Speech and Theology

Language and the Logic of Incarnation

James K.A. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134473939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

God is infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn Him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence ever be made known? Does its very appearance not undermine its transcendence, its condition of unknowability?
Speech and Theology posits that the paradigm for the encounter between the material and the divine, or the immanent and transcendent, is found in the Incarnation: God's voluntary self-immersion in the human world as an expression of His love for His creation. By this key act of grace, hinged upon Christs condescension to human finitude, philosophy acquires the means not simply to speak of perfection, which is to speak theologically, but to bridge the gap between word and thing in general sense.

Part One

HORIZONS

In Part One we establish the horizons of expectation for the question: How should one speak of that which is incommensurate with language? The first horizon is theological; thus, we situate this formal, phenomenological question within a theological history of the challenge of “naming” God. The second horizon to be established (or better, uncovered) is phenomenological: in particular, it will be necessary to effect a certain “formalization” of this theological question in order to demonstrate its affinity with a central problematic in contemporary French phenomenology as embodied in the work of Levinas, Derrida, Marion, and Janicaud.

1

INTRODUCTION

How to avoid not speaking

… one can … think … the concept of concept otherwise …¹

The violence of concepts and the possibility of theology

Theology is a discourse attended by constant prohibition, just as injunctions to worship are invariably haunted by the temptation to idolatry.² But to avoid the lure of brazen images it will not suffice to cease worship – for then we find ourselves only in another idolatry. So also, theology will not resist failure by silence.

In a seminal essay which functions as a horizon for this book, Jacques Derrida raises the question of the (in)adequacy of concepts within the context of a theological discussion.³ Fending off charges that his deconstruction is simply a reproduction of negative theology,⁴ Derrida concedes that both are concerned with a similar challenge: how to speak of that which resists language, which is otherwise than conceptual. Negative theology, he notes, “has come to designate a certain typical attitude toward language, and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, an attitude toward semantic or conceptual determination.”⁵ The negative theologian is faced with the challenge of how to speak of a God who exceeds all categories and transcends all conceptual determination; “by a more or less tenable analogy,” Derrida remarks, deconstruction grapples with a similar problem, which is precisely why he constantly has recourse to apophatic strategies and a “rhetoric of negative determination” when attempting to describe “this, which is called X (for example, text, writing, the trace, differance, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, etc.).” While insisting that this X is neither this nor that, neither being nor non-being, neither present nor absent, such strategies remain insufficient, precisely because “this X is neither a concept nor even a name; it does not lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of predicative discourse. … It is written completely otherwise.”⁶

In his analysis, Derrida effects a formalization⁷ of the problematic of negative theology, raising the broader question of how it will be possible to speak of that which is transcendent, that which is beyond language and exceeds conceptual determination. The project of this book is to push this formalization even further, to locate this problem at the very foundations of philosophical and theological method. Thus, I will initially follow Derrida's project of formalizing the problem of negative theology, in order to open up new a dialogue with phenomenology, particularly the phenomenology of the young Heidegger as a lens for then returning to the protophenomenology of Saint Augustine. However, my ultimate goal is to then return to the theological challenge which first initiated the project. In other words, the movement of the book is from (negative) theology, to phenomenology, and back again. Unlike Derrida, the telos of my project is a philosophical reflection on the possibility of theology – the possibility of speaking of God. In addition, my goal is to make space for an experience of the transcendent within phenomenology itself – to provide an account of how phenomenology can recognize religious experience and the appearance of transcendence.

Method and the question of justice

First, a formalization of the problem: If the very topic of philosophy is experience,⁸ and if we appreciate that experience is pretheoretical, then how will it be possible to theoretically describe this pretheoretical experience? Already, however, we have been confronted by three different challenges, three different instances of phenomena that are incommensurate with language: God, différance, and factical experience. For each, that which exceeds concept ualization is different: in the first instance, we are confronted by a radical transcendence which cannot be conceived, an “Other” which exceeds conceptual determination. Here we would include the face of the Other in Levinas, Marion's Gxd, and the God of Augustine. In the second case of différance, it is not so much a matter of transcendence in a Levinasian sense of plenitude and excess, but rather a “quasi-transcendence,” a phenomenon which is not quite a phenomenon, and thus cannot be named. Finally, in the case of factical experience, we find a phenomenon which resists expression in language, not because of its distance, but rather because of its proximity and interiority, a depth to the self which cannot be expressed because it is a mode of being incommensurate with cognitive conceptualization. “Case studies” of the final category would include Augustine and Kierkegaard's account of subjectivity, and Heidegger's notion of facticity.

However, despite their differences, when we formalize the problem we find that all three confront a similar challenge – a methodological challenge: how will it be possible to speak? Or as Derrida asks, Comment ne pas parler? How not to speak? How to avoid speaking in a certain manner which in fact denies and conceals? How is it possible to speak and yet not grasp (con-capere) in a concept, enframing and thereby stilling that which is spoken of and reducing it to the order of predicative discourse? How can one speak without betraying the object of speech, giving it up and delivering it over to be manhandled by the interlocutor as something present-at-hand? How can language, and more particularly theoretical concepts, communicate without doing violence to the “object” which is exterior to language? Do not concepts always already signal the violation of radical alterity?

This concern regarding the violence of concepts is a distinctly postmodern matter, in the simple sense that it is only a “modern” concept which makes claims to totalization, which is precisely why Hegel is Levinas's most significant foil. Indeed, throughout the history of the tradition – particularly in its most theological moments (Dionysius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas) – we see a persistent awareness of the inadequacy of concepts. Language constantly fails, these premoderns confess, precisely because of the inadequacy of language in the face of God's infinity. From the heart of the tradition, Aquinas confesses that all of the names we would predicate of God “fall short of representing him,” and while they signify the divine substance, they necessarily do so in an “imperfect manner.”⁹ In many ways, I will be attempting to retrieve those aspects of the tradition which recognize the inadequacy or “failure” of the concept to comprehend the transcendent. In modernity, however, philosophy attempts to make up for this failure by reducing the phenomenon to the measure of the concept. In other words, while the medievals accept, even celebrate, the inadequacy of the concept, moderns cannot tolerate it. They refuse the inadequacy of concepts and guarantee their adequation by reducing the object to the measure of the concept. And it is precisely this “cutting-down-to-size” which constitutes what I am describing as the “violence” of the concept.

My concern and object of critique, then, is precisely the “modern”¹⁰ development of the concept in its post-Cartesian form, finding its perfection in Hegel. In modernity, the concept becomes a means of domination, seizure, encompassing, such that one who has the concept of the thing has the thing, “in one's grasp,” as it were.¹¹ In modernity – and marking a significant break from the late ancients and medievals – knowledge and comprehension are no longer distinguished; rather, knowledge is only knowledge insofar as it comprehends (and thereby guarantees “certainty”). “Absolute knowledge” represents the ideal of appropriation, the institution of identity and the erasure of difference. And it is just this modernity that gives birth to distinctly modern theologies which must include both neo Scholasticism and fundamentalisms of varying strains (my concern is its Protestant variety),¹² what Levinas describes simply as “rational theology” (GP 129), or what I would label “theological positivism.” Inheriting the modern penchant for comprehension and certainty (what of faith?), modernist (and, unwittingly, antimodernist) theology is marked by an employment of language and concepts which seeks to define the divine, to grasp the essence of God (and to employ such knowledge to marginalize any who disagree). The Westminster Catechism (1647), for instance (both Larger and Shorter, and the Confession), are completely comfortable asking the question, “What is God?,” and provide an answer – with straight face and without apology: “God is … ”¹³ And it will be precisely this definition which will mark the boundaries of the community of faith.¹⁴ In other words, what Heidegger decried as “ontotheology” is a distinctly modern phenomenon. But it is precisely within a theological context that the violence of such concepts is appreciated: when construed this way, the concept violates transcendence, reducing and “cutting down to size” the Infinite.

The violence of the (modern) concept raises the question of whether language and concepts are inherently reductive and violent. In short, is theory possible? Or rather, is it possible to do theory and employ theoretical concepts without doing violence to that which is “seen?” If the “object” of theoretical articulation is in some way radically exterior to language (God, différance, pretheoretical experience), then every unveiling of it within language will fail to produce the object: the phenomenon will fail to appear, precisely because of the failure of the concept to grasp that which necessarily exceeds its comprehension. Or rather, the object will be forced to appear otherwise than itself, forced to play by the rule of the concept and thus suffering the violence of conceptualization. We inherit this concern from Levinas's suggestion that “theory also designates comprehension [intelligence] – the logos of being – that is, a way of approaching the known being such that its alterity with regard to the knowing being vanishes” (TI 21). To this we must relate his understanding of violence as “making them [others] play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves” (ibid.). Thus the theoretical disciplines – philosophy and theology included – are faced with the methodological question of how to speak, or how not to speak. And in an important way, this methodological question is fundamentally a question of justice: how do we do justice to that which is other (where “doing justice” means respecting the other as other, rather than reducing it to a relation of identity¹⁵), particularly in our theoretical descriptions and articulations? It would seem that either one treats all objects as present-at-hand (a positivist kataphatics), thereby denying their alterity and unwittingly engaging in violence; or, one gives up any possibility of non-violent description and thereby gives up theory (an apophatics which ends in silence).

Unless, perhaps, there is a “third way” out of this aporia: what if, recognizing the violence and failure of theoretical concepts which treat all phenomena as present-at-hand, but at the same time appreciating the imperative of description, one were to develop and work with a new kind of concept or different set of categories? Could there be a kind of concept, and therefore a kind of theory, which does not treat objects as present-at-hand, but rather both honors transcendence and answers the call for reflection? That is, could the violence of the (traditional) theoretical concept signal the development of a new kind of concept and set of conceptual categories, precipitated by a fundamental redirection of philosophy to pretheoretical experience? Could we, as Derrida suggests, think the concept of the concept otherwise? The construction (or recovery) of just such a third way is precisely the task of this book: to provide an alternative interpretation of concepts which do not claim to grasp their object, but rather signal the phenomenon in such a way that respects its transcendence or incommensurability rather than collapsing the difference and denying otherness. Such a reinterpretation of concepts will open a philosophical space for a reconsideration of theological method.

At stake here is the very possibility of both philosophy and theology – the ethical possibility of philosophy and the possibility of an ethical philosophy.¹⁶ This philosophical consideration of concepts will then function as the foundation for a theological employment of concepts which “do justice” to God. In particular, I will attempt to develop the possibility of a “new” phenomenology which is attentive to this methodological question of justice, since it has been precisely phenomenology which has been the object of critique as a philosophical method which denies alterity and levels transcendence. When formalized, the provocation of transcendence in God and the Other, the quasi-transcendence of différance, and the inexpressibility of factical lived experience all pose a methodological challenge to phenomenology: the incommensurable – phenomenology's “impossible.” How could the incommensurate appear? And further, how could we speak about the incommensurable? If phenomenology effects a return to experience as the fund for reflection, how will it be possible to give a philosophical or theoretical description of experience, which is itself pretheoretical and resists theoretical articulation? Is it not precisely the fullness of experience which cannot be “put into words”? Is not factical experience precisely that which is incommensurate with conceptual, philosophical thought? After passing through this formalized version of the challenge of speaking (with Husserl, Levinas, Marion, Derrida, and Heidegger), I will then return to the more specific theological question of how (not) to speak of God (with Augustine, Aquinas, and Kierkegaard).

Phenomenology's other: the French challenge to phenomenology

It is precisely the “other” of philosophy – “it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Radical Orthodoxy Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Part One Horizons
• 1 Introduction How to avoid not speaking
• 2 Phenomenology and Transcendence Genealogy of a challenge
• Part Two Retrieval
• 3 Heidegger'S “New” Phenomenology
• 4 Praise and Confession How (not) to speak in Augustine
• Part Three Trajectories
• 5 Incarnational Logic On God's refusal to avoid speaking
• Index