Post on 21-Apr-2023
1) Jean-Luc Marion writes, “. . . alterity alone allows communion. . . . between God and [human persons] incommensurability alone makes intimacy possible” ( The Idol and Distance , p. 198). Relying on the work of three thinkers, discuss how they might interpret the possibility of relationon the basis of alterity, where relation may be understood as ethical, erotic, or otherwise.
I) The Metaxic Relation: Separation and Link
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil defines metaxu with the
following image: two prisoners are in neighboring cells; they
share a wall. Over time they develop a means of communication by
knocking on the wall. In one sense the wall is utter separation;
in another, it is their sole means of communication. Thus metaxu
is the suggestion that every separation is a link. Metaxic
thinking is the very preservation of desire, of its paradoxical
need to maintain distance in order to maintain intimacy. To
satiate desire is to eradicate the mediation of distance—either
by imposing separation without possibility of conversation, or by
uniting in the dissolution of difference. To destroy the metaxu
—‘communion’ made possible by ‘alterity’—is to render impossible
(or idolatrous) the relation to divine alterity, to human others,
to what immemorially calls us into being, and even to what we
could never anticipate.
1
Though the concept of metaxu is not thematized in the
writings of Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Louis
Chretien, they respectively draw us into its paradox. What
follows is an excavation of possible walls, with consideration
for how these separations prove critically relational (‘without
relation’). I will examine the theological relation of the worshipper
and the icon in Marion, the ethical relation of the Same and the
Other in Levinas, and the erotic relation of call and response, and
the unforgettable and the unhoped for, in Chretien. The function
of the ‘and’ in each of these relationships is the metaxic tissue
of paradox. It is not the supplemental logic of the infinite as
addition. According to these thinkers, the infinite erupts in the
distance between these linked terms, opening in the dimension of
their difference.
II) The Theological Relation: Donation and Withdrawal
Marion’s work The Idol and the Distance suggests that distance
alone makes possible an intimacy. Idolatry, as a mode of
collapsing the distance of God, also damages one’s capacity to
preserve the uniqueness of human others. Idolatry makes alterity
all too available, accessible; it reduces the Other to what is
2
present, representable, and thereby ignoring the invisibility
(irreducibility) of the other. A relation to God and neighbor
must instead resemble the relation of a worshipper and her icon.
The icon gives distance and absence as an infinity within the
finite. The icon resists appropriation and identification with
our needs, our conceptual proofs, and even our divinely
‘justified’ injustice. The icon is Marion’s term for
reintroducing asymmetry into the theological relationship, with
the implication that asymmetry must mark human relations as well.
Asymmetry is not its distortion as power over another, but rather
a reverence of the other’s sacred irreducibility. Concordantly,
the transcendence of the divine beyond (or without) Being is not
simply a separation of power. Marion does not pose God beyond
being in order to whip metaphysics into submission. God’s
transcendence is rather like Heidegger’s event that
asymmetrically relates to Being in its nonpresent giving: an
acknowledgment of the absence granted in presence, the givenness
opened in withdrawal.
Of course, Heidegger does not link God and the Event as
Marion would—even granting that Marion relates them
3
metaphorically (another relation in which difference sustains
connection). Heidegger might link the thinker’s Being and the
poet’s holy, but methodologically he exempts God from questions
of being. Heidegger does so in his ontotheological critique—which
could be read (as Heidegger himself suggests) as a reverence for
God’s absolute irreducibility to Being. The ontotheological
critique seems a destruction of conceptual idols, but in doing so
it also prevents the relation to God as icon.
Marion’s project of resurfacing the iconic relation begins
in the question of God’s death. The death of God suggests an
impasse for theology, and thereby any ethical relationship
founded upon holiness. Thus, Marion’s preliminary concern in
reinstating relationship through distance is to question the
moratorium on God. The ‘Death of God’ concept is often used to
pronounce that God’s absence is not God’s transcendence, but
rather God’s finitude. However, this pronouncement, co-opted by
modern atheism, hardly conveys the erotic, frenzied search of
Nietzsche’s madman. The ‘conceptual atheist’ summons the ‘God’ he
wishes to debunk, never acknowledging that his thesis depends
upon an idolatrous conception of God. The conceptual atheist is
4
hardly aware of the wise foolishness of one who, wandering the
town with a lamp in broad daylight, claims that ‘God is dead, and
we have killed him.’ The pronouncement that God is dead is
conditioned by the fact that we have made God finite, an idol.
Though Marion affirms that the ontotheological God is an idol, he
does not agree with Heidegger that we must therefore remain
silent about God in philosophical discourse. The difference
between philosophy and theology, between God and Being, provides
the grounds for their conversation. In a sense, articulating
God’s withdrawal from Being is the very possibility of
articulating God’s donation to Being. Heidegger’s elected poet,
Hölderlin, knew this; and perhaps Heidegger sensed it too since
his descriptions of Being and time are profoundly influenced by
Hölderlin’s ‘poetic saying’ of the departing gods.
Before engaging Heidegger directly, Marion rescues theology
from philosophical reductions of it. He nods to both Hölderlin’s
saying of God’s absence, and Nietzsche’s wish for a God worthy of
praise. His greatest contribution, to this end, is a chapter on
Pseudo-Dionysius. For Marion, Pseudo-Dionysius most capably shows
the potential of negative theology—the possibility of a
5
worshipful relation to the God absolved of being. The possibility
of intimacy as distance requires that God’s absolute withdrawal
is yet identifiable. God is not so absolved from a relation to
humans and their concepts that God refuses naming. However, in
order for names not to become idol-holds upon the divine,
theological language must be marked by distance. Marion posits
that theology must acknowledge the unthinkable nature of God by
language of excessive donation and withdrawing lack. God’s ab-
soluteness renders God irreducible to being; God is beyond and
without being. Marion describes God’s absoluteness as an
untethering from the ties of our idolatrous thoughts; but this
detachment does not leave God to nothingness and absurdity. God’s
untethering undoes the hold our idols have on us. In God’s
untying, we are undone, and left only to praise. The absence of
God does not render God illusory, but gives God in the very
failure of thought. Correspondingly, the names of God are given
only as progressive ascents beyond thought. But every ascent or
beyond implies a negation, a without. God is neither reducible to
names derived from sensibility nor intelligibility.
And yet, negation itself must be negated. We cannot grasp
6
God through negations, but must clear our knowledge in order to
perceive God’s grasp of us. Our dispossession opens us to our
belonging. Marion claims that the distance opened in our
(non)relation to God is the very space in which our true identity
can be given us. God’s absence creates our presence in some way.
Of course, presence here is never full presence; we are marked by
the distance and withdrawal—the infinite—that creates us. Marion
imagines this distance in Pseudo-Dionysius’ hierarchical
relation. In the hierarchical relation it is not that we are
simply over-powered by a transcendence that refuses to disclose
itself. Rather, we are drawn into a participation in what resists
participation. Participation is the immediate medium (a phrase
which alludes to Heidegger’s description of the holy) through
which we know the unthinkable as unthinkable. This is why thought
must look more like prayer—acknowledging through unknowing.
Prayer, and even analogical language, thus traverse the distance
while preserving it.
Therefore, God’s holiness (separation) does not function as
the concealment of an origin (as Heidegger writes of the Ereignis).
As involving us in a hierarchical participation, divine distance
7
gives us the ability to give. Like the Plotinian One, God gives
divinity in distance, allowing beings to participate not in
absorption, but in reflecting onward the gift. Emanation is the
One giving of itself without strict reabsorption or assimilation.
It is as if God gives the possibility of kenosis. The relation to
God is the abundance of a hollowing out that Marion names in the
logic of paternity, and the intimacy of love. Through paternity,
we are given a relation in difference. And in love, we become
sacraments of Christ’s presence-absence: the ability to give love
to others without reserve, or expectation of return.
The distance Marion depicts is, again, not the same as the
ontological difference. But he does find a certain Plotinian, or
Pseudo-Dionysian, strand in Heidegger’s Ereignis. The language of
God’s irreducibility (founding the divine-human relationship)
seems rather close to Heideger’s irreducible event (which opens
Being as the founding of beings). And Being, like God, seems in
some way unthinkable. It is nearly impossible to think this
difference between Being and beings, even if one poses the chasm
of the event as the very possibility of difference. However,
Marion is adamant: God’s distance is not Being’s difference. He
8
seems to suggest that God’s distance is the very possibility of
thinking Being’s difference. Or, better put, distance is the
distance from Being. God cannot be neutered by Being, or kept in
the anonymity of the trace. Certainly Heidegger’s event as Es Gibt,
informs Marion’s givenness as donation and withdrawal, presence
in absence. But Marion maintains: there is a Giver whose
invisibility, and irreducibility, does not negate relationality.
III) The Ethical Relation: Exteriority and Exposure
This paradox of God’s presence as absence resonates with
Levinas’ infinite. The infinite as the face of the Other, like an
epiphany of the in-visible, puts in question the self’s
phenomenological intentionality. Unlike Marion’s theological
relation, Levinas does not write of the ethical relation as
intimacy—insofar as intimacy implies physical love, or an egoisme
a deux. However, the intimate tones of exposure and openness
guide his considerations in Totality and Infinity. He interrogates how
the Same—be it the totalizing impulses of western philosophy, or
the egoistic self-preservation of the subject—can be ruptured by
infinity. Though he finds some resource in Descartes’ ‘thought of
the infinite,’ he suggests that such a thought concretely
9
intrudes in the enigmatically proximate human face.
The face is separate, foreign; it breaks with the world in
which it appears. The infinite does not ‘appear’ in philosophical
treatises or theological texts, but in the concrete encounter
with the face of the Other: a guest, a stranger, a widow, the
orphan, the neighbor (anyone who comes along). The face disrupts
my attempt to adequately connect a noesis with a noema. It
disrupts, overwhelms, surprises. And it is precisely in this
overflow of my conceptual containers, this receding of the Other
from my grasp, that the Other remains absolute within the
relation. This relation of absolute separation is neither
reversible nor symmetrical—that is, if it is to be an ethical
‘relation’ to the metaphysical. The separation of the Other is
not the same as the separation of the self. Levinas describes the
separation of the self as necessary to the relation of
difference; but he gives the self’s separation a tendency toward
egoism. The self separates in order to build its home, to dwell
comfortably, to pursue happiness in enjoyment. This self-
preservation, necessary as it may be, tends toward totality. The
self wishes to be autonomous, to be secure, and thus exacts an
10
economy of egonomy.
The Other is precisely what ruptures this economy, even as
relation to the Other depends upon both (self and Other) being
absolved from relation. My absolution is my self-identification,
my interiority that makes possible my ability to dwell, to own,
to appropriate. But the Other cannot be digested or appropriated,
as in other goods the self seeks. The Other is precisely the
opening of a metaphysical desire unlike any other hunger or need.
My relation to the Other is made possible by eros—which is not
the structure of intentionality, but a preservation of distance.
Eros does not want consummation or satiation. It is a direction
ever after the Other in both senses. First, the demand of the Other
is prior; I do not initiate it or will it. I am always too late,
out of sync. Second, I am after the Other because my
intentionality is ever eluded. The desire stirred by the Other
must not be construed as traditional lack; I cannot erotically
engage the Other if I wish to possess her or satisfy some need.
Because the Other is radically exterior, desire is double-sided.
Through desire for the Other’s transcendence, I both relate to
her but remain separate. Desire is not a ‘letting-be’ of the
11
Other, but tireless response to the Other’s solicitation.
I cannot transcend this relation; I am unable to view it
from above in some privileged vision. (This necessarily
complicates the ‘said’ of Levinas’ book, even as it alludes to a
‘saying’ of the ethical.) Such a position would reduce the Other
into the Same. Nor can I participate in the Other as if in a
mystical union. I cannot escape the ‘relation without relation,’
my place before a nontotalizable alterity. Levinas’ understanding
of the relation to the absolutely separate is therefore not a
Neoplatonic caricature. Though he draws upon the language of the
‘good beyond being’ to suggest the infinity of the face, the
relation to transcendence forces an engagement in this world.
Certainly the Other brings a height dimension, an asymmetry.
However, the face’s transcendence cannot be encompassed; and in
this sense it is beyond being. The face is metaphysicial—
irreducible to physis. It is somewhere between the ‘here-below’
and the ‘elsewhere.’ The face of the Other is the intrusion of an
otherwise in this world; just as invisible judgment (or a
messianic hope for such justice) intrudes upon a visible history.
Though Levinas works to separate the face from the world,
12
phenomenological appearing, and Hegelian consciousness, he does
not render the exteriority of the Other and the ego of the Same
as an impasse. I can hope to maintain this absolute difference in
speech. Just as language is a relation between separated terms,
speech can relate to the Other without possessing the Other. In
speech, the thematized Other is interrupted, even contested by,
the Other as my interlocutor. I can no longer simply speak about
when I am speaking to the Other. The Other opens a new dimension
in facing me; the Other is the infinite as ‘the more contained in
the less.’ In some sense the Other seems sacramental—the infinite
in the finite, the visible invisible. But the Other is not a
sacrament I digest, or a symbol I appropriate. The Other is holy
because of her separation. The dimension of the divine infinity
opens in the face. This infinity is what founds language; and
signification is infinity. Therefore the Other, and the language
she founds, is not an object. The Other objects to my
objectification and in her infinity summons my speech.
The relation to this Other is not, however, one of constant
articulation and programmatic action. It is marked by receptivity
without a certain passivity: a hospitality that is not simply the
13
dulling of activity, but a relation to freedom as responsibility.
Responsible receptivity resembles time. Because I cannot gather
the Other’s multiplicity into some totality, my speech and my
encounters with her are expression of the elusive ‘not yet.’
Temporality is the possibility of my responsibility to what
eludes me; and the time of the Other is what often postpones my
own death (my finite concepts, my violent totalities, and quite
literally stalls the death I might have without the support of
others). The intrusion of the Other reminds me of the very
distance I have from my present and my finite totalities, because
of the in-finite character of time itself.
III) The Erotic Relation: Excess and Privation
The notion that infinity can be expressed in terms of time,
and by the call of the Other, surfaces also in the writings of
Jean-Louis Chretien. Chretien offers several descriptions of the
irreducible, each resisting the claims of a secured self or
totalizing knowledge: the immemorial that haunts memory, the
unhoped for that surprises, the call of the beautiful, the voice
of conscience, the universality of touch. In each description the
absolute resembles an impure purity, a mediation in which the
14
immediate is not dissolved.
To begin on the heels of Levinas: Chretien considers the
call of the ethical voice as an ab-solute made radically
proximate. Following Fichte, he examines the voice of conscience
that complicates the interior/exterior division. Fichte describes
the conscience as an internalized Other that does not assimilate
into the subject. It is an ‘intimate depth,’ in which the
absolute is strangely present, radically near though phenomenally
absent. This does not mean that the ego’s other alone is
absolute; for Fichte the other person appears as a “Thou shalt”
command (resembling, perhaps, Levinas’ face as “Thou Shalt Not.”)
The difficulty of the call of conscience is that it requires
translation into action; but the translation is always a
listening. Since the call of conscience is absolutely irreducible
to what mediates it, a loss of translation is implied. But every
loss and limitation should urge the subject into an on-going,
infinite attempt to listen and speak, to live as a response to
the call.
Chretien suggests that we can learn about the gifts and
difficulties of moral translation by attending beauty. Before the
15
beautiful, we are summoned to response by a call that precedes
us. A disproportion arises between the call of the beautiful and
the responses it conjures. This very disproportion of the
infinite call and the ongoing finite responses is embedded in
both the Good and the Beautiful (which are etymologically linked,
as Chretien notes). It is as if the infinity of beauty is both
saturating and elusive. The call stirs a response in us that is
more than simple echo; a beautiful sunset may provoke us to paint
it—to reproduce beauty as Diotima says. But the reproduction is
one translation that begs another, and another, insofar as it
participates in the beautiful that prompts and evades every
response. Response seems founded on the impossibility of
corresponding to the call. The impossibility not only gives way
to Levinas’ ethical vigilance, but to the desire for the Good so
connected with beauty. The simplicity of the beautiful, like the
One of the Good, prompts a life-long speech that may take the
form of reverential silence, ethical responsibility, or the
reproduction of beautiful works. These are not competing options,
but rather the variety produced by the call of the Good through
the beautiful.
16
Because Chretien wishes to preserve the infinite call as
disproportion, he piles paradoxes. He writes of the beautiful
call as that of God, whose voice creates the sensible world—which
in turn expresses silently the logos in everything (a concept he
borrows from Merleau-Ponty). The call of God is an origin and an
end—gathering and cultivating our responses while drawing them
out. Beauty is the capacity of beings to respond, even as this
beauty calls them into being. Beauty stirs the very desire it
cannot satisfy; so too God is said to call through beauty to a
call that is absolute: the call that creates in ‘divine silence.’
The interplay between God’s call and God’s silence in creation
resembles the erotic interplay between poros and penia. God
summons the resources of creation out of lack; and the apparent
lack of ‘God’ in creation is what suggests God’s immeasurability.
The non-correspondence between the call of God and the response
of being is what simultaneously founds our praise and breaks our
speech. It is not as though one must abandon philosophy,
theology, or poetry in order to sing. According to Chretien, the
voice must say its inadequacy in order to say what exceeds it. So
too, the beauty of the world serves as a hint, in its very
17
particularity, to the absolute Good beyond being.
Since the Good is not fully transparent (whether in
creation, or in the disruptive dissonance of the translating
conscience), Chretien resists any idolization or idealization of
the call. Because the call is absolute, it summons everything—
even the body—to response. Chretien reminds that flesh is
precisely the site, in Aristotle’s philosophy, where categories
of absolute and relative touch. Touch has an ‘interstitial
character’: proximity requires remoteness; the skin metaxically
joins what is separates. Perhaps Levinas resisted a certain touch
because the skin often forgets its distance. But Chretien finds
the phenomena of touch helpful as a moment when the medium and
the immediate, the absolute and the relative, co-inhere in a
relation without dissolution. Unlike other senses which must be
devoid of the qualities they receive (the tongue should not taste
like anything in order to taste something; the ear must not make
noise in order to perceive noise), the skin must be both
different from its object, but can take on the qualities of its
object (the skin can feel heat and become hot). The metaphorical
potential of skin and touch allows Chretien to imagine the very
18
capacity of a medium to communicate with what exceeds it. Touch
exposes us radically to the world, preventing retreat; this
Levinas would affirm. But it is also, like Levinas’ understanding
of language, a site of exchange where the nonidentical can be
identified especially in the relation of its difference.
But what of the secrets that our body holds from us; or the
very forgetting that comes with being incarnate? What of the
irreducibility that haunts the memory of the mind even as it
opens the possibility of memory? The ability to hear a call that
precedes us—to what degree does this depend upon recollection?
Chretien examines the possibility of an absolute past as the
Good, which marks us as a desire for Good before we can even
intend it. The Good shown us before our Being, is not a trump
card claiming that all truth has already been given. It is quite
the contrary: the givenness of truth is called into question. The
Good came to us in a past that can never be fully present, nor
fully represented by our witness to it. The Good is precisely
given to us in its withdrawal, as the formation of a desire. The
immemorial quality of the Good does not render it entirely
unthinkable; rather it challenges the limitations of our thinking
19
and our memory. The immemorial opens us to consider what may not
be retained (Husserl) or contained (Levinas). In a way resonant
with Levinas’ eschatology beyond history, Chretien’s absolute
past and future breaks intentionality and expectation. And yet,
it is also a gesture toward the Christian doctrine of loss
opening future hope. Loss (as forgetting, or its implied
finitude) is not an excuse for nostalgic return, nor any
supplemental logic where forgetting is added to memory in order
to better remember the essential. Loss re-figures our thinking
and our myths—whether it be the forgetting of being in Heidegger,
the known ignorance of Socrates, or the deep drink from Lethe.
These myths suggest that learning can be an unlearning; and
the gap created by unlearning can hollow us toward a relation to
alterity. Chretien compares Platonic recollection not only to the
love that begins in emptiness, in letting-be, but also to the
tension of the desirous search. Existence then seems to open in
the faults of forgetting; the excess of the immemorial helps us
erotically occupy the gaps in our knowledge. Forgetting becomes
an opportunity to be astonished, to be oriented toward the other.
To ignore the gaps of forgetting, of ignorance, or close them for
20
satiation’s sake, is to possibly foreclose what could have never
been anticipated. Even Plotinus, Chretien reminds, believed that
unification with the One required leaping—going where there is no
path of accessibility. The inaccessibility of the immemorial and
unhoped for positions us to find even what we may not seek. It
positions us for an annunciation, the surprise birth of a promise
—for a call that will take an eternity to receive. The purity of
the past and future—which is to say, their insolubility to the
present—asks the impossible reception of unknowing, touch,
artistic response, and ethical eros.
21