive and free, that is, resolutely egalitarian and uncoerced pursuits of the so-called common good or “a more perfect Union.” Hence, a genuinely messianic and apocalyptic, that is, emphatic and not merely deflationary conception of truth and truthmaking, together with a more than merely ideational form of what is still best called communism—rather than, say, political liberalism, communitarianism, or even social democracy and democratic socialism—may well be what is ultimately called for, as a political spiritual exercise and form of discipline, more than anything else.12 The latter’s aspiration and realization would not model itself after “real existing” models per se, nor limit itself to nationstates, first and foremost. Avoiding the Stalinist and Maoist temptations of old, it would experiment with new global alliances, seeking nothing short of a cosmic redemption across the ages. In short, as I have tried to sketch out elsewhere, it would require nothing less than a miracle, a revolution of minds

11 See, for further reference, my “Invocatio Dei, la discipline de la tolérance, et la vérité de la vérité. J.H.H. Weiler et la Constitution de l’Europe,” special issue on “Les religions et la question de la vérité,” ed. Yves Charles Zarka and Philippe Capelle, Revue Cités No. 62 (2015), 27–61; “A Religious Canon for Europe? Policy, Education, and the Post-Secular Challenge,” Social Research, Vol. 80 No.2 (Spring 2013), 203–232, Special Issue on “Political Theology,” ed. Richard J. Bernstein; “Naar een dieper pragmatisme: de actualiteit van de geesteswetenschappen in de voorbereiding & uitvoering van beleid,” Intelligent Verbinden: Liber amicorum ter gelegenheid van het afscheid van Wim van de Donk als voorzitter van de WRR (Den Haag: Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 2009), 121–130; “Reverse Breakthrough: The Dutch Connection,” Special Dossier on “The Future of the Religious Party,” in SAIS Review of International Affairs, Vol. 17, Number 1S, Supplement, 2017, 89–103. 12 See my “Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political” Political Theologies: Public Religions in the Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1–88. For an interesting proposal to redefine “communism” in phenomenological terms, see Jean Vioulac, Science et révolution. Recherches sur Marx, Husserl et la phénoménologie (Paris: PUF, 2015), 9 and 168–176. According to Vioulac, Karl Marx’s Capital and Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences are “two complementary books, each of them answering the question that the other leaves in suspense” (ibid., 60).

Anti-Retractationes 283 and hearts, to get off the ground and to sustain itself against all the odds. As such seemingly abstract directive, not to mention its concrete agenda, is for another time and certainly needs more justification that I am able to provide in this context, let me instead take a further step back and revisit one of the central premises, all too briefly introduced above, without whose assumption and affirmation none of this could so much as even be dreamed of.

The Triune Turning What was meant by “turn” in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and what or who, exactly, was it claimed that we turn—or had already (perhaps, always already) turned—to? With regard to the obvious answer, namely “religion” or, indirectly, “God,” the matter seemed both complex and simple. For the referent or aim—the apparent source of it all, the be all and end all—while infinite and all-encompassing, had to be thought of as both multiple and unique, hence, as elusive not only of definite and exhaustive description by concepts and propositions, but, quite literally, as absolving itself of every single nomination just as well. What, then, did it stand for? For one thing, the observed and proposed “turn” was to the totality of a past and its virtual archive and apparatus, including a host of conceptual armatures, images, and rhetorical tropes, rituals and institutional arrangements that—each on their own and in resonance with each other— might well have done far more justice to the deeper and wider resources and repositories of the philosophical discourses of modernity and their social, cultural, and governmental analogues than the latter had, thus far, allowed us to perceive and realize more fully. Unable to refute or outdo these canons, there was no alternative but to revisit them and to do so for both metaphysical and pragmatic reasons, each of them steeped in an immemorial depth and reaching out in an unfathomable expanse the acknowledgment of which is the beginning of wisdom and prudence. For another, the “turn” was to a tradition and legacy that is still best called “religion,” in the full awareness that this had, in the meantime, become a highly contested notion whose referent (some would say requisite), only partly covered by “God” or “gods,” also hides under such seemingly narrower and broader names and concepts as “theology” and “mysticism,” “ritual practice” and “spiritual exercise.” Yet to make these precisions is to immediately stumble upon two problems, difficulties that the historical and modern idioms of “turning”—from epoché and metanoia to conversio, reduction, and Kehre—and a fortiori that of “religion,” with its alternative etymologies and questionable validity or use, made painfully clear. The motif of “turn” or “turning,” it should first of all be noted, entails a partial and somewhat qualified “return toward” the resource and repository of the archive and its enabling and distorting apparatuses. Yet, at the same time and, perhaps, with the same gesture, such turn is—principally, and not merely de facto—a “turn away from” virtually everything that very same

284  Hent de Vries tradition and legacy entails (whether it is Scripture and exegesis, commentary and canon, doctrine and catechism, ritual practices and sacraments, prayer and pastoral care, or anything that anyone committed to their truth and survival has come to hold dear, firmly believe, and embody). All of religion’s forms of life, enshrined in its dogmas and laws, customs, and rules, and solidified in institutions, backed up by political power and cultural hegemonies are “fair game,” that is, at once relevant and no longer so. If there is one logic—or, as I am tempted to say, theo-logic—that underlies this, simultaneously, kataphatic (i.e., affirmative or positive) as well as apophatic (i.e., negative or skeptical and ascetic) operation it is that of the à dieu, the to-god, followed, echoed, and mirrored by the adieu, the farewell to all that exists, with all its substances and attributes, powers and potentialities. This reduction of the naturalistic interpretation of the world as we find it, the step back from its ontic elements and features, primary and secondary qualities, existential and political ups and downs, invites and inaugurates a form of disengagement that alone makes engagement possible, sustainable, responsible, and, as it must be, serious and sincere.13 Yet these seemingly contrary moments and movements co-exist with a third, which opens up a further vista, namely that of the very privation of God and all things divine: the a-dieu, the “transcendence to the point of absence” of which Levinas speaks so compellingly. That the best and the worst, the highest and lowest, the most personalized and most depersonalized virtually shade into each other—or, at the very least, cannot be distinguished in full rigor, much less criteriologically differentiated and decided upon, once and for all—all this is part of what, borrowing from Søren Kierkegaard, one might characterize as the horror religiosus. In Levinas’s rendition, moreover, it is nothing short of a divine comedy, echoing Dante’s famous work, but a comedy in which “the laughter sticks in one’s throat.”14 Such, it seems, is the greatest challenge and gravest threat of the spiritual

13 See my “Must We (Not) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in the Work of J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell,” in Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smits, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 90–118. 14 The motif of “divine comedy” in Levinas’s work draws not only on Dante Alighieri’s Divina Comedia, but may well also echo Honoré de Balzac’s multi-volume counterpart to it, La comédie humaine. Balzac’s title for the series of novels and essays is itself a prosaic rejoinder to this illustrious predecessor’s theological and poetic masterpiece. And, lest we forget, both these authors are important references for Marx and Friedrich Engels, respectively, imparting a sense of katabasis (as in Dante’s Inferno) and, thereby, a novel form of social realism (as in Balzac’s depiction of nineteenth-century tensions and conflicts in private and public everyday life). See William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Siegbert Salomon Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 and London: Verso, 2011).

Anti-Retractationes 285 life of the mind and the very agency—or, in the phenomenological idiom, passivity and patience—that it animates and, at times, also debilitates.15 These three combined motifs or structuring figures (à dieu, adieu, and a-dieu) form nothing short of an anti-Trinity, of sorts, in which the reference to God the Father—assuming the “to-God” gets that ever far (quod non, as, also for Levinas, God is not so much a familiar, approximated Thou but an ever distant He, an ille or illeity)—collapses, metaphysically and pragmatically speaking, into the figure of the God-man (dieu-homme), just as Kant, in our epigraph above, speculated and, we might say, predicted. For Levinas, this motif of the God-man conjures the “humanism of the other human being [Autrui]” and it is from here on that his early interest in messianism and eschatology and, more broadly, all religious and philosophical concepts takes a different turn, this time in the direction of genuine “spiritual life [vie d’esprit].” The latter is strikingly different from the providential diffusion or progressive realization of God-the-Holy-or-absolute-Spirit, whose presumed and presumptuous conquering power in the secular world and history, as we know it, are, on the above view, not deemed essential for things to be better and “turned around” rather than following their intrinsic, immanent or teleological course. On the contrary, as an “optics,” ethics, as Levinas sees it formalized and concretized in the spiritual life, is an immediate rather than conceptually or historically mediated way of seeing and setting things straight and aright and to do so right now and virtually all at once. In the latter capacity, genuine acts of responsibility, as also of messianic reform, revolt, and revolution, all have the ability to, if not prepare and usher in, then at least be prepared for and worthy of an all-redemption—in the traditional theological idiom, an apokatástasis pantôn or, alternatively, a restitutio in integrum—whose total recall would be inclusive of each and everything. This silent axiom, if nothing else, is the at once minimal and massive metaphysical claim—more precisely, an eschatological and apocalyptic aspiration and anticipation—that underlies and undergirds each and every step we make, allowing us to take full measure of the consequences and effects, whether unintended and special or not, of thought and agency. Examples abound, but no more weighty illustration can be given than that of our abstract sense of the political (le politique), on the one hand, and

15 Another confession: Horror Religiosus was originally intended as the title of what would become Religion and Violence (whose latter wording was planned as the book’s subtitle and whose implications, now as a main title, were far too wide-ranging, I soon realized, more than I could fathom or master at the time and still now). On proposing it, Bill Regier, as said, the press’s director and again my acquiring editor, no doubt wisely, suggested: “Just google horror religiosus and see in what company you end up.” He was right, I didn’t like what I found, there was nothing Gothic, much less gory, inspiring my avowed thoughts, nor those of the authors whose lead I followed there. “Horror Religiosus” became the title of the book’s “Introduction” instead, as the motif epitomized what in all serious and responsible study of religion should remain a cautionary note and disclaimer, of sorts. After all, with regard to religion, no one needs apologists, at this point.

286  Hent de Vries the awareness of its concreteness and inevitable messiness in everyday politics or policies (la politiqe), on the other. Of course, if with Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, so often cited by Levinas, we consider only “small acts of goodness” (relying neither on God nor on the Good) as quasi-divine or, at least, holy, then so-called all-goodness seems to no longer figure as one of the central, overarching, and essential attributes of a godly presence. But then again, there is nothing preordained that either metaphysically or historically prevents divine omnipotence—and with it all-goodness—to be restored or revealed at long last. And while we may have little reason to place all our hopes on this, there is nothing that logically—or, at the very least, speculatively and imaginatively—excludes that this may well end up happening on the occasion of precisely such minimal acts and gestures to which Grossman draws our attention. As a matter of fact—and counterfactually or virtually put in our very present—when and where this just so happens, what follows in its wake takes place, paradoxically, with maximal impact and force. The minimal and the maximal are inversely proportional, one is inclined to say, even though it is equally clear that—metaphysically and pragmatically speaking—there is no common measure, no direct positive or negative correspondence, between the extreme terms of this polarity. Instead, the minimal and maximal fload free from each other. Such is the nature and structure, if one can still say so, of both natural and historical contingency, including the effects (without cause or reason) that the former may or may not have on both thought and agency. Messianic logic requires nothing less. In fact, no anti-idolatrous religion could be conceived, in the fullest rigor, without the materialization of the ideal, the realization of the non-real or irreal. An inner, isolated, or, as it were, individual messianism, which begins and ends with me and my world or with one’s closest and only concentrically widening circle, would be at once inconsistent and, more importantly, inconsequential. Hence, it is as a singular and collective proof or verification (i.e., truth making) of a godly omnipotence alone that all-goodness—call it absolute or infinite justice—could be thought at all. From here on, as an at once deeply metaphysical and pragmatic idea, it ought to be acted upon instantly and constantly. As a matter of fact—a “fact of reason” and “total social fact,” if ever there was one—its genuine, minimal, and maximal goodness, with neither empirical nor a priori footing in being or reason per se, comes down to nothing else but equal justice for all. In this very summation—not a gratuitous or irrelevant new categorical imperative at this juncture in time, at this critical moment in history of which we are part— incorporates the living no more and no less than the dead, future generations no more and no less than the non-human animate and inanimate beings and things without which no biosphere, as the sum total of ecosystems (life on earth), could possibly thrive, much less survive. To sum up: a minimal thought and act or gesture can thus, all by itself, become an occasion for all that exists or inexists to change its presumed value

Anti-Retractationes 287 completely, that is, maximally. Such a view undermines the age-old pretense of Being, including the Highest Being, to already animate, if it has not already caused or continues to create, all that is, all that becomes or all that may yet emerge in some imminent or distant future scenario.16 The minimal and maximal motif, whose theological pedigree cannot be denied and should not be forgotten, but whose contemporary metaphysical and pragmatic relevance is no less apparent, require a turn in and of our thinking and doing or gesturing; a truth-making, we said, but not necessarily of our own—subjective or even collective—human making. The critique of idolatry, from the early Hebrew Bible to its later, quasi-secular analogues in “theoretical askesis,” has made it its longstanding and ongoing business to warn precisely against such selfcentered overextension of humanist categories on all that is, was or can be. The triune turning in question (à dieu, adieu, and a-dieu) has little in common with Martin Heidegger’s sense of die Kehre, which, as HansGeorg Gadamer once explained a group of students to which I belonged during a visit to Heidelberg, is best understood in light of his passion for skiing (i.e., as a form of zig-zag, down a literal slope). Nor is it to be confused with this same author’s famous “step back” or Schritt zurück, a motif known from the central essay “Die onto-theologische Verfassung der Metaphysik [The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics],” in Identität und Differenz (Identity and Difference). The reason is simple. Heidegger’s idea of turning, like that of the step back, remains premised

16 In a suggestive meditation on the Christian motifs of verbum, incarnation, and Trinity, Hans-Georg Gadamer places the concept of “occasionality” in the wider—in his words, hermeneutic and ontological—perspective that gives it meaning and force: “Every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole worldview [Weltansicht] that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not a casual imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical expression of the living virtuality [Virtualität] of speech that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally. All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out. [Ein jedes Wort bricht wie aus einer Mitte hervor und hat Bezug auf ein Ganzes, durch das es allein Wort ist. Ein jedes Wort lässt das Ganze der Sprache, der es angehört, antönen und das Ganze der Weltansicht, die ihm zugrundeliegt, erscheinen. Ein jedes Wort lässt daher auch, als das Geschehen seines Augenblickes, das Ungesagte mit da sein, auf das es sich antwortent und winkend bezieht. Die Okkasionalität der menschlichen Rede ist nicht eine gelegentliche Unvollkommenheit ihrer Aussagekraft—sie ist vielmehr der logische Ausdruck der lebendigen Virtualität des Redens, das ein Ganzes von Sinn, ohne es sagen zu können, in Spiel bringt. Alle menschliche Sprache ist in der Weise endlich, das seine Unendlichkeit des auszufaltenden und auszulegenden Sinnes in ihem angelegt ist.]” (Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition, Trans. Revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [New York and London: Continuum, [1989] 2003], 458; Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 4th edition (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], [1960] 1975), 434).

288  Hent de Vries on what Stephen Mulhall aptly calls “the myth of the Fall,” a trope shared between Heidegger and Kierkegaard as well as Wittgenstein, and one we have every reason to be quite skeptical, not to say deeply suspicious, of.17 After all, there are no unilinear, unidirectional turns or returns of either descent or ascent in philosophical thinking nor, for that matter, in much of life and especially ethics and politics. Reversibility of perspective—and that includes an inversion of most theological pretentions and pretense or a lateral subversion of just about everything else in traditional and modern culture—forms an integral part of any critical thought, of any critical agency. Moreover, the latter will know when and where to pause, and move back, forth, or sideways, and back again, as they see fit, on the spot and as they go. Metaphysical and pragmatic occasionalism fosters a singular sensitivity to such singular cases. The virtual archive toward which the “turn to religion” orients itself, precisely because of its immemorial nature (its profond jadis, to cite Paul Valéry, so often cited by Levinas)—an unfathomable and inexhaustible depth that religion shares with the former more than any other archive with which we are as extensively and intensively familiar—remains strangely a-temporal. This said, by accompanying us in toto, along the paths we travel individually and collectively, it can also be said to be cotemporaneous and coextensive with all the pasts, presents, and futures we will have never fully inhabited, much less understood or fully lived up to. The virtual archive “is,” in this sense, of and for all ages. No individual and no generation is in a better position to gain access to it occasionally, let alone fully, once and for all. The turn, then, contemplated and proposed in the thinking and writing leading up to Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and finding a more robust exposition in its accompanying volumes, is not so much that of a simple or single step (or looking) back- and forward or sideways, nor is it one that could be considered unidimensional and unilateral. Instead, the step or steps made and suggested by alternate turns are taken in the deep conviction that it is only with the principally open and unlimited assessment of all that exists and has been seriously thought and sincerely endeavored at all times and everywhere, that we can, all the more fruitfully critique, reform or revolutionize no matter what powers or principalities we will have to face up to. Such immersion, inversion, and subversion are characterized by a sovereign streak and, paradoxically, allow us to call into question sovereignties of all stripes worldwide and at any moment. To do so, however, entails reassessing and, when and where necessary, redressing all established forms of intellectual and cultural hegemony, in conjunction or combination with their correlative socio-historical as well as economic conditions and circumstances,

17 Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Anti-Retractationes 289 their “class matrix,” so to speak.18 After all, in irreducible, if non-reductive ways, the latter affect—and, in this sense, determine or co-determine—all historically enshrined, socially coopted and cultural codified institutional, political, and juridical arrangements thus far (arrangements that, at a deeper level, remain metaphysically contingent from start to end).

Dual Vision and Ditto Action Being alternatively squarely within and resolutely beyond, looking and intervening, indeed, militating and agitating from the inside out and from the outside in—in dual vision and ditto action—may well be the very definition of spiritual life. As abstract and aporetic as this conception and practice may seem, its concrete and downright material effects are legion and, in fact, of far greater import and ongoing relevance than so-called determining causes and sufficient reasons, which belong to the apparatus of modern metaphysics. Changing everything drastically while leaving virtually everything in place, as if nothing happened and yet even though nothing is no longer quite the self-same—this is what “religion” both means and thrives on and teaches philosophy. Philosophy’s one-time ambition “to leave everything as it is,” therefore, does not exclude the turn to a transformative, even radical, praxis. Lest we forget, Wittgenstein, who penned down this phrase, at one point, committed to a “spirit of communism,” nothing less, nothing more. Call this, with Maurice Blanchot, a pas au-delà, a “step beyond” which, as the grammar of this expression dictates, might just as well be seen as a “step not beyond.” As a movement on the spot, as it were, it thereby resembles the Dialektik im Stillstand, the “dialectic at a standstill,” that Walter Benjamin and, in his footsteps, Adorno espoused, projecting a redeemed universality or even true totality at the very center or heart of singularity, more precisely, of the singular, but also a strangely filled and fulfilled Jetztzeit or now-time. Such dialectic, like Wittgenstein’s thought, entails a dual mode of seeing—a double vision—of what might otherwise well be one or, erroneously and fatefully, taken to be one.19

18 Cf. Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2022). 19 In his essay above, Eli Friedlander, whose work on Walter Benjamin as well as on Ludwig Wittgenstein (notably his Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001] and Walter Benjamin: A Philophical Portrait [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2012]) has left an indelible mark on my own and continues to be a source I return to, offers a subtle reinterpretation of the one story recounted by the former (“Rastelli Narrates”) that, for me, encapsulates it all: the imbrication of mysticism and materialism, miracles and magic, technique and artificiality, spirituality and practice, and, last but not least, theology and the political. Spiritual exercise, as

290  Hent de Vries Under its gaze and pressure, the traditional metaphysical, onto-theological One and Self-Same (i.e., the highest, most perfect, self-caused Cause, often named God), hand in hand with the physical, psychic, and social reality of the world or cultural spheres it creates and sustains, may overnight, as the Bible says, in the blink of an eye, give way to its altogether different aspect of “infinity,” “eternity,” and, perhaps, “immortality.” From here on, the world of old is both seen and unseen, left to its devices, that is, to its apparent necessity, now invalidated and made absolutely contingent, and thereby not only fundamentally changed but, in the theological idiom, also freed or redeemed. This, nothing else, is the revolution of hearts and minds, of things and bodies, a conversion, of sorts, albeit, this time around, on a global and that means near-cosmic and not merely worldwide scale.

exemplified in Benjamin’s thesis, parable, and fragment, Friedlander rightly recalls, distinguishes itself from “established forms of practical reason, whether Aristotelian, Kantian or Utilitarian. Indeed, the very notion of exercise with its attendant notion of ‘practice’ suggests a form of ‘work’ that brings about the formation of habit of the body, rather than a schema for actions directed by ends or a rational principle. Exercise as training would so to speak remain endlessly within the sphere of means. Practice might indirectly relate to a goal, but in itself it is solely concerned with rehearsing a series of steps. An accomplished musician doesn’t practice by playing a whole piece, but by repeating phrases or transitions. Exercise looks to the small, never to the whole articulated by an end.” And yet, in so doing, it may well prepare and—paradoxically, indeed, aporetically—bring about a total transformation of all things, of all being, and, perhaps, of Being as such. This, nothing else, is the motif of the restitutio in integrum, invoked by Benjamin in his so-called Theologico-Political Fragment, which itself may go back to Origen of Alexandria’s theological notion of apokatástasis pantôn, as Michael Jennings has compellingly argued in his essay, “The Will to Apokatastasis: Media, Experience, and Eschatology in Walter Benjamin’s Late Theological Writings,” in Coby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons, eds., Walter Benjamin and Theology [New York: Fordham University Press, 2016], 93–110). Yet whether we see, act upon, and, as it were, realize this is by no means preordained. On the contrary, there is, as Friedlander aptly puts it, a “close connection between the transformation of our relation to the contingent and an occasion to be taken up. The mode of appropriation is internal to an occurrence being an event, without cause or reason. It is the moment of the calling internal to the miraculous, …, that what we call it, is our call.” The latter motif, while it directly echoes the unique insights of a Stanley Cavell, notably in his magnum opus, The Claim of Reason, harkens back to a much older medieval and early modern tradition of so-called occasionalism (the very theologoumenon that, next to that of apokatástasis pantôn, I would like to grapple with further in a future project). Everything comes down to being able to understand and articulate how metaphysical occasionalism and its archive relates to the apparatus of old and new technological media. In Friedlander’s words: “What is our concept of practice, exercise and the attendant idea of spiritual exercise in the world of technology? What is it to find theology hidden in technology?” Or again: how is “the space of practice”, as it were, “opened by the technological apparatus,” such that it must, in turn, also redirect itself to other causes, mechanical and other? As I hope to argue elsewhere, this question implies a crucial role of “the collective” well beyond that of the individual “virtuoso,” the isolated miracle worker of the eleventh hour whose options rely both on less and more than the magician’s skills and tricks. See for a first account my “Das Wunder des tanzenden Balls. Walter Benjamins mechanischer Mystizismus,” trans. Caroline Sauter, in Kyung-Ho Cha, ed., Aura und Experiment. Naturwissenschaft und Technik bei Walter Benjamin (Vienna and Berlin: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2017), 135–155.

Anti-Retractationes 291 If I am not mistaken, this is precisely what Adorno calls “spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung],” hinting at an operation or exercise that is “philosophical” and “metaphysical,” but not thereby “intellectual” primarily. As he goes on to note, this experience consists in not only seeing, but also sensing and activating “the non-factual in the factual.”20 The latter “is,” if we can still say so, not some reprieve or retreat and escape from history’s diffuse and homogenous, mythically expressed as well as rationally construed totalities—which are the presumed precursors of the barbarisms and totalitarianisms of all and especially modern times—but a unique and distinct possibility (or, on its own terms, a utopian impossibility) virtually ahead of it, lodging within it, hovering around, and venturing beyond it. Infinitely close, such possibility—which, come to think of it, is the “possibility” or “virtuality” of new and genuine possibilities—is

20 See my “On the ‘Spiritual’ in Aesthetic Experience: or, the ‘Non-Factual in Facticity,’” in New German Critique, 143, Vol. 48. No. 2, 2021, 43–61. Special Issue, edited by Peter Gordon, on Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Gordon, in his contribution to the present volume, gives a thorough account of the intellectual background and philosophical considerations that led Adorno to introduce his idea of “metaphysical experience” in its relationship to art, a subject he had broached in two earlier studies, notably Adorno and Existence (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2016) and Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020). Drawing on a concept developed by Amos Funkenstein, Gordon proposes to read Adorno’s dialectical assessment and use of religion under—in his view, irreversible—modern conditions of disenchantment and rationalization as well as differentiation and describes them as a form of “secular theology.” Steering clear from magic, myth, ritual, and dogma, such “secular theology” would hand religion’s truth moment, even truth content, over to art and aesthetics, without remainder. In sum, on this reading, there is nowhere else where religion—or whatever remains of it—could possibly go. Minimal theology, a term Gordon generously adopts, would thus be secular and find its echoes and reverberations in artworks and aesthetic experience primarily (or even exclusively?). It is here and here alone that I beg to differ with Gordon’s interpretation, whose erudition and rigor as well overall intuitions, in his contribution to this volume and elsewhere I, for the rest, have come to deeply admire and trust. And yet, I would say that if minimal theology is worth its salt—not unlike the “salt of earth” (Matthew 5:13), in all of its Biblical resonance—then it must have nested itself in the religious, theological, and philosophical domains and registers of epistemology, moral philosophy, and historical materialism no less and no more than it surely did in art and aesthetics. If so, moreover, it must also have proven itself to be strangely resistant and virtually indifferent to the presumably linear course that history seems to have taken and, a fortiori, vis-à-vis the Hegelian Judgment that History passes. As Adorno knew and stated explicitly, the necessity of historical determination, in all of its multifarious forms—providentially and economically guided by the Weltgeist and ruse of reason, as Hegel said, or in the Promethean revolt and revolution, against the gods, God and State, here and there—is metaphysically contingent. If there is an ever ongoing or even increasing process of secularization, then, with no clear endpoint in sight, there is truly nothing that forces us to ascribe unidirectionality rather than, say, reversibility to its eventual course. If everything can be lost, everything can be gained, if not regained. One should not settle for less than for infinite justice and the heterodox motif of apokatástasis pantôn, of the restitutio in integrum, it requires or calls for says it all.

292  Hent de Vries never conditioned, much less necessitated, by or so much as dependent on what apparently surrounds and co-determines it. Dialectically speaking, in the process of its mediation its immediacy wins out everywhere and at all times. For the latter is this “possibility’s” very definition, its petitio principii also (as Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectics of Enlightenment] puts it upfront), to which philosophy tends to resign, thinking of mediation— conceptually or discursively—as its be-all and end-all. These, then, are all the important reasons why the apparent minimalism of Levinas’s original ethical no less than of Adorno’s later negative metaphysics— including the “other” or “inverse theology,” to which the latter tellingly aspires as well—has a potentially maximal import. At the very least, this is their ambition. Their figures of thought aim to reorient or, more fundamentally, reset the very “totality” they begin by taking seriously but also exception to.21 Once we perceive this sliver of light or scansion of movement within and beyond all things and beings, whatever they may further turn out to be and become in the very striving and perseverance of their nature (their conatus essendi, as both Levinas and Adorno suggest, invoking Spinoza), nothing is—indeed, nothing can, must, or need be—ever quite the same. History, as we know it, the world as we find it, comes to its end and, from here on, is judged on different terms, instantaneously, immediately, in its very totality. And while we are still inevitably part of both realms, as subjects, embodied, and more, we are no longer beholden to the limits (the “block,” as Adorno says) they impose.

21 I have borrowed the expression “apophatic minimalism” from Tomoko Masuzawa’s wonderful opening contribution to this volume. In fact, Masuzawa gives the most compelling rendition and interpretation of what my interpretation of Max Weber’s mention and use of the in pianissimo motif, echoed and parodied in my title Minimal Theologies, really comes down to: “the minimal-ness signaled here is not about the magnitude of confessional claims or about the territorial expanse of theology as a field of knowledge. Rather, it refers to an infinite attenuation of theology’s resonance, a sound that does not die out. There is something about this diminution-without-end—traversing the negative space of the apophatic— that rings antithetical to a mere softening or a moribund atrophy. It seems to imply instead a certain intensification of the nerves, demanding an all-out effort and straining of the ear, as it were, to catch the ever more rarified intimation of god language. Put prosaically, this is an advanced theology at its most ruthlessly modern, and as such, it defies almost all of the ready-made pigeonholes to which ‘theology’ has been customarily assigned.” This said, Masuzawa’s critical and corrective point is well-taken: historically speaking, the so-called “magnitude of confessional claims,” even or especially when institutionally and academically combined with the—to a large extent colonial—“territorial expanse of theology as a field of knowledge,” may always have been a far more contested matter than is now “ex post facto” assumed. From her groundbreaking study The Invention of World Religions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005) to her contributions to the definition of critical terms for the study of religion in a host of lucid essays, to her most recent inquiry into the intellectual and political history of medieval and early modern academic theology, Masuzawa has sounded out these contestations and resistances, both where they occurred in or revealed the cracks in existing disciplinary discourses of ecclesial authority and canon law or were inaudibly called out by its most repressed voices.

Anti-Retractationes 293 Again, once this minimal point has been absolutely and irrevocably made, its being alter is not of an analogical nature, not that of alter ego, as Edmund Husserl, so often invoking “conversion,” might say. Instead an altogether different matter of—non-factual, hence, virtual—“fact,” indeed, a being totally aliter (totaliter aliter) comes into view. Without common measure, eluding established expectations regarding the very fullness and truth of “life,” the “spiritual life” it thereby promises and may realize is of a completely different nature, not of this world. Yet in its minimalism, the totaliter aliter is maximal too. What is conjured up in its alterity is “a pleroma other than Hegel’s,”22 a non-formal identity of further, greater and deeper, reach than that of selfsameness; to put it succinctly, a metaphysically occasioned coincidence of opposites, whose smallest of metaphysical differences already make— pragmatically speaking—the greatest, even all, the difference of the world. To anticipate, this may be the very reason why so-called individual messianisms, like purely private engagements, are never enough to flesh out the past promises, present obligations, and future hopes without neither truth nor goodness nor justice can be envisioned. The implication of the minimal in the maximal and vice versa also explains why a novel sense of commonality, of the common, if not of particular communities and communion per se, then at least of a certain “communism” in spirit remains or is once again de rigueur and now, perhaps, more than ever. That the latter is neither reducible nor insensitive to communism’s historical, “real existing”, state capitalist and authoritarian manifestations, to say nothing of its genocidal crimes and blatant anti-democratic as well as moral failures (one is reminded of the title The God That Failed), goes without saying.

Religion Once More The second difficulty, we said, next to understanding what the “turn” means, regards the very concept and study of “religion” itself, whether broadly or narrowly defined. As is well-known, in recent scholarship, it has been argued that we should, perhaps, do away with the category altogether, steeped as it is in its references to ancient Greek and Roman cultural practices that are neither premised on, nor centered around nor, indeed, geared toward the mental representations or propositional contents that have been given exceptional weight in the way the modern academy defines the term. By the same token, it is claimed, we should suspend our belief in the term “belief,” which, likewise, does not adequately capture what animated and structured ancient, medieval, and early modern forms of Judaism, Islam, and, perhaps, even Christianity in its Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox varieties.

22 Cf. Werner Hamacher, “Pleroma – zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel,” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums,” Schriften 1796-1800, Mit bislang unveröffentlichten Texten (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1978), 11–333; Pleroma – Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

294  Hent de Vries The impressive body of work produced by authors such as Talal Asad, Daniel Boyarin, Leora Batnitzky, Tomoko Masuzawa, Brent Nongbri, and others has suggestively argued as much. A generously sponsored longterm research project under my guidance, with its proposed general title The Future of the Religious Past, tellingly had to alter its original subtitle, namely Elements and Forms of Belief for the Twenty-First Century and, in complying, somewhat clumsily resorted to simply dropping the words “of belief” in its approved iteration, as if that made things clearer. It was subsequently asserted that the foci of its executed program, together with the eventual titles of the individual volumes of the mini-book series that resulted from it over the years—namely Words, Things, Gestures, and Powers—might offer fresh points of entry into a “religion” thus reconceived “beyond a concept” or, at the very least, beyond one single concept (again, the demoted category of “belief” being a case in point). 23 And while this project may well have contributed to the very same trend of robbing, first, theology (the study of divinity), and, then, religious studies (in its historical, philological, and comparative aspects) from its either original or oblique subject and object of inquiry, its published opening salvo, the volume entitled Religion Beyond a Concept, nonetheless left a certain ambiguity firmly and deliberately, I now like to think, in place. It was still “religion,” after all, that stood in need of being reconceived beyond “its” or any other single organizing concept (again, that of “belief” to begin with). The proposed study of the meaning and social impact of “religion’s” past in the not too distant future (the twenty-first century, to be precise), it was thus implied, had to leave the controversial designation—its name and term, at the very least, if not its concept—for now intact, in circulation. One does not jettison a flawed terminology without having to wonder at what price a renaming might come. There is no washing one’s hands in innocence in avoiding a term. “Theology,” for me and several other interlocutors of my generation, always was and would remain the most revealing “search light” in pursuing these questions, just as the historical, philosophical, and broadly comparative definitions of “religion” continued to contain the most promising and, perhaps, rewarding archive and

23 Cf. Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept, The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 1 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Meerten B. ter Borg and Jan Willem van Henten, eds., Powers: Religion as a Social and Spiritual Force, The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 2 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, eds., Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 3 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); Ernst van den Hemel and Asja Szafraniec, eds., Words: Religious Language Matters, The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 4 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Martin van Bruinessen, Anne-Marie Korte, and Michiel Leezenberg, eds., Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice, The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 5 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).

Anti-Retractationes 295 apparatus, resource or repository and arsenal of concepts and practices that alone, here and there, might occasion an at once profoundly metaphysical and deeply pragmatic “exercitatio mentis.”24 24 These two characterizations—theology as “search light” and religion as “exercitatio mentis”—I borrow from Willemien Otten, who, as a historian of medieval Christianity, has, in many respects, traveled a similar path as I have done as a philosopher of religion (or, rather, I should say, looking backward, as a metaphysician, first and foremost), interested as we have both remained in the theoretical, practical, and imaginative possibilities of the religious archive and the “constructive,” rather than “systematic” or “dogmatic,” theologies its resource and repository may yet give rise too. These efforts have been constructive, not least in their efforts to thrive even in and beyond the modern secular age. The motif of theology as a “search light” appears in Otten’s contribution above, that of the exercitatio mentis in her “Religion as Exercitatio Mentis: A Case for Theology as a Humanist Discipline,” in Alasdair A. Macdonald, Zweder R.W.M. von Martels, and Jan Veenstra, eds., Christian Humanism: Essays in Honor of Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 59–73. The term “discipline” renders the Dutch “denkoefening,” that is, thinking practice, which Otten had used in her 2007 Dies Natalis lecture at the University of Utrecht with the same central title. There is, indeed, an undeniable risk that, in using theology as a “search light” and religion as a “thinking practice,” one might, inadvertently, take things too far. After all, one might end up by going down Alice in Wonderland’s (or The Matrix’s) rabbit hole, or, on the contrary, by merely etherealizing what had, in historical times, carried far more substance and, hence, ontological and existential as well as ethical, political, and cultural weight. Seeing miracles in terms of “events,” philosophically speaking—or, a fortiori, as special effects, in the media-theoretical idiom—might thus well lead to a “category mistake,” of sorts. As Otten phrases this danger: “There is a risk that precisely the emphasis on minimalism, on event, on toned-down expectations, can be a way of relaunching these expectations, repackaging them spiritually rather than rationally, and thus failing to take into account the full force of Elliot’s ‘Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god … what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards/in an age which advances progressively backwards’.” Yet not least because I have difficulty accepting the “postmodern” epithet, preferring to espouse a resolute anachronism, that is, a phenomenologically inspired anti-historicism instead, I believe that the twin-errors of abysmal spiritualization and light-weighted etherealization should—and can—be avoided. If this is not a vain aspiration, then there might be a possible response to Otten’s major following worry: “Studying the past without submitting oneself to the logic of ‘advancing progressively backwards’ makes the miracle, appropriated as postmodern event, lose the weight with which it is anchored in its context, whether a literary or a natural one. Differently put, the evanescence of the postmodern event, oddly not unlike the effect of essentializing scholasticism, risks canceling out the role of theology as searchlight, making the connection between miracle and event potentially a category mistake.” Here, in response, it is important to recall that the “turn to religion” can and must, in principle, take all on board, not merely pick and choose, somewhat arbitrarily. I would claim that precisely the motifs of apokatástasis pantôn and restitutio in integrum imply and demand nothing less. Put differently, metaphysical and pragmatic minimalism and their apparent counterpart, namely ditto maximalism go hand in hand. This is exactly what a novel concept of an at once expansive and potentially somewhat formal or even vague, that is, global religion entails. Next to a near ascetic epistemological and normative modernism, then, nothing short of cosmic consciousness and a reappraisal of nature are part of that gambit, which is a wager of sorts. Here lies the understanding I share with Otten’s essay and most recent book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020): “as long as the incarnation is the underpinning of the religious, in the end the miraculous and the natural must meet and can even converge.”

296  Hent de Vries For one thing, speaking of “religion beyond a concept” suggested that we might have to consider new directions, venturing beyond a certain wellestablished—traditional or, perhaps, all too modern, nineteenth-century, Protestant and mentalist—concept of religion, in hopes that other and further concepts might fare eventually much better in unlocking the past and the present in view of the future. For another, doing so also entailed an indirect and paradoxical reference to a novel subject or object of scholarly inquiry (of a virtual archive of inexistence, say) that might well, in the end, turn out to elude each and every single concept considered in this way. Needless to say, this latter interpretation would appear to revert to an apophatic—quasi-mystical or negative theological, perhaps, phenomenological or negative dialectical—suspension of certain judgment, based as classical, traditional, and modern natural, historical, revealed, or positive theologies all too often remained on what Husserl showed to be naturalist, historicist, and psychologist premises or, rather, “attitudes.” And these, like their anthropological and culturalist counterparts, it is hard to deny, would call for an at once metaphysically necessary and morally imperative epoché, askesis as well as kenosis of discourse that alone could keep idolatry, conceptual and other—and including the idol of avoiding all idols— continuously at bay or, at the very least, in and off balance. 25

25 This may or may not be an “idiosyncratic use of religion,” as Burcht Pranger surmises above, as it expresses interest, first of all, in its “tropes and figures, which, in their turn, may be helpful in revealing deeper and often neglected dimensions of human thought.” This said, the apparent “formalization of religious language,” centering around the “mystical postulate,” while disavowing the contingent givens of so-called “positive” religion, in all of its presumed natural and historical or psychological aspects, is a methodic and strategic operation—a spiritual exercise of disengagement before one gets to engagement, so to speak—which almost instantly lets virtually everything back in again. Yet, this time around, these givens are seen and judged in an altogether different light, namely as absolute contingencies that, paradoxically, have somehow been made necessary (by us or by others), for good and for ill. This is, precisely, what it means to say that they have been put under erasure, as they are from here on received and potentially reformed or revolutionized as the very dispositifs or apparatuses that, we now know realize, lack a foundation in Being (a fundamentum in re). Instead, they are held out over the abyss of an infinite, that is, immense and immemorial, irrecuperable and virtual archive that phenomenologically reduces and practically relegates all past, present, and future potentialities (or, as modern philosophy calls them: possibilities) to fundamentally derivative— finite, that is, limited and limiting—modes, modalities, moments, and movements. It is under this aspect of what can only be called eternity (sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza says, sub specie durationis, as Henri Bergson adds) that they are now considered to be not only fallible but perfectible or, at the very least, corrigible. For this to be true, however, there must be “limitless ways in which the miracle of beginning can be expressed,” and the miracle “that there is Being” (as Heidegger mused) or that the world is a “continued” or “subsistent miracle,” in its creatio continua no less than in its original creatio ex nihilo, must, for essential (read: conceptual) reasons, also imply that one fine or terrible day there may be no more miracle or, alternatively, that once upon a time there has been a “primordial phenomenon” that could and should, perhaps, not be regarded as a miracle,

Anti-Retractationes 297 A question remained, however: what was the likelihood that the very name, if not concept, of “religion”—and, thereby, we still tend to assume, of God or gods—might yet capture the original phenomenon (here: religion’s existence and essence) by merely serving as a temporal placeholder or should we say non-synonymous substitution, a provisional signifier for an ever-elusive signified, so to speak? After all, both such a placeholder and substitution, likewise, would have to be seen as being, as one says, always already under erasure or in need of being crossed out, They would, at best, be formal indications that, while they serve as stepping stones, reveal themselves immediately or eventually as stumbling blocks as well. Yet, as to the God of the so-called Abrahamic religions, at least, could this role played by the formula of the contradictio oppositorum, of the non aliud, introduced in Western discourse by Nicholas of Cusa and inaugurating a long tradition, extending as far as Adorno and, no doubt, beyond? Or was God a selfcontradictory notion pure and simple, a literal inactuality or irreality, indeed, impossibility, whose apparent inexistence could thus “be” anything but the ens realissimum and ens perfectissimum, let alone, the ens necessarium, with which His name and concept, nature and essence, substance and attributes—in other words, His ipsum esse subsistens or His esse per se (in and for Himself), if not necessarily proad nos (insofar as He is turned toward us)—had been so often equated?26

historically or strictly speaking, but found itself nonetheless “located beyond the boundaries of language and time while guaranteeing the beginning the end of creation and, by implication, of speech.” But then again, from where we now stand, that would surely be a miracle, the impossible par excellence. Indeed, there may be no more “full religion”— able to replace the merely mystical postulate with a full-fledged corpus mysticum— envisioned anywhere, especially if that means a religion understood in “positive,” natural, psychological, or historical and revealed terms. And yet, the dialectic and alternation or “intertwinement” of “succinctness” (the “brevity” of the “verbum abbreviatum”), on the one hand, and the “expansion” (or “digression”) in the historical scansion of ideas, on the other, of which Pranger speaks—and nowhere more clearly than in his book The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)—does not exclude but, precisely, requires that a redeemed “origin” or “end” may yet be called for. Whether the latter is a “positive” totality or the totaliter aliter, an eschaton or apocalypse, the apokatástasis pantôn and restitutio in integrum of which Origen and Benjamin speak, or rather the strictly hypothetical and counterfactual regulative idea of a “more just world” remains an open question in every aspect. 26 Elliot Wolfson’s work has been instrumental in clarifying two essential points of caution as well as contention in philosophical matters that I, for one, have too often neglected. I remember fondly and with great humility a workshop at the University of California at Berkeley during which he made that clear to me in the kindest of terms. First, Wolfson teaches us to reflect upon what he calls “theomania” or also “the compulsion to worship an invisible God,” citing Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Carrying forward, as Freud himself did, the injunction of the Jewish Bilderverbot or prohibition of images, he rightly notes that in this subordination of “sense perception” to an “abstract idea”—in what is often considered a “triumph” or “progress of Geistigkeit” or spirituality (rather than “intellectuality,” as James Strachey would translate the term)—certain conceptual

298  Hent de Vries This much is certain, if God, according to this apophatic theo-logic, retreated into a strange, a-temporal, absolute space of and for eternity, and, hence, if He should be considered, strictly speaking, as neither presently omnipotent nor necessarily always all-good—in the precise sense that “He” could neither originate nor sustain, much less guarantee, every good and just thing to happen and persist, nor invisibly orient and nudge all created beings and things toward the best—then the following question became all the more urgent and increasingly difficult to answer. How must “He” (allowing, provisionally, this traditional gendered pronoun) be thought and responded to, whether in theological and philosophical meditation and speculation or in prayer and praxis? Moreover, how could such a for all purposes fully absconded God render infinite justice (as “He” must) or so much as even a modicum of redemption for all sentient beings, not to mention all things and objects that ever existed, exist, and may yet exist (as the theologically heterodox but also philosophical strangely stringent, emphatic conception of the apokatástasis pantôn or restitutio omnium would surely require)?

implications and practical ramifications are not always fully realized. As Wolfson puts it in his contribution to the present volume: “Worshipping the one God without images was predicated on smashing the idols of the other gods, but if this one God were to be truly deprived of all imagery, including the image of a God that has no image, then there would be nothing not to see and, consequently, nothing to venerate as what cannot be seen.” Needless to say, this does not mean that Wolfson advocates a God with images, but rather that he charts the idea of a God beyond the historical alternatives of the veneration of icons versus iconoclasm, or of idolatry versus the Bilderverbot. Yet the alternatively invoked or alluded to God dispenses with both personhood and being, and, hence, inevitably veers toward an absolute “Nothing” that “is” neither strictly negative (as opposed to positive) nor the so-called non-formal negation of the negation (yielding a substantive affirmation, as Hegelian logic would famously have it). Neither thetic nor contradictory, nor a hypothesis, a postulate and necessary fiction for thought, nor, for that matter, the putative, merely abstract exception to their identificatory predications, such a god is a non-aliud or not- and non-other, as Nicholas of Cusa so aptly put it, absolved from false absolutes and much else besides (cf. Eliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poêsis [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019], 199–202). Yet on either side of the predicative (i.e., conceptual and discursive) or pre-, non-, and beyond-predicative (i.e., non-conceptual and non-discursive) side of the linguistic, semantic, and semiotic divide, its predicament remains firmly in place. God, more than any other concepts—and exemplary, in this regard, perhaps, for all others—is a self-contradictory and, also in this sense, inexistent notion. In this lies this word’s or name’s and concept’s virtual promise of a virtual salvation as well as its ineradicable potential for danger and destructiveness, its possible evil no less. Other than Wolfson implies (ibid., 201 and Chapter 2), Levinas may have rightly hinted at this indelible chance and risk, expressed nowhere more clearly than in the structural similarity and virtual interchangeability of the il y a (the privative a-dieu, as I have suggested, the pure anonymous “there is” that precedes creation) and the illéité (the name of the asymmetric God, no longer understood as “Thou” but as “He,” addressed directly and obliquely in the à dieu and adieu, respectively).

Anti-Retractationes 299

Negative Metaphysics Meets Deep Pragmatism Before returning to this theological and, at an equal minimum, also deeply philosophical matter of religion in and with reason, how do we bring the actual and especially virtual archive and apparatus of so-called “religion” to bear—maximally—upon what seems an at once inconsequential and consequential question regarding God and, perhaps, gods? Offering an archeology or a genealogy of terms and problems might well be one way of approaching the truth of the matter, blending it with that of method, assuming we can and should really distinguish between these two, that is, between the insight and way of life found, to begin with, and the formal path that we followed to get there in the first place. But then, it seems fair to say that my work thus far and argument here has proceeded neither historically nor philologically, much less critically and clinically, in the precise sense of these modern terms. Its, if you like, deeper and more tentative probing, here and there, have not been undertaken with a diagnostic aim in mind, nor have I ever thought to pursue a normative, much less meta-ethical, inquiry from a traditionally moralistic or value-oriented perspective. One draws on the religious archive and apparatus, resource and repository, for good and for ill, as they provide no more and no less than conditions of possibilities, to use this transcendental language (which, it should be noted, is not wholly appropriate where the logics of presupposition on which it is based ultimately fails us as well). In so doing, they enable, inspire, and orient or reorient not of the best but also of the worst with much in-between. After all, as quasi-transcendental conditions, of sorts, the archive and apparatus, resource and repository of tradition and a fortiori “religion,” are fundamentally the same with respect to offering occasions, in metaphysical parlance, for both fortuitous chance and dangerous peril to take eventual effect, in pragmatic terms. As I now see more clearly and, indeed, have often indicated obliquely, merely in passing, in any case, with insufficient systematic rigor, the logic, grammar, and decidedly anti-moralist normative gist of the turn to religion, including its correlative minimal theology, has, indeed, been resolutely, if largely negatively, metaphysical in inspiration, while at the same time aspiring to be deeply pragmatic, with maximal import and impact, along the way. Deep pragmatism is the view and praxis in which these dual aspects—of seeing and settings things in a new light as well as aright—join hands to the point of becoming virtually indistinguishable and, hence, interchangeable. One need not indulge, therefore, in melancholic hand-wringing in trying in vain to merge Critical Theory and genuine ethical action or political praxis. If properly thought and done responsibly, each of the extreme poles of disengagement and subsequent as well as preceding engagement expresses—and, as it were, slowly and gradually or abruptly, even instantly shades into—the other.

300  Hent de Vries These two pillars of any philosophical and even theological analysis worthy of the name, not like the proverbial, long “arc of the moral universe” that, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. boldly claimed, “bends toward justice,” reach hands and come together in what an equally long and largely forgotten tradition has called spiritual experience and exercise. These latter designations for a discipline and discernment in a philosophical “way of life” or “manner of living,” revisited and reinvested with metaphysical meaning and pragmatic force by the groundbreaking work of Hadot and those he has influenced, help us to sidestep an all too abstract and schematic differentiation and eventual bifurcation between what the Greeks termed theoria and praxis, respectively. Spiritual experience and exercise, as a conversion and practice, are a matter of both individual and collective disengagement and engagement—of mysticism and militancy, contemplation and struggle, embodied first of all by saints and sages, reformers and revolutionaries—each of them characterized by dispositions and attitudes that must be adopted and adapted in their alternation or oscillation. Yet their analysis and explication in philosophical and normative, that is, metaphysical and pragmatic terms, tend to proceed indirectly. They must operate at a distance or, at least, with a different pacing, of sorts. Showing and saying—or, for that matter, writing and publishing—are not quite the same. In Levinas’s singular idiom, “Saying [le Dire]” and “Said [le Dit]” are “produced” (this is his term) while occupying a different space and different time, even though they revert to each other simultaneously, instantly, and constantly, as it must be. Meditation and mediation, releasement and involvement, without which no thought or no agency comes off the ground, gets up and moves on, reflecting upon and changing its world, must, although an oppositional pair, go hand in hand, condemned to each other. Yet, while no good on their own and in so doing, they each—unavoidably—get “dirty hands,”27 that is, they become interrupted and inconsistent to boot. Hence, as this must be necessarily so, no matter what intentions it further may harbor, the good conscience is always the bad (even if the reverse does not hold per se).28 By the same token, translation and betrayal form part of an equation,

27 Mark Poster’s Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) was an early inspiration—and wise word of caution—for the effort at reconsidering this motif, which I have continued to belabor. 28 The converse of that latter statement regarding involvement and immersion in the world could be found in what Alexandre Lefebvre distills from John Rawls’ lifelong project and notably his magnum opus, the monumental A Theory of Justice, namely “the original position,” including its apparent ability of fulfilling the need of “redeeming,” as Rawls further puts it, “the ordinary round of life.” Not unlike the proverbial step back of which Heidegger and other phenomenologists make so much, it conditions any fair—straight or sinuous—step forward in matters of justice, of “equal concern and respect,” which,

Anti-Retractationes 301 whose squaring of circles can never be forced without either prior pause or greater patience. The implications and consequences of these considerations for religious and theological language and thought especially are, of course, immense. Put bluntly, there resides an inescapable idolatry and blasphemy in all so-called god-talk. As a matter of fact as well as of principle, not even divine speech, God’s own Word, revealed in holy Scriptures, much less interpreted by exegetes, dogmatics, and ecclesial councils, pronounced ex cathedra, from the pulpit, or received sola fide in our innermost feelings and voice of conscience, comes through unfiltered, much less intact. His aseitas cannot be thought or said, without contradiction, that is, without requiring at least one word more (or, often, less). We need more and more detours to get “this” (or “there”) eventually. The tradition has always known that what was called God’s potestas absoluta or “absolute power” could and would be virtually and de facto nothing without or beyond His potestas ordinata or “delegated power,” prone to misunderstanding and abuse as the latter remained. In this, nothing else, consisted its divine economy. The latter, although never quite “it,” absolves—reveals, manifests, but also obfuscates—the former, God in and for “Himself,” insofar as “He” must retreat, we now realize, into a merely unintelligible and potentially monstrous “X” without such rendition-cum-betrayal. A “divine comedy,” Levinas mused, echoing and parodying Dante, might well be the result, making us speechless and unable to judge and act as we must. In sum, it is only in its progressive retreat, which alone undercuts, corrects, and redirects all too affirmative Providential and Promethean teleological schemas, that this Other or, as we found, non aliud, together with all of its virtual archive and potential promise that we have to live up to, can be said to be given and found. Indeed, it is only in, through, and beyond the existing—past, present, and future—apparatuses, be they hermeneutic and institutional, dogmatic and enlightened, that such

as Lefebvre summarizes the standard reading, underlies our modern concept of “basic rights.” In its reduction or retreat, askesis and epoché, Rawls resorts to the counterfactual motif and driving motivation of the original position thus offering, Lefebvre argues, “a ‘spiritual exercise’ designed to help people in liberal democracies to work up, transform, and ultimately redeem themselves.” As such, this procedure allows us to snap out and then also zoom in all the more truthfully, justly, and efficaciously regarding all matters at hand. In Lefebvre’s analysis, the very “acceptance of the principles of justice,” as Rawls formulates it, “is no mean feat; it entails wholehearted commitment to justice in everyday life that perhaps only heroes and saints can aspire to.” In yet a different conceptual register, drawing on Bergson and Hadot, Lefebvre has given this latter motif greater depth and further substance (cf. notably his Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013]), in full awareness of the difficulty such aspirations encounter in legal reasoning and the practice of jurisprudence (cf. in this regard notably his phenomenal first book, The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008]).

302  Hent de Vries original and ultimate Referent and Requisite could acquire meaning, force, and actual use for us, here and now.

A Trilogy As a trilogy, Minimal Theologies, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, and Religion and Violence, in the order in which these tomes were conceived, written, and should now be read, investigated the contributions that the philosophy of religion and, more indirectly, the legacy of Biblical and dogmatic theology have made and continue to make to a deeper understanding and more resolute application of modern and especially contemporary metaphysical and moral-political, including juridical and, perhaps, even economic thought. That, at least, was their—as of yet unfulfilled—ambition, program, and plan of action. Together, moreover, these works laid down the premises of an at once philosophical and comparative, constructive and deconstructive, systematic and analytic approach to the academic study of especially “public” and “global” religion (rather than, say, “world religions” or so-called “religions of the world”) that organizes and continues to guide much of my subsequent work. They did so by treating the religious and theological archive and its conceptual and institutional apparatus as the intellectual and normative virtual resource and imaginative repository that might still or yet be capable of—quite literally—doing justice to present-day experience and pragmatic problems in their increasingly multifaceted aspects. Far more extensively and intensively than most forms of traditional metaphysical and modern secular theorizing would seem to allow, it was argued here, notably the archive in question, for all its virtuality and the counter-factual thinking it had on offer, held open questions and untested solutions, if not definitive answers, in stock in its arsenal, whose depth and more than historical weight we have not even begun to fathom. Moreover, that this is the case, these three monographs—together with my extensive introductions to their edited companion volumes, notably Religion and Media, Political Theologies, and Religion Beyond a Concept— somewhat boldly, at any rate, programmaticaly stated, is nowhere clearer than in the moral and political, social and legal conflicts and dilemmas that haunt modernity. Their nature and eventual resolution, it was and has remained my working hypothesis, relies in part on modes of existence and forms of life as well as on more formal and structural elements of cultural and economic exchange, commerce, and communication, including their common use, that are increasingly driven and framed by technological media, that is, by more and more sophisticated informational networks, both for good and for ill. And yet, at the same time, I argued, these latter operate hand in hand, just as they reactivate and revitalize, disseminate and, once again, mobilize age-old spiritual concepts and practices, whose

Anti-Retractationes 303 metaphysical depth and wide pragmatic—public and global—import and impact we ignore at our peril. 29 Finally, these works prepared the elaboration of an ethical corollary and, as it were, spiritual groundwork for future analyses and interventions propounded and to be further undertaken in more political and policyoriented projects. Indirectly, they addressed the question as to what it means to live now, which, in turn, requires a better grasp of the ancient, medieval, and modern logic and rhetoric of testimony, confession, and conversion. For it is these earlier spiritual concepts and practices that, in part, inspire, govern, and continue to reorient the “turn to” and “away from” religion toward unfamiliar territory—according to the motif and formula of the

29 The qualification “for good and for ill,” when applied to these resources and repositories, may help preparing one possible response to Mieke Bal’s justified worry that even a strategically and provisionally advocated and not merely observed “turn to religion” can unintentionally provide—and serve as—a “pretext” for the most authoritarian subjective impulses and political regimes. For all the insights, ambitious institutional planning and curricular programming we have shared over long years and continue to cherish, albeit on different sides of the ocean now, our intuitions and temperaments differ in assessing and assuming the very nature of the at once metaphysical and pragmatic wager that, as Pascal realized, we cannot avoid. It is the dilemma we have already faced and are bound up with and for which Bal proposes to find other—notably artistic or, at the very least, more imaginative—alternatives. In her long-held view, expressed in a host of profound thematic and systematic studies, to see “art as a cultural tool for political argumentation and effect,” even while eschewing dangerous forms of instrumentalization and, well, aestheticization, incurs fewer risks than deliberately using, not to mention counting or banking on, the resources and repositories of religious tradition. Moreover, the latter, in her eyes, is to be seen, first and foremost, as a social and political phenomenon or construct. For me, by contrast, this undeniably greater risk (consider it playing with fire, this much I acknowledge) carries with it an ever-greater potential gain, existentially and politically speaking. In terms of sheer magnitude, that is, in view of its immemorial and unfathomable depth and breadth, religion and everything it stands for—or that it, for that matter, has come to stand for it, in turn—has simply no equal, in both good and, alas, bad. As the largest and longest standing archive, it covers—and, in fact, has a word, image, or affect for—virtually everything, while it does not let itself, its motifs and modes of existence, be reduced to anything else in particular, much less once and for all. As such, its vast reservoir and repository of meaning and practices seems inexhaustible, for now. Again, to say as much, does not make us a homo religiosus per se. Even the greatest and most impressive or strategically important among the archives and apparatuses may run out of steam, lose its semantic and figural force, condemning itself to virtual oblivion and insignificance, until, of course, that tide turns around once more. Epochs and existential options do fade out eventually or overnight, just as they may easily regain all their metaphysical significance and pragmatic force. A single spark may contribute to rekindling the light of tradition or, on the contrary, light the fire under it, burning everything of value to the ground, without remainder. What Bal calls the “practice of cultural analysis” must navigate between these two extremes (cf. Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]).

304  Hent de Vries à dieu, adieu, and a-dieu—just as their “formal indicative” use, inevitably, stands also “corrected” by the latter motifs for which they make space. Here and elsewhere, Heidegger’s incursions into the phenomenology of religion in his early lecture courses, with references to St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Martin Luther, and notably in his lecture “Phänomenologie und Theologie [Phenomenology and Theology],” retain all their relevance for us, even now. In sum, the aforementioned monographs and edited volumes, as I conceived and imagined them at the time and still understand them presently, sought to address and spell out an age-old and novel quandary that, in all its perplexing relevant features, had remained equally simple and daunting throughout much of our intellectual and political history yet whose guiding question and imposing task now reveals itself to us with greater urgency than ever before. I know of no better way than to paraphrase it as follows: How might one come to inhabit a tradition and world while never fully being immersed in, much less absorbed by, its naturalist tenets or determinist (i.e., Providential or Promethean) outlooks, projects, and programs? Or, alternatively, how could one seek one’s way into (and out of) historical legacies and contemporary situations, zooming in on—and, equally, snapping out of—the most minute yet consequential of its motifs and moments, moods and modalities, especially those that had and still have the greatest potential of revealing and making a maximal impact, when all we could come up with ourselves on our own account is long said and done?30

30 Asja Szafraniec raises an important question, namely whether or to what extent such zooming in and out—which I take to be the formal schema of the “turn” (not unlike the Zigzag of Heidegger’s Kehre as seen by Gadamer)—requires on the part of the religious archive a “transformation” or “self-abandonment” first. As she rightly observes, the project of Philosophy and the Turn to Religion is to trouble the traditional and modern tension between philosophy and theology by requiring a deeper questioning and further probing of the very terms of their apparent “opposition”; and this “both by pointing out a leap of faith in those philosophical foundations and by imagining a theology free from any (residual) orthodoxy.” As she continues, “it also requires that one explicitly ask to what extent theology can be released from its own image—how a-theological it can become (not only beyond the onto-theological tradition but also perhaps beyond many of the dissident ‘heterologies’ that always accompanied it).” Or, as Szafraniec puts it further succinctly: “What must happen to religion for philosophy to be able—and willing—to turn to it?” In other words, philosophy’s turn to religion can only be asserted and maintained on the very condition that religion proves open to becoming unrecognizable, radically different from its own self-conception. As she concludes: “In short, theology must do what it traditionally refused to do: accept not just ‘the transformation or displacement of its dogmatic core’ (de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 57) but perhaps its reinvention. The shared feature of this transformation seems to be that the object of the disclosure is no longer God (or even the space left by the absence of God) but the world of finite beings. The corpus of beliefs must abandon itself to a novel, unacceptable reading—perhaps silencing the archives of the tradition, the sacred, and even silencing their empty shells—but without the loss of speculative gain.” But then again, need we grant as much? Further, should we not simply confirm theology’s original promise and, at times, outrageous pretense as that which must—and, perhaps, surprisingly can—yet be salvaged? After all, for Biblical, dogmatic as well as ecclesial tradition to constantly

Anti-Retractationes 305

In, Through, and Beyond Existence The way to reimagine and enact this, I now think, requires an examination and exercise that passes through that of “existence”—or, more precisely, through that of “inexistence,” a term I am borrowing here, as I will explain below—to begin with of God and His declared history with humankind, but hardly ending there and then (i.e., with that particular creation and evolution or dominant species, even species being, in Hegelian and Marxian terms). On the account that I am offering at this moment of writing, reiterating and fleshing out an older intuition, no doubt, the very idea and concept of the presumed reality or irreality of God’s existence and inexistence—immemorial and virtual, counterfactual and even self-contradictory as the latter may turn out to “be”— models or prefigures our own. Hence, our Dasein (i.e., being there, as Heidegger says) or, perhaps more appropriately in our day and age, our nicht ganz Dabeisein (i.e., not quite being there, as Adorno adds) is premised on, reminiscent of, and, perhaps, a future substitute for a speculative, often idealized, possibility that has lost nothing of its philosophical and political actuality, impossible as its immediate or full realization must prima facie further seem. As Biblical lore has it, man is “made in the image” of God (cf. Genesis 1.27 and 5.1), with all the temptations and degradations that that thought may well imply, the well-known satanic claim in Genesis 3.5—in its Vulgate rendition, eritis sicut deus [or dii, in the plural] scientes bonum et malum (and you will be like god[s], knowing good and evil)—perversely proving the point. This is, perhaps, also to say that “humanity,” in contradistinction with homo sapiens, is not beholden to a certain species being or Gattungswesen (as the Hegelian in Karl Marx still believed). Rather, as Spinoza was the first to anticipate or, at least, say out loud, we metaphysically and practically do not know what a body or mind can end up doing and being. Henri Bergson, not only more mysteriously but also with far greater logical consequence (and with Spinoza constantly on his mind, as we know), would eventually muse, in his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion), that in the process of creative evolution (évolution créatrice) a species is just a temporary and provisional sedimentation of life’s deepest—and quasi-mystical— impulse, just as the “universe” as whole is nothing short of “a machine for the production of gods.” Hard to tell what such gods (or is it daimons, being

invite and allow us back in whenever and wherever we turn and return toward it, it suffices that it not be considered as written in stone, out of one piece, that is, as self-contained and self-consistent, folding itself back on itself and on this, its presumed truth, alone. Nothing can, nothing does. How such an insight is often also expressed at the intersection of philosophy and literature I take to be a central lesson from Szafraniec’s own rigorous and deeply informative study, entitled Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

306  Hent de Vries in-between gods and humans and, yet, neither angels nor beasts) might end up looking, thinking, and acting like: one wonders, perhaps, something short of immortal souls, yet subjects strangely propelled beyond and lifted out of the coordinates of time and space, history and nature, as known to us now. And the same would hold true for the very force and power they may yet come to exert on, but also through and beyond, these ontic givens. Mentioning and using, adopting and elaborating the relatively novel concept of “inexistence,” while simultaneously returning to the archive and apparatus of religion and spiritual experience—the latter connoting an ageold practice or exercise that, all along, may have exposed and opened itself to “inexistence” avant la lettre, aiming not so much to ward it off, but to hold it and, thereby, us in a precarious balancing act instead—this and nothing else may be the privileged, if sinuous, path to successfully pursue this new kind of inquiry. To do so with effort and sincerity, seriousness and humor, this much is certain, demands not only a rare paring of what Blaise Pascal termed esprit géométrique and esprit de finesse, but also of moving fast and slow in quick alternation. On the relevance or pertinence of each motion, the occasion, metaphysically speaking, decides or, conversely, calls on us to decide, in pragmatic terms, what we will hold to be true and make good upon. In revisiting this near-transcendental but also strategic opportunism, metaphysics, insofar as it sticks to its absolute minimum and remains, dialectically speaking, negative through and through, and deep pragmatics, insofar as it is preoccupied not so much with formal structures or features but, rather, finely attuned to the down-to-earth matters that concern it (and us) first and foremost, go both hand in hand and co-implicate each other, different as they further remain in substance and orientation. While the first envisions modes of existence and notably inexistence structurally— and, hence, abstractly or speculatively—the latter ties such contemplation to concrete struggles, and, thereby, meditation to militancy. Yet, again, it does so, depending on what the occasion (not to be confused with the contextual situation) requires and summons, if not causes, determines, or conditions. On the contrary, what its privileged moment (the New Testament speaks of kairos and parousia; Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, mentions the Augenblick) calls for, as apparent in our “voice of conscience,” which, coming from “nobody” to “nobody,” saying “nothing” (citing or, rather, parodying once more Heidegger’s Being and Time), is not a dictate or an imposition, but, more fundamentally, our first and foremost call. Negative metaphysics and its corollary, deep pragmatics, revolve around whatever it “is” or “may be” that genuine occasions—all of them events and miracles in their own right, in good and in bad—let us inherit, achieve, and aspire to in both our individual or existential and our collective, that is, social and political, public and institutional lives on this planet or even anywhere else. Some have called this appeal to or by occasions a new metaphysical and pragmatic form of “occasionalism without God,” in other words, an

Anti-Retractationes 307 insistence on instances and instantiations of “secular grace.” Be that as it may, the truth of the matter is that neither divine providentialism nor human, all too human, Prometheanism can quite figure, much less map, this all out. An altogether different kind of invisible hand or religious and theologico-political wager seems to work its wonders here, bringing either quasi-utopian redemption (eschatologically and apocalyptically speaking) or, alternatively, near-fatal calamity (the risk of destruction of self and other) in its solemn wake. Time will tell how things turn out, what will pop out, and what role we, as witnesses perhaps more than as agents, may yet have contributed to the new course of it all by having created a novel, parallel or identical universe or normative set-up for those who come after. Because of this hidden, immediate if oblique, nexus between virtual historical and practical possibilities as well as between those that are present then and there and those that were or will be, there is a secret and mysterious rather than mythical, natural or mechanical chain of events in and through which epochs and generations may or may not co-opt and communicate with each other. When and where this happens, they do so in solidarity and cooperation, making common cause against all odds, across existing boundaries of space and time, boundaries, real and imagined. This virtual correspondence, sent and bequeathed to us as a message in a bottle—Flaschenpost, Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in their 1947 Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), still under the shock of the victories and near indisputable near-global reign of Fascism, Stalinism, and Hollywood—entails much more than a destiny (Geschick or Schicksal). Instead, it allows us to be “anachronistic contemporaries,” as Derrida glossed, and, hence, to be in secret agreement with those with whom we, alas or blissfully, do not share our situation, but who may nonetheless and inadvertently speak to us (as we may, in turn, speak to them), as they reach out to us from an immemorial past, a distant if lateral present, or an unfathomable future, if only we are attentive and courageous enough to heed their “collect calls” from which we may have all too long closed ourselves. As an at present impossible possibility—or, what comes down off to the same, as an at all times and in all places possible impossibility—“inexistence” names and baptizes, inaugurates and demands an indelible “virtuality.” The latter is anything but a potentiality, latency or tendency, which would hold preprogrammed or expected outcomes. Yet its merely minimal anchorage in “being,” our own and that of the nature or things, nonetheless invests and endows it—counter-intuitively and counter-factually, paradoxically or aporetically—with maximal promise, resilient hope and remarkable, indeed, special efficacy. To relegate the historical, metaphysical and theological concept of the “divine” to virtual “inexistence” provides it with a logical and existential modality (stretching the latter concept, modality, well beyond that of a category of understanding, in Kant’s critical and transcendental terms, which limit it to problematic, assertoric, and apodictic forms of judgment,

308  Hent de Vries respectively). Inexistence, divine and other, entails or requires, strictly speaking, neither “existence” (or “being”) nor “nonexistence” (or “non-being”). Hence, it intimates or conjures an illogical or aporetic tertium datur, of sorts. Of “inexistence,” thus conceived, one can, precisely, not say that it must mean or yield and effect either “p” or “~p.” This may not satisfy our long established conventions as to what the requirements of thought, judgment, and agency entail. Which is another reason why the apparent coincidence of opposites, that is, of the tertium datur of “p” co-existing with “~p,” suggest that or must treat “inexistence,” whatever else it may further “be,” as perhaps best rendered in quasi-theological terms. After all, for now and, no doubt, for some time span still to come, the virtual archives of “divinity” hold the greatest semantic and pragmatic, rhetorical and figural, in any case, imaginative resources and repositories for thinking and experiencing individual and collective “existence” from the angle of “inexistence.” The latter should, first of all, be seen as an almost integral, if all too often forgotten or neglected, part—an icon or a shadow, as it were—of the self-same individual and collective existence we tend to lead “proximally and for the most part” (to echo Heidegger once more). Existence, come to think of it, is the negative foil and spring board from which inexistence takes off and escapes in disengagement, we said, before returning to things as they were and are and might be yet again, seeing and setting them aright at last.

Exemplary Discussions Recent philosophical discourses and theological inquiries have boldly insisted that it is of importance to revisit ancient and old, just as we must develop radically new, understandings of the “inexistence,” rather than non-existence, of God. Interestingly—and, I think, wisely—their investigations show little patience for what are by now mostly worn-out, but formerly triumphalist, defenses of atheism (radical and other), nihilism, indifferentism, even agnosticism, and the like. Nor, for that matter, do these investigations make much of the parallel assessments of the fundamentally secularist default—in some cases, quite paradoxically, characterized in terms of “secular faith” and even “spiritual freedom”—that such appeals are often paired with.31 The salient point the more interesting proposals are making is far more simple and daunting, to say the least: in matters of “God” the question of existence, notably of God’s present existence, here and now, not to mention His preexistence—is not of the essence and, hence, as a metaphysical question not all that urgent. The relevance of God’s present existence, non-existence, or, rather, “inexistence” is of

31 See Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) and idem, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019).

Anti-Retractationes 309 a pragmatic—and that means not merely moral but also and especially political—nature, first and foremost. And, as to the latter, the negatively and, as it were, dialectically construed motif and motivation of “inexistence” calls us out, leads the way, and gives its guidance. If only by way of intellectual method and spiritual exercise, the medieval scholastics and early modern jurists knew (the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez and the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius come to mind), we must proceed and operate etsi deus non daretur, as if God was not given or, freely translated, not “a given,” at any rate, “not given to all,” let alone in totality. One reason for stating the metaphysical relevance of “inexistence” might be the flipside of Spinoza’s monistic insight: “If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence.”32 For the author of the Ethics, this means that God, as the immutable substance—or “Nature”— with all of its infinite attributes (thought and extension just two among them), must therefore exist. God, after all, could, Spinoza thinks, not be conceived of as not existing and, hence, existence belongs to His essence, that is, to the one substance, necessarily. But even if one surmises that God need not or even certainly must not exist in the way we conceive of things and unintelligible as His true existence or non-existence remains, for us as finite beings, minds and bodies—“Incomprehensible that God should exist, and incomprehensible that he should not …,”33 as Pascal writes—an intrinsic, conceptual or ontological, nexus between His existence and its purported metaphysical necessity hardly obtains. Such nexus, one could counter, might hold for the philosophical and scholarly concept of God—in other words, for the God of the philosophers and learned men, not the Biblical God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as Pascal’s mémorial puts it memorably—but even then: “A concept of God is not God.”34 In the end, then, we may not be able to resolve the matter theoretically, whether philosophically or theologically, and thus have to draw a truly sobering and, at first glance, counter-intuitive conclusion that heterodox mystics of all ages were well aware of: “Das Dasein Gottes ist kein Problem [God’s existence is not a problem].”35 But if not a problem or the problem, what is it? Why is so-called god talk, not to mention the whole archive and apparatus of proofs for God’s existence and His essential predicates or divine names, such an important and integral part of the history and concept of ancient and modern metaphysics, of natural and

32 Spinoza, Ethics, Bk I Axiom 7. 33 Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings: A New Translation by Honor Levi, Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by Anthony Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 148. 34 Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, Trans. with an Introduction by Jane Kentish (London and New York: 1987), 65. 35 Gershom Scholem, “95 Thesen über Judentum und Zionismus,” in Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith, eds., Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 287–295, 292.

310  Hent de Vries philosophical, if not Biblical, theology, indeed, of Critical Theory, and the fight against idols and idolatry, conceptual and political, up to this day? Almost all of the proposals that invoke the motif of “inexistence,” even those that do not mention or use “God” as their prime example, borrow heavily from the immemorial and virtual archive of messianic and mystical traditions and spiritual practices that—still or yet again—function as the open resources, reservoirs, and repositories or arsenals for a negatively metaphysical and deeply pragmatic, indeed, speculative desideratum and robust agenda, of critical thought and of human agency. Truth be told, the latter’s guiding concepts and practices, arguments and strategies, have long sought to displace this religious archive’s theologico-political legacies (and have done so mostly in vain and at their own peril, we now realize). Yet these legacies live and linger on in the motif and, admittedly, strange modality of “inexistence” from which they may surge forward on any occasion, at any—privileged or doomed—time and place, for good and for ill. If I am not mistaken, the driving force behind the generic and generative concept of “inexistence,” together with that of its analogous concept and practice of “unpower [impouvoir],” offers the greatest hope, just as it potentially and equi-primordially presents the gravest peril, of our most abstract thinking and the concrete follow-ups we may yet give it. To do so sincerely and seriously is no small matter. And, when and where live up to its singular occasions, there is no escape from what we feel we must say and do as our “word” is “our bond.” The first concept (“inexistence”), freely used thus far, I have borrowed, in earnest, from Quentin Meillassoux to whose remarkable oeuvre I will turn below; the second concept (“unpower”) I have taken, with gratitude, from Jean-Luc Marion, whose scholarly work in the history of philosophy, phenomenology, and theology has accompanied me all along.36 Together, they provide a new idiom and mode of presentation for the motifs that my earlier trilogy and, now, my work on miracles, events, and special effects, further supplemented by a more recent project on spiritual exercises, their concepts and practices, have aimed to clarify in both minimal and, increasingly, maximal terms.

A Brief and Recent History of Inexistence The term inexistence (from the Latin inexistentem), originally meaning the simple fact of not existing, dates back, in its French use (inexistence), to the seventeenth century when it had a use in jurisprudence (as in the absence of a testament, as the Littré dictionary explains in broad strokes). For our

36 See Jean-Luc Marion, “L’impouvoir,” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 no. 60 (2008), 439–445; “Unpower: An Interview with Hugues Choplin,” in Hent de Vries and Nils F. Schott, eds., Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 36–42.

Anti-Retractationes 311 purposes, its more recent use is perhaps best expressed by the following observations made by Albert Camus in his L’homme révolté (The Rebel): all Sade’s atheists suppose, in principle, the nonexistence [inexistence] of God for the obvious reason that His existence would imply that He was indifferent, wicked, or cruel. [Tous les athées de Sade posent en principe l’inexistence de Dieu pour cette raison claire que son existence supposerait chez lui indifférence, méchanceté ou cruauté.]37 Paradoxically, Camus goes on to surmise, de Sade’s view leads to an inverted Pascalian wager, of sorts. After all, if God—for what is clearly a moral reason—cannot be said to exist, one may as well risk doing anything and forgo human virtue and valor completely. According to Camus, de Sade showed us as much and, in so doing, revealed the flipside and mirror image of a European philosophical discourse, culminating in Kant, that tends to cross over cruelly into the forbidden territory, as Adorno and Max Horkheimer already spelled out in painful detail in an excursus in their Dialectics of Enlightenment, entitled “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality.” It is not so much God’s sovereignty or omnipotence that is the issue here—the scandal of theology—but the inscrutability of His purported goodness, which, given the nature of how things are and all the unnecessary suffering it condones must be deemed by monotheists to include what is for us, who have not become fully desensitized and inhuman, nothing but sheer “indifference, wickedness, or cruelty.” No theology, whether natural or dogmatic, philosophical or Biblical, historical or onto-theological, mystical or apophatic, existential or hermeneutic, dialectical and political, can simply ignore this. As long as God is said to either really exist or not to exist, the moral predicament stays just the same, for His presumed goodness ipso facto inscribes de facto indifference, wickedness, or cruelty in itself or, for that matter, ignores the latter altogether (by not offering an alternative for it, however remote). Everything remains as it is and injustice— indeed, untruth—rules uncontested.38

37 Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 55; The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower, with a Foreword by Herbert Read (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 37. 38 Gwenaëlle Aubry in her essay for this volume and in her impressive diptych devoted to the Archéologie de la puissance (Archeology of Power), whose companion volumes Dieu sans la puissance (God Without Power) and Genèse du Dieu souverain (Genesis of the Sovereign God) are exemplary in their historical and analytical rigor, has taught me that this predicament may merely be the result of a particular ontology (from which not even the Platonic or Neoplatonic idea of the “Good beyond Being” truly escapes, as it exceeds the latter merely “in rank and power”) rather than of historical and imaginable possibilities in ontology as such or in general. Especially the genealogy of the Christian theological

312  Hent de Vries concept of omnipotence, as she patiently reconstrues it, lays bare that a genuine alternative to the discredited model was always available at the very source, namely Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Here, she argues, a subtle and, in retrospect, preferable option, albeit one that was quickly forgotten, repressed, or glossed over, could have been found and mobilized all along. After all, from this early moment and instance on, in Aubry’s words, “the concept of the ‘omnipotent God,’ and more specifically, the distinction between absolute power and ordained power, which comes to modalize it beginning in the 13th century” was even much more fundamental than the later utilized and, soon, instrumentalized concepts of the miracle or, for that matter, the creation ex nihilo in their respective determinations of the modern concept of the political or the theologico-political. The latter subverted and obfuscated the original Aristotelian severance between being, including God, and power. This, then, is Aubry’s important question: “Must we therefore say, along with Levinas … that every ontology is an ontology of power? In this respect, would there be, much like a structural violence of foundation, a violence internal to the metaphysical tradition in its entirety? Or can we isolate within it a metaphysics, a singular moment, which offers an alternative or an escape from this fate?” How and from where, in other words, could we attempt, instead, to think Being and God “without power” and “dissociate” the metaphysical “principle” from the latter, whether once and for all or, at the very least, intermittently, here and there, if we can get so lucky as to elude our seemingly inescapable but, on closer scrutiny, merely ontic, historical and self-imposed, fates? Aubry, as said, points to an ignored moment in Aristotle, which allows to read his ontology in an “unitary” way rather than light of some “onto-theological constitution,” as Heidegger famously claimed, in Identität und Differenz (Identity and Difference). Revisiting Aristotle would thus allow one to “reread the history of metaphysics differently, that is to say, recognize in it another economy, made of different ruptures and conflicts than those described by the traditional narratives – but also a veritable history, and not a fatum which, from its origin, would entirely and ineluctably condemn metaphysics to violence.”   Building upon an immense philological labor of key chapters in Hellenistic thought, together with its ancient Greek origins and archives, Aubry thus lays the groundwork for a radical rereading of the history of ontotheology, the metaphysical doctrine that reserves one of being’s main characteristics of potentiality and act with the being considered highest, the highest being, often named God. Again, this tradition which for medieval and modern metaphysics seems to exhaust the realm of thinkable and the possible, it is argued, forgets or represses possibilities, chances and challenges, that already Aristotle’s notes on Metaphysics had long held in store. Aubry detects and studies a consequential transition from Aristotle’s concept of “potency” (more precisely “in-potency”) to that of “omnipotence”; a transition so dominant and so complete in Patristic and medieval theology and much of the modern thought it would influence that we find it increasingly hard to imagine anything without or beyond it. These revisions of the received view of metaphysics, in light of an alternative ontological model—one that, she claims, is indifferent with regard to both onto-theology and its destruction—would have left their nearintractable marks on contemporary philosophy in some of its most innovative stations.   More specifically, the historical and systematic problem, as Aubry sees it, is not or not only “how a God who is simultaneously all-powerful and all-good is compatible with the existence of evil [which was the age-old predicament and dilemma of so-called theodicy, HdV], but how omnipotence, thought in its most radical sense, excludes other divine attributes, and notably that of goodness and, thereby, leads us to posit in God Himself a possible principle of evil.” But then, could one think of a first and highest Being or, more simply, divine being in terms of a “pure act” that excludes all “potency”—and, a fortiori, omnipotence and, with it, the demotion or subservience of the Good—and, yet, simultaneously redress the normative, ethico- or theologico-political deficit that the concept of power [la puissance or toute-puissance], on Aubry’s reading, so clearly entails? In other words, how to avoid the “weakness” of the very god or daimon (to cite

Anti-Retractationes 313 For Camus, then, it is the moral implication of God’s existence, as defined by His traditional predicates (God being not merely the ens realissimum but also ens perfectissimum and, hence, all good, to top things off), that poses a problem, to wit: how does God’s place and role as the principal— first, highest, and governing—Being and uncaused Cause square with the imperfections and infamies that unmistakably mark His creation (a world He sustains with divine providence and oikonomia, as has long been held)? Other uses of “inexistent”—one of them, interestingly for our purposes, signifying more simply “existence in”—can be found. In his pamphlet, entitled Admiranda methodus (1643), rebutting René Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophiae, Martin Schook draws a sarcastic implication from this other connotation of the expression in question: “deus in me est, et ego in deo, ergo per deum inexistentem omnia ago [God is in me, and therefore I am in God, and therefore it is through God existing in me that I do what I do].” One might further even surmise that there is an analogy or correspondence between the inexistence of God on moral or logical, ontological and metaphysical grounds, on the one hand, and that of the self, the subject of consciousness and of agency, on the other. Paul Valéry, in his correspondence with André Gide—without any further specific reference to either God or the divine, it must be said, but with explicit mention of the term “inexistence”—lets us imagine as much, while rightly emphasizing the unique and abrupt strangeness of an absence of the consciousness or

Aubry’s candidates for an alternative register of the divine) one could yet again muster, if not faith, in then at least some renewed respect for? After all, “being-in-potency” or dunamei, “being-in-act” or energeiai, are not, therefore, powerless or merely passive either. Free from all things, Aristotle’s god or prime mover is not impotent but endowed with what Aubry, interestingly, calls a “non-efficient efficacity” (a notion, one suspects, not so far removed from Marion’s recent emphasis on “impouvoir [unpower]” although it is clearly differently accentuated in Aubry’s writings).   In sum, then, Aubry’s project is to trace the process in which “the god considered to be a pure act, totally without potency, came to be replaced by the God considered to be omnipotent, all-powerful.” Unearthing and then making such subtle conceptual differentiations allows us not only to rediscover an uninherited legacy of Aristotle’s remarkably unified ontology, but also that in which it was and remains unique in the history of Western thought. Axiologically speaking, in so far as it identifies being with the good, Aristotle would seem to have departed from a known Platonic separation or hierarchization between two orders—being and goodness—whose differently emphasized reign marks and taints the history of Christian theology and dogmatics from St. Paul and St. Augustine all the way up Adolf von Harnack and Karl Barth, and further from Heidegger to Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” and the conversations, notably with Moritz Schlick, it inspired. See Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance. Dunamis et Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin, (Paris, Vrin, 2006) and Genèse du Dieu souverain. Archéologie de la puissance II (Paris: Vrin, 2018). See also the special issue of Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger No.3, juillet-septembre 2010, ed. Gwenaëlle Aubry, on “L’impuissance de Dieu” and notably her “Présentation,” ibid., 307–320.

314  Hent de Vries sensation of existing (“Je veux dire que ces étrangetés continuent: ce sont brusquement des sensations profondes d’inexistence”). 39 One is tempted to say that Valéry thus anticipates one of Adorno’s most deeply held beliefs concerning the inexistence of the self in the wake of the disasters that have marked the twentieth century and the postwar period (“after Auschwitz” and in face of the threat nuclear extinction, as his generation keenly felt it). A remark of the latter on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame/Fin de partie suggests as much: Endgame presents the antithesis to existential philosophy’s norm that human beings should be what they are because there is nothing else they can further be [weil sie schon gar nichts anderes mehr sein können]—the idea that precisely this self is not the self but a slavish imitation of something that does not exist [die äffische Nachahmung eines nicht Existenten].40 On Adorno’s reading, the true or deeper self is merely mimicked superficially, in living vicariously, in other words, in a vacuous existence whose philosophical celebration in terms of finitude in existentialist or, for that matter, theological discourses of the day yields a “jargon of authenticity,” not much besides, as the latter merely equals a nihilism that is never nihilist enough to be really convincing and honest. Beckett, by contrast, would go so far as to usher in another—all too real—concept and practice of “inexistence,” one that eludes or, rather, thins out the traditional distinction between “being” and “non-” or “not-being.” Hence, for Beckett, unlike Hamlet, “to be or not to be” is not “the question” (as much as Shakespeare’s tragedy has often been invoked to shed light on the author of Waiting for Godot and, not surprisingly, on this play in particular). As one of the modalities among the categories of our understanding, inexistence, in its more common notation (Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, speaks of “non-existence”), stands opposed to “existence,” just as “possibility” stands opposed to “impossibility” and “necessity” to “contingency.”41 And this distinction between inexistence and the other modalities should also be seen in light of what Kant stipulates in his so-called table of “Nothing,” differentiating among an ens rationem, a nihil privativum, an ens imaginarium, and, finally, a nihil negativum or pure nothing.42 Inexistence, as we use it here, is nothing of the kind.

39 André Gide and Paul Valéry, Correspondance 1890–1942, Nouvelle édition établie, présentée et annotée par Peter Fawcett (Les Cahiers de la NRF (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 40 Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, [1974] 1997), 312; Notes on Literature, Vol. One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 267. 41 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 88/B 106. 42 Ibid., A 290.

Anti-Retractationes 315 These, then, are among the notions and contrasts that must play a role in any effort at answering the fundamental question as to what “inexistence” and, more specifically, “divine inexistence”—which, as we suggested, is its prime example, model and touchstone—might further mean, metaphysically and pragmatically speaking. Moreover, inexistence, notably divine existence, has an at least indirect bearing on how we conceive the self under present, global conditions of thinking and agency and the political challenges, crises and predicaments, it faces—as it now must be—“without identity” and “without power,” if not, therefore, without inner resolve and strength as well as a messianic force that need not be “weak.” If I am not mistaken, these are matters that have been introduced and analyzed in a number of contemporary authors in the phenomenological and more recent so-called speculative realist traditions of thinking, each of which espouses a distinct model of critique, while drawing its argumentative thrust directly and indirectly, from deeply and broadly affirmative and negative theological considerations, respectively, just as each echoes the silence of certain mystical treatises, and, perhaps, even mimics the experience and disciplines of spiritual practices. To discuss these properly, however, the historical stage must first be set. In the remainder of this long rejoinder, therefore, I will briefly discuss not only Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s introduction of idea or concept of God in his Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) but also treat some of his twentieth century followers and commentators, notably Alexandre Kojève, as a possible source for the motif of “inexistence.” Moreover, I will emphasize that it is the concept and problem of “divine” inexistence that holds the very key to the wider problem of identity and totality or, as I prefer to say, globality, meaning at once a sense of expansiveness as well as of vagueness. To this latter meaning, Hegel and his followers are exposed even more than they themselves realized. In a final movement, I will then elaborate on two striking contemporary exemplary thinkers, namely Jean-Luc Marion and (here, somewhat more extensively) Meillassoux, two authors over whose writings the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Alain Badiou, respectively, loom large in the background.43

43 Again, with this stage set, it needs repeating that several analytic and post-analytic discussions of inexistence, divine and other, can also be found and, I would claim, present themselves with equal rigor. At the very least, the emphatic concept of “inexistence,” if it can be made sufficiently clear in the authors I discuss in this rejoinder, in these “Anti-Retractationes,” should find ample corroboration in those different philosophical registers, under the guidance of no less striking intuitions and compelling methods, for it to be a—metaphysically and pragmatically—viable notion and maxim at all; one, moreover, that is of strangely and increasingly critical use in evaluating the prevailing concepts and practices of the self and of others in light of the unique political and, more precisely, global challenges which the latter now fatefully face but, it might well be argued, have themselves, in turn, also contributed to.

316  Hent de Vries

God, A Self-Contradictory Notion? If there is one quasi- or crypto-theological insight that I have always carried with me, at least since my student days when I first encountered it explicitly and economically formulated—in seemingly paradoxical but, in fact, in resolutely aporetic, negative dialectical terms—it is Adorno’s provocative and, come to think of it, massive claim that “whoever believes in God therefore cannot believe in God.” This surprising statement, found in the concluding section of his 1966 magnum opus, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), is immediately followed by its minimally moral and political corollary: “The possibility for which the divine name stands is maintained by whoever does not believe,”44 whereby the context and the author’s larger ambition make it abundantly clear that material, corporeal and social, institutional and economic, aspects enter into the utopian “possibility” for which redemption is just one name. Indeed, this interpretative horizon of the two intriguing phrases—apodictic and paratactic as they may further strike us—is of equal importance and, hence, merits a more extensive quotation to which I will turn in a moment. The assertion that “whoever believes in God therefore cannot believe in God,” I soon discovered, was only matched by Adorno’s parallel insistence, in the very same book—which, lest we forget, he considered the “theoretical matrix” of his work overall—that even to “think hope,” also independent of its theological associations in, say, secular or profane terms—would ipso facto “works against it.” As a consequence, Adorno claimed such “hope,” like “belief in God,” must continue to fall under the critique of idolatry, whether conceptual, political, or aesthetic, that, under modern conditions, proves itself to be even more urgent and stringent than the Biblical injunction of old. Perhaps hope, like God, would not be of the order of thinking, acting, or judging? But, if not hope or God, what else might these faculties’ most original or ultimate, emphatic and elusive ideas be named, require, and refer to? Adorno’s metaphysical thought opens a new horizon in the philosophy of religion, allowing us to revisit and recast the question of faith and knowledge in light of the much celebrated (and, at times, rightly ridiculed) announcement of the “death of God” (or at least of the Judeo-Christian, moral God, as Nietzsche believed). It is a thought, moreover, that would simultaneously leave the recourse to so-called “nihilism” resolutely behind. In proposing it, Adorno offers a counterintuitive and counterfactual “meditation” or “contemplation” on the historical fate and ongoing—indeed, exponentially increased, deepened, and widened—spiritual significance

44 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1973) 9–412, 394; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 402, trans. modified.

Anti-Retractationes 317 not only of the tradition of divine names but also, more specifically, the ontological proof of God’s existence. Adorno’s consideration or, rather, reconsideration forms an integral part of his broader investigation into so-called spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung], whose journey, once taken, is neither that of the intellect nor that of merely subjective or emotive sentiment.45 If anything, and irrespective of Adorno’s allergy against Heidegger’s as well as Protestant dialectical theology’s jargon, it signals a mode and moment, mood and momentum of existence or, as we shall verify, “inexistence,” whose quasi-theological and mystical resonances are not without relevance for our topic. Formulated in seemingly paradoxical, contradictory terms, Adorno’s claim, in the concluding pages of his work, is that the traditional motifs of “truth,” “God,” and “hope” do not only—logically and pragmatically—belong and cohere together, but also that they, remarkably enough, survive or elude their modern critique. And this, no matter how far their progressive demythologization, secularization, and profanation is propelled forward by the proverbial storm that, as Walter Benjamin mused, in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” pushes us farther and farther away from Paradise, leaving behind a heap of broken tablets, remnants, and ashes, as the violent products of culture, of history qua immanence, the nexus of guilt, of the total administration and its eventual, indeed, ultimate catastrophe. In the process, the substance and referent of thought, its matter and objecthood, like all other normative standards, is merely asymptotically approached and approximated, hence, becoming thinner and more abstract along the way; and this to the very point where virtually nothing is left that could potentially say and mean anything to us, as subjects and agents. The old instances have crumbled and dissolved in thin air, the new ones do not quite congeal into anything tangible we could finally put our fingers and touch upon, thus undermining the most intensive and extensive concepts of truth (qua adaequatio, correspondence, consensus, unconcealment, and what not). The wider context of the passages quoted earlier sees Adorno sketching out the premises of—and inferences from—their seemingly paradoxical or, more precisely, aporetic claim that the predicament of thought and its guiding ideas lies in its very predication without which, needless to say, it cannot be conceived, that is, come off the ground and make so much a difference, metaphysically and pragmatically speaking. As Adorno writes: According to the present state of cosmology, heaven and hell, conceived of as being in space, are simple archaicisms. This relegated immortality

45 As Scholem apodictically claims: “Erlebnis und Thora sind absolute Gegensätze [Experience and Thora as absolute opposites].” And: “Erlebnis ist noch schlimmer als Zauber. Zauber ist dämonisch, Erlebnis ist gespenstisch [Experience is even worse than magic. Magic is demonic, experience spectral].” (Scholem, “95 Thesen über Judentum und Zionismus,” 292, 293).

318  Hent de Vries to that of spirits [Geistern], lending it a spectral [Gespenntisches] and unreal character that mocks its own concept. Christian dogmatics, in which the awakening of the souls was conceived as being simultaneous with the resurrection of the flesh, was metaphysically more consistent—more enlightened, if you will—than speculative metaphysics, just as hope means a physical resurrection and knows itself to be defrauded of its best part by the latter’s spiritualization [Vergeistigung]. With this, however, the impositions of metaphysical speculation wax intolerably. Knowledge tends deeply towards the side of absolute mortality, which is intolerable to it and before which it becomes a matter of absolute indifference to itself. This is what the idea of truth, among the metaphysical ideas the highest, drives at. Whoever believes in God can therefore not believe in Him. The possibility for which the divine name stands is maintained by the one who does not believe. While the prohibition of images in old times extended to the naming of the name, it has become suspicious in this form itself. The commandment has sharpened itself: even just thinking hope, transgresses and works against it. This is how deep the history of metaphysical truth has sunk, a history that denies history—the ever-progressing demythologization—in vain. Yet the latter devours itself, like the mythical gods, with preference, do with their own children. Insofar as it leaves nothing but the merely existing [das bloss Seiende], it reverts back into myth. For the latter is nothing but the closed immanent nexus [Immanenzzusammenhang] of whatever is. It is in this contradiction that metaphysics has withdrawn itself today. And any thought that seeks to remove this predicament, is threatened by untruth, left and right.46 The passage is only matched by Adorno’s further insistence, in the same book—again, the “theoretical matrix” of his work overall—that all thinking, independent of its theological associations, eo ipso implies and requires a reference to God; a reference that it, at least discursively— and this, as we have seen, is the very predicament of its and all predication (perhaps, that of prayer, and praise even included)—ipso facto also betrays. As a consequence, Adorno claims “belief in God” and in its wake “hope” must fall under the critique of idolatry, conceptual and other that, under modern condition, proves itself to be even more stringent than the Biblical injunction of old. Adorno speaks of “an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images

46 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1973) 9–412, 394; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 401–402, trans. modified.

Anti-Retractationes 319 [Bilderverbot], far beyond what this once originally meant.”47 Only an “ascesis” of thought and, by implication and extension, of practice, then— an epoché of judgment and kenosis of discourse—might yet respond, albeit only in paradoxical, indeed, aporetic ways to the very predicament to which “belief” in God and the “hope” it enables is now exposed: a predicament, Adorno does not hesitate to conclude, is that of virtually all predication (theological and philosophical, discursive and other). This said and limiting ourselves to the first statement (“whoever believes in God therefore cannot believe in God”), we immediately realize that “belief in God” is not so much denied here as it is held in a state of temporary suspension. Adorno seems mind- and respectful of the very “possibility for which the divine name stands” (in our present and not just in some remote past), a “possibility,” moreover, which—even in its actual, epistemic as well moral impossibility—must, indeed, can and ought to be “maintained” (“The possibility for which the divine name stands is maintained by whoever does not believe.”). As a name and notion or concept, not to be jettisoned, “God” must be kept as ready at hand as a principle (i.e., beginning and ground), no matter how much its invocation requires thought to commit a fallacy, a petitio principii, of sorts. Critical theory and, as Adorno will come to say, “philosophical,” “metaphysical,” indeed, “spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung]” requires nothing less and, one is tempted to add, little more. Taken together, moreover, its contributions add up to a whole new “form of life.”48 There is a reason why Adorno, hardly your typical believer or theologian, goes so far as to claim that all true philosophical problems revolve around the very nature, phrasing and spirit, of the ontological proof for God’s existence. This proof is known since at least St. Anselm’s Proslogion, albeit it not under this much later, modernized name, whose mention and use has its own corresponding metaphysical, onto-theological premises, which are best known from Kant’s robust attempt to refute the argument (not so much Anselm’s unum argumentum, but its post-Cartesian, dogmatic variety, associated with Christian Wolff and A.G. Baumgarten), once and for all. For Adorno, the stakes of the proof in its effort to forge a nexus between the conceptual and the non-conceptual—here, the positing of existence and all that comes with it—could not be higher. Whatever “hope” the existence and essence, name or promise of “God” once stood for is from here on or, at least, for now “maintained,” if not guaranteed, by His inexistence alone.

47 Theodor W. Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” in Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 10.2 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977), 608–616, 616; “Reason and Revolution,” trans. Henry W. Pickford in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 135–142, 142. 48 Cf. Martin Shuster, Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 71ff.

320  Hent de Vries That such seemingly abstruse considerations may well have a direct and indirect bearing upon much-debated themes such as individual, social, and political identities, their mantra of self-determination and the intractable global challenges they more and more face, is the broader conclusion we can take away from Adorno’s argument. Indeed, “inexistence,” whether of God or of the very existential basis of our present hopes, turns out to be the most “global”—generic and generative—philosophical concept available and one that alone proves capable of unsettling the presumed or, as we might say, abstract and false universality of personal and national “identity” and its apparent—undiminished or, rather, increased—worldwide appeal. I am painfully aware of the fact that the subject of inexistence may, at first, seem surprising and this not least because the concepts, arguments, and best practices we tend to invoke to critically evaluate identity, its politics and global challenges, from a humanistic and scholarly perspective do not often start out from the idea of its non-existence, much less inexistence. On the contrary, identity, like its corollary, totality—which, like capital and money, nation and, state, epitomize the universal equivalent, it seems, of our time, as twentieth-century Critical Theory and phenomenology in their broadly Marxian inspiration and anti-naturalist orientation were the first to jointly point out—are the ens realissimum of the epoch, up to this day. Inexistence, then, and a fortiori “divine inexistence,” its most deeply probing and far-reaching example, is the sole reference—and, as some have argued, the absolute requisite—both for thought and human agency that sees straight through things and then also sets them aright (again or for once). That this is so is all the more surprising given that philosophical critique, for strictly logical, ontological, and metaphysical reasons, nonetheless does not touch upon either notion (inexistence and divine inexistence) directly or can say much about it either, other than by using wildly speculative terms and hypotheses or, alternatively, by saying less or next to nothing as it turns to more urgent pragmatic matters to start with. How, then, should inexistence, divine and other, so much as matter and concern us, given our existential and political predicaments today? In other words, to what end insist on the elusive, paradoxical, indeed, aporetic motif of inexistence at all? Moreover, in what indirect way is especially “divine inexistence” absolutely key as it, in a sense to still be largely determined, holds sway over all other forms of, say, human “inexistence,” just as, conversely, the motif and motivation behind the mere phenomenon of all “inexistence” is, somehow, also “divine” or best described in its terms (i.e., in terms of its virtual archive)? This much is clear: “divine inexistence” is never far away where mere inexistence—even or notably in the most negative of its determinations and, hence, indetermination—is strangely near.

Anti-Retractationes 321

Two Complementary Quotes That Say It All Two contrasting quotes that complement each other can help us to further set the stage for its inquiry. They both tie the concept of existence to that of inexistence and, on the face of it, to divine inexistence, first of all. The first is borrowed from G.W.F. Hegel, the second from Jacques Derrida. Taken together, these two citations, which I had used as epigraphs long ago in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, epitomize what I still very much believe of relevance for us today, even though I am more and more convinced that they can and also must be transposed or translated into different conceptual registers, by drawing also on different authors to restate their point, perhaps, more efficiently. Each of them, moreover, demonstrates why in a truly global perspective identity and its corollary, totality, should no longer fundamentally matter. What takes their place, I have suggested above, is a certain concept and practice of “inexistence,” a notion, I will further say, whose paradoxical or, rather, aporetic nature, including the “difficult freedom” it enables or imposes (as Levinas once aptly phrased it), finds its sources and preparation in a long tradition of theological and mystical thinking, of messianism, eschatology, and apocalyptics, next to that of spiritual experience and exercise, now largely fallen into disrepute in enlightened circles. The first epigraph is found, parenthetically, in the first book of the Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik), toward the end of the section, entitled “With what must the beginning of science be made? [Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?];” the second in the last chapter of L’écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference). Cited together, they read as follows: (and God would have the perfectly undisputed right that the beginning be made with him [or: and God has the absolutely indisputable right that the beginning be made with him, und das unbestrittene Recht hätte Gott, dass mit ihm der Anfang gemacht werde])49 and God contradicts Himself already [Dieu déjà se contredit].50 49 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, Erster Teil, Die objektive Logik, Erstes Buch. Werke Vol. 5, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 79; Science of Logic, Trans. and Edited by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 55, and Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), respectively. The latter translation is cited after Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006), 187. 50 Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 107; Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 70.

322  Hent de Vries The Hegel quote from the Science of Logic raises two preliminary questions at least. First, why does God have the “indisputable right” that we begin with Him, logically and ontologically or metaphysically speaking (i.e., de iure), rather than merely mythologically and theologically or historically (i.e., de facto)? After all, while Hegel’s initial context is and must be that of a consideration of the “Infinite” and of “Being,” a central question remains open and implicit, namely: Why or to what extent is “God” for that guiding motif and driving motivation, throughout this fundamental work, the unchallenged, most adequate or appropriate, name, term or concept, to begin with? We must assume that Hegel is, here also—and especially on this seemingly most “abstract” and “formal” of all terrains—preoccupied by a virtual archive of the absolute past, whose sources, resource and repository, have, for him, lost nothing of their at once profoundly metaphysical and deeply pragmatic meaning and force. And, I would like to argue, mutatis mutandis, the very same would seem to hold true for us, still, here and now. Second, how does the very notion of God, by its own nature or logic lead to a contradiction—a self-contradiction of the most eminent Self or Subject, of identity in its very totality—as Derrida’s word, drawn from Edmond Jabès’s fictive rabbinical dialogues in his Livre des questions (Book of Questions), succinctly points out, thus anticipating his own later analysis of Absolute Knowledge, in Glas and elsewhere? It is as if the totality of Hegel’s oeuvre relegates this contradiction at the heart of the speculative dialectic to God, thereby freeing, indeed, dispensing his logic and metaphysics from religion’s all too fateful implications. God would thus absolve the Absolute from what is not it, from what it surely must not be. Paradoxically, turning or returning to this archive, Hegel, like so many thinkers that preceded and followed him, cannot help but draw on religion in a way that reminds philosophy of its structural, necessary, indeed, absolute incompletion: its lack of pleroma, as Werner Hamacher, basing himself on Hegel’s earliest writings, calls it suggestively.51 Whether a different, fulfilled pleroma—a “universal other,”52 as Meillassoux will venture— substituting for the self-same identity and totality, that is, for the all-in-all, be-all and end-all, and alpha and omega of old, might be thinkable or imaginable, perhaps, precisely as unthinkable and unimaginable, is nonetheless strangely possible and efficacious, must remain an open question at this point. Yet, as such, it hinges on the very concept, idea, or aporetic notion that interests us here, namely that of inexistence, divine, and other.

51 Werner Hamacher, “Pleroma – zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel,” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums.” Schriften 1796-1800, ed. and introduced by Werner Hamacher (Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1978), 7–333; Werner Hamacher, Pleroma – Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 52 Quentin Meillassoux, Trassierungen. Zur Wegbereitung spekulativen Denkens, trans. Roland Frommel, ed. by Armen Avanessian (Leipzig: Merve Verlag, 2017), 19.

Anti-Retractationes 323 But let us revisit the statements, Hegel’s and Derrida’s, with which we started out, once more. These given quotes provide a direct and, taken together, seemingly self-defeating answer to the question that Hegel sets out by posing, in Book One of Volume I, “The Objective Logic,” of The Science of Logic, and entitled “The Doctrine of Being,” namely: “With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?” The answer—without contestation and rightfully, Hegel says—is “God.” Derrida, for his part, adds that at the origin of that very question and answer “already”—that is, in the name and concept of “God,” before any discourse, proof or argument, to begin with—a contradiction arises, internally, from within, as it were. For Hegel, what must be said of God here spills over into the concepts of Being and Nothingness. Much less clear is whether, in following the sinuous path of this metaphysical logic and dialectic, speculatively and resolutely, as it were, we end up with where we began, namely with God as a necessary and not merely contingent “figure” of Being reverting to Nothingness and back again, in a dialectic or oscillation that moves to and fro, ad infinitum or absolutely, as it might seem. If that is the case, then what (with) God began, from a metaphysical point of view (i.e., from nowhere in particular) we may have to end, in more than one sense of that last term (i.e., break off or fulfill), pragmatically, so to speak. For Hegel, Being, in its very purity, abstractness, and formality—that is, as Being without beings—leads literally and figuratively to “nothing.” Yet, as in principle and de facto inseparable from beings, its essence must also appear. Without concretization or, as Christianity will come to claim, without revelation qua incarnation, without divine economy (oikonomia) providentially guiding all things toward their telos, which is redemption and the all-in-all, Being can neither be generalized or realized in ways that the early Hegel will define as “positivity [Positivität],” the term rendered by the later Michel Foucault, following his teacher Jean Hyppolite, as “apparatus [dispositif],” as Giorgio Agamben (in “What Is An Apparatus?”) has reminded us. Being as such, in keeping to itself, would be an empty concept, devoid of reality.53 It thereby contradicts itself and must contradict

53 See my “Die erste Mediatisierung: Oikonomia und Apparatus in Religion und Theologie” and “Divine Economy: Notes on the Religious Apparatus,” referenced above. Samantha Carmel, in her contribution to the present volume, is right to introduce yet another author who, directly and indirectly, has provided a foil against which the twentiethcentury inquiry into the possibilities and impossibilities, opportunities and pitfalls, of theology and, more specifically, “atheology” becomes all but inevitable. This is nowhere clearer than in Georges Bataille’s L’expérience intérieure (Inner Experience), the opening salvo of his provocative La Somme athéologique and, in Carmel’s succinct rendition, “a godless guidebook of spiritual exercises for achieving ecstatic states, a powerful critique of the traditional criteria of philosophy’s legitimate subject matter,” just as it also, and most importantly, explores and formulates “an alternate conception of the ethical.” Interestingly or, rather, shockingly, this new sense of the ethical expresses itself through exercises by means of a “logic”—call it a “general” rather than “restricted economy”—in which the

324  Hent de Vries and, as it were, interrupt and exteriorize, more precisely, alienate itself, so as to live up to its concept. And yet, as it reverts, as mere concept, to virtually nothing (as it “is,” but cannot remain indeterminate) it also, paradoxically, dialectically, manifests itself as more than a mere formal tautology, namely as a becoming, of sorts. In this, Being functions no differently than the point, line, and plane (as Heidegger recalls in a crucial footnote in Being and Time), each of them negating the other, as the very process of all temporalization and spatialization implies and requires, in a dialectical self-contradiction, of sorts.

Self-Inflicted and Self-Healing Wounds versus the Effort to Outwit and Outdo There is a reason why atheism—or, for that matter, “radical atheism”—does not rebut theism as effectively as it has long been believed to do, just as nihilism and so many other attempts at overcoming metaphysics enshrine the latter’s principles or silent, unquestioned axioms even deeper and further or make matters worse. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno states as much. Even the later Heidegger would move from the effort at Überwindung (overcoming) to that of a far more protracted Verwindung (convalescence), distancing himself

experiential exposures to multiple and inchoate forms and instantiations of violence, irrespective of their critique in theological and philosophical thought, themselves must “necessarily assume a certain violence of their own, succeeding only when they [Carmel cites Religion and Violence] “turn violence inside out […] turning good violence against bad or the worst violence.” But there may be a further sense, Carmel surmises, according to which the very logic and economizing of violence is undermined or rendered less powerful, if not irrelevant, just as ideas and concepts of “God” or “the Absolute” are relegated to being mere “categories of the Understanding” (rather, than, say, genuine ideas of reason, in Kantian parlance). This further sense is that of “non-knowledge” or “sovereign experience,” which can neither be stated nor otherwise expressed without resorting to discourse, that is, to knowledge or to whatever existential, non-epistemic “project” we undertake. This said, Bataille, Carmel shows, follows Ignatius of Loyola, in resorting to vivid and violent imagery (e.g., Christ’s agony on Calvary) so as to eventually escape and overcome this deadly cycle, whose fatality is that of existence as such as much as that of society. Accordingly, a “procedure of concentration on an image of dramatic violence is devised to interrupt internal dialogue and preoccupations in the world of project through the triggering of ‘non-discursive experience’.” Or again: “As a spiritual exercise, dramatization thus deploys the most extreme representations of the codes regulating the meaningful appearance of the everyday world in order to suspend and exceed those meanings …: transgressive imagery of such magnitude has the propensity to blind, dissolving the subject’s framework of intelligibility.” Carmel’s own broader investigations pursue analogous motifs and comparable strategies with regard to the thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries representing the so-called conservative revolution and the revaluation of “value”—and, eventually, of Neo-Kantian Wertphilosophie—they endeavored. In her rendition, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Carl Schmitt provided the critical terms for this important debate. See Samantha Carmel, “No Last Men: The Conservative Critique of Instrumental Reason in Nietzsche, Weber, and Schmitt,” Dissertation Johns Hopkins University, 2022.”

Anti-Retractationes 325 even more from the so-called questioning attitude in Being and Time than the immediately subsequent writings had already done. Adorno, moreover, referencing Wagner’s Parsifal, surmised that the metaphysical no less than mythological “wound” could only be healed by the “spear” that inflicted it in the first place. Meillassoux, to whom I will turn in more detail below, intimates, as one commentator has put it, that we must “do Christianity one better,” that is, not dampen or mitigate its speculative pretentions but heighten—outwitting and outdoing—them ever more.54 And neither atheism nor nihilism, nor, for that matter, secular humanism, rehashing the mantra of the death of God or of Christianity as the religion of the end of religion (as Marcel Gauchet quipped), is capable of doing that.55 No one and nothing can contradict God but God Himself, the saying goes. Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse, a phrase heavily debated between Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt, figures as an epigraph to the fourth book of J.W. Goethe’s 1830 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) and the “Spruch” or “saying” can be found once more in the main text of its twentieth chapter. This, then, might offer some indirect background (not invoked by Derrida) of the statement that “God contradicts Himself already.” After all, if any contradiction there is, of any existence and a fortiori of God’s, then surely its very possibility—the very possibility of this impossibility of non- or inexistence—must surely be found with or in “God Himself.” But, then again, this is an impossible possibility, upon closer scrutiny. If contradiction is carried into God, into His very concept and attributes, names or predicates, then surely He is neither the guarantor of either existence or non-existence. It can only be concluded, then, that His very nature and promise, if one can still adopt these terms, “is” one of “inexistence.” God and Nothing (Nichts) or No One (nemo) or Nobody (Niemand), in logical consequence, revert to each other. Writers and poets like Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, drawing on archives of theological

54 Adam Kotsko, “Mallarmé,” in Gratton and Ennis, eds., The Meillassoux Dictionary, 109–111, 111. On Kotsko’s reading, Meillassoux “embraces a possibility that resonates strongly with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, involving a human figure who somehow comes into possession of divine power but gives it up after returning all those who have died to life and bestowing upon all humanity the gift of a new immortal form of bodily existence … It is inaccurate to say that Meillassoux is embracing or appropriating Christianity. What he’s really trying to do is much bolder and, one might say, more insane: he wants to do Christianity one better. He wants to create something more powerful than Christianity that would radicalize Christianity’s wildest hopes— and that would deliver on them, in so far as it is based on the radical contingency of the universe rather than on the illusion of a transcendent God.” (ibid.). 55 See Quentin Meillassoux, “Le néant contra la mort de Dieu. Poétique de Mallarmé après 1866,” in Bertrand Marchal, Thierry Roger, and Jean-Luc Steinmetz, eds., Spectres de Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2021), 107–122; “Nothingness Against the Death of God—Mallarmé’s Poetics After 1866,” in Claude Romano and Robyn Horner, eds., The Experience of Atheism: Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Religion (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 43–60.

326  Hent de Vries and mystical—or, in the former’s case, occasionalist—thought sensed and expressed this all along. Negative metaphysics, not to be confused with so-called “post-metaphysical thinking,” spells it all out. And so does “the other theology” of which Adorno, likewise, speaks. Hegel and, more specifically, one of his most avid and influential readers, Alexandre Kojève, understood and said as much. The latter, in his posthumously published manuscript Atheism, identifies the “pure theist” as someone who affirms the existence of a “something” (nechto) that is said to “be” without any predicates and that, therefore, can precisely not be a determined or specific thing, yielding a “no-thing or nothing (nichto)” instead. As a consequence, the position of the pure theist and that of the atheist are in essence the same, as the latter claims that God does not exist as something determined and specific either. And the so-called “qualified theist,” who attributes some predicates to God, fairs no better. As Kojève’s translator comments, “these predicates must in some sense be special or extraordinary if they are to differentiate God from all other things.” Put differently, the attempt to ascribe unique properties to God fails for the same reasons as the effort to withhold all predicates from God’s being and, hence, “the qualified theist cannot successfully define the difference between the [qualified, HdV]] ‘thinghood’ of God and that of all other things,”56 just as the pure theist cannot differentiate between the unqualified “something [nechto]” and “nothing [nichto].” There is an intrinsic relationship between God and nothing, non- or, rather, inexistence, then, one that would certainly merit further analysis. The latter would have to take place in and on Hegelian terms, no doubt, which I will forgo here, but might also be ventured in alternative idioms, that is, with different—here: phenomenological and speculative—methods. Each of them, I have suggested and will further illustrate, makes what is, fundamentally, a negative metaphysical and deep pragmatic point.

From Micrology to Macrology For Adorno, as developed in his Drei Studien zu Hegel (Hegel: Three Studies), in Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics) and elsewhere, the motif and motto we have been tracing reveals yet another aspect, namely the fact that Hegel “rebelled against the hardened immanence of language” and that “in the process his own language ran into a brick wall.”57 As Adorno goes on to argue, the opening chapter of the first book of the

56 Cf. Jeff Love, “Introduction: Atheism and Politics,” in Alexandre Kojève, Atheism, trans. by Jeff Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xii–xxvii, xv–xvi. 57 Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, [1970] 1997): 247–375, 352; Three Studies on Hegel, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 120.

Anti-Retractationes 327 Science of Logic would be the very “memorial” of this predicament that unsettles the foundation of all the fundamentals of predication: “Being, pure Being, without any further determination [Seyn, reines Seyn,—ohne alle weitere Bestimmung],” an anacoluton that tries with Hebelian cunning to find a way out of the predicament that “indeterminate indeterminacy,” even if clothed in the form of a predicative statement like “Being is the most general concept, without any further determination,” would thereby receive a definition through which the sentence would contradict itself. If one opposed this trick, saying that, strictly speaking, pure names cannot be understood and certainly cannot involve their contradictions, since only propositions, not mere concepts, contradict themselves, Hegel might shrewdly agree, noting that the objection motivates the first antithesis to his first thesis, and that he himself explains that such being is nothing. But in such sophistries a philosophy of identity that wants to have the last words even in the first, and at any price including the shabbiest, is not merely playing dumb. The dialectic’s protest against language cannot be voiced directly except in language. Hence that protest is condemned to impotent paradox, and it makes a virtue out of that necessity.58 Such considerations affect not only Adorno’s appreciation of Hegel and the negative dialectics that could be the only logical—i.e., epistemic as well as moral and political—consequence drawn from his system, they also shed light on the former’s view of what must, likewise, result in terms of negative metaphysics, negative aesthetics, and negative anthropology, in short, an aporetic mode of engaging all things. And, presumably, to do so all at once, by one stroke, with so-called micrology reverting into macrology, and vice versa as well. An altogether different view of “absolute knowledge” thereby emerges, namely one that neither dismisses nor, for that matter, inflates its original pretention or its ultimate reach.59 On every count, a certain idea and praxis stands in for “the nonexistent [das Nichtseiende]” and, hence, inscribes a certain skepsis and imperfection, fallibility or, at least, provisionality in all statements made. And abstaining from predicative language, Adorno critically remarks with reference to the well-known propositions that conclude Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is not really an option. Tainted with such counter-factuality, marked by a certain as-if quality or downright virtuality, the truth content or truth moment of such statements, on the one hand, and their falsity, on the other, are joined at the hip. We may

58 Ibid., 120–121/352–353 59 Cf. in this light also Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowledge (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2018).

328  Hent de Vries speak, therefore, of “the blemish of mendacity,” for example, in art, but surely not in art alone (or even primarily): Although the nonexisting emerges suddenly in artworks, they do not lay hold of it bodily as with the pass of a magic wand [mit einem Zauberschlag]. The nonexisting is mediated to them through fragments of the existing [Das Nichtseiende ist ihnen vermittelt durch die Bruchstücke des Seienden], which they assemble into an apparition [apparition, in French, in Adorno’s text, HdV]. It is not for art to decide by its existence if the nonexisting that appears indeed exists as something appearing or remains semblance [Schein]. As figures of the existing, unable to summon into existence the nonexisting, artworks draw their authority from the reflection they compel on how they could be the overwhelming image of the nonexisting if it did not exist in itself…. [T]he blemish of mendacity obviously cannot be rubbed off art; nothing guarantees that it will keep its objective promise. Therefore every theory of art must at the same time be the critique of art. Even radical art is a lie insofar as it fails to create the possible to which it gives rise as semblance. Artworks draw credit from a praxis that has as yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their letters of credit.60 According to Adorno, then, genuine art—like God, or hope—inexists in the sense that it allows us to think about the paradoxically and, under present conditions, impossible possibility of what, in so-called spiritual experience, surges and shines forth as the “nonfactual in facticity.” It is with this that we must begin, even though, strictly speaking, we cannot predicate anything of “it” or, for that matter, preach, sing, or whistle about whatever “it” is, as its phenomenal, singular hic et nunc, is, literally and figuratively, not of this world, without therefore belonging to some transcendent realm either. Strictly speaking, it neither is nor is it not, much less is it anywhere else. Yet what can thus neither be affirmed nor negated cannot be avoided or, indeed, ignored. In Augustinian and pragmatist parlance, it must be “made true.” Not merely seeing but setting things aright is one and the same requisite for all we further think, do, and endeavor. The apparent contrast and somewhat more hidden correspondence between the two statements from which we set out—to wit: with God we should, by all means, begin, yet God contradicts Himself already (in other words, we must start with God, but cannot, as if echoing Beckett’s repeated “must go on” and “can’t go on” sequence in his 1953/1958 L’innommable/The

60 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, [1970] 1997), 129. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor under the title Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 83.

Anti-Retractationes 329 Unnamable)—shed light on an unlikely project: affirming and, more precisely, having to affirm a possible impossibility, which “is,” so far or at present, for us, an impossible possibility. This pure virtuality, hypothetical, and provisional rather than providential or prometheian as it further remains, “is” much less, but, perhaps, also strangely more than a metaphysical potentiality, not to mention actuality or reality, and, in this capacity, undermines or outwits the latter even further. It is, precisely, in this, its very absoluteness, that inexistence—and, in this sense, Infinity or in-finity, as a motif and modality, moment, and movement, if these terms still apply—calls for critical thought and moral, political action to simultaneously faithfully trace and follow up on “it.” The point being, as Cavell wisely intimates, in his The Claim of Reason, that its “call” (and how we call it) will be and always was “our call,” in the first place.

Dual Aspect Seeing What then, somewhat paradoxically formulated, “is” inexistence? What is meant and entailed by its very concept? Moreover, what to say of the putative self (beyond or before so-called identity, which, after all, is an idem rather than ipse) and its related practice (beyond or before so-called totality or “all-ness,” as Kant defines it) upon which the motif of inexistence shines an at once obscure and “silent light,” casting on them something like a shadow-existence, a double life and ditto vision: a dual aspect seeing, sub specie aeternitatis, at best, a form of schizophrenia, paranoia, or Manicheism and, ultimately, nihilism and madness, at worst? From the faint mimicry of false, emptied out, inauthentic existence, as Beckett, as read by Adorno, saw it, to the newly, reconfigured immortality of the true, genuine, deep subject, what path do we follow? In order to answer these questions, we must begin by observing that the motif in question—as we said, in its very moment and movement, its modality and motivation—easily falls prey to philosophical categories that fall short in determining its very “essence,” “nature,” or “real” (terms that are no less problematic themselves). The way out of this predicament, which is the predicament of all predication, discursive and other, must, no doubt, remain speculative and, in this respect, tentative and fallible, as the proof of the pudding is here, more than ever or anywhere, in the eating, that is, resides in whether and how things get done (without sufficient reason, if need be, but with the desired and promised effect, if we can help it). In this spirit, then, we can venture to claim that it is lies in the “absolute” of knowledge as Hegel may well have conceived it originally, thus eluding a century and a half of fundamentally reductive interpretations that identified and totalized his work, notably the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, in idealist and materialist, naturalist and, more recently, pragmatist terms. With reference to the etymology of the word, the adjective in question, “absolute,” connotes or, at least, implies and conjures that which absolves itself from knowledge and, we might add, does so within

330  Hent de Vries or starting out from the realm of that very same knowledge. The absolute thus becomes a scansion, perturbation, and principled change that at once limits and delimits the parameters of the knowable, the epistemic regimen to which a long tradition of mathematization and mechanization, identification and totalization has subjected the philosophical ambition, thus exorcizing its spirit, inspiration, and aspiration from underlying, surrounding, and future “experience.” As such, this spirituality, for lack of better term, reveals, manifests, gives or materializes and phenomenalizes itself nowhere else than in—my, our, or, for that matter, any other’s—existence itself. In the latter it nests itself as it’s “other,” that is, not as hidden secret and solvable riddle, but as the apparition of the merely apparent, as the miracle of its event, in one word, as the extraordinary in and of the ordinary and the everyday. These, then, are among the multiple ways of describing or invoking the same non-coincidence of all contingency, to begin with the non-agreement with itself, which is yet another way of claiming that any fact or event can be seen under, at least, two aspects at once, the only two that will ever truly matter, to wit: as the necessary, caused, and determined effect whose ground is one of sufficient reason, first and foremost, but also as the principally, virtual and de facto, free occasion for anything whatsoever or anyone at all to occur or arrive, for good and/or for ill.61

61 I have been deeply moved by the contributions in this volume that highlight my more recent interests in the question of miracles. I am thinking notably of Sari Nusseibeh’s and Ilit Ferber’s essays, discussing Ibn Sina and David Hume, respectively, but, more indirectly, also Willemien Otten’s or Mieke Bal’s contributions, which devoted to early Christian thought (in Otten’s case) and to a contemporary Indian artist (in Bal’s case), each touched on this elusive subject. After completing the aforementioned trilogy and following the collective and editorial projects with excursions into the tradition and modern subject of religion and media and of political theologies, respectively, this field of interest has really been the central direction into which my thinking has moved. Having first led to a minitrilogy, in turn, made up of Kleine Filosofie van het Wonder (Philosophy of the Miracle: A Short Introduction), Le miracle au coeur de l’ordinaire et Miracles et métaphysique, works I will now try to expand and improve on for an English reading public, these more recent investigations are also relating this complex historical topic and its conflicting systematic theorizations to that of spirituality and its practices or, more specifically, to spiritual experience and its exercise, discernment and discipline. And, as with miracles, events, and their special—uncaused—effects, spirituality and notably political spirituality takes individual and collective or public even global and cosmic forms.   No author and thinker has had a more profound influence on me, in this regard, than Nusseibeh, whose Tanner lectures on the matter first opened my eyes to the intricate nexus between the ancient and, perhaps, especially medieval theologies of the miracle, on the one hand, and the plights—and hopes—of politics, on the other. These lectures also taught me, in their targeted use of analytical philosophical sources, next to references to Tolstoy and Hannah Arendt, to think more carefully about the need to expand the links between miracles and politics in particular with the discussion of so-called “events” in those analytic registers more generally. This is not to deny that “the seeds” of Nusseibeh’s argument lie within an Islamic medieval tradition of thought and concept of reason with regard to which I cannot claim to have any direct—historical, much

Anti-Retractationes 331

Non- or Not-Other It should come as no surprise that philosophers and theologians as well as mystics of different stripes, throughout the ages, have consistently struggled to define, account for, and, indeed, enumerate the defining traits of God’s existence and essence, His divine names and attributes, and have done so in conceptual—cosmological, ontological, theological, even logical—terms that implied contradictions of some kind, at the least from our point of view. If not in and for Himself (i.e., in terms of His aseitas), it often seemed, then at least in His manifestation or revelation, God would prove Himself to be a coincidentia oppositorum, a contradictio in adjecto, or, alternatively, a being—and be it the most perfect Being, the Most High—that

less primary textual—scholarly knowledge, but whose immense depth and fruitfulness I nonetheless sense from a distance, educated not least by the works of this admired author himself. Nusseibeh’s The Story of Reason in Islam (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016) is a case in point, and his magnificent and moving autobiography, entitled Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) is another. These indirect sources I have used with great profit, both in my teaching and writings. Its very tentative and preliminary results can be found in my “Une ‘nouvelle conception du miracle’ – Partie I. Sari Nusseibeh, al-Ghazali, Avicenne, et l’idée de la foi laïque” and “Partie II. Sari Nusseibeh, le conflit israélo-palestinien et la politique de la foi laïque,” in Aline Alterman, Henri Cohen-Solal, and Lucy Nusseibeh, eds., Une philosophie à l’épreuve de paix. Penser le conflit israélo-palestinien (Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2016), 109–137, 169–194.   Ilit Ferber kindly responded to me at a colloquium at the Philosophy Department of Tel Aviv University on the occasion of the Hebrew translation of my Kleine Filosofie van het Wonder, rendered as Miracles, Events and Small Wonders, trans. Irit Bauman (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2018). Her essay for this volume takes off from these remarks while adding numerous substantial points. Ferber zooms in on what is a profound motif connecting my earlier and later work, namely: “what would it mean to speak about miracles not as mere oppositions to or violations of the law, but rather as appearances that can only be given in relation to it? Put in terms of philosophy’s ‘turn’ to religion: how are we to think of miracles as turning towards the laws, addressing them, rather than merely performing a violation?” Following a rigorous rereading of Hume’s chapter on miracles, Ferber concludes that there is “something essential about the nature of miracles as such: their implications lie not merely in the incredible event itself, but in the potential such an event carries with it. The potential of the miracle demands a deeper, aberrant perspective from us, a viewpoint different than our linear, one-dimensional view on time and space, or cause and effect. …. [M]iracles and the belief in miracles offer a different way to perceive the only reality we have and have ever had: as a deeper, more elastic space of possibilities.” Put differently, the experience, that is, both the performing and admiratio of miracles offers “a new way into the law, into what there is, stable, ever-there. It is about turning the actualized into the potential, or finding the potential in what had seemed to be, in its actualization, so closed-off, sealed. The miracle is something like … a phenomenological re-entering into the ordinary.” That the latter must go hand in hand with a different appreciation of language, its moods and affects, its melancholia and laments, both in response to pain and suffered injustices, I take to be the invaluable lesson of Ferber’s many writings on the subject, notably her Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

332  Hent de Vries eludes all determinations, including the seemingly elementary distinction between identity and difference, the self-same and otherness. According to this interpretation, “God” as a name or concept would, as mentioned earlier, stand in for the non aliud, the not- or non-other of which the later Nicholas of Cusa, having first introduced the aforementioned coincidence of opposites motif, in his De docta ignorantia, makes so much (indeed, everything) the treatise De non aliud.62 Further, as a long historical debate makes also clear, it was not just the implied contradictoriness regarding God’s objective existence—the impossibility of two apparent possibilities to co-exist or overlap in real time, logical space, and the imagination alike—that posed a problem (for us, finite beings and thinkers). It was also the undeniable fact that apparent proofs of the very coherence of His individual attributes internally as well as of their mutual relationship, literally and figuratively, never quite seemed to add up. Between omnipotence and all-goodness, with the added features of omniscience and omnipresence, it was increasingly held that at least one attribute or divine name had to go. But, then, was God’s existence, uncaused and incorruptible, as the Church taught us throughout the ages, the pure being in and for itself, as Hegelian absolute idealism would end up claiming, perhaps, itself the major issue? Was the concept and reality of God (a se rather than ab alio) ever thinkable—or so much as even possible—in terms of His existence, especially insofar as the latter was taken to be fundamental identical with, if not necessarily derived from, His very essence? What, then, would it have entailed to inscribe certain contingency—a necessary or absolute contingency—into His being and essence, inverting and subverting the underlying premise and not so silent axiom on which both classical theism and modern atheism had put all their cards?

The Impossible Phenomenon Jean-Luc Marion, in Certitudes négatives (Negative Certitudes), in a chapter entitled “The Impossible, or What Is Proper to God,” in an excursus devoted to what he calls God’s “Impossible Phenomenon,” draws attention to His ever-greater apparent remoteness. After all, while as a “saturated phenomenon” and “counter-experience” God may well be more than present and absent at once, the question of being or not-being is, here, no longer of the essence. Being is no longer to be considered as one of God’s central predicates or, at the very least, we cannot translate the famous words from Exodus 3:14 (in Hebrew: ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‫;א ְהיֶ ה ֲא ֶשר ֶא ְהיֶ ה‬ ֶ in the Septuagint’s Greek: ego eimi ho on, ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν; in the Vulgate: ego sum qui sum) in

62 Cf. Nikolaus von Kues, De non aliud. Nichts Anders, ed., Klaus Reinhardt, Jorge M. Machetta, and Harald Schwaetzer (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2011).

Anti-Retractationes 333 ontological or onto-theological terms. And what holds true for Being holds true—a fortiori, one is tempted to say—for any other predicate, attribute, concept, or even name as well.63 That both theism and atheism, in their orthodox and radical varieties, presuppose and hang on to such designations which they take as notional truths condemns them to saying either not enough or too much (indeed, they add nothing that, given their absolute, abstracted, and ever so elusive Referent, could be considered of relevance). They hopelessly circle around a putative “totally Other” (i.e., the totaliter aliter, a ganz Anderes, the autrement qu’être or “logical alien”), whose significance not even “indirect communication” or “absolute paradox,” to cite Søren Kierkegaard’s idiom, can help bring closer, much less render determinate and, dare we say, determining of our lives. In Marion’s words: To say, or even want to say, “God” is already enough to make us notice God’s first, radical, and definitive characteristic: inaccessibility. And it is an inaccessibility of a new sort [d’un genre nouveau]. It no longer concerns, as it did under metaphysics, the establishment or even the demonstration of the existence of God: that is no longer a concern … The difficulty, more obscure and also more worrisome, lies in our inability to define the least concept of the essence of God: in wishing to say “God” (well before we’ve come to the point of seeing him or not), we do not even succeed in knowing what we are talking about, or what we are aiming at. This aporia clearly goes beyond the first one. The first one remains metaphysical, since it doubts the existence of God without ever contesting the legitimacy of producing God’s essence, and thus of inscribing him in a concept; for atheism itself not only never refuses itself a concept of “God,” but always presupposes one, precisely in order to be able afterward to exclude God from existence. This is so because existence remains, in metaphysics, the royal and unique road for reaching (God’s) inexistence as much as existence (in general). In contrast, the second aporia wrenches itself free from the metaphysical horizon by contesting that one might ever or must always make use of a concept of “God,” and therefore make use of it as an essence among others (however privileged it proves to be). Breaking the tie between “God” and its concept, and thus between “God” and an essence in general, it liberates God from his inscription in logic, and thus, possibly, in onto-theo-logy. In this way it meets up with the path of apophasis, and

63 For an excellent introduction to Marion’s thought and overall project, see the interview that Tarek Dika conducted with him in Tarek R. Dika and Chris Hackett, eds., Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 40–64.

334  Hent de Vries thus with the critical moment that mystical theology forces on every ascent toward the Name which is above every name.64 For Marion, the very idea of Revelation, more than any other phenomenon or “forms of phenomenality,” hinges on and, as he puts it, manifests a “réserve d’invu [a reserve of the unseen].”65 Yet, one wonders, is this not precisely what the quasi-apocalyptic motif of apokatástasis pantôn or restitutio in integrum seeks to outwit, indeed, overcome? To speak of a “reserve” comes down to adopting an approximative, reformist, if transformative—moral perfectionist—view to which one can only oppose the alternative of greater, universal, global, and cosmic commonality, a revolution and communism, at least of the spirit, as suggested above.66 This said, the inaccessibility or unintelligibility in question could, one might think, best be rendered as one of untranslatability. Yet “untranslatable,” we should do well to remind ourselves, following Barbara Cassin’s brilliant opening move in Sur la nature ou sur l’étant. La langue de l’être?, her detailed commentary on Parmenides’s poem, and in so many subsequent studies, is “not what one cannot translate, but that which one cannot stop translating, hence also that which one does not end not translating [“non pas ce qu’on ne traduit pas, mais ce qu’on n’en finit pas de traduire, donc aussi ce qu’on ne cesse pas de ne pas traduire].”67 One can easily imagine how this consideration, also invoked in the massive Vocabulaire européen des philosophies and its expanded translation, the Dictionary of Untranslatables, would find its way into the ambitious new project currently undertaken by Cassin and others under the working title Dictionnaire des trois monothéismes, notably but not exclusively in its planned entry on “God,” no doubt amending the earlier lemma, written by Rémi Braque.68 And it stands to reason that, in this iteration, several conceptual innovations or breakthroughs that have been proposed and discussed in recent years, by Marion and others, will have to be taken into consideration to make this new effort at translation “relevant,” as Derrida stipulated any translation, first of all, should be. The recent attention to “inexistence,”

64 Jean-Luc Marion, Certitudes négatives (Paris: Grasset, 2010), 87–88; Negative Certitudes, Trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 51–52. 65 Jean-Luc Marion, D’ailleurs, la révélation. Contribution à une histoire critique et à un concept phénoménal de révélation (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2020), 29. See also the text of his 2014 Gifford Lectures, published as Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 66 On the motif of apocalyptics, see Marion, D’aillieurs, la révélation, 192–193. 67 Parménide, Sur la nature ou sur l’étant. La langue de l’être?, Présenté, traduit et commenté pas Barbara Cassin (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 9. 68 Rémi Braque, “God,” in Barbara Cassin, et al., eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 403–404.

Anti-Retractationes 335 I would submit, is surely one of them. The far-ranging implications of the “dialogue in Baltimore,” at Johns Hopkins’s Humanities Center, between the mathematician-Platonist Alain Badiou and philologist-sophist Cassin regarding the reception and most accurate or persuasive interpretation of Parmenides’ poem and its ramifications for the central questions of ontology, not to mention onto-theology, is yet another.69

The Difficulty in and of Freedom Other names, words, and terms are directly implied and affected by these— admittedly, largely metaphysical, indeed, speculative—matters and express the very same difficulty; a quandary that, for a lack of a better expression, I call that of the predicament of predication. To present things this way allows us to more broadly address a distinctively conceptual and analytical, no less than etymological and linguistic, historical and cultural, theological, ontological, and, indeed, onto-theological problem of approaching religion, of exploring so-called God-talk. And the latter, religion and Godtalk, it should by now be clear, remain deeply intertwined with moral, ethical, political, and more general normative issues as well. Echoing the provocative title once used by Levinas in a remarkably similar context, namely Difficile liberté (Difficult Freedom), I would say that it is in this “difficulty,” precisely, that our—religious and other, even political—“freedom” resides. As such, the difficulty in question is more than purely logical or semantic, formal or theoretical; in fact, it has deeply pragmatic and, I suspect, quite some legal, aspects, dimensions, and ramifications as well. Admittedly, since this is a seemingly abstract, all too wide-ranging claim, let me be more specific, in so far as I can, if still somewhat speculative, indeed, metaphysical (in the technical sense that is, rightly, reserved for these terms). In the context of addressing “God,” as a term and much more, the difficulty in question is that of the precariousness—I am not saying arbitrariness!—of divine, but, come to think of it, perhaps, even all modes of attribution, and be they those of names or concepts, images or metaphors, prayer or praise. Apriori or structurally, it would seem, these forms of designation and address are all, without exception, characterized by a precariousness (from the Latin precarius and prex) that has all the connotations of “being dependent on the will of others,” as the dictionaries say, but also, in a far more extended sense, of “being dangerously uncertain, risky, and subject to chance and change.” Not even the withholding of all predicates and attributes by keeping silent escapes this fundamental difficulty to which all words and meanings—and

69 Cf. Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Homme, femme, philosophie (Paris: Fayard, 2019), 115–160.

336  Hent de Vries a fortiori or most exemplary, the signifiers and signs for the signified and signification of “God”—are prone. And the precariousness in question, the predicament of predication, as I said, is thus hardly due to the presumably linguistic “walls of our cage,” as Wittgenstein already knew. In fact, the conditions of possibility and, therefore, of impossibility are situated at a much deeper level of our experience and of our means of expressing it. They are transcendental, transcendent, from a naturalist or cognitivist point of view. But they are also general, indeed, generic, and generative, in that they surround and pervade, traverse and transgress all we say and do or feel, irrespective of the words and other expressions we use. The misfiring of all “God-talk” and all “acts” regarding this and other higher goods is, therefore, not that of ineffability or meaninglessness, necessarily. The difficulty is conceptual and analytic, first and foremost. It concerns the standing risk and haunting specter of possible—indeed, unavoidable—idolatry and blasphemy, which looms at the very heart of all monotheistic religions, including the logic, if we can say so, that governs their discourse and practices, including many, perhaps, all others as well. Even a Tolstoian Christianity, as also Adorno noted in Negative Dialectics, and echoed by Grossman’s Life and Fate, often considered the twentieth-century War and Peace, does not succeed in breaking the vicious rather than simply hermeneutic circle of predication and attribution and, hence, in avoiding the petitio principii or performative contradiction of all discourse and address regarding “God” and whatever or whoever it is this term has stood for, presently stands for, and may yet come to stand for (indeed, no matter the name, image, picture or aspect this God may yet be conceived or envisioned by).

Incongruence and Distance What we call the predicament of all predication, to begin with that of God, is the intrinsic, that is, essential, structural, or formal, limit upon representation—or, for that matter, any other kind (mode, genre, or style) of presentation—of whatever significant subject or object at hand. Whether linguistic or visual, mental or ritual, literal or fictional, this difficulty is manifest a fortiori and exemplarily when “God” is the Referent or Requisite and, as such, seems in need of being conceptualized or envisioned, named and addressed, believed as well as “seen.”70 Le croire pour

70 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Le croire pour le voir. Réflexions diverses sur la rationalité de la révélation et l’irrationalité de quelques croyants (Paris: Éditions Paroles et Silence, 2010); Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers, trans. Christina M. Geschwandtner (New York: Forhham University Press, 2017).

Anti-Retractationes 337 le voir (Believing in Order to See), a recent title by Marion, St. Anselm’s dictum, credo ut intelligam in the first section of Proslogion and a clear echo from St. Augustin, they all belabor this crucial point. In this, the definition of “God” may very well involve kinds of claims that are not unique or sui generis but that are, instead, of a broader metaphysical or ontological, epistemic and axiological—and, hence, not merely religious and theological, mythical or mystical—nature per se. Indeed, there is much to be said for the more daring hypothesis that “God” is not merely a singular object or subject for thought and its pragmatic elements, but strangely exemplary and paradigmatic in its downright exception—its infinity and absoluteness—itself. It is this generic and generative aspect of “God” that is operative in and well before and beyond the traditional Biblical and theological names and concepts we are familiar with from the early and later attempts at systematizing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (now often combined under the contested denomination of “Abrahamic religions”).71 Recent debates and developments in the philosophy of religion as well as in philosophical and systematic, Biblical and dogmatic theology have, perhaps, not always sufficiently analyzed, much less exhausted, this crucial aspect. And yet, this extended dimension of meaning—or deliberate lack thereof as it is methodically espoused by the observation and use of paradox and aporia—puts the archive and apparatus of religion, its theorization and practical relevance, in a radically novel, at once promising and disturbing, light. Again, it is in the predicament of all predication, as epitomized— condensed and heightened—by the concept of God and, we should now add, the latter’s apparent lack of a certain logical and ontological coherence, that this becomes especially clear and reveals its consequence: the difficulty of freedom, as I said before, in matters religious and well beyond. It seems fair to say that a much longer middle period in all three monotheisms, largely dominated by a particular, limited reception of Aristotle’s works, was much less invested in addressing and resolving this peculiar difficulty, as it happily and, perhaps, naively relied on a doctrine of analogia entis (analogy of being) and the unwarranted assumption that ens et bonum convertuntur (being and good are convertible). Yet it is fundamentally the problem of God’s unity and self-consistency, two predicates or attributes that would seem to be necessary premises for any monotheism and divine perfection to be conceived, named, and addressed, intelligibly, that—also or especially in this longer tradition of natural theology or onto-theology, from early Thomist and modern Neo-Thomist syntheses, via early Protestant orthodoxy and its dogmatic prolegomena all the way

71 Cf. Qu’est-ce que Dieu? Philosophie/Théologie: Hommage à l’abbé Daniel Coppieters de Gibson (1929-1983) (Bruxelles: Facultés universitaires Sain Louis, 1985); Ingolf U. Dalferth and Philipp Stoellger, eds., Gott Nennen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).

338  Hent de Vries up to nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of Kulturprotestantismus— remains largely unresolved.72 The common trait of the alternative generic and generative notion of inexistence that more recent metaphysical, phenomenological, and speculative inquiries have rediscovered and resuscitated as a countertradition, of sorts—a countermovement relying on counter-experiences and counter-factualities and virtualities, as I suggest—is not only that of the freedom but also, as it were, the higher worth that God must necessarily maintain vis-à-vis His very own metaphysical or theological concept. And this latter insight extends to the “difficulty” that imposes itself on us to conceptualize, but also name, address, envision, and even praise or pray to Him. In other words, it is the paradoxical, indeed, aporetic assumption that goes so far as suggesting (or, at least implying) that, perhaps, not even God could so much as have an adequate concept of God. If that is, indeed, the case, then, by extension and a fortiori, stringent theological concepts no longer unproblematically denote or even loosely evoke the various ways in which finite intellects capture and comprehend whatever they tend toward either. God, as the Subject of theology, as the initiator of divine speech and its object, on this reading, would no longer be in the business of concepts and the “Word” of God would, well, not even be a word. Levinas’s idea that where God “comes to mind [vient à l’idée]” the word God need or, perhaps, must not even be mentioned is a case in point. Adorno’s similar claim that the possibility for which the divine name stands is respected and defended only by who does not believe, is another. And, if this holds already true for the absolute concept that an infinite intellect (including God Himself) is—falsely—assumed to have of God, seen as the ultimate Referent or Requisite, then there may well be a similar and even more dramatic incongruence or distance between concepts in general and whatever it is they are concepts of or tend toward, indeed, of words and names, non-discursive forms of address and praise, and everything they seek to capture, describe, or honor. Conversely, however, the predicament of predication must also mean that the concept cannot comfortably be held at bay or simply avoided. There is nothing that keeps the so-called “non-concept” (Adorno spoke of “das Nichtbegriffliche” or “die Begrifflosigkeit”) from dissolving its apparent integrity and integrality, and to espouse—or even become—yet another concept, with all the idolatrous and blasphemous consequences this surely entails.73 Not even the name, whether proper or not, whether as singular hapax legomenon, tetragrammaton, G-d, or as bracketed and crossed out

72 G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1964), xix. 73 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological? The Argument According to Anselm and Its Metaphysical Interpretation According to Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 30 (1992), 201–218, 210.

Anti-Retractationes 339 “God,” beyond even an identifiable word or, more emphatically, being “the Word” or “Logos,” remains exposed to inevitable risk, reiteration, and, therefore, also to change of its meaning and force, its intelligibility and efficacy in the world it is said to create and sustain, reveal and redeem. Hence, the perennial need for renewed apologetics and polemics, arguments and proofs—et iterum de Deo, quod existat, as Descartes says in Meditationes de prima philosophia, announcing a second proof after he has already given one—including the ritual recitations that make up a practice and way or manner of life, a mode of existence. Through these iterations alone, it seems, the putative Referent and Requisite of theology, its alpha and omega, if not archè and telos, comes into its own, while exposing itself to distortion, misunderstanding, including self-misunderstanding, in the process. It is too simple, then, to say that, if God is not a—coherent, definable— concept, then He is merely a name or just a word (without generality, much less universality, ideality or reality); a term and thus little more than a flatus vocis, at best, whose semantic lexicon and virtual archive as well as pragmatic relevance, resource, and repository, forms part and parcel of an in principle infinite and, hence, ongoing chain of “non-synonymous substitutions” (to echo, once again, the helpful expression, borrowed from the “theoretical matrix” of Derrida’s De la grammatologie [Of Grammatology] that, in my eyes, still holds valid as the first necessary, if not necessarily sufficient, step of a much broader and deeper quasi-theological argument that was very much his own and whose minimal and maximal implications we have, perhaps, not yet fully fathomed). After all, we may have too strict or too limited a “concept of the concept,” if it relegates the “inaccessibility” of the object or subject to the structural apriori or experiential limitations of the thinkable. Limiting the given as such or once and for all, such a concept of the concept—or, more broadly, such a predicament of all predication (discursive and other)—conjures up the very Block and Bann of the Kantian ignoramus, the “we do not and cannot know,” as opposed to the Goethean, “perhaps we eventually will,” a distinction that forms the heart of hearts of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and the concept or practice, not merely of negative metaphysics, but of “spiritual experience,” a notion not to be reduced to enlightened intellectuality, whose contours and unresolved, ongoing promise I investigate elsewhere.

Truth Making What, then, if neither historically nor systematically speaking the affirmation or negation of “God’s” existence, not to mention of the presumed coherence among His essential predicates, makes much logical, theological, or especially ethical and political sense? What if “God” qualifies as a name or sign, if not flatus vocis, in any case, as much less or much more than as a concept, and should thus be taken as a guiding notion or idea, albeit

340  Hent de Vries certainly not one that either a Descartes or a Spinoza would have qualified as “clear and distinct,” “adequate” or even “common”? What if “God” would be a specimen, if one can still say so, of experientia vaga and one that, for essential reasons, is prone to error, to falsification as much as to verification, in the broadest possible sense of these terms (assuming, with St. Augustine once more, that truth making, veritatem facere, through our speech and actions, is of the essence)? To begin with, it would mean that “God” retreats—or is liberated— from definable terms, and, perhaps, even from counting as a “word,” if thereby, perhaps, not necessarily as the “Word,” with a capitalized W, as Logos, the One, no matter all “perils” that this latter notion also brings with it (and that Stathis Gourgouris has recently inventoried and analyzed in Perils of the One74). Coming at the end of a line of deep phenomenological and ethical questioning of the metaphysical, onto-theological legacy, premised on the assumption of the univocity or analogy of being and, as said, of the ens et bonum convertuntur motif, Levinas, in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence), draws the following radical consequence from such provisos and disclaimers that, together, serve as an illimitable series of anti-prolegomena, undermining any prospect for a natural and revealed as opposed to virtual and, hence, “other” theology. At the risk of sacrificing intelligibility and rationality, he suggests: The word God is still absent from the phrase in which God is for the first time involved in words. It does not at all state ‘I believe in God.’ To bear witness of God is precisely not to state this extraordinary word, as though glory would be lodged in a theme and be posited as a thesis, or become being’s essence. [De la phrase où Dieu vient pour la première fois se mêler aux mots, le mot Dieu est encore absent. Elle ne s’énonce en aucune façon “je crois en Dieu”. Témoigner de Dieu, ce n’est pas précisément énoncer ce mot extra-ordinaire, comme si la gloire pouvait se loger dans un thème et se poser comme thèse où se faire essence de l’être.]75 Well before and independent of being a specific, unusual—“extraordinary”— word or name, term or concept, Levinas implies here, “God” inserts Himself into language, incognito, as it were, if or when and where He does, which is never certain, never a simple given. The linguistic and conceptual determination comes, at best, only next, as the original “Saying [le Dire]” is necessarily stifled and stunted as it becomes a “Said [le Dit].” Neither positive

74 Stathis Gourgouris, The Perils of the One (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 75 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 190; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 149, trans. modified.

Anti-Retractationes 341 nor negative predication, neither the presumably non-predicative language of prayer (which itself is neither true nor false as Aristotle says and Heidegger recalls), nor that of lament, nor, perhaps, even that of via eminentiae and encomium invoked by Levinas and Marion, respectively, avoids this predicament ever fully, much less once and for all. In a sense, their perfectibility merely raises the stakes and, hence, the risk and reality of imperfection (“the more just I am, the more I must be guilty as well [plus je suis juste, plus je suis coupable]”).76

Inexistence The motif of inexistence, as said, holds sway over a variety of contemporary philosophical and theological discourses. Marion’s phenomenology of givenness has been recently characterized as an “apology of inexistence.”77 Yet apologetics is hardly an apt characterization of Marion’s overall project. More specifically, the expression “inexistence,” notably “divine inexistence,” has come into prominence first and foremost through Meillassoux’s unpublished 1997 dissertation, entitled L’inexistence divine (Divine Inexistence) a full copy of which circulates clandestinely online yet only excerpts of which were published in English translation thus far.78 Likewise, from a different, and compared to Marion, at least, virtually opposed perspective, Badiou champions the “inexistence” of “the One” while also allowing for this notion to indicate a whole field of contemporary philosophical motifs, presumably found both in Derrida and Agamben, albeit it with very different meanings and uses.79 In the case of Derrida,

76 For more extensive argumentation, see my Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 2000). 77 Stéphane Vinolo, Jean-Luc Marion, Apologie de l’inexistence, Tome I: La destinerrance des phénomènes; Tome II: Une phénoménologie discursive (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019). 78 See Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 175-238, and in Quentin Meillassoux, “From ‘l’inexistence divine,” trans. Nathan Brown, in Parrhesia 25, 2006, 20–40. See also the following attempts at interpreting and situating this original project in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne, 2011); Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Paul Gratton and Paul J. Ennis, eds., The Meillassoux Dictionnary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and Alexander R. Galloway’s chapter “Quentin Meillassoux and the Great Outdoors,” in his French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures (New York: Public School New York/Erudio Editions, 2010), http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/FTT/ French-Theory-Today.pdf., accessed October 27, 2021. 79 Cf. Bruno Bosteels, “From Potentiality to Inexistence,” in idem, Badiou and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 226–249.

342  Hent de Vries Badiou notes in Logiques des mondes (Logiques of Worlds), the notion of “inexistence” invites a renewed consideration of “the passion of Inexistence [la passion de l’Inexistance, with an ‘a’]” and, more specifically, the invocation of what Derrida himself, in Le toucher (On Touching), had called a “redemption without salvation [Un salut sans salvation],” a redemption that is, as of yet but, perhaps, also always already and still “to come.”80 In the case of Agamben, the motif solicits nothing less than a “Franciscan” ontology of “poverty,” a so-called “weak thought,” whose ongoing insistence on the “indestructible” nonetheless grants the latter no longer any foothold in being. A hope without hope, one might say, if ever there was one. These observations and somewhat marginal comments in Badiou’s later work follow up on a massive inquiry, in L’être et l’événement (Being and Event), the first installment of a trilogy of which Logics of Worlds and L’immanence des vérités (The Immanence of Truths) form part two and three, respectively.81 In fact, the first two volumes of this trilogy are portrayed, in retrospect, as constitutive elements of what Badiou calls his “philosophical system,” with Being and Event comparing to the author’s very own Science of Logic, whereas Logics of Worlds would add to this a belated Phenomenology, thus reversing the chronology of Hegel’s two major works. While this is not a modest claim, it certainly sheds light on how we should take Badiou’s own sense of what he sought to achieve in these two volumes, while leaving open the question as to what the third installment of his trilogy or triptych adds to the equation, at least in Hegelian terms. A reiteration and subjective-objective displacement, transformation as well as elevation, one wants to say. Yet Badiou’s Phenomenology (i.e., Logics of Worlds) is not so much one of Spirit but centers on a radically different conception and pluralization of the “infinite” as well as an on alternative eternalization or immortalization of “Subjects,” that is, of “individuals” and “communities.” The claimed analogy with two of Hegel’s major works, with the implied suggestion of the need for an inverted prioritization of their respective systematic concerns (i.e., putting, other than in Hegel, the Science of Logic first and the Phenomenology second) is telling all by itself. Translated into our problematics, which that of the philosophy of religion, of an “other” or “inverted” and, in this sense, “minimal”—and

80 Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes. L´Être et l’Évément 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006); Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009). 81 Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988); Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005); idem, L’immanence des vérités. L’être et l’événement 3 (Paris: Fayard, 2018); The Immanence of Truths: Being and Event III, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Anti-Retractationes 343 virtually, eventually, “maximal”—theology, it would seem as if Badiou were indirectly acknowledging, albeit it on very different and opposed terms that it is, upon reflection, far more important to begin than to end with “God.” But then, appearances to the contrary, there are, on this view, multiple series of seemingly age-old forms of meditation—more precisely, as Badiou’s “meditation” on Pascal in Being and Event teaches us, “modern forms of an ancient conviction”—that invent and demonstrate, verify (i.e., make true), if not prove, that all is at stake at every moment, on each occasion.82 It is as if any ultimate claim toward “absolute knowledge” or its functional equivalents, which is the universal Truth and the Immortal Subject that sustains it, must, indeed, invoke some notion of inexistence. As a matter of principle and philosophical method, it must begin with the abstraction or subtraction of “Being” reverting to “Nothing,” which is the very moment and movement with which “science,” according to the “Doctrine of Being [Die Lehre vom Sein],” must surely start off. Positive infinity, on Badiou’s account, could result merely as a subsequent add-on or “count of One,” thus reducing and restricting a primordial and preceding infinite multiplicity, whose structural incompleteness and ultimate chaos is one of contingency through and through. To further illustrate the last point, Badiou, in his third installment of the Being and Event trilogy, provocatively, speaks of “dialectical materialism,” whereas others, like Meillassoux, have preferred the adjective “speculative” and, alternatively, have conceived of some alternative form of “realism” so as to better capture the “fields of sense” that the very “immanence” of a “world beyond [outre-monde]”—beyond the naturalist and supra-naturalist interpretations of the world “as we found it,” that is—might strangely entail. Bottom line, for Badiou, the central claim, made early on in the first volume of Being and Event, is that “the one”—standing here for the NeoPlatonic One as much as for the God of monotheistic Abrahamic religions— “is not,” just as Logics of Worlds will proclaim or acclaim “the inexistence

82 As Badiou puts it: “beyond Christianity, what is at stake here is the militant apparatus of truth: the assurance that it is in the interpretative intervention that it finds it support, that its origin is found in the event; and the will to draw out its dialectic and to propose to humans that they consecrate the best of themselves to the essential … to go against the flow; not in the reactive sense of the term, but in order to invent the modern forms of an ancient conviction, rather than to follow the ways of the world, and adopt the portable skepticism that every transitional epoch resuscitates for the usage of those souls to weak to hold that there is no historical speed which is compatible with the calm willingness to change the world and to universalize its form.” (Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham [London and New York: Continuum, 2005], 222).

344  Hent de Vries of the Whole.”83 It is hard to underestimate the seriousness and boldness of these claims, made in the name of a more emphatic reason or set of reasons than modern metaphysics or, indeed, philosophy tout court, has typically dared to entertain. After all, according to Badiou, it is the “reciprocity of the one and being” that counts as the defining and all-determining “inaugural idiom of philosophy.”84 As a logical consequence, this reciprocity must extend itself to the “void” of the nothing as well.

The Question of God: Preliminaries It is at this point that, like Levinas, Marion (who, likewise, is studiously avoided by Badiou, alas85) probes at least as deeply and, indeed, opens up a significantly wider horizon for theological questioning and, especially, phenomenological inquiry, venturing not only beyond traditional, confessional as well as onto-theological assumptions but even beyond the very question of the meaning of being as such and in toto, that is, well beyond the progress already made by Husserl and Heidegger as they ventured beyond the modern obsession with “objects” and “beings.” Beyond—or before— all too thing-like objects and beings, Marion claims, there lies a whole field of investigation, largely neglected by the prevailing theoretical stances Western metaphysics has taken over the course of more than two millennia, and announcing itself in the simple, if elusive, mode of “givenness [donation]” or the “being given [étant donné]” as such and a fortiori in the most telling or striking example of its counter-experiences. The latter absolve themselves from the “myth of the given,” just as they do no longer let themselves be phrased and framed in propositional or observational statements

83 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, 23. Cf. William Watkin, Badiou and Indifferent Being (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 28, 29. A cautionary note is in order here. As Badiou reminds us, “the problem of ‘what-is-not-being-qua-being’” is not immediately, much less necessarily, “the question of non-being.” (Being and Event, 15). As he adds, it is “too soon and quite unproductive” to infer as much. It is important to reconcile this claim with the axiomatic “decision” with which Badiou’s system proudly opens, namely that “the one is not,” which is not to deny that “there is Oneness” but only that “the one, which is not, solely exists as operation,” as the “count-as-one,” whereby the one is, in mathematical and ontological terms, “a number,” even though, “except if we pythagorize, there is no cause to posit that being qua being is a number” (ibid., 23, 24). Perhaps Badiou’s eventual—and “evental”—conception of inexistence takes up that hesitancy and makes it productive. Levinas’s “otherwise-than-being-or-beyond-essence,” if I am not mistaken, attempts the same, outwitting Western ontology’s most profound and long-lasting ambition, namely to mark off the distinction between being and non-being, between being and higher or lesser being, actuality and potentiality, reality and irreality; or, again, between “what is” and what “may be” but is “not-yet.” 84 Badiou, Being and Event, 23. 85 The cursory discussion of Levinas’s project in the context of Badiou’s Ethics is hardly satisfactory. By contrast, Marion in his magnum opus, Being Given acknowledges, however fleetingly, points of overlap between his own work and that of Badiou’s Being and Event, just as he refers to Donald Davidson’s conception of the event and, elsewhere, to Stanley Cavell.

Anti-Retractationes 345 of the nature “S is P.” Zooming in on the philosophical and theological question of God, Marion illustrates and explains this larger point: the question of God requires, at a minimum, that the conditions of its formulation do not contradict from the outset [d’emblée] that which the question has the ambition of attaining. … In other words, when it comes to what we call, for lack of any better expression, “God,” it is necessary, before that, to first and foremost discuss the formulation of the question. Here, as always but even more certainly here than elsewhere, the question decides the horizon of the eventual responses, which could be arrived at and of what they never properly attain.  Thus, in the case of “God,” how do we require to “say something of something” (or, more trivially, “know what we are talking about”), since it is not self-evident that “God” can and must have the rank of a “something”?  Before asking if God “exists,” we must first determine if “being” (assuming that we have an adequate understanding of it in other cases) could or should be a suitable register for “God.”86 But would the singular fact that the concept of God is thus seemingly “irreducible” and even ipso facto self-defeats itself when it is so much as formulated in terms of “Being,” whether of “things” or “somethings,” not precisely tell us that its presumed referent (“God”) cannot acquire any meaning at all? Any question “What is God?” or “What is God?” would necessarily imply as much. Yet to squarely blame the search for a “concept” of God goes only so far. After all, the praise of His name or Divine Names barely fares better. This is precisely what we have called the predicament of all predication, discursive and other. But, then, this leaves “God” so much as a way out, so to speak, since such God who “may be”—the “God” who does not even need “Being” or “beings” or “somethings” for His revelation (creation, redemption) to happen and matter—would seem to have no pregiven features at all. And, in light of this indeterminacy and unpredictability, He remains contingent—or free—through and through, and this, it would seem, somewhat paradoxically put, necessarily so. This is the very necessity from which not even God could absolve Himself. Yet God can for equally essential reasons not be conceived or otherwise believed in terms of a necessary being (ens necessarium), a positive infinity (omnitudo realitatis). Indeterminate and indefinite in this way—trans- and, more strangely, in-finite, as Levinas

86 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, “L’irréductible,” in Critique, janvier-février 2006, vol. LXII, No. 704-705, 79–91, 79. The essay appeared in special issue of Critique devoted to “Dieu,” which features, among other contributions also Barbara Cassin’s opening essay “dieux, Dieu” (ibid., 7–18) and Étienne Balibar’s “Note sur l’origine et les usages du terme ‘monothéisme’” (ibid., 19–45). Marion’s essay also appeared in his collection of essays, entitled Figures de la phénoméologie. Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida (Paris: Vrin, 2012), 179–188.

346  Hent de Vries claimed—“God” must be seen as absolving Himself from all things existing, even from existence itself, just as He cannot be said to be necessarily not exist (or “inexist”?) either. If this is the case, does this make Him a “logical alien” and doom His relevance, for us, here and now?87

A Riposte and “New Counteroffensive of the Absolute”88 Would there be a riposte or rejoinder that might either counter or confirm and, perhaps, supplement Marion’s phenomenological and, presumably, not merely post-metaphysical but non-speculative—non-materialist and non-realist, at any rate, anti-naturalist—claims? Moreover, could one envision such a proposal in the spirit, if not the letter, of Badiou’s dialectical materialist logics of worlds, made against the backdrop of the motif of “inexistence,” including a phenomenology of subjects and bodies, as the eventual carriers of “immanent truths” his logics must with some urgency and, perhaps, with necessity lead to? No easy answers are to be found here, not least since Marion’s proposals are not without Christian theological, apophatic, and mystical sources of inspiration, which Badiou not only ignores but adamantly opposes. While shunning the messianico-eschatological motifs that other twentiethcentury thinkers have deeply delved into, there is, next to “revelation” even an “apocalyptic” motif that Marion now sees as of great relevance for phenomenological thinking in these as well as explicitly theological matters.89

87 On the one hand, to stipulate this of God fits the parameters of “theological rationalism,” as James Conant defines it, since something logically impossible (or, more precisely, necessary) extends to what God can and cannot do (cf. Sofia Miguens, ed., The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2020], 374). On the other hand, we come close here to what the orthodox Christian doctrine considered a heresy and Origin, in De Principiis 2.9.1, formulates as follows: “For we must maintain that even the power of God is finite, and we must not, under the pretext of praising him, lose sight of his limitations. For if divine power were infinite, it could not even understand itself, since the infinite is by nature incomprehensible.” It would, Origen seems to imply, be a merely gratuitous “praise” to attribute to God “infinite” understanding at that, as no sense could be made of it, presumably not even by God himself. Nothing could have infinite power or understanding, not only because power and understanding are not so defined, but, more importantly, no positive infinity would so much as even be logically—or, what comes down to the same, ontologically—possible. 88 Meillassoux, Trassierungen, 18. 89 In Apocalypse de la vérité (Paris: Ad Solem, 2014; Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations, trans. Matthew J. Peterson [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021]) prefaced by Marion, Jean Vioulac pursues a simple, if wide-ranging and consequential, question: what may yet delimit and transgress the fateful frame of immanence that, with few exceptions, has held Western philosophy and theology fundamentally captive, perhaps, to this day? This question is far from innocent, not least because between the ancient Greeks and the emergence of modern technology a dangerous dream of conceptual totality, of absolute knowing, and, perhaps, relatedly, of totalitarian politics and

Anti-Retractationes 347 This said, neither messianism nor eschatology, let alone apocalyptics, fare well in Badiou’s “system,” much less in his “ethics.” Marion thus draws on sources and resources whose guiding motifs and motivations, modalities, and moods—in their very Catholicity, irreducible to the European legacy of thought and its “spirit”90 —remain largely absent from Badiou’s distinctly secular, avowedly atheist, outlook, and this, no matter how often its engagements with the “mystery” and “miracle” of genuine events or with the absoluteness, “infinity,” and “immortality” of truths, next to the subject’s “fidelity” toward them, add up to a constant refrain, a basso continuo of spirituality, including political spirituality, if not in these terms. Yet the riposte or rejoinder we look for might well redraw these conceptual mappings altogether differently still. Are there indications that the contours of such a response can in fact already be found, even though it must, no doubt, be sketched out in further detail where needed and possible? Several direct and indirect answers could be advanced in the name of a “new” rather than “critical realism” (the work of Jocelyn Benoist, in its explicit engagement with Marion’s phenomenology, comes to mind, as does, perhaps from a greater distance, Markus Gabriel’s “neo-existentialism,” which has engaged Badiou’s set theoretical assumptions as well as conclusions).

its respective myths has reigned virtually unchallenged, with no escape, no exodus—or, as Levinas mused, “évasion [escape]”—in clear sight. In response to this dire diagnosis, Vioulac proposes a radical reversal of thought, whose Biblical inspiration and philosophical rigor, for many readers, no doubt, unexpectedly, resonate and reinforce each other mutually. Instead of further musings regarding the miracle of all miracles, namely “that Being is,” the wondrous disclosure for which Heidegger’s rethinking of aletheia in terms of “unconcealment” remains the ultimate name, Apocalypses of Truth dares to tap into a counter-archive and critical repository that, if possible, reaches even deeper and further back. As a discourse on the end of all things, of pending, potential, or imminent catastrophe but also of near-unthinkable revolution, against all odds, the long-ignored idea of apocalypticism is revived and critically used here to overcome the mythological—and, Vioulac intimates—neopagan premises and outlook that have long cast their shadow on Heidegger’s take on Western thought, culture, and politics. Reading the motif of apocalypse eschatologically, that is to say, not so much teleologically but as a discourse of what, if anything, comes “after the end,” Vioulac turns the tables on the infamous judgment of history and inaugurates a different kind of, dare one say, hopeful resolve, without existentialist pathos. What results is not only a stunning rereading of St. Paul, Meister Eckart, Hölderlin, Hegel, and others, but also a subtle loosening of the mythological grip that Western ontology, technoscience and cyberspace, not to mention their political analogues and apparatuses, have too long imposed on their subjects qua assets. A tour de force, in its own right, Vioulac’s book opens a further chapter in the recent breakthrough in phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought in its realignment with Christianity and the “incarnation of truth” it invites us to wager all over again. 90 Christianity, Marion notes, “constitutes certainly an essential part of the European spirit, but neither resumes it, nor above all does it let itself be resumed by the latter in turn” (Jean-Luc Marion, À vrai dire, Une conversation avec Paul-François Paoli [Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2021], 175).

348  Hent de Vries Here, however, I will limit myself to the thought of Meillassoux and the “speculative materialism”91 he propounds with striking and subtle arguments that merit further attention and this well beyond the reception with which it was initially welcomed as the grounding salvo of a presumably altogether novel paradigm for contemporary post-Continental and postanalytical thought (even though many of his most interesting intuitions and axioms seem, so far, to have been largely ignored among the most ardent among his self-described “speculative realist” supporters). Putting all my cards on the table: the avowed aims and elaborations of the resolutely post-metaphysical speculation, in Meillassoux’s earliest work and ongoing project, in terms of “materialism” and “realism” (to say nothing here of the “object-oriented ontology” with which is, in my view, wrongly associated, here and there), do not strike me as particularly novel or controversial per se, nor is the emphasis on these celebrated or contested motifs and motivations, in my view, central to his overall and most original, indeed, groundbreaking thinking. Nor is the effort to “bring to life and into existence a logos of contingency, or again a reason emancipated from the principle of reason—a speculative rationality that would no longer be a metaphysical reason.”92 Rather, it is the concept of “necessary contingency” and via that of a certain “miraculousness” as well as, relatedly, that of a certain “virtuality” (rather than “potentiality”) of truths and events, facts and laws, worlds and objects that, in my eyes, sheds a radically new

91 Meillassoux, Trassierungen, 7. 92 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 77/104. While one can, of course, adopt a historically, philologically, and conceptually precise definition of a metaphysical logos (here: the early modern principle of sufficient reason) to which a speculative one can be opposed, one need not proceed that way. Instead, a more lenient and minimal, less restrictive and general concept may well claim at least as much relevance. Such a minima metaphysica explores as much the predicament of all predication (discursive and other) as it follows up on intuitions that the latter can—must and ought—be also undone. Levinas’s alternation or oscillation of le Dit and le Dire, on the on the one hand, and of le Dédit and le Dédire, on the other, are a step in the direction of such an alternative model. The former entails always the risk of idolatry (conceptual and other), but, conversely, the pursuit of its “totally other” eluding both discursive and other formats of thinking, writing, and speech (and, importantly, to be distinguished from Meillassoux’s idea of the “universal other” precisely because of its lack of speculative determinacy and efficacy) may yet hide a surreptitious thesis, position, and imposition, of sorts: at best, a theism or, at worst, fanaticism that is not borne out be either stringent logical and speculative thought nor, for that matter, by spiritual experience, practice, and exercise (or, what comes down to the same, by “metaphysical experience,” as Adorno will say). What is characteristic of the latter is that they keep matters, concepts, and practices, open as well as dynamic, to resort to Bergson’s concluding and deeply intuitive or qualitative categories. Neither “mechanical” nor “mystical” per se, much less in isolation, they allow us to circumvent the “closed” and “static” forms of thinking and living and, with this preparation, to imagine and live through the unanticipated reversals and incursions of the impossible into the possible, the virtual into the actual, and vice versa.

Anti-Retractationes 349 light on “inexistence,” which begins with and culminates in the motif of “divine inexistence.” The latter is, perhaps, Meillassoux’s most inventive and far-reaching contribution to contemporary thinking, not least in so far as it—with great patience and even greater caution—prepares an altogether different conception and practice of metaphysics (or, as he prefers to say, speculation), of ethics, justice and, I suggest, all too indirectly, also of politics, compared to the ones we are more familiar with in the seemingly diverging Continental and analytical schools of thought. At its centerpiece is the conviction that only contingency is absolute, which renders metaphysical and theological claims regarding divine existence, essence, and omnipotence speculatively relative, as they depend on or themselves express a contingent fact and, in that sense, are seemingly secondary. But this razor cuts two ways, for it might well be countered that in this speculatively reversed view absolute contingency is near-divinized. In other words, it is not so much postulated, “idealistically,” as a “perfect or complete” absolutum or “entity,” but seen, quasi-materialistically, as what remains “separate” and, hence, irreducible and indifferent to the very thought that it overpowers. Conversely, “divine inexistence” is portrayed by Meillassoux as the most condensed and consequential figure for said contingency, whose nature or matter is, from here on, elusive and unfathomable, transcendent in its very immanence, and this is to the point of virtual absence, a “universal other.”93 The concept of divine inexistence is reintroduced in a later essay in the context of the resolution of what Meillassoux calls the “spectral dilemma,” a conundrum certainly familiar to readers of the conversations between Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Adorno. It consists in the irreconcilable tension between the demand for universal, more precisely, infinite justice, spanning the dead and the living, victims of atrocities, murder, and illness, on the one hand, and the assumed linearity and irreversibility of time, history, including all the effective determinations, causal and other, of providentialism and prometheanism, of divine economy and its secular profanation, that end up leaving every as it is and as it, presumably, must be. What to think of this dilemma? As Meillassoux will explain: if God exists (one must assume, as all-good, all-powerful, omniscient, and omnipresent, at a minimum, no matter what else the infinity of his infinite attributes further amounts to), He must have allowed or condoned all existing evil. And yet, if He does not or as long He does not exist in full perfection (having this same minimal set of divine epithets), there’s no hope of eventual—and complete—repair, to say nothing of many further, more emphatically messianic elements of redemption (the latter being tied to yet another, deeper and more ultimate, teleological schema, one in which apocalypticism and eschatology, along a putative finite timeline, form the proverbial dot on the

93 Meillassoux, Trassierungen, 10 and 9.

350  Hent de Vries “I,” in addition to the “all in all” motif, known from I Corinthians 15:28 and elsewhere). Resolving the spectral dilemma would require nothing less—and nothing more—than to speculate that a pleroma or “universal other,” might, one day, effectively exist. A less emphatic concept of infinite justice for all, at all times, and for all times (past, present, and future) would not do. What is at issue, then, is a motif that would itself be a late and strange echo of the apokatástasis pantôn that Origen of Alexandria first coined and systematized and that does, finally, away with the Manichaeisms and Gnosticisms that continue to influence modern and contemporary thought, forcing it into a near-cosmic dualism whose overcoming comes at a terrible prize, at worst, or is indefinitely postponed (and, hence, powerless), at best. In other words, only a full restitutio in integrum would settle for nothing less than the setting free of the virtual possibilities and actual impossibilities of the past, redeeming its injustices, while restoring the present to its just form and measure, without thereby endangering or violating the, perhaps, not so distant future and all those who, one hopes, would populate it as our equals. Whereas Badiou limits himself—contra Hegel—to pointing out the inexistence of the One as well as of Nature, substituting metaphysics with an ontology modeled after mathematical set theory, premised on a theory of the inconclusive multiple, while also steering clear from mathematizing, quasi-Pythagorian equations that would conflate the model with “the real,” Meillassoux gives inexistence a place of pride, indeed, of even greater prominence and promise. For God, the divine, and the infinite justice these so-called referents and requisites presumably stand for to live up to their name and concepts entails, he claims, nothing less than admitting their present absence and, in this sense, “inexistence.” However, the latter assumption, which is based as much on stringent logics as on basic decency, by no means excludes their, possible—if, from where we are, impossible—future existence, albeit one without common measure with what presently is and, so far, has been. For the very name, idea or concept of God to make any sense or to have any moral relevance, we must allow for its future, rather than past or present, meaning and uncommon force to take its ultimate and rightful place. Neither theism nor atheism have fully captured, much less expressed, this simple, if wide-ranging, speculative insight. Not only does the divine—God, the genuinely infinite aspect of justice— inexist at present, there is much to be said that “inexistence,” more broadly, must be sought out and cherished as itself as somehow already standing in for the former. Put differently, inexistence is the reference and requisite of the “already” of the “not yet.” The better daemons of our nature, as at once individual and collective forms or pre-figurations of messianism, individual and other, find their place here, as placeholders or stockholders, for “what” or “who,” as of yet, as said, inexists and, for principal reasons, can never be counted or banked on. Inexistence conjures

Anti-Retractationes 351 the incalculable, more precisely, the infra- or supra-numerary par excellence. In this sense, the divine—God or daimon—resembles and echoes, if one can say so, the “hyper-chaos” out of which it may or may not emerge and, indeed, into which it may well be resorbed again, on the fine or terrible day. For all the disagreement we must assume between their respective philosophical projects, their different sources and orientation, Marion might well agree with Meillassoux’s claim, if not precise argumentation, that the putative positive infinity and absolute perfection of divine existence, as it were, crushes and crumbles under its very own weight and, hence, must give way to what has been called a kenosis of discourse. Marion, as we saw, speaks of a God Who “does not even need to be,” but whose notion, in curious ways, “is” nonetheless “irreducible,” indeed, “the irreducible [l’irréducible].”94 Meillassoux, for his part, speaks of a God Who neither is nor is not (or no longer), but “is not yet.” In his words: God is possible – not in a subjective and actual sense (in the sense that I maintain that it is possible, albeit uncertain, that God actually exists), but in an objective and future sense (in the sense that I maintain that God can really produce [se produire] himself in the future). At stake here is the unknotting of the atheo-religious link between God and necessity (God must or must not exist) in order to reattach it to the virtual (God can exist).95 To do so, again, is to take leave from both theism and atheism, that is, from “providentialism” and “prometheanism.”96 In fact, based on a subtle ontological rendering of the principle of so-called factuality, Meillassoux consequently observes that “God must be thought as the contingent, but eternally possible effect of a Chaos unsubordinated by any law.”97

94 Lest we forget, “L’irréducible” is the title of the final part of Claude Lefort’s Essais sur le politique (Democracy and Political Theory), which contains two important meditations, on “La permanence du théologico-politique?” and “La fin de l’immortalité,” respectively, both of which are relevant to my argument and developed elsewhere in my discussion of political theologies. 95 Quentin Meillassoux, “Deuil à venir, dieu à venir,” in Critique, janvier-février 2006, vol. LXII, No. 704-705, 92–115, 110; trans. Robin Mackay, “Mourning to come, god to come,” in Collapse Vol. IV, 2008, 261–276, trans. modified. For Meilassoux, the core of the matter in the theism-atheism controversy is “the supposedly necessary character of either the inexistence or the existence of God. To be atheist is not simply to maintain that God does not exist, but also that he could not exist; to be a believer is to have faith in the essential existence of God. (ibid., 268/110). But then, of course, certain post-theist or anatheist discourses in the footsteps of Levinas and Marion do, precisely, not accept this premise! 96 Ibid., 271/112. 97 Meillassoux, “Mourning to come, god to come,” 276/115. With Hannah Arendt’s essay “What is Freedom?” in mind, one might modify Meillassoux’s distinction between four “worlds,” surging forth out of “hyper-chaos” (or, for that matter, failing to do so) as

352  Hent de Vries

From Tertium Datur to Tsimtsum Of course, next to Meillassoux’s claim that the dilemma of holding either that God exists or that He does not exist (i.e., “inexists) is undermined by the speculative possibility that He does not yet exist, we might supplement yet a further tertium datur, which neither the classical theist nor modern atheist could possibly accept. It is the equally speculative, if historically widely claimed, thesis that God is non- or inexistent in the sense that He no longer exists (in the plenitude and full force of His putative divine perfection, omnipresence, and omnipotence) as He may well have done before.

even more deeply—absolutely—contingent than he proposes here. The coming into existence or their disappearance and partial or complete alteration may be nothing short of a miracle, as Arendt muses. If so, hyper- or, as Meillassoux comes to say, super-chaos may not need to be as “strictured” or “figured,” as he assumes it must be. Indeed, its “allpowerfulness,” which consists in the “eternal and empty absence of a ground,” may well imply a proper and consequent ex nihilo, as most telling myths of divine creation and absolute beginnings must once have imagined, conceived it, and acted upon. Indeed, of the putative orginal tohuwavohu, if one can say so, preceding creation, one could not even say that it is characterized by either “chaos” (whether hyper, super, or not) or “strictured” and “figured” in any already somehow determined or predetermined way. And of human beginnings, epitomized by their natality and freedom, the same, mutatis mutandis, may well hold true, come to think of it. The reason for this is not the grandeur or misère of man, but the simple non-empirical and non-contingent “fact” that hyper-chaos, as Meillassoux portrays it, must be thought of as capable of violating and invalidating all strictures and figures that being and beings—metaphysically and ontologically, empirically and socially, naturally and phenomenologically speaking—impose upon it and its contingent effects. Again, as Levinas mused, at any point in time and space, the il y a may invade the very nature and order of creation uncontrollably, going and blowing wherever it will, as an in- or rather transfinite bad spirit (as a depersonalized malin génie, of sorts), before true or false, good and evil, and the necessary distinctions that these latter—themselves, absolutely contingent effects of earlier events in the worlds of thought or, indeed, of justice—must also entail. This standing possibility—or, rather, virtuality—does not all by itself make hyper-chaos “inconsistent” or “universally contradictory” (Meillassoux, Trassierungen, 10). Or does it? Could hyper- or superchaos mean anything but a tertium datur, before and beyond the introduction of any p and ~p? To be absolutely contingent means precisely being able (i.e., to have the potential or virtual freedom) to be and become anything whatsoever in principle and this, necessarily so. Therefore, one suspects, hyper- or superchaos can destroy or fundamentally change not only what contravenes the “force” of natural laws to which we remain subjected as finite beings, but also its very own self-induced and self-imposed strictures and figures (which Meillassoux explicitly denies, ibid., 11). Once one goes down the rabbit hole of speculation, as Meillassoux compelling demonstrates one can, must, and should, there is no stopping it here. A strict distinction between the “regime of reason [raison],” cognizant of limitations, although not to be confused with the “principle of reason [principe de raison, Satz vom Grund],” on the one hand, and that of “unreason [déraison],” derailing a “system of precise conclusion,” (ibid., 10, 11), on the other, is—beyond this critical point—hard to maintain. Once a “principle of insufficient reason” guides our speculation it must—as a matter of principle—be vulnerable to reasons and unreasons it can no longer hold at bay.

Anti-Retractationes 353 This fourth thesis has been expounded in essence by the traditional Lurianic Kabbalistic doctrine of the so-called Tsimtsum (‫ )צמצום‬or contraction and condensation of God. Yet a further alternative would be to think of “God” as a being to whom the infinity of infinite attributes need not apply at all, at any moment. A local, finite, limited god, so to speak, but not less venerable for all that. Some Jewish, rabbinical traditions are a case in point. The motif of a suffering, crucified god, as some have argued within Christianity, is another. But let’s leave that for what it is and limit ourselves to the contraction motif. One way of understanding divine self-contradiction—which, come to think of it, is not unlike the self-limitation by “strictures” and “figures” that so-called hyper- or superchaos, Meillassoux claims, must inflict upon itself—is by relating it to this tradition of Jewish mysticism, notably Kabbala, as studied by Gershom Scholem, who like Hegel, Adorno, and especially Franz Rosenzweig and Benjamin, insists on this motif of an apparently irrevocable retreat of God, not only before the creation of the world itself but also and more in particular under modern conditions.98 The theologoumenon of the Tsimtsum, on Scholem’s reading, not only forms a “fundamental concept [Grundbegriff]” of Judaism, more generally, it offers a speculative and spiritual response to the immense theoretical difficulties left by the traditional metaphysical and Christian conceptions of the divine in terms of an uncaused and unmoved cause (in the non-mechanical Aristotelian view) as well as of creation taking place ex nihilo (in Biblical terms) and so on continually. In so doing, it shuns the Neoplatonic alternative of emanation, insofar an internal reserve is seen as being carved out in and by God Himself, which is portrayed as the very condition of possibility of the world and human freedom to emerge in the first place and, importantly, on its own terms. The Tsimtsum, Christoph Schulte recalls, citing Scholem, invokes God’s “self-restraint or -restriction [Selbstverschränkung].” The latter concept requires “an originary selfmovement [uranfängliche Selbstbewegung]” of God even before the creation of the world and, subsequently, “a moving and living development of God parallel to the genesis and history of the world. The God of the Tsimtsum is … a living God who through creation and sustenance of the world, through revelation and world history is Himself affected, moved, and changed.”99

98 Cf. Christoph Schulte, Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag/Suhrkamp, 2014), 383–393, trans. HdV. Schulte helpfully recalls and summarizes the main publications Scholem contributed on the subject, namely his 1941 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Die jüdische Mystik in ihre Haupströmungen [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam, 1967]), dedicated to Walter Benjamin, his 1957 Erranos lecture “Schöpfung aus dem Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes,” in idem, Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 53–89, and his lemma “Kabbalah,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jerusalem 1971, Vol. 10, 588–593. 99 Schulte, Zimzum, 384–385.

354  Hent de Vries As has been argued by others, the late Schelling and the philosophy of history in the wake of German Idealism, not to mention Critical Theory, more broadly, has been deeply influenced by this speculative intuition and founding concept of Judaism generally and of Kabbalah specifically.100 From this conception, discussed in his scholarly writings, should be distinguished a further, even more speculative theological idea, which Scholem formulated informally and traces of which can be found in his letters and his 1930 eulogy of Rosenzweig, published in German only in 1982, after the former’s death.101 This second contraction is a further radicalization of the first, “cosmological”102 one that precedes—and, hence, is external to— creation as a whole. As Scholem surmised, there is a additional—this time, internal, “innerhistorical”103 —contraction which reduces the presence in absentia of God within the created world to virtually nil. Importantly and paradoxically, however, this nil or virtual nothing is, on Scholem’s view, far from negligible. Quite the contrary, for it “is” from within this radical world-intrinsic reduction and quasi-nothing alone that God may—or may not—manifest, reveal or show and signal Himself in His very subtraction, as if a second, narrower open or void space had to be carved out, for the Messiah, or for us, to step in. This second Tsimtsum would mark modernity specifically rather than the world and history in toto. To cite once again Schulte: “Scholem calls it an ‘extreme’ or ‘last’ Tsimtsum, in Hebrew: Tsimtsum acheron, because an even further going retreat of God from the world is not possible.”104 In sum, then, we are dealing here with what Scholem would come to call the “disappearance of God to the point of the nothing [Verschwinden Gottes bis zum Punkt des Nicht].”105 This said, as Schulte reminds us, Scholem does not accept this cumulative demythologization and secularization as an endpoint, a fatum or fait accompli. Instead, he offers nothing short of a “negative dialectical theology” to turn the tables, against all odds, by insisting on the, admittedly, infinite improbability that the virtual absence and virtual presence of God

100 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Dialektischer Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus— Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraktion Gottes,” in idem, Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 172–227; “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialis: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and its Consequences for the Philosophy of History,” in Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman, eds., The New Schelling (London and New York: 2004), 43–89. 101 Schulte, Zimzum, 386 ff. and Irving Wohlfahrt, “Haarscharf an der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus. Zum Motiv des Zimzum bei Gerschom Scholem,” in Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith, eds., Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 176–256. 102 Schulte, Zimzum, 388. 103 Ibid., 389. 104 Ibid. 105 Cf. Scholem’s memorial address, trans. by Michael Brocke and published in Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 532–534.

Anti-Retractationes 355 and His revelation as well as redemption may be virtually interchangeable notions with the pure appearance or mere apparition of God’s being, which turns out to be the flipside, the “Kippfigur,” of His “memory trace,” and vice versa: Does He really not reveal Himself? Does not in this [extreme] selfrestriction lie His very revelation? Perhaps the disappearance of God to the point of the nothing [Nicht] was of a higher necessity such that only a world that has been emptied out will reveal his Kingdom …106 In other words, God would give man over to the “nihilism of pure profanity [Nihilismus reiner Profanität]” in order to enable in this “wasteland [Ödnis]” and “emptiness [Leere]” an unprecedented, new revelation; this, nothing else, would be “the dialectical volte [Volte] of Scholem’s negative theology.”107 The latter would find a further expression in the correspondence with Benjamin regarding Franz Kafka’s work, of which Scholem writes: “Kafka’s world is that of revelation, albeit under the perspective in which the latter has been reduced to its nothingness [Nichts].”108 For Schulte, Scholem’s speculative negative dialectical and theological hypotheses should be largely seen as private musings that developed both before and parallel to his more sober scholarly studies, which bracket such judgments, even though they, likewise, eventually let themselves be read as “reflexes of the existence of a scholar who, in inner exile, despairs of real existing Zionism”109 But what if such historicization and psychologistic, somewhat reductive, account results in unintentionally selling Scholem’s deepest intuition and hope somewhat short? And what if his negative dialectical theological view of the first and second Tsimtsum did not limit itself to the peculiarity of either biography (his own inner retreat in light of historical disappointments) or of modernity at large, notably the Weimar interbellum epoch with its overwhelming sense of looming crisis and, perhaps already, of disaster and desolation to come? What precedes history or carves out an empty space of nothing right in its very midst is hardly what is determined by it, whether externally or internally, as both dialectical

106 Ibid. Cf. also Schulte, Zimzum, 390. 107 Schulte, Zimzum, 390, 391. 108 Cited after ibid., 391 and Benjamin über Kafka. Texte, Briefzeugnisse, Aufzeichungen, ed. by Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 74. For a further discussion, see my “Inverse versus Dialectical Theology: The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith,” in Paul and the Philosophers, ed. Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 466–511, and, especially, Paul North, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 109 Schulte, Zimzum, 393, and Wohlfahrt, “Haarscharf an der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus,” 199–208.

356  Hent de Vries materialism and psychoanalysis of old—two harbingers of demythologization and secularization that were constantly on Scholem’s mind—would, no doubt and falsely, have to presume. Scholem’s motif and motivation is downright theological, metaphysical, or even speculative, if thereby also largely “hypothetical,” for all the good reasons.

“Contingent But Eternally Possible” Needless to say, the concept of God as “contingent, but eternally possible, effect of a Chaos unsubordinated by any law” raises important further questions. Not only: what to make of an “effect” that, for all purposes, is uncaused, hence, a very special effect, one that has no determinate and determining—in the sense of limited and limiting—cause, other than that it “is” a miracle of inexistence, nothing less, nothing more? In other words, what to make of a virtuality and counter-factuality that can always and everywhere befall us, for good and for ill?110 But also: What does the signifier ‘god’ really mean once the latter is no longer posited as existing—as possible and to come, but no longer as actual and necessary? Such an examination would necessitate, notably, an elaboration of the element of a discourse on the divine distinct from all theology founded on the thesis of an eternal God.111 Meillassoux concludes with a “Kantian-style” question (which, in the Critique of Pure Reason [cf. A 805/B 833] comes directly after the question “What can I know?” and “What ought I to do?,” and which itself, in turn, is followed by the, for Kant, overarching and summary question, namely “What is man?”): What am I permitted to hope for, now that I can hope? What is a god which would once more be desirable, lovable, worthy of imitation? If

110 It is difficult and, perhaps, impossible—to think of such a miracle, in its special effect, in any other terms than those of a “being given [étant donné]” or “original donation,” to use Marion’s terminology; in short, an event or counter-experience that we cannot but somehow affirm or that, in denying, we will have either acknowledged (loved and admired) or instead avoided. Again, Marion speaks of the “irreducible” par excellence. One might be tempted to try to subtract such “being given” from the so-called “correlationist” metaphysics and phenomenology that, as Meillassoux argues, characterizes both naturalism and supranaturalism, rationalism and empiricism. But the “fact” remains that its “en soi” stands in the perennial possibility of reaching me or us or, on the contrary, not do that at all (and, in so doing also failing to reach out and speaking to me, to us). This said, in Meillassoux, as in Badiou, the initial interest in the miracle gives way to an eventual reticence. Trassierungen, 12, speaks of the “appearance of the ‘miracle,’” for example. 111 Meillassoux, “Mourning to come, god to come,” 269/111.

Anti-Retractationes 357 one supposes granted the real eventuality of ruptures with the present laws of nature, what will be the most singular possible divinity, the most interesting, the most ‘noble’ in a sense (paradoxically) close to Nietzsche’s exigency? Must this future and immanent god be personal, or consist in a ‘harmony,’ a becalmed [or soothed, apaisée] community of living, of dead, and reborn? We believe that precise responses to these questions can be envisaged, and that they determine an original regime of thought, in rupture with both atheism and theology: a divinology, yet to be constituted, thought which will be fabricated [or woven, tissé], perhaps, new links between men and those who haunt them.112 It is beyond theist and atheist, theological and anthropological or, for that matter, anthropo-theological assumptions, then, that a possible future of— contingent and immanent—hope regarding new relationships between the living and the dead, freed from, perhaps, mutual “spectral” haunting and, one day open to those not yet even born, might be imagined, indeed, speculatively construed. Beyond identity and totality and the rampant globality under which most, if not all, currently suffer, there would lie a possible— emphatic and other—universality, whose contours, depth and span, we cannot even fathom at present. It has been suggested that Meillassoux “inverts the Christian apocalyptic vision in his conception of the coming of a World of justice: it is not an event in which humanity is judged and reproached, but one of redress and rectification for the horrors and justices humans have endured over countless millennia.”113 Moreover, the judgment of history, on Meillassoux’s

112 Ibid., 275/115, trans. modified. 113 Fintan Neylan, “Fourth World Justice,” in Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis, eds., The Meillassoux Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 79. Once again with Arendt’s essay “What is Freedom?” in mind, one might wish to slightly modify and sharpen Meillassoux’s own distinction—and separating out—of the four “worlds,” surging eventfully out of hyper- or superchaos. To do so would mean to portray them as, if possible, even more deeply or absolutely contingent than he himself claims. According to Meillassoux, the world of matter, of life, of consciousness, and of justice are incommensurable, having no common measure, but this, paradoxically, to a different degree in the last case. Yet each subsequent world, with the exception of the preceding first world of matter, it seems (why, one wonders, grant the necessity of this world and, thereby, Aristotle, Avicenna, and Ernst Bloch this much credit, in retrospect?), is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the former, such that there would not be life without matter, no consciousness without life, and no justice without either matter, life or consciousness, in that order. Again, it seems inescapable that the world of justice, as it emerges ex nihilo, just as the other worlds (of, at least, life and consciousness) do, must in principle be capable of undoing, that is, violating or invalidating, the laws and forces that govern matter, life, and consciousness. Indeed, one wonders whether in its most emphatic speculative idea, bordering upon the apokatástasis pantôn and restitutio in integrum, the world of justice must not

358  Hent de Vries terms, need not wait for the latter’s ultimate end which, given the necessary contingency of all that exists and has existed, may inadvertently and surreptitiously come and reverse as well as redress all things and do so at virtually any time, any place, as its advent no longer obeys a teleology, cyclical course or linear and progressive approximation whose movement would need to be accomplished first.114 This said, it is important to keep in mind a proposed “divinology,” which goes hand in hand with what Meillassoux calls “inverted Platonism” by which he means the relentless effort to liberate oneself from “the fascination with the phenomenal fixity of laws” rather than from the ever-changing phenomena, whose supposed immobile forms or ideas had been Plato’s philosophical aim.115 Rather than overcoming, reversing, that is, abstractly negating Platonic idealism, the resolute immanentism and apparent materialism of his speculative realism would thus pursue and find its absolute in, precisely, the radical contingency of both laws and things, which alone would be necessary and, as such, ever unchanging. Such speculative claim alone, Meillassoux presumes, paradoxical as it sounds, would escape the metaphysical predicament of all traditional and most of modern philosophical thought.

Existing Otherwise To Meillassoux’s claim that there is no necessary link between God and existence—as God can exist only contingently and clearly does not do so in the present and, on his view, did never before—we should add that God’s eventual existence will have to be of completely different nature than what we, here and now, call or consider existence. In other words, God’s future existence, if it comes about, must, for all purposes, inexist or, at the very least, exist otherwise, that is, manifest or reveal itself as an “otherwise than being” or, indeed, as a “being” that does not even need to be (or of whose

be thought of as doing exactly the same with regard to the non-specified and nonenumerated, non-lawlike strictures and figures to which hyper- or superchaos must subject itself, while virtually and potentially threatening everything else (again, natural laws and their non-human “force”). In one word, as Bergson well knew, its idea must exceed the logic and existence of substances and attributes, subjects and objects, individuals and collectives, indeed, species and forms of life. In joining the mechanical and the mystical, the material and the spiritual, the world of justice must conceive of the “universe” as a “machine for the production of gods.” 114 In this respect, Meillassoux’s view corroborates the one with which Levinas opens his magnum opus, pitting his own conception of “eschatology” against that of Hegel’s judgment of history and world spirit, without resorting to the powerful, existentialist protest of Kierkegaardian subjectivity. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1961), trans. by Alphonso Lingis under the title Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 115 Meillassoux, “Mourning to come, god to come,” 274/114.

Anti-Retractationes 359 ‘being,’ whatever else could further be said, of it ‘Being’ is not a necessary or essential predicate). But then again, this very fact (a “fact of reason.” if ever there was one) does not exclude that such future God, if He comes to exist or, rather, inexist, might espouse such dismissed full or infinite qualities and attributes (omnipresence and omnipotence, to limit ourselves to just these two, included) contingently or, as I have suggested, occasionally. The alternative, evidently, would be to relegate “inexistence” either to a mere—that is, merely ethereal—idea or to identify this god-who-may-yetcome with the (however infinitesimal) “weak messianic force” of which Benjamin made so much (or, indeed, with the “unpower [impouvoir]” of which Marion has begun musing in recent years). It would be to suggest that God might be said to eventually exist just a little bit, and will keep this as is, according to the trope of the “very little, almost nothing” that has become a modern mantra, of sorts. True, even such weakness in and of being might, paradoxically, give “God” all the more force, rather than power, in, if not of, this world to bring out and sustain His divine justice for all and for always, again, becoming “all in all things,” as we read in Scripture and elsewhere. But it is hard to see how this latter picture does conjure the host of divine names and attributes that “weak thought” brackets on grounds of principle. A final question imposes itself at this point. How does the advent of the inexistent God resolve the so-called spectral dilemma? Presumably, such advent would redress all past injustices, undo suffering, and bring back the slain. A world could thus thereby emerge in which mourning the dead— or other loss—is no longer even needed. In other words, for Meillassoux, when and where a possible God arrives or comes into existence at last, mourning is neither necessary nor even possible. But what could a world without mourning and its unbearable “sickness” possibly be? Mourning and its sickness is a lamentable but, it seems, also defining trait of human existence as we know it and we are hard pressed to imagine things otherwise. A world in which the question of mourning, even that of “impossible” mourning, does not come up lies well beyond our present horizon but is also somewhat counterintuitive, perhaps somewhat immoral. A world without tears? Come to think of it, the gods or daimons whose form we might eventually espouse (eritis sicut deus), in what is portrayed here as the best of all possible worlds, are presumably beings that never mourned, that can and will not mourn. But then, as such they don’t deserve our sympathy, don’t inspire admiration, let alone praise.

A Striking Comparison As they both sidestep the relatively modern articulation of metaphysics as a philosophical project in favor of its “relief,” Meillassoux’s speculative realist or materialist account of “facticity” is, perhaps, not so different from Marion’s interpretation and use of the phenomenological principles of all

360  Hent de Vries principles, namely of “givenness” and all “being given.” After all, also for Marion, these latter phenomena, especially when they reveal themselves as “saturated,” with too much to take in, or in “counter-experiences,” elude their reduction to the order of either “things” or “beings,” just as they fly under the radar, as it were, of Kantian forms of intuition, the categories of understanding, and, regulative ideas of reason, while exceeding the very concept of implicit horizons of which both a Husserl, Heidegger, and Hans Georg Gadamer kept musing. On altogether different grounds, then, Marion might well agree, therefore, with Meillassoux’s surprising claim that: We must show why thought, far from experiencing its essential limits through facticity, experiences rather its knowledge of the absolute through facticity. We must grasp in facticity not the inaccessibility of the absolute [inaccessibility, we recall, was Marion’s characterization of the concept of God and its Referent, HdV] but the unveiling of the in-itself [en-soi] and the eternal property of what is, as opposed to the mark of the perennial deficiency [défectuosité pérenne] in the thought of what is…. No doubt, this will require a ‘change in outlook [conversion du regard]’.116 The “conversion” of the gaze is a motif found in Husserl, one of the central figures to have introduced the philosophical premise and syndrome of “correlationism,” with which Meillassoux takes issue throughout his writings. And the fact that Husserl’s and so many phenomenological writings resort to a theological trope—here, that of a turn or turning, undoing the preceding inversion of idealist thought with a contrary inversion, of sorts—should not surprise us. For Meillassoux, “facticity,” in so far as it “is” absolute, should not be seen as a particular given for the simple reason that its absoluteness necessarily strips each particular being of its—naturalistically and idealistically—presumed necessity and causality, thus making its contingency itself the sole necessity (and, we might add, “cause”) in a universe or, rather, multiverse of infinite, including empirically and conceptually, if, as of now, impossible possibilities: it is absolutely necessary that every entity might not exist. This is indeed a speculative thesis, since we are thinking an absolute, but it is not metaphysical, since we are not thinking any thing (any entity) that would be absolute. The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason

116 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 52, 53/72, trans. modified.

Anti-Retractationes 361 why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise [autrement], but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason [principe d’irraison]. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is [tout doit sans raison pouvoir ne pas être et/ou pouvoir être autre que ce qu’il est].117 With reference to Aristotle, Meillassoux calls this an “anhypothetical principle.”118 In theological terms—terms that have been used with reference to David Hume (an important witness for After Finitude) and also Wittgenstein (debunked by Badiou)—one could call this a negative occasionalism or an occassionalism without God.119 On such a reading, God, like any other being, could also not be; for another, He might just as well come to be, eventually or in the end, when all is said and done. A strange consequence that Meillassoux accepts and

117 Ibid., 60/82. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 53/ 72–73, trans. modified: “instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in every thing as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be, the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason [de pouvoir sans raison devenir effectivement autre]. We must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as ‘unreason [irraison],’ is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge. From this perspective, the failure of the principle of reason follows, quite simply, from the falsity (and even from the absolute falsity) of such a principle—for the truth is that there is no reason for anything to be or to remain thus and so rather than otherwise, and this applies as much to the laws the govern the world as to the things of the world. Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish [or to its loss, à sa perte], but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing [de sa perte].” With all this in mind, the facticity that Meillassoux discovers as one of necessary contingency is absolute, underlying no fundamental law of nature or sufficient reason. There is little here, then, that a straightforwardly realist or, for that matter, object-oriented ontology can lay its hand on so much as even postulate with firmness; no rock bottom, neither basic particulars nor so-called individuals, nor even a je-ne-sais-quoi. Or, to put it differently, what the contemporary “reactivation” of “the Cartesian thesis” amounts to is the speculative hypothesis, if not demonstrable proof, that “everything of an object that can be formulated in mathematical terms it makes sense to think of as a property of the object in itself” (ibid., 3/16, italics added). The object in question should thus be understood as rendered in “numerical” terms, not in a “perception” or “sensation” (ibid.) both of which stand always in “correlation” (ibid., 5/18) with the subject that has or experiences them. The latter precision may help to steer clear from the danger, also noted by Badiou in Being and Event, that to mathematize the world of matter and objects, taking mathematics as the language of ontology at its most fundamental level, does not come down to “pythagorizing” nature per se.

362  Hent de Vries entertains wholeheartedly, at the risk even of sophistry, as it, again necessarily, also must be, is therefore the following: “Philosophy is the invention of strange forms of argumentation, necessarily bordering on sophistry, which remains its obscure [obscure] and structural double.”120 Together with the argumentative effort to “de-absolutize [désabolutiser]” metaphysical thought in view of a speculative account of the absolute as the necessarily contingent itself, such genuine philosophical form of argumentation thus runs the danger of giving “faith” and “fideism” the place they crave in every new dispensation that comes along. And yet, Meillassoux leaves no doubt that such a way out (or, for faith and fideism, to creep back in) can hardly be allowed as an option. The speculative hypothesis—or, rather, “anhypothetical principle”—does not by itself justify “the pretention of belief in general to be the only means of access to the absolute [la prétention de la croyance en général à être la seule voie d’accès à l’absolu].”121 For much of modern philosophy “the de-absolutization of thought [désabsolutiser la pensée] boils down to the mobilization of a fideist argument: but a fideism that is ‘essential’ rather than ‘historical’.”122 Meillassoux calls this a “religionizing [enreligieusement] of reason, thereby deploying an expression that echoes that of rationalization, denoting a movement of thought which is the exact contrary to that of the progressive rationalization of Judeo-Christianity under the influence of Greek philosophy.”123 From God as potentiality or omnipotence, Meillassoux thus proposes, one should separate a “virtual” God, whose integrity and moral Good seems only guaranteed by the fact that He does not (yet) exist. To exist (already and still) would sully His name in a world in which “the reign of a rigorously egalitarian justice among thinking individuals”—more precisely, an “egalitarian Justice for the living and the dead”124 —is not (yet) to be found. This insight has a remarkable double implication: the divine inexistence signifies the inexistence of the religious God, but also the metaphysical God, supposed actually existent as Creator or Principle of the world. But the divine inexistence also signifies the divine character of inexistence: in other words, the fact that what remains still in a virtual state in present reality harbors the possibility of a God still to come, become innocent of the disasters of the world, and of whom one may hope that he would have the power [et dont on

120 Ibid., 76 /103, trans. modified. 121 Ibid., 46/63. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., 47/64. 124 Harman, “Interview with Quention Meillassoux,” 163.

Anti-Retractationes 363 peux espérer qu’il ait la puissance] to accord to specters something other than their death. Or again: either God exists, or he doesn’t. Or more generally: either a merciful principle [principe clément], transcending humanity, is at work in the world and its beyond, bringing justice for the departed; or such a transcendent principle is absent. Now, it becomes rapidly apparent that neither of these two options—let’s call them for convenience religious of atheistic, however innumerable the ways in which they can be configured—allows the essential mourning to take place. To say that God exists, or that he does not—whatever is thought through these statements, both are ways of despairing [façons de déspérer] when confronted with spectres.125 There would be nothing necessary—or necessarily perfect and absolute (again, as in the traditional concept and characterization of the ens perfectissimum)—in such an inexistent, virtual, and future, eternally possible, if thereby also radically contingent, God or god. On the contrary, the very principle of “factuality” says precisely that “only contingency cannot be thought as contingent, that only contingency is necessary, and thus absolute.”126 We can extrapolate, therefore, that any claims and experience of “necessity,” beyond this principle, would, paradoxically, be contingent, in turn, or, more precisely, rely on a “choice,” an adherence, a fidelity, and, perhaps, a faith as well as ethics; a faith and ethics (Meillassoux, somewhat surprisingly, does not say: politics) for which religion and theology, messianism and mysticism, offer archival models, alternative modes of existence and current inexistence, whose resources and repositories have lost nothing of their—again, virtual— actuality. They stand in need of being actualized and realized, even though there is nothing in the cards that they will or, for that matter, that we can, as it were, will them into existence as individuals, much less collectively. In fact, “individual messianism” and “political finitude” are two of Meillassoux’s regulatory concepts in this context and the former absorbs the energies and promises of the latter. The fact that they rely on a “choice” or “decision” does not reintroduce a subjective idealist or, broadly, phenomenological presupposition—or, in Meillassoux’s idiom, “correlationism”— per se: “religious messianism or revolutionary radicalism can be rethought within the framework of an attempt at radical equality for the living and dead alike – an advent that is contingent but none the less eternally possible, totally improbabilizable, and outside the grasp of our action or even of our

125 Meillassoux, “Mourning to come, god to come,” 268/110 and 263/106, trans. modified. 126 Nathan Brown, in Meillassoux, “From ‘l’inexistence divine’,” 21 and 22.

364  Hent de Vries Universe in so far as it is subject to its own laws.”127 And while “individual messanism,” strangely—in ways we neither know nor master—prepares such occasion (an event or, as Meillassoux says, “advent,” if ever there was one), it operates under the supposition that “what a thing is called” is, well, “our” or, much rather, “my call.” By the same token, it wagers that, in such calling and calling out, “my word is my bond.” Moreover, such preparation may further have to rely on what Meillassoux calls elsewhere an “exercise [a test or trial, a Prüfung],” whose existential mood will be one of “schame” and whose occurrence may inadvertently coincide, not least when we arrive at a certain “age,” with the “riddle of maturity,” that is, with an “act of clairvoyance [Klarsicht],” an “ascesis [Askesis],” of sorts.128 Nothing else would allow us to navigate the “analogy of incommensurabilities,” a “framework” in which “God” not quite (not yet or no longer) equals “the One” and in which the list of His essential attributes simply does not add up (and, perhaps, never coherently did, the “One” being merely a “count of one,” as, we have seen, Badiou had insisted).129 With all this in mind, the “virtual” rather than “potential event” of which God could yet be a plausible—that is, speculative possible and morally worthy—name would, in its very “strangeness,” not resemble a monotheistic, say, Abrahamic model at all. It further remains to be seen whether post- or so-called anatheistic qualifications of this “advent” are any more helpful in characterizing its future features. And the same, mutatis mutandis, might well be said of its summation, proposed by Meillassoux himself, in terms of “justice” or “universal Justice.”130

127 Harman, “An Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,” 163. Cf. also Quentin Meillassoux, “L’immanence d’outre-monde,” in Ethica. Cadernos Acadêmicos Vol. 16, No. 2 (2009), 39–71; “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” in Connor Cunningham and Peter M. Chandler, eds., The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition, and Universalism (London: SCM Press, 2010), 444–478. 128 Meillassoux, Trassierungen, 75, 76, 78, 80. 129 Harman, “An Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,”163. 130 Meillassoux’s reasoning here would merit further discussion: “Everything is possible … But it is senseless to believe in the rise of a virtual event (one that does not conform to the laws of our world) in the same fashion in which I await the rise of a potential event (one that does conform to the laws of the world). I can justifiably evaluate the probability that a comet will strike the earth and destroy every form of life; it is a potential event. On the other hand, a virtual event lies outside probability. And there we find its true strangeness: it is neither probable, nor improbable, nor impossible. If I have to determine my relationship with this type of possible, it would be in a very different fashion than in relation to a potentiality. The question becomes: of what absolutely remarkable event is virtual being capable, and how can this event modify my subjectivity once it is recognized as possible? And here it is not unicorns (or spaghetti monsters) that appear in the first rank. It is universal Justice, the equality of everyone, and even the equality of the living with the dead: Justice guaranteed as eternally possible by the absolute inexistence of God – that is to say, by the ultimate Non-sense of super-chaos.

Anti-Retractationes 365 Of course, instead of speculating about a God still (or forever) to come— and mindful of the havoc wreaked by Romantic mythologies regarding der kommende Gott (the coming god), indeed, of the “God who alone can save us,” as Heidegger, citing Hölderlin, fatefully mused—we might well come to feel at this point that we need to set our speculative aims and pragmatic hopes somewhat lower. To do so would mean to postulate or hypothesize, acclaim or proclaim, a virtuality—a counterfactual and big “as if” (as Anthony Appiah has recently analyzed this perspectivalist and fictionalist motif)—for which “God” is, for now and for us, merely the best available archival name or concept, word or term. Such a God would be characterized by a yet another “inexistence,” of sorts, one that could be spelled out neither in terms of present existence nor in that of its absence, but instead would take the form of a real virtuality and eventual virtual reality, whose uncaused effects offer special graces, here and there, without any reason, without ulterior purpose. Let’s call this an occasional god—or god for the occasion—a god who, for all purposes, does not even need to be (i.e., in the way things presently are and have been so far and, indeed, might well end up being this way for much longer); a god, the downright negation or denegation of which or of whom would merely the sign of a defeatist and complacent affirmation of the world as it is (on its own terms and merits, that is, within the limited options the world necessarily has, given its apriori and a posteriori conditions, its natural laws and social norms, its rules and regulations that we—psychologically and politically, if not always, speculatively or even metaphysically—wrongly think we must take for granted). As things stand, such a god would shun Divine Providence (i.e., sovereignty and violence)

For if God does not exist, things become capable of anything: whether of the absurd, or of reaching their highest state. Everything is irreversible, but nothing is definitive.” (ibid., 171–172). No genuine or “virtual” event, not even that of “universal justice,” is ever guaranteed, whether in terms of the moment or mode of its arrival or those taken up in the survival it offers. One could merely say that the maxim to follow would be to welcome the possibilities with the greatest novelty and most innovative inclusion, given earlier advents and advances. And, here, one could see that “universal Justice” or, indeed, “God” would be the best possible candidates in question for such uncharted multiplicity. An aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit, as Anselm defined God, such an emphatic, aporetic and apophatic, idea, more than anything else, while invoking what is presently inexisting but otherwise possible, would stand the best chance of letting itself be thus “realized” (i.e., recognized and taken up when the occasion arises). And the same would hold true for us, insofar as we are, subjectively, concerned, that is, insofar as such a possibility requires as well as enables a subjectivity in a frame of thinking and acting in which integral justice can be finally granted and effectively offered to all. At any historical or situational moment in time and space, then, unidentifiable and non-totalizable things and beings, events and advents, and what not, are possible (at least, virtually at first).

366  Hent de Vries just as much as He eludes all sorts of prometheian, immanent determinism, restricted as these are by naturalism and organicism, mechanicism and automatism, materialism and cognitivism, computationalism and probabilism, and the list goes on and on. Instead, His efficacy would be deep down contingent, whatever metaphysical necessity His effects in the world may further obtain, for no logical or rational—i.e., sufficient—reason whatsoever.131

Negative Occasionalism Negative occasionalism or occasionalism without God would be the view that any occasion, without guaranteed nexus to what comes before or what will come after, hangs over an abyss in which the “surplus of nonsense over sense,” to cite once more Levinas, defies any explanation, any logic of implication and explication, not to mention causation and determination. Every occasion, that is, anything and every event, object or subject, is, on this view, necessarily contingent and what it is to be called an open question on its own terms. Even at the level of concepts and words, images and gestures, sounds and silences, there would be an urgent need—grammatically and pragmatically speaking—to supplement our “notional” with a “real assent” (as John Henry Newman was the first to have argued). After all, even if I know the identificatory criteria of a given phenomenon to be fulfilled, then its whole meaning and force—ontologically, existentially as well as politically

131 Meillassoux explains this very clearly: “If I take supercontingency seriously … then I ought to divide the possible into potentialities (which are submitted to natural laws of our universe) and virtualities (which are not submitted to those laws). If potentialities can be probabilized, … virtualities cannot, by reason of the transfinite character of the number of possibles. Thus, it is pointless to ask what the chances are of one virtuality arising rather than another, or to think that a particular virtuality has an infinitely small chance of arising in view of the immense number of other possibilities. On the other hand, I can do two things with respect to the virtual that are able to transform my subjective relationship with the experience of this world. First of all, I can grant prominence to the most radical novelties of the past: the emergence of life understood as a set of qualitative contents by contrast with inorganic matter that feels neither sensation nor perception; then the emergence of rational thought by contrast with a life that cannot attain the concept of the infinite or eternal truth (of the mathematical or speculative type). This having been done, I can ask what the next advent would be that is capable of just as much novelty in comparison with thought compared with life, or life with matter. For if we grant that thought can attain the absolute (that is to say, contingency considered as necessary), then nothing can transcend thought except for the re-emergence of thought in accordance with the reign of a rigorously egalitarian justice among thinking individuals. We are in the framework of an ‘analogy of incommensurabilities’ …” (Harman, “Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,” 162–163).

Anti-Retractationes 367 speaking—still hinges on my taking it thus and not otherwise. “What a thing is (called)” is our or, more specifically, “my call,” as Cavell recalled in The Claim of Reason. Based upon this “claim”—“acclamation” and “proclamation”—“custom and habit” may well intervene and give further form to a more sustained “calling,” thus making a “profession” of such original “faith,” while resisting the professionalization in which the latter is, inevitably, lost. Negative occasionalism or occasionalism without God, then, is the metaphysical (ontological) and pragmatic (existential) view that for a concept or word, thing of gesture, sound or silence to have any reference to— or support in—the real or, indeed, to realize its intention (its meaning or force) requires an extra effort or spiritual energy, a discernment and discipline, whose responsibility is entirely my (or our) own. The apparent consequence that this introduces what Meillassoux disparagingly calls “correlationism” and “finitism,” for fear of reintroducing some form of idealism over and against realism and materialism, but also some remnant of religious “fideism” or its extreme, namely “fanaticism,” is far from self-evident. Nor is such risk ever avoidable in philosophical discourse or ethical and political praxis. A wrong call made in any of its claims and judgments or actions can only be undone or corrected in some reparative operation of either verification (i.e., truth making, veritatem facere, as we said) or falsification (i.e., dialectical and determined negation, as Hegel and Adorno would add). The latter’s ontological and existential, contingent or ad hoc utterances leave it necessarily open to further revision and revisiting, and this ad infinitum, in an endless perspectivalism and constructivism in name of and for the sake of some “ab-solute,” and, itself, in turn, “absolute,” to begin with. As Adorno said, such meta-critical understanding of knowledge and action no longer postulates an infinite object or subject in the form of absolute knowledge (in the successive domains of religion, art, and philosophy) but, instead, makes itself “infinite” in its proceedings and interventions. This, all by itself, would be the “miracle” of all genuine “reference” (to cite Howard Wettstein’s lucid expression), the fact—nothing short of a “fact of reason” and “total social fact”—that any miraculum rests, at least in part, on an admiratio, without which it would not so much as come off the ground. Against any false claim of miracles, then, only a true one would hold the key, as veritas index sui et falsi est. Occasionalists of all stripes have long known and insisted as much. Cavell, in a lecture first presented in Amsterdam, in 2000, and then republished in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, entitled “What Is the Scandal of Skepticism?,” has drawn the same line as follows: “I am the scandal” of “skepticism” and the surpassing of its impass, the only possible refutation of idealism. Indeed, as Cavell immediately added, one “does not need the idea of God to achieve ‘the miracle of moving out of oneself,’ … but only an investment of a certain kind

368  Hent de Vries in a particular finite other,” while he acknowledged that one might always consider “that this investment is equivalent to the idea of God.”132

In Conclusion In an effort to sum things up and conclude, we might say that, for Marion, God is the impossible par excellence, but an impossible that, albeit for Him (God) alone, is totally possible, as His divine nature (albeit not His existence or essence, as metaphysicians and onto-theologians have claimed) surely requires. A certain idea of inexistence or “without being” and a certain eternity and “unpower [impuissance]” would allow us to think and, perhaps, live up to this. Conversely, virtually every impossibility occupies the very—logically speaking, illogical—space beyond reasons where God may or may not (decide to) enter eventually and, when and where He does so most eventfully, must do so miraculously, without conditions, without restraint, and without limit. For Meillassoux, likewise, God is—speculative speaking—a possible, virtual “real,” a “being otherwise” or, rather, “otherwise than being and beyond essence,” to use Levinas’s haunting terminology (studiously avoided by Meillassoux as it is by Badiou), given that everything and everyone else (laws, objects, and subjects) are seemingly irrevocably caught in an ontological “fixety,” whose “ideology” is hard to break through. Moreover, they are exposed to an abstract—and potentially fanatic—motif of and penchant toward transcendence that, quite literally, leads nowhere and that, come to think of it, is “perverse” through and through. By contrast, every genuine possibility occupies the very space where a true novelty— God, for example—may eventually enter, albeit now in a new, that is, necessarily contingent and, indeed, immanent format alone. Such a “god to come” is inexistent and virtual in so far as He eludes the laws and rules of this world. Although not eternal, His is a peculiar temporality which is that of timeless time or, rather, an infinitely or, in any case, limitless and productive and creative time in which advents ex nihilo can happen at virtually any moment and just about anywhere. And while this eventual God is no longer to be seen as omnipotent and sovereign, to the extent that we are entitled to invest hope and more in Him, He alone presents an alternative “power [puissance]”133 that may yet allow us to see and set things aright again or for once. What kind of weak or strong messianic force, then, do we need to assume or ourselves summon up for the spectral dilemma to be resolved, not merely

132 Stanley Cavell, “What is the Scandal of Skepticism?,” in idem: Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 132–154, 151. 133 Meillassoux, “Mourning to come, god to come,” 268/110.

Anti-Retractationes 369 episodically, on occasion or here and there, but, far more radically, for good, that is, once and for all, covering past, present, and future injustices; in other words, not only retroactively but proactively, if at all possible? Could one so much as think—and wish—for a “god-to-come” who or that would insure us against time and the chances as well as perils that it must also entail, as its necessary condition of contingency, to so speak? Only a positive infinity might conceivably do so, but, thereby, ipso facto, annihilate our freedom, need and will, to think and act. Interestingly—in contradistinction with his teacher and ongoing source of inspiration, Badiou—Meillassoux offers what would seem a fundamentally moral, much more than strictly philosophical, set-theoretical, or even political, argument against the existence of God as well as against its negation. Neither theism nor atheism would permit us to hope, that is, to envision a future in which we can redress the past’s injustices (and no longer, perversely, ascribe or attribute them to a sovereign and violent demiurge or world ruler as well as summum bonum, as any theodicy inevitably must do). The horrific deaths suffered by the victims of history and the injuries inflicted by life as we know it require a space without reasons that would, paradoxically and speculatively, allow anything to happen, the resurrection of the dead, the restitution of all things (restitutio in integrum), a total recall, indeed, an apokatástasis pantôn included, which alone could restore a certain measure and balance envisioned by justice, even if such virtual future surely would not wipe away all shed tears (or would it, in Meillassoux’s eyes?).134 But why and how would we put our hopes on an inexistent God still, if not necessarily forever, to come? For such a God to make any difference, would He not need all the power and omnipresence that classical providentialism attributed to Him and that modern atheism and humanism, in their

134 To say that the absolute is not an absolute or absolutum but the “being-capablebeing-other [pouvoir-étre-autre]” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 56/77), is to depart from classical and modern theism, without, therefore, postulating post-theism, characterized by a weak God, who would not even need to be and never will. On the contrary, it is to assert a power—perhaps, a strange messianic “unpower”—that might change everything completely at every instant and on each occasion. Alternatively put, it is the assertion that no power and no natural force could prevent such change, which may well take place in toto and come like the proverbial, New Testament figure of a thief in the night, announcing the kairos as well as parousia. Such an arrival absolves itself from all theoretical and practical, critical and existential grip on our part, even though it lets itself be speculatively thought and, perhaps, intuited, imagined, fictionalized, and even realized. The aforementioned apokatástasis or restitutio leaves nothing outside its orbit for the simple reason—or, more precisely, lack of sufficient reasons—that we do not know “what a body” or, for that matter, what a “thought” can do and achieve. What has been said and done may seem unredeemable and unforgivable, but we must— under the aspect and aegis of necessary contingency—speculatively assume that nothing needs to stand as it is and that much or most stands in need of being undone.

370  Hent de Vries no less determined prometheism, precisely deny Him? What “force [puissance]” could such a God or god possibly muster—and do so contingently and immanently so—such that things would effectively change and not just present but also past and future suffering and injustice would for always be undone and prevented? And if and where this might just so happen, why and how would it last, as it clearly should, without any metaphysical or ontological guarantee backing this up as it is, again, a contingent immanence that alone might pull this off? Meillassoux departs and argues from the perspective, indeed, from the resolutely speculative (i.e., counter-factual and counter-experiential) thought of the integrity, that is, intactness and integrality, of a certain life worth living or well lived, both in the past, present, and future. And he does so in immanent terms that, he claims, are not only far from realized or realizable but, in this respect, also hard to conceptualize or even imagine, hence, merely virtual—inexistent—from beginning to end, all the way through, down and up. Marion, on the contrary, departs and argues from a different angle, which is the integrity, that is, intactness and integrality, of a conceptless, incomprehensible and inaccessible, invisible and intangible God, whose icon and encomium alone must, could, and should inform our thinking and practices. But, then, why and how would or could such a God, without being, so much as manifest and give or, more precisely, reveal Himself? What brings a mystical, apophatic, or conceptless theology to phenomenalize itself? And, conversely, where and when, if ever, do we find our way back or toward it, unless certain signs and hints, words and gestures, things and powers appealed to us already? The latter, one might say, in Marion’s own terms, find their sole warrant in “saturated phenomena” and in the “counter-experiences” and “negative certitudes” we might have of them. And yet, in order for us to find and have them, we must just as much—perhaps, first of all—be willing, if not predisposed or able, then at least open, to sense, hear, and see, their silent and oblique, ineffable and invisible, call or appeal, whose signal or sign goes nowhere unless “we” (or “I”) make it so, make them true, and follow their lead.

Coda In the preceding remarks, I have not been pretending, far from it, that I have found a way—a method, much less a strict or even vaguely usable criterion—to arbitrate between these different conceptions and at once analogous and very different philosophical, phenomenological and theological (or atheological) speculative assumptions and the negative metaphysical rather than post-metaphysical views they entail. The intellectual and practical discipline and discernment of ascesis and epoché, kenosis and conversio go only so far. The proof of the pudding may well be in the

Anti-Retractationes 371 eating—or, perhaps, in having the cake and eating it too—thus assigning this task pragmatically to the evaluation of ethical and political considerations and stances Marion’s and Meillassoux’s, “Badiou’s and Levinas’s respective thoughts on “inexistence,” divine and other, enable or further inspire. The paradox or aporia that each single one of them brings out so forcefully and demonstrates with much vigor—including the stark contrast or contradiction between them as polar opposites—are the very expression and strangely lucid indication of a conceptual and more than conceptual problem in need of a solution, without guaranteed outcomes. And any such solution or resolution—tradition speaks of all-redemption, the apokatástasis pantôn, as we have seen—looms large beyond the critical terms that we currently have at hand and that we, rightly or wrongly, still largely feel we must continue to work with. Whether such solution or resolution could be eventually found within the confines of the philosophy of religion or within philosophy as it follows the turns and twist of the phenomenon called “religion,” all this will have to remain an open question, I think. We must be open to shift terrain, when and where necessary, if the occasion seems right, just as we must be open to even dropping “religion” and “God” altogether, if not once and for all. And this would be especially opportune when and where their conception and the practice they lead to gets in the way of the undeniable and unforgettable grandeur—that is, the so far inimitable breadth and depth, freedom and love—for which they once stood and, perhaps, remain stand-ins, for now. James Baldwin once said as much in striking, at once disarmingly naïve and provocative, prosaic terms, in “Down at the Cross,” in The Fire Next Time: If the concept of God has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, it is time we got rid of Him.135 Yet the same, mutatis mutandis, would need to be said of every concept of self and other, of individual and collective identity and the politics they imply and also call for, not to mention and the ever-increasing, that is, deepening as well as widening, globality they must both reflect, inspire, and aspire to. And the latter they can and should only do in an open, if resolute, spirit of inclusiveness and equality, allowing us to be finally “communists at heart” or, at least, “worthy of the social revolution,” and, perhaps, more than just that: global souls with a cosmic consciousness, nothing less. This said, to make this possible and realizable, self and other, identity and politics would have to be reimagined in at once smaller and bigger,

135 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, “Down at the Cross,” in idem, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 314.

372  Hent de Vries deeper and broader, more elusive or even absolute terms than the concepts of thought, ideas of reason, and forms of practice they have, so far, implied and enabled. Like the proverbial sky, God is the limit; a provisional name and critical term beyond its role as a “searchlight” much—indeed, a whole world of meaning or, more than that, innumerable possible worlds—may yet be given, found, or invented. Yet to keep an open mind, heart, and place for all that, God’s as well as our individual no less than collective “inexistence” (which is, hence, divine and other) must be our point of departure and endpoint, for now. God’s—and, by way of formal extension and analogy, the self’s and the other’s—original and ultimate meaning as well as socio-historical, political force may, thereby, add up to virtually nothing or, at the very least, seem self-contradictory and self-refuting or self-defeating. But, precisely, such aporetic experience—or, if one likes, paradoxological exercise—provides the sole, sinuous, and tortuous path that can lead both forward and sideways, even backward, in any case, out of but then also back into world as we found it, each time dismantling the political and not merely institutional powers that be. For us to prepare for, witness, and assist in such reversal, conversion, and inversion and to do so effectively, requires more than traveling up and down an unending road, fundamentally questioning the very doxa of “being” and “Being” along the way (as we surely must). As Levinas once aptly put it, behind the “weight of Capital” there lies, first of all, the “weight of Being.”136 Yet the latter comes only into view once one considers its contrast rather than opposite, namely the “otherwise than Being [autrement qu’être],” which seems itself not a bad name for “inexistence,” divine and other. But then again, as Levinas would have been the first to agree, the latter is not envisioned, much less concretely encountered, in the abstract, with empty hands, but is, as it were, realized in material—we may call them economic—concrete practices alone. As much as the open question of divine existence or inexistence is a potential prime target for philosophical as well as theological, not to mention political, critique, as it, at least historically, represents a daunting pinnacle, a condensation and culmination of metaphysical thought, it is, paradoxically, also what allows one to criticize all too rigid metaphysical and onto-theological constructs and constrictions, in turn. Indeed, like Parsifal’s spear, in Wagner’s opera, or Baron Münchhausen’s gesture, in Adorno’s rendition, divine existence, not least when reconceived in terms of inexistence, may heal the very wounds it inflicted or, for that matter, pull us up out of the swamp all by itself again. As a consequence, our turning

136 For a discussion, see my “The Exercise of Paradoxological Thinking,” A Commentary on Eric L. Santner’s 2014 Tanner Lectures at Berkeley, in Eric L. Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject Matter of Political Economy, ed., Kevis Goodman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 204–233, 227.

Anti-Retractationes 373 away from and our turning toward its so-called inflection or, indeed, turning point are fundamentally part—or two sides of—one and the same operation and production of the divine as it comes into and goes out of existence. And with this operation or production, nothing compares: neither supra-naturalist nor naturalist, theist nor atheist accounts of revealed (i.e., historical, positive or established) religion; neither the reference to the as mono-theist God and His attributes, nor the pantheon of multiple lesser or (who knows?) greater gods, whether deemed transcendent or immanent or somewhere in-between. What counts, however, is that religion’s archive not only contains the countless samples and remnants of these traditional and modern “positions” and “dispositions,” but also remains immemorial in the precise sense that they are unfathomable—inexhaustible and unpredictable—in what they may yet have to offer, yet for now, must withhold (without reasons given). Intellectually, morally, and politically, in terms of their concepts and practices, affects and effects, religion’s reservoirs and repositories of meaning and use have remained largely intact and also mostly ignored. But then, with every attempt at reframing its apparatuses or crafting new ones, the global “economy” of its spiritual life in the localities and contexts we inhabit and sojourn through stands in permanent risk of distorting and betraying— that is, idolizing, blaspheming, presumably secularizing, and profaning—the source and resource at its very roots. Again, with respect to this predicament of all predication (discursive and other) not even apophatic silence, much less stoic resignation, provides a way out, once and for all. Negative metaphysics and its accompanying deep pragmatics can live with that, and act upon it, in strife and against all odds. Following the avenue of thinking and acting that the turn to religion and, in its footsteps, to “inexistence” and relatedly “unpower” has opened up, my central claim has been that the concept of divine inexistence, including the dialectical negation, call it suspension, of godlike “sovereignty” that comes with it, can serve as a compelling and exemplary philosophical and political model of an interpretative and heuristic nature. Strangely put, as an at once resolutely metaphysical and deeply pragmatic framework of thinking and acting, the recent emphasis on “inexistence” might reopen, reorient, and, from there on, further guide our current inquiries, mired in impasses, in the humanities and social sciences. Upon further reflection, this redirection of concepts and practices might not be without important analogies and resonances in the natural and cognitive sciences (including those of “life”). Suffice it to say that the question of existence around which so much of the history of philosophy and theology, notably of ontology and onto-theology, revolves is herewith resolutely bracketed, subjected, and, indeed, reduced to its epoché, as phenomenological method since Husserl’s classical formulation of its “conversion [Umkehr]” and “renewal [Erneuerung]” would have

374  Hent de Vries it. In an alternative register, we might say that its claims take on a merely hypothesized or possibilized form, that is, as a necessary idealization and counter-factual or grand “as if,” of sorts.137 Existence and its recommended substitute “inexistence” are “as-if” proposals, whose merits—that is, ontological or, as I prefer to say, metaphysical and pragmatic depth and weight, intensively and extensively considered—depend on spiritual discernment, esprit de finesse, judgment or tact, more than anything else. Richard Rorty spoke of “cultural politics” as a substitute for gratuitously ontic and ontological truth-claims.138 But, surely, much else besides and beyond “culture” and “politics” is here, fundamentally and ultimately, at stake. If this intuition or observation could be further fleshed out or given proper evidence, there might be virtually nothing that concerns us and ends up mattering most that is not touched—or even put into radical question—by “inexistence,” divine and other, our own to begin with. After all, inexistence’s putative “be-all and end-all” dimension or aspect, that is, its apparent totality or, rather, globality, recalls each and every of the essential traits and features—names and concepts, icons and economies, attributes and predicates, prayers and praises—of divine existence, classically or scholastically understood. All these, seen and set aright in light of the motif of “inexistence,” individually and jointly concern a nomination, appellation, or invocation that at least Western tradition, in one form or other, has always longed for in vain and that modernity, for the relatively brief period it has been around, has so far largely denied or ignored at its peril.

137 Cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealizations and Ideals (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019). 138 Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and Arguments for God,” in Nancy K. Frankenberry, ed., Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53–77.

Appendix List of Hent de Vries’s Works

Books Spiritual Exercises: Concepts and Practices. Under review, 350 pp. Miracles et métaphysique Six Leçons, Collection Chaire Métaphysique Étienne Gilson, trans. Lucy Bergeret (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 403 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Discours Palmarès Académie Française, February 2020, 12–13; Jean Greisch, Bulletin de Philosophie et Christianisme 2020/1 Tome 8, 118–120; Samuel Lacroix, Philosophie Magazine, January 9, 2019. Le miracle au cœur de l’ordinaire, trans. Marlène Jouan, Loumia Ferhat, and Gabriel Briex (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2019), 206 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Gildas Labey, Études. Revue de culture contemporaine, 2019/6, juin, 44–45. Kleine filosofie van het wonder [Philosophy of the Miracle: A Short Introduction] (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2015), 256 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Carel Peeters, Vrij Nederland, February 27, 2015; Christian van der Heijden, RKK.nl, March 20, 2015; Sebastien Valkenberg, Trouw, April 15, 2015; Gérard van Tillo, Edmund Husserl-Stichting, website, May 1, 2015; Rens Bod, NRC Handelsblad, June 26, 2015; Sjoerd van Hoorn, Volzin, June 2015; Leon Commandeur, iFilosofie # 14 Zomer 2015; Herman de Dijn, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 77 no. 3 (2015), 668–670; Stoker Wessel, NTT, vol. 71 no. 2 (201), 212–213. Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD and

376  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) (Expanded and completely revised edition of Theologie im pianissimo), 657 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: S. Wynands, Religion and Literature, vol. 37 no. 3 (2005), 117–120; J. K. A. Smith, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 43 no. 2 (2005); Jan Greven, Trouw, May 10, 2005; Josef Früchtl, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 17, 2005; Espen Hammer, Radical Philosophy, no. 134 (November–December 2005); JCRT, vol. 7 no. 1 (Winter 2005); Sandra Wynands, Religion & Literature, vol. 37 no. 3 (Autumn 2005), 117–120; Oona Eisenstadt Bulletin de la Société Americaine de Philosophie de Langue Française, vol. 15 no. 2 (Fall 2005), 94–99; Chistopher Craig Brittain, Studies in Religion, vol. 35 no. 1 (2006), 180; Colin Davis The Modern Language Review, vol. 101 no. 2 (April 2006), 508–509; Christopher J. Insole, Times Literary Supplement (April 21, 2006), 30; Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Religious Studies Review, vol. 32 no. 2 (2006), 113; Ryan Coyne, The Journal of Religion, vol. 87 pt. 1 (2007), 121–123; Jeffrey Dudiak, Philosophy in Review, vol. 26 no. 1 (2006), 21–22; Owen Anderson, The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 59 no. 4 (2006), 878–880; Benson Bruce Ellis, Christianity and Literature, vol. 56 no. 3 (2007), 52–523; William David Hart, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 75 no. 1 (2007), 179–182; Oliver Kozlarek, Signos Filosóficos, vol. IX, no. 17 (2007), 197–200; Nicolaas P. Barr Clingan, in The European Legacy, vol. 15 no. 5 (2010), 549–563; Narasimhananda, Swami, in Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India, vol. 120 no. 2 (2015), 247. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, second printing 2006), 398 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Leo D. Lefebure, Christian Century, vol. 119 no. 23 (2002), 45–46; Yoram Stein, Trouw, July 23, 2002; Kevin Hart, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, October 2002; Brian Schroeder, Ars disputandi, vol. 3 no. 1 (2003), 206–209; Willem A. de Pater, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 65 no. 2 (2003), 393; Theo Hettema, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 57 (2003), 174–175; Rem B. Edwards, Review of Metaphysics, vol. 57 no. 4 (2004), 833–834; Andrew J. McKenna, Modern Theology, vol. 19 no. 4 (2003), 573–575; Andrew McGettigan, Radical Philosophy, vol. 116 (2002), 43–46; Lasse Thomassen, Philosophy in Review, vol. 23 no. 2 (2003), 98–100; Arthur Bradley, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, The English Institute, vol. 11 (2003); C. K. Bellinger, Journal of the Academy of Religion, vol. 72 no. 1 (2004), 247–249; Andreas Peter, Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, vol. 136 (2004), 285–301; Thomas E. Reynolds, Journal of Religion, vol. 83 no. 3 (2003), 479–480; Leo D. Lebure, The Christian

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 377 Century, vol. 119 no. 23 (2002), 45–46; Ned Lukacher in: Choice vol. 40 no. 1; Peter Gilgen, JCRT, vol. 7 no. 1 (Winter 2005); Nadia Delicata, Religious Studies Review, vol. 35 no. 1 (2009). Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, second printing 2000), 440 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Karl Simms, Philosophy in Review (Comptes rendus philosophiques), vol. 2 no. 5 (2000), 337–339; Folia, February 4, 2000; C. W. Beals, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 40 no. 3 (2000), 401; Virginia Quartely Review, vol. 76 no. 2 (2000), 74; Danish Theological Periodical; Willem A. de Pater, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 62 no. 4 (2000), 798; Krisis: Tijdschrift voor empirische Filosofie, Dossier with Critical Responses from Anton van den Harskamp, Harry Kunneman, Herman Philipse, and Burcht Pranger (December 2000); Eddo Evink, Digibron. Kenniscentrum Gereformeerde Gezindte, December 1, 2000; Dossier with critical responses by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Casey Haskins, Joseph Margolis, and Monique Roelofs, Religion nach der Religionskritik, ed. Ludwig Nagl, Wiener Reihe, 2001; Martin Kavka, Modern Language Notes, vol. 116 no. 5 (December 2001), 1119–1123; Sjoerd de Jong, NRC Handelsblad (2001), 37; Susanne Hennecke, NTT, vol. 56, no. 1 (2002), 85–86; John P. Manoussakis, Religion & the Arts, vol. 6 no. 3 (2002), 375–382; Denis J. M. Bradley, Review of Metaphysics, vol. 55 no. 4 (2002), 852–854; Miguel Vatter, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5 no. 2 (2002), 294–296; Tyler Roberts, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 72 no. 1 (2004). Theologie im pianissimo & zwischen Rationalität und Dekonstruktion: Die Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas’ (Kampen: J. H. Kok; Peeters Publishers, Leuven, 1989), 323 pp.

Books in Translation Hebrew translation, with a New Preface, of Kleine Filosofie van het Wonder [Philosophy of the Miracle: A Short Introduction], trans. Irith Bouman and Eli Schonfeld (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishers, 2018), 289 pp. Religion et violence: Perspectives philosophiques de Kant à Derrida, trans. Marlène Jouan (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, March 2013), Collection Philosophie & Théologie, 529 pp. French translation, with a new Preface, of Religion and Violence. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: S. Decloux SJ, Nouvelle revue théologique, vol. 136 no. 1 (2014), 145–146; Emilio Brito, Revue

378  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works théologique de Louvain, vol. 45 no. 4 (2014), 624–625; Léonard Katchekpele, Revue des sciences religiueses, vol. 88 no. 4 (2014), 551–552; Richard Ongendangenda, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, vol. 90 no. 4 (2014), 784–786; Jean-Michel Maldamé, Bulletin de Littérature Ecclésiastique, vol. 116 no. 3 (2015), 171–174; Thibaut Delaruelle, Études théologiques et religiueses, vol. 91 no. 4 (2016), 733–734; Allard Maxime, Science et Esprit, vol. 69 no. 1 (2017), 107–108. Dat Ve’Alimout: Derrida Ve’ha Teologi Politi [Religion and Violence: Derrida and the Theologico-Political], Hebrew translation, with a new Preface, of an abridged version of Religion and Violence, trans. Guri Arad and Michal Ben-Naftali (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishers, October 2012), 285 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Liat Elkayam Haaretz, April 19, 2013. Bouryoku to akashi [Violence and Testimony], Japanese translation of chapter 2 of Religion and Violence with a new “Preface to the Japanese Translation,” translated by Takaaki Kawai (Tokyo: Getsuyosha Limited, May 2009). Din va Resaneh, Majmooe Maghalat [Religion and Media: Selected Essays] (Qom, Iran: Religion and Denominations Press [Entesharat e Adian va Mazaheb], 2009).

Edited Books Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World, Co-edited with Nils F. Schott (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), 240 pp. Selected Reviews: Jeffrey Hanson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2016.05.13; Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Essays in Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 2 (July 2016), 191–202. Paul and the Philosophers, co-editor, with Ward Blanton (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), 608 pp. Selected Reviews: James A. Cox, The Midwest Book Review, March 2014; Christophe Chalamet, Notre Dame Reviews, vol. 8, no. 34 (2014); Patrick Gray, Religious Studies Review, vol. 41 no. 3 (2015), 116–117; Geoffrey Turner, The Heythrop Journal, vol. 57 no. 4 (2016), 727–728. How the West Was Won: Essays on the Literary Imagination, the Canon and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, eds. Hent de Vries,

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 379 Willemien Otten, and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 420 pp. Religion – Beyond a Concept, the Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1006 pp. Selected Reviews: J. Jaeger, Choice, vol. 46 no. 2 (2008), 317–318; Matthew T. Powell, JCRT vol. 9 no. 3 (Fall 2008), 28–33; Victor Marsh, M/C Reviews, June 14, 2008; Joshua Steven Alvizu, Modern Language Notes, vol. 124 no. 3 (April 2009), 752–756; Jos Becker, Religie en Samenleving 4 (2009), 64–69; Stephen Bigger, Journal of Beliefs and Values, Summer 2010; Matthew Engelke, American Ethnologist, vol. 37 no. 2 (2010), 371–379; Carole Joseph Younan, Studies in Religion, vol. 42 no. 1 (2013), 91–96; Israel Selvanayagam, Implicit Religion, vol. 17 no. 1 (2014), 105–110. Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. Abridged Edition, eds. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New Delhi: Social Science Research Press, 2007). Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, eds. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006, 2007), 796 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Darren Jorgensen, The Bible and Critical Theory, vol. 3 no. 3 (2007), 521–523; Clayton Crockett, Political Theology, vol. 9 no. 1 (2008), 118–121. Carl Raschke, “The Religion of Politics: Concerning a Postmodern Political Theology ‘To Come.’” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, vol. 9 no. 1 (Winter 2008), 101–111; Ian Ward, The Journal of Church and State, vol. 50 no. 1 (Winter 2008), 150–151; Matthew Chrulew, Colloquy, vol. 17 (2009), 102–107; Amos Yong, Pneuma, vol. 31 no. 1 (2009), 157–158; Ton Groenweg, “Voluminous Questions,” Krisis, no. 1 (2009), 104–106; Mia L. McIver, in Christianity and Literature, vol. 58 no. 2 (2009); Charles Hirschkind, Social Anthropology, vol. 19 no. 1 (2011), 90–102; Theo W. A. de Wit, “Splijtstof rond macht en heil: Hedendaagse politieke theologie in meervoud,’ Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 73 (2011), 109–145; John Hewson, Implicit Religion, vol. 14 no. 3 (2011), 370–375. Religion and Media, eds. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 672 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Hillary Warren, Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 1 no. 2 (2002), 135–136; H. J. Adriaanse, NTT, vol. 56 no. 4 (2002), 356–357; Joel Freeman, MEDIENwissenschaft, vol. 19 no. 4 (2002), 356–357; Eleanor Block and Gary R. Edgerton,

380  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works Communication Booknotes Quarterly, vol. 33 no. 4 (2002), 263–266; James McDonnell, Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 18 no. 3 (2003), 404–407; Günther Thomas, Journal of Religion, vol. 83 no. 3 (2003), 510–512; Willem A. de Pater, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 65 no. 2 (2003), 393; Melissa Conory, JCRT, vol. 5 no. 2 (April 2004), 143–146; Debbora Battaglia, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 77 no. 1 (Winter 2004), 145–151; Arthur Bradley, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, The English Institute, vol. 11 (2003); Jeremy Stolow, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 22 no. 4 (2005), 119–145; Charles Hirschkind, Social Anthropology, vol. 19 no. 1 (2011), 90–102. Post-Theism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition, eds. Hent de Vries, Henri A. Krop, and Arie L. Molendijk (Leuven: Peeters Publishing House, 2000), 581 pp. Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, eds. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 344 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Choice, vol. 36 no. 1 (1998); Edward B. Rackley, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 34 no. 1 (2001), 95–102; Kok Chor Tan, Philosophy in Review (Comptes rendus philosophiques), vol. 19 no. 1 (1999), 9–11; C. Geulen, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 3 no. 1 (2000), 125–127; J. W. Murphy, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 22 no. 3 (2001), 323–324. Enlightenments: Encounters between Critical Theory and Recent French Thought, eds. Hent de Vries and Harry Kunneman (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishers, 1993), 405 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Volker Kaiser, Modern Language Notes, vol. 109 no. 3 (April 1994), 547–456; C. E. M. Struyker Boudier, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 57 no. 1 (1995), 171; Elliot M. Levine, History of European Ideas, vol. 21 no. 3 (May 1995), 439–445; H. Wattieux, Revue Théologique de Louvain, vol. 28 no. 1 (1997), 124–125. Die Aktualität der “Dialektik der Aufklärung”: Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, eds. Hent de Vries and Harry Kunneman (Frankfurt and New York, NY: Campus Verlag, 1989), 235 pp. Selected Reviews and Book Notices: Neue Zürcher Zeitung; Frederik van Gelder, “Die Dialektik der Aufklärung in den Niederlanden” In: Eva-Maria Ziege/Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Hrsg.), Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft: 70 Jahre Dialektik der Aufklärung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018).

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 381 The Future of the Religious Past (5 vols.), General Editor of a Mini-Series in Five Volumes: 1 Religion: Beyond a Concept, the Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1006 pp. 2 Meerten B. ter Borg and Jan Willem van Henten, eds., Powers: Religion as a Social and Spiritual Force, The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 2 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), 264 pp. 3 Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, eds., Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, the Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 3 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), 496 pp. 4 Ernst van den Hemel and Asja Szafraniec, eds., Words: Religious Language Matters, the Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 4 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016), 624 pp. 5 Martin van Bruinessen, Anne-Marie Korte, and Michiel Leezenberg, eds., Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice, the Future of the Religious Past, Vol. 5 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2022), 688 pp..

Articles and Chapters “Adorno and Phenomenology,” in Martin Shuster and Henry Pickford, eds., Oxford Handbook of Theodor W. Adorno, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2023. “Divine Economy: Notes on the Religious Apparatus,” in Glenn Dynner, Susannah Heschel, and Shaul Magid, eds., New Paths: A Festschrift in honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson (Pittsburgh: Purdue University Press, 2023). “‘Nobody’s Perfect’: Moral Imperfectionism in Ozark,” in Sandra Laugier and David LaRocca, eds., Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind (University of Exeter Press, forthcoming 2022).” Die erste Mediatisierung: Oikonomia und Apparatus in Religion und Theologie,” in Dieter Mersch and Michael Mayer, eds., Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Vol. 7, special issue on Mediality, Theology, Religion, ed. by Johannes Bennke and Virgil Brower (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 23-61. “The Antinomy of Death: Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on Utopia and Hope,” in Angelaki, vol. 27, no. 1 (2022) 110-127, special issue on Death, ed. Ruth Ronen and Rona Cohen. “The Miracle of the Eucharist and the Mysticism of the Political Body,” in Regina Schwartz and Patrick McGrath, eds., On Sacramental Poetics (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2021), 159–172. “On the ‘Spiritual’ in Aesthetic Experience: Or, the ‘Non-Factual in Facticity,’” in New German Critique, 143, vol. 48. no. 2 (2021), 43–61. Special issue on Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Peter Gordon. “Jacques Derrida et le prix Theodor W. Adorno de la ville de Francfort,” in Sara Guindani and Alexis Nuselovici, eds., Jacques Derrida, la

382  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works dissemination à l’oeuvre (Paris: Éditions de la Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2021), 191–211. “Max Horkheimer: Theologia occulta,” in Philippe Capelle-Dumont and Danielle Cohen-Levinas, eds., Christianisme et judaïsme (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2020), 206–211. “Theodor W. Adorno: Theologia minima,” in Philippe Capelle-Dumont and Danielle Cohen-Levinas, eds., Christianisme et judaïsme (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2020), 263–270. “Theologia paradoxa, theologia crucis: Heidegger’s Luther,” in Bruce L. McCormack and Heinrich Assel, eds., Luther, Barth, and Movements of Theological Renewal (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), 151–171. “Lévinas, lo spinozismo e il significato teologico-politico della scrittura,” in Carlo Altini, ed., La fortuna di Spinoza in età moderna e contemporanea. Vol. II. Tra Ottocento e Novecento (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2020), 335–354. “Reverse Breakthrough: The Dutch Connection,” Special Dossier on “The Future of the Religious Party,” in SAIS Review of International Affairs, vol. 17, no. 1S, Supplement (2017), 89–103. “Un pragmatisme profond,” in Marc Goldschmit and Elisabeth Rigal, eds., Jacques Derrida, la philosophie hors de ses gonds (Paris: T. E. R. & Centre National du Livre, 2017), 225–256. “Das Wunder des tanzenden Balls. Walter Benjamins mechanischer Mystizismus,” trans. Caroline Sauter, in Kyung-Ho Cha, ed., Aura und Experiment. Naturwissenschaft und Technik bei Walter Benjamin (Vienna and Berlin: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2017), 135–155. “Whitman und Wunder,” in Natascha Adamowski and Nicole Gess, eds., Archäologie der Spezialeffekte (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 61–87. “Jacques Derrida and the Theodor W. Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt,” in Special Dossier on What Is a Prize?, Dominik Zechner, ed., Modern Language Notes, vol. 131, no. 5 (December 2016), 1276–1294. “Une ‘nouvelle conception du miracle’ – Partie I. Sari Nusseibeh, al-Ghazali, Avicenne, et l’idée de la foi laïque,” in Aline Alterman, Henri Cohen-Solal, and Lucy Nusseibeh, eds., Une philosophie à l’épreuve de paix. Penser le conflit israélo-palestinien (Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2016), 109–137. “Une ‘nouvelle conception du miracle’ – Partie II. Sari Nusseibeh, le conflit israélo-palestinien et la politique de la foi laïque,” in Aline Alterman, Henri Cohen-Solal, and Lucy Nusseibeh, eds., Une philosophie à l’épreuve de paix. Penser le conflit israélo-palestinien (Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2016), 169–194. “Prefatory Note,” Special Dossier on Practices of the Ordinary, in Modern Language Notes, vol. 130 no. 5 (December 2015), v–vi. “The Exercise of Paradoxological Thinking,” A Commentary on Eric L. Santner’s 2014 Tanner Lectures at Berkeley, in Santner, Kevin Goodman, ed., The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject Matter of Political Economy (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), 204–233.

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 383 “Preface” and “Human Alert: Concepts and Practices of Love and Forgiveness,” with Nils F. Schott, in Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World. Co-edited with Nils F. Schott (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), vii–ix, 1–23. “The Passionate Utterance of Love,” in Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World. Co-edited with Nils F. Schott (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), 191–234. “Invocatio Dei, la discipline de la tolérance, et la vérité de la vérité. J. H. H. Weiler et la Constitution de l’Europe,” special issue on “Les religions et la question de la vérité,” Yves Charles Zarka and Philippe Capelle, eds., Revue Cités, no. 62 (2015), 27–61. “Chapitres à écrire: Jacques Derrida et la méditation sceptique,” in (In)actualités de Derrida, Collège international de Philosophie, Rue Descartes, 2014/3 – no. 82, 154–157. “‘Et Iterum de Deo’: Jacques Derrida and the Tradition of Divine Names,” in Edward Baring and Peter E. Gordon, eds., The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015), 13–38. “‘et iterum de Deo’: Jacques Derrida et la tradition des noms divins,” in Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Ginette Michaud, eds., Appels de Derrida, Précédé d’un texte de Jacques Derrida, “Justices” (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2014), 189–228. “Debemos (no) querir decir lo que decimos? Seriedad y sinceridad en la obra de J. L. Austin y S. Cavell,” in David Pérez Chico and Alicia García, eds., Perfeccionismo: Entre la ética política y la autonomía personal (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2014), 195–231. Japanese translation of “The Kierkegaardian Moment: Dialectical Theology and Its Aftermath,” trans. Takaaki Kawai, in Gendai-Shiso (現代思想 or Contemporary Thought) (Tokyo: Seidosha Publishers, 2014), 192–221. “The Kierkegaardian Moment: Dialectical Theology and Its Aftermath,” Modern Language Notes vol. 128.5 (December 2013), 1083–1114. “Hypertheology,” in Richard J. Lane, ed., Global Literary Theory: An Anthology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 786–795. “Global Religion and the Post-Secular Challenge: Habermas’s Recent Writings and the Case for Deep Pragmatism,” in Jonathan van Antwerpen, Craig Calhoun, and Eduardo Mendietta, eds., Habermas and Religion (New York, NY: Social Science Research Council and Polity Press, 2013), 203–229. “A Religious Canon for Europe? Policy, Education, and the Post-Secular Challenge,” Social Research, vol. 80 no. 2 (Spring 2013), 203–232, special issue on “Political Theology,” ed. Richard J. Bernstein. “Inverse versus Dialectical Theology: The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith,” in Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), 466–511. “A Religious Canon for Europe? Policy, Education, and the PostSecular Challenge,” in Gracienne Lauwers, Jan de Groof, and Paul de Hert, eds., Islam in State-Funded Schools: Religion and the Public

384  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works Law Framework (Online publication available in Itunes Store, 2012, http://itunes.apple.com/be/artist/gracienne-lauwers/id502789716?mt=11). “Phenomenal Violence,” in Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 496–520. “‘Simple Dreams, Small Miracles’: The Obama Phenomenon,” Philip S. Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012), 105–134. “Stanley Cavell on St. Paul,” Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature Issue, vol. 126 no. 5 (December 2011), 979–993. “‘A Greatest Miracle’: Stanley Cavell, Moral Perfectionism and the Ascent into the Ordinary,” Modern Theology, vol. 27 no. 3 (July 2011), 462–477. “Causes for Wonder: Religion, Media, and the Miraculous,” in Boris Groys and Peter Weibel, eds., Medium Religion: Faith, Geopolitics, Art (Karlsruhe and Köln: ZKM Center for Art and Media & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011), 106–117. “Whitman’s Miracles,” in Theo Hettema, ed., Geloof in poëzie (Amsterdam: Olive Press, 2011), 121–146. “Jacques Derrida (1930–2004): Différence et messianisme,” trans. Marlène Jouan, in Philippe Capelle, ed., Philosophie et théologie à l’époque moderne, Vol. IV (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2011), 313–322. “Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): Matérialisme et métaphysique de l’expérience spirituelle,” trans. Marlène Jouan, in Philippe Capelle, ed., Philosophie et théologie à l’époque moderne, Vol. IV (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2011), 45–56. “A Vocation for the Humanities: Honoring Richard Macksey,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 125 no. 5 (2010), 1003–1009. “The Disorientation and the De-Europeanization of the West (Seiyou no Shinro no Soushitsu/Touzen no Shuen to Datsu-Youroppa-ka),” in Naoki Sakai and Jun’ichi Isomae, eds., Overcoming Modernity and the Kyoto School: Modernity, Empire and Universality (Kindai no Choukoku to Kyoto-gakuha: Kindaisei, Teikoku and Fuhensei) (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2010), 265–320. “Müssen wir (nicht) meinen, was wir sagen? Ernsthaftigkeit und Aufrichtigkeit bei J. L. Austin und Stanley Cavell,” in Katrin Thiele and Katrin Trüstedt, eds., Happy Days: Lebenswissen nach Cavell (München: Fink, 2010), 203–233. “The Deep Conditions of Secularity,” Modern Theology, vol. 26, no 3 (July 2010), 382–403. “Fast Forward, Or: The Theologico-Political Event in Quick Motion (Miracles, Media, and Multitudes in St. Augustine),” in Willemien Otten, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Hent de Vries, eds., How the West Was Won: Essays on the Literary Imagination, the Canon and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 255–280. “Philosophia ancilla theologiae: Allegory and Ascension in Philo’s On Mating with the Preliminary Studies (De congressu quaerendae eruditionis

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 385 gratia),” trans. Jack Ben-Levi, The Bible and Critical Theory, vol. 5 no. 3 (November 2009), 41.1–41.19. “Naar een dieper pragmatisme: de actualiteit van de geesteswetenschappen in de voorbereiding & uitvoering van beleid,” Intelligent Verbinden: Liber amicorum ter gelegenheid van het afscheid van Wim van de Donk als voorzitter van de WRR (Den Haag: Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 2009), 121–130. “Testing Existence, Exacting Thought: Reading Ronell with Deleuze,” in Diane Davis, ed., Ronell: Critical Responses (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 164–185. “Tiefendimension von Säkularität,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 57 no. 2 (2009), 301–318. “Preface to the Japanese Edition,” trans. Takaaki Kawai, in Violence and Testimony: Kierkegaardian Meditations (Tokyo: Getsuyosha Limited, 2009). “‘The Miracle of Love’ and the Turn to Democracy,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 8 no. 3 (2009), 237–290. “Must We (NOT) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in the Work of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell,” in Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smits, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 90–118. “The Niebuhr Connection: Obama’s Deep Pragmatism,” Invited Contribution to The Immanent Frame, June 18, 2009. “A Genuine ‘Theologico-Political’ Phenomenon,” Invited Contribution to The Immanent Frame, June 16, 2009. “Naïve and Reflective Faiths,” Invited Contribution to The Immanent Frame, December 20, 2008. “The ‘Option’ of Unbelief,” Invited Contribution to The Immanent Frame, December 19, 2008. “Derrida, Jacques,” trans. Nils F. Schott, in Stefan Gosepath, Wilfried Hinsch, and Beate Rössler, eds., Handbuch der Politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie, Vol. 1 (Berlin and New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 212–213. “Theologie, politische,” trans. Nils F. Schott, in Stefan Gosepath, Wilfried Hinsch, and Beate Rössler, eds., Handbuch der Politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie, Vol. 2 (Berlin and New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 1326–1330. “Introduction: Why Still ‘Religion’?” in Hent de Vries, ed., Religion – Beyond A Concept (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1–98. “Le miracle au centre de l’ordinaire: le théologique-politique dans le “moral perfectionism” nord-américain,” in Philippe Capelle, ed., Dieu et la cité: le statut contemporain du théologico-politique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2008), 185–200. “Ordinary Words,” in Aris Fioretos and Urs Engeler, eds., Babel: Festschrift for Werner Hamacher (Berlin, 2009), 102–110. “Dialektik, Dekonstruktion und Wahrheit – Oder: Die Moral des Skeptizismus bei Adorno, Derrida und Cavell,” in Eva L. Waniek and Erik

386  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works M. Vogt, eds., Derrida und Adorno. Zur Aktualität von Dekonstruktion und Frankfurter Schule (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2008), 217–231. “La religion globale, la théologie minimale,” in René Major, ed., Derrida pour les temps à venir (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2007), 199–221. “Levinas, Spinoza et le sens théologico-politique de l’écriture,” in Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Shmuel Trigano, eds., Levinas et les théologies, vol. 42 of Pardès (Paris: Éditions in Press, 2007), 79–94. “The Shibboleth Effect: On Reading Paul Celan,” in Bettina Bergo and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judeities (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007), 175–213. “Instances,” trans. Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Des Confessions: Jacques Derrida-Saint Augustin (Paris: Stock, 2006), 256–276. “On Obligation: Lyotard and Levinas,” in Victor E. Taylor and Gregg Lambert, eds., Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. III (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 73–100. “From ‘Ghost in the Machine’ to ‘Spiritual Automaton’: Philosophical Meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 60 nos. 1–3 (December 2006), 77–97. “Religion and Media: A Political Theological Problem,” in W. B. H. J. van de Donk, A. P. Jonkers, G. J. Kronjee, and R. J. J. M. Plum, eds., Geloven in het publieke domein: Verkenningen van een dubbele transformatie (Den Haag, Amsterdam: WRR/Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 447–471. “Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in the Post-Secular World (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1–88. “Spinoza, Levinas, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture,” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in the Post-Secular World (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006), 232–248. “Im Umkreis des Theologisch-Politischen,” in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judentümer: Fragen für Jacques Derrida (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2006), 257–290. Hebrew translation of “From Ghost in the Machine to Spiritual Automaton: Philosophical Mediation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas,” in Amir Horowitz, Ora Lmor, Ram Ben-Shalom, and Avriel Bar-Levav, eds., The Past and the Beyond: Studies in History and Philosophy Presented to Elazar Weinryb (Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel, 2006), 487–519. “Augenblicke. Zeit-Weisen von Augustinus bis Derrida und Lyotard,” in Nikolaus Müller-Schöll and Saskia Reither, eds., Aisthesis. Zur Erfahrung von Zeit, Raum, Text und Kunst (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2005), 141–162. “On General and Divine Economy: Talal Asad’s Genealogy of the Secular & Emmanuel Levinas’s Critique of Capitalism, Colonialism, and Money,”

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 387 in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds., Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 113–133. “The Two Sources of the ‘Theological Machine’: Jacques Derrida and Henri Bergson on Religion, Technicity, War, and Terror,” in Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Theology and the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 366–389. “Vom ‘Ghost in the machine’ zum ‘geistigen Automaten’: Philosophische Meditation bei Wittgenstein, Cavell und Lévinas,” trans. Nils F. Schott, in Eva Horn, Christoph Menke, Bettine Menke, eds., Literatur als Philosophie – Philosophie als Literatur (Munich: Fink, 2005), 385–412. “Orientalism,” in Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York, NY, Macmillan, 2005), 6881–6885. “Instances: Temporal Modes from Augustine to Derrida and Lyotard,” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 68–88, with “Response by Jacques Derrida,” ibid., 88–90. “Les deux sources de la ‘machine théologique’: Une note sur Derrida et Bergson,” Cahiers de l’Herne (Paris: 2004), 255–260. “Derrida et l’éthique: une pensée hospitalière,” Europe, May 2004, 234–256. “Instances: Levinas on Art and Truth,” in Jeremiah Hackett and Jerald Wallulis, eds., Philosophy of Religion for a New Century: Essays in Honor of Eugene Thomas Long (Dordrecht, Boston, MA, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 187–210. “Die andere Theologie: Adorno über begriffliche Idolatrie,” in Florian Uhl and Artur R. Boelderl, eds., Die Sprachen der Religion: Schriften der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Religionsphilosophie 4 (Berlin: Parerga, 2003), 257–292. “Autour du théologico-politique,” in Joseph Cohen and Raphael ZaguryOrly, eds., Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 277–301. “‘The Other Theology’: Adorno on Conceptual Idolatry,” Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 70 no. 3 (2002), 669–790. “Horror Religiosus: Response to Nicholas Wolterstorff, Joseph Margolis, and Casey Haskins,” in Ludwig Nagl, ed., Religion nach der Religionskritik (Berlin and Vienna: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 301–314. “Levinas ‘christlich gelesen’?” in Josef Wohlmuth, ed., Phänomenologie, Differenz, Transzendenz: Sprachfigurationen “jüdisch” und “christlich” gelesen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 67–92. “Lapsus absolu: ‘Dichtung’ und ‘Wahrheit’ in Maurice Blanchots L’instant de ma mort,” in Andrea Kern and Ruth Sonderegger, eds., Falsche Gegensätze: Zeitgenössische Positionen zur philosophischen Ästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 176–208.

388  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works “Of Miracles and Special Effects,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion vol. 50 nos 1–3 (2001), 41–56. “Derrida and Ethics: Hospitable Thought,” in Thomas Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 172–192. “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3–42. “Levinas über Kunst und Wahrheit,” in Hans-Dieter Gondek and Burkhard Liebsch, eds., Vernunft im Zeichen des Fremden: Zur Philosophie von Bernhard Waldenfels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 99–129. “Gewalt und Bezeugung,” in Ursula Erzgräber and Alfred Hirsch, eds., Sprache und Gewalt (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 2001), 159–190. “De terugkeer van ‘religie’ en de taak van de filosofie,” dossier on Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Krisis: Tijdschrift voor Empirische Filosofie, vol. 1 no. 4 (2000), 6–11. “Horror Religiosus,” dossier on Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Krisis: Tijdschrift voor Empirische Filosofie, vol. 1 no. 4 (2000), 41–53. “The Theology of the Sign and the Sign of Theology,” in Ilse N. Bulfhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2000), 166–194. “Transnihilistic Propositions: A Debate between Thierry de Duve and Hent de Vries,” ASCA Yearbook 1999 (Amsterdam: ASCA, 2000), 131–151. “Philosophy and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Henri A. Krop, Arie L. Molendijk, and Hent de Vries, eds., Post-Theism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Leuven: Peeters Publishing House, 2000), 537–552. “Winke: Divine Topoi in Nancy, Hölderlin, Heidegger,” in Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), 94–120. “Deconstruction and America,” in Ieme van der Poel, Sophie Bertho, and T. Hoenselaars, eds., Traveling Theory: France and the United States (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP/London: Associated UP, 1999), 72–98. “Confessions – la religion,” in Marie-Louise Mallet, ed., L’animal autobiographique. Autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilee, 1999), 493–513. “Die Bezeugung des Anderen. Von Temps et récit zu Soi-même comme un autre,” in Burkhard Liebsch, ed., Hermeneutik des Selbst – Im Zeichen des Anderen. Zur Philosophie Paul Ricoeurs (Freiburg: Alber, 1999), 202–223. “De Universiteit als kosmopolis: Martha Nussbaums ‘Cultivating Humanity,’” Tijdschrift voor Literatuurwetenschap vol. 3 (1998), 210–222. “In Media Res: The Turn to Religion,” published in English, French, German, and Dutch, Theaterschrift, no. 13 (1998), 16–33.

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 389 “Stanley Cavell: Filosoof van het gewone,” Introduction to Dit nieuwe maar onbereikbare America. Emerson na Wittgenstein (trans. by Frans van Zetten of Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America) (Amsterdam: Parrèsia, 1998), 7–27. “Formal Indications,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 113 no. 3 (April 1998), 635–688. “Levinas,” in Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder, eds., A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 245–255. “‘Lapsus absolu’: Some Remarks on Maurice Blanchot’s l’Instant de ma mort,” Yale French Studies vol. 93 (1998), 30–59. “On Obligation: Lyotard and Levinas,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vols. 20/21 nos. 1/2 (1998), 83–112. “Violence and Testimony. On Sacrificing Sacrifice,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity and Self-determination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 14–43. With Samuel Weber: “Introduction,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity and Self-determination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–13. “Cultural Analysis – On Theorizing the Present,” ASCA Brief Yearbook (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishers, 1996), 3–6. “Mimesis, Truth, Politics,” ASCA Brief-Yearbook ASCA Brief Yearbook (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishers, 1996), 65–68. “Attestation du temps et de l’autre. De Temps et récit à Soi-même comme un autre,” in Jean Greisch, ed., Paul Ricoeur – L’herméneutique à l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Beauchesne, 1995), 21–42. “Adieu, à Dieu, A-dieu. Retracing a Levinasian Figure,” in Adriaan Peperzak, ed., Ethics as First Philosophy (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 275–289. “Sei gerecht! Lyotard over de verplichting,” in Harry Kunneman and Richard Brons, eds., Lyotard lezen: Ethiek, onmenselijkheid en sensibiliteit (Meppel: Boom, 1995), 32–49. “Theotopographies: Nancy, Hölderlin, Heidegger,” Modern Language Notes vol. 109 (1994), 445–477. “Ellipses of Enlightenment: Derrida and Kant,” in Harry Kunneman and Hent de Vries, eds., Enlightenments. Encounters between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993), 211–256. “Das Schibboleth der Ethik. Derrida und Celan,” in Michael Wetzel and Jean-Michel Rabaté, eds., Ethik der Gabe. Denken nach Jacques Derrida (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 57–80. “Le Schibboleth de l’éthique: Derrida avec Celan,” in Michael Wetzel and Jean-Michel Rabaté, eds., L’éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, Colloque de Royaumont décembre 1990 (Paris: MétailiéTransition/Seuil, 1992), 212–238. “Anti-Babel: The ‘Mystical Postulate’ in Benjamin, de Certeau and Derrida,” Modern Language Notes vol. 107 (1992), 441–477.

390  Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works “Zum Begriff der Allegorie in Schopenhauers Religionsphilosophie,” in Wolfgang Schirmacher, ed., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und die Kunst, Schopenhauer-Studien vol. 4 (1991), 187–197. “Theologie in pianissimo: de afnemende en de blijvende verstaanbaarheid van het spreken over God,” in H. J. Adriaanse and H. A. Krop, eds., Theologie en rationaliteit: Godsdienstwijsgerige bijdragen (Kampen: Kok, 1988), 260–302. “Die Dialektik der Aufklärung und die Tugenden der Vernunftskepsis: Versuch einer dekonstruktiven Lektüre ihrer subjektphilosophischen Züge,” in Haary Kunneman and Hent de Vries, eds., Die Aktualität der ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung: Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne (Frankfurt and New York, NY: Campus, 1989), 183–209. With Harry Kunneman: “Einleitung,” in Haary Kunneman and Hent de Vries, eds., Die Aktualität der ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung: Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne (Frankfurt and New York, NY: Campus, 1989), 9–14. “Theologie en moderniteit, rationaliteit en scepsis,” Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift vol. 42 (1988), 21–41. “Philosophia ancilla theologiae bij Philo van Alexandrië, Over de verhouding van de propaedeutische disciplines, de filosofie en de wijsheid in Philo’s traktaat, De congressu eruditionis gratia,” Stoicheia vol. 3 (1987), 27–52. “Theologie als allegorie, Over de status van de joodse gedachtenmotieven in het werk van Walter Benjamin,” in H. J. Heering, ed., Vier joodse denkers in de twintigste eeuw, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Fackenheim, Levinas (Kampen: Kok, 1987), 22–51. “Westerse rationaliteit en cynisme, sceptische argumenten voor het politieke realisme,” in Meerten B. ter Borg and Lammert Leertouwer, eds., Het neorealisme in de politiek: Theologisch beschouwd (Baarn: Ambo, 1987), 109–127. “Moralität und Sittlichkeit. Zu Adornos Hegelkritik,” in H. Kimmerle, W. Lefèvre, and R. W. Meyer, eds., Hegel-Jahrbuch (1988), 300–307. “De godsdienstwijsgerige relevantie van Adorno’s ‘Meditationen zur Metaphysik’. Prolegomena voor een confrontatie met het werk van Levinas,” in C. van Eck and H. Philipse, eds., Praesidium libertatis, Filosofische Reeks vol. 13 (1985), 92–98.

Book Reviews “In der Gewalt des theologisch-politischen Dilemmas,” Review of Heinrich Meier, Das theologisch-politische Problem. Zum Thema von Leo Strauss, trans. Nils F. Schott (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 52 no. 5 (2004), 823–829. Review of R. J. Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School: From Universal Pragmatic to Political Theology (Berlin, New York, NY, Amsterdam: 1985), Bijdragen vol. 4 (1988), 468–470.

Bibliography of Hent de Vries’s Works 391 Review of R. A. Cohen, Face to Face with Levinas (New York, NY: 1986), Bijdragen vol. 3 (1988), 348–350.

Translation Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin und wir,” trans. Hent de Vries and Karin Schulze, Zeitkritik nach Heidegger, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 1989), 85–88.

Interviews “Gesprek met een wonderfilosoof,” http://www.rkk.nl/nieuws/gesprek_ met_een_wonderfilosoof Contribution to Unpacking Derrida’s Library (screening October 10, 2014, from 5:15 to 6:15 pm at Princeton University), a video featuring comments by Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Hent de Vries, Avital Ronell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Samuel Weber (122 minutes) https:// slought.org/resources/unpacking_derrida “No Religion without Violence, No Violence without Religion,” An Interview with Liat Elkayam Haaretz, April 19, 2013. “Minimal Difference with Maximal Import: ‘Deep Pragmatism’ and Global Religion. An Interview with Hent de Vries,” by Victor Taylor, Journal for Cultural and Religion Theory (JCRT), vol. 11 no. 3 (2011), 1–19. “Radikaalimystiikka ja ihmeen politiikka—Haastattelussa Hent de Vries,” Niin & Näin vol. 3 (2009), 76–78. “Religie is nooit weggeweest,” Interview with Filosofie Magazine, May 22, 2009. Interviewed by Gary Shapiro for an article on Emmanuel Levinas, “A Rising French Philosopher,” in The New York Sun, June 2, 2006. Trouw, June 3, 2005. NRC Handelsblad, June 6, 2001.

Mobile Apps Advisor of the production team of Jumping Pages Inc., led by its founder and director Rania Ajami, for the award winning iPad and mobile phone app “Maggie and her Magical Glasses.” ( h t t p : / / w w w. p a r e n t s - c h o i c e . o r g / p r o d u c t . c f m ? p r o d u c t _ i d = 32815&StepNum=1&award=aw)

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by notes. Abbasid Caliphate 24n15 Abelard 28, 44 Abrahamic religions 297, 343, 364 Abraham’s sacrifice 10–11 absolute power 36, 38–39, 47, 301, 312n38 absolute reality 67n80 absolutus 39n13 abstract intellectuality 52 academic theology 18–25, 28–33; Christian theology in universities 23–25, 28–30; development of Greco-Arabic sciences and philosophies 30–32; and geographical location of the universities 21–23; history 18–21; marginality of theology in universities 33 Acute Melancholy and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (Hollywood) 272n3 Àdieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida) 189 Ad martyras (To the martyrs) 104n26 Admiranda methodus (Schook) 313 Adorno, Theodor 1, 8, 77–78, 233–254, 273n4, 278n8, 289, 367, 372; Aesthetic Theory 235, 241–242, 244; on concept of divine inexistence 349; Drei Studien zu Hegel 327–329; on hope and God 316–320; Negative Dialectics 324–326, 336; on “non-concept” 338–339; spiritual experience 291–292 aesthetic secularization 236–241 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 235, 241–242, 244

affirmation: Derrida on 82–90; forms of 90 Agamben, Giorgio 47, 104–105, 323, 341, 342 Akhenaten (Egyptian pharaoh) 50–51 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 245 Alexander of Aphrodisias 113–115, 119, 122 Alighieri, Dante 284 alterity 75, 293 Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) 253 Anabaptist churches 93 anamorphosis 57n28 Angela of Foligno 157 anhypothetical principle 361, 362 aniconism 73, 77 animation 263 Anselm of Canterbury 207, 319, 337 Anthropology (Kant) 187 anthropomorphism 54, 76 “Anti-Babel” 37 antinomies 70 anti-retractationes (anti-retractions): call to total recall 281–283; comparison 359–366; complementary quotes 321–324; contingency 356–358, 363; difficulties 271–275, 335–336; discussions 308–310; dual aspect seeing 329–330; dual vision and ditto action 289–293; eternal God 356–358; existence 305–308, 358–359; God, self-contradictory notion 316–320; impossible phenomenon 332–335; incongruence and distance 336–339; inexistence

Index 393 305–315, 341–344; micrology to macrology 326–329; and negative metaphysics, deep pragmatism 299–302; negative occasionalism 366–368; overview 270–271; philosophy’s turn 275–279; predicament of predication 279–281; question of God 344–346; religion, concept of 293–298; riposte 346–351; selfinflicted and healing wounds 324–326; tertium datur to Tsimtsum 352, 353–356; trilogy 302–304; triune turning 283–289; truth making 339–341 Apel, Karl-Otto 279 aphtonia 44 Apocalypses of Truth (Vioulac) 347n89 apocalypticism 280n10, 347n89, 349 apokatastasis pantoon 212 apology of inexistence 341–344 apophaticism 72–79 apophatic minimalism 292n21 apophatic operation 284 apophatic theologies 79 apparatus, defined 277 Aquinas, Thomas 19n3, 25, 200–201; on power of being 40–41 Arabic sciences and philosophies, theology absorption of 23–25, 28–30 Archeology of Power (Archéologie de la puissance, Aubry) 311n38 archive: defined 277; notion of 197–198; religious 299, 302, 304n30, 310, 373; virtual 280, 283, 288, 296n25, 299, 301, 308, 310, 322 Arendt, Hannah 108, 125n9, 330n61, 351–352n97 Aristotle 24, 36, 44–46, 113, 116, 123, 205, 312n38, 313n38, 357n113, 361 art: political 251, 254, 265; as secular theology 241–247; violence in 249, 257 art as counter-text: circular blindness 256–260; miracles 260–262, 266– 268; musings on common ground 249–256; painted words image and philosophize 262–266; viewing in detail 260–262 The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Christianity 297n25 Asad, Talal 294 ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) 253

Aten religion 50–51 atheism 90, 325, 326, 333, 350, 351, 357, 369, 370; and idolatry 53; radical 324; see also inexistence of God Atheism (Kojève) 326 Atlan, Henri 79 attentiveness 136–137, 146–147; see also miracles Aubry, Gwenaëlle 11, 311n38, 312n38, 313n38 Augustianisme et théologie moderne (de Lubac) 207 Augustine, St. 97–98, 129–130, 196, 204, 206–207, 210, 211, 304, 313n38 aura, dissolution of 237, 239, 244 Aurelius, Marcus 219, 222 Austin, John 255 Autobiogriffures: Du chat Murr d’Hoffman (Kofman) 188, 191–192 Averroes 24, 25, 28, 29, 31 Avicenna 24, 28, 330n61; on miracles 108–128 Bacon, Roger 28, 204 Badiou, Alain 315, 335, 342–343, 344, 346, 347, 350, 361n119, 369 Baius 207, 212, 213 Bal, Mieke 15, 303n29, 330n61 Baldwin, James 371 Balibar, Étienne 345n86 Balzac, Honoré de 284n14 Bannon, Steve 203 Barber, Daniel Colucciello 74 Baroque period 203 Barth, Karl 101, 199, 313n38 Bataille, Georges 15, 156–175, 323n53, 324n53; action, exercise, and responsibility 173–175; ethics of the singular and the general 170–172; “inner experience” 157–160; overview 156–157; “project” 160–162; “project” as transcendental violence 168–170; violence turned “inside out” 162–168 Batnitzky, Leora 294 Bauman, Irit 331n61 Baumgarten, A.G. 319 Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Szafraniec) 305n30 Beckett, Samuel 314, 325–326, 328–329 bedazzlement 57–59

394  Index Being: of the ego 69; and God without power 44–48; principal meanings of 45 Being and Event (L’être et l’événement, Badiou) 342, 343, 344, 361n119 Being and Time (Heidegger) 55, 306, 324, 325 Being Given (Marion) 69n86 Bejahung 81, 84n3 belief 85–87, 111, 127 Believing in Order to See (Marion) 73n113, 336, 337 Benedict, Saint 106 Benjamin, Walter 15, 36, 39, 198, 255, 289–290n19, 297n25, 317, 349, 353, 355, 359; on anti-systemic form of thinking 235, 236, 237, 239, 241, 242, 255, 289–290n19, 297n25, 317, 349, 353, 355, 359; on spiritual exercise and miracle 139–145 Benoist, Jocelyn 347 ben Zakkai, Yoḥanan 51 Bergson, Henri 14, 222, 228, 278, 301n28, 305, 348n92 Berkhof, Hendrikus 97 Berlin, Isaiah 112n4 Bernstein, Richard 51 bias: anthropocentric 76; Christocentric 59n42; philosophical 113n6 Bilderverbot 52 Blakney, Raymond 70n95 Blanchot, Maurice 289 Blumenberg, Hans 325 Boletsi, Maria 251n3, 251n4 Bonaiuto, Andrea di 25, 27 Book of Questions (Jabès) 322 Book VI of the Republic 41, 43 Bos, David 94n4 Boullant, François 181n11 Boyarin, Daniel 51, 294 Braque, Rémi 334 Brown, Peter 105 Buddhism 221 Butler, Judith 251n3 Byzantine imperial court system 30–31 Cajetan 205 Camera Obscura (Kofman) 181 Camus, Albert 311, 313 Canon of Medicine (Avicenna) 28 Canticle to the Sun (song) 204 Carmel, Samantha 15, 323n53, 324n53

Carr, David 67n80 Cassin, Barbara 334, 335, 345n86 causality 43, 44, 62, 134, 135, 136, 145, 148, 360 Cavell, Stanley 15, 81, 84, 90, 145, 229, 280, 290n19, 329, 344n85, 367 Celan, Paul 325–326 The Childhood of Art (Kofman) 180 Christianity 220, 221, 246, 287n16, 318, 323, 325, 337, 347n90, 362; apocalyptic vision 357; conceptions of divine 353; doctrine 325n54, 346n87; history of 197, 212, 295n24, 313n38; incarnational and Trinitarian conceptions 277; theological concept of omnipotence 311–312n38; Tolstoian 336 Christocentric bias 59n42 Christology and Mariology 100–107 Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Schillebeeckx) 199 Cicero 102 circular blindness 256–260 Cixous, Hélène 178–179 The Claim of Reason (Cavell) 280, 290n19, 367 Cohen, Hermann 54 Coleridge 262 Colish, Marcia 102 La comédie humaine (Balzac) 284n14 communism 282, 293 communitarianism 282 complementary quotes 321–324 Comte, Auguste 179 Conant, James 346n87 concrete sensuality 52 Confessions (Rousseau) 190 Connor, Peter Tracy 164n37 consciousness 58–59, 65–66, 67, 84, 229–230, 295n24 conscious will, unity of 145–150 Constantine I 30 contingency 356–358, 363 corporeality 146–149, 151–154 Corpus Christi, feast of 202, 204 Corpus Iuris Civilis (Justinian Code) 31 corpus mysticum 196–214; ‘archive,’ notion of 197–198; by de Lubac 199, 200, 201–202, 203, 205–212; Eucharist as 198, 199, 200, 201–202, 203, 204, 205–206, 212–214; Kantorowicz’s thesis 198, 202,

Index 395 203; mystical postulate, notion of 196–197, 198; religious notion of 203; supranatural grace 208–209 Corpus Mysticum, l’eucharistie et l’Eglise au moyen age (de Lubac) 200 corpus verum 202 Correa, Charles 256 correlationism 360, 363, 367 “correlationist” metaphysics 356n110 cosmic consciousness 230, 295n24 “cosmic play” 84n3 The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl) 67n80 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 51, 166 Culler, Jonathan 250n2 curricula, medieval 24 cynicism 222 Dasein 305 Davidson, Arnold 218, 221 Davidson, Donald 344n85 de Brouwer, Desclée 207n22 De carne Christi (On the Flesh of Christ) (Tertullian) 101–102 de Certeau, Michel 12, 198 de Chardin, Teilhard 201, 210 De correptione et gratia (Augustine) 207, 210–211 deep pragmatism, negative metaphysics and 299–302 de Jardin, Teilhard 206 delectatio victrix 208 Deleuze, Gilles 255, 267, 267n18 de Lubac, Henri 12, 199, 200, 201–202, 203, 205–212; see also corpus mysticum democratic socialism 282 de Montaigne, Michel 222 demythologization 58 denial of self 65 Derrida, Jacques 12, 13–14, 159, 172, 198, 254, 255, 257, 262, 275n6, 278n8, 307, 315, 321, 322, 323, 334, 339, 341–342; on affirmation 81–90; on belief 87–88; foundation of violence 40–44; and Kofman 179–192; on Marranism 89; mystical foundation of authority 36–40; on question of the animal 177–178; on violence and metaphysics 34–35; on violence of law 36

Descartes, René 80, 187, 188, 252, 253n5, 313, 339, 340 Deutscher, Penelope 182n17 de Vries, Hent 196–199, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 234, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 266, 267, 331n61; conceptualization of religion 1–6; educational training 92–93; kinship between philosophy and religion 131–132; on metaphysical and hermeneutic supplement 3–4; notion of spiritual exercise and concept of miracle 140–155; on role of religious archive 95–100; work on miracles 131–133, 137; see also specific entries dialectical materialism 343 dialectical model of secularization 234, 244 dialectical theology 101 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 77, 237, 307, 311 Dialogues (Gregory the Great) 105 Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin) 334 Didi-Huberman, Georges 251, 254 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 267 Dika, Tarek 271 disengagement, engagement and 227–228 disjunction 125–126 distance, incongruence and 336–339 ditto action, dual vision and 289–293 Divina Comedia (Alighieri) 284n14 divine 201, 205, 208, 277, 353; comedy 284, 301; economy 277, 301, 323, 349; existence of 242, 315, 349, 351, 372; inexistence 315, 320, 321, 322, 341, 349, 362, 372–373; metaphysical and theological concept of 307; names 309, 316, 317, 318, 319, 331, 332, 338, 359; omnipresence and omnipotence 242; providence 313, 365–366; providentialism 307; sovereignty of 199; speech 301, 338 Divine Inexistence (Meillassoux) 341 dogma 158 Don Quijote (Spanish literature) 267 “dramatization” and mystical experience 162–168

396  Index dream and reality 65n70 Dream Houses (film) 262–263 dunamis 43, 46 dunamis pantōn, concept of 43 duplex ordo model 92–95, 101 Dutch Reformed Church 93, 94 Dworkin, Ronald 218 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche) 190 ecclesia triumphans, image of the Church as 203 Eckhart, Meister 162–163, 211, 212, 347n89 ecstasy 169–170 ego 69 Elements and Forms of Belief for the Twenty-First Century 294 11-panel painting 258–260 El Greco 148n10 Eliot, T. S. 98–100 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 99 empiricist orientation 63 Endgame/Fin de partie, Beckett 314 energeia 45, 46–47 engagement and disengagement 227–228 Engels, Friedrich 284n14 Engels, Marx 284n14 Enigma of Woman (Kofman) 184–185 Éperons (Derrida) 181 Epicharmus 246 Epicureanism 217 Epicurus 217 “epoché” 8n31 eschatology 349, 358n114 esse 41 eternal God 356–358 eternity: eschatological level of 211; mysteries 203 ethical practice and violence 156–175; action, exercise, and responsibility 173–175; ethics of the singular and the general 170–172; Inner Experience (Bataille) 157–160; mystical experience and “dramatization” 162–168; “project” as transcendental violence 168–170; “project” in Bataille’s text 160–162 ethical transcendence 42 ethicometaphysical transcendence 35 Ethics (Badiou) 344n85 ethics of the singular and the general 170–172

Eucharist, as corpus mysticum 198, 199, 200, 201–202, 203, 204, 205–206, 212–214 Euclid 24 Euripides 273, 274n5 euthanasia 199 The Excluded Middle (Milbank) 206 exclusive humanism 4 exercitatio mentis 295 existence of God 207, 302, 305–310, 313, 325; affirmation or negation of God’s 339; concept and practice of 321; demonstration of 333; of divine 242, 315, 349, 351, 372; existing otherwise 358–359; future 350; nonexistence 276, 308–309, 320, 325, 328; non- or not-other 331, 332; objective 332; see also inexistence of God existentialism 222, 347 facticity 360 fairness, justice and 225 faith 111–112, 127–128 Faith and Knowledge 85–86 fanaticism 280, 348n92, 367 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard) 10 Ferber, Ilit 13, 330–331n61 fetishism 184–185 Fichte 72 fideism 362, 367 fidelity 86–87 Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Hammerschlag) 278n8 film and gestural corporeality of the human body 151–154 finitism 367 The Fire Next Time (Baldwin) 371 Flaschenpost 307 Foucault, Michel 277, 323 Francis, Pope 199, 200, 201, 209 Franciscan Order 204 Franciscan project 199–200 Francis of Assisi 204 Frederick II 21n9, 25 free will 112n4, 121, 207–208 Freud, Anna 51 Freud, Sigmund 74, 297n26; representation of Judaism 51–52 Freud and Fiction (Kofman) 183 Friedlander, Eli 15, 289–290n19 Funkenstein, Amos 242–243, 291n20 The Future of the Religious Past (de Vries) 96, 294

Index 397 Gabriel, Markus 347 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 287, 360 “Galaxy of Musicians” 258 Gališanka, Andrius 218 gaze 57–59, 63, 73, 151, 165, 192, 204, 254, 258, 263, 271, 290, 360 Geistigkeit 51 Gelassenheit 81 The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 182–183 Genesis of the Sovereign God (Aubry) 311n38 gesture 147–148, 151–154 Gibbon 21n6 Gide, André 313 Gilson, Etienne 209n24 Given Time (Derrida) 88–89 Glas (Derrida) 188 God: Bataille’s assessment of 163; contingent but eternally possible 356–358; eternal 356–358; god-talk 301, 335, 336; image of God and imagination 50–53; impossible phenomenon 332–335; invisible but personal, worshipping 53–59; metaphysical 281, 362; non-existence of 276, 308–309, 320, 325, 328; occasional 365; occasionalism without 361; question of 344–346; self-contradictory notion 316–320; without power and being 44–48; see also existence of God; inexistence of God; invisible but personal God God Without Power (Aubry) 311n38 Goethe, J. W. 220, 325 Goldman, Emma 222 Good, the 43–46, 58, 127, 211, 222, 275, 286, 312–313n38 Gordon, Peter 5–6, 291n20 Gozzoli, Benozzo 25, 27 Greco-Arabic sciences and philosophies 30–32 Gregory of Nyssa 74 Gregory the Great 95–100 Grendler, Paul F. 21n9 Grossman, Vasily 286, 336 Grotius, Hugo 309 Guardini, Romano 201

Haeckel, Ernst 142n2 Hägglund, Martin 233n1, 233n2 Hall, Gilman 275n6 Hamacher, Werner 322 Hammerschlag, Sarah 278n8 Hammerstein, Notker 22n11 Harris, Franck 142n2 Harvard Review of Philosophy (HRP) 215–216 Haskins, Casey 272n3 Haskins, Charles Homer 22n10, 23, 24n14 Hasse, Dag Nikolaus 24, 28 Hebrew Bible 252, 253n5, 287, 290 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 159, 315, 321, 322, 323, 326, 327, 329, 342, 347n89, 350, 353, 358n114 Hegel: Three Studies (Adorno) 326 Hegelian Judgment 291n20 Heidegger, Martin 55–56, 81, 86, 188, 197, 206, 245, 287, 288, 304, 312n38, 313n38, 317, 324, 344, 347n89, 360, 365; on invisible but personal God 68n84; ontology 35, 42; on question of Being 46–47 henology 44, 48 Henry 69–72 hermeneutic judgment 6 Hertz, Neil 275n6 Hindu 249, 258 Hippolytus (Euripides) 273, 274n5 Hoffman, E. T. A. 179, 188–189 Hölderlin 245, 347n89, 365 Hollywood, Amy 272n3 hope and God 316–320 Horkheimer, Max 77, 307, 311, 349 Horror Religiosus 10–11, 284, 285n15 human agency 124 human existence, formalization of 197 Humani Generis (Pope Pius XII) 209 human knowledge 134 human rights 222 Hume, David 130–131, 133–136, 330n61, 361 Husserl, Edmund 8n31, 35, 53–55, 62, 67n80, 246, 293, 344, 360, 374 Huyssen, Andreas 252 Hyppolite, Jean 179, 323

Habermas, Jürgen 2–3, 9, 156, 273n4 habit 135, 146–147 Hadot, Pierre 15, 158, 175n77, 217, 219, 220, 221, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 270, 300, 301n28

Iberia 23–24 “Ibizan sequence” 145–150 Ibizenkische Folge (Benjamin) 145 ibn Sina see Avicenna icon 73n109

398  Index iconoclasm 76 idolatry 53–54, 76–78, 287, 296, 298n26, 301, 310, 316, 336, 348n92 idols 74, 76, 79, 280n10, 296, 298n26, 310 Ignatius of Loyola 324n53 image of God and imagination 50–53 immanence 8, 9, 58, 60–77, 317, 326, 343, 346n89, 349, 370 The Immanence of Truths (Badiou) 342 impartiality, original position and 226 impossible phenomenon, God’s 332–335 in-act 45–46 incongruence and distance 336–339 indemnity 82, 89–90 India: and Pakistan 258; pretext of religious rivalry 249 individual messianism 363, 364 Ineinander 67n80 inexistence of God 276, 305–310, 313, 333, 350–351, 374; apology of 341–344; brief and recent history of 310–315; concept and practice of 321; divine 315, 320, 321, 322, 341, 349, 362, 372–373; hopes on 369–370; respective thoughts on 371; subject of 320 inner experience 157–160, 172–175; episodic nature of 174n75; intensity of 166; and project 162; and relationality 163 Inner Experience (Bataille) 156–161, 170, 174–175 in-potency 45–46 intersubjectivity 66–67 The Invention of World Religions (Masuzawa) 292n21 inverted Platonism 358 invisible but personal God: icon of the invisible 72–79; oneiric figuration 59–72; unmasking the mask of invisibility 59–72; worshipping 53–59 invisible revelation 69 invocatio Dei 281–282 invu 58 Irigaray, Luce 178–179 Islam 249, 293, 330n61, 337 Jabès, Edmond 322 Jaeger, W. 46 Jansenius (1585–1638) 207, 208, 213 Jennings, Michael 290n19 Jirsa, Tomáš 267n18

Joachim of Fiore 206 Johnson, Galen A. 24 Judaism 293, 337, 353, 354 Judeo-Christian scriptures 101 justice and fairness 225 Justinian Code (Corpus Iuris Civilis) 31 Justinian I 31 Kabbala 353, 354 Kafka, Franz 139, 147n8, 148n10, 355 Kafkaesque process 209 Kant, Immanuel 21n6, 51, 166–167, 187, 197n5, 242, 278n8, 285, 307, 311, 319, 356 Kantorowicz, Ernst 12, 198, 202, 203 Kaplan, Simon 54n16 Kashmir (India), dispute over 258 kataphatic operation 284 kenosis 351 Kenyon Review (journal) 234 Kern, Iso 67n80 Kierkegaard, Søren 10, 34, 72, 172, 173, 179, 218, 284, 288, 333, 358n114 King, Martin Luther, Dr. 300, 304 The King’s Two Bodies (Kantorowicz) 198, 202, 203 knowledge and self 159 Kofman, Sarah 178–179, 278n8; background of 178–179; and Derrida 179–192 Kojève, Alexandre 159n17, 315, 326 Körper 146n4 Kreisler, Johannes 188, 189 Krisis: Tijdschrift voor empirische Filosofie (journal) 272n3 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 23n12 Kristeva, Julia 178–179 Kunneman, Harry 272n3 Kyritsos, Alexander 191 Lacan 187 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe 178 language 84–85; and Christian idea of salvation 102; differential nature of 159–160; of Hebrews 11:1 72; of the holy writ 52; of Marion 73; residual of theological 74–75; of transcendence 61–62, 90 Laruelle, François 76–77 Latin Christian art 25 Latin West, impact of 23–24 Laudato Si (Pope Francis) 199, 200, 201, 204, 213n30

Index 399 Lawrence, D. H. 193 Lectures de Derrida (Kofman) 180–181 Lefebvre, Alexandre 15, 300–301n28 Lefort, Claude 351n94 legal order 12 Leibniz 121, 122–123, 127 Leiden 97 Levinas, Emmanuel 1, 35–36, 69n86, 167, 187, 274–275, 278n8, 281, 284, 285, 286, 292, 298n26, 300, 301, 312n38, 315, 335, 338, 340, 341, 344, 345–346, 347n89, 348n92, 351n95, 352n97, 366, 368; definition of violence 41; on invisible but personal God 53–54, 68–69; on transcendental violence 169 liberalism 221–222, 282 Life and Fate (Grossman) 286, 336 The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (Hoffman) 179, 188 Life of Saint Benedict (Gregory the Great) 100–101, 106 Louis C. K. 225 Lutheran churches 93 macrology, micrology to 326–329 magical trace, in artwork 241–242 Maimonides 24 Malani, Nalini 15, 249, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255–256, 257n11, 258–260, 262–263, 265, 266–267 Mallet, Marie-Louise 178 Maoist 282 marginality of theology in university 33 Margolis, Joseph 272n3 Marion, Jean-Luc 57–58, 73, 310, 315, 332, 333, 334, 337, 341, 344, 345, 346, 347, 351, 356n110, 359–360, 368, 370 Marranism 89 Marrati, Paola 267n18 Mary, Tertullian on 103–104 Masuzawa, Tomoko 6, 292n21, 294 media 13–15 mediation, meditation and 300 meditation 217, 271, 278n8, 281, 287n16, 300, 343 Meditationes de prima philosophia (Descartes) 313, 339 Meditations (Descartes) 187 Mediterranean universities 29 Meillassoux, Quentin 310, 315, 322, 325, 341, 343, 348, 349, 350, 351,

352, 356, 357–358, 359–362, 363, 364, 366n131, 367, 368, 369, 370 Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (Blakney) 70n95 Memmi, Lippo 25, 26, 27 Mémoire sur l’histoire des mes écrits (de Lubac) 206 Mendelssohn, Moses 77 Mendicant Orders 204 mental blindness 63 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 60–61, 62–65 metaphor 64 metaphysical God 281, 362 metaphysics 248, 277, 280, 286, 287, 322, 333, 335; Adorno on 316, 317–318, 319; atavistic 246; “correlationist” 356n110; depth 302–303; ethical questioning of 340; experience 247–248, 291n20, 348n92; necessity 296, 366; negative 278n8, 292, 299–302, 306, 310, 326, 327, 339; occasionalism 288, 290n19; post-metaphysical thinking 247, 280, 326, 346, 348; practice of 349; principle 248; relevance of “inexistence” 309; speculative 246 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 312n38 Michael, David 68n84 micrology to macrology 326–329 Middle Platonism 74 Milbank, John 206, 210 Minimal Theologies (de Vries) 1, 6–8, 10, 16, 18–19, 34, 81, 196, 249, 253, 273, 275, 276, 292n21, 302–304 minimal theology 291n20 miracle of miracles 95–100 miracles 260–262, 266–268; Augustine on 129–130; conceptualization of 14; de Vries’ work on 131–133, 137; Hume on 130–131, 133–138; and media 13–15; and political theology 11–13; and special effects 13–15 miracles, Avicenna on 108–128; the possible and the potential 113–128; preliminary remarks 108–112 Miracles, Events and Small Wonders (de Vries) 137n23, 331n61 Miracles et métaphysique (de Vries) 148n10 Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Merleau-Ponty) 61n49 Modi, Narendra 249 monotheism 50–53

400  Index monotheistic dogma 75 monster 211–212 Montaigne 34, 36, 82 Montanier, Mathieu 267 Montanism 101, 105 moral education 128 morality 15, 82, 86, 147n7, 157, 170, 172, 173, 209, 227, 278n8, 311 mortis causa contract 39n13 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 50–53, 297n26 mourning 359 Mulhall, Stephen 288 Münchhausen, Baron 372 musings on common ground 249–256 Muslim 258 mystical body see corpus mysticum mystical experience and “dramatization” 162–168 mysticism 173, 198, 202; see also corpus mysticum Nancy, Jean-Luc 178 Nardi, Paolo 22n11 Natalis, Dies 295n24 Natorp 46 ‘naturalism,’ St Francis 204 Negative Certitudes (Marion) 332 Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 78, 235, 246, 278n8, 316, 324, 326, 336, 339 negative metaphysics 6, 9, 278n8, 292, 299–302, 306, 310, 326, 327, 339 negative occasionalism 361, 366–368 negative theology 7, 8, 9, 10, 78n129, 82, 90, 177, 197, 198, 355 Neiman, Susan 218 neologism 63n61 neoplatonism 41, 43–44, 74 Newman, John Henry 21n6 Newton 243 Nicholas of Cusa 297, 298n26, 332 Nietzsche, Friedrich 81, 84, 180–181, 182–183, 187, 218, 222, 324n53, 357 nihilism 99, 316, 324, 325, 329, 355 Niobe 262 non-existence of God 276, 308–309, 320, 325, 328 Nongbri, Brent 294 nonmanifest 55–56 non-synonymous substitution 297, 339 North-African texts 105 noumenal selves 228, 229 nouvelle théologie 200, 205, 209, 210

Nusseibeih, Sari 12–13, 330–331n61 NWO (Dutch research organization) 96n8 objective reality 80 occasionality, concept of 287n16 occassionalism 281, 290n19, 365; negative 361, 366–368; without God 361 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 188, 190 oikonomia (divine economy) 277, 301, 323, 349 oikos 88 omnipotence 242, 286, 298, 311, 312n38, 332, 349, 362; Christian concept of 43–44; concept of 38–39; theology of 36–44 omnipresence 242, 332, 352, 359, 370 omniscience 332 Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Nusseibeh) 331n61 One beyond being 73–74 One-Good 43 oneiric self 65n72 oneiric visualization 65–66 oneirism of wakefulness 65 On the Flesh of Christ 104 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 187 ontico-ontological difference 42 ontological reality 72 ontological structure 41n19 ontological transcendence 35 ontology of power 47–48 onto-theology 44 On Touching (Derrida) 342 open intellectual experience 235 Opus Dei 47 ordinatus 39n13 Orientale Lumen (Paul) 200 Origen of Alexandria 206, 210, 212, 290n19, 297n25, 346n87, 350 original position: engagement and disengagement 227–228; features of 226–230; global consciousness 229–230; and impartiality 226; purpose 224–226; as spiritual exercise 221–224; wonder and everyday 228–229 orthodoxy 253n5, 293, 304n30, 333; Christian doctrine 346n87; Protestant 337; Radical 206 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas) 68–69, 68n85

Index 401 Otten, Willemien 6, 196, 295n24, 330n61 ousia energeia 45–46 painted words image 262–266 Pakistan and India 258 pantheism 54 Parmenides 334, 335 Parsifal (Wagner) 325 Pascal, Blaise 34, 36, 281, 303n29, 306, 309, 343 Paul, John, II 200, 201, 202, 304, 347n89 Pauline 104 Paul VI, Pope 209, 210 Peeters, Benoit 182, 191 Pegis, Anton 209n24 perceptual consciousness 65–66 personal spiritual exercises 219, 224 Peterson, Matthew J. 346n89 Petrarch 204, 205, 206 Phänomenologie und Theologie (Heidegger) 304 phenomenality 8, 57–60, 70, 71, 74–75, 334 phenomenology 41, 54–55, 58–59, 67–68, 274n5, 304, 310, 320, 341, 347, 356n110, 363 Phenomenology and Theology (Heidegger) 304 Phenomenology (Badiou) 342 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 63–64 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 159, 329 Philipse, Herman 272n3 The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Michael) 68n84 philosophization, painted words image and 262–266 Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Religion and Violence (de Vries) 10, 34, 81, 132, 196, 197, 253, 275, 276, 279, 283, 288, 302–304, 321 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Nietzsche) 84n3 Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cavell) 367 Pieter Breughel the Elder 257 Pijnappel, Johan 257n11 Pius, Pope, XII 209 Plato 41–43, 43n24, 44, 73–74, 179, 205, 217, 358

pleroma 293, 322, 350 Plotinus 43, 44 Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Postmodern (Kearney) 61n49 poetry 249–250, 257, 262; Hölderlin’s 245; Parmenides’s 334, 335; Rilke’s 240 Poetry and Truth (Goethe) 325 politeness 147n7 political art 251, 254, 265 political finitude 363 political theologies 38; contemporary articulations of 282; and miracles 11–13; notion of 198; origins and development of 198 Political Theology (Schmitt) 11, 302 political theory, spiritual exercises in: engagement and disengagement 227–228; features of original position 226–230; global consciousness 229–230; impartiality and original position 226; original position as spiritual exercise 221–224; overview 215–216; purpose of original position 224–226; Rawls on 215–219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228–229; spiritual exercises 219–226; wonder and everyday 228–229 polities 223 ‘positive’ religion 197, 238 “positivity,” defined 323 possibility and potentiality 113–128 post-metaphysical thinking 247, 280, 326, 346, 348 potentia absoluta 38–40, 44 potentiality and possibility 113–128 potentia ordinata 38–40, 44 practices, spiritual exercises 219, 224 Pranger, Burcht 12, 272n3, 296–297n25 praxis 300 precariousness 335–336 predicament of predication 279–281, 326–327, 335, 336, 338, 345 presentism 257n11 prometheanism 307, 349, 351 Proslogion 319, 337 Protestant Christianity 93 Protestant churches 94 Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) 94 Proust, Marcel 222, 245, 246, 247 providentialism 307, 349, 351, 370 pseudomysticism 240

402  Index PThU 94n6 Ptolemy 24, 222 Puntel, Lorenz B. 75n119 pura natura, hypothesis of 208–209, 212 qualified theist 326 question of animal 179–192; Kofman and Derrida 179–192; The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (Hoffman) 179 question of God, philosophical and theological 344–346 radical atheism 324 radical immanence 69 radical orthodoxy 206 radical theology 210 Rashdall, Hastings 21n7 rationality, definition of 2–3 Rawls, John 15, 215–219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228–229, 230, 300–301n28 The Rebel (Camus) 311 Regier, Bill 285n15 Regier, Willis 275n6 Reik, Theodor 186 religion: Abrahamic 297, 343, 364; and art 241–247; concept of 1–6, 293–298; and the Other 6–9; positive 197, 238; and “search light” 295n24; and violence 9–11, 87–88; see also violence Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought (Tierney) 22n10 Religion and Media (de Vries) 253, 257, 302 Religion and Violence (de Vries) 37, 196, 198, 253, 276, 278n8, 285n15, 302–304, 324n53 religion as pretext: abuse of 254; circular blindness 256–260; miracles 260–262, 266–268; musings on common ground 249–256; painted words image and philosophize 262–266; viewing in detail 260–262 Religion Beyond a Concept (de Vries) 294, 302 Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (Cohen) 54n16 religious agency 173 religious order 172

Remembering Mad Meg (shadow play) 256, 257 resolute anachronism 295n24 retractions (retractationes), anti- see anti-retractationes reverse-painting technique 260 Rilke 240 riposte and “New Counteroffensive of the Absolute” 346–351 The Rise of Universities (Haskins) 22n10, 24n14 The Rock (Eliot) 98n10 Roelofs, Monique 272n3 Roger’s Version (Updike) 102n19 Rogues (Derrida) 189, 193 Roman Curia 21n9 Roman legal tradition 30–31 Rorty, Richard 374 Rosenzweig, Franz 353, 354 Rousseau 190 Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Kofman) 179, 191 Rust, Jennifer 203n17 sacrifice 10–11 sage, Rawlsian 217–219 Saint Angela of Foligno 162 Saint Ignatius of Loyola 164 Saint John of the Cross 157 Saussure, Ferdinand de 277 Schelling 354 Schillebeeckx, Edward 199 Schiller 154 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 19n3, 93n3 Schmidt, Dennis J. 55n21 Schmitt, Carl 11, 37–38, 197, 198, 203, 324n53, 325 scholasticism 19n3, 24, 25, 98 Scholastic period 212 Scholem, Gershom 353, 354, 355, 356 Schook, Martin 313 Schritt zurück 287 Schulte, Christoph 353, 354 Science of Logic (Hegel) 315, 321, 322, 323, 326–327, 329, 342 Scotus, Duns 39, 40 Secular Age (Taylor) 4 secularization: of aesthetics 236–241; dialectical model of 234, 244; socio-historical process of 237; of theology 241–247 secularization-of-art thesis 236 secularized ritual 237

Index 403 secular theology: art as 241–247; form 291n20; overview 233–236; secularization of aesthetics 236–241; thesis of 236 self 63 self-defeating 323, 345, 372 self-detachment 230 self-showing, identification of 56 self-transcendence 174n74 Seneca 222 sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) 51 Setzung: concept of 37; survey of 198 Shults, F. LeRon 75 Shuster, Martin 271 Sider, Robert 102 signum contradicibile 102–103 Silesius, Angelus 197 Simeon, prophet 102 Siraisi, Nancy 29 skiing 287 sleep 146–147 “slow philosophy” 250, 255–256 Smith, Adam 222 The Snake (Lawrence) 193 social contract tradition 223 Socrates 179, 217, 218 Specters of Marx (Kofman) 181 spectral dilemma 349–350 speculation 89–90 speculative materialism 348 speculative metaphysics 246 speculative rationality 348 Spinoza, Baruch 222, 271, 305, 309, 340 Spiritual Exercises: Concepts and Practices (de Vries) 164, 216, 217, 220 spiritual exercises, in political theory 15; criteria 219; defined 219; original position as 221–224; Rawls on 215–219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226; structural concept 220; see also political theory, spiritual exercises in spiritual exercises and miracles 139–155; exercise, training and practice 140–145; overview 139– 140; presence of mind in the body 145–150; theological in the technological 150–155 spiritual experience 248; Adorno on 291–292; and exercise 300 squeezing 251 Stalinist 282 Stambaugh, Joan 55n21

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 51 Stoicism 217, 219–220, 230 Stokes, John 142n2 The Story of Reason in Islam (Nusseibeh) 331n61 “The Storyteller” (essay) (Benjamin) 149n12 Strachey, Alix 51 Strachey, James 51 Strauss, Leo 54n16 Stravinsky 240 studia generalia 22n10 Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Kristeller) 23n12 Suárez, Francisco 46, 205, 309 Summa Atheologica 157 Summa Theologiae 19n3 supranatural power 207, 208–209, 210 Surnaturel (de Lubac) 205, 207 Symphony of Psalms 240 Szafraniec, Asja 5–6, 304n30 Taubes, Jacob 12 Tauler 211 Taylor, Charles 4–5 temporality 68n84, 86–87 temporal placeholder 297 tertium datur to Tsimtsum 352, 353–356 theism 333, 350, 351, 357, 369; see also existence of God theolatry 53–59 theological education in the Netherlands 92–94 theological in the technological 150–155 theologico-political, paradoxical structure of 38 Theologie im pianissimo (de Vries) 1, 273 theologies: absorption of Arabic sciences and philosophies 23–25, 28–30; academic 18–25, 28–33; apophatic 79; marginality in university 33; miracle of miracles 95–100; of omnipotence 36–44; and religious studies in the Netherlands 92–95; status in universities 22; Thomist 27; see also academic theology; secular theology Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Funkenstein) 242

404  Index theology as searchlight 92–107; duplex ordo -system 95–100; Gregory the Great’s take on miracle 100–107; introduction 92; religious studies in the Netherlands 92–95; Tertullian’s take on miracle 100–107 theomania 297n26 theoria 300 A Theory of Justice (Rawls) 216, 218, 219, 226, 228, 300n28 Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Otten) 295n24 Thomas of Aquinas 205 Thomistic concept of aptitudo 41 Thomist theology 27, 29, 41, 205–207, 210, 337 thought-experiment of original position 223, 224, 225 Tierney, Brian 22 Timaeus: khôra 42 Tolstoian Christianity 336 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 35, 42, 53 Totem and Taboo 52 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 327 Tracy, David 100 transcendence: ethical 42; ethicometaphysical 35; language of 61–62, 90; ontological 35; self-transcendence 174n74; transcendental temporalization 81–82 transcendental temporalization 81–82 transcendental violence: Bataille’s engagement with 167–170; Levinas on 169; “project” as 168–170 trans-descendence 62 transformative spiritual exercises 219, 224 translatability 255, 334 transubstantiation, doctrine of 202, 204, 212–213 trinity 212, 285, 287n16 Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas 26–27 triune turning 283–289 trompe l’oeil 211 Trump administration 203 truth making 339–341 Tsimtsum, tertium datur to 352, 353–356 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson) 14, 278 Tyson, Alan 51

Überwindung (overcoming) 324 Ukraine 249 Ullern, Isabelle 181n11 “Unity in Diversity” (2003) 258 universities: earliest 20–25, 28–30; impact of Roman jurisprudence on 31–32; Italian 21n9, 22–23; marginality of theology in 33 Universities in Early Modern Europe (Hammerstein) 22n11 Universities in the Middle Ages (Nardi) 22n11 The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Rashdall) 21n7 The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Grendler) 21n9, 23n12 University of Naples 21n9, 25 University of Paris 20–21, 29 university towns, early 21n7 unreason, defined 361n119 Updike, John 102n102 Utopia 256, 263 Valéry, Paul 151, 313, 314 van Alphen, Ernst 267n18 van den Harskamp, Anton 272n3 Varma, Raja Ravi 258 verbum abbreviatum 196 Verhoeff, Nanna 262n15 veritatem facere 276, 280 Verwindung (convalescence) 324 Vico 242, 243 violence 250–251; in art 249, 257; Bataille’s engagement with 167–168; circularity of 256; circular recurrence of 257–258; foundation of 36–44; inchoate forms and instantiations of 324n53; of law, question of foundation 36–44; within metaphysical tradition 34–48; of political hierarchy 183; representation of 254; time of 256; see also ethical practice and violence Vioulac, Jean 346–347n89 virtual archive 280, 283, 288, 296n25, 299, 301, 308, 310, 322 voluntary spiritual exercises 219, 224 von Harnack, Adolf 211, 313n38 voyance 61n50 Wagner 325 Walker, Michelle Boulous 250n2 Walten 86–87 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 336

Index 405 Weber, Max 1–2, 18, 161n25, 240– 241, 244, 292n21, 324n53 Weil, Simone 53 Weininger, Otto 51–52 Weithman, Paul 218 Wetzel, James 211 White, Alan 75n119 “White Mythology” (essay) (Derrida) 183 Wilde, Oscar 142n2 will: free 112n4, 121, 207–208; unity of conscious 145–150 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15, 206, 288, 289, 313n38, 327, 336, 361 Wolff, Christian 319

Wolfson, Elliot 8, 297–298n26 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 272n3 Works of Love (Kierkegaard) 72 worshipping a deity 54–55 Writing and Difference (Derrida) 321 “You Needed to Perfect Me” 260–261, 263–265 Zarathustra 218 Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Benjamin) 36 Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Adorno) 246 Zusage 84–85