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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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