We begin our new topic by beginning to read the wonderful summary
of the mystical language in the Zohar by Melila Hellner-Eshed, a
student of Daniel Matt who has been translating the Zohar into
English for the last decade or so.
I offer a challenge immediately in the consideration of this
appended book review by John D. Caputo who reviews Jean-Luc Marion's
study of St. Augustine's Confessions. For those who have not read
the Confessions, what is immediately apparent is that they were
written and spoken not to us but to God. Here we have one of the
most sustained accounts of what it may mean to be human, one of the
first true autobiographies in the Western tradition, and it is not
reflections upon a myself to a community but reflections upon a
self, a soul addressed to the internal eternal. It is simply a
prayer.
My challenge, if you wish to consider it, is consider the 78 cards
of the tarot as the blockage of natural chapters in the lifespan.
Make some up as you like, each card represents a prayer about
yourself to the author of your eternal personhood, whether you
reincarnate or not, you are in the process of moving to some purpose
that is storied. We will be examining the way life in prayer
integrates in the stories told and implied in the Zohar and we will
be considering the tarot as its own silent witness to the stories of
our emerging selves.
So take a moment to reflect on this book review and then latch a
hold of whatever themes strike your fancy from it and we will
discuss it as well as our initial impressions of by Melila
Hellner-Eshed this Tuesday evening. Have your deck of choice for the
second part of the discussion when we will interrogate the tarot
about how it may chapter a self, better yet, with less wiggle room,
how it chapters the self who we are and cannot now but be.
*****
Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews
2013.01.18
View this Review Online
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Jean-Luc Marion,
In the Self's Place: The Approach of St. Augustine, Jeffrey L.
Kosky (tr.), Stanford University Press, 2012, 414pp., $25.95 (pbk),
ISBN 9780804762915.
Reviewed by John D.
Caputo, Syracuse University/Villanova University
It was almost
inevitable that Jean-Luc Marion would write a book about Augustine.
Marion is widely regarded as both the leading Catholic philosopher
of his generation and the leading scholar of René Descartes, with
whom Augustinian scholarship has been intermingled, even entangled,
ever since the 17th century. In a book bearing the
suggestive title In the Self's Place (Au lieu de soi),
Marion reads the Confessions as an exercise in what he
calls a "saturated phenomenology." Thinking in the wake of
Heidegger's project of "overcoming metaphysics," Marion means to
liberate the iconic God of love from the idol of the God of being.
But, for Marion, Augustine does not actually need to "overcome"
metaphysics because he comes before metaphysics. Unlike the
subsequent history of philosophy and theology, and hence unlike his
modern readers and translators, Augustine was never a party to
metaphysics in the first place. Augustine is after metaphysics
because he is before it (9).
This strategy, too,
is adapted from Heidegger, who liked to say that in the great Greek
beginning of philosophy what we find is "thinking," not metaphysics,
ethics, and epistemology, which are schoolroom distinctions whose
very emergence is an unmistakable sign of the decline of thinking.
Just so, for Marion, the later categories of philosophy, theology,
and even autobiography are nowhere to be found in Augustine. They
have not been invented yet. When Augustine uses the word philosophy,
he means the love of God (6-7). When he writes the Confessions
he is not speaking of himself but of God, and so the book is not an
autobiography but a heterobiography (43-45). And the self of whom he
speaks is the very opposite of a Cartesian cogito, not a
fundamentum inconcussum but a deposed, displaced and
trembling heart, one who cannot so much as say "I" (61-64). Even
when he speaks of God, this is not theology because it is not
about God but a prayer to God, a confession of the
incomprehensibility of God that lacks the logos of theology.
We are warned repeatedly that every precaution must be taken to
avoid the anachronism of reading Augustine in the light of the
aftermath, contracting what takes place in the Confessions
to the subject/object categories of Cartesianism, on the one hand,
and to the categories of a theology immersed in the history of
metaphysics, on the other hand.
While owing a great
deal to Heidegger for all this, Marion wants to do Heidegger one
better. For Heidegger -- who, like many major continental
philosophers in the twentieth century, undertook an interpretation
of the Confessions -- the task of reading Augustine was one
of "retrieval" (Wiederholung), of extricating the
Christian-factical experience of life (Luther's theology of the
cross) from the deep overlay of Neoplatonic metaphysics (Luther's
theology of glory) in which his work is immersed. Marion -- who is
listening not to Luther but to Michel Henry on life and von
Balthasar on Herrlichkeit -- will not concede even that
much. For Marion everything takes place in the element of Christian
confessio, of prayer and laudatio, and nothing
that happens is metaphysics. What takes place does not belong to any
idol made of "being," not even the "truth of Being" advanced by
Heidegger, but to the horizon without horizon of "love" without
measure or being.
This does not leave
us lost for words in speaking of Augustine today. Rather readers of
Marion's work will recognize at once that the signature terms of his
thinking -- the "saturated phenomenon," "reduction" and "givenness"
-- are here brought to bear upon reading the Confessions.
If the Confessions belong anywhere, if this text has a
place, it is the place of "donation," to which justice can
be done only by a "phenomenology" of donation. Marion uses
donation to translate Husserl's Gegebenheit, pure
"givenness," which is the English translation he prefers. Against
Husserl, he describes a phenomenon of excess whose givenness
(fulfillment) overwhelms (saturates) its intention (concept) instead
of falling short of it. In the process I think the meaning of
Gegebenheit has shifted closer to the English transliteration
"donation" (or maybe "gifting"), meaning a sphere or element, the
air or "milieu," in which gifts take place -- God's giving and our
being given, our being-given-to God (adonné, à Dieu)
and God's self-giving, God as giving Godself to us as a gift and
giving us to ourselves, and of our giving thanks and praise to God
in return. That is the place in which the Confessions take
place (avoir lieu).
The book is all
about place: about God's place, and about the place and displacing
of the self, and finally about the place of the Confessions
itself. Derrida once said that Marion has a genius for titles, and
this book is no exception. Au lieu de soi: seeking the
place of the self; instead of or in place of the self;
to or towards the self (see translator's note, xx). The book
tracks "the approach" of (and to) Augustine, who pursues the way
from the ego (moi) to the self (soi), whose place
is in God (§43). The milieu of God means not so much that
God is in us as that we are in God (243). I am where I love; there
where I find God, I find myself (312).
The saturating
givenness of the life of the soul by the life of God (Michel Henry)
is compromised both by the Cartesian analogy and the analogy of
being, a claim that draws upon Marion's theory of the three
reductions. The first reduction, to transcendental subjectivity, is
shown by Heidegger to compromise the openness and truth of Being
(the second reduction). Even so, the second reduction, too, finally
fails under the pressure of the third and ultimate reduction to
unconditional givenness, which suspends the condition (or idolatry)
still imposed by being. In his more recent works Marion calls this
the "erotic" reduction, meaning the reduction of being to love (eros,
desire, love), whose "univocity" upends Nygren's distinction between
eros and agape (272-73) and alone provides the
proper milieu of the Confessions.
Marion's book is a
brilliant excavation of the richness of the Confessions in
the light of the entire Augustinian corpus before they are carved up
by the categories of metaphysical theology and entered into the
polemics of theology. The book itself is a gift, an original,
subtle, close and illuminating reading of Augustine, full of astute
asides and rich documentation, altogether an enormously rewarding
exercise to work through carefully. It is in short everything that
we have come to expect from Jean-Luc Marion. If I have my
differences with the argument, I do not mean to take anything away
from this elegant book, which comes along with the additional gift
of having been artfully translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky with his
usual skill and acumen and his deep familiarity with the challenging
language and thought of Marion.
* * * * * * * *
Put in the simplest
philosophical terms, Marion presents the case that the
Confessions and Augustine's corpus generally are to be taken as
an exercise in phenomenology, not in the later metaphysical theology
that would follow in Augustine's wake. My first concern is that
Augustine is not, perhaps, as innocent of metaphysics as Marion
would have us believe; he has not so much been overtaken by a later
metaphysical theology as he has launched it. Augustine is not only
the beautiful soul portrayed here; he also has a taste for
theological polemics and heresiology that is surpassed by few.
Augustine is the author not only of the haunting prayers of the
Confessions but also of the scary citadels erected in the
City of God and of a highly strident heresiology -- over twenty
of his treatises are entitled contra this or that or
somebody! For Augustine, the unmistakable place of truth is the
Roman Catholic Church, and when it comes to the Church, truth does
not mean phenomenological manifestness, but getting the Church's
propositional assertions right, and if one dissents that is due to
one's perverted nature. If truth means love, it means tough love.
The famous saying "love and do what you will" (dilige et quod
vis fac) meant that we have a lot of leeway in dealing harshly
with heretics if our motive is the love of the Catholic faith. As
always, there is a thin line between love and violence.
Among a series of
acutely sensitive phenomenological analyses of the self, memory,
time, truth, creation and God made by Marion, I choose three to
illustrate both what Marion makes of Augustine and my own concerns.
(1) Heidegger
famously said that the faith of the theologians prevented them from
asking the question of being. They come to the question with a
foregone conclusion that beings are creatures made by God and with a
pre-understanding of being in terms of production (Herstellen),
which is forgetful of Greek poiesis and is an antecedent to
modern Technik. To Marion, this objection is surprisingly
obtuse, forcing the Scriptures to answer a question they never asked
(232-33). The Confessions, like the Scriptures, are cast
not in causal but in confessional language; they speak not of
effects but of gifts. They are not out to prove a prime mover but to
praise and proclaim the goodness of God, the giver of all good
gifts. Creatures are the issue of love not of some cosmic source of
energy, and as such they are, like love itself, without why.
Without denying this
perceptive rendering of the text, the question remains how well
Augustine's confessional language is insulated from metaphysics, or
how far praise is from predication. Are they not completely
compatible and complimentary, in fact, mutually interdependent? They
are no more incompatible -- and no less interdependent -- than
honoring one's parents while also wanting to know their medical
history. We are causally dependent upon our parents in the order of
being even as we honor them in the order of love beyond being.
Just so, creatures speak to us on two levels when they say "he
made us;" they are saying, God really did draw us out of nothing
(causality) and our very existence proclaims God's glory (confessio)
and all the credit belongs to God, not to us. Indeed, the Scriptures
are praising God's works (tua opera), not merely the
world's beauty, and their praise is proportioned to the degree to
which God deserves this credit. Indeed, the God who creates ex
nihilo is ironically not a teaching of the Scriptures at all
(where there are preexistent elements). It is an innovation of
second century theological speculation devised to argue that the
Christian creator God is worthy of higher praise than a pagan
Demiurge. Were someone to deny the truth of this second century
theological doctrine, they would feel the fury of Augustine and the
sting of his very pointed stylus. If there were no
metaphysical-theological predication standing virtually behind the
praising, it would make no difference whether one praised a
Demiurge, the creator ex nihilo, natura naturans
or even blind chance.
(2) A similar
question can be raised about Marion's reading of Augustinian time.
He tries to displace the metaphysical distinction between time and
eternity in Augustine by arguing that when Augustine speaks of the
soul's fall into time the operative distinction is between the times
(tempora), in which the soul leads a distracted and
dissipated life occasioned by falling into sin, and authentic time (tempus),
in which the soul by being converted is recollected unto God
(225-26). Very nice -- but the soul that gathers itself together in
temporal unity and intends or is extended to what lies ahead is on
the high road to enjoying eternal life, where fleshless bodies
cavort, all the limitations of corporeality and temporality having
been removed. Everything that Augustine says about time presupposes
that (metaphysical-theological) distinction.
(3) In still another
suggestive analysis Marion shows that Augustine cultivates an erotic
truth that lies beyond both the truth of being and propositional
truth, one to which we cannot be indifferent because it is the truth
that we must either love (because it illuminates) or hate (because
it shines a light upon our faults) (109). But the limitation of this
idea shows up in Augustine's episcopal preoccupation with
"heretics," say the Manicheans, who do not love the truth because of
the perversity of their nature (126). But how does Augustine know
that? Maybe the Manicheans just see things differently than
Augustine but in good faith? Standing behind the erotic truth,
waiting for its cue if someone steps out of line, lies the big stick
of doctrinal rectitude and propositional truth, which is the truth
of the Catholic faith, over which Augustine stands constant guard.
Erotic truth has its police.
* * * * * * * * *
I think that
Marion's argument would be strengthened by a simple confession that
like Heidegger he too is engaged in a Wiederholung,
fetching back a phenomenology of donation from a text that
is also up to its ears in metaphysical theology. Marion's
book would gain in credibility were he to confess that the place he
is trying to stake out is a mixed neighborhood, with stretches of
mystical theology, metaphysical theology and heresiology, and that
his book is trying to displace the metaphysical theology by
highlighting strains of a phenomenology of the saturated phenomenon.
But that in turn would present Marion with a decisive problem, which
brings me to another and more basic concern, that his phenomenology
remains in complicity with the power of being. The third reduction
is intended to isolate the pure givenness of the call, its pure
phenomenality, to hear a pure call without being (= causality and
propositionality). It must deprive the call of any metaphysical
back-up, of any implicit or closet metaphysics, and allow it to
speak for itself in its phenomenal structure as a call. The problem
Marion has is that, not only is this not how the call functions in
Augustine, it is not even how it functions in Marion himself.
Marion is certainly
right to say that Augustine is not engaged in metaphysics in the
modern (onto-theological) sense, in making idols of concepts, in
deductive system building, and that Augustine prayerfully respects
the incomprehensibility of God. But it is also obvious that
Augustine's texts are laced with metaphysical-theological arguments
(about the omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence of God as
enshrined in his Catholic faith), and hence with propositional
assertions to which he is fiercely attached, all of which draw
deeply from a Neoplatonic well. In this connection it is interesting
to observe that this book is based upon Marion's 2004 Etienne Gilson
lectures. Gilson was the champion of Aquinas's philosophy of being,
of God taken as ipsum esse per se subsistens, and the young
Marion's God Without Being created a stir by challenging
what had become an orthodoxy among Catholic philosophers in the
twentieth century (see §§45-48). But Marion's God of love and
Aquinas' God of being are alternate and complementary accounts of
God's excess.
For Aquinas, God is
subsistent love and the reason is that God is subsistent being, and
love is being's finest glow. Esse subsistens is the best
way Aquinas could express and protect God's incomprehensible excess.
This reflects the Neoplatonic side of Aquinas, his version of the
via eminentiae, which forced Marion to concede that
esse subsistens is an icon not a metaphysical idol. Just so, in
Marion himself, all the talk of God "without being" is his version
of the via eminentiae, meaning not that God does not get as
far as being, but that being does not get as far as God, which
implies that being is virtually present, present by its
power (virtus), eminentiore modo, in the excess of
love. "Without being" means that being is included in but does not
suffice to affirm the super-eminent excess, the super-being of the
hyperousios, and this supports the entire discourse of love
and donation in Marion. In short, Augustine (eternity),
Aquinas (esse), and Marion (donation) are all
agreed that God is the incompehensible hyperousios. The God
of love and the God of being are ultimately compatible and mutually
dependent and (historically contextual) alternate (substitutable)
ways of formulating the excess of the hyperousios, of
praising the hyper-eminence of God, of intensifying the eminence of
God's being (without being, esse supra ens).
The one thing Marion
does not do is to reduce this call to its pure phenomenality by
depriving it of virtual contact with being. Were that purity more
ruthlessly exposed, were the call laid bare more radically as a pure
call, we would find that the place of the self is a desert, not the
super-sacred desert of Eckhart's Godhead, like the agathon,
but the desert within this desert, the khora-like desert of
which Derrida speaks. Then the incomprehensibility of God would not
be a way to praise God's eminence but a confession that cuts into
our hide, an incision, a "circum-fession," that we really do not
know who or what is calling, or what is being called for, or what we
are being called to, or to what or whom we are responding. To
"circumfess" that we do not know who we are, that we are a question
to ourselves, would not be an affirmation of plenitudinous excess
(saturation) but a confession of our exposure to a risky and
unforeseeable future (desertification), a confession of unnerving
radicality that is not to be found in Augustine, Aquinas, or Marion,
not as such. The radical faith (foi) required to respond to
such a truly naked (reduced) call would be deprived of the
confidence that accompanies the Catholic creedal belief (croyance)
that drives Augustinian theology and its companion heresiology, just
as Marion himself once famously embraced the authority of the
bishops to decide who has the right to teach. The task of reading
(situating) Augustine radically would then lie in seeking the
flickering traces of the desert place into which Augustine dares at
times to wander in the Confessions.
Open discussion and reading texts hour one: Second hour tarot exercises and games.
Beginning January 22nd
In this course we use the text by
The books and decks dealt with:
Initially any tarot deck of your choice is fine for exercises. Eventually we will tackle in turn, the decks the The Shining Tribe Tarot by Rachel Pollack and Tarot of the Spirit by Pamela Eakins as painted by her mother, Joyce Eakins.
(You will be charged your regular long distance rate, if applicable. There are no hidden charges or tolls for this class.
You are welcome to dial in any time during call.
The alternative number is when and
if the 1st number is not working properly
Alternative number: 1 (605) 715-4920
Access number: 2160089 #