Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseduo-Dionysius: Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise 9780739183410, 9780739185704, 9780739183427

Table of contents :
EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE IN LYOTARD AND PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What is the Inexpressible Expression?
One. Witness and Testimony
Prologue to the Problem
The Witness and Testimony in Lyotard
Heidegger’s Silence
Lyotard on Testimonial Narrative
Lyotard’s Critique of Heidegger
The Witness and Testimony in Pseudo-Dionysius
Concluding Remarks
Two. Contextualizing Jean-François Lyotard
Prologue on Contextualization
The Difficulty of Characterization
What is Postmodernism?
Three. Bearing Witness in The Differend
The Differend’s Style and Form
The Problem of Bearing Witness
Testimony
And as Linkage in Gertrude Stein
Therapeutic Language Games in Ludwig Wittgenstein
Parataxis in Theodor Adorno
Authorization of the Addressee in the Cashinahua
Concluding Remarks
Four. Contextualizing Pseudo-Dionysius
The Difficulty of Characterization
Neoplatonism
Mysticism
Five. Bearing Witness in The Divine Names
The Divine Names’ Style and Form
Witnessing and Testimony
Naming Names
Subsistence and Participation
Good and Light
Beauty and Eros
Evil and Proportionate Privation
Mystical Language and Spiritual Exercise
Six. Silence and Eros
Introduction to a Last/Further Solution
The Symbiosis of Silence and Eros
Lyotard on the Possibility of a Just Silence
For the Love of God
Conclusion: The Expression of the Inexpressible
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

MELANIE V. WALTON

Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius

Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseduo-Dionysius Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise Mélanie V. Walton

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walton, Mélanie Victoria. Expressing the inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-dionysius : bearing witness as spiritual exercise / Mélanie V. Walton. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8341-0 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8570-4 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8342-7 (electronic) 1. Lyotard, Jean-François, 1924-1998. 2. Lyotard, Jean-François, 1924-1998. Differend. 3. Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite. 4. Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite. De divinis nominibus. I. Title. B2430.L964W35 2013 194--dc23 2013022848 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my parents, for your love and support, to Clancy and Cliff, for fulfilling Aristotle’s definition of the highest form of friendship, and to Nikki, Kali, Tal, Tiger, and Vox for teaching me the balance of the art of concentration and the restorative power of play.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

ix

INTRODUCTION: What is the Inexpressible Expression?

1

ONE. Witness and Testimony

15

Prologue to the Problem The Witness and Testimony in Lyotard Heidegger’s Silence Lyotard on Testimonial Narrative Lyotard’s Critique of Heidegger The Witness and Testimony in Pseudo-Dionysius Concluding Remarks

TWO. Contextualizing Jean-François Lyotard Prologue on Contextualization The Difficulty of Characterization What is Postmodernism?

THREE. Bearing Witness in The Differend The Differend’s Style and Form The Problem of Bearing Witness Testimony And as Linkage in Gertrude Stein Therapeutic Language Games in Ludwig Wittgenstein Parataxis in Theodor Adorno Authorization of the Addressee in the Cashinahua Concluding Remarks

FOUR. Contextualizing Pseudo-Dionysius

15 18 30 33 40 45 54

67 67 68 75

89 89 100 127 127 131 140 143 146

161

The Difficulty of Characterization Neoplatonism Mysticism

161 164 171

FIVE. Bearing Witness in The Divine Names

185

The Divine Names’ Style and Form Witnessing and Testimony

185 188

Naming Names Subsistence and Participation Good and Light Beauty and Eros Evil and Proportionate Privation Mystical Language and Spiritual Exercise

SIX. Silence and Eros

188 193 199 201 204 210

223

Introduction to a Last/Further Solution The Symbiosis of Silence and Eros Lyotard on the Possibility of a Just Silence For the Love of God

223 226 243 256

CONCLUSION: The Expression of the Inexpressible

283

Bibliography Index About the Author

293 310 315

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not be, were it not for the inspiration and dedicated guidance offered me by Professors Bettina Bergo, Lanei Rodemeyer, and Thérèse Bonin.

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS THE

INEXPRESSIBLE EXPRESSION? “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value1

What is an expression that can express that which cannot be expressed? Logicians and grammarians may say that an expression cannot say what cannot be said: it is an impossibility—or, at the very least, a sloppy use of language. But, humanity’s intellectual and literary record eloquently and garrulously attests to both the legitimacy of the inexpressible expression and the multiplicity of ways to give it voice. Its every articulation must be meaningful if each so subverts that sensibility by which the logicians and grammarians judge; every judgment of a transgression must begin from the affirmation that it can be understood by the offended rule to be an offense. While heterogeneous in time, place, and philosophical situation, the contemporary French father of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), and the late antique to early medieval, presumably Syrian father of Neoplatonist Christian mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 471-528 C.E.), both rigorously and intimately confront the inexpressible expression.2 Both are provoked by a witness who is silenced by the binding limits of grammatical possibility, even while called to testify to an ineffable. Their examples are remarkably distinct, the holocaust survivor and the religious faithful, yet, they assign equal imperative to their expression. Both define the inexpressible as precisely that which must be expressed in the face of logic that deems it absurd. They both proceed by con-

2

INTRODUCTION

siderably similar methods and styles. Lyotard’s postmodernism and PseudoDionysius’ mysticism, both endeavors bearing the weight of impossibility, are astonishingly analogous: while postmodernism is founded on a secular and rigorous science of stripping away misleading “grand narratives” in philosophic thinking, it operates with and by a reverence for unknown possibility equal to that in religious mysticism. Both are pedagogic pursuits, spiritual exercises in the originary sense of philosophy as the love of wisdom and its activity as an exercise of seeking it in the face of adversity, into and through perplexity. Religion’s intimacy with the inexpressible and its elaboration is far better documented than postmodernism’s: God is and creates by the Word, angels communicate without speaking, God spoke to Adam through thunder and lightning, to Moses through a burning bush, to Jeanne d’Arc through provocative visions and angelic voices. As Umberto Eco sought to explain it: “If we are to understand it [God’s communication] . . . we must conceive of a language that, although not translatable into any known idiom, is still, through special grace or disposition, comprehensible to its hearer.”3 These incomprehensible communications are made intelligible by expression in metaphor, riddles, and koans, parables, confessions, testimony, and transcription. Religion, traditionally, has granted greater leniency to these paradoxical expressions and its faithful accept the apology of language’s inadequacy to express the meaning and truth of the inexpressible. Even systematic theology, which can be dismissive of mysticism, only truly seeks to offer better transcription, through argumentation, of the incomprehensible. Instead, it is the skeptic, critic, competing religion, and the philosopher thinking reason to be faith’s opposite who ask: what makes these expressions inexpressible and strictly repellent to logic and how can meaning operate outside of the rules governing meaning’s communication? Philosophy, historically and on either side of the contemporary divide, has been obsessed with these questions, and often to the detriment of the inexpressible’s legitimacy. Aristotelian logic, most simply, entails that a valid argument necessitates the truth of its premise. 4 The necessity implies a command that this truth be known prior to its demonstration in argument, thus, demonstrable before its demonstration. Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, and Michael Dummett debated whether the formal validity of arguments must necessitate their premises to be empirically verifiable.5 The logical problem at stake is whether truth can be deduced from premises that can be verified neither empirically nor formally. Hegel even invokes this question when expressing his disdain for the abstraction of law due to its universalization of the concrete. 6 His disdain challenges the utility of formal logic’s complaints about non-contradiction because, sometimes, as in the case of the inexpressible expression, statements are true and contradictory. This opens the door for meaning to be far more than what can be logically expressed. Lyotard, working first within the convoluted framework of legal judgments, seeks to unravel how the witness to the inexpressible is silenced by a tribunal that operates by a logic that exceeds the rigor life unfolds and demands

WHAT IS THE INEXPRESSIBLE EXPRESSION?

3

logical exposition when none can be. This logic of the tribunal is the logic that binds us, that keeps us from truthfully calling the meaningful expression of an inexpressible an actual expression. This logic of the tribunal is senselessly rigid and ignores the canonical precedent for expression being far more than its narrow, logical definition. For example, Husserl acknowledges gestures and nonsense in his investigation into meaning and sense, Wittgenstein acknowledges the body and grunts as meaningful expressions, and Lyotard acknowledges the successful communication by a cat’s swishing tail—but the judge and jury of logic will not allow these expressions to be legitimate testimony. 7 The legitimacy of the demands by the “logical”—broadly construed, be they demanding truth to be self-certain or empirically demonstrable—must be examined: are any of their means of validation valid under their own rules? The current work undertakes an exploration of this problem of the expression of the inexpressible as a philosophical exercise into the problem of bearing witness to that which forbids its testimony. This problem cannot be limited by linguistic, logical, or epistemological confines. Exploring the identity between two instances of the ineffable from radically differing thinkers, times, and intents helps to illuminate the problem’s frequent historical recurrence and the breadth of its ontological, aesthetic, and political dimensions and consequences. The universality of the experience of the inexpressible expression, however, does not diminish the exceptionality of its address by Lyotard and PseudoDionysius and the productivity and richness that come from reading their expressions together. After a chapter focused on the problem itself, the relative obscurity of these two thinkers, the immense disparities between them, and their ironic connection that each is equally and vehemently resistant to concrete characterization necessitate their independent introductions and contextualizations before moving to their synthesis in the final chapter. The contextualization of each, however, will prove to be a true con-texere, a weaving together of their thought by the fact that their obvious heterogeneities only serve to more brightly highlight their few, but profound, points of philosophical communion. Lyotard resists an easy label, like “metaphysician,” “ethicist,” or even “philosopher” because his writing is so prolific, his topics tremendously diverse, and his style constantly adaptive to the theme at hand without ever shedding its frustrating complexity.8 There are an equally many subtle difficulties to encapsulating Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought under a simple title, but the most profound stump is that he is, precisely, a pseudonym. Pseudo-Dionysius is not Dionysius the Areopagite—the distinguished convert of St. Paul in Acts 17 and an Athenian member of the judicial council. He whose philosophy unremittingly invokes the power of names to permit one to know one’s Creator, refuses us his own, truthful name. His pseudonym, however, does successfully express the union of the potentially conflicting sources that compose his intellectual background: Neoplatonism and Christianity. On the cusp between late antiquity and the early

4

INTRODUCTION

middle ages, Pseudo-Dionysius’ philosophy shows evidence of influence by both Greek and Alexandrian philosophy and bears affinity with Jewish, Islamic, and Christian mysticism (even while he, himself, is responsible for the coinage and defining account of “mysticism”). Lyotard, too, shares a background of incendiary influences: radical Marxian politics, phenomenology, and Freudian psychoanalysis, carefully read through the history of philosophy, led him to influence the development of post-structuralism and critique it through his own postmodernism, while sustaining an abiding passion for aesthetics and art criticism. Their respective resistances to concrete characterization foreshadows the equal obscurity encountered when one attempts to summarize the guiding principles of their respective schools of postmodernism and mysticism. Postmodernism, for Lyotard, means something very different than how the term is used in the everyday marketplace of contemporary theories and catchphrases.9 It is neither a diachronical next period after the modern, nor is it the modern’s overturning by an interruption of linearity through an eclecticism or roughshod assembly of artifacts. Instead, postmodernism is primarily methodological and purports an anti-historicism and active uncovering of bias akin to Husserl’s phenomenology. Its endeavor is to lay bare what otherwise remains un-presented or covered over in thinking. Lyotard prefers to name it “re-writing modernity” to emphasize its persistent re-velation and re-address of the prejudicing and fictive grand narratives to which our thought so easily succumbs. The “Re-” of re-writing refuses any idea of a re-turn to an origin or answer, but encourages re-turn as a turning through again, a working through that is productive and pro-motive of, in some cases, new pro-grams or, in others, the persistence of its own activity. Postmodernism’s emphasis on the activity of the “Pro-” and “Re-” conjures an allusion to the Neoplatonist theory of procession and reversion that underlies Pseudo-Dionysius’ mysticism. Like Lyotard’s postmodernism, mysticism endeavors to uncover and experience (physically or by knowing) that which can neither be seen nor understood. Its etymology leads us to the Greek mystērion, meaning a “secret rite or doctrine,” mýstēs, meaning “one who has been initiated,” and the verb mýein, meaning “to close” or “to shut,” likely referring to the closed lips that keep secrets and the shut eyes for all but the initiated who were permitted to see the sacred rites.10 Ultimately, it tells us that mysticism concerns that knowing that neither comes from the eyes nor is communicable through the lips. For Pseudo-Dionysius, mysticism is faith and philosophy’s activity: the discernment of and contemplation on the knowability and unknowability of God that engages one into the cycle from which being and knowledge come and to which all long to return. The mystic, then, is he or she who longs to know God. This knowledge cannot proceed by the same manner and expression of how one may know the name of this dog, the chemical composition of a cappuccino, how to build a house, discern the seasons, or count in French. This knowledge, instead, is based

WHAT IS THE INEXPRESSIBLE EXPRESSION?

5

in the passions and requires the faithful to be precisely that: the actively faithful witness whose faith commands one’s testimony of that which resists its intellectual capture. Mysticism, then, centrally concerns the problem of bearing witness to and testifying about the ineffable. Lyotard’s postmodernism shares in spirit this very same definition. For Lyotard, the problem of witnessing is introduced, in his seminal 1983 work Le Différend, by the provocative declaration: “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (§1). This situation, wherein one finds testimony impossible, is a differend. A differend is an impasse to successful communication; it is an insurmountable gulf between heterogeneous phrase regimens that forbids the translation of one’s meaning into anything the other side could comprehend. Translation between languages can, of course, take place, but there are different phrase regimens or genres across which there can be no translation, and hence their encounter founds a differend (§§39-40). Lyotard’s most poignant example of a differend is the holocaust survivor whose testimony is illegitimated by a logical bind born from Robert Faurisson’s revisionist claim that his scientific research proves that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps (§2). The rules of this logical bind limit the survivor’s truthful response by prohibiting the objective demonstration of her personal experience, that is, of being a survivor of a death camp for it prohibits the living witness from testifying to her own death by gas. The revisionist’s vicious logic thus perpetrates a second wrong against the already-victim: it silences her. Instead of dismissing historical revisionism as hate speech, criminal, or inhuman, Lyotard takes up the bind and endeavors to unravel it from within itself. To dismiss it without challenging it within its own framework would only bolster its power and falsely affirm its logic. Ultimately, Lyotard reveals such logic to be constructed poorly—albeit with no simple logical flaw, as most who hear of the bind first presume—but, importantly, that the bind remains immensely significant in that it points beyond itself to the true challenge: that “Auschwitz” is an event of such proportion that it does exceed our capacity to encapsulate it, and thus exceeds our ability to testify to it.11 This example demonstrates the central challenge of his book, that is, the necessity of addressing all differends, even as the possibility of once and for all bridging these impasses is likely to fail. But, before accepting and having to mount a justification for his conclusion, I wish to better sketch out the survivor’s differend and whether and how Pseudo-Dionysius’ unique method of naming God would permit her a new idiom by which to address the revisionist and his logical tribunal. Pseudo-Dionysius’ object of the differend is God. God, for the existentially unknown Pseudo-Dionysius, is essentially unknown and unknowable: “Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for

6

INTRODUCTION

anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity.” 12 But with no hesitation, no justification, he immediately adds: “And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything” (588C). God is essentially, yet not entirely, unknown and unknowable because He is unknowable, but He is not wholly incommunicable, wherein “communication” intends successful conveyance of meaning, of knowledge. He is and is not knowable, then, which is, itself, a suggestion to the explanation. The essence of the difficulty of knowing Him resides in His superessentiality: all that He is surpasses humanity’s capacity to know. This spawns the central question of faith: “If God cannot be grasped by mind or senseperception, if he is not a particular being, how do we know him” (869C)? According to Pseudo-Dionysius, it is by His grace, through the divinely inspired words of the Scripture writers, and with the aid of philosophy that we may know some things of Him. Pseudo-Dionysius’ aim, then, throughout his oeuvre, is to achieve this knowledge, however deficient, that is permitted humanity so as to achieve union with the One wherein He can be known in His full essence. Union, however, is His gift for which we must cultivate in ourselves the capacity to receive it. We do this through the activity of faith fueled by desire: we are called and we call to Him. Our call is exercised as the discernment and expression of His names, that is, the demonstration of our limited knowledge of Him. Faith commands us and our desire impels us to testify to this unknowable knowledge. God is a unique inexpressible, yet remarkably comparable to that in Lyotard’s example. God is a differend between skeptics and the faithful much like the gas chambers between the victim and revisionist, but, also, like “Auschwitz,” He, Himself, is both the limit of human comprehension and He who calls us to know Him. “God” and “Auschwitz,” as differends and their birthing grounds, are somethings of which we can know many things with varying degrees of certainty, but are in themselves somethings that are far more than we can know. The element of their unknowability is the source from which their meaningfulness comes. Without knowing what cannot be known, what is known of them, is, at once, not knowledge of them at all. And, since “Auschwitz” and “God” are exceptional—that is, they stand out as objects of wisdom and limits to comprehension and weigh upon all manners of thought and life—they command that we strive to know what we cannot. To this absurd end, Pseudo-Dionysius effectively founds a method by which to communicate this impossible knowledge of God. His method utilizes the Neoplatonist theory of emanation and practices a radical conjunction of apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (affirmative) theologies. Pseudo-Dionysius justifies his project to know He who “surpasses all discourse and all knowledge” through emanation theory, which rests on the premise that God, as Creator, precontains all of His creation because there can be nothing before His having created it. For Pseudo-Dionysius, insofar as He pre-contains and creates all that is, all that is, is of Him—that is, everything in existence is like a little piece of God

WHAT IS THE INEXPRESSIBLE EXPRESSION?

7

(593A). With the emphasis on “everything,” this interpretation of creation infinitely expands the idea that it was only humanity that was “created in His image.”13 To capture the totality of creation, the Neoplatonists often employ an aquatic illustration of emanation wherein God, who, in every way, exceeds all that is, overflows Himself and thereby renders creation (and, in turn, just as the fountain always pours forth, all of creation returns back to the One).14 God slips from our grasp and overflows any possible containment within human knowledge, but since His outpouring created all that we can know, all that is gives us some knowledge of Him. Pseudo-Dionysius’ expression of this piecemeal knowledge of God is radically honest and reflects the nature of the knowledge itself: it affirms and denies itself. A strict affirmative theology would compound all these fragments of knowledge together into a mural to represent God. But, Pseudo-Dionysius rejects that this could truthfully depict He who is “nameless and yet has all the names of everything that is” (596C). Thus, we must grant to God every name, and we must deny every one as insufficient. Pseudo-Dionysius’ method, then, conjoins negative theology, the rejection of the possibility of naming and thereby knowing God, to every affirmation of a divine name. For example, concerning the name of God of “Truth,” Pseudo-Dionysius’ method would read that God is Truth and God is not Truth, because He creates truth and exceeds it. The discordant, stuttering conjunction affirms and denies the legitimacy of each scrap of Scriptural and sensible knowledge to be a name of God thereby presenting and withdrawing a representation of the inexpressible. Pseudo-Dionysius’ treatise proceeds in this manner to denominate many hundreds of divine names, of which he rigorously analyzes approximately thirtyfive. His form of naming and negating the names of God is radical; his activity’s purpose and fulfillment—divine union—is equally so. And, still, there is one name within this veritable dictionary-encyclopedia hybrid that makes the unknown Syrian’s work truly incendiary. This ultimate provocation is not any terribly uncommon name (for he never bats an eye at calling God Human, Posterior, or Inebriated 15 ); instead, it is one of God’s most common names: Love. Pseudo-Dionysius’ source for names is the Scriptures; it provides both the intelligibly discernible names such as Being, Life, Truth, and Word, and the sensible names, those directly taken from sensible phenomena and material objects, such as Still Breeze, Dew, Feet, Crown, Cups, and Mixing Bowls.16 For the divine name of Love, however, the common cum alien: he claims Scriptural support, yet fails to demonstrate it. Scripture’s name is agape; Pseudo-Dionysius’ name is Eros. The only true support for this radical name—not cited, of course, in his Christian treatise—are the pagans Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus.17 But the name, however radical, is as necessary an addition to his treatise as is his use of emanation theory and his provocative method. Eros is the most passionately intense instantiation of love. This knowledge of God is discerned and expressed through the passions because it evades our human reason. Its attainment is through dis-

8

INTRODUCTION

cerning what He created out of and by the superfluity of His love. We undertake this attainment of knowledge because God’s love for us calls to us and founds our most passionate desire for Him. We undertake this pursuit because it may permit us to achieve the logically impossible ecstasy of divine union. Eros, as a divine name, underscores the infinite significance of our quest to express the inexpressible. In this transgressive transformation of love, Pseudo-Dionysius’ move is paralleled by Lyotard’s transfusion of Freud through Marx to seek to know economy libidinally and, further, to do a phenomenology of the unpresented’s impact on lived social experience, to undermine the rigidity of theory so as to open the seams of reality for unadulterated intensity.18 It is through love heightened to the superlative that the rigidity of knowledge can be loosened, and thus allow for the meaning that affirmative theology or the tribunal would deny. The Divine Names is both a rigorous, analytical delineation of divine names and a desperate love letter to God and is structured as a letter to a colleague. It proffers itself as a model by which to acquire divine knowledge and of honoring God until one may be granted, presumably though this form of praise, divine union, and thereby come to truly know He who is the object of our desire and search. 19 His treatise, then, is as much pedagogic as it is an encyclopedia of names and is, thus, parallel to how Lyotard’s The Differend, in its enactment of a search for a new idiom, is as much pedagogic as it is an analysis of language’s confrontation with its limits. Pseudo-Dionysius’ text acknowledges the unknowability of God and allows that silence may express it, if his stuttering speech may fail, but, nonetheless, persists, as any true lover would, in his project of speaking the names of his mysterious love. Likewise, Lyotard demonstrates the absolute necessity of seeking the unknown idiom that could bridge the differend, even while affirming the likely possibility of its very impossibility. Both thinkers demonstrate a provocative persistence of expressing the inexpressible in the face of its impossibility, which is most productively understood as being demonstrations of their pedagogy and its inseparability from their content. It is possible, then, that Pseudo-Dionysius’ method of the radical conjunction of the affirmation and denial of each element of his testimony to his knowledge of God, a method infused through with eros, may be a model by which Lyotard’s silenced witness may speak and be heard? In order to determine its value as a model, we must broach an examination (that will be fully carried out in the further chapters) of two of the many attempts at the ineffable’s articulation that Lyotard discerns, analyzes, and finds failing: Gertrude Stein’s stream of consciousness and Theodor Adorno’s parataxis. Gertrude Stein, the American writer and renown art collector, styles her writing in between prose and poetry to form a stream of consciousness a little less eclectically spontaneous than the form’s other practitioners but better reflective of the automatic flow of a mind rigorously trained to seek structure and undo it. Lyotard’s central interest in her work is how she employs infinite “ands”

WHAT IS THE INEXPRESSIBLE EXPRESSION?

9

by eliminating them all from her texts to permit linkages between phrases beyond grammar and narrative context. His central interest in the critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s writing is his poignant use of parataxis, which is the elimination of written logical, grammatical connectors. In essence, Adorno’s linkages are conducted though the active negation of that which Stein effaces but over amply affirms. This interests Lyotard because, if a differend is an insurmountable impasse between two regimens of language, say, that of denomination versus that of ostension or that of the court versus that of the street, then a radical method of linking phrases outside of grammatical rules and context could possibly form a bridge between the two sides. Stein’s invisible “and’s” and Adorno’s prohibited connectors offer no logical justification for themselves similar to how Pseudo-Dionysius’ “and,” sometimes there and sometimes absent, conjoining the affirmation and denial of each name, unapologetically links two logical contradictions. Lyotard carefully highlights the benefits each style brings forth while he also unravels the potential success of each model. Even as Stein’s linkages are based in the passions and proceed sensuously, her absence of a logical necessity between phrases is filled in by an ontological necessity. This substitution undermines her model’s ultimate utility because it is precisely the ontological status of the witness to that which forbids testimony that is in doubt. A witness is one who can give testimony that can be heard; failing this communication, one fails to be a witness (cf., pp. 67-8). And, even as Adorno’s style forbids its enclosure in silence in the face of the prohibited, and proceeds according to analytic reason while still undermining grammar, it gives itself a prohibition against any positivity that is just as binding as the revisionist’s logic (cf., §§100, 152-3). These examples reveal that Lyotard would admire Pseudo-Dionysius’ acknowledgement of the reverence of silence and how he, regardless, violates it by his stuttering testimony. Like in Adorno, this persistence in the face of absurdity is an acknowledgement of the all-encompassing necessity (beyond one from ethics, politics, or epistemology alone) of expressing what resists its expression. He would admire, as well, Pseudo-Dionysius’ linkage of contradictions and their comprehensible necessity, as he admired this in the other two models. Finally, he would especially admire the embrace of the legitimacy of knowledge and its discernment that occurs in the passions rather than reason. There exists more than can be acknowledged by logic because all events, God and the holocaust preeminently included, exceed their possible, logical encapsulation. Thus, to point to these events requires phrases that operate outside of the confines of logic. But this is the root problem, as well. For a differend to be undone, its addressor and addressee must understand one another. If the addressor’s challenge is framed such that only a deictic, an ostensive verbal or otherwise demonstrable “this,” “here,” is the legitimate response, and the addressee responds with description, the addressor will judge it as no answer at all. For example, to respond to the police officer’s shout of

10

INTRODUCTION

“open this door” by saying “it is a lovely door,” would result in the officer’s judgment of your response, to put it mildly, to be impertinent. More accurately, it would be judged as untrue, for it was not an answer according to the rules of what an actual response must be. To the skeptic and the revisionist, the testimonies that declare “God is Truth and God is not Truth” and “I was interned in a death camp and I am not dead” are illegitimate, and are not at all even testimonies for that very class of utterances are to be demonstrations of knowledge. Even if such testimony technically breaks the violence of being silenced, affirms the ontological status of the witnesses by being beings speaking something, and points better than any other to the truth (which is the utter incomprehensibility, by humanity, of these events), these expressions are rejected. And yet, with this last revelation, the failure of this new model for the witness is slackened. How Pseudo-Dionysius’ example of testimony does succeed, despite its failures, is in its occurrence as one more option to be taken up and worked through. It is a productive delay. It is a transgression of answers, if not a solution. Its consideration prohibits the memory that resists capture from fading. As the activity of spiritual exercise, as the Socratic struggle through aporia, Pseudo-Dionysius’ speaking the unspeakable offers a truly productive method for continuing Lyotard’s search for a new idiom for the silenced witness.

Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 16e. 2. While scholarly convention is to shorten his name, this work will preserve it as “Pseudo-Dionysius” to acknowledge the hermeneutical depth his pseudonymity brings him and because it truly has a more eloquent ring than the name offered by Erasmus and used by Luther: “Dionysius the whoever-he-was” (quoted in Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 17). The dates offered for his lifespan also diverge from convention to acknowledge the scholarly dispute, understandable given that he is a pseudonymous author, concerning the date of his birth either as or between 471 or 485 and his death as or between 518 or 528. 3. Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1998), 24. 4. Cf., Aristotle, Prior Analytics, trans. A. J. Jenkinson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: Volume One, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), I. 2, 24b18-20. 5. Cf., Hilary Putnam, “Is Logic Empirical?,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 5 (1969): 216-41; Michael Dummett, “Is Logic Empirical?,” Truth and Other Enigmas (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1978), 269-89; W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20-43. 6. Cf., G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§148-53, 251 ff. and Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Par-

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is: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 137-45; in translation, “Hegel Notice,” pp. 91-97. All following references to The Differend will be cited by section or page parenthetically in the text with the English translation from The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), unless there is a reason for divergence, in which case the French will be given alongside my own translation. 7. Cf., Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume I, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. II, pt. I, ch. 2, §18; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), §2 ff.; and Lyotard, §123. 8. Robert Harvey and Lawrence Schehr name him “a polymath of a special sort,” that is, “A philosopher steeped in phenomenology, a militant for pluralist thinking, an esthetician of the figural, Lyotard staked out territories for innumerable scholars in literature, the arts, politics, and ethics, as well as in more recently recognized fields such as gender studies and postcolonialism” (Harvey and Schehr, “Editors’ Preface,” Yale French Studies 99 [2001]: 1-5, 1). This diversity makes him, as Peter Dews notes, “something of an anomaly,” wherein he “remained on the margins of an orthodoxy [contemporary French philosophy] which defined itself precisely in terms of its focus on, and celebration of, the marginal” (Dews, “Review: The Letter and the Line: Discourse and Its Other in Lyotard,” Diacritics 14, 3 [1984]: 39-49, 40). The scope of his diversity is further suggested by the final section in Gary Browning’s bibliography, “Studies on Lyotard and/or relating to Themes of his Work,” which cites primary texts of Habermas, Hegel, Marx, and Wittgenstein alongside the standard secondary works that address his oeuvre (Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives [Cardiff, England: University of Wales Press, 2000], 195-7). 9. Lyotard, rhetorically and mockingly, asks, “is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change” (§182)? Elsewhere, affirming that his thought “has obviously nothing to do with what is called postmodernity or post-modernism on the market places of today’s ideologies. It has nothing to do with the use of parodies and quotations of modernity or modernism in either architectural, theatrical, or pictoral pieces, and even less with that movement resorting to the traditional forms of narrative as they have been displayed in novels or short stories” (Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, 3, 54 [1987]: 3-9, 8). 10. Cf., “mystic” and “mystery” entries in Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert K. Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz (New York: Larousse Kingfisher Chambers Inc., 2006), 690-1. 11. The quotation marks around “Auschwitz” are intentional, for Lyotard, and ought to be read as implying two aspects: first, that the referent of this name is not a specific concentration camp and its sense is far greater than even the historical account of what transpired therein, at that time, that place, includes; second, the device presumably shares a similarity to his insertion of quotations around “jews” in his work Heidegger and the “jews,” where he explains, “I use quotation marks to avoid confusing these ‘jews’ with real Jews” (Lyotard, Heidegger and “The Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 3).

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12. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, collected in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 588C. All citations indicate original pagination and will be noted parenthetically. 13. Genesis 1:27. 14. Etymologically, emanation means to flow forth or stream, indicating how causality pours forth from God; it is the theory that all derived things proceed out of a more originary source (cf., Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysius Tradition [Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1978], 17-19). The image of flowing of water excellently captures the cyclic nature of emanation as both creation, as procession, and reversion to the One. The image’s use has a long history: Iamblichus described causality as emanation, as “everflowing and unfailing creativity,” Proclus and Damascius name the effect as “flowing” from its cause, and Pseudo-Dionysius describes the Cherubim as the “effusion of wisdom,” describing God and His attributes as “outpouring” to His creatures (Ibid.). PseudoDionysius also describes God’s creativity as “bubbling over” and “bubbling forth” (952A). For its intensive analysis, cf. Thérèse Bonin, Creation as Emanation: The Origin of Diversity in Albert the Great’s On the Causes and the Procession of the Universe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2001), 15-21. Chapters one, four, and five, below, further explore this theory and his method. 15. For the divine names Human and Posterior, cf. 597A-B, and they can be found in Genesis 3:8 and Exodus 33:23, respectively; for Inebriated, cf., Pseudo-Dionysius, “Letter Nine: To Titus the Hierarch,” in Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 1112B-C. 16. Selected Scriptural references, respectively: Exodus 3:14, John 11:25, John 14:6, John 1:1, Wisdom of Solomon 7:27, Isaiah 18:4, Exodus 24:10, Revelations 14:14, Psalms 75:8, and Proverbs 9:2. Mixing bowls, receptacles for blending holy nourishment, reappear in an existent letter and are described as “being round and uncovered . . . a symbol of the Providence which has neither a beginning nor an end, which is open to all and encompasses all” (Pseudo-Dionysius, “Letter Nine: To Titus the Hierarch,” in PseudoDionysius, Op. Cit., 1109B). Pseudo-Dionysius claims that The Divine Names focuses on the intelligible names alone, because his earlier treatise, Symbolic Theology, concerned His names taken from things we can sensibly perceive and apply symbolically; however, this treatise is not surviving and widely presumed to be fictitious, which may explain his ample statement of sensible names in The Divine Names, despite his comment to the contrary. 17. Despite his lack of citation, even his earliest commentaries acknowledged his sources and help to explain much of the scholarship’s interest in his work. Andrew Louth notes that Pseudo-Dionysius’ “enthusiasm for late Platonism (or Neoplatonism) went well beyond use of logical terminology: much in the deeper concerns of such philosophy attracted him” (Louth, Denys the Areopagite [London: Continuum, 1989], 12) and Gersh elaborates that his “historical significance . . . stems from the fact that his doctrine is the first Christian version of a type of Neoplatonic philosophy” that surfaced in Athens and Alexandria between the fourth and sixth centuries, making him a Christian “transmitter of the dominate philosophy of late Antiquity in its most elaborate and developed form” (Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 1). 18. Julian Pefanis proposes that Lyotard’s development of the idea of the postmodern condition, the incredulity we bear to grand narratives, can be seen outlined in his earlier Economie libidinale, wherein the “libidinal” is borrowed from Freud’s libido and desig-

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nates those relations of love and hate, affect and disaffect, and the “economy” in question is Marxist theory; he writes: “At this stage Lyotard is indeed more interested in the dysfunctional, perverse aspects of the theory of the libido; in that book the analysis of Marx’s text is a type of literary profanation of the body of theory in the name of intensity” (Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991], 5). I argue that this incredulity is further developed as the unease we turn to differends and that his early interest in the libidinal (as beautifully described by Pefanis as this profanation of the theoretical body by and for intensity) is still in play in that which agitates and incessantly keeps us seeking in absurdity to open the logical bind and let something less rational be more meaningful. 19. Some scholarship has argued, although never systematically, that the format of the treatise may be the editorial work of a later figure; given the lack of evidence and the ample text expressing hesitation for the uninitiated to read his work, I take its structure as an instructive letter to be consistent with its implicit pedagogy of incessant spiritual exercise (cf., the note by Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., n. 2, p. 49).

ONE: WITNESS AND TESTIMONY Prologue to the Problem: The Inexpressible “The inexpressible” presents itself as a noun, as that which cannot be expressed, while “inexpressible,” minus the designating “the,” is understood as an adjective applied to some noun, meaning that the thing in question is or is presenting itself in such a way so as to keep one from expressing it. Lyotard and PseudoDionysius investigate specific inexpressibles through their witness. For Lyotard, the inexpressible in question is “Auschwitz,” that inexpressible behind the testimonial failure of the death camp survivor to her own death. For PseudoDionysius, it is “God,” that inexpressible behind the testimonial failure of the faithful to his creator. “Auschwitz” and “God” are neither the only inexpressibles, nor just things that are inexpressible; they are two explorations into the inexpressible itself. The inexpressible itself defies definition, but can be indirectly gleaned through an attunement to its adjectival sense. The adjective typically indicates an associative feeling of being overwhelmed because the thing is too strong to be captured in description, to be put into words. While we think of examples such as inexpressible joy, or inexpressible beauty, the adjective wraps these things with a sense of negativity—somehow they harm us by their strength or power, prevent us from capturing them in words, leave us unsatisfied and lacking their proper expression. This negative hue is captured in a related adjective, “unspeakable,” popularly meaning, from the 1830s on, something so very bad or wicked, one must not speak of it. But everything wicked carries its contrasting appeal, for its designation as such creates a prohibition, which arouses the temptation for transgression. The unspeakable and the inex-

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pressible are passionate qualifiers, be they indicative of rapture or astonishment, some elevated states, or of pensive or ruminative, depressed states. So, even when the perfect French expression of je ne sais quoi, the “I don’t know what,” the “inexpressible something,” may be said mildly, as an ambiguously dismissive gesture, it is also a vocalized ellipsis, hauntingly unfinished, leaving the addressor and addressee unfulfilled. This attunement, so far, has intimated the significance of the passions to the project. This project, specifically, seeks the expression of the inexpressible, and this calls us to further the attunement. “Inexpressible,” “ineffable,” and “indescribable” are fairly synonymous terms indicating that which cannot be expressed, that beyond expression, and that which cannot be described (although, “ineffable” will also be used in mystical discourse to suggest that which cannot be experienced and, in religious discourse, as that which must not be uttered, or that which is taboo). These three terms differ by degree from the inexplicable, what is incapable of being explained or interpreted, because the inexplicable suggests some dimension can be spoken, even while its whole does not lend itself to further explanation or open itself for interpretation. Sketching out what the three terms prohibit—the expressible, expression, the effable, utterance, the describable, description—then, will be a useful grounding to understand this project’s aim and means of its pursuit. “Expression” has its etymological origin in the compounding of the Latin ex-, out, and -pressāre, press, from premere, to press. Expression, then, is this pressing out, this presenting forth, wherein one describes or depicts something— a manifestation of something. As a noun, an expression may be the act of expressing or conveying or manifesting or representing something in words, art, music, or movement; that which expresses or communicates; the manner by which something does so; a particular word or phrase itself; a mood or disposition; or a facial aspect that conveys some special feeling. “Utterance” has roots in the Middle Low German utern, to turn out, show, speak, from uter, outer, and in the Old French outrance, from outrer, now translated as outrage, but originally as a going beyond the limits. Its first sense bears the same breadth as expression, and can mean the act of, the power to, and the something that is uttered, with the exception that it is often restricted to an audible expression. Its second meaning is as an uttermost end or extremity. “Description,” from the Latin describere, to write down, delineate, or sketch, shares the breadth of mediums with expression, so that one can be giving a verbal account or transmitting a mental image or impression with words, presenting a lifelike image, tracing, drawing the figure of something, or outlining it. While philosophy, with good reason, carefully marks distinctions between these definitions—for example, acts are different from capacities, things are different from powers, to manifest is to conjure up while description is to put down, and a presentation has more immediacy than a representation—but, here, it is beneficial to maintain the breadth of their meanings. The inexpressible, ineffable, and indescribable fends

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us off with definitions of the impossibility and incapable, exceeding, beyond, refusing, denying, prohibition, and forbidding. These terms logically disallow the activity this project will carry out on the inexpressible. And since meaning is not housed solely within logic or speech, or even a subject alone, the expression of the inexpressible demands the greatest field of possibility for its success. This attunement has conducted our attention towards three points: the question of ontological status (which will be revealed to concern the inexpressible, the being of the witness silenced by logic, and the living truth of testimony), the significance of the passions (for meaning is felt and its expression clashes the passions against reason), and the necessity of activity (both incorporating the breadth of speaking and drawing, gesturing and uttering, presenting forth and marking down, and engaging absurdity, as we seek to do that which language tells us we cannot). Seeking the passionate expression of the inexpressible, this project must enact a thoroughly phenomenological synthesis of three ancient definitions: Aristotle’s definition of the human as the rational animal, philosophy’s definition as the love of wisdom, and Socrates’ definition of wisdom as knowing what one does not know. Through the conjunction of being, passions, and unknowing, Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius will reveal an understanding of humanity as those creatures whose activity is in seeking the unknown. Being ought not be understood through the successes of reason, but by its reaction to failure. The history of philosophy recounts how the search leads to aporia—that bewildering, frustrating, perplexity felt at the realization of impasse, the surge of doubt tinged with despair rising when one’s path suddenly seems barred by impossibility. For Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius, it is precisely within this perplexity that the very meaning of being can be located; only by suffering this state can one’s impossible testimony possibly gesture toward the truth of the supersensible and speak the unspeakable. There is no logical success in expressing the inexpressible. But, the expression of the inexpressible is the activity of humanity attempting to define itself. We can only hope for success and must seek to locate the productivity in failure and consider this activity as a matter of philosophical, spiritual exercise. Thus attuned, our work begins as that of a surveyor (while later chapters will demand that of a miner or diver when it is solutions, rather than the problem that must be seen). To survey the problem of the inexpressible expression, we must establish it through the testimony of one who bears it witness, which will first come through Lyotard’s The Differend, and closely consider the nature of testimony and its consequences to the being of the witness. Demanding elaboration, the implications to the subjectivity of a silenced witness will be revealed by recourse to Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. The conclusion will turn to broach a potential salvation by introducing the radical method created by Pseudo-Dionysius to testify to the ineffable.

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The Witness and Testimony in Lyotard Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute unravels a particular paradox of an inexpressible expression and thereby reveals the paradox of the inexpressible that cannot be undone. What it specifically untangles is the logical, linguistic, ontological, and ethical implications of the double bind born from the impossibility of a witness’ testimony in the case of the holocaust survivor who cannot give testimony to the horror of the death camps. What it cannot undo is that there is that which is inexpressible. His work offers us an explication of the testimonial victimization of those who are denied their own histories, people marginalized outside of the political or juridical space in which they could protest, despite their being called to these very spheres. It focuses our awareness on the instances of lived reality that demand our attention, and yet evade logical formula. These instances render the attempt to give testimony to them, within the rules of linear narrative, as a certain failure. When testimony fails, it silences a victim, further victimizes an already-victim. Lyotard’s primary example, the holocaust survivor, is first encountered on behalf of an exploration (later, one realizes it is a devastating critique) nominally in response to Robert Faurisson’s revisionist claim that his diligent and scientific research proves that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. 1 Lyotard neither explicitly confronts Faurisson, nor does he directly attack his theory; instead, the addressee is The Differend’s reader and his address is about the adjudicative violence that this form of a claim casts on the survivors of and witnesses to the death camps: “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (§1). Using propositional logic, Lyotard works out the implications of a claim like Faurisson’s for the death camp victim: essentially, if a survivor argued that he was such, a survivor of the death camps, how would he argue being a victim if not dead? The logical distillation presents a bland form of statement shockingly discordant with its content and our nearly universal reactions between disgust and outrage and dismissal. The International Military Tribunal, established in 1945, and numerous scholars since have established falsity of such a revisionist claim, and their evidence has established the grounds for our reactions. Over six million Jews were slaughtered; hundreds of thousands of Roma were murdered; hundreds of thousands of the mentally disabled were euthanized. Trade unionists, homosexuals, political dissidents, intelligentsia, religious dissidents, and prisoners of war were killed, be it by active execution or death by forced labor, starvation, disease, and other slower wrought means. Primo Levi recorded the recollections of holocaust survivors being taunted by SS officers who claimed: “none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with

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you.”2 But, our archives are massive and the holocaust literature voluminously records first, second, and third party testimonies, eyewitness reports, archival and field research—and who can legitimately challenge these accounts when one cannot say who is even authorized to define who was and was not made a victim when the estimated causalities alone of World War II are over 63 million? Most historical revision is merely an excuse for hatred; some of it, to directly justify prejudice or intolerant party platforms, some of it is done in the spirit of a provocateur, under the guise of the persecuted, marginalized voice of questioning and dissent—although these may be indirectly or unconsciously excuses for hatred, they are that still. The questioning of victims, in particular, through the revisionist lens is something best described as unjust and/or unwarranted, insensitive and inhumane, let alone the fact that it begins from the absurdity of questioning verifiable fact about what is quite possibly the greatest instance of horror in modern history. And, even when we swap the basic impulse of outrage for argument, the sense of Faurisson’s logic seems senseless, falling prey to some fallacy, be it of a vicious circle or false definitional reliance or a converse error. Another sort of philosopher may even quip, like Lyotard, that, “to Faurisson, it can be answered that no one can see one’s own death” (§49).3 Before addressing why these immediate responses should be suspended and why an attempt at dialogue with such disgusting antagonists should be entertained, it is important to offer a scant but suggestive sketch of the personal importance of the holocaust for Lyotard. His thirty years of nearly militant political activity suggests the importance of justice to the man. Justice, however, can be interpreted as something that can be objectively determined and enforced. Lyotard’s early engagement with injustice in Algeria, as Bill Readings helps us to discern, “offers Lyotard no way to pretend that he can occupy the position of the other and engage un heroic combat by proxy, as foot soldier, journalist, or strategist.”4 His political writings, then, speak of the wars of others that nevertheless cry for, perhaps even demand, our attention. His writings are testimonies that call to us for response. But, belonging to others, no testimony and no response will be adequate; the debts and obligations are too unclear. Thus, when Stuart Sim states that “Auschwitz is a stain on modern culture that Lyotard is determined we must bear witness to such that those who suffered are not forgotten, and that we realise the horrors that can be committed in the name of grand narrative,” we can see Auschwitz as the emblem of the whole enormity of the experience of the holocaust, as an event of radical injustice that called to Lyotard, who could only respond by offering some testimony. 5 Such testimony is of central focus in his The Differend and Heidegger and “the jews,” but also appears throughout his massive oeuvre. 6 His testimony will never answer a question or solve a problem, but will cry out for others: those who suffer, those who do not. The failures to which such testimony is condemned can nevertheless spawn productive action. One productivity may be to make those who are

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not the others who suffered realize another way the horror of being silenced, the terror in regimes, be they political or ways of thinking, and the connections of horror and terror to grand narratives. Lyotard’s political commitments can be understood as a stance of desperate concern. This indirectly explains the reason why we must engage the historical revisionist, but the question’s importance demands a more direct explanation. The problem with our immediate responses of disgust and dismissal to historical revisionism, no matter how such may be appropriate, is their likeness to the propagandistic method of insulting our critic instead of answering his critique. In most cases, the insult only perpetuates the low level of social discourse; in the case of holocaust denial, such response does far more damage. First, it serves to keep the event out of discourse. Writing an essay as one of the generation born in 1925, Lyotard expresses how “These hollow faces,” of the freed concentration camp survivors, “plague our reflections,” and yet his generation does not know how to be, that is, to respond after the holocaust. 7 He captures the consequence of this silence, and perhaps its reason: “Expression has not found its proper measure, since the century has already taken the measure of a new excess on the part of humanity, an excessive cruelty. An Inquisition without any theological pretext, this cruelty has been nakedly revealed, devoid of any justification, with a disturbing beauty. Now it lies behind us, and we do not know what is going to happen to us.”8 Allowing too long a silence will allow the plaguing memory to fade and the images to become only “history.” And, will this not simply succeed in the complete erasure the Nazi’s Final Solution intended? The second damage from a dismissive response is an opposite consequence that is equally repellant: that such serves to cover over the ground from which the questions rose and breeds further room for skepticism to be asserted as possible truths. Those same SS officers, whose taunts were chronicled by Primo Levi, predicted these spaces for skepticism: “And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.” 9 Their reasoning identified the history of Allied propaganda as the ground. This ground, however, is something that can be disproven by the ample archives. What is more insidious is the ground for skepticism being precisely in the accounts by the survivors. Consider any number of works in holocaust literature: pervasive through the accounts of the camps’ reality are overwhelming admissions of the irreal; the most forceful accounts are framed with reflections on their impossibility to be thought for anyone without such experience, and even for many who survived such experiences and more. Simon Wiesenthal writes, for himself and his fellow prisoners, “Everything for us was unreal and insubstantial . . .” and that “even reason was out of place. What in this Nazi world was reasonable and logical? You lost yourself in fantasy merely to escape from the appalling truth. And in such circumstances reason would have been a barrier.”10 That there is truth, is asserted, but its chronicler finds himself compelled to linger on the expressions

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of the unreality, insubstantiality, the unreasonable, illogical, and fantastical. In his statement for the Office of United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Bruno Bettelheim reports that survivors were “never wholly successful [in convincing] themselves that this was real, was really happening, and not just a nightmare.” 11 Elie Wiesel avows that those “who did not live through the event will never know it. . . .”12 Sven Alkalaj, reflecting on his generation’s experiences through the genocide in Bosnia and the generations who lived through the holocaust, concludes: “Nobody who hasn’t gone through what we went through will ever be able to understand.”13 The literature repeats these individual affirmations of truth and its impossible concretion, the single selves who know and cannot know at once, and how these torn individuals, who cannot have certainty, nevertheless have some knowledge that no one else can know. As there are many reasons for the holocaust’s absence within discourse, there are ample and diverse spaces wherein skepticism can grow. To not openly engage discussions, we condemn the holocaust to its disappearance or denial. Instead of covering over this ground, letting memory fade or the roots of hatred find too many sources from which to feed continual new growth of revisionism, we must work these fields and we must address holocaust denial from within its own plot. We must answer the revisionist claim from within its framework, which means that answers will be judged as legitimate only by logic and within the bounds of the court. 14 Maurice Blanchot may rightly state that holocaust literature is “not read and consumed in the same way as other books,” but it is equally true that they can be used just like many other sources in investigations conducted under the rules of the tribunal, regardless of our protests. 15 We can debate how this literature ought to be read, what it is that constitutes truth, but this necessitates our having the debate. And, debates fracture different realms of discourse if there is no consensus as to which rules we are thereby authorized to make judgments. And, in discordant language games, one game’s judgment to reject the revisionist will not eradicate revisionism, while another game’s judgment that the eyewitness cannot be alive does effectively silence the survivor. The impact of the superlatively distasteful claim from the revisionist is in its force: we cannot answer from within its own logic—how can one answer the attack that demands one to prove one is a victim of death and not dead? If she speaks, she is alive; she has lost the argument. “It is easy for an opponent to refute whoever affirms the reality of a referent by enclosing him in a dilemma . . . the one that assails all philosophies based on showing. . . .”16 We may argue that this is unfair, but this complaint is likewise illegitimate as a response. This “double bind” that Faurisson develops abandons the victim to legal and logical damage and/or to silence: “This is what a wrong would be: a damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage. This is the case if the victim is deprived of life, or of all his or her liberties, or the freedom to make his or her ideas or opinions public, or simply the right to testify to the damage, or even more simply if the testifying phrase is itself deprived of authority. . . .”17 If one’s

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testimony is stripped of its authority by this legal logic, and one testifies in the face of this lack, one is then judged as deceived or as offering false testimony. Regardless of intending the deceit or not, either way, the victim is effectively forbidden from being a witness. By definition, a witness is one who gives testimony of what she has seen or knows. Thus, this victim cannot be a witness; she is effectively silenced.18 Earlier, I quoted several instances of the difficulty of testimony in holocaust literature, but here, an elaboration of this victimization of the victim that Lyotard is pointing to can be found within actual testimony in the Nuremberg Trials. I will first quote the testimony of a victim, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who spent three years interned at Auschwitz for being a member of the French Resistance, in order to permit it to reveal three problematic forms of witnessing: [W]e saw the unsealing of the cars and the soldiers letting men, women, and children out of them. I know these details as I knew a little Jewess from France who lived with her family at the ‘Republique’ district. One night we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered, on the following day, from the men working in the Sonderkommando—the ‘Gas Kommando’—that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had thrown the children into the furnaces alive.19

The first account comes the closest to the witnessing that is valued the highest (thus, considered most true) by legal and everyday logic: I saw X. Nonetheless, it is not a perfect account, for she speaks in the plural about an action not explicitly criminal. The second account is “hearsay,” a second-hand report: I knew someone who told me so. The third account is a synthesis of the first two forms; it is a plural report of hearing something not apodictically criminal, and only learning about the criminal through hearsay. The imperfection of her testimony is noted in the challenge from the defense lawyer: MARX: Does your statement contain what you yourself observed or is it concerned with information from other sources as well? VAILLANT-COUTURIER: Whenever such was the case I mentioned it in my declaration. I have never quoted anything, which has not previously been verified at the sources and by several persons, but the major part of my evidence is based on personal experience.20

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier’s testimony about her personal, first-hand experiences reveal the non-criminal (I saw them open the cars, I heard the screams) and the criminal (I saw them beat the women), but cannot reveal the crime to which she testifies (the death camp was a death camp; i.e., I testify that it killed me). Logic forbids that testimony. If she were to testify to the logically impossible, she could not be judged as providing a true account. Logic requires that the victim of the death camp be dead while logic also forbids a witness who

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no longer exists; thus, for this narrow logic, there cannot be a victim who is a witness of the death camps. Her bind: she either offers what can only be judged as false testimony or she is silenced; either way, the victim is once again victimized: her truth denied or prohibited. The Nuremberg Testimony of SS General Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D21 reveals how much easier it is to testify to the horror if you are on the side of actor and not recipient, for the defendant and not as the victim: COL. AMEN: How do you know that there was such a written agreement [to create the Einsatzgruppe]? OHLENDORF: I was repeatedly present during the negotiations which Albrecht and Schellenberg conducted with the OKH and OKW [the Oberkommando des Heeres, Army High Command, and Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Armed Forces High Command of Wehrmacht, respectively]; and I also had a written copy of this agreement which was the outcome of these negotiations, in my own hands when I took over the Einsatzgruppe. COL. AMEN: Did you yourself ever see a copy of this written agreement? OHLENDORF: Yes! COL. AMEN: Did you ever have occasion to work with this written agreement? OHLENDORF: Yes! COL. AMEN: On more than one occasion? OHLENDORF: Yes; in all questions arising out of the relationship between the Einsatzgruppen and the army. COL. AMEN: Do you know how many persons were liquidated by Einsatz Group D under your command? OHLENDORF: In the year between June 1941 to June 1942 the Einsatzkommandos reported ninety thousand people liquidated. COL. AMEN: Did that include men, women, and children? OHLENDORF: Yes. COL. AMEN: On what do you base those figures? OHLENDORF: On reports sent by the Einsatzkommandos to the Einsatzgruppen. COL. AMEN: Were those reports submitted to you? OHLENDORF: Yes. COL. AMEN: And you saw them and read them? OHLENDORF: I beg your pardon? COL. AMEN: And you saw and read those reports personally? OHLENDORF: Yes. COL. AMEN: Did you personally supervise mass executions of these individuals? OHLENDORF: I was present at two mass executions for purposes of inspection.22

Within this binding juridical logic, Otto Ohlendorf, whatever else he may be, is a far better witness than Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier: he was present, he saw written records, he personally added to records, he took reports, he was giv-

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en reports . . . most importantly, he was there, and as an official witness, no less: he saw it with his own eyes. But why do we ascribe the greatest objective reality to Ohlendorf’s testimony? Because he was there? Because he saw it with his own eyes? To concur with either of these reasons, as Étienne Gilson puts it concerning other content, is to reduce “the notion of knowledge . . . to the notion of scientific knowledge . . . [in which, the] verb ‘to know’ then means to express observable relations between given facts in terms of mathematical relations.” 23 We mutate our maxims about “seeing is believing” into claims with the rational apodicticity of mathematics. In neat parallel to the presumption of Ohlendorf’s testimony’s greater validity, Gilson succinctly offers the standard critique against God’s demonstrability from within this inadequate framework: “Now, however we look at it, no given fact answers to our notion of God. Since God is not an object of empirical knowledge, we have no concept of him. Consequently God is no object of knowledge, and what we call natural theology is just idle talking.” 24 It is important to clarify that the condemnation of this “scientific” logic is not one of science itself, but of its perversion into scientism. 25 The scientism Gilson condemns is that he sees in Kant’s criticism and Comte’s positivism. But the burden of guilt is neither restricted to nor properly borne by these thinkers or methods— Kant and his critique, especially, will be shown later to allow productive talk precisely through the idea of the noumena. Most thinkers can be guilty of scientism and constructive of dialogue at once. An ideal example is Descartes, who upheld the perfection of mathematical proofs in his reverence for the apodictic, which led him to an overly rigid presumption that truth was rational and, thus, capable of logical narration, and yet repeatedly attacked empiricism and realism’s presumptions that truth resides in the immediacy of sensuous experience and exists as independent of the mind and could, therefore, reliably be presented before us.26 So, why do we ascribe the greatest objective reality to the eyewitness’ testimony, in this case, to the testimony of the SS officer Ohlendorf? It is not simply the comfort of habits borne from how things appear to us in the natural attitude and enforced by demands for and expectations of empirical testimony in the everyday. Instead, it is a faulty equation made between the empirical and rational. The origin may be found precisely in the rise of monotheism, even as it is that which suffers most explicitly from this very equation. In the very early middle ages, we witness an inversion of definitions between knowledge and belief. For the ancient Greeks, knowledge was the apprehension of the eternal and immutable, whereas belief was the apprehension of the changing objects of sense experience. Within early Christian philosophy, knowledge concerned matters of the world around us, whereas belief concerned the eternal and divine. Following in the inversion’s wake, we link science to knowledge and religion to belief, but become easily confused as to which provides certainty, which affords evidence, and of what sort. The faithful may claim certainty in their belief, declare they

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know such to be true, and provide both mythic stories and rational arguments as evidence. Likewise, while many scientists hold fast to knowledge being fallible, society uses empirical science as irrefutable proof to establish certainty. And today, for the most part, we all straddle both positions, even when we claim membership in just one, and further blur the language beyond even a contextual relativism. It is a common impulse, then, to shrink from having either sacred literature or scientific theories called “stories,” even when it is their narrative structure that causes us to see them as rational, thus true. It is not just because one party in the trial can “show” the truth, but that one can “better” tell its story. Testimony is not lived experience. It does not exist in any moment of life in its immediacy. Instead, it is the reflection back over the moments of life that fixes and delineates its order of events, and thus their import. But, there is an argument to be made that this view of testimony is flawed; that, instead, one is his or her very testimony. To just barely sketch out this idea, consider the word itself: “testimony” comes from the Latin testimonium, evidence or proof, where testis is witness and monium signifies an action, condition, or state of being. Testimony, most literally given the etymology, is the being a witness. The term is also implicitly religious; a full century before testimony’s fourteenth-century association with the idea of proof or evidence given, it denoted the Ten Commandments. The religious connection to a set of commands reinforces the term’s connection to the activity of one’s being. What is striking herein is that if testimony originally points to a being, rather than saying, there are two opposing possible consequences: a positive consequence is that being unable to speak forth some evidence cannot negate the presence of one’s being there, while a negative consequence could affirm that to silence someone’s testimony is to put their very being into a conditional state. 27 Thus, our tendency to mistake the empirical for the certain, to equate the story given in a complete, linear narrative with the truth, and the possibility of thinking testimony in some way to legitimately allow the absence of presence and wholeness justifies Lyotard’s entertainment of dialogue—which, itself, risks the possibility that it will be correct—with the historical revisionist. It also reveals the challenges before him: the victim’s testimony is deficient against the coherent narrative of the captors and that the former’s deficiency is not judged upon its truth content. A false story is more readily accepted under what Lyotard terms the logic of the tribunal than a truthful account that contains its own contradiction. For Lyotard, this is the differend [le différend]: “the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.”28 The divestment is due to the fact “that a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general.”29 Thus, “the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.”30 The consequence of a differend is that the silenced party is forced into “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot

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yet be.”31 Under a rule that demands an account that is coherent—the party must speak to all events in a linear order from the first person—only the SS officer’s testimony can be heard. The victim speaks in different idioms; she cannot translate her testimony into the proper phrase regimen. Differends are not conflicts of differing languages per se; every language can be translated. Instead, Lyotard is revealing the existence of essential disconnects between narratives and their genres. Many seeming differends prove not to be differends, which means they can be solved; but many more remain differends, even if they are solved. This highlights a difference between being solved and being dissolved, for some differends remain no matter how many solutions can be provided so as to transmute their wrongs into damages that permit arbitration and compensation. Narratives can come from different regimens and be composed by phrases from equally differing genres. Denominative phrases that name or ostensive phrases that show are not always legitimate answers to descriptive or cognitive phrases that describe and signify. If one demands you to “tell me his name!” and you reply, “he is beautiful,” the descriptive genre of your response is impertinent to the ostensive genre of the demand.32 There are clashes that can be corrected and those that are perpetual. For example, imagine the difference between the testimony of a scientist on DNA data collected at the scene of a crime and the testimony of a mother who saw her only child brutally murdered. The difference can clearly be felt, but the argument can be made that their languages are technically the same, and thus justly amenable to a single rule of judgment. But, to be most technical, their languages are not the same: an emotional appeal to humanity, no matter its legitimacy in general, cannot legitimately answer a scientific appeal to fact and objectivity. Thus, the judgment will be made according to one register or another. Both parties can conform to the rule, or they can remain disjointed; either way, a judgment can be made that corrects damages. Regardless of whether the parties translate their testimony into a shared genre of discourse, and regardless of whether “just” damages are deemed and corrected, the two original phrases will never legitimately hear one another. Lyotard’s address of Faurisson’s logical bind is his attempt to meet the revisionist claim from within its own logical framework or phrase regimen. He endeavors to unravel its bind by discerning the argument’s regimen and genre to understand what is required for its response to be valid. His aim is to untie the double bind by finding the “unknown idiom” by which the victim can give testimony to the primary wrong that can be judged as legitimate, thereby dissolving the secondary wrong of being silenced. 33 To find this legitimate response, according to Lyotard, is what is called for by the very revelation of the bind: “In the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away.”34 Overcoming the differend between victim and prosecution will seemingly ease the pain that accompanies, not the original violence itself, but the suffering that results from the

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witness’ incapacity to speak: “This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence . . . that they are summoned by language . . . to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.”35 It is a philosophic necessity (thus, not just a moral obligation, an ought, to which we could choose otherwise) that we find the narrative or invent the new register of discourse by which the victim can speak. 36 As Lyotard examines in detail near the close of his book, an obligation humanisticly requires an addressee who is called to respond whereas a necessity requires response for there to even be an address, addressee, and addressor.37 The weight of the necessity is revealed in that if we do not seek the new idiom, the very being of the victim is threatened, not by force, but by a loss of its name. This exceeds humanistic concern by being the threat of an elimination of s/he who could be addressee or addressor. The necessity from the logical and the linguistic disruption reveals a blending of necessity and obligation: to lose one’s name is to lose one’s truth of being: silencing as murder. Your “existence is not concluded” if you, the witness, do not speak, in other words, “human beings are names, or they are not human.”38 Lyotard, again expressing our spontaneous, common-sense reaction, declares: “It would be absurd to suppose that human beings ‘endowed with language’ cannot speak in the strict sense, as is the case for stones.” 39 Thus, we reason, some witnesses do not, instead of cannot, speak—perhaps because they are threatened if they do so. For the silenced victims of whom Lyotard speaks, this is no literal threat, as if against one’s life, property, family, etc., and it is not a cause, per se, of their silence. For, even if there was a literal threat, and the victim trespassed silence and risked the result, one would still find oneself under the double bind of proving what one cannot. This would make a further paradox for us to stumble over, wherein we would have to imagine a threat leveled against, say, the life or happiness of one who would speak, “an unreal, conditional state … which cannot be threatened, since one is oneself unreal or conditional as long as one has not spoken. . . .”40 The victim’s silence, then, has a cause other than some sort of immediate threat of harm; there is, however, a threat inherent in the very attempt to articulate one’s testimony, and this threat does not come directly from an accusing party. This threat is born within the bind. The victim cannot speak; he or she cannot offer testimony permissible under the rules of the tribunal. This is the threat—the impossibility of testimony. The threat is from impossibility, which is from the rules governing trials. And the threat is against the very Being of the being who cannot testify.41 In silence, one bears only a conditionalized status of Being; one’s existence is entirely contingent upon one’s speech. “But how could a threat work when it is exerted upon something . . . which does not currently exist?”42 He answers that the threat “is only a threat because the ability to speak or not to speak is

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identified with x’s existence.”43 The witness cannot testify because to testify one must be a subject, and this witness’ subjectivity has been obliterated by the wrong. The viciously circular logic is that the wrong is that which deserves testimony and is that which prohibits testimony; it makes the witness a victim to a wrong as it strips the witness of existence and makes the witness a victim once more. This last paradox, essentially, the circular logic of the victimized victim born from the synthesis of language and Being, spawns a further paradox. This interminable loop subjects the victim to “not the vertigo of what cannot be phrased . . . but rather the irrefutable conviction that phrasing is endless.”44 Just as language and being are interdependently linked, the inability to phrase is fused with the conviction of the impossibility of ceasing to phrase. For the victim, this infinity of responses minus one the tribunal will understand is her nausea. For the tribunal, that “phrasing is endless” is an indication of the necessity that testimony can infinitely repeat itself, be comprehensible (requiring less affectivity and more objective disinterest), and prove itself to be logical (as verification demands the ability of repetition). For society, its infinity prohibits forgetting and founds an ethical imperative. Thus, the endlessness of phrasing is a harm, a means of verification, and a good, at once; as verification and good, the harm against the victim is heightened—how does one argue against logic and the public that such endlessness is terror? For the victim, the perpetuity of phrasing induces vertigo—the overwhelming dizziness, the sudden lightheaded feeling, the nausea that often comes from looking down from great heights, and originally comes from the Latin, vertere, which is intimately connected to the Latin versus, that is, to the legal denotation of one party being against another. This offers us two critical questions: what is its true source and what is its connection to being (the Being of) one of these two parties? To ask about the true source of vertigo is also to offer an interpretation of the source of true harm in the differend. In a case, with one side versus another, one’s opponent is not always the reason for there being a case. If it is one’s opponent that is the reason, then the opponent is the source of the harm. In Lyotard’s case, it can be said that the logic established by the revisionist is the cause for the victim’s harm; thus, being silenced by her opponent is the source of her harm and the source of the vertigo. However, it can be that there are two sides in a case only by virtue of their relation to one event. Here, the event is not the logic, but that which is being asked about: the experience of the death camp. Here, one comes face to face with the enormity of that which one is being asked to do. There is no end to what needs to be said. Thus, vertigo’s source is from being silenced—but this silence bears a potent contradiction that makes vertigo’s origin a paradox: its dizzying perplexity comes from one’s inability to speak and the inability to see the end of speech. Vertigo is our response to the

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inexpressible—to the act of being bereft of expression and the event that evades it. This leads us necessarily to the second question: what is vertigo’s connection to being one of these two parties in opposition? This demands understanding vertigo as not a condition out there, but as a condition of Being. Kierkegaard most adeptly establishes the intimate connection between vertigo and anxiety— an intimacy that toys with the notion of the status of subjectivity for the one who casts her eye to that which one cannot rationally encapsulate, to that which one’s eye is nevertheless drawn. 45 Anxiety is not fear, for fear has an object—“I am afraid of heights”—while anxiety has not—“I am anxious about . . . well . . . this . . . no . . . just. . . .” Anxiety is tied to lack, as Heidegger elucidates: “Anxiety reveals the nothing. We ‘hover’ in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves—we humans who are in being—in the midst of being slip away from ourselves . . . there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there. Anxiety robs us of speech.”46 Anxiety has no object—even if it feels as if there is or was or should be some reason. There is something revealed by the nothing. It is precisely the feeling of being bereft of a reason and as if there is one that is key, and illuminates anxiety to be affective. One does not think anxiety; one suffers anxiety. It is a matter of passion, of pathos, that which you suffer, and is distinct from ethos and logos. It is a natural state of Being for the being suddenly aware of the yawning abyss of his or her freedom. One’s freedom spawns anxiety because it is the absence of something determined. We suffer this nothingness. Kierkegaard’s faintness is from the inexplicable abyss before the subjectivity of one’s faith or realization of utter freedom and Heidegger’s is in the anxious moment when Being and Nothing become incomprehensibly synonymous. Lyotard likewise links the experience of the unsteady self to silence spoken endlessly in the face of the vertiginous, inexpressible event [arrive-t-il and Ereignis].47 Vertigo’s source, then, resides in the cruel conjunction of being unable to speak and unable to see the end of speech. The silence and infinite onslaught of phrasing is due to the enormity of that which the silence and phrasing concerns: their object that resists being an object one can simply grasp. Vertigo ensues and is, in its being the paradox of unspoken endless speech, what one is: it becomes one’s condition of Being, making that being only conditional. The witness who cannot be a witness stands dizzy before the abyss of the inexpressible that is the paradoxical site of her incapacity to testify and her incapacity to cease her testimony, the site of her illegitimacy because she lives, and her illegitimacy causing her loss of subjectivity. The differend before the witness has thus been shown to cause her testimony to be silenced; by her silencing, she has been victimized again. In her silence, this second harm is both by fact of her being unable to speak and oppressed by the endlessness of necessary speech. This harm is felt as vertigo. Her Being be-

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comes conditional—by her status of being a witness who cannot be a witness and by her Being being anxious: both her and not her at once. The differend’s harm has placed the very being of the witness into a state of question, a conditional status, contingent upon speech she cannot offer. Language and Being have become, if not synonymous, then inextricably dependent upon one another for either to be at all. If this vicious circle cannot be undone, no further step can be made as to letting the victim’s testimony meaning something before the tribunal. Earlier, however, the question was raised as to rethinking the definition of testimony so that by linking Being and language, testimony became the saying of one’s Being, as opposed to its being the speech from a being. This rethinking would prevent silence from being a veritable death of subjectivity. Before this can be explored, the knot between Being and language must be better understood. Lyotard’s entertainment of this connection is from, and subsequent criticism is against, Heidegger. It is to his establishment of the yoke and Lyotard’s critique that we must now turn.

Heidegger’s Silence: The Synthesis of Language and Being “In keeping silent, authentic being-one’s-self does not keep on saying ‘I,’ but rather ‘is’ in reticence the thrown being that it can authentically be.” —Heidegger, Being and Time48

Lyotard writes coyly of the equation of Being and language. His discussion of the conditionalized status of the silent witness alludes to the assimilation of Being and language—perhaps to underline the necessity to which we are called to erase the differend that keeps the witness silenced. Yet, Lyotard does not wholly and explicitly affirm this equation of Being and language, which he understands as a problematic correlation in Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. Instead, his allusion can be understood as an instance of the method of “rewriting” that he engages frequently—the entertainment of various methods or ideas so as to work through them, undo their supporting biases and reveal their consequences, and, ultimately, work beyond them. His concerns about the synthesis of Being and language are legitimate—but does he too quickly foreclose two possibilities this synthesis could ground? One, a way to redefine testimony so as to loosen the logical requirements imposed upon the witness, and, two, to cast the witness’ silence as a shelter, rather than condemnation and its consequential conditionalizing of her subjectivity. This silence would be one that holds open the meaning of Being as possibility: “we are an uninterpreted sign.” 49 Before turning to Lyotard’s critique of silence as the witness’ shelter, it is profitable to expound Heidegger’s equation of Being and language.

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Heidegger begins Being and Time by rehearsing our prejudices against reraising the question “what is Being?” While it seems the most apparent concept, he reveals repeatedly our inability to define it. This reveals the paradoxical reality that we are at home in language in that there is nothing closer to our who, our what, our is-ness than language for Heidegger, and yet, all the while, the expression of our Being remains beyond articulation. Being and Time thus establishes the intimate connection between Being and language by defining the one by the other: “In the ordinary and also the philosophical ‘definition,’ Dasein, that is, the Being of man, is delineated as zoon logon echon, that creature whose Being is essentially determined by its being able to speak. Legein [discoursing] . . . is the guideline for arriving at the structures of Being of the beings we encounter in discourse and discussion.”50 Da-sein—the being who asks about its own Being, the one for whom Being is a question—further interconnects Being and the ability to speak by the notable reliance on logos as speech, word, reasoning and as our ground, that from which we come. Logos is expression and origin. This insight concerns both content and its form: as content, it is our ground; as form, it is the method by which we come to understand this ground.51 Thus, while the primary theoretical circularity is between Being and language, there is this second circle wherein logos is both that from which we come and that by which we come to know ourselves. Logos, then, is the primordial locus of truth (where truth is not an adequation of a judgment with a state of affairs), and it is its own procession. Using logos as a means of return to itself as origin means that truth is an allusion towards its hidden essence, which Heidegger expresses as a saying without saying. Uncovering the truth itself by the methodological process of coming to know ourselves through language is simultaneously a covering over of ourselves with language because the means of disrobing is through robes. Heidegger’s definition of Being can be seen as parallel to his project’s conjunction of ontology and phenomenology. 52 Ontology is the endeavor to explain Being so as to make the Being of beings appear, while phenomenology’s endeavor is to let that which shows itself be seen. Thus, Heidegger’s phenomenological-ontology is the science of the Being of entities that uncovers the meaning of Being by uncovering the basic structures of Da-sein. Therefore, Heidegger cannot help but return to this equation of language and Being persistently as he conducts his philosophical questioning. The conjunction is most explicitly seen later in Being and Time when language is named as a mode of Being of Da-sein, that is, as one of the four existentialia, or basic structures of “Being-in as Such:” attunement, understanding, discourse, and entanglement.53 The first mode is attunement, the mood in which Da-sein always already finds itself; it is the awareness of our thrownness, facticity, and Angst. The second is understanding, wherein Da-sein exists for possibilities of being that are not yet actual through a projection that presses forward to these possibilities and an interpretation that sees them in advance. Third is discourse, of which he initially says little and casts the impression of

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language as something negative and more properly belonging to the fourth mode of entanglement. Eventually, however, he reveals discourse’s ultimate importance as the expression of meaning and articulation of the world that organizes attunement and understanding: “The fact that language only now becomes thematic should indicate that this phenomenon has its roots in the existential constitution of the disclosedness of Da-sein. . . . Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with attunement and understanding. Intelligibility is also always already articulated before its appropriative interpretation. Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility.”54 The last mode of being is entanglement, which is similar to intersubjectivity (the “being-with” of Da-sein), but differs by emphasizing the potentiality of being trapped by the “they.” Entangled with the “they,” language is idle chatter, as opposed to being the ontological root of Being. This distinction of language as being both an essential structure of Da-sein and a trap that snares Being within the ontic, everyday realm of beings is crucial and foreshadows the importance of Heidegger’s “call of conscience,” which is the best explication of the positive role of silence. The call of conscience is the primordial call of Being to Being that is discourse, yet says nothing. This call reveals the structure of discourse as essential and awakened by silence—for discourse is to be more than an “idle talk” of the “they” that entangles Da-sein in ontic everydayness: “The call introduces the fact of constantly being-guilty and thus brings the self back from the loud idle chatter of the they’s common sense.”55 The call takes us from language as chatter to language as our primordial root. He describes this essential form of language as having the character of “reticence,” which seems equally as negative as being called chatter, but ultimately is shown to be an honorific form of language as silence.56 It is an understanding of discourse akin to the apophantic interpretation of logos that is the speech that may be saying (meaning) what it is not saying. Casting this lack as an openness, Heidegger says, “we characterized silence as an essential possibility of a discourse.”57 Therefore, the Da-sein open to the call of conscience exists in discourse as one who “takes the words away from the commonsense idle chatter of the they.” 58 Through the call of conscience, that silent speaking of Being to Being, the lack of language brings us back to an awareness of our own Being as language. 59 This is a silence that does not murder our subjectivity, but, rather, calls our awareness precisely back to it. Heidegger turns to discourse as silence while being keenly aware of the dangerous tendencies of language to misrepresent that which it seeks to express. In a later work written as a dialogue with a Japanese scholar, he writes, “I now see still more clearly the danger that the language of our dialogue might constantly destroy the possibility of saying that of which we are speaking.” 60 This danger is all the more acute when language is equated with Being itself. When we try to speak about things-in-themselves, those concepts that repel ostensive definition, we often falsify the thing itself.61

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Heidegger names this falsification “metaphysics.” This charge is an accusation of the misrepresentation of Being as something Being is not. This charge surfaces frequently. In Being and Time, we are all guilty of metaphysics because of our deep-seated prejudices against rethinking the question of Being, be it because Being is presumed to be simply a genus, indefinable, or utterly selfevident. In his “Letter on Humanism,” existentialism in general and Jean-Paul Sartre in particular are charged with metaphysics for naming Being as human beings. In Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes, Nietzsche is charged (albeit with a tone of praise) with being the greatest of metaphysicians for naming Being as will to power. The problem motivating Heidegger’s frequent accusations is that to posit X is Y (for example, that Being is genus, beings, or will) is to commit a logical falsity; either X is X, Being is Being, or else the equation is incorrect. Heidegger is not concerned with the validity of the law of non-contradiction. His concern, rather, is the misidentification of the essence of Being as its instantiation, similar to the identification of a dog as a poodle; while true and productive in a narrative describing Being or dogs, it does not name what each is in itself and that which makes disparate instantiations one. Heidegger wishes to direct our attention to the truth of the logical circle of “Being is Being” in order to seek the nature of and how we know what we cannot legitimately name otherwise. This search for a way of expressing this circularity so as to give knowledge is the essential question for the witness and, as we will see, for PseudoDionysius when he asks how to name God himself without misnaming Him as His creations. Pseudo-Dionysius will ultimately adopt a stutter affirming and denying the names of God, which is not entirely distinct from Heidegger’s recognition of how “is,” as a conjugation of the verb “to be,” renders his formulation of Being is Being as a redundancy: Being being Being. The simplicity and severity of this aim to speak beyond a stutter haunts Heidegger. His writings experiment with writing Being as the unfinished phrase “Being is . . .” and as Being and beyng.62 No option ultimately satisfies him—perhaps this explains his later curiosity in the symbolic languages as opposed to alphabetic-grammatical ones witnessed in his interest in Japanese and his attempt at a translation of the Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching. Perhaps the problem was not with the definition of Being itself, but with the act of defining—with the language in which we think and express Being. 63 This consideration brings us to Lyotard’s concern with the inherent deception in testimonial narrative, which is a necessary preface to his critique of Heidegger’s equation of Being and language.

Lyotard on Testimonial Narrative On the witness stand, one is sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But, if we grant Heidegger accuracy in the charge of metaphysics, a renaming of something as something it is not, then testimony is inherently

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falsification, unless, perhaps, the witness does not answer her questions (“Being is . . .”), or stutters (“Being being Being”), or otherwise attempts to state and erase her words (“Being,” “beyng”). But, the witness who does not answer, stutters, or otherwise backtracks upon her statements will be dismissed as not telling the truth, to be in contempt of court, or, perhaps, just crazy, deceived, or otherwise mistaken. The truthful witness, then, will be judged as the opposite. And, if Being is integrally linked to language, what does this do to the Being of the witness whose testimony is refused? Before addressing this question through Lyotard’s critique of Heidegger’s linkage of Being and language, it is productive to look at the further problems facing the witness who attempts to speak the truth and Lyotard’s analysis of the inherent problems of testimony. Begin, by recalling the testimony cited above from the Nuremberg Trials: it revealed that Otto Ohlendorf, the SS officer, was a better witness than MarieClaude Vaillant-Couturier, who had been detained in a concentration camp. Ohlendorf’s testimony recorded that he was present, he saw, added to, was given, and took written records at the camps in the role of an official witness. The analysis of this testimony revealed that it was not his deposition’s empiricism alone that made it superior to the victim’s, but that it formed a logical narrative of events in the idiom held to be valid eye witnessing by the courts, that is, held to be truth. Within this juridical logic, the victim’s testimony was evidence only of her detention (thus proving the camps to be concentration camps) and not of her death (thus inconclusive about the camps being death camps). Thus, the sworn evidence of the holocaust victim did not prove to be evidence against the historical revisionists like Faurisson, who argued that there was no proof of the existence of Nazi gas chambers. Leaving aside, for now, the critique of the narrowness of revisionists and tribunal’s idiom, Lyotard takes up the problem of how to let the victim bear witness to the horror of the death camps, even while she is not dead, as his most explicit illustration of a differend wherein “the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.” 64 Lyotard takes up this problem of differends because it is a most fundamental conflict of intelligibility. Ultimately, this pursuit reveals that reality itself cannot be represented rationally because it overflows with singular events that exceed their containment in logical narration. The inability to express one’s experiences manifests as a spectrum from the cases that make us shudder in horror to the relatively universal and common occurrences that we typically do not take the time to explore philosophically. The spectrum does not diminish the importance of any or all events of inexpression, nor does it diminish the necessity of their evaluation. Instead, to echo Heidegger, it is the most seemingly self-evident ideas that demand the most diligent reevaluation. Testimony, within the idiom of the tribunal, relies upon the singular event being logically delineated and requires a non-contradicting, linear recount in order for it, and, by extension, its event, to be judged as true. This form of lin-

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guistic construction is the narrative. The narrative plays a crucial and recurrent role in Lyotard’s philosophy. The two most important appearances include narrative as the epistemological, ontological, and ethical problematic of The Differend and the concept that permits the differentiation between the modern and postmodern. Narrative in The Differend and the question of what is postmodernism and how the grand narrative is critical to its understanding will be explored in the second chapter. Here, the task is to better understand narrative’s role in testimony in general; thus, I will refer to some of narrative’s other appearances. Just as the tribunal accepts logically consistent narrative as more truthful than the witness’ testimony, Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition shows how scientific discourse rejects literary or mythic narrative as inconsistent and illogical. The debate between the languages of the scientist and author reveals why juridical logic cannot understand the victim. “Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse,” and, one that “does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative. . . .”65 We must immediately recognize something here is amiss. The tribunal operates with a rigid set of rules as to correct testimony—something we might call a logical or scientific genre of discourse, and the chosen genres “fix rules of linkage,” and “determine stakes, they submit phrases from different regimens to a single finality. . . .”66 Yet, what the tribunal wants is a narrative. This is not a case of using “narrative” as a synonym for the discourse it deems permissible as testimony; instead, it is a hint of an inconsistency in its demands that much be worked out at length in chapter three. What must be understood first is this conflict between the discourse of science and that of narrative. Narrative, that communication of knowledge Lyotard sets against the scientific, typically recounts the undertakings of heroes, thus establishing positive or negative models for a society. Its form, then, allows a great diversity of phrase regimes and genres of discourse—that is, denotative statements are followed by prescriptives, by interrogatives, evaluative statements, and so forth—and, thus, how they are conveyed typically defines their inherent rules. Such narrative is essentially theatrical, even when borrowed for objective report, because it requires an addressor who has authority to tell the tale, a listener with the authority to hear the tale, and a third party of whom or about which the narrative concerns. The narrative speaks to and of the society within which it occurs; the players, recitation, and production actualize the narrative simultaneously as the narrative is their own actualization. 67 In contrast to and incommensurate with narrative is the language of the post-industrial sciences. Scientific discourse proceeds by the denotative statement—that which posits the addressor as the knower, while the “addressee is put in the position of having to give or refuse his assent, and the referent . . . demands to be correctly identified and expressed by the statement that refers to it”—and actively rejects any other language game.68

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Unlike narrative, it neither forges nor reflects the social bond, even while it contributes to it by founding many modern institutions and values. Scientific language, then, neither elevates nor even includes the other; instead, it remains superior to the speaker, claiming an objectivity divorced from the social and historical. Narrative will always include, even if to its own ends, the languages of the other; scientific discourse will always exclude these other languages: [Narrative] approaches such [scientific] discourse primarily as a variant in the family of narrative cultures. The opposite is not true. The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof. He classifies them as belonging to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped . . . Narratives are fables, myths, legends. . . .69

Juridically accepted narrative, like that by science, requires you to speak its language, or else it judges you as incapable or unwilling to report the truth. Like the scientist, the judge and jury are confounded by a rational animal’s incapacity to be rational by the standards of scientific reason. Narrative’s openness to other genres of discourse may make it seem a promising genre for the witness silenced by juridical logic. And, it does indeed offer a productive option, albeit not a successful one—at least, as narrative is here defined as this pre-scientific model. “Narrative is perhaps the genre of discourse within which the heterogeneity of phrase regimens, and even the heterogeneity of genres of discourse, have the easiest time passing unnoticed.” 70 Unfortunately, heterogeneity invites heteronomy, from which differends can emerge, those breakers against which communication crashes when a phrase cannot bridge the diversity of phrasal modes. And, any maintenance of the conditions for heteronomy suggests that the differends are only pushed a little under the surface, and not undone. The result may be a longer trial, but not a more successful one. Another elaboration of narrative, in Lyotard’s late lecture entitled “Clouds,” highlights his critique of the rigidity of testimonial narrative and encourages an understanding of a more truthful account of reality. 71 Within the essay, he interrupts his recounting of his own life narrative with the delineation of the two sides of what he terms “narratology,” that study that hinges upon the questions invoked by the demarcation of beginnings and ends. Narrative cannot be thought without thinking of time and Being. How does one render the latter and how does the latter unconsciously render the narrative depends upon the selection, arrangement, and presentation of events in time. Representing, for Lyotard, one side of this narratological divide is the seventeenth-century’s protector of the generative complexity of ancient narrative, Nicolas Boileau, who “defended the beautiful disorder permitted by the ‘rule of no rules,’” and representing the other side is the lover of scientific rationality, Charles Perrault, who, “in the name of the modern, is obviously for order and definite beginnings, middles, and ends.” 72

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These two sides map, more or less, a distinction like that between the literary and mythic narrative and scientific language. Presenting examples from literature and his own body of work, Lyotard sketches the impulses of both camps of narrative, and critiques both. Boileau’s preference for the disordered order of phrases, like literary narrative, first sounds like a position beneficial for Lyotard and harmonious with his own persistent struggle to loosen order so as to let other ideas present themselves. And, in this way, it is a far more productive mode of writing than the scientific. It is an impassioned writing that fights indifference—be it “the Epicurean ataraxia, the Stoic apatheia, the extreme Stoic adiaphora, the Zen not-thinking, the Taoist nothingness, etc.”—which is a position that Lyotard himself embraced early on in his master’s dissertation, “Indifference as an Ethical Notion.”73 He argues that nihilism and skepticism may be a productive entry into philosophy, but are positions of indifference one must shake free from, which shows the Boileau camp of narrative to be a productive treatment in its emphasis on the passionate disorder. Lyotard names his book Economis libidinale as his own treatment, wherein “my only law, therefore, was to try to be as receptive as possible to emerging impulses. . . .”74 However, to assume that the guiding “rule of no rules” is an utter lack of rules is mistaken, for this would prohibit any legitimation to the narrative. 75 While he calls it an “honorable sinful offering,” his critique of the mode of writing wherein one performs a complete upheaval of one’s soul so as to spill forth the passions of the self into the text, to have the text perform the passage of intensities, is that “the polymorphic paganism of exploring and exploiting the whole range of intensive forms could easily be swept away into lawful permissiveness, including violence and terror.” 76 Indifference and subsumption into pure intensity both result in one’s opening to that violence that ignores our being called to speak. Tragedy and the epic epitomize the opposite narrative camp, Perrault’s position, in their clear designation of a point of departure and one of arrival, which signals the accomplishment of the earlier—for example, an oracle makes a prediction that the hero then fulfills, typically by an attempt to defy it. Here, a clear rhythm is established, a cooing, lulling one; it guides us through a chain and satisfies us with a finish; it offers us “the delusion that we are able to program our life . . . [as] a part of an ancient fidelity to something like a destiny. . . .”77 Lyotard’s first critique of this camp concerns the prejudicing we may be unaware of in a presumption of destiny, and his second concerns its resultant discursive inflexibility born from the presumption of linearity of lives and events— “Not too bad, such an arrangement with time! But it undoubtedly conceals something dishonest”—pointing out how “any narrative whatsoever begins in the middle of things and that its so called ‘end’ is an arbitrary cut in the infinite sequence of data. . . .”78 To forget how we fix the meaning we choose by making these selective cuts in time also becomes his critique of structuralism, which he explains by reference to the Freudian Nachträglich, the afterwardness, or that belated understanding we grant—a retroactive attribution—of meaning to earlier

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events. 79 To tell a story is not to repeat or rehearse the same event in some originary truthfulness, but to re-present a re-thinking of the event. The rationalized structure of this type of narrative forgets the prejudices that lead us to assign meaning after the fact to the original event and the soothing rhythm of its structure brushes all realization of this under the cloak of comfort the story provides. Lyotard’s analysis of narrative will frustrate any reader looking for an answer, for some clear pronouncement and set of instructions. He is immensely self-aware of this; this is also, however, the necessary methodology, intimately bound and utterly inseparable from the content of his search for an idiom by which the silenced can speak. A biographical remark aids our understanding of his inability to give us an answer: he says that he was enthralled, as a child, with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and the works of Bernanos because of their “exposition of the way a tortured skepticism is tied up with faith.” 80 Skepticism that leads to indifference is a sin against thinking; a tortured one that cannot let go of faith is a necessary trait. One must necessarily be turned towards something. Thus, amidst the damning critiques, Lyotard highlights the productive features of narrative, the most important of which is the call. The call is linked to law; the call calls to us and commands our response. “Even if there is neither a need nor a demand for writing any sentence, if no god addresses the writer any prescription to write anything, the necessity to begin, continue, and finish sentences, or better, phrases, remains. You can add: be it by writing or otherwise.” 81 There is something that calls us. This fact, along with the force of Lyotard’s critiques, demands a construction of a more flexible consideration of testimonial truth-determinations that does not abandon any possible legitimation. His best expression of this better way of thinking the construction of narrative comes when he likens thoughts to clouds: The periphery of thoughts is as immeasurable as the fractal lines. . . . Thoughts never stop changing their location one with the other. When you feel like you have penetrated far into their intimacy in analyzing either their so-called structure or genealogy or even post-structure, it is actually too late or too soon. One cloud casts its shadow on another, the shape of clouds varies with the angle from which they are approached.82

As elusive as accumulations of water vapor, thoughts resist delineation. An artist may paint the most stunning cloud, but that representation is not what I look up, now, and see. When I offer my testimony, I can trace the boundaries of the event, but these curves are deceptive. They will be real outlines, but not real testimony (because they did not capture the actual outlines of the actual cloud and what is all that is an actual cloud, anyway?). “With this metaphor I am describing nothing but the condition of thinking insofar as it takes into account the principle of relativity it is affected by.”83 I cannot capture the single event and represent it truthfully; even if a perfect capture could be had (which it cannot, as

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every event overflows our attempt at its seizure), my re-presentation is always already affected by something. Like Heidegger feared in his discussion with his Japanese friend, our language will misrepresent our intended object. But, Lyotard may shy from “misrepresent,” and simply affirm that it will “re-write” it. This inability to encapsulate, within either scientific discourse or experimental narrative, the singular event may be one of the factors that gave the young Lyotard pause when he was asked to write an essay giving an account of life as someone born in 1925. The essay demanded him to speak on behalf of his generation, and he found that, trying to speak with a universal voice, he could only offer truthful contradictions: “We will come out of war, the Twentieth Century’s most concrete product, with a monstrous poverty of thought and morals. We are twenty years old when the camps disgorge that which they have had neither the time nor the appetite to digest. Those hollow faces plague our thinking. . . .”84 Lyotard encapsulates the we (all who were born in 1925) as incongruity: we will come out of war the most concrete yet utterly impoverished generation; we will be most rooted in the real, brought down from metaphysical peaks to be fully aware of the horror that had taken place, but, also, we will be unable to respond, we will be “a monstrous poverty of thought.” 85 We, like the tribunal, do not want narrative contradictions. We want a narrative obedient to Socrates’ instruction to Phaedrus: one that is like a living being with a distinguishable head, body, and tail. The conflict or the differend within testimonial narrative, however, is that the real often refuses to unfold like a proper argument and have an apodictic beginning, middle, and end or be a causal chain. A striking instance of the confounding between linearity and truth can be found in Lyotard’s Cashinahua Notice within his last chapter of The Differend. The Cashinahua, a native population settled in both Peru and Brazil, employ a strict and fixed formula by which to begin and end their miyoi, their traditional narratives. This formula, as quoted from André-Marcel d’Ans, begins with: “Here is the story of . . ., as I’ve always heard it told. I am going to tell it to you in my turn, listen to it!”86 Lyotard notes that the narrator’s declaration of always having heard the tale singularizes his authority as it universalizes his history: “If every narrator has always declared this, then the story will have been reported with no discontinuity since the time of the Ancients, who were the first narrators as well as the heroes. There would be no gap, therefore, between the current narrator and the Ancients, except in principle a chronological one.”87 The singularity of a narrator telling the tale, a singular event, universalizes their collective history. The tale’s inheritance grants authority as it demands authority to be telling it: this question of right is circular while the telling of the tale itself cements Cashinahua reality into a single linear narrative. We want our myths, histories, and witness’ testimony, likewise, to grant the authority of the one who can tell it and whose telling unfolds it into a perfect, single genealogical line of narrative inheritance.

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The danger of making the singular occurrence, be it the death camp, the self, a first kiss, sip of coffee, or God, follow such a restrictive narrative is that it imposes fiction over the fragments of fact: it must invent the cuts, the order of the scenes, label one the beginning and one the end. This means that the testimony found comprehensible to the tribunal is a narrative that is as much fiction as it is fact. This undercuts our demand that testimony be sworn evidence of the truth. Is there any way, then, for the victim not only to bear witness to what the tribunal declares inexpressible in a way to render it comprehensible, but also to do so truthfully?

Lyotard’s Critique of Heidegger If the witness will be comprehensible only by a fictionalization of the truth, can she not be more honest by remaining silent so long as we accept her silence to not eliminate her Being? Thus, we return to the question of whether Lyotard’s reluctance to accept Heidegger’s equation of Being and language is too hasty. Heidegger revealed that the silent being stands as “an uninterpreted sign.”88 So long as that sign is, even if it is unread, uninterpreted, even silent, it still is: the sign points to Being. In this manner, the witness, then, could remain a witness when silent; with her silence she could bare truthful witness. Lyotard seems to accept this movement when he analytically deduces testimony’s linguistic components and determines that phrases call forth other phrases, even the phrase of silence.89 Even the event of a silent phrase points toward the serial nature of all phrases and referents, thereby fixing silence as a something within a whole. As Heidegger’s silence always points back to Being, there is, likewise for Lyotard, no isolated phrase. Any one phrase always is; it calls to us to link it with something preceding it, “[a] phrase presents at least one universe. . . .”90 It calls to us to think about the relations between, before, and after the instant of the phrase that constitute its meaning. Heidegger’s silence calls to conscience as Lyotard’s phrase demands us to respond. Heidegger’s silence meaningfully says nothing, thus justifying the possibility for Lyotard’s silent witness to meaningfully be her own testimony. Despite these initial correlations between Lyotard and Heidegger’s thought, there are three interconnected divergences between them. First, Lyotard accepts this correlation of language and Being only ontically, not ontologically. When Lyotard asks, “Could the presentation entailed by a phrase be called Being?,” he answers that it is not Being but only a mere being that is equated with language the moment Being calls, speaks: “But it [Being] is one presentation, or what in a phrase-case is the case. Being would be a case, an occurrence, the ‘fact’ that happens to ‘fall,’ that it ‘comes running’ . . . Not Being, but one being. . . .”91 Essentially, Lyotard proposes that Being is a phrase, only, we must define Being, against Heidegger, as a being: “Being can be presented, [only] as an exist-

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ent.”92 For Heidegger, this would be a metaphysical mistake akin to that of humanism’s, making Da-sein into individual, specific existents. And, for Lyotard, the inherent problem here is not metaphysics, but that the singular being, like the singular event, overflows all possible encapsulation, and thus, would only be a phrase and not the truthful testimony.93 A second, although connected, divergence from Heidegger begins from correlation—Lyotard’s acceptance, although with strict cautioning, of the event as Ereignis—and builds to a divergence—wherein the event cannot be an experience had by Being. “The phrase considered as occurrence [Ereignis] escapes the logical paradoxes that self-referential propositions give rise to.”94 The phrase, for Lyotard, is parallel to the presencing and withdrawing of the meaning of language and Being, proposed by Heidegger, in that it embodies an essential, paradoxical movement. Like the one called by Being to reflect on one’s ownmost potentiality of Being, Lyotard is working out the “unknown idiom,” which calls to us, and by which the victim can give testimony to the paradox of the wrong.95 A phrase that can be and not be at once, like Ereignis, may be a phrase that will stand for her testimony. The victim’s testimony must withstand “the test of universal doubt.” 96 And the phrase can, Lyotard tells us, because it is, like Ereignis, something and no one thing. By nature, the phrase is serial; it calls to us to link it with something preceding it, “[a] phrase presents at least one universe. . . .”97 And it is always more than what it is; it calls to us to think about the relations between, before, and after the instant of the phrase. Further, it must always be taken as certain fact that there is at least one phrase; any argument against this must presuppose it, must employ a phrase to deny the existence of a phrase.98 In this way, then, Ereignis as phrase may necessitate the existence of Being and connect that Being to a web of instances that can constitute reality. The caution, however, that Lyotard insists upon is how we consider the call of the event. For Heidegger, it is silent and productive of anxiety, which forbids its translation into common idioms, but it is clear that the call comes from Being and is addressed to Dasein. It is a confusion, Lyotard argues, in the identification of Ereignis as the phrase compounded with the identification of Being and language, to assume the logical conclusion to this calculation to be that the event, then, is phrase and Being and, thus, that it is the addressor to itself as addressee. First, we cannot identify Being as the addressor, for the event happens, and then its components are situated into a phrase universe of addressors, addresses, senses, and referents. Second, since the phrase universe demands an addressor to have an addressee (or else our potential solution becomes merely another differend), we are presuming “that Being (or language) (die Sage) . . . has need of man,” which contradicts Heidegger’s claim, which Lyotard affirms and here cites, that beings need language, language has no need of beings. Said otherwise, Lyotard’s imagined interlocutor asks: “Isn’t the I also divested here of its power qua addressor of sense to be no more than the ear of the unpresentable that calls out to it?” 99 To

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which Lyotard responds in the negative—such is a mere presumption that “the foreign phrase wants to phrase itself through you as its go-between, that it wants something from you because it would like to be itself.” 100 The challenge, here, is to discern Lyotard’s analysis from his critique—is he clearing up misinterpretations that could be made about Heidegger’s conception of the call of Being? Or is he warning us off of this conception? The latter may just be suggested if we see the equation of Being and language as a need of one for the other to be wholly itself. This does violate Heidegger’s later writings, but has he slipped up in not thinking out the codependency implied in this unification? Lyotard asserts (possibly also as would Heidegger), “you are nothing but its [the event’s] advent . . . in the universe presented by the phrase that happens. It wasn’t waiting for you. You come when it arrives.”101 The challenge continues with Heidegger’s linkage. The call may be silent, but since silence is a phrase, and any phrase is necessarily within a series and necessitates its further linkage, then it seems that the witness’ silence makes her own Being a phrase. This Being is, even as it allows her the absence so as to permit her to stand outside of her physical being alive and testify to her being a victim of a death camp. But, to bear Being as the phrase that permits immediate witness to the event is to suggest that the event is an experience had by, thus presupposing, Being. This denies the “you” only coming to be by the happening of the event. And, this is again precisely what Heidegger, as Lyotard credits him, undoes as a mistaken legacy built by Augustine and Descartes. Phenomenology, instead, constitutes the meaning of the “I” and the event only in their mutual codetermination. 102 Since the event is not an experience had by a subject who predates it, holding Being as the phrase, as that which can bear witness to the event, even as the being can be held in absentia so as to testify to her death, fails. And we cannot turn back to the (ontic) being as the witness, unless we commit the error of metaphysics and name being as Being. The final divergence between Lyotard and Heidegger here concerns a return to the idea of silence. For Heidegger, the call is silent. Support can be easily found in Lyotard to affirm silence as a phrase. But, through a proposal of linking Being and language, and letting silence be language, this silence did not obliterate the being’s Being. Silence, then, was the salvation, for Heidegger; for Lyotard, there remains a question as to whether this silence bears enough activity to keep the shelter from being a prison. Using Heidegger, we have sketched a presentation of Being and an absence of language as allowing Being and not being; such presencing and withdrawal granted the witness transcendence over life, granted her Being as Da-sein as ecstasy, the ec-stasis, a standing outside of oneself. For Lyotard, there is not enough activity to permit the disembodied witness to truly speak. He cannot see Da-sein’s testimony—a reflection upon itself through silence—as true testimony, rather than a sheltering within silence: “language . . . [is] the house of Being” and “human being consists in dwelling.”103 Silent reflection gives only a demonstration of being—once again, returning to

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the second problem, where Being is the eyewitness to an experience had by it. Connecting this to the first problem, if it is a phrase, even if a silent one, it is a demonstration of the self who still lives, the self situated within the experience that is only possible after the event happens. Prohibited true ecstasy, Heidegger’s Ereignis does not permit the witness to the death camp to stand outside of her (living) self so as to truthfully proffer testimony (to being a victim of a death camp). Thus, we face again the given pronouncement that the witness logically forbidden testimony finds herself in a state where “one is oneself unreal or conditional as long as one has not spoken. . . .”104 If silence is envisioned as a shelter, and her Being alone cannot actively speak, then the silence renders a wrong akin to ontological homicide. For Heidegger, silence is provocative of a call parallel to how Ereignis silently provokes beings to uncover the true structures of Being, to read the sign that points to Being. For Lyotard, the witness must speak; silence is no redemption before an accuser, a judge and jury, an audience who judge reality based upon testimony and demonstrable evidence. For Lyotard, the witness must find a way to speak a speech that lets her stand outside of herself (as living) in such a way to grant her testimony (of death) legitimacy. And this is why Lyotard must rescue Da-sein as ecstasy at once with his movement to the ontic realm. If the witness can achieve ecstasy in her testimony, then her phrases can embody the sensual legitimacy that the tribunal accorded as proper to eye witnessing, which no dead body could do. What this ecstatic silence truly is will take chapters to develop and need the aid of Pseudo-Dionysius. To undertand his role in this construction, we must first better sketch out what is ecstasy. Ecstasy, ekstasis, is from the Greek for “trance” or “distraction” (as related to the expression existanai phrenon, to drive out of one’s mind). It is derived from the prefix ex-, out or outside, and the verb -stasis, to stand. Ecstasy, etymologically, is rapture experienced as a standing outside of oneself (its contrast being enstasis, a standing within oneself that can be understood as interiorized contemplation). Its various emotive designations include fearful states, stupors, utter happiness, and as a supremely good feeling. Ecstasy calls to mind love, the sublime, and God. It calls forth a connection to love by its intonation of Socrates’ definition of desire, notably in the Symposium, as an intentionality directed out and towards something that one personally lacks. It is an intense yearning forth for some elusive thing. It calls forth a parallel to the Kantian sublime by provoking the sensuous immediacy of both fear and awe through the qualitatively or quantitatively overwhelming that yields an utterly blissful, self-promotive victory as reason conquers the fear by conquering the incomprehensibility. Finally, ecstasy calls forth a comparison to the religious dimension by being the state of the mystic drawn outside of himself by either epistemological or emotive disconnect when drawn up to union by and with God. 105 Anthony Steinbock offers the example, from Rabbi Dov Baer, wherein the effect of divine ecstasy is described as “going out of Egypt,” and explains that the ancient Hebrew for

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“Egypt” is identical to “limitations,” thus making the historical pilgrimage from Egypt one with the personal, religious movement out from one’s own place. 106 Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica’s “Treatise on Human Acts,” otherwise called the “Treatise on the Passions,” explores the relation between ecstasy and love in Question 28, Article three, “Of the Effects of Love.” 107 Citing the authority of Dionysius the Areopagite and quoting his The Divine Names—“the Divine love produces ecstasy . . . [and] God himself suffered ecstasy through love”—Aquinas counters three objections to affirm the intimate relation between love and ecstasy so that every love is a cause of ecstasy. 108 He writes, “to suffer ecstasy means to be placed outside oneself.” This suffering can afflict the apprehensive power or the appetitive power; thus, ecstasy can be of two ways. When it afflicts the power of apprehension, “a man is said to be placed outside himself, when he is placed outside the knowledge proper to him,” which is born from an uplifting movement. This ecstasy is “due to his being raised to a higher knowledge . . . inasmuch as he is placed outside the connatural apprehension of his sense and reason, when he is raised up so as to comprehend things that surpass sense and reason.” The ecstasy afflicting the power of appetite, though, is born from a defiling movement, “due to his being cast down into a state of debasement . . . when he is overcome by violent passion or madness.” In this descent from oneself, “a man is said to suffer ecstasy, when that power is borne towards something else, so that it goes forth from itself as it were.” 109 The two ecstasies born from love are caused by a divergence between a love that is indirect (dispositive) and one that is direct. The ecstasy that afflicts the apprehensive power is born from an indirect love “in so far . . . as love makes the lover dwell on the beloved . . . to dwell intently on one thing [that] draws the mind from other things.” 110 The ecstasy that afflicts the appetitive power is born from a direct love that is either “by love of friendship, simply; by love of concupiscence not simply but in a restricted sense.”111 This distinction of direct love hearkens the schism between agape and eros that will be explored below. A simple, direct love is agape, like the love between friends and the love that most often surfaces in the Bible. The concupiscent love, eros, is considered to be restricted, according to Aquinas, because, “the lover is carried out of himself, in a certain sense; in so far, namely, as not being satisfied with enjoying the good that he has, he seeks to enjoy something outside himself. But since he seeks to have this extrinsic good for himself, he does not go out from himself simply, and this movement remains finally within him.”112 Here, the movement of ecstasy is seen as a dramatic going outside of oneself and return back into oneself instead of a pure love constantly emanated outward “absolutely.” 113 This examination of Aquinas merges together the two common employments of ecstasy mentioned above, love and religion. Pseudo-Dionysius will elaborate upon this merger in such a way as to permit the argument to be made that his narrative, which seeks to name and thus know God, cannot be spoken without it. Pseudo-Dionysius’ testimony, then, is epistemologically ecstatic. It

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permits the episteme to be an embodied knowledge that lets the witness free herself from confines of reason and physicality, vivifying a union with the ineffable. Lyotard’s testimonial employment of ecstasy will be revealed in chapter three to be primarily aesthetic. His examinations of alternative forms of testimony for the witness and radical interpretation of the Kantian sublime reveal a possible path of ecstatic expression. Read together, Pseudo-Dionysius and Lyotard reveal a merger of faith and love that provides a possible salvation of voice for the silenced.

The Witness and Testimony in Pseudo-Dionysius How then can we speak of the divine names? How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable? —Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names114

The prior sections have revealed the integral, no matter how quickly problematic, relationship between being and speaking and how to permit a silenced witness to actually be, that is to be a witness; thus, to speak, requires a way to break out from the stranglehold of logic. To be, then, requires a way of being that is outside of the strictures of being that silence. Ecstasy is the most promising state through which the witness may be freed from these binds. Pseudo-Dionysius preeminently displays the breakage of silencing strictures on numerous levels: as author, in his method, his content, and his goal. This section seeks only to introduce this multidimensional thinker’s project and method as to how they merge epistemic testimony with its embodied expression and his ecstatic goal. Like Lyotard’s first charge to us—how to let the silenced witness speak?— Pseudo-Dionysius begins by asking: “How then can we speak of the divine names?”115 Divinity, being superessential, exceeds our conceptual capacity, and thus, exceeds our expressive one, too. “Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity.”116 But, absurdity cannot silence our attempt and our call to speak; thus, the pseudonymous one who delights in contraries, adds, “And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything.” 117 God exceeds human imagination and comprehension, yet history has recorded many testimonies and recounts many calls to witness God. God may be unknowable, but we can name Him by admitting that any

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name truthfully given to God must embrace its own inherent paradox as untruthful. This is the undertaking of the self-named-Dionysius who radically reworks language, as he did his own identity, to be able to speak (of/to) the unspeakable. When our soul is enlightened by the love of God, Pseudo-Dionysius says, we can concentrate through yearning alone on achieving a perfect divine union with Him, but until this union, we cannot positively know God. We are only permitted scraps of knowledge: “we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning the hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed. Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being.” 118 Just as senses cannot grasp ideas and form cannot represent the formless, we cannot know what is beyond knowing in any other way than by troublesome indirection, analogy, suspicion, and these scraps of scattered bits of knowledge collected in The Divine Word we know as Scripture. We cling to these scraps in order to come closer to grasping the divine. We set our heart and minds to work assembling a collage of these fragments—to make a picture, to give us a name by which we can know something about God. We strive to know by naming that which we desire. “We now grasp these things in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils. . . .” 119 This intense desire and command to know God, to know that which exceeds our rational capacities, is well documented. Beyond the Scripture writers, the history is rich with this paradox. Moses Maimonides, for example, explains the strength of this desire to know these “things (beyond that boundary) which are acknowledged to be inaccessible to human understanding . . . their minds are bent on comprehending such things, that is to say, they are moved by desire. . . .”120 Julian of Norwich’s desire to know God, to be one of “Christ’s lovers,” was so painfully intense that death would be relief; she writes, “here felt I truly that I loved Christ so much above myself that methought it had been a great ease to me to have died bodily.” 121 The Cloud of Unknowing’s anonymous author reveals that “all that you will find is a darkness, a sort of cloud of unknowing; you cannot tell what it is, except that you experience in your will a simple reaching out to God.” 122 Father Tugwell, in his preface to The Cloud of Unknowing, elaborates this sentiment more positively by declaring that “our minds are defeated when we try to draw close to God; only love can take the final step, drawing us into the dark yet dazzling mystery of God as he is in himself.” 123 We cannot comprehend the creation that defines our existence. We are unable to bear witness to God empirically or rationally, but the religious call is precisely to strive to this witnessing and such testimony: “Look up now, feeble creature, and see what you are. What are you and how have you deserved to be called by our Lord?”124 In an attempt to be worthy of being called to testify to that which exceeds our possible demonstration of evidence, Maimonides rejects the “impropriety of ascribing to God any

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positive attributes,” which would suggest some claim to knowledge. 125 Julian seeks to affirm the impossible by embracing the suffering that she feels in her distance from God as a mimetic honoring of the suffering of Christ. The Cloud’s author does not embrace pain but the rigor of mental exercise as an honorific conditioning to be worthy of knowing He who cannot be known. These reverences, however, are tenuous if purported to be demonstrations of knowledge of God. Logic, like that of the court that rejected Lyotard’s witness, would likewise reject these sufferings that claim to be testimony that denies the capacity of testimony. It would reject the demonstration of pain as evidence, reject the witness who is now silent, yet reserves the right that he may one day be prepared to speak. According to the voice of logic, if one knows that God is, then one can say that and what He is—knowledge can and must be demonstrated in order to be legitimated as knowledge at all. Thus, these diverse attempts to bear witness to the ineffable are not solutions capable of speaking in the logic of the everyday. Pseudo-Dionysius’ exploration and address of this paradox both precedes and exceeds his fellow mystics’: he cannot give perfect testimony, but he can speak. Pseudo-Dionysius’ confrontation with the problem of bearing witness to the indefinable renders The Divine Names a radical treatise, “proved to be one of the most pregnant texts in the medieval canon for philosophic conceptions and methods.”126 His work is first guided by the instruction of 1 Corinthians 2:4, to speak the truth “not in the plausible words of human wisdom but in demonstration of the power granted by the Spirit.” 127 What the power behind their activity as scribes revealed was a slew of attributes, oddments of knowledge, naming the Divine as “invisible,” “incomprehensible,” “unsearchable and inscrutable,” “Life of the living, the being of beings, it is the Source and Cause of all life and all being,” one who creates and commands things to be, and becomes thus their maintenance. 128 What we know of Him is that we know only splinters of the whole of what is. This meager knowledge translates our testimony into a fragmentary stammering. Pseudo-Dionysius’ testimony to the knowledge of the unknowable embodies a hyper-amplified desire directed to the creation of a method of speaking and rejecting these scraps of knowledge. Using Scripture as a guide, he collects attributes of God, in themselves insufficient to name that which is above all names, and pastes them together as a picture, once drawn then erased. This is Pseudo-Dionysius’ innovative balance of both the denial and affirmation of God’s nature born from the inherent contradiction of our knowledge of Him. This method is a ceaselessly active conjunction of cataphatic (affirmative) and apophatic (negative) theologies. Cataphatic theology, in regards to the question of naming God, is the method employed by theologians to ascribe confirmatory names to God without equivocating them. This approach is the most common; it sets out a positive elaboration of God, his nature, and his acts. Through such, one can write a narrative about God: God is omnipotent, He is omniscient, He is omnibenevolent.

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Employing this method does not equate the manner of existence between the name and God, despite the grammatical suggestion by connecting the two through the verb “to be.” Instead, cataphatic theology purports that “God is good” in that He creates goodness; all creations must be first in the creator; thus, He is what He creates and what He creates is what He is without ontological equation. Our aim, though, is not to describe what God does, but what He is in and of Himself. Pseudo-Dionysius explains this transmutation of “is” and “creates” by affirming that we can call God the names of His creatures because He, the cause, pre-contains His effects, the creatures. All is in God before it is in creation, thus it is truthful and correct to call God by the names of his creations understood to be His processions. 129 This explanation is an appeal to the theological theory of emanation, which explains creation as procession from God. “The metaphor of emanation is a prominent feature of Neoplatonic thought and described the way in which spiritual principles—for pagan writers the One, the henads, etc., for Christians God and his divine attributes—exercise causality.” 130 Etymologically, emanation means to flow forth or stream, indicating how causality pours forth from God; in other words, it is the theory that all derived things proceed out of a more originary source. 131 Like water, however, its course is cyclic, not onedirectional. Just as creation flows forth from God, the faithful can concentrate on this creation so as to trace it back to its origin, so as to return to God. This theory will be carefully considered in chapters four and five; here, just one further aspect is of particular interest: how the process of procession from and reversion to an origin does not destroy the perfect unity of that origin—its unity is preserved through understanding emanation as ecstasy.132 Translating this movement from the divine to the temporal can help explicate the possibility held open for both Pseudo-Dionysius’ faithful and Lyotard’s witness for moving outside of herself while still being herself so as to testify to the union with God and death in life. Gersh explains the relation of ecstasy to emanation through the lynchpin of the Neoplatonist Proclus’ doctrine of potency, “the connecting element between unity and being ‘for it is a procession of unity and an ecstasy towards being.’ . . .”133 Gersh reveals how ecstasy is synonymous with emanation in all cases where ecstasy contextually signifies causality. This elaborates Damascius’ pronouncement that “an effect is said to remain in its cause inasmuch as ‘it does not stand aside [i.e., ex-stasis] from the nature of the cause.’ . . .”134 Alexander Golitzin succinctly describes the two-sidedness of Pseudo-Dionysius’ ecstasy: “As God comes out of himself, exestekos, in a ‘departure from His own being,’ kat’ekbasin tes ousias, in his processions [proodoi] to create, sustain, and save the world, so we are called to an ecstasies, a departure from ourselves, as the act of our return [epistrophe] to him.” 135 Pseudo-Dionysius’ synonymy of ecstasy between the believer and God is founded in love. This ground reveals the motive and means of emanation; as Gersh notes, “Thus God, because of the superfluity of his benevolence, produces all

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creatures by means of his ‘ecstatic superessential power.’ . . .”136 Put more directly, Golitzin writes, “the power enabling our return to him and firing our longing for him is . . . the very same divine love that moved him to call us and our world into being.” 137 The linkage of ecstatic-emanation with love reveals the theoretical intent and support of Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names. God’s excess of love is the ecstatically creative over-pouring of love that produces all his loved and loving creatures. The theory of emanation justifies his use of cataphatic theology to ascribe, without logical equivocation, the names of what proceeds from God to God himself because God is the source from which all that is, comes to be. By employing the names of what is, then, for naming Him, Pseudo-Dionysius has revealed that to seek to know and reflect on these names of God is a method that permits us participation in the cycle of emanation. The epistemic method permits us ecstasy: a way leading outside of ourselves and returning (through knowledge instead of death) back to God. This, however, is only one half of the picture of Pseudo-Dionysius’ methodological attempt to name God. In contrast to cataphatic theology’s positive attribution of names to God, Pseudo-Dionysius also employs apophatic theology, which denies that God is anything namable—that is, this view affirms a denial: God is not any of his beings or His beings’ attributes. This disjuncture of the equation permits God truthful transcendence over His creatures by being their cause. McGinn expresses the difference between the two methods by saying, “cataphatic theology operates on the level of reason, while modes of apprehension that surpass reason are used in apophatic [theology]. . . .”138 God’s true being surpasses our intellectual comprehension. Negative theology, thus, says, “God is not alive,” “God is not love,” and that “God is not light,” because life, love, and light are things on our human level, so to speak, and not truthfully representative of God. God’s transcendence is more easily acceded when Pseudo-Dionysius, in his either fictional or lost Symbolic Theology, draws the names for God from the symbolic, for instance, naming God rock, sun, and hand. 139 These names proceed from knowledge born from our sense perception, so, while they illustrate well the metaphoric nature of all names because we easily understand that God is not a clod of dirt, Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophaticism applies to all names; hence, He is also not love, not being, not light, not good, not power, and so forth. More audacious than calling God rock, crown, and eye, however, is calling God a straightforward contradiction. “The revolution that was to take place in the Christian Neoplatonism of the Pseudo-Dionysius was when both hypotheses were applied to the same Trinitarian God as negative and positive expressions of the single Creative Source.”140 Pseudo-Dionysius’ radical move is that he appends one theological method to the other in a hybrid but organic stutter: God is and God is not.141 And he does so with an almost wholly unapologetic “logic:” “Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond

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being.”142 The testimony, then, is a stammering of the fragments of knowledge cum stuttering of names that repeat and differentiate, that call God “nameless and yet has the names of everything that is,” “He is power insofar as he exceeds all power,” He is greatness and smallness, immovable and moved. 143 This appendage of the negative to the affirmative is necessary in the attempt to describe the indescribable: “When we assert what is beyond every assertion, we must then proceed from what is most akin to it, and as we do so we make the affirmation on which everything else depends. But when we deny that which is beyond every denial, we have to start by denying those qualities which differ most from the goal we hope to attain.”144 Every name must be given and taken from God. While the end is incomprehensible—naming He who is beyond names—the means are analytically precise, even as they create such a disconcerting stutter. This rigorous establishing and unsettling of knowledge is led by two overwhelming desires in the religious witness: to know God and for God. Thus led, the faithful one employs a path conceptually supported by the theory of emanation and whose cyclic narrative imitates it. Stuttering an affirmation and negation of each name, he climbs from the firmest ground of knowledge (God is), over slippery paths (God is yearning), over abysses (God is not), and finally ascends into pathlessness (the ultimate negation of all affirmation and negation itself). This final ascent to union is the negation of speaking the names of God: it is silence—an ascent beyond language better conceived as a descent into uncognizable union where one gives up the climb to sink into an ineffable merger with the One. The path is where the sensible and intelligible feed off of one another until both must be surpassed for this ultimate fulfillment of knowledge that is like no knowledge that we can conceive. Most interestingly, however, in his ascent/descent to union with God, Pseudo-Dionysius slips one beat in his pattern of negation: he never negates the potentially slippery slope of naming God as yearning. His silence comes before he refuses God His most provocative name. This is our first hint at a merger even more brazen, perhaps, than that between faithful and God: one between religious and erotic ecstasy. Recklessly, let’s hint towards a further merger that hearkens the debate between Heidegger and Lyotard: one between epistemology and something between ontology, phenomenological lived-experience, and existential embodiment. Like Pseudo-Dionysius, Plotinus had characterized procession and reversion as both an ontological expression about God and His creations and as an epistemological one. In addition to being a description of creation, emanation was a way of understanding creation and the creator. But, as both PseudoDionysius and Plotinus reveal, it is not through knowledge alone that we step outside of ourselves and towards God: “Plotinus was a resolute intellectualist, but the profoundly erotic tone of Enn. 1.6 shows us that he did not think that knowing alone could bring the soul back to its source.” 145 The ecstasy through which we stutter names of God to try to express our understanding of God is motivated by our desire to merge with God. This pursuit, then, reveals itself to

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be epistemology that is based in the passions instead of one that sets knowledge against the passions.146 The grounding within the passions permits us to better understand the possibility and productivity of an epistemology that is beyond reason. The epistemic ascent beyond the rational and logical is an embodied ascent. The reunion of thinking and being beyond reason and mere physicality is sketched out in Nicholas of Cusa’s interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ text to be revelatory of both the cause and creation of negative affirmation in his 1453 letter to the abbot of the monks in Tegernsee. Roger J. Corless quotes from Nicholas’ letter: Since negative [theology] removes without positing anything, God will not be seen in an unveiled way because of it, for God will not be found to be but rather not to be. And if He is sought by way of affirmation, He will be found only through images and in a veiled way . . . in most places Dionysius taught theology by means of this disjunction: viz. that we approach God either affirmatively or negatively. But in the book where he wants to display mystical and secret theology in a way possible, he leaps beyond this disjunction into a uniting and a coincidence, or a most simple union. This [union] is not a side-by-side conjunction but is vertically beyond all removing and positing—where removing coincides with positing and negation with affirmation.147

Nicholas, through his own conflicting influence by Pseudo-Dionysius and the apophatics on the one hand, and by Scholasticism on the other, reveals the possibility of understanding the contradictory expressions as unified and permit us to see the epistemic embodied. One must think this union as “vertically beyond” negation and affirmation in such a way that negation becomes matched or harmonized with affirmation. 148 Pseudo-Dionysius’ method and words recognize and approach this “beyond” as their intellectual and personal goal. One uses these inadequate names to raise oneself beyond them to the truth towards which they point: “We call a halt to the activities of our minds . . . we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge . . . that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of . . . it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it.”149 One must halt reason to access this knowledge. The result of our endeavors is that “we shall be united with him and, our understanding carried away, blessedly happy, we shall be struck by his blazing light.” 150 The stammering of the names of God is the only path by which we can know what we cannot know and express what is inexpressible: “to praise this divinely beneficent Providence you must turn to all of creation.” 151 The Nameless is Every Name: Being, Light, Truth, Cause, Word, Power, and “that he is all, that he is no thing.” 152 Our knowledge of God, thus acquired through naming and un-naming Him, is born from our desire to know God and this desire is from God. Since we are given the capacity to desire by God, Desire becomes a name of God. That which impassionedly drives our epistemic action to achieve an ecstatic union with Him

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also becomes part of the content by which we know Him. To call God Love, the Greek agape, is not provocative; it is well-documented throughout the Scriptures as an attribute and name of God. However, Pseudo-Dionysius is not calling God Agape; he has named Him Eros. That which drives us to the inconceivable merger with the supersensible is itself the superlative form of love. And, further, Pseudo-Dionysius does not negate this name; Yearning cures his stutter. 153 While the flux of affirmation and negation fades when our witness calls God Yearning, the confidence of his voice falters in a new manner as he rushes to argue that the name is legitimate. He claims the case has already been laid in Scriptures: we faithful always desperately yearn to know God; we desire to be “drawn together toward the divine splendor.” 154 Scripture affirms how sacred minds, contemplating His creations, “with a love matching the illuminations granted them,” are permitted to “take flight, reverently, wisely, in all holiness.”155 In love with Him who we can never know well enough, we pluralize every name to try to express the superabundance of all the greatness we nonetheless know our Beloved to be.156 “And so it is that all things must desire, must yearn for, must love, the Beautiful and the Good . . . each bestirs itself and all are stirred to do and to will . . . because of the yearning for the Beautiful and the Good.”157 Simply, we desire God; it is desire in general that motivates all of our naming of the Divine, and thus, we give God the strongest name of Desire. The case is persuasive, yet Pseudo-Dionysius’ voice falters. He does not negate the name, but he apologizes. Despite claiming a previous treatise to have named him by his symbolic names, from Rock to Dirt to Mixing Bowls, it is for the name Yearning that he proffers the first and only apologetic justification of his treatise: Let no one imagine that in giving status to the term “yearning” I am running counter to scripture. In my opinion, it would be unreasonable and silly to look at words rather than at the power of the meanings. . . . Now if in saying this I would appear to be misusing holy scripture, let the critics of the word “yearning” listen to this: “Yearn for her and she shall keep you; exalt her and she will extol you; honor her and she will embrace you.” And there are many other scriptural passages in which the yearning of God is praised.158

A slight bravado in the disclaimer may partially shield his trepidation over his use of Yearning, yet his need to even offer a justification reveals the degree of his awareness of its potential indecency. Further, his bravado pales as the contexts of his cited evidence reveal them to be weak aids for his case. The key support he cites for yearning in the Proverbs identifies the object to be yearned for and exalted is knowledge: “Get wisdom, get understanding,” and “Wisdom is the principle thing.”159 Wisdom is, indeed, an attribute of God, although the argument that this is an indirection through which we are to justify yearning for God is difficult to support. Overall, Pseudo-Dionysius’ ample citation of evidence for Scriptural use of the name Eros is weak at best.

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McGinn notes the disparity between the Biblical evidence and PseudoDionysius’ testimony throughout The Divine Names, and the name Yearning is its best example: One gets the sense that Dionysius, despite his dependence on a host of biblical passages, represents a tendency to atomize the biblical text in the service of an overriding systematic concern. Although the Areopagite distanced himself from the actual text of scripture in his concern for methodological issues, he would probably have insisted . . . that his method was revealed in the scriptures themselves as the fundamental hermeneutical principle.160

While the argument that Pseudo-Dionysius is revealing the true force of the Scriptural passages is a fascinating one, it is one that demands far greater support than Pseudo-Dionysius offers. The only unquestionable fact we can attest to his citations is that he is fully correct that desire as agape is an abundant theme in the Scriptures. That agape lays a hermeneutical foundation for love to be conceived as eros could be argued by turning beyond the Scriptures, but the best evidence for this argument comes after Pseudo-Dionysius and often rests upon his authority (that authority garnered through his choice of pseudonyms). For example, the late fourteenth-century anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes about the need to labor in the contemplation of God “until you experience the desire” and that “it is sometimes his will to set on fire the bodily senses of his devout servants . . . with marvelous sweetness and consolation.” 161 Although, even the Cloud’s author goes on to repeatedly stress (nervously?) over the course of several further chapters that this sweetness is not bodily but proceeds from an inner spirit. Bodily desire, designating eros, he argues, is sensation sent by an evil angel and never to be trusted. Suspicion, he continues, ought to even extend to this divine, inner sweetness granted by God; accept sweet feelings cautiously and “do not depend too much on them because of your weakness . . . it may be that you will be moved to love God simply for their sake.”162 The inadequate textual support for his naming God Eros may explain the potential trepidation in the name, but the fact that his voice belies his confidence in his accord with the Word of God (Scripture) may be his most honest assent to the perfection of the name itself. It is a name that he does not negate—and, he does not have to. Eros, unlike agape, as conceived by Plato and embraced up to and through and beyond the Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius, is a lack. It is, in itself, no thing. It is no name. Its name, its existence, is a passionate pointing beyond itself. How eros’ nature as lack permits it a genuine sanctity as a name for God, permitting its end not as consummation, but as an affirmation of the existence of that which we love, will be explored more deeply in chapters five and six. Suffice it to say for now, desire, defined as a lack, and given as a name of God, supremely expresses the ecstasy that expressing the inexpressible requires.

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Concluding Remarks “We want to think thoughts that cannot be thought.” —John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God163

Two chapters in the middle of Lyotard’s The Differend, “Result” and “Obligation,” betray a tonal change, a hint of desperation in his voice, much like the trepidation that creeps into Pseudo-Dionysius’ apology for language after proposing the name Eros for God. Both of these authors have written profoundly personal and potentially scandalous books. Upon the highly logical and abstract theoretical structures each text works, their voices are passionate and echo the sorrows, anxieties, and prayers we can imagine from their respective witnesses. We, the readers, feel the experience through their works of being both witness and he who desperately tries to let the witness speak. Their chosen forms of thought are, equally, expressions of their content and, thus, their respective voices both permit and threaten their projects. Lyotard is as honest as he desires the tribunal and witness to be. This honesty challenges our democratic principles and our comprehension by foiling our faith in pragmatic plans and our seeking linear arguments that end with conclusive answers. Lyotard engages Faurisson’s repulsive (and in some countries illegal) logic so as reveal its frequency, its limited legitimacy, its failures, and its absurdity—yet, without ever making these proclamations directly. Lyotard moved the same way through Heidegger’s equation of Being and language: neither explicitly adopting nor rejecting it. He refuses us a simple answer, permits us to see the possibility of the silence as a way to reclaim the witness’ ontological validity, and reveals, indirectly, how this opening can be as enclosing as the double bind it seeks to evade. Lyotard never cites Pseudo-Dionysius in his writings, but he does explore alternative methods of expressing the inexpressible that are akin to the spirit of the Syrian mystic’s. To each alternative, Lyotard is painfully truthful. Every new method of expression raises hope for defeating the historical revisionists, but he reads carefully and critically, uncovering the inherent problems and possible failures of each one. Lyotard works through and often seems to delight in contradiction more than nearly any other thinker. But he never lets a contradiction simply be its rejection; instead, each is an opening to look ever more closely and, thus, leaves us ever without a clear solution. This account reveals the reason why I propose that Pseudo-Dionysius’ radical conjunction of the wholly and essentially contradicting cataphatic and apophatic theologies and his merger of the epistemic with the embodied that opens a space of ecstasy from which one can passionately express the inexpressible reveals a most productive possibility for Lyotard’s witness silenced by logic. Pseudo-Dionysius’ method will still sound illogical to the court; it, alone, cannot be a solution for Lyotard’s differend. It can be, however, a productive

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method to explore because, first, it can evade the fictionalizing tendencies of linear narrative, to which many of the other explored methods fall prey, and, second, it can open up two radically non-narrative models of testimony that lift his testimony of God’s names beyond reason. Further, it also supports the legitimacy of ecstasy and silence, rather than letting them fall prey to escapism and an enclosing reserve. Both authors’ passionate voices testify that this venture of pointing to what cannot be pointed to cannot spring from the reason of the court. Their testimony must grow out of the fertile but neglected soil of desire. Out of his desire and by divine command to faith, Pseudo-Dionysius employs a unique method, justified by the theory of emanation, to provide, defend, and erase the attributes of God so as to come to know Him and return to Him. These names are born from a traversing of ontological stages within a metaphysical system and consequentially provide him with an epistemology. The epistemological nature of this profound method and record of divine names is most interesting in its artful unraveling of logic and ground within the passions and will prove to be a most productive model for Lyotard. Therefore, it is utterly necessary for this project to take a moment to clarify the contrast between the modes of knowing employed by the historical revisionists and religious skeptics and Lyotard and PseudoDionysius. While the four models are not identical to one another in kind or in their contrasts, the revisionists and skeptics and then Lyotard and PseudoDionysius share much in common so as to permit a solid contrast between knowledge that only accepts independently verifiably, logically based reason versus a knowledge that works up to, through, and beyond reason alone. 164 The passions are not a strictly, rigidly defined faculty or group of powers. Most epistemologists, including this project’s revisionists and religious skeptics, have tended towards models that deny the diversity of human powers in truth determination (be they like the Cartesian “by the mind alone” or the empirical command “seeing is believing”). Instead, for the subsequent analyses of PseudoDionysius and Lyotard, I intend the passions to designate a knowing that is inclusive of what is typically excluded from intellectual activity, non-exhaustively including: sensory apprehension, whether by exterior or interior senses, drives, will, sensus communis, phantasia, memory, vis aestimativa, and the synthetic powers of mind that blur the distinctions of intelligible activity. I intend to include these modes of knowing under the broad category of the passions to designate what is other than pure reason alone and inclusive of all that is invoked by its etymological distinction that the passions are what we suffer. The category will remain broad because it is not the aim of this project to explore any single one power but to pursue how an overly narrow use of reason utterly fails for considering that which eludes its capture. A further reason for the broad category of the passions is because of the question’s long interpretive history that has used common language for designating contrary powers in contrary epistemological models. In essence, the knowledge sought by this project is that prohibit-

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ed by a narrow conception of reason, yet attainable through the passions. This usage is the simple acknowledgement of the impossibility of dividing a pure mind from body and, thus, indication of knowledge as the whole embodiment in lived experience—even those events that happen, yet elude their cognitive capture. For the Neoplatonism that inspired Pseudo-Dionysius, “in every external object there is an inexpressible element not assimilable in the cognitive process”—it is this element that that we seek to express and that which requires knowledge to be grounded within the passions. 165 This passions-based mode of knowing will be elaborated first as the most fruitful capture of the inexpressible expression in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend.

Notes 1. Faurisson is described in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s work, which Lyotard references, as “[p]ursuing his crusade—whose theme may be summarized as follows: the gas chambers did not exist because they can not have existed; they can not have existed because they should not have existed; or better still: they did not exist because they did not exist— Robert Faurisson has just published a new book.” A book that is “neither more nor less mendacious and dishonest than the preceding ones” (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, On Faurisson and Chomsky, collected in Assassins of Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 65). 2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 11. 3. Lyotard’s quip is a play on Heidegger’s infamous insight on the impossibility of reflecting on one’s own death (cf., Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), esp. II, ii, §§46-53. 4. Bill Readings, “Foreword,” in Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiii-xxvi, xiii-xiv. 5. Stuart Sim, “Auschwitz,” in The Lyotard Dictionary, ed. Stuart Sim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 25. 6. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Lyotard, Heidegger and “The Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 7. Lyotard, “Born in 1925,” trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul, collected in Political Writings, Op. Cit., 85-89, 85. 8. Ibid., 87. 9. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Op. Cit., 11. 10. Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken Books, 1997), 36-7. 11. Bruno Bettelheim, “On Dachau and Buchenwald,” Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. VII (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), 824. 12. Elie Wiesel, “Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” in Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 7.

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13. Sven Alkalaj’s reflection collected in Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, Op. Cit., 102. 14. At the start, this command remains hazy; it becomes the extensive work of Lyotard’s text to uncover the specifics as to this “logic” and its “court,” as will be delineated in brief in this chapter and at length in the third. 15. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1997), 110. 16. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §64. 17. Ibid., §§8, 7, respectively. 18. Ibid., §7. 19. Nuremberg Trial Testimony of Marie Claude-Valliant-Couturier, January 28, 1946; available at: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/vaillanttest.html. 20. Ibid. 21. Einsatzgruppe D was the fourth of four paramilitary units charged with “liquidating” Jews and other parties both ethnic and political. The other Einsatzgruppen were attached to units invading the Soviet Union, but the ‘D’ unit was independent and sent to the Ukraine. The Einsatzkommandos, mentioned below, were sub-groups of the Einsatzgruppen ordered to carry out the killings. 22. International Military Tribunal Testimony of SS General Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D, January 3, 1946; available at: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/Ohlentestimony.html. 23. Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 109, emphasis is mine. 24. Ibid. 25. On science’s productivity and perversion, cf. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 26. Cf., most notably, René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), Meditations I-III. 27. A tangential, but similarly striking insight is that the equally, implicitly religious related term “confession” (born from the verb confessus, comes from the Latin past participle of confiteri, to acknowledge or, more literally, to admit together) originally meant a public pronouncement of faith or an admission of guilt where the latter can be religious or civil. Thus, it is confession, which we take today to be more a matter of one’s sins and guilt and something that is but needs no further evidence, that was more explicitly connected to the saying forth of some evidence. 28. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §12. 29. Ibid., p. xi. 30. Ibid., §12. 31. Ibid., §22. 32. Cf. Ibid., §227 and §64. 33. Ibid., §135. 34. Ibid., §23. 35. Ibid., §23. 36. On necessity and obligation, cf. Ibid., §§102, 135, and 161-70. 37. Ibid., §§102, 135. 38. Ibid., §47, p. 153, respectively.

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39. Ibid., §15. 40. Ibid., §15. 41. For an attempt at clarity, this chapter will begin to capitalize “Being” when it is used in an ontological sense of the Being of a human being, that is, the universal shared by the many instances of living persons. In the section on Heidegger, this distinction will be critical. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., §16. 44. Ibid., §17. 45. “Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down” (Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 61. 46. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” collected in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 93-110, 101. Further: “Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent. That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the presence of the nothing” (Ibid.). 47 . Arrive-t-il translates Ereignis—a term infamously nebulous, yet central to Heidegger’s thought. It is variously translated as occurrence, presencing, enowning, appropriation, or, awkwardly, “propriating,” endeavoring an allusion to “proprietary” or an echo to the French propre (own) in order to incorporate the sense of ownness born from the eigen into the idea of an event. Ereignis refuses to be a straightforward noun for both Heidegger and Lyotard; instead, it is both a site and an activity intimately related to Being and language. “The human is indeed in its essence linguistic. The word ‘linguistic’ as it is here used means: having taken place (ereignet) out of the speaking of language. What has thus taken place (das so Ereignete), the essential being of man, has been brought into its own (Eigenes) by language so that it remains given over or appropriated (übereignet) to the essential nature of language” (Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, quoted in John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought [New York: Fordham University Press, 1986], 166). Lyotard’s essay “Touches,” notes: “I would like to call an event the face to face with nothingness,” and, “thus, to encounter an event is like bordering on nothingness” (Jean-François Lyotard, “Touches,” within Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 17-8). 48. Heidegger, Being and Time, Op. Cit., II, iii, §64, p. 323. 49. Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking?” collected in Basic Writings, Op. Cit., 369-91, 382—perhaps playing off of Hölderlin’s poem “Mnemosyne:” “We are a sign that is not read.” 50. Heidegger, Being and Time, Op. Cit., Int., §6. Legein may be translated as “to deliberate” or “consider,” but its linkage with logos and apophainesthai, discussed below, renders it properly understood as the activity of discourse between beings. In his later writings, Da-sein is hyphenated to emphasize its own etymology as “Being there.” 51. The phenomenon that is Being as an appearance (i.e., as the manifest that may be a seeming) is undertaken through logos. Literally, the Greek logos is “speech,” but

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Heidegger’s etymology argues: “Logos is ‘translated,’ and that always means interpreted, as reason, judgment, concept, definition, ground, relation. But how can ‘speech’ be so susceptible of modification that logos means all the things mentioned, and indeed in scholarly usage” (ibid., Int. II, §7b, 32)? Instead, he argues, logos is speech as apophainesthai, as the making manifest what one is talking about in speech, either for oneself or for those with whom one wishes to communicate (Heidegger cites Aristotle’s explication of apophainesthai [appearing, bringing to light, presencing] in De interpretatione, chs. 1-6, Metaphysics, VII.4, and Nicomachean Ethics, VII). This “making manifest,” or letting something be seen, is logos’ fundamental sense, for Heidegger, and occurs before anything is said as the very condition without which nothing could be said. Logos, then, is the intelligibility that makes it possible to express what has been made manifest in the phainomenon. 52. Phenomenology, etymologically as the conjunction of phainomenon and logos, is the pursuit to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. This self-showing of the phenomena, Being, is united with the “letting be seen,” the uncovering and covering over by logos, language. 53. The mode of entanglement is flushed out in the Second Division’s discussion of “Temporality and Everydayness” as Falling Prey, while the others remain the same. 54. Heidegger, Being and Time, Op. Cit., I, V, §34, 160-1. 55. Ibid., 296. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. The links between Being and language in Being and Time are not as explicitly and radically conjoined as in his later works, as revealed by his reflection on the text, marginally appended by Being and Time’s discussion of Da-sein’s familiarity with the worldliness of the world that grounds the possibility of disclosing significations through understanding and interpreting that themselves ground the possibility of language. The note simply reads: “Untrue. Language is not imposed, but is the primordial essence of truth as there (Da)” (Ibid., 87 and note beneath the text). The text grounds language’s origin in Da-sein while the note grounds language as the originary ground of Da-sein. In his latter works, the primacy of language and its proprietary hold of Being can be seen in the affirmation in the beginning of “On the Way to Language” that our essence is language, or the pronouncement in his essay “What Calls for Thinking?” that “we are an uninterpreted sign” (Heidegger, “On the Way to Language,” collected in Basic Writings, Op. Cit., 397426, 397; and Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking?,” Op. Cit., 382, respectively). 60. Ibid., 15. 61. Heidegger’s concern mirrors Descartes’: “But meanwhile I marvel at how prone my mind is to errors. For although I am considering these things within myself silently and without words, nevertheless I seize upon words themselves and I am nearly deceived by the ways in which people commonly speak” (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Op. Cit., Meditation II, 31-2). The consequence of this danger is material falsity. Error was only a threat for judgments, until the Third Meditation, wherein danger is revealed to lurk within ideas themselves when they appear to grant existence to what is nonexistent. Defining heat as the privation of cold ascribes more reality to cold than to heat: cold has existence; heat is its mere lack. It is materially false, then, to form the idea of heat as an agitation of the soul or consequence of the sun because such ideas attribute qualities to

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what is only a negation of plenitude, and not capable of having properties in itself (Ibid., Meditation III, 43-4). “Material falsity” is remarkably akin to Heidegger’s “metaphysics.” 62. In a tone clearly expressive of a certain frustration, Heidegger strings five questions offering variations of “Why do we not for once ask about the relation of being to the human being?,” before answering with a loud rhetorical question: “But how can ‘we’ ask so decisively on the basis of beyng” [Heidegger, The Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013], §36)? 63. There is ample evidence for Heidegger’s interest in and involvement with Asian thought. His writings include direct references to Eastern Asian Languages, the Tao, and Lao Tzu in “The Question of Being,” Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); “The Nature of Language” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1982); “Science and Reflection” in Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, 1977). “From a Conversation of Language,” footnoted in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Bock (New York: Henry Regnery Company, 1949) references §XL of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Further, there is documentation that by 1930 Heidegger read Karl Jasper’s translation of the Chuang Tzu and was already acquainted with his translation of the Tao Te Ching. In the late 1940s1950s Heidegger was in collaboration with Hsiao on his own translation of that latter work (however, it is said that Hsiao was ambivalent about the project, afraid that Heidegger’s interpretations would diverge too greatly from the text). Heidegger’s philosophical interests are highly compatible with Asian thought. Chinese, for example, could supplement Heidegger’s critique of “ontotheology” (i.e., an ontological-theological-logic) through its lack of a concrete subject-object distinction (no onto-), lack of a linguistic metaphysics (no theo-), and lack of a foundation in an Aristotelian logic (no logic) that he deduced in the Greek and Latin foundations of the European languages. 64. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §12. 65. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Op. Cit., §1, 3, 7, respectively. 66. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §40. 67. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Op. Cit.,§6, 18-23. 68. Ibid., §3, 9. “Language game” is here synonymous with “genre of discourse” and is a concept Lyotard borrows from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (this theoretical inheritance will be elaborated in chapter three). 69. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Op. Cit., §7, 27. 70. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §219. 71. Jean-François Lyotard, “Clouds,” in Peregrinations, Op. Cit., 1-15. “Clouds are invoked as a metaphor for thoughts so as to highlight the insubstantiality of thinking in relation to the reality that is to be conceived” (Gary Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000], 6). 72. Lyotard, “Clouds,” Op. Cit., 2. Boileau (1636-1711), French poet and critic, sharply fashioned his reflections against the French author Charles Perrault’s (1628-1703) widely repeated theory of the superiority of the moderns over the ancients (widely, so as to be known as the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” between the two men and followed by the Académie française in the early 1690s). 73. Ibid., 9. 74. Ibid., 13.

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75. Ibid., 2; also, cf. 8, 15. 76. Ibid., 15. 77. Ibid., 3. 78. Ibid., 3, 2, respectively. 79. Ibid., 8-9. 80. Ibid., 3. 81. Ibid., 4. 82. Ibid., 5. 83. Ibid., 7. 84. Lyotard, “Born in 1925,” Op. Cit. Translation quoted here from James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (Malden, MA: Polity Press, Blackwell, 1998), 7. 85. Ibid. 86. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., p. 152. Lyotard cites André-Marcel d’Ans, Le dit des Vrais Hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 87. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., p. 154. 88. Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking?,” Op. Cit., 382. 89. The components follow de Saussure’s addressor, addressee, sense, and referent, and will be discussed more in chapter three. “Phrase,” as suggested in de Saussure, Husserl, and others on language, exceeds the solely linguistic and is broadly conceived to include gesture, etc. (cf., Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §§109, 123). Critical here is that every phrase calls for its situation and response; each requires linkages, and thus, calls forth other phrases. 90. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §111. 91. Ibid., §113. 92. Ibid., §114. 93. Lyotard’s first critique seems to be wrought from experience. Heidegger is equating Being with language, but Lyotard’s essay “Clouds” reports negatively on his own attempt of equation in Economie libidinale: “There was something outrageous with respect to Being in my attempt to equate it with the text” (Lyotard, “Clouds,” Op. Cit., 14). What proved outrageous was that the torturous giving over of the self to the feelings within, and their wracked effect over the text, allowed simply for there to be another way the content could be avoided and thus be given over to the very violence he writes against. 94. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §99. Cf. note 47, above, on Ereignis. 95. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §135. 96. Ibid., §94. 97. Ibid., §111. 98. Ibid., §99. 99. Ibid., §173. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., §71. Although Lyotard later, indirectly, challenges Heidegger’s full adherence to the codetermination, pointing out that when Heidegger identifies the faculty of having ideas in general as that which grasps primordial time and the faculty of presentation as the seat of the productive imagination, do we not have to presume the being who has these faculties (§98).

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103. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, Op. Cit., 5; and Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings, Op. Cit., 343-63, 351. Also in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 145-61. 104. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §15. 105. Evelyn Underhill, an eminent scholar on the mystical experience, writes, “All mystics agree in regarding such ecstasy as an exceptionally favourable state; the one in which man’s spirit is caught up to the most immediate union with the divine. The word has become a synonym for joyous exaltation, for the inebriation of the Infinite” (Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness [Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002], 358). Stephen Gersh, on the founding possibility of knowing God for Pseudo-Dionysius, writes, “emanation is interpreted by Neoplatonists as an ‘ecstasy,’ a notion which recurs in much speculation of mediaeval and more recent times” (Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysius Tradition [Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1978], 20). 106. Anthony Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 68. 107. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 1, Treatise on Human Acts, “Great Books of the Western World, 17.1,” trans. Father Laurence Shapcote, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1994), Q. 28, art. 3, 742-4. Also named the Treatise on the Passions in the Benziger Brothers edition of 1947, available at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.i.html. 108. Ibid., Q. 28, art. 3, 742. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 47-131, 593A-B. 115. Ibid., 588C. 116. Ibid. For example: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways!” (Romans 11:33) and “For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world, by wisdom, knew not God, it pleased God, by the foolishness of our preaching, to save them that believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 588A. 119. Ibid., 592B. 120. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (New York: Dover Publications, 2000) ch. XXXI, 41. 121. Julian of Norwich, A Shewing of God’s Love: The Shorter Version of “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,” ed. Anna Maria Reynolds (London: Sheed and Ward, 1974), 1-2 and 30, respectively. Little is known about Julian, even the authenticity of her name; she was probably born in the end of 1342 and experienced mystical visions at 30 years old as a Benedictine nun and recluse at the now-named St. Julian’s Church in Norwich. This desire, that she reports, to be His lover is supplemented by her desire to forge her relation

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to God as one of marriage. She reports that until the day she may be one with God she will not love, rest, or experience bliss, “until I be so fastened unto him. . . .” (Ibid., 10). 122. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. James Walsh, S.J. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), ch. III, 120. He continues, “This darkness and cloud is always between you and your God, no matter what you do, and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason, and from experiencing him in sweetness of love in your affection. So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love” (Ibid.). The anonymous author is thought to have been a Carthusian hermit who rejected all attachment to bodily and worldly things. While he recognizes the importance of Church prayers, he drafted personal religious exercises wherein yearning for God is a condition requiring strict exercise. His desire is not for knowledge in and of itself, but for generating feeling: “the desire for God, and the achievement of union with him insofar as it is possible in this life” (editor’s introduction to Julian of Norwich, A Shewing of God’s Love, Op. Cit., 17, 28-9). 123. Father Simon Tugwell, O.P., Preface, in Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, Op. Cit., xiv. Also, see “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8). 124. Ibid., ch. II, 117. Jean-Luc Marion eloquently expresses this dilemma in the start of his work God without Being: “Theology renders its author hypocritical in at least two ways. Hypocritical in the common sense: in pretending to speak of holy things . . . he cannot but find himself, to the point of vertigo, unworthy, impure—in a word, vile. . . . He remains hypocritical in another, more paradoxical sense: if authenticity (remembered with horror) consists in speaking of oneself, and in saying only that for which one can answer, no one, in a theological discourse, can, or should, pretend to it. For theology consists precisely in saying that for which only another can answer—the Other above all, the Christ who himself does not speak in his own name, but in the name of his Father” (Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Envoi, 1-2). 125. Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Op. Cit., ch. LX, 87. 126. Kent Emery Jr., “Untitled Book Review of Paul Rorem’s Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence,” in Catholic Historical Review 80, 4 (1994): 780-5. 127. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 585B; his citation from 1 Corinthians 2:4. Another Scriptural command can be seen later in Corinthians: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:6). 128. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 588C, 589C; he extracts “Invisible” from Colossians 1:15, 1 Timothy 1:17, Hebrews 11:27 and “Unsearchable and Inscrutable” from Romans 11:33. 129. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 596D-97A. “For Denys, we address God by giving him names: or, to be more precise, not by giving him names but by using the names that he has revealed” (Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite [London: Continuum, 1989], 78). 130. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 17. The Neoplatonists mentioned in the flowing discussion will be examined closely in chapter four of this present work. 131. Ibid., 18. 132. “Emanation is interpreted by Neoplatonists as an ‘ecstasy,’ a notion which recurs in much speculation of mediaeval and more recent times” (Gersh, From Iamblichus to

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Eriugena, Op. Cit., 20). Chapter four will elaborate how ecstasy, as Gersh notes, became an interest of Christian Neoplatonism. 133. Ibid., 20. Gersh cites Proclus, Theologia Platonis [Procli Successoris Platonici in Platonis Theologiam Libri Sex], ed. Aemilius Portus (Hamburg: 1618), 163. 134. Ibid. Gersh cites Damascius, Dubitationes et Solutiones, ed. C. É. Ruelle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1889), vol. I, p. 162, l. 14. 135. Alexander Golitzin, “‘Suddenly Christ’: The Place of Negative Theology in the Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagites,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8-37, 13. 136. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 20. Gersh cites Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 712B. After Pseudo-Dionysius, many Christian Neoplatonists neglect ecstasy in favor of divine will, thus, neglect emanation for willful creation, as Gersh explains, out of a “sensitivity to the element of automation implicit in the unqualified emanation metaphor” (Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 20). Gersh does not readily side with this view of an absolute conflict between emanation and willful creation, ultimately, but strongly makes the case nonetheless. Several stages of his larger argument include how: the diffusion of causal potency sounds more automatic, thus negating the concept of divine will; emanation is from God whereas creation is ex nihilo; and emanation is eternal whereas creation is in time. The counter case is the reconciliation of emanation and creation by means of a historical review of thinkers who excuse the pantheistic tone of Pseudo-Dionysius by revealing the “bubbling” as nominative of divine will and so forth. Gersh concludes that the debates eventually diminish simply for favor of the Biblical version of creation (Ibid., 21-3). 137. Golitzin, “‘Suddenly Christ,’” Op. Cit., 13. 138. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 163. 139. Pseudo-Dionysius’ Symbolic Theology is presumed to be fictitious or may just be lost; he lets us know through references and examples that it concerned itself with names for God taken from things we can sensibly perceive. Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., n. 89. 140. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 58. 141. Cf., especially, Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 817C-D. 142. Ibid., 588A. Later, he writes: “The God who is transcends everything by virtue of his power” (Ibid., 817C), thus, God is is supplemented with “He was not. He will not be. He did not come to be. He is not in the midst of becoming. He will not come to be. No. He is not” (Ibid., 817D). An interesting invocation of His being beyond being can be found in Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being, where it is used to summarize Heidegger’s theological stance and ground Marion’s critique (Op. Cit., 76-8). 143. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 596C, 889D, and 909B, respectively. 144. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Op. Cit., 1033C. 145. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 47. His continuation foreshadows themes that will be very important in chapter three, below: “Even in Plato . . . eros was not so much a selfish desire for personal possession and enjoyment of the beautiful as a

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creative desire to beget beauty on the beloved. In Plato, however, because eros always involves a deficiency of some sort, it could not be ascribed to the divine world. In Plotinus, erotic love has an ambit both more cosmic and more transcendental” (Ibid.). I will take up the argument later that the deficiency of Plato’s eros does not prohibit its attribution to the divine. 146. The broader argument implicit in this analysis is pointed towards by Jean-Luc Marion’s comment that while philosophy is defined as the love of wisdom, our common understanding of this definition often “masks another, more radical meaning: philosophy defines itself as the ‘love of wisdom’ because it must in effect begin by loving before claiming to know” (Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007], 2). 147. Roger J. Corless, “Speaking of the Unspeakable: Negation as the Way in Nicholas of Cusa and Nagarjuna,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 2 (1982): 107-117, 111-2. The German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) frequently cites Pseudo-Dionysius in his writings on the problem of the knowledge of God, developing a justification for knowing Him by the divinity granted to our human mind by our Creator and utilizing PseudoDionysius as support of his idea of sacred ignorance as our minimal yet truthful degree of understanding God, cf., De Docta Ignorantia, I, ch. 17. In the second footnote to the introduction of his translation of this work, Jasper Hopkins chronicles the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius on Nicholas of Cusa: “In Ap. 12:19-22 [Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae] Nicholas denies that he received the idea of learned ignorance from (Pseudo-) Dionysius or ‘any of the true theologians.’ But he acknowledges that after his voyage to Greece he began to examine these teachers. In DI [De Docta Ignorantia] he several times cites the opinions of Dionysius, though the main influences came subsequently to the writing of DI and to his having been presented with the translations made by Ambrose Traversari. Nicholas seems to have received these translations in 1443. Cf. p. 187 of Paul Wilpert’s translation Vom Nichtanderen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976, 2nd edition)” (Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance, trans. and commentary, Jasper Hopkins [Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990]). 148. Corless, “Speaking of the Unspeakable,” Op. Cit., 107. 149. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 592D. 150. Ibid., 592C. 151. Ibid., 593D. 152. Ibid., 596C. 153. Much of the scholarship (cf. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 159) posits The Divine Names as predominately displaying cataphatic theology in its analysis except for chapters nine and thirteen. I take issue with this characterization; while the form is not always perfectly compounded in earlier chapters, these affirmations of names are still co-present with their negations. Where this is most strikingly absent is in the discussion of eros as a name of God. 154. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 588A. 155. Ibid., 589A. 156. Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) remarkably illustrates how the intensity of eros is often a reflection of the degree to which lovers remain unknown to one another. 157. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 708A.

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158. Ibid., 708B-C. Pseudo-Dionysius quotes from Proverbs 4:6, 8, in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament. 159. Proverbs 4:5, 7. 160. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 162. 161. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, Op. Cit., ch. III, 120, and ch. XLVIII, 212. Later medieval female mystics abandoned much of commentary on caution while employing highly erotic language and imagery, but many of their works met with censure, cf. Marguerite D’Oingt’s graphic focus on the body of Christ (The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski [Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1997]), Marguerite Porete’s dialogue The Mirror of Simple Souls’ subsuming God and the trinity under love (Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993]), and Julian Norwich’s desire to be Christ’s lover, discussed in the beginning of the section (A Shewing of God’s Love, Op. Cit.). 162. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, Op. Cit., ch. L, 216. Also see XLVIII-XLIX, 212-5. 163. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 104-5. 164. Cf. “Mystical Language and Spiritual Exercise” in chapter five and “The Symbiosis of Silence and Eros” in chapter six, below, for further elaboration of the passions versus reason as an epistemological base. 165. Quotation from Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 276; interpretation, my own.

TWO: CONTEXTUALIZING

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD Prologue on Contextualization The Introduction briefly noted the heterogeneity—in time, place, and philosophical situation—between Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius. If this work fails to properly argue for their synchrony, also previously noted—in definitions, method, style, their equally rigorous responses and shared provocation by the inexpressible born from silenced witnesses, their equal imperative and similar challenges, and how both craft exercises in perplexity and render works that are pedagogic pursuits—then their seeming heterogeneity can condemn this project to mere novelty. The irony this would ensue, however, is that heterogeneity itself is one of their mutual concerns insofar as it is a fundamental challenge against the expression of the inexpressible. One definition of “heterogeneity” is diversity, another is a process of substances in different phases, and a final one simply is incommensurability. For this project’s task, the first foreshadows successful expression, the second offers a possible route towards triumph, and the last pronounces failure. Thus, heterogeneity must be further explored precisely through an evidencing of the many harmonious chords between Lyotard and PseudoDionysius. This evidence will be demonstrated here out through a careful form of mirrored contextualizations. Contextualization, here, must be understood both as it is commonly—a situation of something into its context—and etymologically— as a weaving (-texere) together (con-) of two or more things. Thus, this brief

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chapter will mirror the fourth chapter as to flushing out the philosophical inclinations and adherences of each thinker, situating each into his respective intellectual climate, and by beginning the work of weaving together their shared meanings and intentions as demonstrated in their inheritances and works. This task of contextualization will continue by having their immediately subsequent chapters (three and five) be precisely textual, situating their respective texts, The Differend and The Divine Names, within the literature and history of each, and textual analyzing them with an eye to extract their complete portrait concerning the witness and testimony. The dual situations of authors and texts will ground the final and most intimate contextualization of Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius, in the sixth chapter, on two potentially productive responses to the ineffable: silence and eros. This carefully built tête-à-tête will also speak beyond itself to the growing, current interest in something other-than-reason that has brought so many contemporary Continental thinkers back to religious mysticism. 1 Bringing PseudoDionysius and Lyotard together begins the production of a largely unprecedented conversation immensely compatible with contemporary concerns. It is a conversation that promises to be productive of further discourse. The dialogue that Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius could initiate between contemporary phenomenology and postmodernism and late antique and medieval mysticism has been largely ignored in the secondary literature in favor of comparative work limiting itself to postmodern readings of early theology that, typically, either ignore or hastily reject phenomenological insights and methods. Otherwise, the discussions have been from a school of theologically leaning phenomenologists, despite the fact that phenomenology falters when it is to describe what it cannot see and these thinkers falter before including the critiques from postmodernism that may further their endeavor. Besides any hesitation to see the points of communion between phenomenology, postmodernism, and theology, it may be the immense difficulty of individually characterizing these two thinkers, let alone drawing parallels between them, that accounts for the scholarship’s silence. The following chapters hope to initiate these conversations by offering rigorous groundings of each and numerous intersections for both.

The Difficulty of Characterization Pseudo-Dionysius, amidst the other more subtle difficulties of encapsulating his thought, is ‘himself’ a difficulty by being, precisely, a pseudonym. Dionysius was the distinguished convert of St. Paul named in Acts 17; Dionysius is not the author of The Divine Names. Just as Lyotard’s writing often culls language and theory from law, Pseudo-Dionysius is also often named Dion (the) Areopagite, which identifies him as an Athenian member of the Areopagus, the judicial council.2 Dion, however, is not the author of The Divine Names. He, who unre-

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mittingly invokes the power of names to permit one to know one’s creator, refuses us his own, truthful name. Scholarly consensus, however, affirms this pseudonymous author to have been a Neoplatonist Christian writing from Syria sometime between 471 or 485 to 518 or 528 A.D. But this only betrays the further difficulty behind characterizing this thinker. Is he a Neoplatonist or is he a Christian? Is he a philosopher or is he a theologian? Eric D. Perl forcefully addresses this distinction in the very first sentence of his work on PseudoDionysius as he argues him to be a philosopher, not a “late antique cultural phenomenon; nor as an influential episode in the history of Christian theology; nor as ‘mysticism,’ if that is to be taken to mean something other than philosophy; nor as a series of texts with ascertainable relations of influence and citation.”3 The difficulty in characterizing Pseudo-Dionysius is seen in that he can and has profitably served each of these other roles mentioned. The final, rather immense classificatory difficulty is generated in his writings—those writings he has left us that serve as evidence to the existence of he whose lived existence is unknown. He writes of his treatises he likely never wrote, he quotes teachers who likely never existed, and he writes with a style that sways between poetic prayer and logical treatise. Jean-François Lyotard, while no pseudonym, undeniably suggests a certain longing for a little distance from himself, be it through his prose’s rhetorical questions that occasionally coalesce into unnamed interlocutors, or his many moments of disembodiment, like in his 1978 television appearance on “Tribune Libre,” when he arranged the image of him speaking to be notably out of sync with the sound of his voice, in order to, as the host announced, “critique his own discourse and to ask himself questions concerning his presence among us on television this evening.” 4 Thus, this writer, too, who is equally obsessed with names, has provoked ample dispute as to what to name him. Is he a phenomenologist, a postmodernist, or even, primarily, a philosopher? Or, do the decades of activism make him an activist, his arrangement of Les Immatériaux, an art exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a curator, or his vast number of essays on art, a critic?5 Peter Dews names him “something of an anomaly. Lyotard has, in a number of respects, remained on the margins of an orthodoxy which defined itself precisely in terms of its focus on, and celebration of, the marginal.” 6 And his own influences are as broad as those fields he has influenced. 7 Robert Harvey and Lawrence Schehr name him “a polymath of a special sort,” that is, “A philosopher steeped in phenomenology, a militant for pluralist thinking, an esthetician of the figural, Lyotard staked out territories for innumerable scholars in literature, the arts, politics, and ethics, as well as in more recently recognized fields such as gender studies and postcolonialism.”8 His early work was political radicalism followed by work in phenomenology infused with psychoanalysis and Marxism and directed to studies of the social sciences, literature, and art.9 His interests span the canon and the divide between Continental and Analytic phi-

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losophy, and rebuke the conception of a “pure” philosophy as something divorced from the other humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. Quickly sketching the order of his oeuvre fails to show its odd richness, but aids a first revelation of the whole’s unity. Thus, skipping over numerous essays, it is Lyotard’s first book, his rigorous work Phenomenology (1954), that reveals a way of working that echoes throughout his corpus: therein, he shapes his own method, grounded in phenomenology, by employing the method of phenomenology to react against Husserl, work through the social sciences, and critique Marx. He ended that work within the political, and his writings—even if done as an anti-politics—there stayed through the 1950s and 1960s. His works from the 1970s still concern politics, yet heighten the critique of political foundations and proliferate in engagements with art and psychoanalysis.10 His most notable work of the decade, however, came in its last year: La Condition postmoderne (1979, translated into English as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1984).11 It was instantly and widely embraced, as Gary Browning reports: “In the immediate aftermath of its publication, it served as a cultural signpost pointing towards the postmodern and away from modernity.” 12 Its exploration is into the impact of the rapid growth and influence of technology on humanity and is, thus, centrally concerned with the definition of the postmodern—this will be elucidated in the following section, but it serves this sketch well to elliptically posit it as the attempt to reveal the unpresentable in presentation itself, for it is herein revealed, this attempt, as his central preoccupation that has been lurking in all of his works up to this one. Into the 1980s, equally prolific years for Lyotard, this concern with the unpresentable is engaged diversely and powerfully. He wrote several works on art before the 1983 publication of Le Différend (translated into English in 1988), which will be discussed in detail in the following chapter, and stands as the most stark pursuit of that which remains to be presented.13 Two other notable works of this decade narrow his usual style of breadth down to almost monographs: L’Enthousiasme: la critique kantienne de l’histoire (1986, translated into English in 2009) and Heidegger et “les juifs” (1988, translated into English in 1990). A final epic of the 1980s is his all-inclusive L’Inhumain: causeries sur le temps (1988, with an English translation in 1992), which is a broad cultural critique of humanism through considerations of time, place, and contemporary art. His first two books of note in the 1990s return to the monographic: first, on Kant, in his Leçons sur l’Analytique du sublime: Kant, Critique de la faculté de juger, #23- 29 (1991, with an English translation in 1994), and the second, on the artist Karel Appel, in his Sans Appel. La geste d’Appel en quête d’un commentaire (1992, with an English translation in 2009). From the early nineties up to his death in 1998, his focus was aesthetic and secularly religious on the notion of the unpresentable in the artist Sam Francis, the writer André Malroux, and Saint Augustine.14

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While Geoffrey Bennington notes that, “at first sight, [Lyotard’s oeuvre is] more remarkable for its shifts and breaks than for any continuity,” it is also not entirely discontinuous. 15 In memorial, Michael Naas points out that “in every subject he took on, in all these heterogeneous projects, Lyotard was interested in what resists within them and in the dangers of resisting and thus concealing this heterogeneity and this resistance.”16 All of his works seem to be after a consideration of what is not considered. For example, The Postmodern Condition names the postmodern as “that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”17 In a letter written in the early 1980s, Lyotard describes the postmodern’s presentation of the unpresentable as one “which refuses the consolation of correct forms . . . and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them but to better produce the feeing that there is something unpresentable.” 18 Yet, Lyotard’s singular focus on the inexpressible and his broadly pluralist intellectual agility in its pursuit has not provoked parallels in the secondary research to these themes of utmost importance to the early mystics, most notably, his rich parallels with Pseudo-Dionysius. This same interest that renders Lyotard’s writings so akin to the mystics of late antiquity and the middle ages may be that which rendered the scholarship rather mute about his philosophical relationships to his contemporaries, despite their incessant references to “postmodernism,” “differends,” and “narratives.” This possibility is suggested in Gary Browning’s remark, “Lyotard is a demanding thinker, complex and a strain to live with. He takes paths that are the other side of where most of us are going.” 19 On the one hand, all of contemporary thought that names itself postmodernism is in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard. On the other hand, so little of what calls itself postmodernism respects the warnings and reminders of his work. Thus, it may be more accurate to say that all of the major currents of contemporary philosophy are in his wake as being those guilty of that which he diagnoses. Jacques Derrida, in his memorial essay “Lyotard and Us,” writes, “For I know that the debt that binds me to Jean-François Lyotard is in some sense incalculable; I am conscious of this and want it thus.”20 This may be the most honest expression of Lyotard’s influence. The influence is there, throughout contemporary philosophy and its scholarship, as it is throughout Derrida’s large body of work, but it is nearly incalculable. The influence, for the most part, appears to be conscious of its debt to some degree, to be thought in conversation with Lyotard’s or employing his notions and language. But consciousness is not calculability; to what degree contemporary thought is Lyotard’s thought is left unthought. For Derrida: “I will thus not even begin to give an account of this debt, to give an accounting of it, whether with respect to friendship or to philos-

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ophy, or to that which, linking friendship to philosophy, will have kept us [gardés] together, Jean-François and me . . . in so many places and so many times that I cannot even begin to circumscribe them.”21 And why would thinking want it this way? One reason the incalculability may be desired is because of the rampant misuse of what Lyotard bequeathed contemporary discussions. His vocabulary has everywhere been co-opted in a thoughtless manner because of its radical edge and its desirable image. Lyotard crafted arguments and employed words and ideas to unhinge thought that then became the very currency of the consumptive culture they sought to evade. Further, contemporary thinkers may not account for Lyotard’s influence because it may be unconscious. To claim their heritage in his insights is risky because what, exactly, is his position on anything at all? Just as it is dangerous to exclaim with our history of skeptics “I affirm the truth that there is no truth,” it is unfaithful to Lyotard’s thought to try to pin it to one clear stance on any one issue. A final point of incalculability of Lyotard’s influence may be, as Derrida admitted, that influence from Lyotard often yielded work without “even a common accord [ensemble]” to its origin. 22 In addition to Derrida, Lyotard was friends with Gilles Deleuze, and he was geographically, temporally, and philosophically close to Michel Foucault. The nearly simultaneous early works of Lyotard and Derrida were concerned explicitly with Husserl’s phenomenology. 23 Within about a four-year spread, all four thinkers were producing works critical of phenomenological and structuralist positions simultaneously as the influence of Freud and Marx can be felt in them in varying degrees. 24 A sharp departure from Freud and Marx can be read barely a year apart in both Lyotard and Deleuze.25 This shared vocabulary of concerns and influences does not guarantee accord between these thinkers, but the dialogue is as rich as it is nuanced in agreements and disagreements. Even as Lyotard diverged further away, as the others tended to greater agreement amongst themselves, by all accounts that have surfaced, not one holds a negative image of Lyotard as a person and philosopher. Even his most biting critics often only admit to not understanding him. No one dismisses his rigor, passion, or genuineness. But most of contemporary philosophy is guilty before Lyotard’s thinking; most contemporary thought can be taken to task by his careful readings. Occasionally, those in his wake recognize this and recognize that his work has succeeded, as in Gary Browning’s reflection that, “his work . . . is important, and offers flashes of inspiration as well as sustained hard thinking that challenge much in what we are and how we operate.” 26 Beyond his progeny of postmodernity itself, Lyotard has lit contemporary thought through with further, notable “flashes of inspiration.” The first, not new, but newly infused with relevancy, is fragmentation. Lyotard, being a careful reader of Hegel and Husserl, embraced the opposite impulse from the construction of a system or a Wissenschaft. His thinking more closely resembles a work of abstract art reproduced as a mosaic: each piece a sparkling artifact of rethink-

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ing thoughts and each can be seen to link almost endlessly with so many other captivating tiles around it. And, stepping back, one can see a fantastic large mural—but it is abstract: it does not represent any one thing and every re-seeing reveals the lines tending in a new direction to new shapes wherein new color combinations catch the eye. The best illustration of this construction is in his The Differend, which lacks a traditional, linear narrative, instead proceeding through indirect linkages from brief section to section interspersed with excurses into disparate thinkers or texts illustrating tangential treatments of connecting ideas.27 His method, like his legacy, can be best grasped by an image he was partial to: clouds in the sky, forever drifting, forming shapes here and there that one may see and another may see differently, perennially blurring together and separating.28 Hand in hand with his thought embodying fragmentation that opens infinite linkages, it embraces pluralism. To see something in the mural or in the sky, one cannot expect only what one wants. They are works of art, creations of nature, not Rorschach tests. One must entertain open desire for the multiplicity of possible views, methodologically (phenomenology, structuralism to poststructuralism, Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy) and materially (philosophy, history, science, art, politics). When he undertakes the essay “Some of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” he follows an account of Sun-Tse’s military training of women by an analysis of Freud on the passivity of feminine desire followed by an account of love for Socrates and its relation to Western male preference for prostitutes followed by a Marxist account bolstered by the Marquis de Sade.29 No source, no matter how disparate or their collective diversity, is gratuitous; they are rigorously woven together and all speak to critical concerns, albeit from distinct voices. Sometimes the threads clash, but it is by virtue of their contrast that the weave is so impressive. This clash is often in his pluralism of method and tone. His phenomenology will give to an undertow of structuralism; his Marxism will be psychoanalyzed. He speaks from many voices, sometimes in those foreign to the forum. His book on the contemporary painter Sam Francis makes art criticism into cryptic poetry inspired by each reproduced painting; his essay, “Longitude 180 W or E,” accompanying a exhibition guide for the contemporary artist Arakawa, speaks in two voices, one labeled “East,” one “West,” speaks of blanks and whiteness and space and meaning, parataxis, paradox, and Zen koans, and occasionally about Arakawa and the reproduced works. 30 The shock from his lack of fidelity to a single method or from the tone’s difference between expectation and receipt, however, ultimately lends his works their exceptionality and theoretical value. Most important, and why Lyotard has uniquely brought something to these not new requirements of fragmentary and pluralistic thinking, is that the way that the fragments link together and how the plural methods and contents come to inform thinking must neither be purely random nor strictly rule-based. Here is a dangerous edge that Lyotard’s thinking walks. Linkages are boundless and

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phrasing is endless, yet there are impasses and there is silence. The linkages must come together in a legitimate manner, harmonize and open the silent space of accord, even while we ceaselessly seek a new kind of illegitimacy that will permit the meaningful rupturing of the silence born from impasse. Phenomenology’s seeing is fruitful, but cannot be one’s sole method. Structuralism’s reading the world as a text is fruitful, but cannot be one’s sole method.31 Seeing and reading are obviously entwined when one sits at her desk, sees the page, reads the words and are, too, when one gazes out the window and reads the scene outside. But, as methods of philosophy, they instantly come to contradict one another as approaches to the world, suggesting an absorption versus interpretation, an over reliance on presentation versus an over eagerness to find structures. In the wake of these contradictions, Lyotard uses their contrary forces to make their conflicts productive of a pluralistic method. Likewise with content, he reveals that philosophy cannot operate in ignorance of history, but history cannot presume to be a science of actual events. Philosophy cannot operate in ignorance of politics, but politics cannot claim to be the accurate representation of reality. History and politics alone presume that singular events can be represented and narratives can be fixed and truthful; philosophy must reveal the impossibility of capturing the singular event and the illusions that proceed from grand narratives without ignoring our intense attraction to these impossibilities and the positive contribution they can yield. This acceptance and denial required of every position, each itself required, makes reading Lyotard taxing and leaves his synopsis as a legacy of seemingly logical paradoxes. Carefully reading him frustrates the desires of the reader— even if it is that frustration that intensifies the desire to understand him. 32 If I read Libidinal Economy, Marxist and Freudian through and through, I can only be left with an argument for the impossibility of Marxism coexisting with Freudian thought, and the impossibility of their being understood in isolation from one another. If I read The Differend seeking an argument against hateful historical revisionists and a solution permitting the witness to testify, I will only find my own silence before the former and the continued impossibility of the latter. An analytic reading could show (almost any) one text in opposition to another, his early work too Marxist or phenomenological, his later work too aesthetic or mystical, various turnings in his career to be inconsistent “flip-flopping” between positions. These readings would be productive insofar as one ought to focus one’s eyes on how his ideas link to other ideas, and it would be misled insofar as it would be likely offered as evidence of non-rigorous thinking and an explanation for dismissing him. Ironically, every critic who withholds this final judgment is, actually, in the wake of Lyotard’s influence. Lyotard’s difficulty, by his rigor, his fragmentary openness, his diverse scope of sources and voices, his obstinately ever-changing voice, is testament to his value in the canon and valuable as an introduction to the remainder of this chapter, which will consider this enormity only through a narrow looking glass.

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The task ahead will seek to be an honest analysis of just one consistently pervasive theme through Lyotard’s works: the ineffable. This task is to draw out from his works a portrait of the witness who is forbidden testimony and what options she may or may not have to uncover a new idiom by which to speak. It will be accomplished by briefly working through what Lyotard means by the postmodern before focusing upon a close textual reading of the inexpressible in his The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Silence, as an option for the witness, has been addressed in chapter one and will be returned to in chapter six. Therefore, this textual reading will be particularly concerned with exploring other options of phrase registers that disrupt the bind of logic and may prove promising to yield a new idiom for the bearing witness to the ineffable. The first option explored will be the style of a stream of conscious and use of “and” in the writings of Gertrude Stein. Next, will be an exploration into language games and their therapeutic nature in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Third, will be a variation of the stream of consciousness style as conducted by the paratatical construction of Theodor Adorno’s texts. The final consideration will be the unique traditional narrative style of the South American Cashinahua Indians. Lyotard takes up these considerations in varying contexts throughout his work and to disparate depth and length, yet they have been selected for examination in this chapter as the most illuminative examples of styles and methods that subvert standard logic and grammar and thereby offer the most promise for being a model from which to craft the witness an unprecedented idiom for linking impossibly disparate phrase regimes.

What is Postmodernism? “Is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?” —Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend33

“Postmodernism” is as allergic to characterization as Pseudo-Dionysius and Lyotard. It has been used as a name for a school of thought for a highly heterogeneous cast, a temporal designation of contemporary philosophy and literature, and as a commercial adjective. Most definitions of it Lyotard, its widely accepted “father,” would reject. According to Geoffrey Bennington, “To the extent that Lyotard’s ‘postmodern’ is important, it means almost exactly what he means by ‘philosophy.’”34 Postmodernism is not a formal school of thought as there is no clear manifesto that sets an organizing principle to thinkers labeled as postmodern. Yet, the postmodern does signify something different than the post-modern, the diachronical next step past the modern. Lyotard writes, “postmodernism is

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not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.” 35 And, as a mode of thinking, postmodernism is not a thoughtless borrowing of cultural and epoch-crossing references in everything from contemporary fiction to architecture to fashion. While postmodernism is a study in love with contradictions, this love is not haphazard: “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae, you watch a western, you eat McDonald’s at midday and local cuisine at night, you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong, knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows.”36 Thus, a better conception of postmodernism is a method of thinking that puts into question the story of the modern while it simultaneously proffers and challenges the possibility of the story being otherwise. Lyotard protests that “postmodern,” “is probably a very bad term, because it conveys the idea of a historical ‘periodization,’” as if one could sketch out a line and say: this is Enlightenment thinking, which gives way to modern philosophy, which gives way to postmodern philosophy.37 His critique, which adopts a tone akin to Husserl’s critique of historicism in his “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” argues that this periodization biases us to think we are always progressing and, occasionally, to support arguments of our persistent decline from the golden ideal. Ironically, he argues that this bias would not even qualify as “post” modern because “the diachronical periodization of history is typically a modern obsession. . . . To the same extent that modernity contains the promise of its overcoming, it is urged to mark, occasionally to date, the end of an age and the beginning of another.”38 This bias leads us to form “grand narratives,” stories that, in essence, place blinders upon a thinker and hamper genuine reflection. Grand narratives are the powerful stories we call upon to create and structure meaning, and often, also, to rally people. These stories may conjure national identity or portray capitalist political economy or invoke proletariat struggle or emancipation from marginalization. They are highly effective in coalescing distracted masses to effect social change and revolution, but, ultimately, can become a totalitarian imposition of a rigid identity and closed intellectual perspective. Postmodernism is a method that attempts to uncover these narratives that hamper our thought. But it is precisely the diagnosis of the grand narratives we construct that is partially responsible for a “pop-postmodernism.” To diagnose grand narratives suggests that one can break their bind through a playful interruption of their linearity, disruption of their symbols, and “solve” all problems; the unfortunate consequence being a proliferation of texts with oddly spelled words, excessively used hyphens, and the invocation of new narratives in the combat of old ones. When we think, as we “rational animals” are occasionally inclined to do (which is a grand narrative in itself), and discover one of these epic accounts, we are disposed to act passionately. We counter nationalism with an argument for humanism, only post-facto in recollection acknowledging the binds of a humanist narrative. We encourage an open embrace of tolerance for different perspec-

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tives and political paradigms to counter the failings of capitalism, but then come to see the threat of globalization as we forcefully embrace, modify, and take over other systems. We take up the cause of radical equality and brotherhood in the face of marginalization. Then, as we see that we have eliminated individual freedom, we rush to embrace the differentiated subject. In our passionate and well-read responses to these binds, we invoke new grand narratives to counter grand narratives. To step outside of action and diagnose this tendency as Hegelian dialectics or as the psychological habit of closure is also to invoke narratives. Thus, the act of uncovering narratives and becoming aware of the tendency to create new ones is to become aware of how we think and how thinking (and the unthought) guides our being in the world. This is postmodernism. And, yet, this is why Lyotard adopts the term “re-writing modernity” instead of postmodernism, because, “modernity presupposed a compulsion to get out of itself and to resolve itself, therefore, into something else, into a final equilibrium, be it a utopian order or the political purpose involved in the Canonical Narratives—so that in this sense postmodernity is a promise with which modernity is pregnant definitely and endlessly.”39 Modernity desired its end through a rebirth into an epic resolution and postmodernism strives to be its perennial editor. Husserl’s critiques of historicism and psychologism revealed very similar traps of thought and his phenomenological method permitted a way to set out of consideration these biasing narratives. Lyotard was a careful reader of Husserl and phenomenology and is much more like a phenomenologist than a variant of structuralism, like most of his contemporaries. For example, Lyotard preserves phenomenology’s preference of seeing the world over the post-structuralist tendency to view the world as a text we read, which is explicit in Derrida. 40 Why, then, if he grants credence to phenomenology, does Lyotard need to distinguish a way of thinking like re-writing modernity? In his early book on phenomenology, Lyotard praised Husserl’s philosophy for its ability to best discern the proper object for study, especially within the social sciences, and the best method of directing one’s attention to this object in its essence, first, then its application beyond itself to other studies.41 He also praised phenomenology as a preeminent method of validation of the philosophical success of each study. His dominant critique of phenomenology, in that early work, focused upon its inability to address history critically, that is, politically and therefore being unable to help supplement Marxism. Obviously, Lyotard would drift away from this early critique of phenomenology as he distanced himself from Marxism and militant political action. There must be, then, another trace of critique that leads Lyotard to re-writing over phenomenology. Lyotard, I believe, founds re-writing as a synthesis of the positive traits and eschewal of the negative that he found in the conflicting veins of phenomenology and structuralism. Like phenomenology first did and post-structuralism followed, Lyotard shuns historicism and psychologism, as can be seen in his critique of grand narratives. His means of shunning these biases begins much like

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the phenomenological method of the epoché and proceeds much like both phenomenology’s careful return to originary essences and post-structuralism’s rereading histories of ideas to uncover and avoid biases. As a middle ground between these two variations of the suspension and revisitation of ideas, Lyotard’s search for idiom by which the witness could speak is enacted much like Husserl’s eidetic reduction, that reduction which he first invoked as a preparation or an exercise before enacting the full, phenomenological reduction. This method permitted its own repetition and allowed for failure; it did not seek originary essences, but practiced the suspension of biases and invoked the proper mindset for the philosophy to continue. It avoids the presumption of essences, critiqued by post-structuralism, while successfully avoiding biases and invoking the repetition utilized by Pseudo-Dionysius and demonstrated throughout The Differend. The embrace of a phenomenological exercise, rather than the full routine, permits Lyotard’s method to be an interruption and unceasing perpetuation of the phenomenologist’s next step of describing the presentations she has seen. This interruption, differing from phenomenology, melds with the structuralists’ rejection of originary essences, and permits Lyotard to demonstrate what is best captured by a premise underlying the Neoplatonist theory of emanation: any event overflows its possible encapsulation. Or, as one eloquent reviewer phrases it, Lyotard is revealing that “the effort of language to capture a prelinguistic word is foredoomed,” even while he keeps trying.42 While this preference for an incessant and diverse rendition may open an interesting study into Lyotard’s embrace of the phenomenological account of time, supplemented by his thoughtful consideration of Augustine’s account of time and memory in the Confessions, it also more profoundly reveals the remarkable position he holds on the question of presence. While it is clear that Lyotard preserves phenomenology’s emphasis of presentations as an inclination to seeing the world rather than considering it, like the post-structuralists, to be like a text that can be read, Lyotard is obviously concerned with the ineffable, with that which does not appear to us. Therefore, if phenomenology describes the laid-bare appearance, how can it be used to describe that which does not appear or express that which appears but confounds our capacity to re-present it to ourselves or to others? He does not, then, embrace the post-structuralists as the opposite theoretical stance because they, too, have difficulty permitting pure spontaneity, immediacy, or the un-structured, the un-linked within their system. Therefore, while Lyotard does not want to affirm origins to the disregard of our historical, existential, and linguistic formation, he does admit that there is more than what can be seen or logically deduced and seeks to uncover what otherwise remains un-presented. Presence, permitted by phenomenology and critiqued by structuralism, can capture immediacy and evade processing perception into an objectivity. But, for Lyotard, this presence, to reveal the unpresented, which “invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself,” must permit a mode of awareness that is like a seeing and painting of the

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world in its activity, that is, as if engaged in the very act of creation on an unending canvas.43 The use of language including seeing, painting, and creating is apt as much of Lyotard’s writing was art criticism and aesthetic theory. All of his philosophy, notably his frequent recourse to an interpretation of the sublime, could be argued to be aesthetics. “Aesthetics,” from aisthesthai, the Greek verb “to perceive,” is a study, for Lyotard, that precisely concerns perception and not, therefore, one concerned solely with matters of taste or whence to divide the sublime from the beautiful. It is not a study undertaken from a perspective of the disinterested perception of form, but a philosophy that is sensuously aware, that makes the thinker feel “the anguish of being full of holes.” 44 Philosophy is more than description of the phenomenological lived experience, it is a thinking in and from an intense embodiment wherein one is yanked from anesthesia of objectivity and one desperately tries, and fails, and tries again to capture and express this experience. Philosophical activity comes upon us suddenly and catches us unaware like the moment one finds oneself confronted with an abyss, a plunging canyon, a violent storm, a raging war, an infinitely tall mountain. Throughout his oeuvre, Lyotard is concerned with the perception of the sublime and how to express the inexpressible, which is asking, also, the phenomenological and aesthetic question of how to keep a memory alive if remembering lacks a fixed narrative and is always reconstituted.45 It is in Lyotard’s oddly phenomenological-post-structuralist-postmodern aesthetics that one may uncover the possibility of representing what we have forgotten or been unable to express. This consistent task of his also best captures his critique of phenomenology and why he needed to found postmodernism as a re-writing: this endeavor is not strictly epistemological. Lyotard’s critique is not the destruction of phenomenology; it is often quite consistent with it. Instead, Lyotard’s critique brings a great benefit to phenomenology by proffering it a path beyond itself: beyond epistemology alone, avoiding critiques of origins, religiously biased and subjectpresumptive preferences for monologue, and an over-emphasis on reason. This is invaluable to its usage in the social sciences and to phenomenology’s theological turn. Since the critique is not devastating, it is proper to ask more precisely that, if we have carefully re-read phenomenology and have come to recognize these binds, acknowledge their danger, and seek to avoid reinscribing them, do we still need Lyotard’s re-writing? If we heed his lessons, can the persistent exercise end? Lyotard accedes that we have become wise to or fearful of some rallying cries, apathetic to others, and suspicious of most of them. Given this, it is far more difficult to galvanize unity and movement by inventing and appealing to a meaning conjured in a story of these symbols. 46 However, this is, for Lyotard, precisely another explanation for why we need postmodernism. We once more feel the penetrating vacancy of meaning that spurred the moderns (and could all peoples in all times) to create these stories as a curative or salve to meaningless-

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ness. As Nietzsche reminds us in the Genealogy, “man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose.”47 We may acknowledge that these stories, these “grand narratives,” can no longer salvage our thought, but, still, we desire salvation. This is why Lyotard argues that the “re-” of the “re-writing” recalls redemption or revelation, the renaissance or revival, and the revolution. He elaborates these instantiations of the “re-” through reference to therapy. 48 Re-writing is an activity. Postmodernity will never solve the tale of modernity because it does not have an answer (an essence or origin) that one could genealogically discern. But, to lack an answer is not to lack meaning; postmodernism takes the tale of modernity and just keeps reworking it. It is creative, but not as a construction of answers; instead, its creativity is in its deconstruction, which then opens new possibilities for new creations, which will also be subject to reworking. This constant endeavor shows itself as meaningful even in its absence of concluding truths, which would only be further reinscription of grand narratives. Thus, the “re-” of re-writing modernity is not a return to an origin but is better compared to the Freudian Durcharbeitung, a “working through” that Lyotard describes as “a work of thinking the meanings or events that are hidden not only in prejudices but also in projects, programs, prospects and the like, that are concealed even in the propositions or purposes of a psychoanalysis.” 49 The comparison comes, however, with careful distinctions. Lyotard profitably uses Freud and Sophocles to point to the comparisons between our desire for grand narratives and the psychoanalytic desire to let the patient find her ills and their cures in constructing her narrative. The analyst deciphers this narrative to reveal the diseases she suffers and encourage her new, healthier narratives. Narratives have opening and closing rhymes (either literally, as in Greek tragedy, or through the harmonization of meaning, as in psychoanalysis) and grant meaning through offering causes for events. Such narratives “seek access to consciousness of the reason, the cause for the ills they are suffering and have suffered during their lives—they seek rememoration, the remembering of a dismantled time. . . .”50 Lyotard notes that this recollection “resembles a detective novel.”51 Antiquity’s tragedies, modernity, and Freudian patient demonstrate the firm embrace of the belief that fate can foretell one’s future and its cure can be sought by tracing its past. The flaw in being a detective whose goal is to solve a problem is that this activity seeks an understanding of being through time, through one’s relation of one’s destiny to one’s origin, and believes the origin to be the answer, when this very seeking actually enacts the completion of one’s destiny. He illustrates this by reference to Œdipus’ destiny of blinded, miserable exile being actualized by his seeking to understand his origin, that from which he fled, leaving his “home” only to initiate its truth by finding him in the new space wherein he killed his father and married his mother. Additionally, Lyotard refers to the Marxist revolutions that seek to end the alienation of labor, only to re-impose versions of the old rules of control and re-

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perpetuate alienation, and to Nietzsche’s critique of the canon as ensnared in metaphysics, his declaration of bringing about its end, and his own falling prey to metaphysics when he settles his ideas upon a foundation of will. These instances illustrate the impulse of remembering as reenacting the very “sins” each sought to avoid, thus actualizing the destinies each sought to avoid by understanding their origins. Unlike the modern obsession with periodization, making narratives with set beginnings and ends, postmodernism is as ambiguous as the “now” moment between the past and future, that “now” that is instantly a “not-now,” forever fluid and fleeting while utterly necessary to seek any understanding. It is the therapy that never ends, that never seeks to cure the patient by locating the wrong, thus never finalizes the patient’s diagnosis. Instead, of a simple rememoration, postmodernism engages a “knowing of the self” by doing a “working through” truly free from a rigid and self-actualizing narrative. One’s guide is feeling, listening to feelings, and the activity is open and flexible linkage. There is no loop closed by the activity, no cure, no answer; the gain is only the creation of scenes open to change: the method reveals the productivity of aporia.52 To stress the never-ending nature of postmodernism’s re-writing is to toy with the suggestion of the theory’s futility. 53 If we heed the warning to not fall prey to grand narratives, to not reinscribe that which we discern as a bind and desire to overcome, what may we do? Standing mute before the vision of the insurmountable impasse was rejected in chapter one. Do we, then, endlessly babble incoherencies that gain nothing, change nothing? Postmodernism rewrites modernity to work through it; thus, it must be productive. Avoiding the fatal flaw of “working through” actualizing its destiny by working with and towards a purpose, Lyotard describes is as a “work without purpose and, therefore, without will. . . .”54 Thus, to re-write is reminiscent of a Kantian freies Spiel, a free play, Lyotard continues, “without purpose in the sense that it works without being guided by the concept of its aim, but not without purposiveness.” 55 For Lyotard, this may be conceived of as a free play of narration whose aim is not to diagnose disease and engage treatment but to be the activity of philosophy that hopefully uncovers those stories that cannot be told and points to the possibility of their linkage into intelligibility. Lyotard’s The Differend carefully examines precisely this: the logical and necessary linkages that phrases enact to form narration and communication, and when these linkages fail. When these associations logically cannot happen we have differends, those impasses that cause the silencing of parties. Thus, rewriting may be revelatory of a way to speak productively when a victim cannot give testimony to the crime committed against her because of an insurmountable, un-linkable abyss between the phrase universes of the prosecution and defense. Durcharbeitung, in a cautious revision later made by Freud, commanded the listener to “equally-floating attention,” wherein one listened to all reports

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without placing more or less weight on any one aspect, and instructed the patient to speak freely all ideas as they occur to him or her, unselected, in disorder. Lyotard’s postmodernist rendering of Freudian free association results in a philosophical method: A fragment of a sentence, a bit, one word, is coming up. You link it on the spot with another bit. . . . In doing so, you are gradually getting close to a scene. . . . You sketch it out . . . it refers to the past. . . . Lost time is not re-presented as on a tableau or even presented at all. Lost time is presenting the elements of the tableau and re-writing is primarily the recording of them. . . . this re-writing gives us no knowledge of the past . . . it is a matter of technique, of art rather than science. Re-writing doesn’t result in a definition of the past. On the contrary, it presupposes that the past is acting by giving the mind the elements with which the scene will be built.56

This method has become “linkage.” Lyotard’s conception of free association renders it a phenomenological method that can uncover structural paradoxes and freely speak to them in such a way that upsets the logic that maintains them as paradoxes. Lyotard’s adoption from Freud is melded into an adoption from Kant, rendering this free association/re-writing modernity akin to the Kantian work of imagination on the sense of the beautiful. This method and Kant’s “have in common the importance given to the free acceptance of the bits released by sensitivity; and second, the emphasis put on the release of forms in aesthetic pure pleasure, making them as free from empirical or cognitive interest as possible such that the more fluid, shifting, and evading the phenomena, the more beautiful.”57 The more beautiful, according to Kant, are like the flames blazing and shifting in a fireplace and the play of figures fleeting, formed by quickly flowing waters. With these images as illustrative, “Kant comes finally to the principles according to which imagination gives the mind ‘much to think,’ more to think than the understanding, working with concepts, can give it.” 58 This is what Lyotard wishes to proffer the logically-bound witness; not a new narrative to reinscribe the possibility for new charges from the revisionists but a source of speaking that floods the abyss between logical genres. This method of free linkage is a creation of a space from which one can work towards a scene. It proceeds by feeling, listening to feelings, drawing forth scenes from the past whose “lost time” is neither presented nor represented but coagulated as possibilities so as to make the space of many elements from which a scene can be drawn. Like Kant’s, Lyotard’s project is a critical one and ends in aesthetics. Like an abstract artist, Lyotard writes: “it is not up to us to provide reality but to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable.”59 The productivity of postmodernism is like that of art; its productivity is invocation. This production will now be demonstrated through the consideration of Lyotard’s The Differend.

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Notes 1. There are, arguably, two waves of the phenomenological and post-phenomenological turn to theology. The first wave would include Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Ricoeur, while the second wave would include Marion, Nancy, Henri, Chrétien, Caputo, Kearney, some works by Agamben and Bataille, and the vocal criticism of Zizek. The latter wave was celebrated at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center 2009 Conference entitled “Phenomenology and the Theological Turn,” which featured papers by Marion, Kearney, Wyschogrod, and Lampert. A notable scholarly review of this turn is Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” trans. Bernard George Prusak, in Phenomenology and the “Theological” Turn: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). Its follow up has recently been released, Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Within postmodernism circles, the most influential article was Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), although, in kind with my own premise herein, J. Arron Simmons makes the argument that Lyotard is the preeminent example of a postmodernist centrally concerned with the question of God as that which can only be presented indirectly (J. Arron Simmons, “Continuing to Look for God in France: On the Relationship between Phenomenology and Theology,” in Words of Life, Op. Cit., 15-29, esp. 20-22; he begins the argument, however, in God in France: Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God, ed. Peter Jonkers and Ruud Welten (Leuven: Peeters, 2005)). 2. Cf. Kevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004, available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/. While unusual to refer one to an online encyclopedia, the scholars and their work in this entry are most impressive. 3. Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 1. 4. Lyotard, “A Podium without a Podium: Television according to J.-F. Lyotard,” collected in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 90-95, 90. 5. The exhibition was in the Grande Galerie, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, March 28-July 15, 1985, managed by the Centre de Creation Industrielle and curated by Lyotard and Thierry Chaput. Lyotard edited the exhibition catalog, Les Immatériaux, v.1: Album. Inventaire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985). Simultaneously, a collection of essays was released edited by Lyotard and Élie Théofilakis, Modernes et Après? “Les Immatériaux” (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1985). 6. Peter Dews, “Review: The Letter and the Line: Discourse and Its Other in Lyotard,” Diacritics 14, 3: Special Issue on the Work of Jean-François Lyotard (1984): 39-49, 40. 7. His own influences are documented in Gary Browning’s study Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives (Cardiff, England: University of Wales Press, 2000), where the final section of the bibliography offers “Studies on Lyotard and/or relating to Themes of his Work” and includes the references for Habermas and Hegel, Marx and Wittgenstein

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alongside the standard, scholarly secondary works that address Lyotard’s oeuvre. Appreciative of his creativity, I am surprised, however, by Browning’s omission of Kant. 8. Robert Harvey and Lawrence R. Schehr, “Editor’s Preface,” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 1-5, 1. 9. He explains his affinity to Freud in his Discours, figure: “Freud’s reflections are, from the beginning to the end of his career . . . centered on the relation of language and silence, of signification and sense, of articulation and the image, of the commentary which interprets or constructs and the desire which figures” (Lyotard, Discours, figure, 59; quoted in Dews, “Review: The Letter and the Line: Discourse and Its Other in Lyotard,” Op. Cit., 44). 10 . These interests are intertwined in Discours, figure (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1971), written for his doctorat d’état. The critique of Freud and Lacan was the sole focus of Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, Collection 10/18, 1973). The same year, Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1973) was released with writings on politics and art, essays on Adorno, Freud, and Cezanne. Politics’ merger with psychoanalysis can be found in Economie libidinale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974). Finally, three further notable 1970s works on art include Le Mur du Pacifique (Paris: Broché, 1975), Sur cinq peintures de René Guiffrey (Editions Palluel, 1976), and Les Transformateurs Duchamp (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1977). 11. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 12. Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives, Op. Cit., 21. 13. Books on art: La Partie de peinture, illustrated by Henri Maccheroni (Cannes: Candela, 1980); Sur la constitution du temps par la couleur dans les oeuvres récentes d’Albert Aymé (Paris: Traversière, 1980); An exhibition catalogue: Monory. Ciels: nébuleuses et galaxies: les confins d’un dandysme, Derrière le miroir, no. 244 (Paris: Galerie Maeght, 1981), and related work: L’Assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory, Collection “Le Mot et la forme,” 3 (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1984). 14. The books included: Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness—“Like the paintings of a blind man” (Los Angeles: Lapis Press, 1993); Signé Malraux: biographie (Paris: Grasset, 1996, English 1999); La Chambre sourde: L’Antiésthetique de Malraux (Paris: Galilée 1998); the posthumously released La Confession d’Augustin (Paris: Galilée 1998, English 2000); and Un trait d’union, which appeared in French in 1993 but was supplemented with further correspondence and translated as The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Press, 1998). 15. Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1. 16 . Michael Naas, “Lyotard Archipelago,” Minima Memoria: In the Wake of JeanFrançois Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 176-96, 180. 17. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Op. Cit., 81. 18. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), 24. 19. Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives, Op. Cit., vii. Lyotard, I hazard, would have been pleased with this observation.

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20. Derrida, “Lyotard and Us,” Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, Op. Cit., 1-26, 9. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Lyotard, La Phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), and Derrida, Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990, written in 1953-4), and Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la géométrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). 24. Lyotard, Discours, figure, Op. Cit., 1971, Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) and L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), and Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968) and Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969). 25. Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, Op. Cit., 1973, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972). 26. Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives, Op. Cit., vii. 27. Cf. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 28. Cf. Lyotard, “Clouds,” in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1-15. 29. Cf. Lyotard, “Some of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” trans. Deborah J. Clarke, Winifred Woodhull, and John Mowitt, Wedge 6 (1984), 24-9. Originally published as “One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” SubStance vol. 6/7, no. 20 (1978): 9-17. 30. Cf. Lyotard, Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness, Op. Cit., and Lyotard, “Longitude 180 W or E,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, in Arakawa (Milan: Padiglione D’arte Contemporanea, 1984). 31. Lyotard’s engagement with phenomenology and post-structuralism is explored in greater detail in this chapter’s following section. 32. There is a remarkable affinity here between Lyotard and Henri de Lubac, who writes elliptically about paradox, which: “exists everywhere in reality, before existing in thought. . . . As each truth becomes better known, it opens up a fresh area for paradox. . . . Paradox, in the best sense, is objectivity”; this objectivity is an uncomfortable one that propels us continually to questioning because the opposing sides therein, “do not sin against logic, whose laws remain inviolable: but they escape its domain,” which prompts de Lubac to wonder “whether all substantial spiritual doctrine must not of necessity take a paradoxical form” (Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, trans. Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 10, 12, and 13, respectively). 33. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §182. 34. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event, Op. Cit., 4. 35. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Op. Cit., 22. 36. Ibid., 17. Further, “The re-writing meant here [postmodernism] has obviously nothing to do with what is called postmodernity or post-modernism on the market places of today’s ideologies. It has nothing to do with the use of parodies and quotations of modernity or modernism in either architectural, theatrical, or pictoral pieces, and even less with that movement resorting to the traditional forms of narrative as they have been displayed

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in novels or short stories” (Jean-François Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, 3, 54 [1987]: 3-9, 8). 37. Lyotard, “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” trans. Brian Massumi, Cultural Critique 5, “Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism” (1986-87): 209-19, 209. Further, “the relevant opposite of modernity here is not postmodernity but the Classical age” and that “neither modernity nor the so-called postmodernity can be identified and defined as clear-cut historical entities, the latter always being next to the former” (Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” Op. Cit., 3). 38. Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” Op. Cit., 4. 39. Ibid., 3-4. 40. For further argumentation of these two modes of interpretation and thinkers, cf. the superior review by Hent de Vries, “The Theology of the Sign and the Sign of Theology: The Apophatics of Deconstruction,” in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, ed. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 166-94, esp. 166-78. 41. Cf., Lyotard, La Phénoménologie, Op. Cit. 42 . Dews, “Review: The Letter and the Line,” Op. Cit., 41. Cf., Lyotard, La Phénoménologie, Op. Cit., 43-4. 43. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children, Op. Cit., 25. 44. Lyotard, “Music, Mutic,” in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 217-33, 231. 45. This, again, hearkens the question of Lyotard’s engagement of phenomenology’s conception of time and that in Augustine’s Confessions when he asks, how can I love you, God, if I cannot remember you?: “Past, present, future—as many modes of presence in which the lack of presence is projected” (Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 17). Lyotard also seems to employ a conception of the “now” as conceivable through aesthetics. In permitting aesthetics to best express the idea of memorial, Lyotard’s aesthetics could be capable of founding a political program (although, later, he dismisses vehemently the viability of programs) perhaps akin to Jacques Rancière’s, wherein politics fights for the image of society and aesthetics is a singularity that cannot be isolated, yet can be a model for society (cf., Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill [London: Continuum, 2006]). 46. “These narratives have lost their credibility for the bulk of contemporary societies, and are no longer sufficient to ensure a political, social, and cultural bond, as they had once claimed to do. Our situation is that we have little confidence in them anymore” (Lyotard, “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” Op. Cit., 210). 47. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), Essay III, §XXVIII, 299, which is the last line of the work and reformulates its first appearance in §1 of Essay III, 231. For Lyotard, without narratives, one has a social and intellectual climate where “we must confront the problem of meaning without any possibility of responding with hopes for the emancipation of humanity . . . or for that of the Spirit . . . or with the practice of the Proletariat to achieve the constitution of a transparent society. Even capitalism, the liberal or neo-liberal discourse, seems to have little credibility in the contemporary situation: that does not mean that capitalism is finished, quite the contrary. But it does mean that it no longer knows how to legitimate

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itself. The old legitimation, ‘everyone will prosper,’ has lost its credibility” (Lyotard, “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” Op. Cit., 210). 48. Alongside being a reference to his engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis, this may point to Wittgenstein’s view of therapy (who was cited as the work’s “pretext” [xiii]): “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998], §255). 49. Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” Op. Cit., 4. Durcharbeitung, according to Lyotard, is the methodological demand for an analyst to pay equal attention to all phrases the patients uttered, discriminating against none, no matter how seemingly inconsequential they may sound. This method is much like the Cartesian and phenomenological demand of the suspension of all prejudices and judgments and reception of ideas “in ‘disorder,’ unselected, unrepressed” (Ibid., 7). Cf., “Working-Through (Durcharbeitung)” in Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36-8. The Pro- and Realso invoke Neoplationism’s cycle of procession and reversion, cf., chapter four, below. 50. Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” Op. Cit., 5. 51. Ibid. 52. Cf., Ibid., 3-9. To understand the sense in which postmodernism may be a detective story, consider the series of children’s books “Choose your Own Adventure”—these permit children to choose different responses within a narrative; for postmodernism, this form offers flexible rethinkings of narratives and requires one to read them over and again, from the start and through each new ending, never settling on a single reading as the story. 53. The translators of Lyotard’s collected correspondences ask: “If it is no longer possible, or credible, to assume the authority to speak for the future, what escape is there from an endless repetition of the already-said?” They answer in his spirit, “But thought has to proceed. Lyotard argues that it must do so by casting itself adrift . . .” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, Op. Cit., foreword). 54. Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” Op. Cit., 7. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Lyotard, “Untitled Interview with Bernard Blistène,” Art and Philosophy (Milan, Italy: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1991), 65-83, 24.

THREE: BEARING WITNESS IN THE DIFFEREND “The time has come to philosophize.” —Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend1

The Differend’s Style and Form In an interview with Bernard Blistène, Lyotard described the goal of both reflective artists and aesthetic thinkers as being “not up to us to provide reality but to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable.”2 This is a productive instruction for how to read Lyotard’s method in, and the overall structure of, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Allusion, therein, is persistently at work as a means of indirection, pointing the reader through highly conceptual turns of logic to connections between heterogeneous topics. The allusions are set within a concrete, albeit vast, framework: its countless direct references span the canon, its cited context is “the ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy (Heidegger’s later works, the penetration of Anglo-American philosophies into European thought, the development of language technologies); and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses (the metaphysical doctrines of modern times . . .). The weariness with regard to ‘theory’ . . .,” and its pretext directly identifies three guides: Kant’s third Critique and historical-political texts and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (p. xiii). The unnamed allusions, however, and however indirect, offer a directive for the reader: an attunement into the feel

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of the text that is necessary for the reader to follow the connections and conceptions never bluntly stated. A compelling allusion immediately apparent following his citation of Wittgenstein is one of the latter’s other works: Zettel—that work of fragments whose German title literally translates to “slips of paper,” and was precisely the collection of the many slips of paper that Wittgenstein cut from various typeset pages from his earlier works. Like Wittgenstein’s collection, The Differend treats diverse topics in a coherent and systematic, yet nonlinear, manner. There is a sense of a dictated premise and conclusion, but it is hardly a thesis followed by argument concluding in a proof or product—it is only given as a call and directed by signposts with elliptical arrows. There are, however, abiding themes that weave the many interior paths of evidence and argument. The work as a whole indisputably reveals the activity of productive philosophy. A sympathetic reader may consider the prose and structure an allusion to the pedagogy at work in Hegel’s Phenomenology: “The real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about.” 3 Another fruitful comparison may be to Plato’s dialogues, as Lyotard’s reader slips into a role much like that of Socrates’ interlocutor: trying out various hypotheses, discovering the failure of each, and never receiving an answer. 4 The answer, for Lyotard, is impossible; yet, seeking it, nonetheless, is absolutely necessary. The witness must be able to testify against the historical revisionists, but, within their binding logic, the differend is impassable. We can conceive an answer, but we do not know how to formulate this idiom. In other words, The Differend’s form is as important as its content: the form is a demonstration of the content as both form and content evade the linear in order to demonstrate the failings of such direct logic. This chapter will step inside of Lyotard’s text and attempt to follow its indirection with an eye to the options and failures of different narratives. I will begin with a more elaborate exposition of his style as an encapsulation of his book’s content and then cull from the content its dominant models of narration, which include the avant-garde author Gertrude Stein’s methodology, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games, Theodor Adorno’s parataxis, and the storytelling style of the South American Cashinahua Indians. After contextualizing the purpose of each example for Lyotard, my aim will be to convert his examples into explicit test cases proffering various forms of alternative testimony for the silenced witness and determine if they pass Lyotard’s muster. The Differend begins with a preface in the form of a “Reading Dossier” with the main text following as a non-linear narrative divided into chapters that are then divided into brief numbered sections interspersed irregularly with dense analytic excurses (“Notices”) of disparate texts. The Reading Dossier, as the English name suggests, is a collection of brief entries about the book that appear only at the first glance to tell the reader all critical information about the ensuing

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read; the irony is furthered by its actual deviancy from the object designated by its French name, Fiche de lecture, which one could otherwise translate as a synopsis or reader’s brief report, and then made even more explicit by Lyotard’s remark that the reading dossier “will allow the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her, to ‘talk about the book’ without having read it” (p. xiv). The irony of the dossier failing to tell us what the book has to say, no matter its appearance to do just that, is apparent in its every entry. It begins with a definition of the work’s title, “differend.” The definition starts concisely, only to unravel and undermine its intention to be a definition by the interspersion of six disjointed parenthetical comments. The first two parentheticals are identical—“(at least)”—and broaden his definitions, while the lengthier other four seek to clarify them (p. xi). The clarification, however, actually only succeeds in further multiplication of their meanings through specific cases—for example, when the differend wrongs all parties or the moral rights of an author and when an author is hostage to his or her work—before exploding the specific to universality with the final comment pointing out that the differend of which we are speaking is a differend, but the state of there being such in general. It is unclear if these additions are meant to clarify his meaning or purposely to obscure it. This first entry, however, does end by presenting, unnoted, his thesis for the whole work: “The title of this book suggests . . . that a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general” (p. xi). Being just the beginning, and without being told it is such, we do not yet grasp this as a thesis proper, let alone understand what its context or consequence or even what it and he means by universal rules, heterogeneity, lack, and genres of expression. And, given his evident sardonic wit throughout the preface, we cannot help but question how we are to interpret his “definitions” and understand what he is undertaking (although his terms do gain some flesh in his dossier’s section misleadingly named “Thesis”). Our perplexity does not extend, however, to our certain feeling of there being here an intense irony—it actually helps us to “get it.” What we will “get” from the text is not a text as object, “an object whose sales the publisher (who will also have produced the film, the interview, the program, etc.) will obtain a certain profit margin, because people will think that they must ‘have’ it (and therefore buy it) so as not to be taken for idiots or to break (my goodness) the social bond” (p. xv)! Instead, this book, Lyotard relates, “belongs to the last of last year’s line [fin de série],” because, “despite every effort to make his thought communicable, the A. knows that he has failed, that this is too voluminous, too long, and too difficult” (p. xv). Our perplexity is as good as Lyotard’s failure to produce a popular pulp book. Our perplexity is our encouragement to work to follow as hard as Lyotard worked to craft the allusions to what cannot be presented. Our understanding may fail just as Lyotard’s attempt did in making the content clear, but this is the content: “to find, if not what can legitimate judgment (the ‘good’ linkage), then at least to save the honor of thinking” (p. xii).

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This is the merger of form and content, and this merger is pedagogic. Permit me to elaborate the lesson with three examples that I see, respectively, as lesser and more intentional allusions in The Differend to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Augustine’s Confessions, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. An allusion to Descartes from a gifted and critical phenomenologist exploring the inability to produce proof in the face of doubt would be utterly unsurprising, although I propose that it is to the Meditations’ prefacing work, and specifically its tone, that Lyotard’s Reading Dossier alludes in his dreary evaluation of our postmodern attention span and tendency to not want to take the time to work through what is hard, even if necessary. The rightness to tackle the differend is clear from Lyotard’s first section that names its consequence as a wrong, and it is perhaps neglected because, as Descartes’ prefacing letter to the Church authority at the Sorbonne explains, “few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient, if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an afterlife.”5 And, according to Lyotard, today, we lack these incentives: “Reflection is not thrust aside today because it is dangerous or upsetting, but simply because it is a waste of time. It is ‘good for nothing,’ it is not good for gaining time. For success is in gaining time” (p. xv). Capital’s speed has trumped God’s stick and carrot. Seemingly wary of such readers, Descartes expends a good energy, palpable with trepidation, warning about his work’s misrepresentation: “But although I regard the proofs as quite certain and evident, I cannot therefore persuade myself that they are suitable to be grasped by everyone.” 6 While his first clause grates against Lyotard’s theoretic stance—Descartes’ certainty is in his answers being correct, while Lyotard’s is in his own failure to fully communicate any— their tones of sorrowful recognition ring as one. Descartes explains that geometric principles “are somewhat long, and demand a very attentive reader, it is only a comparatively few people who understand them,” and: In the same way, although the proofs I employ here are in my view as certain and evident as the proofs of geometry, if not more so, it will, I fear, be impossible for many people to achieve an adequate perception of them, both because they are rather long and some depend on others, and also, above all, because they require a mind which is completely free from preconceived opinions and which can easily detach itself from involvement with the senses.7

Lyotard’s revelation of the seduction and stranglehold of grand narratives has likewise demonstrated to us the difficulty of thinking outside of biases. While Lyotard, however, calls us to do precisely this, and expresses a pleasure that his book will be distributed, even if to a limited and distracted audience, Descartes offered only a brief delineation of his ideas, in his Discourse on Method, in French, the common language, and felt only comfortable to expand these ideas in Latin: “I thought it would not be helpful to give a full account of it in a book written in French and designed to be read by all and sundry, in case weaker in-

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tellects might believe that they ought to set out on the same path” (no matter that we know his translation of Meditations followed not long after). 8 And, even while first in Latin, hence with a limited audience, Descartes’ preface to his readers cautions that “I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinions. Such readers, as I well know, are few and far between.”9 If we understand these similarities only to show a parallel evaluation of and disappointment in their prospective audiences, we do an injustice to the characters of both thinkers. Instead, recalling my identification of Lyotard’s tone as ironic, let us recall the master of irony, Socrates, and his complaint, in Plato’s Apology, that the most shocking charge from Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon was that he was a clever speaker—he who would only proceed to speak in the very manner he did everyday around Athens, and he who would proceed to offer a defense beautiful and rich, fully enlivened as a perfect speech, like Aristotle commanded, with a proper head, body, and tail. Unlike Aristotle’s ideal, however, do these speeches by Socrates, Descartes, and Lyotard appeal to logos or to pathos? Are they not clever speakers? Descartes sought the protection and promulgation that would come from the Church authority—what Doctor would charge the scientist with nudity at the risk of being one of “those readers” who simply could not understand the “certain and evident truth” of his text? Socrates hardly made a light step to protect his life or name. And Lyotard—was his life endangered by the ideas in The Differend, could any evidence be scrounged that he feared for his reputation? Instead, is it perhaps a juicier carrot being presented when all three indirectly call their readers to be ‘one of us’ by casting the others as so weakly beguiled? Or, perhaps, a pedagogic seduction wherein the uglier sides of intellectual vice are described just before one is offered a mirror and, in between, there is an instant wherein the reader can craft the reflection she or he will cast? What is it, then, that Lyotard is calling us to see? It is something that we must do. And it is best suggested through another allusion. Lyotard’s last work was on Augustine’s Confessions, and his reading of the Saint’s life was rigorously intimate to a degree wherein the rigor appears as a spastic confrontation, a vehement intervention cradled by respect and love that fuels the reproach. This work is so unrestrained it strongly entices the reader to desire that height of engagement and is so dramatic it suggests itself as a role we can play—and, thus, we sense another parallel. Descartes sought to condition his audience to be successful readers by seducing them into a textual co-implication—they had to meditate along with him in order to ensure the success of his method and, consequently, his proof. Augustine, likewise, has an intense motivation to seduce his audience and an equal critical need to ensure the success of faith by ensuring the success of his autobiography. Why would one need to confess to an omniscient God? Confession is an act of piety, an activity one desires to do, but Augus-

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tine’s audience is also other witnesses, for to hear about God is to hear about the self, as it awakens our desire for God; it also reminds us by contrast what we are, and thus propels our transformative action. 10 By accounting for himself, Augustine is presenting a model for others to follow to faith. He is a guide who can only guide if his audience desires to emulate his desire for God, because when he speaks, he only ever bemoans his ignorance of the way: “Let me know you, my known, let me know Thee even as I am known,” and “how shall I find you if I do not remember you,” and “how can one pray to you unless one knows you?”11 How could he rationally explain that his incessant search for knowledge of God was only a preparation for the faith that came in a lightning flash after a sweaty and tearful, long tormented fit by simply listening to a child’s cries of “tolle lege” and hearing it as a command? He could only explain it as well as Lyotard, that “he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (§93). Augustine’s recount of the many conversion stories that he had heard while offering his own and Lyotard’s incessant allusions are indirect invitations to hermeneutical engagement. Hermeneutics, whether concerned with the Talmud, the Christian Bible, Plato, or the human person as text, teaches methods of discernment of (often esoteric) messages through the careful consideration of etymology, tone, use of symbol, and consideration of form. Within Lyotard, rhetorical questions call us to read through, in, around, and behind his words because it is this very activity that will be the object of investigation, just as Augustine offers up his life as an invitation for us to join him in the activity to become precisely his own story’s sought referent. No matter our idolatry of proofs and reason, these two allusions reveal their very preconditions to rest in something passionate—and the third offers us only further evidence. While Lyotard’s self-denomination in the Reading Dossier as “A,” presumably for “author,” hearkens Kierkegaard’s use in Either/Or as designating the writing of the aesthete, rather than “B,” the Judge with whom he corresponds, it is the direct and indirect references to Fear and Trembling that are most notable.12 The latter text is parenthetically noted in The Differend’s fifth chapter, “Obligation,” which then engages it in an intimate dialogue on obligation—one so intimate we cannot clearly hear their every connection. One voice proposes that “the speculative non-sense of ‘Auschwitz’ could conceal a paradox of faith,” while the other rhetorically asks if Abraham’s command by God is any less intelligible Nazi memorandum commanding the round-up and concentration of Jews, and the elliptical dispute only leaves us with the sense that their referent commands not obedience, but obligation (§§161-63). This direct address of Fear and Trembling allows us to consider it as parallel to The Differend’s project, thereby reading the latter as grappling with an ethical conundrum, but further chasing the indirect allusions to Fear and Trembling throughout Lyotard’s text allows us a deeper parallel to Kierkegaard concerning pedagogy.

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Both texts struggle with and against silence in various instantiations, although one of its modes directly concerns the merger of content and form: that type of silence that issues from authorial failure. Lyotard’s admittance of his failure to clearly communicate hearkens Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes de silentio, that paradoxical authorial embodiment of silence through another’s voice, who admits he fails to be able to understand Abraham.13 Further, it is silence’s opposite that presents itself as another telling allusion. Recall the previous quotation of Lyotard’s derisive tease that the Reading Dossier “will allow the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her, to ‘talk about the book’ without having read it” (p. xiv). His barb or jest succeeds if it makes us aware that there is something in us that desires to be able to “talk about” things without the labor of “working through” them. Kierkegaard’s Johannes prefaces Fear and Trembling with a letter complaining that everyone is impatiently going further—“everyone begins in order to go further”—even as he sighs, “Perhaps it would be premature and untimely to ask them where they really are going.” 14 Just as Lyotard cheekily sorrows that “in the next centuries there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time” (p. xv), Johannes sorrows that “in our age, everyone is unwilling to stop with faith but goes further.” 15 As with Descartes’ Meditations, few readers will want to admit that they are “one of those readers,” perhaps so much so that they refuse to become one of them, and instead exercise a “working through” that is not a “going further,” but stays at the site of the bruise (perhaps like the Knight of Infinite Resignation) to persistently press at it, keep the pain, the obligation, immediately present. Why would we not (besides the obvious disinclination to struggle and pain and sense that it is “a waste of time,” and that “success is gaining time” [p. xv])? Kierkegaard, much later, remarks: People who are profoundly lacking in learning and are given to clichés are frequently heard to say that a light shines over the Christian world, whereas a darkness enshrouds paganism. This kind of talk has always struck me as strange, inasmuch as every more thorough thinker, every more earnest artist still regenerates himself in the eternal youth of the Greeks. The explanation for such a statement is that one does not know what one should say but only that one must say something.16

One may ultimately fail to say something, not because of a lack of courage or habituated laziness, but because one knows equally and at once that one doesn’t know what to say and that one must say something: “For there to be no phrase is impossible, for there to be And a phrase is necessary. It is necessary to make linkage” (§102). Why? One must “find, if not what can legitimate judgment (the ‘good’ linkage), then at least how to save the honor of thinking” (p. xii). How? “He or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (§93). The way can only be indirectly pointed to through allusions, although these allusions can help one to learn to see the path.

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The allusions are one’s guide by implanting in the reader some feeling, by making the reader feel, the allusions are teaching him or her to feel. A guide that comes to us by allusion is the biblical Abraham: “But what did Abraham do? He arrived neither too early nor too late.”17 Which may be to say that he worked through the impossible to think command without just going further past it. Which may be why Johannes rewrites variations of the story of Abraham and Isaac before seeking to explain why we cannot understand it. Which may be why Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is both, as its subtitle notes, a lyric and a dialectic: part affective attunement and part intellectual grappling. And this may be an intentional allusion by Lyotard, as he similarly and repeatedly uses the same wording to speak of the “now” that “is not now, it is not yet or already no longer, [and that] one cannot say now now, it’s too early (before) or too late (after)” (p. 74).18 The now is felt “as an occurrence, as an event” (p. 74) that is like Kierkegaard’s theorization of Abraham’s transgression of the ethical, the universal, of the communicable, by his transcendence of it as a particular raised to relation with the absolute. To speak of this event, we must remain in the universal, for only in these “universes presented by phrases,” can we situate its constituting instances in relation to a fixed, absolute now, thereby making the now’s presentation presentable as a situated phrase (p. 74). Of course, what we speak is not the now itself, the event itself, but its capture in the situation; in itself, the now, the event, will always exceed our grasp. Lyotard, as much as Kierkegaard, needs one to be attuned to feeling the impossible command for there to be a dialectic of one’s referent and its sense, and to then infinitely feel the failure of our work and the presence of some absence of sense in every situation. Our thinking must learn to feel what resists presentation: The periphery of thoughts is as immeasurable as the fractal lines. . . . Thoughts never stop changing their location one with the other. When you feel like you have penetrated far into their intimacy in analyzing either their so-called structure or genealogy or even post-structure, it is actually too late or too soon. One cloud casts its shadow on another, the shape of clouds varies with the angle from which they are approached.19

Our thinking must become like clouds in the activity of being clouds that is only ever a becoming. The thought will feel as wispy as a cloud, one’s activity as a clutching at air, a feeling of having “nothing to grab onto,” against the weight of there always, ever being an “and,” a necessity to phrase, to found an idiom, to make the linkage—and “that’s just it: the feeling that the impossible is possible. . . . Absurd, of course. But the lightning flash takes place—it flashes and bursts out in the nothingness of the night, of clouds, or of the clear blue sky” (p. 75). What does this style look like? According to the dossier section entitled “Style,” Lyotard writes that his “naïve ideal is to attain a zero degree style [le degré zéro du style] and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were” (p. xiv). Precisely what a “zero degree” style may be for Lyotard is vague, and

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his qualification of his ideal as “naïve” may admit his own recognition that he does not or does not always achieve it, as he further adds, “There sometimes ensues a tone of wisdom, a sententious one, which should be disregarded” (p. xiv). Like Socrates’ claim to have only the wisdom that recognizes what he does not know, Lyotard eschews the typical premise of an author having an answer. However, like the analysis above suggests, we must again ask if he is being a clever speaker. Before considering any of his content as offering answers, our task remains to just see what this style, this style he may not successfully attain, truly is, and whether he achieves it. Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero paints a conception of this style by objecting to Jean-Paul Sartre’s insistence that literature is a matter of taking positions.20 Understanding Lyotard’s postmodernism as a re-reading that seeks to lay bare the authorial influence by one’s positions, we can understand Lyotard’s sympathy with Barthes’ conception. But, at once, The Differend inescapably, no matter how indirectly, unites questioning with an ethical engagement. The phrase calls to us, and demands our response. While he may lift the command from the ethical realm by making it a necessity, rather than obligation, this only charges us with redefining our understanding of ethics. Thus, Lyotard is hardly writing in the “artless” style in the stances described by Barthes, that one wherein style is a secret beyond the limits of literature, or shown in the silence of John Cage (a frequent reference in Lyotard’s works), and the absence of artifice commanded by the Danish film style of Dogme 95. These engagements may be prime examples illustrating Lyotard’s descriptions of attempts to embody the revelation of the unthought, but Lyotard’s style itself is distinct from them. “Zero degree,” however, may also mean the equally obtuse “deconstructed” style, which can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, a deconstructing style may be one that engages careful textual analysis and a hermeneutical disassembly of ideas. Such style could be demonstrated in Platonic elenchos, defined in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione and elaborated in his Poetics and Rhetoric, and codified in practice in medieval analysis of sacred texts. If this is Lyotard’s goal, he achieves it. His critical reading of texts is superior. However, the “deconstructed” style can also designate the Heideggerian “destroyed” text, wherein he tries to erase the signification of words by printing “Being,” “Beyng,” or replacing the term with only an ellipsis.21 This model is only accurate for Lyotard if that which is destroyed is not the signification of words, but their grammar’s inherent tendency to fictionalize sense through linear narrative. Finally, the designation of a “zero degree” style may also suggest that he intends to stylistically render a minimalist work. At first glance, if this was the intent, Lyotard seems to fail miserably for the density of his excurses and profound clutter of allusions and references appear to be the opposite of the minimalist style, say, of Samuel Beckett. Amidst his complexity, however, there is something minimal: apparent connection. In his content, this lack is between topics; in form, it is between sections and excurses. There is no linear narrative,

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no persistent tone of authorial opinion, and no delineated form of logical argument to guide the interconnection between his many topics. In this lack, the absence is pregnant with the reader’s own prejudices for the devices and interpretations one wishes to find. Read through Lyotard, minimalism’s sparse prose or visual emptiness intends to reveal a grasp of an excess of meaningful density. This intent is captured in Lyotard’s reflection on “Looking Through,” a painting by the Californian abstract expressionist Sam Francis—a striking acrylic whose canvas is mostly white, with only a few grided bars of color partially painted—wherein he writes that Francis has painted a “perdition, the loss from which is engendered the bliss of seeing,” wherein, “he finds that the flesh is merely possible, that another presence, an unpresentable one, derealizes its oh-so-kind self-evidence,” and that the cruelty of art rests in “Flying the colours of making themselves seen, here colours let glimpse what they blind.”22 In the white expanse where color brightly but barely peaks through, Francis painted the perdition—not the eternal damnation, but the destruction of solid material. The absence made visible by the colors lets the sense reveal itself. This is what Lyotard ends his reflection by naming: “Working through.”23 As with the conception of “zero degree” as an “artless” style, the description seems compatible with Lyotard’s intention, although discordant with his apparent style. But, becoming aware of our own frustrations with his text—its lack of connections, his evasion of direct judgments and pronouncements—is to become aware of his dense text’s absence. Lyotard’s style has an undercurrent of minimalism revealed by the apparent inversion of minimalism: it presents us with the excessive density so as to show emptiness that is pregnant with immeasurable meaning. Concretely, what this style produces is a text containing seven chapters, each further divided into numbered sections of varying but brief length. Each section makes a clear point, even as the linkages from section to section may be jumpily indirect. Each chapter ends with one feeling its conceptual clarity while, simultaneously, each stands disjointedly discontinuous from one another. Interspersed unevenly between these numbered sections are off-set “Notices:” brief, but shockingly intense, excurses on textual fragments from or on Protagoras, Gorgias, Plato, Antisthenes, Kant, Gertrude Stein, Aristotle, Hegel, Levinas, the French Declaration of Rights of 1789, and the Cashinahua. Lyotard asks that his reader, for the main text, to be “A philosophical one,” but defines such as, simply, one who has not given up on language nor wishes to save, win against, or gain time; and, while the dossier permits one to sound intelligible with little work, the Notices, he warns, require “a little more professional a reader” (p. xiv).24 His warning is well warranted. Each surfaces as an explanation or critique of textual points in a manner similar to how one, in conversation, may digress into tangents or, in writing, one may add a footnote, to which one relegates excessively technical explanations. Just as the chapters follow in thought, albeit

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far from linearly, his Notices work together according to a partially inconceivable but intuitable order and there is a degree to which all of the Notices also link to one another—for example, Kant is specifically addressed across four separate Notices, and most cite one another literally or by tone and theme. Their construction, as evidence of another clever element in this highly artfully crafted text, lays bare a theoretic order of narrative that follows thematically, like clouds melding form from form, rather than linearly. Just as the tone of thought and expression changes between the differing elements of the presentation in his text, the relation between the names of the chapters, the themes of the numbered paragraphs, and the topics of the Notices, at least apparently, is neither systematic nor immediately graspable in a rational, easily elaborated manner. However, the sections frequently note parenthetical cross-references, directing the reader forwards or backwards in the text to explanatory sections. This forward and backward movement (which is also as much a swirling, ascending, and descending one) is again illustrative of his depiction of how thinking itself works. Like clouds, thought’s periphery is immeasurable, they “never stop changing their location one with the other”; just when you congratulate yourself for having “penetrated far into their intimacy in analyzing . . . their so-called structure . . . it is actually too late or too soon. One cloud casts its shadow on another, the shape of clouds varies with the angle from which they are approached.”25 Thus, we must keep shifting our position, like his text, rigorously, yet frenetically, keeps shifting. His incessant alteration also provokes an allusion to the naturalness of how our thought can switch between natural attitudes and scientific attitudes (to borrow the terms from Husserl). And this alteration also illustrates how the work can possess a natural, intuitive flow at the same time as the non-linear narrative fights its easy transcription. The paradox of ease and impossibility that this work illuminates is representative of Lyotard’s own meta-thematic of grand narratives. His evasion of a linear narrative capable of simple transcription, in favor of one that weaves divergent, sometimes contradictory voices from the canon with echoes from parasitic narratives that we already hold, pointedly reveals the inherent paradoxes and problems yet necessity of all narratives. This very dissolution of boundaries as a disillusionment repeats an allusion to Wittgenstein, who wrote, “my propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” 26 For Lyotard, the only possible way to re-write modernity is to explore the “senseless” as the only new possibility for “sense.” This re-writing may be a means by which he can give voice to the silenced victim. To understand this rewriting, though, we must climb through and attempt to articulate the flow of the content of The Differend.

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The Problem of Bearing Witness While it was difficult to encapsulate The Differend’s form and style, to say what this text is about is both easy and nearly impossible. Its content enacts, in the reader, what it describes: “making it impossible to speak, making it impossible to keep quiet” (§16). It is about so very many things, and yet, only one thing: the differend—something that is what cannot be said. In its immensely rigorous address of differends, the text is both a radically new contribution to philosophical thinking and an exemplar of scholarship on both contemporary and canonical philosophical ideas. Its content has a singular referent, and yet it intensely explores the philosophy of language (both the structuralist traditions coming from de Saussure and the key analytic figures, as well as analyses of narrative and alternative literary models), metaphysics (primarily questions of reality, but also systematic philosophy and religious questions), ontology (from the Pre-Socratics to the Cartesian and Heideggerian instantiations), ethics (especially the differentiation between an obligation and a necessity born from the prohibition of shifting from the descriptive to the prescriptive modes of discourse), and the social, political, and economic (from the anthropological, historical, and Marxist perspectives, as well as an extensive consideration of the holocaust). This dizzying scope contains neither fluff nor gloss; instead, its breadth is its rigor: each exploration forms an aspect of the work’s comprehensive consideration of differends. But, its breadth does prohibit this review from providing full textual analysis and a proper elaboration of its many direct references or strong allusions to other thinkers, theories, and ideas throughout. It will, however, attempt a sketch of its content through the summation of each chapter, and then pursue key threads and themes relating to the problem of bearing witness through close, but selective, textual analysis. Further textual analysis of sections concerning testimony will be found in the chapter’s subsequent section. To begin a sketch of The Differend, it is useful to begin with two artistic references: the leitmotif and the mise-en-abyme, more commonly known today as the Droste effect (thanks to Droste cocoa advertising). A leitmotif is the “leading motif” of a work that surfaces persistently, but briefly, as in the recurring musical phrase in a composition or literary metaphor frequently and variously hearkened. The Differend has a singular leitmotif, the differend, that is embodied through various examples and surfaces continually throughout the text’s many various considerations. Each chapter, however, contains sections and Notices that cluster about specific themes that provide their respective chapters with a distinct thematic tone, their own leitmotifs, without losing sight of the work’s guiding theme. Thus, I propose that we understand The Differend’s “one and many” content as engaging the mise-en-abyme, an artistic effect found in early medieval art wherein a picture appears within its own picture, which initiates a visual infinite regress to the very boundaries of resolution. Each chapter is not its own mechanical reproduction of the whole, nor is it something

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wholly distinct; instead, each pursues the central leitmotif of the differend in its own sketch, which is both a sketch of and a part of the full work itself. Thus, The Differend’s seven chapters—“1. Differend,” “2. The Referent, The Name,” “3. Presentation,” “4. Result,” “5. Obligation,” “6. Genre, Norm,” and “7. The Sign of History”—centrally concern the analysis of the differend even while each is representative of an aspect of its study; these miniature leitmotifs are, respectively: 1. the legal, 2. the metaphysical, 3. the phenomenological and linguistic, 4. Auschwitz, 5. the ethical and religious, 6. the political and social, and 7. the narrative and economic. In its composition, the fourth chapter serves as the text’s hinge: the three preceding chapters define the differend and explore its origins, nature, consequences, and many failed addresses; the fourth chapter rigorously analyzes the differend of Auschwitz according to the frame established in the previous chapters; and the three final chapters focus on our various practical addresses to differends (extensively, but not exclusively, the differend of Auschwitz) and their failures. In a sense, the text moves from the presuppositions of the problem to the concrete case and into practical instantiations. While this preliminary sketch of the arc of the text’s content may be useful to conceptually contextualize its elements, its formulation is overly reductive, and thus, we must move to a fuller consideration through a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. The Differend’s first chapter, “Differend,” contains 46 numbered sections and Notices on Protagoras, Gorgias, and Plato. Without offering us a thesis statement and methodological plan, this chapter nevertheless establishes the problem and presents a grand sketch that will be filled out in the later chapters. This establishment and sketchy plot is presented provocatively through the preeminent differend and Lyotard’s abiding example: the holocaust survivor who is forbidden from testifying to the existence of the gas chambers due to the binding logic of the historical revisionists that only permits the truth of such testimony to be from one who experienced them—and, thus, dead. This impossible bind is a specific example of a differend, but leads to Lyotard’s greater concern of the differend that is “Auschwitz,” which subsequently leads to the genus itself: the inexpressible. Thus, Lyotard defines and explicates the differend through the introduction to the historical revisionist’s binding logic. This example situates the problem into a legal framework, which allows, first, the logical bind to be revealed as part of a cognitive genre of language that has its ends in the determination of truth and falsity, and second, the extended analyses of the problems of testimony, including silence and verification. Silence is the consequence of a differend, but also provides the clue by which to undo the differend’s wrong: the silence must be lifted in order to establish the reality of the referent. This provokes the question that guides the following two chapters: what are the requirements for the verification of the referent? The answer rests in linkage (l’enchaînment), which is introduced here and worked out in the following two chapters. The Protagoras and Gorgias Notices within this chapter concern paradoxes: the logic they follow and subvert. Some differends will be

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paradoxes, insofar as both are instances wherein a party is entrapped in a catch22—damned if one does and damned if one doesn’t—and suffers a wrong by having one’s testimony silenced. However, some differends—perhaps one will say true differends—are not paradoxes, but are cases of the truly incommensurable. A paradox is a logical bind, and “binds” suggest their possibility of being unbound, untangled. The incommensurate is that which lacks a standard or rule by which to judge it, and a lack cannot be undone, but only filled. Both problems suggest possible remedies, but, to undo a knot is a different sort of fix than to fill a lack: an undone knot is no longer a knot, whereas a filled lack is still a lack that has been filled. The final Notice in this first chapter is on Plato and explores ways of speaking—testimony, dialogue, and metalepsis—thus beginning our exploration of how to fill the void cleaved by differends. The second chapter, “The Referent, The Name,” picks up a thread from the first concerning the establishment of the reality of the referent and reveals that the revisionist position, however distasteful, is actually a very common one precisely because it relies upon “common sense” forms of argument and validation. “It is easy then for an opponent to refute whoever affirms the reality of a referent by enclosing him in a dilemma,” one which precisely questions what is the real (§64)? The chapter’s task, then, is to debunk the common sense presumption that verification of any referent can be done by naming it. But, the chapter provides no simple “philosophical” as opposed to “common” answer to the problem of verification because our common sense means of verification are the only common means we have to verification. This “naming” of the referent can be done through donning it with a proper name or a deictic (e.g., “here,” “you,” “that,” those terms whose meaning rely on context), ostensive definition (pointing to it), or description. Thus, while this common sense presumption, which is our reliance on incomplete modes of verification, fuels the revisionist reliance on a mistaken “scientific” genre of language (e.g., “seeing is believing”), its debunking also prohibits the witness from simply naming the event and being able to presume that others will understand its truth. Lyotard reveals that reality can only be sufficiently established when a referent is verified by being declared the same through the descriptive, nominative, and ostensive regimens, and then there must be a fourth phrase to affirm that these acts all concern one and the same referent, and that this procedure must be reestablished each and every time the referent is questioned (§65-6). This multidimensional method of verification demands that we speak in varying language games and doing so thoughtlessly gives rise to incommunicable impasses; thus, it is necessary to consider here the proper linkage of phrases. To link is to phrase; it is the establishment of reality. But, “reality entails the differend,” and this insight entails the chapter’s closing section on Auschwitz, which establishes only that its reality has yet to be established (§92). Reality is the establishment of the universe presented by the phrase (the phrase event, the occurrence that happens, the Ereignis or arrive-t-il?); thus, the

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third chapter, “Presentation,” explores precisely that—the presentation—and that which is not presented in the phrase event: the negative presentation. The chapter begins with Lyotard’s critique of Descartes to show that his cogito ergo sum contains three presuppositions: first, both the “I” and doubt; second, the mechanism to verify the firstness of the “I doubt;” and, third, the prior phrase that presents what one then doubts. The point of this critique is to reveal that the cognitive and logical regimens presuppose the presentation, thus they may come before and found the “how,” but do not come prior to the “what,” and “a phrase is a ‘what’” (§99). Thus this “what,” the phrase, is here intensely scrutinized as to its nature and happening, and how this happening is serial and successive, and conducted through linkages. The chapter’s first Notice is the text’s first of four on Kant, and concerns the interplay of sense and understanding. The other two Notices, on Gertrude Stein and Aristotle, concern the seriality of phrases. In Stein, this operates by the linkage “and,” and, in Aristotle, the presentation of a phrase is explored through “now,” thus seriality is explored as a matter of time and then decided to be, instead, a matter of being. What proves critical, however, is that our central problematic, the differend, demands that we seek the nonbeing phrase, the “what” that is not, insofar as what has to be established is that that has not presented itself. The goal, then, is to understand the negative presentation. The fourth chapter brings us to what I called above the hinge of the text. It connects the first half to the latter half by concerning, most directly and extensively, Auschwitz as analyzed through the forms given in the first three chapters, and offering the content that will be addressed practically in the final three. It is a hinge, then, by connecting and conducting the text along its way and, in this way, it is like the rest of the text; but, also like a hinge, it is something distinct from the rest of the text. Its form differs from the other chapters by its numbered sections being longer and titled. Its content differs by its concentrated focus. In both form and content, it differs from the rest of the text by offering the most direct pronouncements concerning the differend. There are four main addressees (thus referents) here: Theodor Adorno, G. W. F. Hegel, Plato, and the Nazis. The analyses of Adorno and Hegel lay bare a division between negative dialectics and positive speculative philosophy that allow us to see the torn state of the “we” “after Auschwitz” against the “we” of the victims prohibited the Greek ideal of the “beautiful death.” This dichotomy makes us ask about the possibility of a synthesis—a third party to mediate between the differend’s two sides—but Lyotard affirms most clearly the true incommensurability of the differend of Auschwitz, and explains how we are left without a result. In the face of the impossibility of a result, the last three chapters demonstrate our nevertheless necessary attempt to find the linkage that will lift the silence and obliterate the differend. The impossibility ensures our failure and makes our activity absurd, and yet grounds its necessity. It is understandable, then, that Lyotard begins the chapter with a consideration of Kierkegaard, in

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order to demarcate the difference between obedience and obligation, between an “ought” and a “must,” and show how our task is necessary without this meaning that it ethical or religious. It is further understandable, then, why he moves to a Notice on Levinas and subsequent consideration of the call and the attempt to know God. With the religious proving futile, he ends the chapter with a second Notice on Kant concerning law, freedom, and ethics. The deflating consequences of the ethical and religious considerations of the last chapter provoke the sixth, “Genre, Norm,” to begin with the claim “we see no reason to grant a ‘mystical’ profundity to the abyss that separates cognitives and prescriptives,” and thus turn to the other practical science of politics and its related discussion of the social (§178). While the differend’s explanation and address may be kept from the “‘mystical’ profundity,” this does not mean that it is merely a problem in thought alone. Lyotard firmly establishes this through several sections on incommensurability and exploring, in the third Kant Notice and its following sections, how thought can begin to think the incommensurate and how the demand for such thought signals the conflict between our modern and postmodern tendencies. The surfacing of this distinction between the modern and postmodern—its only mention in the work—is brief but critical to retain in mind for the remainder of the book. The four subsequent sections quickly summon and plow through politics, capital, art, and the social, and provide elliptical hints of evidence to fuel our inner skirmish between the modern and postmodern. These four options provide the richest resources for addressing the inexpressible, and yet are the most replete with binding grand narratives that cover over and create, and never undo, differends. This duality of provocation and obfuscation is more clearly sketched out in the rest of the chapter’s consideration of politics and a revelation of a distinction between its normative and deliberative forms. “The Sign of History” is the final chapter of The Differend, and does not offer the pleasure, however superficial, of Hollywood endings. It is, however, like Hollywood films, predominately about narratives. The previous chapter left us with the idea that deliberative politics offers a promising model for thinking and acting in a manner honorable to the demands from differends, and the warning that the deliberative is far more fragile than the narrative form. The social, which is rife with differends and bears the charge of pushing these to its borders, operates most efficiently through the rigid construction of narratives. This is explored instructively in the chapter’s first Notice on the storytelling style of the Cashinahua native tribes—one that founds the community’s unity by the ritual telling of its history and permits itself to become history to others by a narrative style that establishes a rigid protocol for the open possibility of forming new linkages. This leads to the consideration of history itself, how it is done, and its promise of being the means to reveal old truths. This deliberation is aided by the work’s fourth and final Kant Notice, concerning historical inquiry, and then expanded in following sections into a critique of Marxism, the economic genre of

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language, and other philosophies of history. While narrative is exceedingly effective at filling the lack created by differends, Lyotard murkily reveals its failure to genuinely remedy the originary harm throughout the chapter. He concludes, in only two brief sections, with a reminder that the occurrence will happen, that differends will be born, and that they summon us to address them; and, while their remedy is impossible because they resist our testimony and elude our political programs, we “can bear witness to it,” the occurrence, and it “is to be judged, all the way through to its incomparability” (§264). This summary provides what Lyotard’s text does not: thematic contextualization and a sense of linear development. While being an imposition of a narrative arc upon his text, for this section’s purposes it is beneficial for revealing the interconnections necessary to fully understanding the problem of bearing witness. Thus, with this sketchy roadmap of the chapters’ interconnects, we must turn to the elaboration of these details and their precise connections. This will be done by textual analysis that weaves together four broad themes: the differend, paradox and incommensurables, the phrase universe and its consequent problem of naming that invokes silence, linkage, and metalepsis, and, finally, presentation. This weave can be understood by the provocation of and in the question: what is the problem of bearing witness? In essence, it is the problem of the differend. Similar to the creation of a paradox, it is a case wherein there is a logical rupture between parties that prohibits successful communication. This demands that we seek to better understand the definition of a differend, its nature, and how it comes to be. To understand its creation, we must understand the event that provides the opportunity for a phrase universe to come to be. In the establishment of the phrase universe, the differend results from instances of silence. These silences must be undone by the linkage of phrases. To properly link phrases, one must understand the problems inherent in naming. This means that we must seek to understand presentation, that is, reality. These issues are predominately established within the first three chapters of The Differend (the last four chapters will help us to understand the problem of testimony and will be addressed in this chapter’s subsequent section). Thus, this chain of topics necessary for our understanding of the problem of bearing witness forms the outline this section will proceed through. Différend could be translated as dispute, a difference and disagreement of opinion or interpretation, a conflict or quarrel or dissension—for the consequence of a differend is a failure of communication, an impasse—although any of these translations obfuscate the technical complexity Lyotard instills within it and seeks to reveal. Short of using them all at once, and perhaps supplemented with a translation as discord, to reveal how the conflict is a tearing apart (dis-) of the heart (-cor), “differend” is the best term to use, even as it necessitates careful and difficult explanation. Lyotard broaches the act of definition of the differend by an example: the elaboration of Robert Faurisson’s denial of the testimony about the death chamber from holocaust survivors.27 Historical revision is a pro-

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vocative concrete practice that permits us to see the social, legal, and political implications of the philosophically perplexing notion. His first sentence of the text, which will be repeated verbatim and alluded to throughout the work, tells us, “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (§1).28 This situation that renders one mute is the differend. “I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff [le plaignant] is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim [une victime]” (§12). The legal framework is productive, but must be taken as only one mode of interpretation, as ten sections later the differend is defined as “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence” (§22).29 Between the two definitions Lyotard offers two further illustrations. The first is of an editor who points out that a masterpiece cannot be such if it has been rejected by all publishers, for then it would remain unknown (§3). The merely potential masterpiece is silenced like the merely potential witness. The second illustration is of a testimonial bind of a resident of the fictitious Ibansk, the land of Ivans, from the Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev’s Kafkaesque novel, The Yawning Heights. 30 This bind silences the witness because its premise—“either the Ibanskian witness is not a communist, or else he is”—is impossible to prove either way (§4). He can declare whatever he likes or whatever one wants to hear: he is or he is not a communist—but how do we know for certain that he tells the truth or that he does not, what does it mean to be one, or not to be one, what one is, or what a communist is not? As Zinoviev’s character verbally sighs, “our life is made up of attempts to solve insoluble problems.”31 Lyotard emphasizes how his communist nature renders a particularly deep differend because this “object” is neither observable through concrete symptoms, like the presence of a virus in a body, nor directly, like a nebula in the sky. There is no established and consistent scientific method to deduce the communistic character of one’s nature (§5).32 This suggests, too, that Lyotard’s address to the historical revisionist is not going to be merely a juridical presentation of empirical counter evidence, but will seek to tackle the underlying perplexity inherent in that state of prohibited language. This perplexity is explored predominantly through the logic and long history of double binds. There is an important difference between paradoxes and differends: a paradox logically leads us to an inconsistent or impossible conclusion whereas a differend leads to the incommensurable, to a state of affairs wherein there is no single rule by which to judge two or more sides. Nevertheless, there is an intimacy between paradoxes and differends, and exploring the former allows us greater insight into the latter. Thus, Lyotard moves through a series of Notices on paradoxes in Protagoras, Gorgias, and Plato, and their further re-elaboration in the legal and linguistic framework of the revisionists. The legal notation of the double bind denotes what “a wrong [tort] would be: a dam-

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age [dommage] accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage” (§7). The wrong, which is the silenced state that results from an impossible dilemma, functions by the simple, logical either/or premise: “either you are the victim of a wrong or you are not” (§8). Lyotard reveals how the wrong unravels a possible response: If you are not [victime d’un tort, a victim of a wrong], you are deceived (or lying) [vous vous trompez (ou vous mentez)] in testifying that you are. If you are, since you can bear witness to this wrong, it is not a wrong, and you are deceived (or lying) in testifying that you are the victim of a wrong. Let p be: you are the victim of a wrong; not p: you are not; Tp: phrase p is true; Fp: it is false. The argument is: either p or not p; if not-p, then Fp; if p, then not-p, then Fp (§8).

The logical notation’s purpose is to show that this bind violates the principle of non-contradiction, that is, one of the three most basic laws of logical thought that says that contradictory statements cannot both be true and false at once: if A is true and its opposite is B, B cannot also be true. But, Lyotard shows us, life is full of contradictions, and some of these are truly impossible. Just as the phenomenological reduction demands that we suspend judgment by premises deemed law, the everyday presence of impossible contradictions demands that we reconsider the “law” of non-contradiction. Logic silences the cases when A and B are both opposites and true: it commits a wrong. And, these are the cases to which we must pay heed, for these wrongs cannot be undone if we cannot undo their binds. The pursuit of logical flaws moves Lyotard into his text’s following three Notices that expose the paradoxical nature of the double bind that logic can force, the ontological conclusions that hang upon the possibility of a witness giving testimony or not, and the philosophical and political consequences of how one speaks and by what logic one speaks. The Protagoras Notice unfolds the vicious logic of the double bind through Protagoras’ demand for payment from Euathlus, his rhetoric pupil, who refuses to pay on account of not having won a debate (which would verify his receipt of instruction). Protagoras, however, shows Euathlus that his successful refusal of payment would be his successful end to a debate, and result in his owing the payment; and, if he lost the debate, as the loser’s fine, he would still owe the payment. Damned if he wins and damned if he does not, the student cannot argue otherwise. Although Lyotard can: in his critical re-reading, he dissects the bind to show how one may begin to justify crying foul. The paradox, Lyotard reveals, rests on the fact that, for Protagoras, a phrase must take itself as its referent: “I did not win, I say it, and in saying it I win” (p. 6). Lyotard argues that Protagoras, here, “confuses the modus (the declarative prefix: Euathlus says that) with the dictum, the negative universal that denotes a reality (Euathlus did not win once)” (p. 6). Following Bertrand Russell’s analysis, this trick can be avoided by the addition of a rule: a proposition that refers to a totality of propo-

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sitions cannot be included in that totality. This addition would mean that the proposition that is the verdict of the debate cannot be included in the debate that judges the totality of other arguments that Euathlus has made. The justification behind this addendum is that the current debate’s inclusion in the whole denies it the right to be the universal principle or rule by which they are judging. So, a good logician can simply reject Protagoras’ form of argumentation. While a logician despises this terrible slight of logic, Lyotard tells us, the sophist loves it. The sophist neither denies nor ignores the principle of noncontradiction, including the verdict in the judgment, but “unveils” it, uses it to his benefit (p. 7). Because, why not? The rules established for judgment did not include the rule that the verdict could not be included in the debated cases. In a parenthetical remark, Lyotard notes that while the sophist laughs at his mastery of winning argumentation, in other cases, especially wherein one is the victim of such mastery, we cry—and he refers us back to the example of the bind wherein the Ibansk cannot prove his nature to be communist (§4). More specifically, Lyotard tells us that Russell’s way of avoiding these cases is by the establishment of a set of rules that carefully defines a genre of discourse (that is, a set of rules for linking phrases). His genre is logic, and its goal is to decide the truth of a phrase. Protagoras’ rhetoric, however, plays by a different set of rules (perhaps one that makes the weaker argument the better in order to win, that is, to persuade the other). Lyotard then asks: “Is it acceptable within another genre” (p. 7)? Protagoras’ rhetoric, yes, certainly, for it plays by some rules. But, his response within Russell’s genre is never acceptable. A differend will be born when two or more parties speak in different languages, when they play by different rules. While we can discern faulty steps in paradoxes’ arguments or craft impressive objections, the fact remains that Euathlus, engaged in the event itself, committed to playing by its rules, cannot speak. He must pay the price.33 This Notice’s investigation into paradox primes us for the text’s quick declaration that: “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong” (§9). To be a victim is to be a recipient of some harm. The victim is his or her own witness, knowing oneself to be this recipient, to be one who knows what harm one has suffered. “Witness,” from the Old English wit, “knowledge,” is one who has knowledge of something. It is, thus, sensible for another to ask what this something is that he or she has knowledge. It is, thus, up to the victim/witness to present the object of his or her knowledge: “Reality is always the plaintiff’s responsibility” (§10). The defense’s responsibility, on the other hand, is only to refute what the plaintiff says, and this is, thus, the defense’s advantage.34 This explains Lyotard’s remark that “the defense is nihilistic, the prosecution pleads for existents” (§10). To place this in terms of the negative and positive, this means that the activity of the defense is negation, the defense negates X, but the X must be given, said, shown, or presented by the plaintiff, whose command is positive demonstration. “That is why it is up to the victims of extermination camps to prove that extermination. This is our way of

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thinking that reality is not a given, but an occasion to require that establishment procedures be effectuated in regard to it” (§10). Thus, for the survivor, her task is to show what seems most obvious, what was reality in the camps. But, how reality was, in this case, is what is put forward as dubious by the logical bind of the revisionist. Lyotard offers us an auxiliary example: “How can I prove that I am not a drug dealer without asking my accuser to bring forth some proof of it and without refuting that proof? How can it be established that labor power is not a commodity without refuting the hypothesis that it is? How can you establish what is not without criticizing what is? The undetermined cannot be established” (§11). Another example could be when the United States demanded that Iraq, before the Third Iraq War, prove that it did not have weapons of mass destruction. The demand is for them to show their weapons; if they do not have any weapons, then, they must show that, too. But, how does one show a lack? If they are demanded to show something, and they produce nothing, the logic given them declares them to be insolently responding. About these commands, Lyotard notes, “Kafka warned us about this. It is impossible to establish one’s innocence, in and of itself. It is a nothingness” (§11). This discourse elucidates Lyotard’s definition of the differend as “the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim,” then expanded as “a case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom” (§12). The “idiom,” here, refers to the genres of discourse or rules governing the type of communication that has been established. When the idioms being employed are different, that is, the testimony and its requirements are from heterogeneous genres of discourse, the tribunal cannot be competent to hear it, that is, the tribunal cannot hear testimony in a genre of discourse outside of what forms it (cf., §13). Lyotard entertains the voice of the skeptic as his dialogical partner throughout the text, here introducing the two interpretations of “can:” “‘The survivors rarely speak’ (no. 1). But isn’t there an entire literature of testimonies . . . ? – That is not it, though. Not to speak is part of the ability to speak, since ability is a possibility and a possibility implies something and its opposite” (§14). On the word “possibility,” Lyotard begins to unravel a crucial difference between not being able to speak and not choosing to speak. “It would be absurd to suppose that human beings ‘endowed with language’ cannot speak in the strict sense, as is the case for stones” (§15). Working through the differences between possibility and necessity again invokes the important negative and positive distinction (which will be addressed in regards to Pseudo-Dionysius at length in the next two chapters and for them both in the final one): “To be able to not speak,” the negation, does not equal “not to be able to speak” a deprivation (§14). Why would they be quiet out of necessity? Because they are threatened if they do

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speak, then . . . but this implies the real possibility that they would speak, which is different than saying they could not. Lyotard, in a style similar to Protagoras, asks, how could such a threat work if those who are silent are not . . . they have not established they are; thus how can they be threatened? This reveals the establishment of the question of the unusual ontological nature of the victim that was explored in this project’s first chapter through Lyotard’s divergence from Heidegger—that is, in so far as humans are those endowed with language, if one cannot speak, one’s humanity, one’s nature, one’s state of being is put into an unreal, condition state. Can one be a witness, one who has knowledge of something, and be unable to demonstrate that of which they have knowledge? Can one be a victim if one cannot demonstrate the damages that render him or her a victim (cf. §§15-16)? Thus, principle A and its opposite, B, are both true at once in the same ways, concerning the same referent: one has and does not have knowledge; one can and cannot speak; and one does and does not speak. Knowing and speaking do not undo the not knowing and not speaking. For, as a further paradox, to not be able “to phrase,” that is, to speak or to testify, is just as victimizing as not being able to stop speaking (§17). This mise-en-abyme induces in the silent-speaking-subject an infinite vertigo issuing from the realization of the endlessness of phrasing. Lyotard links this incessant and unstoppable phrasing to the fear of death, invocative of its feel and source. The phrase event, Ereignis, is that event or occurrence that Heidegger illustrates through the call of conscience and one’s intimate directedness to death. In our fear of death, we suffer trepidation for the unknown to which we are directed every moment we live; we are our dedication to it, that which we cannot experience. Bereft of the possibility of experience, we are kept from a passage through it to some beyond point from which we could reflect back upon it so as to know any one phrase, any one truth, about it. For any phrase to be the last one, there must be another that declares it to be the end. For knowledge about X, there must be a vantage point beyond X from which one is able to turn back around, survey the event, and reflect back upon it. Just as lacking a reflective perch will rob one’s knees the capacity to provide stability, to be unable to speak and to be unable to stop speaking causes a vertiginous existential anxiety. To not be able to stop speaking is to come ever a painful moment late into realization that phrasing is endless: there are millions of linkages that could happen, but none of them are pertinent to the genre of discourse one must work under. When we discovered the Rosetta Stone, we discovered that which gave us the ability to translate hieroglyphics into a language we can read; but, here, for the survivor or any victim of logical binds, imagine a problem for which there is no key for translation, no known language can work, no matter how many languages one may have at one’s disposal. This is a state outside of logic, language analysis, epistemology, and even ethics. One has slipped through a hyperbolic teleological suspension into a state of absolute

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transcendence, face to face with the ontological heart of the problem of testimony. In the revelation of that gaping chasm of endless phrasing, how did we get so high up and far beyond everything when, at once, the “simple” act of communication is a situation of reality wherein the addressee and addressor become such by being instances presented by a phrase (§18)? The addressee, to be, must be given as the addressee, and likewise for the addressor: they are what they do; something names them; thus, they must be what they are by their activity (done through a phrase) of addressing or being addressed. That is, the phrase does not exist as an independent between them, but is what comes from one and is received by the other. The phrase situates them in a “phrase universe” (§25). The phrase universe includes the addressee, the addressor, the referent (that which the phrase is about), and the sense (the meaning). But, in this universe, what are these relations between the instances and what is the nature of language for the instances? Do we own phrases, or, do phrases happen (Ereignis) and present universes in which these four attributes are established? In his Reading Dossier, under the title entitled “Title,” Lyotard asserts: “but the very principle that one ought to treat a work as an object of ownership may constitute a wrong” and, under the heading “Question,” he further explains: “A phrase ‘happens’” (pp. xixii). Lyotard, then, has already established, before the question became apparent, that we do not own language, but language owns us. We do not possess it here like one may hold an object or even like one’s body holds its heart; it holds us. And sometimes this hold flings us so very far outside, no matter how mundane and concrete everyday reality seems to be. How can one end this disembodiment? Toss the floating self a lifeline. Lyotard proposes that to undo a differend, we must link to other families of phrases: To give the differend its due is to institute new addresses, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to be put into phrases. A new competence (or ‘prudence’) must be found (§21).

This quotation is crucial because it is one of the few and certainly the firmest piece of textual evidence that suggests we can undo differends by finding a new idiom. Later textual instances intonate the very impossibility of ever undoing differends, even as they discordantly clash an affirmation that we must do the impossible. “The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence” (§22). Silence, as explored in the first chapter and will be returned to in the last, is included in his definition of phrases because it, too,

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“talks”—while it is a “negative phrase,” it still calls to other phrases to link up with it. Often, the silent phrase indicates what we talk about as “feeling” rather than “knowing.” Its negativity is key. “What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them” (§22). In Plato’s Apology, Socrates reveals that he does what he does, his gad-fly-ly philosophy that is no philosophical doctrine, because it is his divine mission: he is called by the gods “wise,” and called to seek what he is, wisdom, to seek that what he does not know. Here, Lyotard is quite likewise positing philosophy’s mission as bearing witness to that which cannot be testified to, without bringing forth a wrong, bringing on silence to that which is a silence: “In the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away” (§23). This is what is felt—a philosophical call to arms. Philosophy is no removed, objective study done passionlessly in ivory towers. Instead, in towers or dirty streets, on the swayful prairies, in law courts and war rooms and boardrooms and classrooms and suburban homes and coldwater flats, phrases happen, differends ensue. Differends provoke us by being something that is an absence. They demand of us that we try to solve them. They drag us into full perplexity. Differends reveal that we do not own and use language in quite the way we thought. We learn this through the pain that accompanies silence and the pleasure that comes from founding the new idiom by which we can testify. We are summoned to language and by language “to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute new idioms which do not yet exist” (§23). Roused to action, Lyotard plays the coy lover and steps backwards to pick up an earlier line of questioning about threat—“It is possible then that the survivors do not speak even though they are not threatened in their ability to speak should they speak later” (§24)—that further incites action. Different studies jump up and seek out different reasons for these silences: socio-linguists, psycho-linguists, and bio-linguists all seek their own reasons, passions, interests, and contexts for these silences. But Lyotard wants us to (first) seek their logic, which necessitates that we acknowledge how silence substitutes for phrases (in many, many genres of discourse) and how “the phrase replaced by silence would be a negative one” (§24). This means that our action forward must be via negativa; this means that the silence negates at least one instance in the phrase universe—that is, specifically, for the addressee: this case does not fall within your competence; for the referent: this case does not exist; for the sense: it cannot be signified; and for the addressor: it does not fall within my competence. Any of these instances, or several of them, could be the phrase form of a silence. A final requirement for our logical beginning of the study is that we must acknowledge and understand how silences negate and, thus, do not even point to the right instance wherein they could be presented: “Silence does not indicate

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which instance is denied, it signals the denial of one or more of the instances” (§26). Since silence tells us nothing about which instance is negated, when the survivor is silent, we could deduce different interpretations: 1) that the situation in question (the case) is not the addressee’s business (he or she lacks the competence, or he or she is not worthy of being spoken to about it, etc.); or 2) that it never took place (this is what Faurisson understands); or 3) that there is nothing to say about it (the situation is senseless, inexpressible); or 4) that it is not the survivor’s business to be talking about it (they are not worthy, etc.). Or, several of these negations together (§26).

Thus, “The silence of the survivors does not necessarily testify in favor of the non-existence of gas chambers, as Faurisson believes or pretends to believe” (§27). Here, Lyotard has revealed at least four, and likely more, truths and/or definitions of the survivor’s silence—he has, in effect, done what a good sophist does in multiplying the number of possible truths in order to undermine the position of one who thinks that they are holding the one, universal definition. He has undone the legitimacy of the other’s position, but this is just the negative denying of what is, and, thus, he now needs to establish its positive existence: If one wishes to establish the existence of gas chambers, the four silence negations must be withdrawn: There were no gas chambers, were there? Yes, there were. —But, even if there were, that cannot be formulated, can it? Yes, it can. —But even if it can be formulated, there is no one, at least, who has the authority to formulate it, and no one with the authority to hear it (it is not communicable), is there? Yes, there is (§27).

This offers us the plan that Lyotard must accomplish. Thus far, he is only saying what it is; he must now try to produce the argument for every “yes.”35 And, thus, in order to “establish the reality of a referent, the four silences must be refuted,” which must be done through turning the negations of expressions of each instant in the phrase universe into affirmations (§25). Via negativa, we must proceed “in reverse order: there is someone to signify the referent and someone to understand the phrase that signifies it; the referent can be signified; it exists” (§28). Each of these instances exists in a network of meaning, and therefore in a set of rules: each has its own rules for determining what and how it is. Lyotard goes on to demonstrate here that, this being the case, these networks of meaning, that is, rules, give a method to their determination and, thus, a plan for solving the differend. The plan, however, takes us to a seeming dead end. Lyotard works out the rules for these instances and hits a critical point wherein, for the existence of the gas chamber to be demonstrated, the two plus sides must agree on what “gas chamber” means or to what it refers. If accomplished, then, an ostensive phrase, one that “points,” in other words, thus says, “here, this is a gas chamber,” can “show” the gas chamber and link the sense to

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the referent. (The requirements for this demonstration, which is the command and problem of presentation, will be established later as even more demanding.) This is what the cognitive genre of discourse, the network of meaning wherein we establish the four instances of a phrase universe, calls for in an answer. The persistent question, however, is if an answer can happen. Does it happen, not only in the case of the historical revisionist, but even in the sciences, where we expect empirical demonstration of truths, where we would expect or locate this genre? To explore the possibility of the successful functioning of the ostensive phrase in the cognitive genre, Lyotard plumbs Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method for its beneficial claims about the productivity of science increasing by its counter-inductive movement and how theses never agree with the whole of possible evidence, and that this lack of totality of affirmation does not harm the assent of theories.36 Lyotard then redirects his exploration, noting that this is not even the right question with which to begin because the cognitive genre is different than the scientific one. He cites Bruno Latour’s point that the cognitive is more rhetorical than the scientific genre, but then asks: to which genre does Latour’s own remark belong? 37 Answering his own question, he supplies the question that we should be asking about: “It’s up to you to supply the proof that it is not so, but that it is otherwise,” and underscores the necessity that “this will be done according to the minimal rules for adducing a proof (No. 65), or it will not be done at all” (§29). This moment of interview allows Lyotard to establish one more facet in the quest for legitimate testimony and lays an introduction to his later movement into Wittgenstein’s extensive argumentation against language’s function and adoption being a matter of pure ostension. He establishes that, in the sciences, if you say X is not the case, you then proceed to say Y is the case, and how this movement is not a paradox, but a “rather. . . .” The argumentation abides by the rules given by the genre of scientific cognitive discourse, the most important of which is that the reality of a referent can be established. So, if you say it cannot, you are violating its central rule and must then (however circularly) show that you cannot show it for it to be a legitimate response. Lyotard, thus, refines Latour’s remark about science to say that it is not rhetorical, but that some science is, indeed. This refinement is stressing the differentiation between a “well-formed expression” and a “meaningful phrase” (§30). Why? Because the former is concerned with phrases for the cognitive genre wherein truth and falsehood are at stake. The latter is in, amongst others, the genre of common or ordinary language wherein meaning extends beyond truth and falsity. Note that the former phrases may be nonsensical in the latter and the latter may be illogical or false in the former. For example, the phrase “the cat is orange and white,” will stimulate wholly different responses from the logician and the little girl. The “restrictions,” or rules, in any genre of discourse will accordingly determine what

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and how to say things and authorize the addressor and addressee, but these “restrictions” are not really “restrictive”—instead, they open up more possibilities for specification (§31). “Ballgame” may be a singular noun, but delineating the rules as to whether or not the ball can touch the ground, be hit by a bat, hand, or foot, or be made of rubber or leather, multiplies the game into being many. 38 Our confrontation with differends, then, demands that we interrogate the restrictions of their operative genres of language to untangle the many different ends to which each specification aims. (And, in our obedience, we move from considering the cognitive and scientific genres to the historical genre.) Cats and balls may bear no relation to most differends, but every differend will have a connection to the human. “Vidal-Naquet quotes Lucien Febvre quoting Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘We must not believe everything about a man, because a man can say everything. We must believe only what is human about him’ . . .” (§31). I am quoting Lyotard who quotes Vidal-Naquet, the historian who introduces the problem of Faurisson, who quotes Lucien Febvre, another French historian who fully embraced modernism and contextualized all his history against the style of his day, who quotes Cyrano de Bergerac, the dramatist known for a grand nose and great agility with his sword, who is most often known by his transposition into being the subject of other fictionalized or biographically based dramas. From this allusion-rich form, direct your attention to the well-traveled quote’s content: what is the distinction to which Lyotard et al are gesturing? Just as our initial rebuke to holocaust denial is a disgusted dismissal that also, harmfully, covers over never addressed questions, the invocation of humanity hides the necessity of its critical inquiry. “The historian asks: ‘What is human? What impossible? The question we must answer is: Do these words still have a meaning?’ Shouldn’t we believe the inhumanity reported by testimonies of Auschwitz” (§31)? When we look into the eyes of the survivor, how can we let icy reason get hung up upon a logical consistency? Lyotard answers his historian interlocutor: “Inhuman means incompatible with an Idea of humanity,” and spells out two senses of inhumanity (§31). The first is terribly pertinent for the ethical, juridical, political, and historical families of phrases, “where this Idea is necessarily at stake” (§31). But there is a second sense of humanity at work in cognitive phrases, wherein “human predicated an event which relates to the human species, and for which cases can be shown” (§31). In the case of Auschwitz, all of the people involved are considered human in the latter sense, they become what we could describe as mere human being, for “the messages we receive from them are meaningful and offer material for verification, even if they are incompatible with any Idea of humanity” (§31). Thus, our quick sympathy for the historian (and everyone) who cannot fathom how the revisionist could look into the eyes of another human being already so wronged and wrong them again is problematized by Lyotard’s quick revelation of how even the plea of humanity can be incongruous across different genres of discourse. 39

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If inhuman is an actual opposite to human, as rhetoricians in his two previous Notices suggest, the inhuman must be understandable to the degree to which humanity is understandable. But, do we understand either in itself? Is not the idea of inhumanity precisely that which lets us affirm what is human, and, thus, how, in turn, we cannot fathom any human doing otherwise? Recalling Hannah Arendt’s patently obvious and yet radically shocking remark that the Nuremberg Trials revealed the banality of evil, recalls how this phrase is a gesture towards the genuine differend, that to which the holocaust points: how can that soft spoken German man, that good father, that loving husband, that faithful son, that sweet grandmother, that loving mother, that friendly sister, that good nurse, that good professor assist in the discrimination, subjugation, murder, torture, and the inexpert and clinical eradication of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings, of men, women, and children? How is any perpetrator of any such act not a devil incarnate?40 He or she is not a devil because we would not ask how a devil could do such things; we only understand the inhumanity we say we cannot fathom by understanding it to be human. But what is this understanding that we have of humanity and inhumanity? The revelations from the cognitive, scientific, and historical genres demand our further consideration of verification. The key challenge will be how to verify the verification: even if verification is done according to the rules prescribed by the genre employed, how does one ever know that the other “gets it?” This question that Lyotard now pursues is working towards a further ontological and existential (central and timeless) question about whether or not one can ever know the other. Lyotard, or an interlocutor, perhaps he as his interlocutor, answers: “— The addressor presupposes it” (§32). And no other response could be more commonplace. I say X to you because I assume that you will understand it; if I thought that you would not, I would not speak. This presupposition is required for communication to take place. It is only when we think philosophically, that is, we reflect or stop to question things, that we begin to wonder about whether the other really gets it, can ever, could ever, and despite what the other says or shows as “proof.” Skepticism is a secondary condition; in everyday life, we presume (as in Husserl’s natural attitude), it is only when we stop to think it over (as in his phenomenological attitude), that we can broach the question as to whether communication (the actual creation and transference of meaning) has happened. Lyotard, or his other or self-as-other, then adds: “Here you are in the act of doing ‘human sciences,’ of probing the meanings (vouloir-dire), the desires, the beliefs that you presuppose to be the property of these entities, human beings” (§32).41 The “ontological” questions of those sciences are only ontic. They work within the natural attitude’s presumption that beings use language (and, thus, carry into their studies the same presumption as the revisionist, that the witness owns the knowledge of the event to which he or she was witness, and can, thus, present it to another).

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This instrumental model of language, Lyotard reveals, follows a technological model: “thought has ends, language offers means to thought” (§32). As better explicated in his The Postmodern Condition, the technological model follows a “principle of optimal performance: maximizing output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expended in the process).”42 Its “game” is directed not to the ends of truth, justice, or beauty, but to efficiency. Its guiding rule is, essentially, “do not waste my time,” and rejects everything that could compromise the speed and simplicity of its automation. “For questions of [this technical, instrumentalist] language, the pertinence of the ideas of Homo, of Homo faber, of will, and of good will, which belong to other realms, appears not to raise any questions” (§32)! Lyotard’s inclusion of “Homo faber,” “Man the Maker,” as in one who is a smith, after the “Homo” so common it does not need its “sapiens,” “man the wise,” alludes to a distinction employed by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler to designate the view that humanity controls its environment through tools, and its further reference by Henri Bergson, in The Creative Evolution, to define intelligence. In general, such a language and attendant view of humanity ignores how, in between the ends and in and around the means, we are humans, are creatures of habit and impulse, are contexts, are ideas of will and intelligence, manipulation and truth, passions and indiscretions, and more. A “pure” ends and means language would probably look like the language of the builders in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where one grunts “slab!” and the other then fetches it.43 Instrumentalism flattens the world into an impulse and response model that ignores the necessity of context in understanding meaning. Such compression of life, extraction of all life from life, is an act of mauvaise foi, the existential curse of Bad Faith or inauthenticity, and the topic to which Lyotard turns next. “It remains that, if Faurisson is ‘in bad faith,’ Vidal-Naquet cannot convince him that the phrase There were gas-chambers is true” (§33). If, as existentialism argues, one is thrown into the world, into existence, without a pre-given essence, then one’s existence has no essential meaning. There is no inherent reason or purpose for existence. Humanity, to be and have meaning, must make meaning. The only authentic solution is to acknowledge our throwness, embrace our meaninglessness, accept our radical freedom, and take responsibility for our value. From its first provocation to simple refection beyond of the norms of everyday being in the world, every command incites greater anxiety. It is, precisely, the mode of life that we do not have time for anymore, as Lyotard says in his Reading Dossier (p. xiv). Slinking away from our responsibility, we fall into false meaning, fulfill false roles, and live under false values: this is mauvais foi. And, mauvais foi is also a term employed in law to designate the intentional dishonesty of not fulfilling a contract. A breach of contract is cause for a charge of bad faith. Lyotard broaches the affaire Dreyfus to unite the existential and legal instantiations of mauvais foi and to raise the point: “Thus bad will, or bad faith, or a blind belief . . . can prevent truth from manifesting itself and justice

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being done” (§33).44 A point that resounds as pertinent and productive to our quest serving the undoing of differends—and, thus, a resonance Lyotard speedily silences by utterly demolishing it: “—No. What you are calling bad will, etc., is the name that you give to the fact that the opponent does not have a stake in establishing reality, that he does not accept the rules for forming and validating cognitives, that his goal is not to convince” (§33). In other words, any act of covering up evidence shows that the other, the addressee or addressor, has no stake in agreeing to the rules of the language game. A true case of the cognitive genre, the one commanded by the tribunal, requires that the parties agree that the reality of a referent can be established (§29). Our existential complaint is not necessarily false, but this genre cannot even see it as evidence. If it could be presented and ruled against, the failure could be mediated, as it was with this historical example in Dreyfus’ re-trial. But, it cannot be presented to the revisionist, for the revisionist cannot see it. “The historian need not strive to convince Faurisson if Faurisson is ‘playing’ another genre of discourse, one in which conviction, or, the obtainment of a consensus over a defined reality, is not at stake. Should the historian persist along this path, he will end up in the position of victim” (§33). The interlocutor, however, refuses to accede: “But how can you know that the opponent is in bad faith as long as you haven’t tried to convince him or her and as long as he or she has not shown through his or her conduct a scorn for scientific, cognitive rules” (§34)? In other words, bad faith is our common disposition, so, do we turn away from the combatant before we know whether or not he or she would be willing to strive for a good faith communication with us? Lyotard responds by suggesting that it is not a matter of knowing if the other is genuine or manipulative, but a matter of playing the game of the genre of discourse and seeing whether or not the addressee responds in accordance with the same rules. The other can lie or obfuscate, but the witness is required to present reality, and so must simply keep presenting evidence that the defense must simply keep attacking until something comes about and is revealed by the process. An arbitration is no solution, so this something must be either an elimination of or the headlong confrontation into the differend. That is, this process should solve the dispute by its eradication or reveal the other as irreconcilably working under a heterogeneous genre of language. It seems impossible, they (Lyotard and his devil’s advocate) propose, to avoid a differend by anticipating it, because to anticipate it is to prejudge something, which is prohibited by the rules of the genre. The game must be played out to determine its ends. And this is precisely the work Lyotard has been undertaking all along in his The Differend. These textual investigations between the Gorgias Notice, wherein the impossibility of agreement was demonstrated, and the Plato Notice just before us predominately concern matters of consensus—that is, if we want to replace the silence in one or more of the four instances of the phrase universe with an affir-

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mation and permit the witness to speak, how do we do it? The answer is that we need to get the two sides to agree upon a rule, that is, we must establish the reality of the referent. For the survivor, this is the reality of the gas chambers. If both parties agreed on what “gas chamber” means or to what it refers, they could then find the idiom that would point to it and link sense with that referent. This is what the scientific, cognitive genre demands in testimony. But, the foregoing textual analysis has revealed that the problem of consensus is not the true roadblock. Instead, it is a confusion as to the true demands of testimony. The revisionist’s presumptive genres of discourse, the cognitive and scientific, do not entail such a naïve rule as “show it.” And yet, by exploring other genres spawned by restrictions following from the originary genres’ analyses, seeking therein equivocal options of verifiable presentation, Lyotard only uncovers an endless highway of roadblocks and detours. The cognitive, the scientific, the historical, and the existential genres of discourse all lead to the same silence. An utterly crucial further attempt towards solution is made that challenges the distinction between acting in good or bad faith in his Plato Notice: Plato shows us a case wherein the witness and the judge are eliminated and consensus is acted out by persuasion. In labyrinthine form, spiraling from an analysis of the dialectics of the strong and weak to one of dialectics itself, of dialogue and selection, darting back and forth across texts to show every instantiation or shadowy intonation of a double bind, to conclude on intonation itself as metalepsis, a reference to something by remote association, Lyotard traces this theme of how Socrates strives to prevent the weaker argument to win over the stronger by charm and persuasion.45 Lyotard digresses into the Menexeus, itself a labyrinth, being the Platonic account of Socrates’ dialogue with Menexenus, another man who shares his own son’s name, that is mainly composed of a funeral oration that satirically mimics an oration given by Pericles, according to Thucydides, but claimed, by Socrates, to be one he learned from Aspasia, herself an intellectual and lover of Pericles.46 His digression has purpose: the exploration of Socrates’ revelation of the displacements of instances in the phrase universe enacted by funeral oration, logos epitaphios, that song of eulogy. In this oration, which Lyotard names “a kind of epideictic genre,” the addressor is an orator elected by the Council, his addressees are the citizens of the Assembly, his referent are the citizens who died in combat, and his sense is praise for the dead (p. 20). Yet these instances of the phrase universe must switch positions for the oration’s success. The rotation happens through prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device wherein an addressor speaks as or personifies an imaginary, dead, or absent person, born from the conjunction of the Greek prosōpon, which can mean both “mask” and “person,” originally designating the theater masks that revealed one’s character’s character or emotional state, and poiein, “to do,” “to make,” or “to create.”47 The addressor, then, must don the mask and become the dead so that his praise of them can become praise for the Athenians: “death in combat is

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a ‘beautiful death’; a beautiful death implies a ‘fine’ life; Athenian life is fine; the Athenian living this life is fine; you are fine (p. 20). Prosopopoeia is, Lyotard reveals, a paralogical operation including elements of métabolè, mimèsis, and peithô. These operations presuppose an ability to be affected in the addressee (a patheia); in the addressor, there is presupposed a dissimulation, in spite of the fact that Lyotard declares, “The canonical phrase of Platonic poetics would be in sum: I deceive you the least possible” (p. 22). 48 Beyond introducing the crucial element of pathos into the consideration of sense determination in testimony, this investigation allows Lyotard to propose connections to the role of dialogue, namely, the debate between speech versus the book, which is as crucial to considerations of Socrates as to Derrida’s deconstruction, and the question about the effacement of the writer versus the participation in the living dialogue of life (these issues will resurface in his Cashinahua Notice, explored below). An important key, however, is the Notice’s close on metalepsis, “the kernel of pedagogy,” the figure of speech in which one thing is referenced by something merely remotely associated with it, utilized often by sophistical allusion (p. 26). A very common example of metalepsis is the expression: “I’ve got to go catch the worm tomorrow!” Its meaning is the declaration that I will awaken early tomorrow in presumption that doing so will permit me to achieve success. It is an instance of metalepsis because it makes an association between waking up early and success by allusion to the cliché that the early bird catches the worm. Metalepsis offers a productive key by which to turn to a broader statement of Lyotard’s purpose in this rigorous investigation of the differend through the wrong and the double bind. If a witness cannot provide an answer equivalent to either a yes or no, the only way for her to speak at all is to evade the dichotomy and appeal to another idiom. Lyotard is seeking the type of testimony that permits the witness to refer to what she is prohibited from saying. But, as this same rigorous analysis reveals, evading a double bind may be impossible. Metalepsis is not viewed productively as an oratorical device, as seen in Quintilian’s dismissal of it in his Institutes of Oratory: Of tropes which modify signification, there remains to be noticed the μετάληψις (metalepsis), or transsumptio, which makes a way, as it were, for passing from one thing to another. It is very rarely used, and is extremely liable to objection. . . . For the nature of metalepsis is that it is an intermediate step, as it were, to that which is metaphorically expressed, signifying nothing in itself, but affording a passage to something. It is a trope that we give the impression of being acquainted with rather than one that we actually ever need. . . . I shall dwell no longer upon it, for I see but little use in it except, as I said, where one thing is to lead to another.49

Quintilian’s dismissal could be due to its fragility to objection, as he notes, although dismissal could also be warranted by two opposite instincts: it says noth-

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ing, or, it says too much. As a mere “passage,” it is no thing in itself, but, in its being no thing that none less moves you, it could inspire a certain fear as to its power to found unpredictable linkages, themselves capable of either radical freedom or immense ability to mislead or lead one astray. But this is precisely what Lyotard needs: an opening up of an utterly unprecedented linkage to an unsaid. The witness needs a new idiom by which to evade the double bind. This need was implicitly underscored by the “must” and the “yet” in the heart of the definition of the differend as “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (§22). The possibility of uncovering the unknown idiom appears to be an impossibility from within the silencing logic of the revisionists, but, “what escapes doubt is that there is at least one phrase, no matter what it is” (§99).50 That it is, however, is not enough. We must know what it is. There are eleven further sections between the Plato Notice and the close of the first chapter, which predominately concern further questions of validation (what are the motives of the historian and how the cognitive genre necessitates validation through a positivistic interlocutor), the challenging question as to whether we can avoid differends, and, as a natural response to these two topics, an exploration into the question of vengeance. Lyotard, without departing for a moment from his intense rigor, displays the deeply painful and desperate frustration that questions like those that spawned his work generate in their thinkers. Addressing the situation of the wronged witness, one (we, he) asks: isn’t this witness subject to the criteria of competence, morality, sincerity, and/or truthfulness? How are these not criteria by which we could decide if his or her testimony is or is not admissible (§35)? Lyotard chronicles how Vidal-Naquet (his historian interlocutor against the revisionist) questions his authority because he wavers between two motives: first, to preserve memory from oblivion, and second, to carry out revenge. The first subjects the witness only to the rules of scientific cognitives in order to establish the facts of our past. The second “is different” (§35). Its archetype, Lyotard reveals, comes from François-René de Chateaubriand, the eighteenthcentury French diplomat and writer who may well be credited as the founder of Romanticism: “In the silence of abjection, when the only sounds to be heard are the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to deserve his disfavor, this is when the historian appears, charged with avenging this people. 51 And yet, now, post-war, Vidal-Naquet, according to Lyotard, declares the second motive to be over because the Jews have been displaced from victimhood by their prohibited testimony—tragedy has become secularized. The historian, then, is left with no one to bear witness to because the referent (the victims) have been prohibited from being precisely that, victims. “There are no more victims” (§36). Following from the differend, this is certainly the case; all those who could be such, because of the logic of the revi-

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sionists are prohibited from being victims. But, on the other hand, “to say that the Jews are no loner victims is one thing, but to say that there are no more victims at all is another. A universal cannot be concluded from a particular” (§36). Employing Plato, Lyotard notes that the phrase There are no more victims and the phrase There are no more differends is a tautology, and neither is a cognitive phrase that could be verified or refuted in accordance with the rules established for establishing and validating cognitives. He elaborates this revelation with the aid of Kant. “Labor-Power” is the object of a concept, but, according to Kant, its concept is an Idea, which does not give rise to an intuition and therefore cannot issue a controversy or bring about a verdict before a tribunal of knowledge. He elaborates again with an example of a citizen of Martinique: a Martinican is a French citizen but she is one who cannot bring a complaint against X that impinges upon her rights as a French citizen under the constitutional privileges of French law. Even if the wrong may be prosecutable under international law, this pursuit of action would still not be a matter of the person bringing forth a complaint as a French citizen. The colony’s people are owned by the colonizer, but not embraced as full citizens of that mother nation: “These are examples of situations presented in phrase universes of Ideas (in the Kantian sense): the Idea of nation, the Idea of the creation of value. These situations are not the referents of knowledge phrases. There exist no procedures instituted to establish or refute their reality in the cognitive sense. That is why they give rise to differends” (§36). To these examples, we may do well to also recall the Ibansk who is asked to prove his communist-ness or the masterpiece prohibited from being a masterpiece by its prohibition from being publically recognized. Lyotard has offered us a nearing-encyclopedic account of examples wherein, if we attempt to formulate these situations in accordance with the rules for cognitive phrases, we will end in a paradox, bind, or absurdity. But he will not cease: Let us admit your hypothesis, that the wrong comes from the damages not being expressed in the language common to the tribunal and the other party, and that this gives birth to a differend. But how can you judge that there is a differend when, according to this hypothesis, the referent of the victim’s phrase is not the object of a cognition properly termed. How can you (No. 1) even affirm that such a situation exists? Because there are witnesses to it? But why do you grant credence to their testimony when they cannot, by hypothesis, establish the reality of what they affirm? Either the differend has an established reality for its object and it is not a differend but a litigation, or, if the object has no established reality, the differend has no object, and there is simply no differend (§37).

This, says Lyotard, is the reductionist line of positivism—that school of epistemology that proposes that the only authentic knowledge must have as its base actual sense experience. The idea has been around since antiquity, but was

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coined as a distinct school by Auguste Comte and taken up predominately by sociologists including Émile Durkheim, despite later thinkers, notably Max Weber and Georg Simmel, sharply rejecting its strictness. In psychology, positivism can be seen best in behaviorism, that school that believed that psychology can be determined by watching behavior, which will be alluded to as one recipient of sharp critique by Wittgenstein, below. Positivism, according to Lyotard, fatally confuses reality and referent: “in many phrase families, the referent is not at all presented as real” (§37). For example, he quotes the opening line of Goethe’s poem “Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruhe,” the mathematical formula 2x2=4, the command Get out!, the vague descriptor At that time, the explanation he took the path towards …, the expression that’s very beautiful. “This does not prevent the phrases from taking place,” but then, parenthetically, adds, “(But is to take place the same thing as to be real?) (§37). If phrases from different regimes encounter each other and yield differends, is it not the case that they must have enough in common so as to encounter each other? Do they not have common properties? Do they not have to encounter one another in the same universe? Lyotard replies, no, for this universe to be one is to presuppose it exists prior to the phrases instead of it being produced by the phrases. The phrases make the universe seem as if it has always been there, but it has not. Lyotard’s analysis bears close resemblance to Kant’s conception of space and time as a priori forms of sensibility which come prior to and make possible all sense perception and his Categories as the a priori concepts which come prior to and make possible understanding by giving understanding the forms for the synthesis of sensible data, as well as bearing close resemblance to Derrida’s ideas of the différance, trace, and arché-writing, as three things which come prior to and permit that which is in question to present itself or be inscribed. The positivistic interlocutor attempts to use the transcendental possibility as a rebuff to Lyotard, saying that he is not claiming the universe to be the reality, but to be the condition for the possibility of reality, to which Lyotard demurs, arguing that the condition for the encounter is the phrase, not the universe instituted by it. The condition of the encounter is transcendental, not empirical. The universe, on the other hand, would be like the effect of the encounter, which is the same as saying the universe is the condition of the encounter. “Transcendental and empirical are terms which do no more than indicate two different phrase families: the critical (criticizing) philosophical phrase and the cognitive phrase” (§39). What we must seek, here, is how phrases from heterogeneous genres of language encounter one another in instances that he will describe as proper names, indicating worlds that are determined, contextually, by networks of names. But, we are prone to ask, if the encounters between heterogeneous regimens birth differends, can we not avoid them? No, says Lyotard, contact is unavoidable and necessary: “it is necessary to link onto a phrase that happens . . . there is no possibility of not linking onto it” and “to link is necessary; how to link is

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contingent. There are many ways” (§40). Some ways of linkage are pertinent, some not. The interlocutor proposes that if we eliminate the inconsistence linkages, we will avoid the differend. Yes, sure, says Lyotard, but how do you know which are which? You must work through them, let them happen, make them, try them . . . all . . . including the inconsistent ones. But, there are rules, cries the interlocutor. If we obey the rules can we not avoid differends? Lyotard responds: “Genres of discourse determine stakes, they submit phrases from different regimens to a single finality: the question, the example, the argument, the narration, the exclamation are in forensic rhetoric the heterogeneous means of persuading” (§40). It cannot necessarily follow, he argues, that differends should be eliminated between phrases. Phrases are not so set and forbidden that other genres cannot pick them up and play them through to entirely different ends. The interlocutor tries once more: just because several linkages are possible, must there be a differend between them? And Lyotard inaudibly, in his words, sighs: yes, only one phrase potential can be actualized at a time. “It is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is never necessary. It is suitable or unsuitable” (§41). For example, if a student is pounding upon your office door to demand a further extension on the already overextended paper due last month, it is tempting, yet unsuitable, for you to comment: that is not my door—or, as Lyotard superbly proffers: “the officer cries Avanti! and leaps up out of the trench; moved, the soldiers cry Bravo! but don’t budge” (§43). “These unsuitabilities are so many damages inflicted upon the first phrase by the second” (§41). The wrong is not just that the second interferes with the validation of the first, for “validation is a genre of discourse, not a phrase regimen” (§41). Thus, the validation of a phrase cannot be done from within its own regimen; instead, “a descriptive is validated cognitively only by recourse to an ostensive (And here is the case). A prescriptive is validated juridically or politically by a normative (It is a norm that . . .), ethically by a feeling (tied to the You ought to), etc.” (§41). Thus, differends cannot be avoided by avoiding the contact between heterogeneous genres of language because it is precisely by outside validation that sense is determined. Once more we are confronted by the unhappy damnation if one does and damnation if one does not. Why not meet this damning bind with vengeance? “The victim’s vengeance alone gives the authority to bear witness” (§§35, 42)! But, alas, Lyotard notes, “authority” is equivocal (cf. §43). Legally, the victim lacks the authority to do so; if she does gain vengeance, it is in spite of the law (and likely, outside of the law). “The law reserves the authority to establish the crime, to pronounce the verdict, and to determine the punishment before the tribunal which has heard the two parties expressing themselves in the same language, that of the law” (§42). When the victim cries for justice, she cries for vengeance for the wrong committed against her. And, we must remember, her wrong is two: the victim is victimized a second time by being silenced, but the referent is not the same, the dam-

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ages of the event are not the wrong, the property to be demonstrated is not the event to be told—even as they hold the same name. This is a further reason why this cry should not be put into the language of law, that is, in the forensic and juridical discourses, for law cannot hear it. Her cry is properly not in that language, for if it were, her second wrong would be undone by undoing the original wrong. “All the same, vengeance authorizes itself on account of the plea’s having no outcome” (§43). This is, properly, psychology or social psychology, Lyotard notes. But, nonetheless, its greater problem is that is accepts “a teleological principle [that] regulates the passage from one genre of discourse (the cognitive) to another (the phrase of the Idea). But what proof do we have that there is a principle of compensation between genres of discourse?” (§43). This passage may well be taken like an illusion or as a refrain that summons Kant’s Third Critique, named as one of the two sources of “Pretext” in the Reading Dossier (the other being Wittgenstein). Is not the Third Critique’s starting question about how can, in reason, judgment judge without a concept—precisely in contrast to how, in understanding, judgment has the table of categories through which it gets a priori principles? Lyotard, like Kant, is asking something similar to whether, in reason, judgment can give itself an a priori principle. For Kant, yes, reason does do precisely that, employing concept of the purposiveness of nature, which can be represented according to aesthetic (the accordance of form, related by the imagination, to the cognitive faculties) or teleological (the accordance of form with the possibility of the thing-itself) judgments. This, alongside Lyotard’s poignant question, “Can it be said that since I don’t succeed in demonstrating this, then it is necessary that I be able to tell it?,” foreshadows a route of resolution aided by Pseudo-Dionysius that will be worked out in the final chapter (§43). The point at work is that “vengeance has no legitimate authority, it shakes the authority of the tribunals, it calls upon idioms, upon phrase families, upon genres of discourse (any which one) that do not, in any case, have a say in the matter” (§44). Its demands include the revision of competencies and the institution of new tribunals. It disavows any tribune of phrases claiming supremacy. And, it is mistaken to think that vengeance calls upon “rights of man” against the law—“Man is surely not the name that suites this instance of appeal, nor right the name of the authority which this instance avails itself of (No. 42). Rights of the other is not much better. Authority of the infinite perhaps, or of the heterogeneous, were it not so ineloquent” (§44). And if one would like to defer to the “tribunal of history” or Hegelian “tribunal of the world,” “these can only be symbols, like the last judgment” (§45). The second chapter, “The Referent, The Name,” maintains the tone of desperation of his query of vengeance to elaborate the precarious state of the eyewitness and finds that existence is not concluded from the discussion of it (§47); in other words, “naming is not showing” (§49).52 This prohibition definitively

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rejects the hope held out by the humanist and Heideggerian option that the mere existence of the witness can stand as her testimony because Da-sein is a sign that points beyond itself. This also prohibits the witness’ testimony to simply name Auschwitz as evidence that demonstrates the wrongs it housed. In this chapter’s Notice on Antisthenes, Lyotard shows how his form of the argument that naming points beyond itself is the same as that form which argues each referent to have its own, singular phrase. He sees this as the main argument articulated in Plato’s Euthydemus: if one talks about a distinct thing, it exists, and thus the talk about it is true, and so long as one talks to another about true things, one will not mislead another while discussing things. 53 While this line of reasoning would abolish contradiction and permit the witness to testify to that which the revisionist logic prohibits, Lyotard shows how this argument fails. In it is the echo of the verb legein, “to say something, talk about something, to name something,” the same Greek verb on which Heidegger dwells in Being and Time’s sixth section of the “Introduction.” Lyotard argues that ti legein, “to talk about something,” cannot be the same as the definition of “to name something” that is permitted by legein. In other words, a paradox rises if one uses ti legein as a referential phrase (about something) to refer to something as if it were a semantic phrase (something itself). The semantic understanding can serve the function of naming a thing, but to name something is not the same as to talk about the thing, even if to talk about the thing may include offering its name. “Designation is not, nor can it be, the adequation of the logos to the being of the existent” (p. 37). Instead, “nomination is an active designation, a poiein (Euthydemus 284c) which isolates singularities in the undetermined ‘neither Being nor Not-Being’ (Gorgias Notice)” (p. 37)—poiein being that Greek verb “to create” that was the making, doing, and becoming of the “mask” and “person” in prosopopoeia. While he rejects naming as the founding of being, if naming can be construed of as the activity or capacity to create, it may yet be a productive path for the witness. Creation could not be conceived as rendering an empirically graspable object, but it may be thought of as a poetic making something come forth: a rendering of allusion. Thus, after this concentrated review of the desperations against which the witness stands, allusion brings us back to the project’s pursuit of the new idiom by which the survivor may eliminate the wrong and truthfully bear witness. Lyotard proffers many possibilities for metalepsis and unravels their many failures throughout his work. The greatest potential for productivity can be elicited from his investigations into silence, the poetical style of Gertrude Stein’s writing, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, Theodor Adorno’s employment of parataxis in his Negative Dialectics, and the oratory style of the native Cashinahua Indians. Silence, another option, however disdained by Lyotard, has been broached in the first chapter and will be examined more closely in the sixth. The remainder of this chapter will work through these other options for founding a new idiom of testimony. The division between the different

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options is artificial yet offers some productive clarity, and the conclusion to the chapter will offer a brief synopsis of their interconnections.

Testimony And as Linkage in Gertrude Stein In The Differend’s third chapter, “Presentation,” Lyotard devotes a short Notice to Gertrude Stein. He further references her in three later sections evenly spaced out to the end of the book. Within the Notice, he concentrates on her 1931 work How to Write, although his comments are relevant to the entirety of her literary output. He begins with Stein’s words, “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is,” thereby introducing the topic he will unravel by stringing together her own words, quote after quote, with his voice only inserting two parenthetical comments (p. 67).54 He follows this collaged narrative with the pronouncement, “No comments. The selection done for the purposes of quoting is already outrageous. Another remark or two” (p. 67).55 His remarks actually number nine, epigrammatic and numbered, and conclude his brief excursus on Stein. Lyotard’s style and method of excursus, here, is distinct from any he adopts through the rest of the work and is highly imitative, or, rather, responsive to Stein’s own style. While she predates him by fifty years, there is an affinity even beyond the intellectual and aesthetic between Lyotard and Stein. He, a Frenchman who spent many of his later years teaching in America and writing on avant-garde art; she, an American who lived most of her life in Paris and was known for her extensive modern art collection.56 His fundamental endeavor was to seek a new mode of expression, born from a selective amalgamation of phenomenology, aesthetics, and post-structuralism, that could represent the inexpressible and avoid becoming misrepresenting grand narratives. Her writing is aesthetically powered, sensory rich, and maintains a witty style while using a stream of consciousness that is sharply attuned to visual presentation. Stein, born in 1874, was educated at Radcliff under William James, which may account for her writing style whose impulse seems fueled by phenomenological observation and a psychological acceptance of the power of emotions. Lyotard’s first parenthetical, immediately following her quotation concerning the emotional superiority of a paragraph over the sentence, reveals his interest in her work and its introduction at this juncture: “(Because the feeling or the sentiment is the linkage [l’enchaînement], the passage [le passage]. Does this happen to fall [tomber], or what? Or nothing, but nothing would be too much: A phrase, and and [et et])” (p. 67). His aside, however stylistically elliptical and Stein-like, firmly establishes that to which he has often alluded up to now: that phrases beckon other phrases, and that one links to another to permit a passage to or through meaning—except in the case of the differend, where comprehension meets an impasse. A phrase or sentence alone is a distinct unit. A para-

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graph, to be meaningful, must link the discrete units together. The force of the meaning is in the linkage, more than its individual components. Thus, the question that Lyotard uses Stein to provoke is whether a manipulation of the linkages between sentences can evoke a means of passage between incommunicative phrase regimens (notably, those of the witness and revisionist tribunal). In her work, Stein shows consistent concern with emotive linkages and the powers that these linkages have to both disrupt and found meaning. Her early work, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms, sought these emotional linkages within words and phrases themselves. Its style is crafted to capture the prosodic meaning of words and phrases: that meaning that is conveyed by the poetic connection of tone, rhythm, or stress, instead of by grammar or definition. For example, in the middle of the section “Objects,” Stein writes: A PLATE. An occasion for a plate, an occasional resource is in buying and how soon does washing enable a selection of the same thing neater. If the party is small a clever song is in order. Plates and a dinner set of colored china. Pack together a string and enough with it to protect the centre, cause considerable haste and gather more as it is cooling, collect more trembling and not any even trembling, cause a whole thing to be a church.57

While she has not offered a definition one would find in a dictionary, she has conveyed a powerfully rich feeling of a plate. She has not used any logical connecters like “therefore,” “because,” “in order to,” and so forth, yet the passage has its own jaunty flow. The connections function by sound and gesture. An occasion is an occasional event that can be repeated like the use of a plate, once it has been washed. Plates are parts of dinner sets, which are both things that can be packed. To be packed gestures towards leaving; leaving invokes haste. Haste can be accompanied by anxiety-induced trembling, which is underscored by the work’s persistent refrain of anxious events like war and enemy occupation. Trembling can also be the nature of puddings, which can be held on plates, and is also a repeating image throughout the work. After this passage, Stein moves her image-play to colors, which leads her to remark on light and lamps, before returning to a consideration of cakes, covered, on plates. Her anti-narrative has touches of circularity that reveal a rhythm beyond end-rhymes. The rhythm of her words is also used to express a rhythm of time: sunlight fades and lamps come on, coffee and cake hour differs from high tea hour. This rhythm, though, is not evenly metered; Stein’s writing expresses time in a purely visceral sense. “In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.” 58 Time is embedded within her phrases and operates much like emotion; Lyotard comments, “it is not the thinking of the reflective I that withstands the test of universal doubt . . . it is time and the phrase” (§94).

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Amidst her many playful images and streaming words that sometimes have difficulty rising above the merely nonsensical, there are poignant images capable of withstanding this doubt of reason and are productive for Lyotard. For example: “Startling a starving husband is not disagreeable. The reason that nothing is hidden is that there is no suggestion of silence. No song is sad. A lesson is of consequence.”59 There is no premise, situation, and development, but there is a poignant story with these phrases that better express a hard time than if one made its mere pronouncement. But, at the same time, this poignancy is entirely conducted by declaration. Further: “All along the tendency to deplore the absence of more has not been authorized. It comes to mean that with burning there is that pleasant state of stupefication. Then there is a way of earning a living. Who is a man.”60 Lyotard would appreciate the lack of the question mark. Symbolic grammar is refused and the phrase takes the meaning of both declaration and question at once. Its greater meaning comes only fragmentarily, building though the composition of emotional association sparked by the phrase’s various words. The phrases that Lyotard extracts from Stein’s How to Write all similarly infuse emotion into their respective fragments and help to intensify, obfuscate, or mutate meaning by proposing unexplored ifs: “because the feeling or the sentiment is the linkage, the passage” (p. 67). Her phrases, “Sentences make one sigh” and “I would use a sentence if I could,” emotionally underscore her desperation about the unknowability within phrases (p. 67). 61 Stein’s fear is that a phrase may be like a philosophic “simple” [simple]. Descartes, for example, proposed that a simple is the clearest element of thought, as did Wittgenstein, as previously quoted by Lyotard, and that a simple designates an “unalterable and subsistent” object so clear as to have its clarity prohibit its being thought (§55). 62 How can one think a simple? Or, as Stein asks in unmarked questions: “can you think a sentence. What is a sentence. He thought a sentence” (p. 67). For Wittgenstein, one can think such only indirectly by configuring it alongside other objects in an unstable collective (§55). Lyotard echoes this necessary collectivity: “(when A phrase is saved, it will be And a phrase that is saved, and it might be that it is gained then)” (p. 67). Thinking a simple is only done by thinking a simple and a simple, a chain or cloud of simples. A simple alone is unthinkable. As wholly isolated events, they lack any grammatical and emotive linkages; they lack meaning. If one cannot think a simple itself, and there are simples that resist configuration into some thinkable arrangement, there is the possibility for much to be unknowable. In other words, despite her radical experimentation and emphasis on emotive linkages, it is possible that Stein’s sentences do not actually link—at least, in a reliable manner and one that can meet the bar set by any genre of discourse suitable for testimony. Stein has eliminated all logical connectors from her writings: they have no “ands.” She has eliminated all expected punctuation that could serve to yield questions discernible from answers, from lists, or from explanations. These

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eliminations have been her goal and purpose: to free the sentence from logical dictates, to free meaning from logical connectors, to replace logic with the emotive force of her strung together phrases in order to convey another sort of meaning. While it is true that the revisionist bind cheats the witness by issuing from contradictory rules, no genre studies thus far—the cognitive, scientific, the historical, the existential—has undone its force. For Stein’s method to work for the witness, the simples need within them some intense and reliable force to ensure their collection into a form with meaning. If their emotive power fulfills this, Stein’s method would be a valuable model for the witness: it is impossible for her to translate her testimony across the gulf of heterogeneous phrase regimens or genres of discourse, but perhaps she could transcribe her testimony free from the bind of logic that says she cannot be alive and testify to her death, transcribe it into a Steinian styled stream of emotive meaning born from logic’s evasion. But, the transcription’s possibility of success is slight. It is possible that the logician is “contented by the identities of sense,” Lyotard writes, quoting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 3.343, and thus can overlook the transcription’s blurring of obligation into invitation into imperative, but, the Steinian method is trying to precisely call attention to this shifting swirl of genres as what gives forth sense itself. Lyotard writes, “the analogy of ‘sense’ between the two [transcribed] phrases is not only the analogy between the abstract concepts to which they can be reduced, but it should also extend to the universes which are presented by the two phrases and within which they are themselves situated” (§79). It is the invocation of there being this complete picture of sense that the testimony must convey. It can only do this if the flexibility of linkages is made necessary in such a way so as to be granted even by the revisionist. This form of transcription, then, fails because there being “And a phrase [Et une phrase]” is not, within it, a logical necessity, but an ontological one (§103). Stein’s elimination of logical connectors does truly reveal that there is always another phase, but that there could be; and, if there is, the force of that other phrase following meaningfully, even if not according to the meaning of grammatical reason, is uncertain. The form of its following could be by ontological necessity, and the question remains if such a necessity can make her testimony meaningful before the revisionist. The simples command a firmer structure. And, unfortunately, the witness cannot enact the opposite of Stein’s method— forcing simples into paragraphs—to achieve logical necessity, which is something that Lyotard entertains by commenting that the paragraph is a form of division that unites. A series of definitions begin to explain his idea: the Greek Paragramma, he writes, is “what is written on the side” and “an extra clause in a law or contract”; the Paragraphè is “an objection made by the defense to the accountability of a plea,” and the Paragraphein is “to add a clause, especially fraudulently” (p. 67). The definitions draw the paragraph into a legal framework, closer to the case for the witness, but also reveal its fraudulent linkage. The paragraph is extra; to paragraph is to intersperse “ands” amidst phrases, rather than

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having the “ands” called forth by each phrase. The paragraph, as a grammatical function, ought to logically regulate and make comprehensible the testimony, but, instead, “the differend is reintroduced into the heart of what ought to regulate the litigation, in-between the law and the accused” (p. 67).63 Thus, instead of leading to logical necessity, the paragraph invokes doubt by its own form of the potential uncertainty that accompanies linking. This uncertainty is not the sort of enticing mystery, Lyotard tells us, but that of doubt, which damns the paragraph. While a phrase’s linkage often ensues due to its embedded emotion, the subtle but pervasive inherent allusion, which spurs thought to the many possible ifs and ands, its ambiguity that could offer flexible possibility ultimately lacks mystery. It is provocative mystery, not enclosing doubt, that sparks pertinent linkage. Mystery requires a subject, whereas the phrase does not, either to receive it or make it. Curiously, and however circuitously, Lyotard has brought us back to the lingering question of the force of the ontological function of the phrase. Phrases are not individual, but they found the meaning of the individuals who employ them. Phrases call forth addressors and addressees to “come take their places in its universe” (p. 67).64 This recalls and reconfirms the ontological, rather than logical, necessity of phrases—and, again, fails to answer whether ontological force is enough for meaning that could undo the differend. The witness needs meaning that eludes the logical bind; emotively laden phrases, wherein the emotion serves the role of the logical “ands” to inspire linkage, could possibly create a chain or cloud of meaningful phrases, but they would need this linkage to be hardened to reliable verifiability. Imposing paragraphs in phrases will only fraudulently imply a necessity they lack. The witness requires a way to stand outside of her individuality and speak within the logic of the courts. This logic cannot be grounded by a fraudulent imposition of grammar on her testimonial phrases, just as it cannot find her testimony to be meaningful if it is transcribed into an anti-grammar that unsettles its dictation of meaning. There is great productivity born from Lyotard’s consideration of Stein, but her method, alone, cannot salvage the witness’ testimony from silence.

Therapeutic Language Games in Ludwig Wittgenstein Lyotard’s affinities with Gertrude Stein are as many and strong as his debt to Ludwig Wittgenstein, although Stein and Wittgenstein, while contemporaries, seem mostly asynchronous with one another. Both do promote a certain playfulness through linguistic games—but their conceptions of such are diametrically opposed.65 Stein plays with language by removing logical connectors between words and sentences. Wittgenstein plays with language by constructing a theoretical game to reveal the typically unthought but ultimately necessary family connections between words and sentences. Stein dismisses this sort of logical, meaning-based linkage; Wittgenstein dismisses most philosophy as an obfusca-

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tion of these basic linkages of meaning. Both, however, are concerned with exploring the nature of linkages. We have been led to the problem of linkages by the supposition that the two parties engaged in the differend need to come to an agreement upon the meaning of the referent, to which Lyotard showed that this presupposed our understanding the rules of forming meaning and its validation in various genres of discourses. The presumption that the witness needs to merely “show” the referent for there to be agreement is to obfuscate nearly any genre’s actual mode of verification of the reality of the referent. But, the problem remains, then, how do we do the legitimate equivalent of “showing” the truth of one’s referent? What idiom can express it in such a way that it avoids the violation of and is verifiable according to the rules of testimony? The “showing” needs to be amenable to meaningful linkage. Stein’s subversion of logic through linkage via the emotional force of phrases themselves proved too loose of a method: the emotionally rich phrases are too furtive to found correct, reliable, verifiable linkage. The close of Lyotard’s Stein Notice can be heard as a call for a conception of logical necessity to linkage that allows a valid expansion of what constitutes logic, and it may be that Wittgenstein can provide such. In addition to a richer and more rigid conception of linkage, Wittgenstein immensely benefits Lyotard on the necessities of context—for linkages are this construction, and this construction is the situation of reality, which must be established in the witness’ testimony—and also presents another picture of the activity of philosophy as an exercise that is as phenomenological as it is aesthetic, and is not wrongly named spiritual. Lyotard constructs a précise of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus concerning this construction of a structure from simples to meaning to suggest an improvement from Stein’s phrases: Wittgenstein calls “objects” (TLP: 2.02) simples that bound together form states of things (2.01). These are “configurations of objects” (2.0272) which are unstable, while “objects” are “unalterable and subsistent” (2.0271). In a “picture” (Bild), which is to say at this point, in cognitive language, “elements” correspond to these objects (2.13). These elements are simple signs (3.201) which, employed in propositions, are called “names” (3.202). The “object” is the Bedeutung or referent, in the Fregian sense, of the name (3.203). Concomitantly, “in a proposition a name is the representative [vertritt] of an object” (3.22). Objects can thus only be named (3.221) without their being known. Between simples and elements, there are certain kinds of feelers (Fühler) (2.1515). Their fixity allows for the cognition of what is unstable, the compounds of objects (§55).

Lyotard and Wittgenstein (in his later reconsideration) both have deep dissatisfactions with this theory of language, but it is still very productive to consider here for its depiction of the binding of simples into structures more reliably generative of meaning. Or, that is, to show how the bound simples still do not give us meaning. The simples compound to fixed objects (referents), which suggests

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something inherent and essential to which our analysis could trace back meaning that garners consensus. The instability of their further configuration allows the possibility of disagreement, but also permits the possibility of flexible linkage. The key is to determine the extent and validity of the “feelers” between the names and bound simples, for the strength, fixity, or rigidity of the feelers is what permits these unstable states of things to be thought. But, the revelation of these objects being capable of being named without this meaning they are understood reveals where the differend resides. The problem means that “cognition requires more than the lexical correspondence between the language of elements and the world of simples” (§55). In addition, such a “picture” will only be reliable if reality itself looks exactly like it. The simples, in themselves, are not objects for cognition, so, no matter their stability, they cannot be “thought” and thus the source of evidence for this judgment and/or verification of the picture’s correspondence to reality. Thus, simply offering options as to how to conceive these “feelers,” no matter how creative and rich, will not aid us in “showing” the truth of a referent if we are relying on or trying to communicate with another who is relying on this picture theory of language. It may seem that reality is given, but it is not; it must be established. The establishment leads us into Wittgenstein’s greatest, specific innovation and gift for Lyotard: the conception of linkages at work in his theory of language games. Prior to philosophical study, Wittgenstein was inclined to engineering by trade and to building mechanical things and a house for his sister by hobby. 66 His philosophy uses numerous literal and metaphorical references to tools and building, as well as theoretical similarities between how one would approach a task of building a machine and his approach to meaning formation in language itself. An initial explanation of linkage is profitably sketched by the example of building a house. A house is more than the composition of wood and nails, windows and doors—it also links ideas of shelter, family, and holiday dinners. Each of these elements—physical, gestural, ideas and hearkened emotions—these phrases, in Lyotard’s terminology, link together conceptually and build the full meaning of a house, whose full meaning will always overflow the pieces delineated. For Wittgenstein, these linkages are made according to the family resemblances between the meanings of words and phrases. The isolated pieces fit together according to their resemblance and the correct fit hinges upon context. Deducing, creating, or affirming these meanings is to play language games. We play constantly: as we think, as we speak, write, live, we are engaged in this play. Pedagogic in its activity, the play with language games turns our attention to simple representations of the formation of meaning. Play uncovers how meaning is both used and formed in and from the linkage of these different linguistic elements. For Wittgenstein, these elements are construed as broadly as Lyotard’s conception of the phrase, that is, broad enough to include nonverbal gestures, intonations, full context, and all that is still unsaid.

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Lyotard’s The Differend plays with language with fervor—for his game is serious and hinges upon the discovery of an unknown phrase that could communicate the truth to which the survivor was witness. In the search for the unknown idiom, the designation “phrase” does not signify anything strictly technical. Simply, there is a language family of testimony; the survivor primarily occupies the place of the witness and searches for the phrase, the sense, by which to testify to her experience that she survived, as referent of the event. It is yet unknown because the revisionist insists that her survival negates her right to testify to being in a death camp. This prohibition commands the witness to speak in an idiom that the court can understand; her phrase, then, must be in obedience to Wittgenstein’s rule, “When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of the everyday.” 67 To demonstrate the commonplaceness of the sort of phrase that she must seek, Lyotard offers examples: “It’s daybreak; Give me the lighter; Was she there? . . . ax2+bx+c=0; Ouch! . . . This is not a phrase; Here are some phrases” (§109). The revisionist’s bind prohibits the witness’ testimony to be silence or nonsense, but Lyotard hints to an alternative when he includes the example of the phrase, “raised tail of a cat” (§123). He does not intend a phrase to fixedly correspond to the actual tail, but to note an event that reveals the serial nature of meaning. Like in Wittgenstein’s language games, this phrase can provoke a reminder to feed the cat, inspire studies on feline physiognomy, verbally paint an iconic cat picture, provoke reflections on the history of cats, conjure allusions to feminine sexuality, and so forth. In other words, Lyotard is demonstrating that there is no isolated phrase. Any one phrase calls to us to link it with something preceding it, “[a] phrase presents at least one universe” (§111). It calls to us to think about the relations between, before, and after the instant of the phrase so as to create a “chain of communication” from the linkages, “l’enchaînement,” between at least two phrases, “d’au moins deux phrases” (§57). Lyotard explains this call by quoting from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 6.01, “this series itself results . . . from a ‘general form of passage [Uebergang] from one proposition to another’” (§95). And yet, it is the ordinariness of the phrase needed that makes the witness’ silence all the more troubling. The witness’ silence is simultaneous with her realization that phrasing is endless—from “cat tail,” the Uebergang is infinite. Wittgenstein and the witness, however, are not interested in the absolute multiplicity of potential meanings, but seek the correct meaning: “And if we are told ‘N did not exist,’ we do ask: ‘what do you mean? Do you want to say …… or …… etc.’?”68 Such a declaration, like “N did not exist,” opens wide the multiple, possible linkages and provokes us to seek clarification. We must seek to determine the correct linkage. In other words, the declaration commands us to play out this language game in order to clearly discern the correct meaning of statements born from the linkage between phrases. This playing entails discerning the correct rules, following, and then verifying them, that is, it entails the abidance by context and grammar

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and the verification of our practice by the correct implementation of words and phrases. And this play is the task to which both thinkers proceed. In writing styles that are remarkably similar, the two thinkers proffer fragments of games, demonstrations of where certain phrases can lead and examinations of various wells into which the careless language users can stumble. Context is the linchpin of the game. “‘Look for A’ does not mean ‘Look for B;’ but I may do just the same thing in obeying the two orders.” 69 To know who and what, where and why would help to determine the correct phrase, but the obviousness of their aid cannot be taken to mean that what apodictically determines truth is that which is apparent by simple ostension. Both Lyotard and Wittgenstein would chime, as if one could know it by pointing to this, instead of to that. The witness cannot point to her own death. For her, any deictic, any “this,” “here,” or “now,” “appears and disappears with this universe, and thus with this phrase” (§50).70 To believe ostension would work would be to fall prey to a conception of language having a rigid, one-to-one correspondence between meaning and words. Imagine, for example, trying to teach a child “red” by pointing to an apple. How is the child to know you intend the apple’s color and not its nature as a fruit, as food, its shape, or its number? 71 This misconception threatens our thinking particularly when such is directed to the meaningless (that is, to that which lacks a pin-pointable meaning or, for the revisionist, that instance when the living witness testifies to experiencing a death camp): Let us first discuss this point of the argument: that a word has no meaning if nothing corresponds to it.—It is important to note that the word ‘meaning’ is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that ‘corresponds’ to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N.N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say that, for if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no sense to say ‘Mr. N.N. is dead.’72

The meaning of a name transcends the instance wherein one could point to he who holds that name. Likewise, the meaning of a testimony must stand, be capable of being judged as true, even when Sherlock cannot produce the weapon or pronounce the whodunit. It is context, for Wittgenstein, and its meaning, founded through careful attention to the rules of linkage, that will prevent us from falling prey to these obscurities of language and obstructions from the historical revisionists’ mistaken conception of eye-witnessing and evidence. Concerning the impasse between witness and revisionist, Lyotard’s mindfulness of the rules that govern linkages and the importance of context is exceptionally similar to Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definitions. The Differend’s second chapter, “The Referent, The Name,” states and repeatedly demonstrates that to name something does not fix its meaning. Even pointing to the physical gas chamber does not establish the legitimacy of her testimony. Just as to call the witness a witness does not ensure that she can be that, one who can

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give testimony. “The name ‘rigidly’ designates across phrase universes, it is inscribed in networks of names which allow for the location of realities, but it does not endow its referent with a reality” (§63). The Differend’s third chapter, “Presentation,” carefully lays out the differences between denominative phrases that name things in the world, descriptive phrases that describe things, cognitive phrases that signify things in the world, and ostensive phrases that show things. Uncovering the failures for the witness in each, his rigorous analysis confirms, alongside Wittgenstein’s, that context is required for correct understanding and for communication to happen. Unlike Wittgenstein, however, Lyotard balks about context constituting sure evidence for the possibility of this same communication. In other words, Lyotard permits differends. He permits “what we cannot speak about” and that which, then, “we must pass over in silence,” whereas the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations seems far more confident about the possibility of finding the unknown idiom though which to speak. 73 Lyotard, in this third chapter, uses Wittgenstein in quote and echo to reveal what he sees as a failure in the latter’s over reliance on rules and context by exploring the diversity and fluidity of rules and highlighting the contradictions that arise from the phrase’s bind to a subject. The chapter takes its title, “Presentation,” from Lyotard’s contention that any such occurrence demands an “I” to whom the presentation is presented. Context cannot be separated from the “I,” even when the “I” violates the rules of logic by being a witness and not testifying. This revelation hearkens his earlier argument that it is the victim’s very subjectivity that hangs in uncertainty when her life forbids her to be the addressor of the testimony, the witness to the event of the gas chamber. The necessity of the linkage between the “I” and context shows Lyotard to be merging together the Philosophical Investigations’ reliance on context (esp. §141) with the Tractatus’ acknowledgement of the incomprehensible in his conclusion on that about which we must remain silent (§135). This merger, for Lyotard, shows us that the silence of the witness is comprehensible as a phenomenological move wherein reality is established by a co-presentation of the self and world and the challenge is only in determining the possibility and way by which she may describe the contents of her consciousness to others. The true challenge of intersubjectivity is that there are things about which we must remain silent.74 Numerous readers have critiqued or condemned the conclusion to the Tractatus as a collapse into the solipsism of mysticism because, as P. M. S. Hacker’s Insight and Illusion succinctly explains, even if one accepts the truth of the inexpressible, it is legitimate only within a solipsistic model that prescribes that the world to be dependent upon the self and the self to be the sole determiner of the limits of that world.75 Lyotard’s re-employment of the question of the difficulty of intersubjectivity, however, is taken up in order to move the argument in a divergent direction. His concern with the accordance of truth is phenomenological, rather than solipsistic. All of modernity is obsessed with the self and the other, with how the self can know the other, with the self’s em-

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bodiment in the world, with empathy and intersubjectivity: all of which provokes him to ask the unpopular question about the truth in solitary reflection and the even more unpopular question about the dialogue that is only a monologue, the silent communication man has with himself or with the divine Him. Lyotard quotes Wittgenstein: “‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (TLP:7),” and then asks, “—is the must (il faut, muss man) addressed to man” (§135)?76 Even if we grant that “the world is my world,” that I determine its limits, there is an event that is named as that which we must silently pass over: it is in our language even if it is being named as inexpressible.77 It is an event, a presentation, anything among all other events of life, from walking the dog to getting divorced, that is separated from them only by its resistance to being named and described. Even as it resists a moniker, it is the something that is and cannot be spoken of and, as such, it, too, establishes its existence and dictates that there is an “I” to which it is presented. The solitary reflection that leads to this revelation, and in which it is dwelled upon, cannot be dismissed as truthful only in solipsism because the intersubjectivity of language already universalizes the truth of the revelation. It does not even have to be mystical, even if that is one common form by which to speak of the “it” that is beyond the grasp of logical delineation. Context is required for understanding it, but the “I’s” refusal to form phrases violates our understanding context to be logic and yield apodictic truth. That is, the presentation of the ineffable affirms possible phrase linkages even as it does not produce the phrases required to found typical, meaninggranting context. Were context to necessarily require certainty and always yield truth, there would not be such a profusion of rules by which language games could be played. Lyotard’s movement further into his chapter is like a hyperactive child let loose in F. A. O. Schwartz. The first game he picks up concerns rereading Wittgenstein’s rules with Wittgenstein’s own text. He moves, then, to the game of parataxis, learned from reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, wherein, in contrast to syntax, language is utilized without conjunctions. Even more radically than Stein, all of the common grammatical linkages, “and,” “in,” “therefore,” “thus,” and more, are eliminated. Instead of ending the game, this absence reveals the linkages to be ever more fluid and prolific (§§100-101, 152). Very similar games are encountered in his discursus through the obscurities in Freud’s analysis of who is addressed in female fantasy, through the mutability of Lacan’s metaphysical Other, and exact vagueness of Leibnizian “incompossibles” that help to form psychoanalysis’ symptom, before he finally returns to Wittgenstein for a rereading of his conception of the idiolect. 78 What each of these games share in common becomes clearest when one grasps the connection between rules and context in Wittgenstein’s frequent example of feeling and expressing pain. According to Lyotard, the problem uncovered by Wittgenstein in the occurrence of pain is when its expression is taken to be a cognitive phrase. This happens because when one says, “My teeth hurt: this is a

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descriptive, paired with a co-presented request: Relieve me of this” (§145). The dentist, who hears the description and request, makes the phrase cognitive by using it to deduce there must be a cavity therein, which then gives concrete steps he can take to remove it and your pain. But, the cognitive phrase is essentially different than the phrase that cries “ouch!” The ineffable is spoken in that cry. No cognitive response actually gets at the ineffable, for pain is not the cavity itself, just as that very utterance is also not one’s pain: “—but the toothache is painful, it’s a lived experience, etc! —How can you verify that it is lived experience? You are the exclusive addressee of this pain. It is like the voice of God: ‘You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed’ (Zettel: §717). Wittgenstein adds: ‘That is a grammatical remark’” (§145). “Ouch!” announces that pain is, even as its is-ness is entirely obscure to the one not in it and painfully obvious and inexpressible to the one in it.79 The “ouch” is only a grammatical remark. It is as close as we can get to that about which we must remain silent without actually remaining silent. Pain then reveals the same burden as the revisionist’s paradox: if one cannot communicate one’s lived experience, one cannot truthfully testify to its existence and cannot be the witness to that lived experience. Your fact of survival prohibits you from being a witness to what it is that you survived. In this paradoxical bind, the one demanding evidence will not be satisfied if the other attempts description about lived experience. The paradox makes the experience impossible and thus prohibits it to yield a cognitive deduction. To testify with description in the face of this prohibition, would be to ask for the suspension of logic and would be to forget the difference between phrase regimes that both thinkers so carefully delineated. This act of testimony could only be branded as false or deceived or true only within the rigid bounds of solipsism (markedly close to a legal decision of insanity). Nor can the witness say, “because I say so,” for this initiates the same decision of solipsism or prompts the circularity of “why?” One could not break the circle because one neither point to the living’s death nor, even if one could, could one ever rely upon ostensive definition, as Wittgenstein and Lyotard both revealed its many failures and basic violations of the grammatical rules established in the active language game. Dialogue would also fail the witness by ignoring the differend already formed in the paradox that prohibits all these attempts to speak. Phrases cannot leap from one to another family when linkages across these boundaries are impertinent. For example, if the police pound on your door and demand: Open this door!, it is impertinent to reply: Oh, what a lovely door! or to use a hammer to tighten a screw, or, to have a witness be alive and dead at once.80 In this context of the ineffable, all the standard rules of linkage fail. There is an event that cannot be expressed, that is, there are differends that cannot be linked. When the ground reveals itself to be an abyss, we can make that Kierkegaardian leap or take that Kantian step back when reason kicks in and begin to imagine bridges. One reading of Wittgenstein would suggest that there

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can be a bridge for every abyss. Lyotard perniciously shows us, however, that there are abysses that are pure impasses, that over them, any bridge is only an impossible revelry. Such abysses upturn reason and undermine every possible design for passing over. Yet, each impasse that proves to be this insurmountable also commands us with unspeakable power to try anyway. Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein, further, shows him to be the teacher in this lesson in absurdity. From Wittgenstein, Lyotard reads a lesson in imagining impossible bridges to bridge impossible divides, that is, he learns about most rigorously covering the gaping impasse with a veil, a house of cards, or a hazy drift of clouds. Each cover as a rethought bridge lets thought move on. To propose that Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein consists in finding him embracing absurdity seems, at first, absurd itself. Wittgenstein, the “father” of ordinary language, he who declared “the real clarity that we are aimed at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear,” cannot possibly be advocating a purposeful obfuscation of meaning!81 But, Lyotard’s method of rereading the canon to rethink even unpopular thoughts has primed his readers to note that any thinker who declares that the problems to be thought ought to disappear ought, in himself, be rethought through. Wittgenstein declared that “what we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”82 Lyotard has shown this declaration to be a challenge by demonstrating a rereading of his texts as compatible, rather than opposed, by showing his presumed ordinary language philosophy to allow for the extraordinary. In this demonstration, we see more than why Lyotard names Wittgenstein as his “Pretext,” as, along with Kant, “epilogues to modernity and prologues to an honorable postmodernity” (p. xiii). Wittgenstein’s encouragement to evade misleading concepts and his emphasis on method and description is a crying out of a phenomenologically inspired postmodernist desire to uncover prejudicial grand narratives. His incessant employment of various methods, fed by a desire to avoid any conception of an essence beyond ordinary language, further brings Wittgenstein in line with Lyotard’s postmodernism as a re-writing, and thus, in line with the latter’s effort to describe that which evades description. Anthony Kenny argues that Wittgenstein has two different views on the nature of philosophy.83 The first is that philosophy is like a method of therapy; like a medical practice, its telos is to heal: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” 84 Quite different from Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, wherein Lady Philosophy’s “harsh medicine” is rigorous, systematic, dialectic argument, Wittgenstein’s treatment is psychoanalytic, and can be seen in his Philosophical Investigation’s style of using unidentified voices in dialogue that blur back and forth into monologues.85 And, this is markedly akin to how Lyotard describes postmodernism, comparing it to the Freudian Durcharbeitung, a “working through,” or “a work of thinking the meanings or events that are hidden.”86 To stress the never-ending nature of psychoanalysis,

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ordinary language philosophy, and postmodernism’s activity is to toy with the suggestion of the theories’ futility. 87 But, each re-write narratives to work through them; futility must also be productive. The second conception of the nature of philosophy for Wittgenstein hearkens productivity as well, and is characterized as such that, “the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose,” wherein the purpose is to grant understanding through clarity: the destruction of the house of cards or the clearing up of the false pictures of the world. 88 The two views are not excessively divergent, as Wittgenstein shows by writing, “the results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.” 89 Slamming one’s head repeatedly is not futile, but productive. Conceptual confusions harm our understanding and philosophy, as the uncovering of these confusions, can heal us. Either way, philosophy is activity. Kenny argues that, for Wittgenstein, “philosophy is a matter of the will, not of the intellect. Philosophy is something which everybody must do for himself; an activity which is essentially, not just accidentally, a striving against one’s own intellectual temptations.”90 Lyotard seems to invert this claim of will by describing such productivity as a “work without purpose and, therefore, without will,” that is, as an activity that is oddly reminiscent of a Kantian freies Spiel, a free play, “without purpose in the sense that it works without being guided by the concept of its aim, but not without purposiveness.”91 But, this is no inversion; the free will is still an active, willing exercise. For Lyotard and Wittgenstein, both, this may be conceived of as a free play of narration whose aim is not specifically to diagnose disease and engage treatment but to be the activity of philosophy that veils and unveils appearance, uncovers the existence of those stories that cannot be told, and points to the possibility of their linkage into intelligibility. But, why, precisely, do they keep speaking if they acknowledge the impossibility of that speech to ever reach the ineffable and why do they even want to try and describe that which resists description? Because they, and we, are obliged. “The book’s point is an ethical one. . . . I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.”92 Wittgenstein’s silence, however, spoke countless volumes to Lyotard, because the latter understands “Silence as a phrase” (§110). And, with this reference to the incessant activity as silence, comes the idea of negativity and the need to turn to Lyotard’s consideration of Theodor Adorno.

Parataxis in Theodor Adorno One would expect reference to Theodor Adorno in a work considering how one testifies to the experience of the holocaust, given his infamous conclusion to his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” is that one cannot write poetry after

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Auschwitz.93 Yet one would not expect him to be taken up precisely as a poetic response to the inexpressible experience. One would not necessarily expect, further, the author of an essay “Adorno as the Devil” to turn so openly to Adorno as the savior for his silenced witness. 94 That is, not until one recalls that one is working with Lyotard. Adorno surfaces one section after his comment, “what escapes doubt is that there is at least one phrase, no matter what it is” (§99, which continues with a delineation of Wittgensteinian-style linkages between phrases), and four sections before his excursus on Gertrude Stein. He surfaces as Lyotard offers examples of the “‘modern’ style” of writing: the use of paratax as opposed to syntax (§100). Parataxis is the combination of phrases without conjunctions (the elimination of “and,” “so,” “therefore,” etc.). Syntax, on the other hand, is the rule-abiding combination of statements, ordering of words and structural phrases and sentences. It is the set of rules for making grammatical structures. Wittgenstein focused on syntax. Stein employed parataxis in her stream of consciousness. But it is Adorno who most consistently, most aggravatingly, wrote in a parataxtical style. Arguing for the demand Adorno’s texts impose upon the reader for interpretive involvement, Clifford Lee summarizes Adorno’s style as a “fondness for the aphoristic, [including] his disavowal of the structural function of paragraphs, his propensity not to offer conclusions, and his replacement of syntax with parataxis.” 95 He suggests that this style that demands a “movement from passive receptor to active contributor serves to counteract the passive, apathetic form of subjectivity produced by modern society,” and, thus, underscores a possible source of Lyotard’s interest in Adorno. 96 Adorno’s Negative Dialectics shuns grammatical and linguistic connection and convention. His style may be argued to emphasize precisely the negative, the lack of meaning. Lyotard, while perhaps more vocally echoing Heidegger and Kierkegaard, writes on parataxis’ relation to negativity, and productively reflects Adorno: “Paratax [La parataxe] thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being [l’abîme de non-être] which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is said is said. And [Le et] is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defying it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention)” (§100). While a phrase calls forth another phase, there can also, always, be the and that has nothing to follow it. A phrase which neither calls nor is responded to: this is the anxiety of phrasing and the central problem. In enclosing logic, “there are no true discussions. But here is a phrase (the speculative rule) which is nonetheless up for discussion. The fact that this is so is ‘our’ entire affair, an affair of linking phrases” (§152). This causes Lyotard to take up Adorno in two passages in his fourth chapter, “Result” (although, implicitly, also through many further sections). These passages are each longer than the excursus on Stein and the first, entitled “Model,” compares such with and against the “example” by reference to Hegel on dialéktikè and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (§152).

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The dialectic is what prompts Lyotard to note that enclosing logics forbid true discussions and spurs his consideration of Adorno’s work, which seeks to invert such enclosure by a radical negativity. Within the latter’s work, Lyotard focuses on its third part, from which he took the title “Models,” and which offers a number of phrases that all concern “After Auschwitz.” “Auschwitz” for Adorno, Lyotard concludes, is a model and not an example. 97 An example illustrates while remaining indifferent; a model brings forth what it is into the real. Thus, reading Hegel and Adorno together, Lyotard writes “the ‘Auschwitz’ model would designate an ‘experience’ of language that brings speculative discourse to a halt” (§152). “Auschwitz,” then, is another way of expressing a differend: it is a non-traversable gulf. “Auschwitz,” he continues, “is a name ‘within’ which speculative thought would not take place. It wouldn’t be a name in Hegel’s sense [which would require permanence]. . . . It would be a name without a speculative ‘name,’ not sublatable [irrelevable] into a concept” (§152). It cannot be an example; it refuses indifference. The following section, entitled “Experience,” evaluates this claim. In other words, the central question is whether the Hegelian concept of experience is valid after “Auschwitz.” Experience, a significant idea in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, is the “dialectical process which consciousness executed on itself (PhG: 144, 142)” (§153). Lyotard notes that, for Hegel, experience presupposes the life of mind as a life enduring death and maintaining its being in death. This sphere “liberates the Zauberkraft [magical force] of the mind, the power to convert the negative into Being, the ‘göttliche Natur des Sprechens [divine nature of speech]’ (Ibid.:160)” (§153). But, Adorno has prompted us to ask the question, “Can one still speak of experience in the case of the ‘Auschwitz’ model?” (§153). Is “Auschwitz” a death where the affirmation of non-Being can take place? But, “after Auschwitz,” to fear death means not to fear some sort of eternal return, but to fear that death really is the end of both the finite and the infinite. “It [‘Auschwitz’] could not therefore be said to be an experience, since it would have no result. Its not having a speculative name, however, does not preclude the need to talk about it” (§153).98 So, the question, according to Lyotard, is not Adorno’s (is experience valid after “Auschwitz”?), but “the question raised by ‘Auschwitz’ is that of the genre of discourse that links onto ‘Auschwitz’” (§153). Lyotard’s question, then, about the genre of discourse we can use “after Auschwitz” is asking, within Hegel, if we cannot speak, as we must, in the speculative genre, how then can we speak? Outside of this genre we lose our authorization by the Aufheben, by the floating position of the Selbst from referent to addressee to addressor as each new linkage is formed and validated in the turning of the dialectic. His following section, “Scepticism,” explores the possibilities of divisions in Hegel between dialectics as negative reason and speculative philosophy as positive reason to explore whether something from this genre can speak with linkages to “Auschwitz,” that “something thought from the outside” (§153-4).99

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If it cannot be sublated, interiorized, “its unmediated-ness suppressed, made to show itself to itself, then, according to Hegel’s program, there is only ‘empty, subjective, arbitrary chatter’” (§153). This chatter, like the endless phrasing that causes the victim vertigo, is the work’s nemesis throughout, that which Lyotard tries over and again to mold into something that can render its noise meaningful. 100 Thus, he concludes this section offering that we must understand “Auschwitz” as not outside speculative logic because from within such, it would then be rendered an incomplete, invalid moment, but that “Auschwitz,” itself, “cracks speculative logic itself ” (§153).101 Lyotard seems to admire Adorno for that impulse that led him to be hostile to Wittgenstein for resting in silence in the face of the differends. Adorno understood silence as Wittgenstein’s misled pressing for the concretion and ruleabiding that resulted in the purposeful ignoring of what did not fit into such a syntax. To ignore these cases, for Adorno, is fascist. 102 This addresses the bleeding together of the moral imperative with the logical paradox that Lyotard insists upon and agreeably supplements Lyotard’s rejection of the witness’ silence as reverence for the ineffable. However, Lyotard reveals how Adorno fails in adequately escaping this silence. In refusing anything positive in his negative dialectics he refuses the possibility of testimony. For Adorno, any phrase spoken “after Auschwitz,” or within a logic as binding as the revisionist’s, verifies the existence and authority of that logic, and thus prohibits the statement to say anything different. To evade this trap, Adorno resorts to persistent negation. This maneuver, however, fails to assist the witness because it forbids the positive affirmation of her experience while pure negatives would perpetuate the tribunal’s deafness to the witness’ testimony.

Authorization of the Addressee in the Cashinahua “Narrative is perhaps the genre of discourse within which the heterogeneity of phrase regimens, and even the heterogeneity of genres of discourse, have the easiest time passing unnoticed” (§219).103 Heterogeneity of phrase regimens is natural in language; altering from interrogation to declaration, for example, is nothing unthinkable. It would be more scandalous to claim any system to be language if it did not embody these differences. Yet, heterogeneity also accounts for the existence of differends, for those walls into which communication crashes when a phrase cannot bridge the diversity of phrasal modes. If narrative can span or evade these differences best, is this a solution for differends? Or, is the facility of narratives the reason we cannot fathom the impasse of differends? First, we must better understand narrative and its relation to differends. Narrative does not reject differends, but, rather, recounts them: every good story needs a central problem. The recount avoids binding them to silence if it imposes, on the differend, an end, a conclusion. “Its finality is to come to an

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end. . . . Wherever in diegetic time it stops, its term makes sense and retroactively organizes the recounted events. The narrative function is redeeming in itself. It acts as if the occurrence, with its potentiality of differends, could come to completion, or as if there were a last word” (§219). 104 The story redeems. It solves the differend by imposing an end upon it, arranging its middle pieces and beginning however best to make the ending good. Calming the silencing power of the differend, “the unleashing [déchaînement] of the now is domesticated by the recurrence of the before/after. The diachronic operator or operator of successivity is not called back into question. . . . It ‘swallows up’ [avale] the event and the differends carried along by the event. Narratives drive the event back to the border [aux confins]” (§219). Can narrative, then, really solve the differend? Can the story be therapy for the tribunal? Or is narrative the fuel? The seventh and final chapter of The Differend, “The Sign of History,” includes a long Notice, divided into eight sections, on the Cashinahua, a native population who settled in both Peru and Brazil. The Notice is predominantly a review of select passages on narrative in Le dit des Vrais Hommes: Mythes, contes, legends et traditions des Indiens Cashinahua, a study of the population by André-Marcel d’Ans, a professor of anthropology and political sociology at Paris VII who focused on linguistic ethnology of South and Central American natives. Lyotard’s analysis of the work concentrates on the population’s use of narrative as binding their history.105 The Cashinahua employ a strict and fixed formula by which to begin and end their miyoi, their traditional narratives or myths. This formula, as quoted from d’Ans, begins with: “here is the story of . . ., as I’ve always heard it told. I am going to tell it to you in my turn, listen to it!” (p. 152). The story is then told and concludes with another strictly prescribed formula: “Here ends the story of . . . He who told it to you is . . . (Cashinahua name), or among the Whites . . . (Spanish or Portuguese name)” (p. 152). Each tale will be unique, yet framed identically to every other traditional Cashinahua narrative like separate volumes within a set of collected works. The uniformity binds the tales together as Cashinahua history, “every phrase contained in these myths is pinned . . . to named and nameable instances in the world of Cashinahua names” (p. 152). Yet, more notably, the act of telling the tale, by obeying the formulas, concretizes this history and the place of the storyteller and listeners within it, “by means of a strict denomination, a ritual fixes the extension of myths and their recurrence” (p. 152). Lyotard notes the further linkage of Cashinahua history and its participants because d’Ans, the “White” or non-Cashinahua ethnologist, reports to us, further “Whites,” about the Cashinahua storyteller telling the tale of a Cashinahua hero to an audience of Cashinahua listeners. This secondary telling further fixes Cashinahua history as it situates it as a study within “White” history. (It permits a further telling through Lyotard’s Notice.) However, any further linkage would have been impossible if it had not been for d’Ans having been given permission

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to hear the story. He had to become a character in the narrative. The permission for him to participate was recognition of his existence; for the Cashinahua, “if the child has no name, he is nothing, he cannot exist” and “human beings are named, or they are not human” (p. 153).106 D’Ans had to be fixed within their history and repeatable in their tales; therefore, he became both “White” and Cashinahua by their giving him a Cashinahua name. This society determines its membership not upon bloodlines but upon names, “kinship relations are thus derivable from the system of names alone, without considerations of consanguinity” (p. 153). Each member has two names: their citizenry in Cashinahua society gives each one a name while their humanity in general gives each member another name. Each name is determined by three factors: gender, generation, and “exogamic moiety,” which refers to a descent group determined by marriage of parties from different clans. 107 Being given your names grants you existence as it determines your place within this network and how you link to each of its components and each other individual. Within the native population, the native name links you to your peers; the “White” name links each member as member and collective population of Cashinahua to the outside world. The miyoi’s concluding formula’s inclusion of the two names of the storyteller reveals the radical flexibility of their narratives to link to multiple phrase regimens. Names grant permission within the society and found a plethora of linkages. Your names grant you existence. Your names may also grant you the right to hear the narratives, if you are a male old enough to have received a name or are a female too young to have received one. Your names will also determine if and when you may be able to tell the stories. If you are a named Cashinahua, then you may be told about by the stories. There will be no stories about that which is not named within the innermost system of Cashinahua names. “But the system of names does not engender and cannot engender narratives . . . since the namings are not descriptions” (p. 153). Names grant existence and determine classification within the system, which details what one may and may not do, but the names and the system they forge are not a narrative. To form and tell the narrative of their names, someone must not be one of them and thus be able to view their names as descriptive. D’Ans, then, must remain “White” as he is a Cashinahua. The tale that the native storyteller tells has multiple universes within it and each one has its own diverse linkages; each Cashinahua hero will link to every other Cashinahua hero, place, addressee, and addressor—as will each new storyteller. But this diversity actually reveals a unification. The miyoi’s prescription that the narrator declares his fidelity to the tale, to repeating it, “as I’ve always heard it told,” singularizes the tale as one amidst all the tales and singularizes their history: “If every narrator has always declared this, then the story will have been reported with no discontinuity since the time of the Ancients, who were the first narrators as well as the heroes. There would be no gap, therefore, between

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the current narrator and the Ancients, except in principle a chronological one” (p. 154). The tale’s inheritance grants authority as it demands authority to be telling it: while this question of right is circular, the telling of the tale itself cements Cashinahua reality into a single linear narrative. The telling of the tales depends upon a system of names that is radically flexible in its multiplicity of linkages that it opens; yet, the telling of the tales unifies the narrative to such a restricted circle that from within it, one cannot describe the system itself. Mimetically reading the Cashinahua Notice as an option being explored for Lyotard’s witness yields interesting results. To argue that being given a name is the requirement for existence is similar to Heidegger’s proposition of the intimate relation between being and language, explored in chapter one. Lyotard alluded to this affinity by arguing that the silencing of the witness rendered her existence conditional, yet he balked at the proposition that granting her a mere name, “witness,” offered her a reprieve from suffering. Granted, a witness can only be one who does testify, but, if she does not testify and we call her “witness” we are just making a mistake. We could also call her “Tom,” “bulldozer,” or “dead,” but none of these locutionary acts creates that reality. Our mistake does not grant her a voice. Lyotard’s second chapter established that “naming is not showing” (§49). Even if the names reveal a greater referential system, they do not found or prove reality. For example, if Jean tells Jacques the where and when designated by a name, he is revealing its “chronological, topographical, toponymic, and anthroponymic systems” but, Lyotard points out, “these names do not imply that Jean himself ‘was there’” (§49). To show that she is a witness, she, like d’Ans, needs to have a second name: one inside the system and one outside of it. She needs the ability to stand outside of the system so as to be able to form a narrative about it. The catch: the Cashinahua needed to recognize d’Ans as “White” and as one of them. The witness needs this recognition from the tribunal of the historical revisionists.

Concluding Remarks The names of the Cashinahua reveal innumerable, diverse linkages. The witness could craft a testimony that endlessly names these same types of linkages in the hope that enough cross-referential names would form a system of meaning for the living to sensibly speak of having experienced death. Her activity would be playing Wittgenstein’s language game: an elaboration of the series of linkages that found meaning. It could profitably use the tactics embodied in Adorno’s and Stein’s writings. Exploiting the flexibility of linkages to determine the bounds of meaningful and meaningless phrases may permit an avenue by which to make the meaningless more meaningful and discover a way to bring the witness’ testimony into the tribunal’s realm of comprehension. It is this possibility that seems to fuel Lyotard’s continued catalogue of examples that I am reading as

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proposals for the witness to invent or uncover a new idiom the revisionists can understand. But, amongst his persistence in unfolding and elaborating diverse options, his writing pronounces a clear tone of failure. On its own, each option meets its own differend. Each fails in its own, sometimes minor, yet always abortive way. Stein’s writing advances the possibility for testimony by infusing her writing with the emotively sensual, demanding its comprehension proceeds by faculties other than reason. Her writings also fail because Lyotard shows how her means of linking phrases may very well command an ontological necessity, but a greater logical necessity is demanded by the revisionists. Wittgenstein’s language games inexpressibly aid Lyotard’s case and reveal the rule-bound concretion of meaningful linkages. But Wittgenstein alone cannot craft the witness’ successful testimony because there are those instances that resist the logical formula of language games, notably, the witness to the gas chambers. Adorno’s specific consideration of the radical theoretical alteration caused by the holocaust leads to a refusal of silence adopted by Wittgenstein and Heidegger and criticized by Lyotard. Adorno’s use of parataxis reveals an example of a disruption and creation of linkages akin to Stein’s, but one more aware of the failures of a pure poetics and, thus, is more rigorously situated in reason. Adorno fails, however, because, while he shuns silence, he refuses anything positive. He forbids any phrase to be spoken “after Auschwitz” or within a logic as binding as the revisionist’s, thereby verifying that very logic and perpetuating its deafness to the witness’ testimony. The Cashinahua fuse the ontological and logical systems of linkages together through the example of their narrative, yet they fail to aid the witness because their tales are not truly descriptive narratives that can situate one as an onlooker, as testimony requires. The following chapter will focus upon Pseudo-Dionysius in the spirit of Lyotard’s Notices. Pseudo-Dionysius’ challenge is identical to Lyotard’s: how to give testimony to that which forbids its testimony. His motivation is as passionate because his faith and religion as well as his philosophy command him. His method is of the same character as the alternative narratives Lyotard isolates. The unknown Neoplatonist from late antiquity can offer Lyotard a productive option for the witness to bridge her differend.

Notes 1. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), Preface’s “Context,” p. xiii; “L’heure de philosopher” (Lyotard, Le Différend [Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983], “Contexte,” p. 11). The following textual analysis will use parenthetical citations to the English page number, for the preface and notices, and section number for the main text. All other

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works will be cited by endnotes. The French, when particularly important, will either be inserted in the text in brackets, if a matter of words, or as an endnote for longer passages. All French quotations will come from the Ibid., and noted by the French pagination for the preface and notices, and by section for the main text. When my translations differ from the English edition, it will be noted. 2. Lyotard, “Untitled Interview with Bernard Blistène,” Art and Philosophy (Milan, Italy: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1991), 24. 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §3. 4. For an engaging analysis of Platonic dialogues as intellectual exercises, cf. Joshua Landy, “Philosophical Training Grounds: Socratic Sophistry and Platonic Perfection in Symposium and Gorgias,” Arion 15.1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 63-122. 5. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2, in original pagination. 6. Ibid., 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. Cf. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Putnam, Signet Classic, 2001), X, ch. 2-3, and VII, ch. 10. 11. Ibid., X, ch. 1; X, ch. 17; I, ch. 1, respectively. 12. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 13. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, in Kierkegaard’s Writings IV: Fear and Trembling / Repetition, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1-123, “Problema I,” III, 105, 55. 14. Ibid., “Preface,” III, 59, 7 and III, 57, 5, respectively. 15. Ibid., “Preface,” III, 59, 7. 16. Ibid., “Problema I,” III, 105, 55. 17. Ibid., “Preliminary Expectoration,” III, 86, 35. 18. In The Differend, this discussion of the “now” happens in Lyotard’s Aristotle Notice amidst a rigorous analysis of time in Aristotle’s Physics, which further offers critical insights into Lyotard’s understanding (partially with and partially against Heidegger) of the situation of the event into a phrase universe, the phrase occurrence as a what that happens that must direct us to the question of being and not-being and not one of a moment in time. A similar consideration of Aristotle’s now as “once and for all both too late and too soon for grasping” can be found in Lyotard’s essay “Re-Writing Modernity,” which makes the consideration even more explicitly about pedagogy as the essay identifies the feeling-led thinking as the method of postmodernism and its contrast, the periodization, as an obsession of modernity, while presenting a call to us to do philosophy as the thinking through, the unceasing re-writing that keeps us aimed at the unpresented (Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, 3, 54 [1987]: 3-9, 3). Finally, one can find three more notable instances of this consideration of the unpresented, with its linkage to one’s own activity and in identical phrasing, in Lyotard’s The Inhuman: “Because it is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific

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and paradoxical constitution of the event. . . . [which] makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity;” and, second, his elliptical plea to “Grasp me if you can. But it will be or has been too early or too late. Is an accent (an accent in the state of the body) graspable outside of succession?,” which surfaces in conclusion to his consideration of photographs taken of hysterical women that these images of nows captured in film “suspends the dialectic (for an instant);” and finally, under the subheading “Obligation,” his identification of Barnet Newman’s painting to be “inscribed in the great temporal hinge between too early/too late. It is always a matter of ‘too much’, which is an index of poverty . . .,” and is notable for again hearkening the aesthetic, that which will be our medium of attunement to the having and lacking a grasp of the event’s meaning (Lyotard, “Time Today,” “Speech Snapshot,” and “Newman: The Instant,” all in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], 58-77, 59; 129-134, 134; and 78-88, 80, respectively). 19. Lyotard, “Clouds,” in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5. 20. Cf., Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), which engages an insistence established by Jean-Paul Sartre in his What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). A similar expression in this debate of art saying something, taking sides or not, is Étienne Gilson’s remark that “the good philosophical style is one which is barely visible, one which steps aside to let the idea, and it alone, be seen. One might say that it lets the thought emerge without any direct help from language” (Étienne Gilson, “The Education of a Philosopher,” in Three Quests in Philosophy [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008], 1-24, 9). The connection to Lyotard can be seen variously, and especially in how his postmodernism is a re-reading that seeks to lay bare many of these positions taken, consciously or not. However, The Differend inculcates its reader with an intense sense of a command to take a position, which suggests that he is hardly writing in the “artless” style in the stances described by Barthes (e.g., style is a secret beyond the limits of literature) or shown in the silence of John Cage or absence of artifice from the premises of film’s Dogme 95, even as he may reinterpret these as attempts to embody the revelation of the unthought. 21. Cf., chapter one, above, note 62. 22. Lyotard, Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness . . . like the paintings of a blind man . . ., trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-François Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists, Vol. II (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), plate 40. 23. Ibid. Note the repetition of the phrase “working through,” analyzed above through the allusion to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. 24. “Lecteur. Philosophique, c’est-à-dire n’importe qui à bout du ‘language’ et de ne pas ‘gagner du temps’. . . . (Pour les Notices, un lecteur un peu plus professionnel)” (p. 13). While the English translation is accurate: “Reader. A philosophical one, that is, anybody on the condition that he or she agrees not to be done with ‘language’ and not to ‘gain time.’ … (For the Notices, a little more professional a reader)” (p. xiv), I am inclined to veer from accuracy for translating gagner, to simply better suggest its range—we must remember that Lyotard is a phenomenologist intimate with the study of time (with his reflections on it in Augustine, Kant, Husserl, yet also the movement of time in art and music) and a thinker with a past of radical and Marxist politics, wherein time is labor, as

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well as a thinker of postmodernism, adept in his cultural critique of contemporary apathy towards the hard work of critical thinking. 25. Lyotard, “Clouds,” in Peregrinations, Op. Cit., 5. 26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness (New York: Routledge, 2001), §6.54. In other words, his style enacts the teaching of his content. Note the similarity, here, to Hegel’s proposition that his Phenomenology was introductory in that it was to train the student to have the right mindset for doing philosophy; thus, upon completion, it may be set aside as the student moves on to his other works. 27. Robert Faurisson, the French historical revisionist, as described in the previous chapter, argued that the gas chambers did not exist because no witness who experienced them has been able to testify to their existence, cf. chapter one, above. 28. “On vous apprend que des êtres humains doués de langue ont été placés dans une situation telle qu’aucun d’eux ne peut vous rapporter maintenant ce qu’elle fut” (§1). 29. “Le différend est l’état instable et l’instant du langage où quelque chose qui doit pouvoir être mis en phrases ne peut pas l’être encore. Cet état comporte le silence” (§22). 30. Alexander Zinoviev, The Yawning Heights, trans. Gordon Clough (New York: Random House, 1979). 31. Ibid., 326. 32. The revisionist may complain in like manner to Giovanni Papini’s “critics”: “How can we write the life of the Unknown Man, since the very fact that it is unknown prevents us from knowing anything about him” (Giovanni Papini, Four and Twenty Minds, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company Publishers, 1922], 2)? Like Papini, Lyotard may exclaim: “A foolish excuse!,” but, instead of continuing, “The critics may go their way, and I’ll go mine,” Lyotard pursues them precisely because we do and cannot let them too easily go their own way (Ibid.). 33. Plato’s Apology is justifiably called to mind here, to an interesting conclusion. While Socrates multiplies the charges against him to include making the weaker argument the stronger (thus, the accusation of being a “clever speaker” that so surprised him), his last “cross-examination” of Meletus, concerning his impiety, cleverly committed the young man with the nice nose to the rule that declared Socrates an atheist who believed in spirits (cf., Plato, Apology, esp. 18b-19c, 26b-28a). Socrates’ anti-sophistic commitment to wisdom sought by elenchos fused with his being an embodiment of persuasive power provides us an interesting model potentially beneficial for the silenced witness. 34. Lyotard refers us, on this point, to consult Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1402b24-5. 35. Interrupting the moment of the promise of consummation, Lyotard carries us back to the Presocratics, to further complicate the situation (for which one could only hope the final act would carry forth that much more pleasure). His Gorgias Notice, which echoes his treatment of Protagoras and also explores Parmenides and Hegel, provides further illustrations of the intricacies of double binds and carries the discussion deeper into the debate concerning being and not-being, rich with allusions to Heidegger’s exploration of the ontological connection between the logical and linguistic bind of the witness, discussed in the current project’s first chapter. Being and not-being not only connect to the conditionalized being of the witness, but also present Gorgias’ three-step argument (nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something is known about it, its knowledge cannot be communicated) as a triadic form of questions confronting the witness (asking about the existence of gas chambers, the nature

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of existence of the witness, and the existence of one who could say “yes” to the negations posed by the victim’s silence). This leitmotif revelation also establishes Gorgias as a nihilist, as one who believes that nothing exists and nothing can be known; second, that the metaphysical and ontological theory is like his rhetoric, and is, thus, a performative argument demonstrating a theory of knowledge regardless of reality and or how to know and to communicate are dubious; or, third, that the metaphysical and ontological theory is like his rhetoric because he is showing the most far fetched argument, that is, the one our eyes deny, to be the strongest—a précise that becomes directions for the continuation of The Differend into the analysis of presentation. 36. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1989). 37. Lyotard is referencing Bruno Latour, Irréductions. Tractatus scientifico-politicus, unpublished typescript (Paris, 1981). 38 . One can read Lyotard as doing a sort of mereology here, discerning the many spawned forth from the one. This invocation, however, would prompt Pseudo-Dionysius to insist that we move at once backwards as well as forwards to maintain the subsistence of unity in and despite its diversity. Thus, Pseudo-Dionysius would argue, in addition, that every new “restriction” created in the ballgame yields another ballgame that is and is not that same ballgame. Not only would new rules within baseball still make the game baseball, but we can also say that baseball is basketball by their being ballgames even as baseball is not basketball by their respective commands to use bats or hoops. 39. This line of inquiry is also quite revelatory of Lyotard’s stance in the debate between the Ancient’s, Scholasticism’s, and the Renaissance’s interpretations of humanism or Heidegger’s critique of Sartre’s humanizing phenomenological-ontology into existentialism. From Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or strains of the medievals and the possibility and necessity of training or cultivation of the perfect citizen versus an excessive predetermined model of humanity with a fixed essence and pre-plotted course to the Renaissance’s insistence on the worldliness to which a person should aspire, including, importantly, the conditions of the world that affect that human development, there is a long history of resistance to a strictly solipsistic or determined model of human nature. But the subtly of Heidegger’s resistance to (especially Sartre’s) existentialism’s humanism concerned the former’s search for (equally precedented by the ancients) the essential traits of Being itself as opposed to the specific traits of being in the world. While Heidegger’s study of Being was embodied and engaged in the world, it was not individual beings but the essence that makes all those beings be Being. Sartre’s existentialism was humanism; Heidegger’s philosophy was not. Heidegger, like Lyotard’s project here, was seeking a universal that could be applicable across many different particulars. But, Lyotard’s employment of Heidegger, however, is what the latter would consider blasphemy; most basically, it comes down to the same charge that Heidegger held against Sartre: you make Being into beings. For Lyotard, the only way that it works is if we acknowledge the inseparability of Being and beings. But, while Lyotard is promoting a humanistic position and shows its impulses by such things as saying that phrases call to us, differends obligate our involvement in trying to resolve them, no matter how absurd, etc., but, he would hesitate at the term “humanism.” He is not really doing a humanism. He is doing something more primary, something that rests under the consideration of humanity and makes it possible, much like a Kantian transcendental founding the conditions for the possibility of something. Consider, for instance, Lyotard’s “Introduction:

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About the Human,” to his work The Inhuman: “Humanism administers lessons to ‘us’ (?). In a million wars, often mutually incompatible. Well founded (Apel) and non founded (Rorty), counterfactual (Habermas, Rawls) and pragmatic (Searle), psychological (Davidson) and ethico-political (the French neo-humanists). But always as if at least man were a certain value, which has no need to be interrogated. Which even has the authority to suspend, forbid interrogation, suspicion, the thinking which gnaws away at everything. / What value is, what sure is, what man is, these questions are taken to be dangerous and shut away again pretty fast. It is said that they open the way to ‘anything goes’, ‘anything is possible’, ‘all is worthless’. Look, they add, what happens to the ones who go beyond this limit: Nietzsche was taken hostage by fascist mythology, Heidegger a Nazi, and so on” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, Op. Cit., 1). 40. A fairly recent cinematic example of this can be seen in the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” (2007), wherein a man (Anton Chigurh), one we rightly call a diabolical murderer, a psychopath, and a dispassionate murdered, is in pursuit of another man (Llewellyn Moss) who accidently discovered two million dollars amongst the slaughter from a drug deal gone terribly wrong. The sheriff (Ed Tom Bell) pursuing the murder is persistently overwhelmed by the pure dispassion with which each murder (of anyone and everyone who even remotely gets in the way) takes place. The sheriff cannot fathom this much blood over money. He must make the killer into something more than human. Eventually, he contextualizes the murderer’s occurrence as a change in times and the country and, noting that they are more than he can comprehend, he fixes their incomprehensibility in reality as simply “changed”—these times are changed; this country is changed. Hence, the film’s title is the sheriff’s affirmation that this is “no country for old men.” He cannot admit any human is capable of the murder’s actions and all times can contain this degree of dispassion—the acts are too evil for a banal cause and context—for these admissions would undermine his (our) means of comprehending “human” and empty his (our) consolation of thinking time to be something that can be good or evil. 41. The French vouloir-dire, while the conjunction of the infinitive verbs “to want” and “to say,” is an idiomatic expression correctly translated as “meanings,” but seeing its linguistic components permits the English to show that aspect of meaning our term does not so clearly convey 42. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 44. 43 . Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), I, §2 ff. 44. L’affaire Dreyfus, the Dreyfus affair, was a French political scandal in which Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted for treason in 1894 and sentenced to solitary confinement in prison for life for allegedly conveying French military secrets to Germany. In 1896, evidence revealed the real culprit to be Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. This evidence, though, was suppressed and the latter was acquitted. False documents, created by a French counter-intelligence agent Hubert-Joseph Henry, were produced to further incriminate Dreyfus and were uncritically accepted. Émile Zola, in 1898, agitated tremendous public protest about the acceptance of these documents, and the framing of Dreyfus was exposed. In 1899, Dreyfus was re-tried, thus, re-splitting French society. The court eventually decided that the charges against Dreyfus were baseless and exonerated him. 45. Cf., note 33, above.

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46. While nearly endless remarks could be made upon this form, there are two that prove fruitful to this project’s conclusion. First, specifically concerning Lyotard’s frequent invocation of Socrates, we must bear in mind that Socrates claimed to know that he was wise because of instruction from a woman, the Oracle of Delphi, that he took as instructions to act upon to discover its meaning: that wisdom is knowing what one does not know. Another something that Socrates affirms himself knowing is eros, another lesson from a woman, Diotima, in the Symposium, and another something is that no-thing: it is only a lack. It is not farfetched to propose that this lesson, too, he took as an instruction to practice, given the many accounts of those who loved him. And, it is not too farfetched, as well, to propose that the Menexenus suggests a third piece of knowledge, that of death, again taught by a woman, Aspasia, and again, a lack, and again, a lesson practiced, as detailed in the Phaedo. Three times, we see Socrates as knowing lacks, taught by women (the gender extensively defined as lack), and practicing them. It is hard to deny that The Differend is going to do more than try to persuade us to take up the lesson from the recognition of the event, the lack of the presented that demands its being phrased, feel it, and, thereby, act upon the call by acting out its attempt at solution. Second, and more generally, Lyotard’s examples and allusions repeatedly demonstrate the long chains of linkages behind every respective idea they illustrate (beyond the Platonic, refer back to the quotation by Cyrano de Bergerac, §31). His inclusion of these specific examples demonstrates his doing what it is that they are showing and what he is calling us to do: the endlessness of speaking, of there always being another phrase, and the incessant attempt to found that new idiom. 47. Quintilian writes of the bold and great force of prosopopoeia, which gives “animation to eloquence, in a wonderful degree,” permitting us to “display the thoughts of our opponents,” so long as we “represent people saying what is not unreasonable to suppose,” although, this permission stretches quite far, for “in this kind of figure, it is allowable even to bring down the gods from heaven, evoke the dead, and give voices to cities and states” (Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson [Ames: Iowa State University, 1856, 2006], Bk. 9, Ch. 2, §29-31). 48. Lyotard’s Notice ties this to Socrates’ charge of impiety (multiplied to be equal charges against Protagoras, Corax, and many others), wherein the position of the gods in the instances of the phrase universe are switched so as to be taken as addressees. Lyotard shows how Socrates multiplies the charges to three impieties, thus making it resemble the paradox of Gorgias: impiety renders the gods weaker, nonexistent or spoken about, thus concluding, for Socrates, that “language is the sign that one does not know the being of the existent. When one knows it, one is the existent, and that’s silence” (p. 22, Lyotard cites Plato, Letter VII, 342 a-d for justification). 49. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Op. Cit., Bk. 8, Ch. 6, §37-9. 50. “Ce qui échappe au doute, c’est qu’il y ait au moins une phrase, quelle qu’elle soit” (§99). 51. In Vidal-Naquet, “A Paper Eichmann,” trans. M. Jolas, Democracy I, 2 (1981): 94. 52. “Nommer n’est pas montrer” (§49). 53. Plato, Euthydemus, 284a. Lyotard clarifies this by working out the argument from Dionysodorus, who accompanied Euthydemus: if neither of us say the logos of the thing, then there is no contradiction. If I say the logos of the thing and you do not, there is still no contradiction because how can your not talking about the logos of the thing contradict my talking of the thing?

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54. Gertrude Stein, How to Write (New York: Dover Publications, 1975), 23. “Une phrase n’est pas émotionnelle un paragraphe oui” (104). 55 . Lyotard’s coy wink is even more apparent in the flow of the French: “Pas de commentaire. Déjà la sélection aux fins de citation est indigne. Une ou deux remarques encore” (104). 56. Lyotard wrote extensively on aesthetic theory and on artworks. The scholarship has largely ignored the latter writings, despite their comprising nearly twenty books and thirty articles across his bibliography; they predominantly concern painting, but also installation art, photography, television, film, and music. His art criticism concerns diverse artists: René Guiffrey, Daniel Buren, Gianfranco Baruchello, Albert Aymé, Valerio Adami, Barnett Newman, Arakawa, Ruth Francken, Corinne Filippi, Stig Brogger, Pierre Skira, and Marcel Duchamp. David Carroll’s Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987) admits Lyotard’s tight relation between aesthetic theory and his greater philosophical projects (particularly the political), but he focuses on aesthetic theory over criticism. Stein, first with her brother Leo and then partner Alice B. Toklas, fostered a salon in Paris renowned for its collection of art and artists from Picasso (on whom she wrote a book) to Hemingway. For a biographical sketch of Stein, cf., Patricia Meyerowitz, preface and introduction in Stein, How to Write, Op. Cit., v-xxv. 57. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (Champaign, IL: Book Jungle, undated reprint of limited edition by Claire Marie Press, 1914), 11. 58. Ibid., 19. 59. Ibid., 37. 60. Ibid., 38. 61. “Les phrases vous font soupirer” and “J’utiliserais une phrase si je pouvais,” respectively (104). 62. Cf., René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Op. Cit., I; differentiating a dream from reality contrasts a simple (color) to a composite idea (satyr). Lyotard quotes Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Op. Cit., §2.02-2.0271. 63. “Le différend est réintroduit au cœur de ce qui doit régler le litige, entre la loi et le cas incriminé” (105). 64. “Et ils viennent prendre place dans son univers” (105). 65. Although Marjorie Perloff has made a compelling case for the productivity of reading them side by side in her Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp., 83-112. 66. Schulte makes an interesting remark concerning the house he built for his sister, “in many ways the building reflects Wittgenstein’s own personality: there is a sober matterof-factness combined with the solemn upward thrust of a cathedral, a painstaking exactness in the completion of each detail, and a total lack of concern for the comfort of the person living there” (Joachim Schulte, Wittgenstein: An Introduction, trans. William H. Brenner and John F. Holley [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], 7-8). 67. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §120. 68. Ibid., §79. 69. Ibid., §685. 70 . Interestingly, Lyotard cites Hegel’s Phenomenology and Jean-Louis Gardies’ La Logique du Temps on this point, rather than Wittgenstein. 71. Cf., Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §1. 72. Ibid., §40.

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73. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Op. Cit., 6.7. 74. Lyotard, I argue, is thoroughly phenomenological, even as he does show the ultimate failure of phenomenology to simply “present” the referent. In kind, I propose that we see Wittgenstein, like Lyotard, to be doing aesthetics and phenomenology throughout his philosophy. Wittgenstein’s mother was a talented pianist and he gave away most of his inheritance to artists, even as he never engaged the modernism of his contemporaries or became an artist himself; theoretically, his philosophy focused on practice, and he never formulated a theory of the beautiful (cf., Schulte, Wittgenstein, Op. Cit., 5-6 and Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Op. Cit., xi, 18-23). Nevertheless, it is still most profitable to consider his philosophy to be an aesthetics, although defined very differently than how two notable scholars argue the same point. First, Jacques Bouveresse makes the argument that Wittgenstein must be considered to be engaging aesthetics, yet he makes this point so as to differentiate his method from phenomenology (Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein et la philosophie du language [Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 1991]). Second, Marjorie Perloff sees Wittgenstein as engaging aesthetics, yet posits his emphasis on use as antithetical to postmodernism; she quotes The Differend, “[use is] prey to anthropological empiricism” (§76), and then notes, “Like Adorno, Lyotard cannot, in the end, accept the anticlosural bent of Wittgenstein’s investigative mode, his refusal to press toward theoretical definition” (Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Op. Cit., 14). Against Bouveresse, I argue that Wittgenstein’s method is aesthetic by showing it to be phenomenological. Against Perloff, I argue that her selective quoting is misleading; “use” is an incessant activity in both thinkers, and can unite them both as postmoderns. “Use” neither keeps Wittgenstein’s philosophy from being aesthetic, nor bars it from being phenomenological. Aesthetics, etymologically, comes from aisthesthai, the Greek verb “to perceive.” Lyotard argues it to be not disinterested perception, but one sensuously aware: “what enters through the blazon of the body, sensations, aisthesis, is not just the form of an object, it’s the anguish of being full of holes,” and, further, that “aesthetics is phobic, it arises from anesthesia, belonging to it, recovering from it” (Lyotard, “Music, Mutic,” in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 217-33, 231, 232, respectively). The aesthetic confrontation is a powerful perceptual and sensual one that comes upon us when we are caught unaware of these sensations. All that presents itself to us, affects us. The world is not a neutral background and our ordinary response to it cannot ignore its extraordinariness. Our affectation by the world is the sensation of being wounded and needing a therapeutic dissolution of the originary harm. Logical progress must recognize the meaningfulness of the illogical. In undoing the harm, we are practicing philosophical activity, doing aesthetics, and coming to uncover the essential harm itself. In this frame, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on use and activity is, thus, aesthetic; it is the sometimes painful coming to awareness of the conceptual confusions and working to clear them away. This clearing is phenomenological. It is a methodological approach to reducing biasing pictures and aims at the description of how things really are: “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §124). Wittgenstein evades any system-building and emphasizes the methodological purpose of philosophy: “we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (Ibid., §109). And, much like Husserl, he stresses, “there is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (Ibid.,

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§133). Like Husserl’s command, “to the things themselves,” Wittgenstein is not seeking an essence hidden under misconceptions, but how things commonly are when they are not obscured: “we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation” (Ibid., §91). 75. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1989), 100-4. 76. Lyotard is quoting Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Op. Cit., 7. 77. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Op. Cit., 5.641. 78. Lyotard shows Freud’s definition of female fantasy, Ein Kind wird geschlagen, to obscure and impossibly blend the addressee of the fantasy, the woman, with the object named, the beaten child, who is, at once, another child beaten by the father who, himself, is an effaced referent in the phrase. Lyotard shows Lacan’s big Other to be a metaphysical alterity with nothing to do with the little other, the patient, while also having everything to do with the other’s psychic harm. Lyotard borrows “Incompossibles” [les incompossibles] from Leibniz to designate a concept dear to his own project, cf., “For even if the world is not metaphysically necessary, in the sense that its contrary implies a contradiction or a logical absurdity, it is, however, physically necessary or determined, in the sense that its contrary implies imperfection or moral absurdity. And just as possibility is the foundation [principium] of essence, so perfection or degree of essence (through which the greatest number of things are compossible) is the foundation of existence” (Gottfried Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things,” in Philosophical Essays, ed. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989], 149-54, 151). Another elucidating passage is from his “On First Truths”: “But it is as yet unknown to men, whence arises the incompossibility of diverse things, or how it can happen that diverse essences are opposed to each other, seeing that all purely positive terms seem to be mutually compossible” (in The Shorter Leibniz Texts, ed. Lloyd Strickland [London: Continuum, 2006], 30). Deleuze characterizes compossible as designating the possible paths and the incompossibles as other paths, existing, but rejected by choice for the former; cf., Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). In personal correspondence, Clancy Smith elaborates, “compatible possible things are within a possible world such that some possible things . . . are, in fact, incompatible with other possible things as to render them unrealizable, hence arising the need for compossible, possible things in a possible world for within a possible world the things that populate it must be compatible with one another . . . rendering the whole damn thing realizable.” Finally, Lyotard equates the coexistence of the incompossibles to the psychoanalytic symptom and assimilates this into Wittgenstein’s “idiolect,” or common mode of linking between meanings (cf. Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §144). 79. However obscure, its existence is not doubted: “Here it is a help to remember that it is a primitive reaction to take care of, to treat, the place that hurts when someone else is in pain, and not merely when one is so oneself—hence it is a primitive reaction to attend to the pain-behaviour of another” and, in the following section, he adds the clarification, “What, however, is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably, that the mode of behaviour is pre-linguistic [vorsprachlich]: that a language-game is based on it: that it is the prototype of a mode of thought and not the result of thought” (Wittgenstein, Remarks

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on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], §§915-6). 80. The first two are examples employed in Lyotard, The Differend, Op. Cit., §147, and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §§10-11, respectively, while the last is the overarching example throughout Lyotard’s The Differend and this book. 81. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §133. 82. Ibid., §118. 83. Anthony Kenny, “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy,” in Anthony Kenny, ed., The Legacy of Wittgenstein (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 38-60. 84. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §255. 85. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard H. Green (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), I, ch. 6; II, ch. 1; III, ch. 1, etc. 86 . Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, 3, 54 (1987): 3-9, 4. Durcharbeitung is the methodological demand for an analyst to pay equal attention to all phrases the patients uttered, discriminating against none, no matter how seemingly inconsequential they may sound. This method is much like the Cartesian and phenomenological demand of the suspension of all prejudices and judgments and reception of ideas “in ‘disorder,’ unselected, unrepressed” (Ibid., 7). 87. The translators of Lyotard’s collected correspondences ask: “If it is no longer possible, or credible, to assume the authority to speak for the future, what escape is there from an endless repetition of the already-said?” They answer in his spirit, “But thought has to proceed. Lyotard argues that it must do so by casting itself adrift” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, Op. Cit., Foreword). 88. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §127; cf., Kenny, “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy,” Op. Cit., 38-9. 89. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Op. Cit., §119. 90. Kenny, “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy,” Op. Cit., 59. Schulte elaborates this activity geographically through Wittgenstein: “a philosophical problem has the form ‘I’m not familiar with the terrain,’” and remarking, “for whoever is unfamiliar with the terrain will not try to remedy the situation by constructing theories . . . rather, he will attempt to organize his thoughts and gain an overview—for which he may build a new model or draw a new map” (Schulte, Wittgenstein, Op. Cit., 99; his translation of Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §123). Just how a new town that is reminiscent of a familiar one can make one get lost, the common ways that we use language can often deceive us. 91. Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” Op. Cit., 7. 92. Wittgenstein is referring to his Tractatus, here, in a letter of October 1919 to Ludwig von Ficker, but it is an equally apt expression for any and all of his works as well as for Lyotard’s (quoted in Editor’s appendix to Paul Engelman, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L. Furtmüller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967) as well as in Hacker, Insight and Illusion, Op. Cit., 105). 93. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 34. 94. Jean-François Lyotard, “Adorno as the Devil,” trans. Robert Hurley, Telos 19 (Spring 1974): 127-137. 95. Clifford Lee, Aesthetic Pedagogy: Kierkegaard and Adorno on the Communication of Possibility (Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Information and Learning Co., 2008), 18.

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96. Ibid. 97. “‘Auschwitz’ est pour lui un modèle, non un exemple” (§152). Lyotard purposefully uses quotation marks around “Auschwitz,” here, presumably for similar reasons as he does around “jews” in his work Heidegger and “the jews,” where he explains, “I use quotation marks to avoid confusing these ‘jews’ with real Jews” (Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 3). The marks permit a greater generality and broader possible history and meaning than one, physical concentration camp can designate. 98. “Cela ne pourrait donc pas être dit expérience, puisque cela n’aurait pas de résultat. Cependant, que cela n’ait pas de nom spéculatif n’empêche pas qu’il faut en parler” (§153). 99. Any such division is nearly paradoxical, as Lyotard acknowledges: how could a distinction be maintained with the continuing movement of the dialectic? Lyotard names the opposition a trace, “the scar of a wound in speculative discourse, a wound for which that discourse is also the mending. The wound is that of nihilism” (§154); “trace” is developed in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 100. “From the fact that Adam was able to talk, it does not follow in a deeper sense that we were able to understand what was said” (Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], 45). 101. “Mais que ce clivage fêle la logique speculative elle-même” (§153). To crack speculative philosophy is neither to affirm nor reject that it may speak “after Auschwitz.” It is not a productive option for the victim, but Lyotard will not risk the consequences of rejecting it because speculative philosophy itself permits no outside. The impertinence, however, is clear in his language; for example, if “Auschwitz” is a model of negative dialectics, “Then it will have awakened the despair of nihilism and it will be necessary ‘after Auschwitz’ for thought to consume its determinations like a cow its fodder or a tiger its prey, that is, with no result. In the sty or the lair that the West will have become, only that which follows upon this consumption will be found: waste matter, shit. So must be spoken the end of the infinite, as the endless repetition of Nichtige, as the ‘bad infinity.’ We wanted the progress of the mind, we got its shit” (§154); and “What would a result of ‘Auschwitz’ consist in?” For Hegel, the result of the dialectics is positive, but any result would be in the genre of discourse of the speculative. 102. Cf. Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Op. Cit., 11-2, for a cursory review of Adorno’s disdain for Wittgenstein, although her reading unfairly equates Lyotard and Adorno on the dismissal of Wittgenstein. 103. “Le récit est peut-être le genre de discours dans lequel l’hétérogénéité des régimes de phrases et meme celle des genres de discours trouvent au mieux à se faire oublier” (§219). 104. “Felicitous or infelicitous in its meaning, the last word is always a good one [un bon mot] by virtue of its place” (§219). 105. André-Marcel d’Ans, Le dit des Vrais Hommes: Mythes, contes, legends et traditions des Indiens Cashinahua (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Cf. a biographical sketch as obituary notice prefacing his article in La Quinzaine Littéraire (972): July 4, 2008, available at: http://laquinzaine.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/andre-marcel-dans-nous-a-quitte/. 106. Lyotard is quoting d’Ans, Le dit des Vrais Hommes, Op. Cit., 38.

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107. Horticulture defines exogamy as cross-pollination of different plants. Exogamic moiety would be the genetic classificatory groups and would be what one would review to determine the “species” origins of a hybrid; for example, a Heucherella is a distinct plant, yet also the result of a cross between the distinct species Heuchera (coral bells) and Tiarella (foam flower). For zoology, this type of classification would find that the mule was the hybrid result of the breeding of horses and donkeys. Within anthropology, the human groups would be divided more subtly; for example, on Cuba one could find a “hybrid” whose parentage is both African and Spanish. Within linguistics, this practice would be an act similar to tracing the etymology of a word, for example, considering the adoption of a foreign word to name a new phenomenon.

FOUR: CONTEXTUALIZING

PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS The Difficulty of Characterization But purity, too, is beauty. A solemn spirit arises within from diversity. So very simple, these images, so very sacred, one quite often fears to describe them. But the gods, ever good, all at once, how rich, possess virtue and joy. —Friedrich Hölderlin, “[In lovely blue . . .]”1

Pseudo-Dionysius unremittingly wrote about the power of names, but he refused us his own, truthful name. His refusal resounds as the true identity of this writer of the ineffable remains shadowed in history. Scholarship has deduced and declared him to have been a Neoplatonist Christian writing in Syria sometime between 471 or 485 to 518 or 528 A.D. It argues that he adopted the name of Dionysius—thus, also called Denys or Dion—and the title “the Areopagite.” The various forms of “Dionysius” represent him to be the distinguished convert of St. Paul from Acts 17; “the Areopagite” represents him as an Athenian member of the Areopagus, the juridical council.2 All of these names tie him to the philosophical center of Athens, even while he truly has “neither birthday nor native land,” as Paul Rorem notes, sprightly translating a comment about mystical obscurity into one about the literal obscurity of his biography.3 Bernard McGinn,

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while commenting on the Jewish origins of late Antiquity’s mysticism, proffers a comment on the withheld name that is equally relevant for consideration of Pseudo-Dionysius: “Pseudonymity . . . indicates a belief that revelation lies in the distant past and is fixed in written texts, and it also implies that those who sought to identify themselves with the heroes of Israel’s past felt that they could claim an equally inspired authority for writings issued in the seer’s name.”4 An invented name can obviously serve to protect an author, but this cannot be its sole explanation, because it would suggest that there is no real distinction between texts with false names and those with no names. Pseudonymity, like anonymity, permits the actuality of the author to recede, but, while the work of the unknown garners authority from its content alone, the pseudonymous work garners its authority from a useful fiction—the pen name becomes a device that can contribute to the content’s meaning. An author’s adoption of an alias to honorifically, ironically, or heuristically share another’s authority is conceivable and, while far more common in literature (George Eliot and George Orwell and George Sand, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Robinson Crusoe, and so forth), it is not uncommon in some form or another in the philosophical canon. A hint of the adopted name is Plato’s penning of the words of Socrates. An inversion is seen in how Lao Tzu and Confucius may be less pen names than bywords for collective endeavors. While it is bombastic to ask whether the word of God, the Bible, was written by God—or by apostles, ancient scribes, or hundreds of anonymous editors—it is less so to ask the same of the Gospel of Thomas or many of the Gnostic texts. Søren Kierkegaard is a modern master of the pseudonymous who consciously manipulated the hermeneutic depths in his pen names and, thereby, reflected a marked theoretical stance on the unknowability of the self. His most apparent playfulness is found in his Fear and Trembling, where the purported author is named Johannes de Silentio. The impossibility of an author both writing and being silent mirrors the paradox of faith with which de Silentio struggles.5 Jean-Paul Sartre’s novella, Nausea, embodies the sly use of pseudonyms as honorifics and distancing devices, surely inspired by the Dane’s “Seducer’s Diary,” through the invention of editors who “discover” a diary of a nauseous man who finds himself as other than himself, and then existentially bound up with man whose biography he is writing, and then must strive to invent himself anew.6 Pseudo-Dionysius’ pseudonymity may be an honorific act: the adoption of another’s name for carrying on a worthy tradition. Perhaps akin to why a father often names his first son after himself, Pseudo-Dionysius’ name may denote filial piety to the Dionysius of the Acts and indicate his desire to carry on his tradition. His pseudonymity may also be a shrewd or necessary maneuver so as to ensure a broad readership. Or, it may be means by which to indirectly reflect or comment upon the elusive nature of his topic. Perhaps the nameless one realized that his own biography would not have deepened our relationship to his text, and that the biography of Dionysius of the Acts might do so. Specifically,

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as Rorem suggests, “We should not overlook the brilliant choice of the . . . pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite for the author himself. Just as Paul’s starting point for his sermon in Athens was the ‘unknown god’ (Acts 17), so also the writings attached to the name of his Athenian convert are especially concerned with God as known and unknown.”7 In Acts 17, Paul is in Athens (where “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas”) to convert the Jews and “God-fearing Greeks” to Christianity. 8 Epicurean and Stoic philosophers confront this “babbler,” bring him before a meeting of the Areopagus, and demand, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.”9 Paul begins his explanation with a justification, that, in his wanderings in Athens, “I even found an alter with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.”10 Paul, as the claimed “babbler,” one who talks rapidly in a way that lacks logical sense, brings forth “strange” ideas, ideas that may be foreign or disturbingly unsettle, and converts many followers, including Dionysius, by sharing his knowledge about that which they know of, but not about. In parallel, Pseudo-Dionysius concocts a logically disruptive, incessant stuttering, full of novel and disturbing ideas, by which to enact in the faithful, through this new knowledge, a transformative act. The extension of the levels of such a chaotically confounding feeding of style off of content, content off of style are productive to prime our consideration of Pseudo-Dionysius’ text. The above proposals may, however, be deemed too far-fetched, with the follow-up that he must have known that his name’s falsity would be revealed, and, thus, would not have counted on the efficacy of any content-illuminating indirections. I would gladly grant such a possibility. Although, granting the knowing possibility that the authorial substitution would be revealed, could one not profitably consider the value that may come from a lack of any knowable, certain biography? The effective erasure of his actual name and history, even as done through its substitution by another’s name, serves as a removal of a mediator between reader and the written. One less level of distance may provide that much greater ease for the text to be both informative and affective. And, its only real consequence is that, if we want to know him in this deficit of certainty, we must move beyond the absence of his birth date and parents’ names, and read his history through his philosophy and through the creation of the pseudo-Dionysius. Since the details of the debate as to the real author of The Divine Names exist as exhaustively as they can in the scholarship, this current study proposes that we simply accept the pseudonym as meaningful for any and all of the above possibilities and especially for the insight the unknowability of the author tellingly reflects upon the unknowability of God.11

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Pseudo-Dionysius’ pseudonymity, in addition to his eclectic influences and innovative style, make him as resistant to characterization as the second chapter found the over-inscribed father of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, to be. Their similar resistances inspire this chapter to mimic the structure of that one and endeavor a contextualization of Pseudo-Dionysius by means of a brief situation of his work within the philosophical context of Neoplatonism and through an elaboration of a definition of mysticism. The following chapter will then turn to Pseudo-Dionysius’ text, The Divine Names, to work through his unique synthesis of apophatic and cataphatic theologies and his focus on beauty and eros. The delineation of Neoplatonism will situate the unknown Syrian intellectually into the tradition out of which he came, while the definition of mysticism will elaborate the essence of that which he bequeathed to subsequent generations up to postmodernism. The task of this chapter, then, is to see what he transmitted and how it was that Pseudo-Dionysius served as a relay switch between antiquity and the middle ages and precipitated such a legacy that I wish to draw up into postmodernity.

Neoplatonism “From him and to him are all things.” —Romans 11:3612 “Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it.” —Proclus, The Elements of Theology13

Pseudo-Dionysius’ philosophy is as Christian as it is Platonist. 14 This does not condemn it to inconsistency, but only demonstrates how Platonism, after Plato, proliferated into being a vast flock of many-colored sheep: its many strains bear some family resemblance to one another, but only occasionally to their purported father, Socrates. Neoplatonism crossbreeds Socratic elenchus with Aristotelian rigor and employs it to draft esoteric, religious doctrines of the ineffable. A number of studies have concentrated on dissecting the late Neoplatonists as Pseudo-Dionysius’ primary influence. Gersh, for instance, argues that PseudoDionysius’ historical significance “stems from the fact that his doctrine is the first Christian version of a type of Neoplatonic philosophy” that surfaced in Athens and Alexandria between the fourth and sixth centuries, making him a Christian “transmitter of the dominate philosophy of late Antiquity in its most elaborate and developed form.”15 Louth concurs, noting Pseudo-Dionysius’ “enthusiasm for late Platonism (or Neoplatonism) went well beyond use of logical terminology: much in the deeper concerns of such philosophy attracted him.” 16 Nevertheless, just as the late Neoplatonists are still Socrates’ heirs, there is an equally rich narrative of influence to be found in Pseudo-Dionysius from the

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early movements of Platonism. A profitable way of envisioning this genealogy from Plato to Pseudo-Dionysius is through the themes of the One and the Many, the theory of procession and reversion, and the importance of the beautiful and desire. Much of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Neoplatonist inheritance comes from Plato’s unwritten doctrines, which, purportedly, were debated more than the written dialogues, with possible exceptions of the Timaeus and Parmenides. It was Plato’s nephew Speusippus (ca. 407-339 A.D.), the first diadochus (head successor) for the Academy, who codified these teachings into what would become the focus of the middle ages.17 In essence, these teachings are based upon Pythagorean theory and expound the first principle of how the cosmos came to be as two opposed forces: the Monad and Dyad. Equally important is the idea of the World-Soul, similar to Plato’s Demiurge, who mediated between the ideal and matter to create the elements, which expands the dualism into a tripartite metaphysical system. Simplifying Speusippus’ elaborate rendering, there is first the Monad (the One above Intellect, beyond being) over against the infinite Dyad (the Many) from which all multiplicity comes. This dichotomy produces Number, “by reason of a certain persuasive necessity,” in order to provide the “principle of infinite divisibility.” 18 The divisibility operates by an elaborate geometry to then create all that is.19 Within multiplicity’s realm of World-Soul, Speusippus claims that goodness become apparent. 20 The good is a creative power, a demiurgic activity of the World-Soul, and echoes the Timaeus’ characterization of the goodness of the Demiurge as the “agent of all order and tendency towards perfection in the physical universe.”21 The creative infusion of goodness through a tripartite system gives Pseudo-Dionysius a ground from which to conceptualize his own renderings of hierarchy and agency. This tripartite metaphysical structure was maintained for the most part through the succession of Academy heads despite their alternating, competing preferences for skepticism and stoicism and the turn to monotheism. 22 The Jewish, “Later Middle Platonist” of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus (ca. 20 B.C.–50 A.D.), fused Stoic and Platonic thought in a manner akin to Pseudo-Dionysius: “Philo built up a philosophical system out of material borrowed from the Greek philosophers and treated it in the spirit of the Hebrew . . . conception of God as the sole being and as remotely transcendent above the world.” 23 In this union, Philo acknowledges skepticism through affirming the human mind’s incapacity to know truth unless it receives a Platonically inspired “gift” of revelation from God. Philo, as will Pseudo-Dionysius later, explicitly substitutes the faithful one for the Dyad who desires both what comes from God and to return to Him. This gift of revelation can only be granted when the thinker is in a “certain state of soul denominated ‘enthusiasm,’ a ‘reposeful divine rapture,’ in which the soul, liberated from sense and absorbed in itself, is fructified by God.”24 In this state,

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the thinker must make herself worthy of receiving this gift by maintaining an active repose through philosophical exercise. 25 This renders a doctrine wherein God is unknowable, for He is in the world only through his power, like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, yet we are called and compelled to give Him attributes as if He were here by essence or as substance. His power is creative as infinite potentialities and unified as Logos; it emanates from Him and founds His attributes. “As related to both God and the world, the Logos . . . has a double nature . . . symbolized by an inward thought and an expressed thought in their union.”26 Employing the Stoic notion of Logos as an organizing principle, Philo specifically makes it the means by which God creates (as detailed in Genesis).27 Further, in “the terminology of Plato . . . Logos is the Idea, the Idea of Ideas, the ‘place’ of Ideas, the supra-sensible world.”28 Logos also designates how humanity finds its place between the sensible and the suprasensible worlds. We are seduced away from God as much as we are desirous of rejoining Him. 29 It is through Logos that humanity may approach God. 30 In Philo, the syntheses of Aristotle and Plato, stoicism and skepticism yield a monotheism that emphasizes the divine ecstasy of faith as an epistemological model to know God. This model is remarkably akin to the thought of PseudoDionysius. The synthesis of ecstasy and epistemology is likewise found in Plutarch of Chaeronea (b. ca. 45 A.D.), who “speaks of an immediate intuition or contact with the transcendental” that results from his mystical attempt to achieve a “purer conception of God.”31 With our “natural tendency and love for the Good,” we push thought to reach beyond the many mediating beings and towards the divine, although it is only death’s release from the body that can permit us divine union wherein we can “gaze with insatiable longing on the beauty which may not be spoken of by the lips of man.” 32 Likewise, Albinus, another notable “Middle Platonist” (ca. second century C.E.), envisioned a chain of mediating beings between the One and us by which is possible a “gradual elevation to God through the various degrees of beauty.”33 Pseudo-Dionysius employs a similar power of beauty and ecstasy as a path of transference between the mortal (Many) and divine (One) via an equally elaborate hierarchy of mediating beings as minds or angels.34 The Neoplatonic theory of the Monad and Dyad, between cosmology and metaphysics, sometimes inspirational of an ethics, becomes, for PseudoDionysius, the foundational construct upon which he builds his religious mysticism and epistemology of divine names. The One is the Creator who births the Many and, to which, the Many desire to return. In his fourth chapter of The Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius puts words into the mouthpiece of his teacher, Hierotheus: “let us say that there is a simple and self-moving power directing all things to mingle as one, that it starts out from the Good, reaches down to the lowliest creation, returns then in due order through all the stages back to the Good, and thus turns from itself and through itself and upon itself and toward

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itself in an everlasting circle” (713D). The construction of the Neoplatonist Monad and Dyad here renders a beautiful dynamism of procession from and reversion back through the sequence of hypostases that descend from the One. This ebb and flow will work throughout Pseudo-Dionysius’ treatise. Procession is an emanating or pouring forth that can be expressed as the actualization of a potency. In procession, there comes forth a sequence of hypostases (being, life, intellect, and soul) that descend from the One. 35 Reversion is the turnabout that seeks return to the One and is the completion of the creative, active cycle. This theoretical cycle yields rich imagery. Gersh etymologically traces emanation from the Greek verb meaning “flow” or “stream” and related intimately to “to flow forth” and “an effluence.”36 Iamblichus described causality as emanation, as “ever-flowing and unfailing creativity”; Proclus and Damascius name the effect as “flowing” from its cause; and Pseudo-Dionysius describes the Cherubim as the “effusion of wisdom,” describing God and His attributes as “outpouring” to His creatures. 37 The flowing of water is an excellent, cyclically expressive image. This cycle expresses, more effectively than most illustrations, the journey by which one (be it the mystical faithful, any creation, or thought) can naturally come from and go to God. The power that motivates this effluent cycle is desire. God’s love creates all of creation and all of creations’ desire is to return to Him by cultivating desire’s culmination in ecstasy: our own form of emanation out of ourselves and back to Him. Gersh links ecstasy, literally “standing aside,” synonymously with emanation in all cases where ecstasy contextually signifies causality. This is specifically seen in Pseudo-Dionysius’ emanation, as he “links it closely with the notion of Love. Thus God, because of the superfluity of his benevolence, produces all creatures by means of his ‘ecstatic superessential power.’”38 Proclus’ doctrine of potency, then, serves “as the connecting element between unity and being ‘for it is a procession of unity and an ecstasy towards being.’” 39 But, PseudoDionysius’ linkage to Proclus cannot be fully appreciated without understanding how Plotinus (ca. 205-270 A.D.) chronicles the beauty of the movement of desire that animates the flow from the One to the Many and back. Plotinus’ explosion of the movement beyond its metaphysical structure provides the necessary explanation for Pseudo-Dionysius’ ultimate linkage with the broader question of impossible testimony. Plotinus reputedly began what became his Enneads in 253, and continued it until shortly before his death, whereupon his student cum editor collected his notes and essays into six books each of nine treatises, hence assigning them the name, Enneads. The work is primarily concerned with the metaphysical elaborations of the One and Many because, “for Plotinus, as for many of his contemporaries . . . multiplicities cried out for explanation and found such explanation if it could be traced back to some primordial unity,” the ineffable, transcendent One. 40 Plotinus, however, both inherits and alters the model of the One and Many. He posits the One as the primordial, creative source of all while holding

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it as a unity independent from all categories of being or nonbeing because “everything is derived from it, all beings owed their existence to a declension from original unity . . . [all things are] an effect of the outflow from the potent reality of the ultimacy of the One.”41 This One can neither be any one thing, nor the sum of all things. It is emanated from the cosmos as a series of lesser beings, while being prior to all things. Plotinus uniquely adopts the metaphysical result that, in procession from the One, unity weakens to multiplicity, to found an epistemological model about the acuity of knowledge in each movement. As created things, our knowledge is the least coherent and we must strive to know all that we do.42 The movement between these realms, for Plotinus, is the procession from and reversion to the One for both metaphysics and epistemology. That is, the cycle that explains creation and disintegration also explains why we do not know the One and, thus, offers an identifiable means by which to come to know the One. Reversion becomes a methodology for knowing the unknown. To seek unification is to seek to know the One by retracing the flow of emanations. It is my contention that the procession and reversion that grounds a metaphysical and eschatological conception of reality and his epistemology cannot only be understood as these, but also as the ground for one’s actions. To identify the goal and how to achieve it is to underscore a theological divine command and to posit an ethical maxim as to how to live in the world. The goal to rejoin the One can be achieved by seeking to know the One, and, to do so, we seek to trace back the created things to their creator. We live by seeking the godly in created things and standing in awe of their creator; it is by desire that live in this system and by desire we come to know that which we desire: the One. The metaphysical system becomes an unusual, ethereal erotic movement of mystical, intellectual, and ethical striving to unification.43 The call from the created things comes to us as a display of beauty. Beauty initiates our desire and unfurls our love for God as spiritual and epistemological exercises. Plotinus’ eighth tractate of his fifth Ennead, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” opens with the premise that one who can grasp a vision of intellectual beauty may understand the Transcendent of divine beauty. Through the sensible perception and intelligible comprehension of beauty, we may come to know the divine. But, we must strive to apprehend “how the Beauty of the divine Intellect . . . may be revealed to contemplation.” 44 In other words, we must prepare ourselves to see beauty. Employing a distinction between an unformed block of stone and a formed statue, Plotinus’ contemplation begins with the appreciation of nature to move to that of art. The highest beauty is in the idea that the beautiful, finished work of art imitates nature. While there is a confounding reciprocity between the levels, the method of contemplating beauty operates at each in the same manner: The Nature, then, which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it,

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run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it. But that the thing we are pursuing is something different and that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly, in soul or mind. And it is precisely here that the greater beauty lies.45

Confounding is the blending by which the sensible can and cannot properly discern and motivate a pursuit of the intelligible. All beauty is of the originary beauty, all beauty initiates a call to us to return to the One, but the pursuit of any one beauty is insufficient to being us to beauty itself. The greatest beauty exceeds its containment in that which is beautiful. And to see this excess of beauty, one must see its permutations and their deficiencies. If one cannot see this beauty, Plotinus tells us, one should look within and gaze upon one’s inner self. If one is not moved or finds no beauty within, one ought not bother looking for the “greater vision,” for any seeking would be futile, mere “questing it through the ugly and impure.”46 One must train oneself to see the beauty of all that participates in the greatest beauty. In other words, the greatest beauty, the “creative source of the very first Reason-Principle” of beauty, is the “Intellectual-Principle”—but, how do we understand and name this source of beauty that is beauty itself? This beauty is elusive because it is all of its incarnations and yet none of them; it is neither form nor matter; it is “Intellect.”47 With words Pseudo-Dionysius will later use, Plotinus asks, how do we speak of the “beautiful in a beauty beyond our speech,” that beauty that, in “its immediate presence sets the soul reflecting,” but not our voice to properly speaking of it? Is it, then, something we can imagine? “By what image thus, can we represent it?” Plotinus concedes, “We have no where to go but to what is less.” 48 We have no words beautiful enough to capture the beauty from which beauty is possible. Thus, we name that beauty by the beauty of things we can speak about, well aware that these things do not match its perfection. The sensible is that to which we resort because beauty itself exceeds our capacity to perceive it and comprehend it in a manner by which we could know it itself. We name what is elusive to our names by borrowing the names of the beautiful things whose beauty is because of that original, greatest beauty. In a procession of the beauty of the divine, “Soul also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being in its image,” because there is a natural and right dilution of the power in each instantiation; thus, “we ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being.”49 This is no static hierarchy from the most beautiful to the least, but, rather, it is a delineation of the participation in and of beauty. The soul, less beautiful than Intellect, can still take “increase of beauty by looking to that original,” and we created beings, whose ugliness is our turning away from Intellect in our ignorance, can increase our own beauty by increasing our self-knowledge.50

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The self-increase of knowledge, however, is not a logical increase or linear path to beauty. As Plotinus reveals, this knowledge by which we step outside ourselves and towards this beauty, is not logical: “Plotinus was a resolute intellectualist, but the profoundly erotic tone of Enn. 1.6 shows us that he did not think that knowing alone could bring the soul back to its source.” 51 We must rely upon the sensible to lead us to the ungraspable intellectual idea of the One. We stutter the sensible names to try to understand and merge with the divine One because logic fails us and our knowing is still driven by desire. In this way, the metaphysical, creative cycle births an epistemological model that becomes an erotic method; the creative reveals a mystical knowing that is based in the passions. We suffer the onslaught of beauty and we suffer a prohibition against knowing the One. All we know and our desire to know are situated in the passions.52 Proclus profoundly adopts from Plotinus’ ode to beauty the emphasis on eroticism which will fully saturate Pseudo-Dionysius’ work, most notably infusing the hypostases between the One and the many with providential love (pronoetikos eros).53 “Unlike Plotinus, Proclus never says that the Ultimate One is in any way eros, but he goes further than Plotinus on giving yearning eros a consistent cosmic role.”54 This role is one of providing harmony to the universe. “From above, then, love ranges from the intelligibles to the intra-mundane making everything revert to divine beauty.” 55 Love is the active, creative power of the gods and an attribute we are given by them; love is given to us so that we can show our love back to the gods. Pseudo-Dionysius employs the Neoplatonist, metaphysical model of the One and the Many to ground his Christian philosophy. Like Plotinus’, his use of the model is thoroughly epistemological and grounds a call to action in the world as a theological or ethical command; the theory of emanation, then, is as pedagogic as it is his theoretical base. In this light, his epistemology is better understood as one that is based in the passions, as opposed to in strict reason, following the distinction made in the concluding remarks of chapter one. Even as he pursues the intelligible names of God, he must seek these names through sensible knowledge. This pursuit leads him through the sensible and beyond the intelligible; Pseudo-Dionysius must subvert reason to account for the unknowability of God. L. Michael Harrington carefully delineates and describes this other sort of knowing in Pseudo-Dionysius that this project identifies as the uniquely mystical knowing that is based in the passions rather than reason alone. He discerns three distinct modes of knowing in Pseudo-Dionysius: one type of knowing is the passionate knowing that is the synthesis of sensation and thought; another type is the passionless knowing that is circular and discursive; and a third type that is depicted geometrically by Pseudo-Dionysius as a spiral. This knowing, Harrington explains, is both the line of the sensuous knowledge and the circle of the discursive knowledge at once, and thus beyond both in themselves. He elab-

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orates this knowing by noting Pseudo-Dionysius’ reference of Paul’s possession by Christ and Hierotheus’ divine inspiration as examples of the “language of self-effacement,” employed as a means “of participating in a higher principle through the rejection of one’s own nature.” 56 The effacements of the selves, here, were conducted ecstatically through love. Pseudo-Dionysius, through the mouth of Hierotheus, describes the knowing that led to and followed from this participation, and recorded them in his book as from others, from reason, and from initiation. The first two, Harrington notes, respectively, are sensuous and discursive modes of knowledge, whereas, “the last is not.”57 It is, however, a knowledge that Hierotheus is initiated into and become sympathetic with; he suffers it, which is a bearing of knowledge that is born from the root “path-,” and shared by “the passions.” While Harrington’s argument has other ends, this insight bolsters this own project’s affirmation of Pseudo-Dionysius employing an epistemological model born in the passions rather than reason because it is one that is beyond pure reason alone. This model of knowing motivates Pseudo-Dionysius and the faithful to action and proposes a model of being in the world that is ethically and existentially aware of the failure of reason born from the unknowability of God, and how this failure necessitates faith to be a spiritual exercise in absurdity. Therefore, the metaphysical model from Neoplatonism grounds Pseudo-Dionysius’ premise of the knowability and unknowability of God (which founds his method of naming God by use of God’s attributes), his faith (which is motivated by the necessity of naming the unnamable), and his desire (that which his method does, which is to speak reverence to God, its content, which is He Himself as revealed through His names, and its goal, which is divine union). This Neoplatonist inheritance grounds Pseudo-Dionysius’ invention of a most radical Christian mysticism.

Mysticism “Trinity, over-being and over-god, who over-ideally look into the theosophy of the Christians, guide us to the over-unknown, the over-shining: the loftiest peak of the mystical discourses. New, free and unbending mysteries of theology are cloaked there in the over-shining darkness of a silence that teaches in secret.” —Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology58

Neoplatonism broaches all of the principles of mysticism, yet mysticism itself remains elusive to definition and resistant to characterization. Its definition is a thorny task because it is intimately concerned with that to which one can neither point nor name. Bernard McGinn, however, uses this difficulty to make a helpful distinction between the experience (the activity that is the pointing to) said to

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be mystical and the theoretical reflections on (the naming of) such experience. Mystical experience dramatically eludes philosophy’s capture because its very capture renders it reflection. Mystical naming, however, can be examined productively on various theoretical levels: theologically, philosophically, and psychologically. These varying modes of investigation can then produce an open set of possibilities for understanding the mystical experience as an element of religion, a way of life, and an expression of a direct consciousness of God. 59 The following exploration will only endeavor an outline of the origin of the term “mysticism” and its ascendancy to its use in and after Pseudo-Dionysius by focusing on how it relates to the greater project’s concern of speaking the unspeakable. Mysticism’s etymological derivation is, itself, rather mysterious; evading the philological debate for precision, it serves our concern perfectly well to risk some conflation or imprecision and propose the standard consensus, that “mysticism” comes from the Greek mysterion, meaning a “secret rite or doctrine,” which is from mýstēs, meaning “one who has been initiated,” which is from the verb mýein, meaning “to close” or “to shut.”60 The chain of derivations leads us to understand the last as referring to the closing of the lips, so as to keep a secret, and the shutting of the eyes, wherein only the initiated were permitted to see the sacred rites. Mysticism, then, according to this etymology, may be considered to be the enigmatic knowledge that is neither acquired through the eyes nor is communicable through the lips. This understanding can be enjoined productively, then, with a more commonplace definition of mysticism as an immediate, direct, intuitive knowledge of God, or of some type of ultimate reality, attained through personal religious experience. 61 The experience here mentioned may be understood as the achievement of a final mystical union or return to God or as a single or series of brief encounters with Him through dreams or visions so as creating a continuum of contact directly in proportion to received knowledge. Presumably, the union could provide intuitive and indubitable knowledge of God, while the episodic experiences could provide scant, partial or veiled knowledge. If by “definition” we mean the secure fixing of meaning to a word, thing, or experience, then all of these definitions of mysticism concern a knowledge and its attainment that elude definition. Consequently, all definitions of mysticism emphasize the how of knowing the unknowable and almost always resort to its communication as a poeticism. Indeed, McGinn identifies poeticism as the most notable and recurrent feature amongst all mystical writers who must “concentrate and alter language to achieve their ends.”62 Lyrical prose more effectively reveals divine presence by description because the encounter with God: “defies conceptualization and verbalization, in part or in whole. Hence it can only be presented indirectly, partially, by a series of verbal strategies in which language is used not so much informationally as transformationally, that is, not to convey a content but to assist the hearer or reader to hope for or to achieve the same

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consciousness.”63 Mystical language speaks across, on the other side of, or beyond “information” and the rules by which normal communication operates. Coming to understand how poeticism may permit the religious mystic to meaningfully express the inexpressible, unknowable knowledge of God may contribute another model by which the witness, bound to silence by logic, may still speak. Michel de Certeau’s The Mystical Fable seeks to better discern mysticism’s literary peculiarities, namely, those that reveal what is inherent in mystical knowledge, through tracing the evolution of the term. 64 He understands mysticism to be “not a body of doctrines but a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and experiential practices” that we often fail to understand today because of “the historical transformation of the adjective mystique . . . which designated certain qualities, into the noun la mystique . . . a word which consolidates those qualities, according to a scientific discourse, into a single place or field.” 65 His work is our productive foil. It is immeasurably useful because of his definition of mysticism as encompassing a diversity of discursive practices and his conclusion that concerns their universal embrace of passion. It is shortsighted, however, because of his intense disparaging of the evolution of the term and of Pseudo-Dionysius’ influence on such. To explore the flexibility of mysticism to address secular ineffable experiences, it is profitable to briefly review his genealogical account of mysticism. De Certeau’s The Mystical Fable identifies Pseudo-Dionysius as, if not the founder of the term in the fifth century, at least its “dominant reference” of origin through the thirteenth century. 66 According to his premise, PseudoDionysius’ use of mysticism was strictly in the sense of being an adjective. A concise expression of such a premise may be found in L. Michael Harrington’s introduction to his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology, which illustrates Pseudo-Dionysius’ unique usage by revealing how the term “mystical” is integrally linked to his usage of the term “theology” and how this shifts the treatise’s meaning from words about God to words of God.67 De Certeau’s complaint concerns how mysticism, properly understood adjectivally as a description of theology, mutated through an ambiguous process into a codified system of belief and practices. The codification of that which is ineffable is absurd and all too common in our everyday understanding of the term. De Certeau correctly emphasizes how mysticism, as an adjective, counters the implicit, however erroneous, intellectual equation of a noun with reality. We more easily presume a thing to be its name than we mistake a description for an ontological statement. However, to limit mysticism to only being an adjective also prohibits a productive discourse beyond strictly religious knowledge. De Certeau undervalues the ambiguity in the evolution as productive, rather than destructive, to the meaning of mysticism as a diverse, discursive collective. The terminological ambiguities in the evolution of mysticism all revolve about the creation of infinite variations of a dichotomy concerning reality, for

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example, a dichotomy of materially versus perceptually conceptual reality, real versus imaginary, body versus spirit, sense versus nonsense, and so forth. The historical illustrations of these debates are broad and fascinating. De Certeau cites the sixteenth-century French Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle’s note about the tradition of the division between Jesus’ real body and mystical body dating to the thirteenth century and how, still, three centuries later, “we adhere to his real body by the communion at the Eucharist, and to his mystical body by the communion of the Church.”68 The late middle ages strengthened both the division and confusion between the real and the mystical as evidenced in René d’Argenson’s early eighteenth-century division between an existent, political state and a mystical state (reality versus “a silent and living ‘inner’ realm, the reality of which eludes intelligence as well as sight”).69 When mysticism is conceived of as an adjective, its tone can be either positive or negative; as mysticism became a noun, thus codified into a system of thought, it carried this ambiguous tone into designating personality. The “mystics” of the sixteenth century were “contemplatives” and “spirituals” who populated the pages of Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and others. The mystical union was called, variously, “unitas supereminens animae,” “estado perfectísimo de contemplación,” and “contemplación quieta.” 70 But, as de Certeau elliptically alludes, a bias developed in the choice of terms under the influence of negative theology. For example, John of the Cross preferred “‘contemplation,’ and only uses ‘mystical’ theology to designate the ‘negative’ aspect of infused contemplation in reference to the apophatic tradition of Dionysius the Areopagite. He refers to ‘contemplatives’ or ‘spirituals’ when he quotes those whose doctrine he follows.” 71 Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophaticism became so broadly influential its language was used as both proper names for mysticism and as fodder to praise or damn others. A superior example of this circularity is Luther’s use of “quae docet Deum quaerere negative,” rather than the simpler word, “mystic.”72 De Certeau reviles the ambiguity present throughout the evolution of mysticism’s meanings and how it maintains some degree of being both an adjective and noun. For example, in the seventeenth century, “‘mystical’ refers primarily to a kind of ‘exposition’ of the Scriptures,” even while Pascal writes, “there are two perfect meanings, the literal and the mystical.”73 When Luther disdains the “merissimae nugae,” the foolish speech of mystical theology, he still ties its meaning as an adjective to the elusive words of God, which are “plus platonisans quam christianismans,” more Platonist than Christian. Nevertheless, he also extends the term beyond mere adjective when he suggests it is a playing of “ludens allegoriis suis,” an allegorical game of which, he declares, thinkers from Origen to Pseudo-Dionysius to Gerson are all guilty. 74 The ambiguous expansion of the meaning of mysticism moves it beyond its connotation to an exposition of the Scriptures and to a personal experience: “the allegory of biblical facts . . . is extended to all kinds of things, changing them

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into living images of the secrets of experience.”75 While de Certeau blames the enormous popularity of Pseudo-Dionysius for inspiring this evolution, he fails to acknowledge that within Pseudo-Dionysius’ own writings this ambiguity is present. The Divine Names is as concerned with the words of God as it is with the very power and primacy of words themselves. From the beginning, mysticism was a hermeneutical theology of lived experience wherein one’s self is as open to reading and re-reading as is the text under study. This means that, from its incipience, mysticism was an epistemology that demanded ontological, ethical, and spiritual engagement. It concerns our engagement with knowledge we can neither see nor speak. The description of something invisible as means to reveal something essential is a thoroughly phenomenological endeavor. John D. Caputo, in his book, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, describes Heidegger’s “thinking,” the term he preferred in his later writings to designate a non-information and non-reason based philosophizing, as remarkably akin to mystical thought: “There is in ‘thinking,’ as also in mysticism, an extraordinary sensitivity to an encompassing presence, a presence which we cannot seize with concepts, but to which we must open ourselves in letting-be.”76 However, Caputo only permits Heidegger’s thought to be akin to mysticism and not mystical in itself. Amongst his six strands of argument, his first specifically aids this investigation and hinges upon “the fact that Heidegger’s [mystical] experience is an experience with language.”77 For Caputo, born from his analysis of Meister Eckhart, mysticism demands a goal of surpassing language for the silent speaking of ineffable truth. Heidegger, he argues, pursued “the very opposite of Meister Eckhart: a renewal of language itself,” and, “if Wittgenstein is right in identifying the mystical with that which cannot be put into words . . . then it is in Eckhart alone, and not in Heidegger that we find mysticism.” 78 While Caputo acknowledges silence’s privilege throughout Heidegger’s oeuvre as the condition for authentic language and the sole space in which we can hear the call of Being, he argues that, nevertheless, “such silences as these can occur only within the framework and boundaries of language, as a caesura within language. What never happens for Heidegger is that silence altogether replaces language.”79 Caputo, like de Certeau, is wary of mysticism being tied to a language that fixes meanings and things and could be submitted to scientific testing and empirical demonstration. I applaud and embrace Caputo’s definition and conclusion for mysticism, as I did de Certeau’s, even while I argue that Heidegger is indeed a mystic and embrace Pseudo-Dionysius’ broad mysticism—both, due to their engagement with language. Mysticism is precisely that which cannot be put into words and, thus, propels one, with all of one’s passion or faith, to endlessly attempt to put it into words. Pseudo-Dionysius acknowledges the supreme silence, and then meticulously delineates the names of God. Likewise, Heidegger embraces silence as the moment of authenticity, and then forms his language so as to best express that which is divine in silence. And, as Lyotard has affirmed in

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The Differend, silence, too, is a phrase among others we endlessly speak (§105).80 To speak silence or to silently, endlessly speak are faithful enactments of mysticism. Thinkers of mysticism are called by their subject matter to be the most passionate, fervent of thinkers. Their writings are endued with an urgency to put into words that which they know, yet do not know in such a way that it may easily conform itself to language. De Certeau, while limiting his explanation to the adjectival form, nevertheless locates passion within the very use of mysticism: “A semantic passion is revealed here: the conjunction of a passion (which desires and suffers the other) with a meaning (which is offered or refused). The secret introduces an erotic element into the field of knowledge. It impassions the discourse of knowledge.” 81 As Georges Bataille argues, eroticism is the yield of a prohibition and its possible transgression. Likewise, mysticism cannot be based upon silence without its contrast to language, or concern the ineffable without the possibility of the transgression of its own impossibility. The knowledge that we “know in our hearts” is not centered in reason.82 Seeking this unknowable and seeking to speak of it creates a hermeneutical circle in which the secret, the inexpressible, is the prerequisite for all attempts to testify to it, to speak it: “there can be no interpretation without the supposition of something hidden to decipher in the sign. But it must also be supposed that an order exists between the unspoken and what masks it, for otherwise the very hypothesis of an interpretation collapses.”83 In essence, there cannot be silence without the honorific attempt to speak it, and there is no motivation to speak without the hidden being presumed. Thus, “anything termed ‘mystical’ becomes a mini detective story, an enigma; it requires a search for something other than what is stated; it introduces endless details having the value of clues.”84 We use our reason, our logical inclinations, in an attempt to discern knowledge from the unknowable, but the truest expression of this unknowable is a language that unsettles reason and logic in an attempt to translate the feeling of the other into words. Thus, mysticism is the knowledge that is neither acquired through the eyes nor communicable through the lips.

Notes 1. Friedrich Hölderlin, “[In lieblicher Bläue . . .],” Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 2, Gedichte nach 1800, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1953), translation my own. 2. Cf. Kevin Corrigan and Michael Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004, available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/. His self-identification as the Areopagite interestingly links to Lyotard’s frequent culling of legal terminology and theory; both step into law in order to speak of and for the witness and testimony.

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3. Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3. Its genealogy is long: he quotes from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 409, who quotes from Maurice Maeterlinck’s introduction to Jan van Ruysbroeck, Spiritual Espousals: L’ornement des noces spiritueles (Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1891), xvii. Its lineage mimics Pseudo-Dionysius’ equally long inheritance and heritage. 4. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 13. In Pseudo-Dionysius’ case, his name connects him to the heritage of the New Testament. 5. The name is allegedly borrowed from the Brother Grimm’s fairy tale “The Faithful Servant”—an apt and telling selection because, while it is illogical for an author to be an author, and yet not author words, this author must hold a certain silence for, while he speaks a great deal about faith, the figure of faith cannot speak because “faith begins precisely where thought stops,” and “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak” (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, in Kierkegaard’s Writings IV: Fear and Trembling / Repetition, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 1-123, “Preliminary Expectoration,” III 103, 53, and “Problema I,” III 110, 60, respectively). 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964). 7. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 7. 8. Acts 17:21, 17, NIV, respectively. 9. Ibid., 17:18-21. 10. Ibid., 17:23. 11. Cf. the scholarly accounts of Pseudo-Dionysius and his namesake: Erick Wilberding’s “A Defense of Dionysius the Areopagite by Rubens,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 52, No. 1 (1991): 19-34, 21; the introductory essays in Colm Luibheid’s PseudoDionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 11-46; Vladimir Kharlamov, The Beauty of the Unity and the Harmony of the Whole: The Concept of Theosis in the Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 62-73. On Pseudo-Dionysius in negative theology’s history, cf. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, “Echoes of an Embarrassment: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology—An Introduction,” in Flight of the Gods, ed. Bulhof and Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 1-57, 4-11. 12 . Cited by Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 121A. 13. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), no. 35, 38. 14. “[He] was a genuine Christian philosopher. His transformation of paganism is too thorough to be that of a pagan writer expounding Christianity” (Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the PseudoDionysian Tradition [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978], 1). Eric D. Perl also emphatically stresses his nature as philosopher, “not, primarily, as a late antique cultural phenomenon; nor as an influential episode in the history of Christian theology; nor as ‘mysticism,’ if that be

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taken to mean something other than philosophy . . . but as philosophy” (Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007], 1. 15. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 1. 16. Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 1989), 12. The prominent focus of his attention to Plato was via the philosophy of Proclus. 17. Very little is reliably known about Speusippus beyond his being Plato’s nephew and the speculation that he was a hot-tempered and lascivious man who was passionate in life and faithful to Plato’s thought. He wrote on rhetoric, commentated on various Platonic dialogues, and, while enamored with the thought of Pythagoras, he amply relied upon the thought of Aristotle to elaborate the metaphysical system that occupies nearly all Neoplatonists to and through the middle ages. Cf. John M. Dillon, Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347-274 BC) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30-3, 38, 40. 18. Speusippus, quoted in Dillon, Heirs of Plato, Op. Cit., 44, and Dillon himself, respectively. 19. All that is includes multiplicity’s creation of the realm of Soul, responsible for geometrical extension, the generation of all other souls in the universe, the physical world, celestial bodies, earthly body, thought, language, instinct and passions, the Good, and motion and repose (Ibid., 40-53). 20. Goodness and all other Platonic Forms are housed within the World-Soul, despite Aristotle’s argument that Speusippus abandons them (Ibid., 52). Along with goodness, there is also evil therein because Speusippus wishes to prohibit good and evil from the highest realms much like how Plutarch will later reject the One as being evil and the creator, source, or origin of evil; this results in harmony being limited to the World-Soul and between realms, as he “wished to deny ‘goodness’ both to the primal One, and even to the mathematical and geometrical levels of reality, not because they were bad, but simply because he felt that the term had no real meaning at those levels” (Ibid., 53). 21. Ibid., 4. Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 29e. 22. Interestingly, the synthesis of this dichotomy of stoicism and skepticism can be felt in Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings between the competing strains of desiring knowledge as a matter of faith (akin to the stoic principle that knowledge is virtue) and the rejection of humanly knowledge to accurately know the divine (akin to skepticism’s principle of the unverifiable nature of knowledge). 23. Dillon, Heirs of Plato, Op. Cit., 264-5. George Robinson emphasizes this synthesis of thought pointing out that he wrote entirely in Greek and likely read the Torah in the Septuagint and may not have even known Hebrew, despite his references to having traveled to Jerusalem. “He is at home in the turbulent waters of Greek philosophy that whirled about Alexandria, quoting from the Stoics and Pythagoreans with ease and owing a sizable intellectual debt to Plato. But Philo is first and always a Jew,” notably, in that his philosophic output is based entirely upon exegesis of the Torah (George Robinson, Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals [New York: Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2000], 407). 24. Benjamin Chapman Burt, A Brief History of Greek Philosophy (Boston: Ginn and Company, Publishers, 1889), 264-5. 25. The necessity of the philosophical exercise to achieve active repose is found throughout contemporary Continental philosophy (cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life,

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trans. Michael Chase [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995], 79-144) and founds the basis for Lyotard’s necessity of attempting an impossible testimony while aware of its failure. 26. Burt, A Brief History of Greek Philosophy, Op. Cit., 266. 27. Robinson, Essential Judaism, Op. Cit., 408. 28. Burt, A Brief History of Greek Philosophy, Op. Cit., 266. 29. Ibid., 267. 30. Robinson, Essential Judaism, Op. Cit., 409. 31. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. I, Greece and Rome, Pt. II (Garden City, NY: Image Books, DoubleDay and Company, 1962), 197. 32. Ibid., 78, quoting Plutarch, De Iside Et Osiride [in his Moralia] and Ibid., 198, respectively. 33. Ibid., 199. 34. This transference permeates many esoteric sheep of Platonism’s flock: Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the philosophical commentary born out of the Chaldaean Oracles (all which variously influence Pseudo-Dionysius’ influences). Hermeticism is a religiousphilosophical dialogic system attributed to the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus (1600s scholarship dates it ca. 200 B.C.E–200 C.E) and advocates the One as ultimate source in a tripartite system and entails a mystical doctrine concerning alchemy, astrology, and theurgy. Gnosticism (gnosis, knowledge), attributed to Alexandria, Athens, Rome, and the greater Indian empires with wide affinities from Judaism to Buddhism, promises salvation through mystical knowledge via a pantheistic, idealist, and dualistic truth of divine union versus entrapment in the degradation of matter. Equally obscure are the origins of the surviving fragments of the Chaldean Oracles, the second century Hellenistic commentary on an unknown mystical poem attributed to the unknown Zoroaster. 35. Pseudo-Dionysius’ hypostases differ from Neoplatonism as he converts the polytheistic system to monotheism: “The metaphor of emanation is a prominent feature of Neoplatonic thought and described the way in which spiritual principles—for pagan writers the One, the henads, etc., for Christians God and his divine attributes—exercise causality” (Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Op. Cit., 199). 36. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 18. For an intensive analysis of emanation as flowing, cf. Thérèse Bonin, Creation as Emanation: The Origin of Diversity in Albert the Great’s On the Causes and the Procession of the Universe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2001), 15-21. 37. Ibid., 17-9. Further, cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 47-131, 952A, for “bubbling over” and “bubbling forth.” 38. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 19; he cites Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 712B. However, post-Dionysian Christian Neoplatonists neglect ecstasy in favor of divine will. Gersh explains this turning away from ecstasy as a “sensitivity to the element of automation implicit in the unqualified emanation metaphor” (Ibid.). 39. Ibid., 20. Gersh cites Proclus, Theologia Platonis, 163. 40. Ibid. 41. Louth, Denys the Areopagite, Op. Cit., 12. 42. Louth summarizes Plotinus’ various realms between the One and before us, as created things: “Closest to the One was the realm of Intellect, which corresponds to Plato’s realm of the Forms of Ideas, where there is true knowledge of differentiated reality. Beyond that is the realm of the Soul, which is still further from the unity of the One, where knowledge

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is only the result of searching, and Soul itself is distracted by its lack of unity. Beyond the Soul is the material order which receives what coherence it has from the realm of Soul. Beyond that there is nothing, for such disintegration has itself no hold on being” (Ibid.). It is debatable, however, how much we see hierarchy as a digressive weakening in PseudoDionysius. 43. Plotinus’ eroticism is ethereal insofar as he was a sincere skeptic of materiality and posited desire akin to happiness as the self identifying with the best, a movement of the self, born from the One and striving to return to the happiness of the One. Happiness is neither directed nor determined by worldly fortune; rather, all beings can strive to attain this happiness within consciousness: “there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing we hold to constitute happiness” (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page [Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952], First Ennead, IV, 4). It is possible to argue that it is Christianity that recenters eros as a sensible drive by concentrating on the flesh and blood of a living and murdered son of God. This helps to support Pseudo-Dionysius’ claim that he is not running counter to Scripture by naming God Eros rather than Agape. On the role of religion in eroticism, cf. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957, 1986), and, further, the current project’s chapters five and six. 44. Plotinus, Enneads, Op. Cit., VIII, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” §1, 239. 45. Ibid., §3, 240. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 240-1. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., §13, 246. 50. Ibid. 51. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 47. His continuation foreshadows themes important for chapter six: “Even in Plato, as we have seen, eros was not so much a selfish desire for personal possession and enjoyment of the beautiful as a creative desire to beget beauty on the beloved. In Plato, however, because eros always involves a deficiency of some sort, it could not be ascribed to the divine world. In Plotinus, erotic love has an ambit both more cosmic and more transcendental” (Ibid.). The end of chapter five will consider how eros’ deficiency does not prohibit its attribution to the divine. 52. Plotinus’ dying words, recorded by Porphyry, capture this sense of a suffering lover’s lament in equal recourse to poetic language: “‘I have been a long time waiting for you; I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.’ As he spoke a snake crept under the bed on which he lay and slipped away into a hole in the wall: at the same moment Plotinus died” (Porphyry, “Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Work,” in Plotinus, The Ethical Treatises, being the Treatises of the First Ennead with Porphry’s Life of Plotinus, and the Preller-Ritter Extracts forming a Conspectus of the Plotinian System, trans. Stephen MacKenna [Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1918], §2). 53. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 59. 54. Ibid. 55. Proclus, Commentary on the First Alcibiades, number 52, in McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., 59.

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56. L. Michael Harrington, Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004), 100. In Harrington’s translation, Pseudo-Dionysius writes: “the great Paul, who became erotic in his possession by the divine, and transported with its self-effacing . . . power, said with his divine tongue: ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me’” (Ibid.; this quote cites Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., 712A). 57. Harrington, Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism, Op. Cit., 100. 58. Pseudo-Dionysius, A Thirteenth-Century Textbook of Mystical Theology at the University of Paris, trans. L. Michael Harrington (Paris: Peeters, 2004), 51, 57. 59. McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., xv-xvi. 60. Michael Craig Rhodes, prefacing a rigorous exploration into the etymology, designates the originating verb as myeō, and follows the Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon’s definition as “to initiate into the mysteries” (Michael Craig Rhodes, Mystery in Philosophy: An Invocation of Pseudo-Dionysius [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012], 2). The Reverend John F. O’Grady proposes the origin as either myein, which he defines as “to hide,” or myeo, which he defines as “to initiate someone into something hidden or secret or even sacred” (John F. O’Grady, Catholic Beliefs and Traditions: Ancient and Ever New [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001], 152). Demetrios J. Constantelos identifies its origin as the hyphenation of the two possibilities, “myein-myeo,” defining the latter half as “to close the mouth, lips, and eyes, remain silent, and be initiated into a mystery” (Demetrios J. Constantelos, Christian Faith and Cultural Heritage: Essays from a Greek Orthodox Perspective [Boston: Somerset Hall Press, 2005], 176). McGinn, in a note, also avoids the details of the debate by remarking: “There is no really adequate history of the originally Greek qualifier mystikos and its various derivatives” (McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., n. 8, 344). He then directs us, as I will do as well, to Louis Bouyer, “Mysticism: An Essay on the History of the Word,” in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books, 1980), 42-55. Similar discrepancies can be seen between etymological resources, e.g., “Mysticism,” Online Etymology Dictionary, November 2001; available at: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=myein&searchmode=none and Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert K. Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz (New York: Larousse Kingfisher Chambers Inc., 2006), 690-1. 61. McGinn prefers the word “presence” to “experience,” arguing that the latter overly focuses mysticism on experience rather than language’s expression of a presence, and Denys Tuner fiercely insists on rejecting “experience” because “in so far as the word ‘mysticism’ has a contemporary meaning . . . [that] links ‘mysticism’ to the cultivation of certain kinds of experience—of ‘inwardness,’ ‘ascent,’ and ‘union’—then the mediaeval ‘mystic’ offers an anti-mysticism. For though the mediaeval Christian Neoplatonist used that same language of interiority, ascent and ‘oneness,’ he or she did so precisely in order to deny that they were terms descriptive of ‘experiences’” (McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., xviii and Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 263, respectively). Nevertheless, here, “experience” is a productive term understood as Heidegger’s Ereignis, an event or an occurrence, used by Lyotard to describe the ineffable what happens. 62. McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., xiv. 63. Ibid., xvii. 64. Michel de Certeau, the French Jesuit philosopher, classicist, theologian, and arguable psychoanalyst, has written numerous, diverse studies of mysticism; cf. The Mystic Fable:

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The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), which considers mysticism at its flourishing and its relation to language; Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) has a chapter on “Mystical Speech”; The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), includes two parts on language and believing; and The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia Press, 1988), includes two parts on religious archeology and systems of meaning. 65 Marsanne Brammer, “Thinking Practice: Michel de Certeau and the Theorization of Mysticism,” Diacritics 22, 2 (1992): 26-37, 28. Brammer characterizes de Certeau’s interpretation of mysticism’s content as “what had once been ‘mystical’ became phenomenological” (Ibid.). 66 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Op. Cit., 90. Numerous translators begin this discussion by noting that French scholars have an advantage over the English, as Smith, this text’s translator, notes: “la mystique . . . cannot be rendered accurately by the English word ‘mysticism,’ which would correspond rather to the French le mysticisme, and be far too generic and essentialist a term” (Michael B. Smith, Translators’ Note, in De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Op. Cit., ix). 67 “The meaning of ‘mystical’ . . . is then closely tied to the meaning of ‘theology’ . . . [whereas] the common meaning of the word in English bears little resemblance to the meaning Dionysius gives to the term. . . . He does not even intend the more literal meaning of the term: the study of the nature of God . . . [instead] Dionysius treats the term not as meaning ‘words about God,’ but as meaning ‘words of God’—that is, the canon of scriptures in the Christian tradition, and, more primarily, the Hebrew tradition” (L. Michael Harrington, “Introduction,” in Pseudo-Dionysius, A Thirteenth-Century Textbook of Mystical Theology, Op. Cit., 4). 68 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Op. Cit., 94. He quotes Pierre de Bérulle, “Dédicace au Roi,” Grandeurs, in Oeuvres (1644), 133. 69 Ibid. De Certeau quotes René d’Argenson, Traité de la sagesse chrétienne (1651), 111, 186. 70 Ibid., 95. De Certeau quotes the fourteenth century’s Henri de Herp, Luis de Granada, and Bernardin de Laredo. 71 Ibid. 72 Cf. Ibid. n. 57, 319. 73 Ibid. De Certeau quotes Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres, ed. Léon Brunschvicg and Pierre Boutroux (Paris: Hachette, 1908), 6:89. 74 Ibid., 95. He quotes Luther, Werke, ed. Weimar, 6:561-62, and Tischreden, ed. Weimar, 1: n. 644. 75 Ibid., 96. 76 John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 224. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 225. However, Heidegger may intend an interplay between language and silence much like the one Martin Buber expresses: “And we speak to him only when all speech has ceased within” (Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1970], 153).

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80 Cf. chapter six, below, for an in-depth study of silence. 81 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Op. Cit., 98. 82. “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Psalm 14:1). This is, as well, the counterpoint for Anselm’s ontological proof for God’s existence (cf. Anselm, Proslogion, with Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, ch. 2 ff.). 83. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Op. Cit., 99. 84. Ibid.

FIVE: BEARING WITNESS IN

THE DIVINE NAMES The Divine Names’ Style and Form “Let us give thanks to God who clothed himself in the names of the body’s various parts . . . We should realize that, had he not put on the names of such things, it would not have been possible for him to speak with us humans. By means of what belongs to us did he draw close to us: He clothed himself in our language, so that he might clothe us in his mode of life.” —Ephrem the Syrian, Hymn 31 on the Faith1

The unknown, but presumably Syrian, Pseudo-Dionysius channels Christianity through pagan philosophy to develop a mystical knowledge unknowable through the eyes and incommunicable through the lips that wholly embodies the unknowability of God. It is Pseudo-Dionysius’ complete embrace of the divergent strains of thought and their resultant ambiguity—as well as his own selfconcealment in the name of another with its further indirection to the content with which that other was engaged—that permit him to accomplish the impossible: to express the inexpressible. Just as his namesake converted the Athenians by revealing to them what they did not know about their “unknown god,” Pseudo-Dionysius will enlighten us, and thereby transform us, about knowing the unknown. 2 The unknown Pseudo-Dionysius notes, concerning the unknown

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God: “Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity. And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything.” 3 This passage provides an illuminating entry into his work, The Divine Names, which is preeminently concerned with the problem of naming the divine. The essence of the difficulty resides in God’s unknowability due to his super-essentiality: all that He is surpasses humanity’s capacity to know Him. Nonetheless, by His grace, through the divinely inspired words of the Scripture writers, and with the aid of philosophy, we may know some things of Him. Pseudo-Dionysius’ aim, thus, is to achieve this knowledge, however deficient, that is permitted to humanity so as to achieve union with the One.4 Before considering the particulars by which Pseudo-Dionysius accomplishes this task, a few notes on The Divine Names’ style and form must be made, and these must be broached by considering the whole from which it comes. The Areopagitical corpus can be conceived several ways. The standard conception considers only existent works: ten letters and four treatises. The division, however, between the letters and treatises is questionable, for two of the letters are actually longer than several of the treatises, and, although perhaps not by Pseudo-Dionysius’ own hand, the treatises, as we have them today, are composed as letters addressed to “Timothy the Fellow-Elder,” whose qualification, following Biblical precedent, identifies him as a fellow presbyter.5 Another approach to envisioning the corpus, which may have greater fidelity to Pseudo-Dionysius’ intention, understands it to be composed of the existent letters, letters cum treatises, plus at least two further treatises. The inclusion of additional works is contested by the scholarship: neither do they exist today, nor do we have solid evidence that they ever existed. Regardless, even if these further treatises were never in fact written, Pseudo-Dionysius references them multiple times. The references may suggest to us that they did exist; thus, we should hold open the idea that his corpus is greater than what we have today. Or, we may suspect that their reference is an evasion. Perhaps this means that there are issues that he knew needed explanation, but that he did not want to provide it or could not provide it. Such absences could be for any number of reasons, from their being not truly necessary or that they would be hindrances to his main goal, to the possibility that such explanations were impossible either by logic or the limitations of human reason. Rather than contribute to the debate to their existence, the current work will note them as they arise and consider them to be meaningful as both rhetorical device and as allusion to an argument that could be (or was) made elsewhere. Within his corpus, as we have it today, his ten letters range from elliptically to extensively offering exegeses of his thought and moral advice. They are replete with poetic and provocative declarations, Neoplatonic allusions, bombastic redresses, strong opinions, and intensely mysterious and unexplained remarks.

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They are addressed to monks, a deacon, priest, and hierarchs whose names can be traced Biblically. This order has been argued, by Ronald Hathaway, as important in that it presents an ascending hierarchy of addressees, with the exception of the eighth letter, addressed to a monk, inserted between two to hierarchs. The exception to this hierarchical order, from a thinker with two works exclusively on hierarchies, is notable, Hathaway argues, for its Neoplatonically infused and markedly sociopolitical content. 6 More literally, the rank of the presumptive recipients guides their content, as the lower ranked addressees receive the reminders about the esoteric nature of divine truths, while the hierarchs receive the more theoretical expansions and condemning complaints about other various parties who transgress this knowledge. Beyond the letters, there are the four surviving treatises: The Celestial Hierarchy, which delineates the ranks of angels; The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which delineates the ranks of religious figures; The Divine Names, which undertakes a study of the intelligible names applied to God (i.e., Goodness, Wisdom, Yearning, etc.); and finally, The Mystical Theology, which philosophically prompts one to abandon the sensible and intelligible in order to experience a union with God. The two debated treatises are the Theological Representations (Outlines of Divinity), which was said to be on the trinity and incarnation, and the Symbolic Theology, which reputedly analyzed the sensible names representing God (e.g., Rock, Right Hand, etc.). Each of these treatises shares some degree of the poetic and bombastic fervor of The Letters. Pseudo-Dionysius has been called the writer who epitomizes mystical language.7 Another commentator remarks on how Pseudo-Dionysius “delighted in etymologies, puns, and allusions. In particular, the proper personal names, such as Gaius [the monk to whom four of his letters are addressed], were all selected carefully as part of an inventive overall program and may occasionally provide overtones and oblique clues to the contents of the corpus.”8 Pseudo-Dionysius’ delight in the play and power of language renders his style as oblique as his content. Paul Rorem remarks, “the great challenge of reading the Dionysian materials has little to do with quantity . . . the complete works requires less than 250 pages. The challenge is rather in the complexity of the vocabulary, the syntax, and especially the concepts involved.” 9 In particular, The Divine Names is noted as exemplar of his literary fecundity and “proved to be one of the most pregnant texts in the medieval canon for philosophic conceptions and methods.” 10 Aquinas concurs, although hastens to add that “one must consider that the blessed Dionysius used an obscure style in all his books,” most notably, he “often multiplies words, which may seem superfluous, but nevertheless will be found to contain a great depth of meaning by those who consider them diligently.” 11 The most plaintive remark is the reflection by John Scotus Eriugena, that “in his usual way he expresses himself in an involved and distorted language, and therefore many find him extremely obscure and difficult to understand.” 12 The following exegesis of The Divine Names, then, will carefully consider his obscurity as a

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meaningful contribution to his philosophy by carefully noting terminology and rigorously interpreting his technique. His style will be considered as it assists his method of the radical conjunction of apophatic and cataphatic theologies and enhances his focus upon Beauty and Love as particularly revelatory names for God.

Witnessing and Testimony Naming Names Each of The Divine Names’ thirteen chapters has a title, which may or may not be later editorial additions, as noted by the co-translators Colm Luibheid and Rorem, who reference the dearth of systematic study of this question. The title of chapter one begins with a dedication: “Dionysius the Elder to Timothy the Fellow-Elder: What the goal of this discourse is, and the tradition regarding the divine names” (585A). Terminological clarification of the address presents an interesting interpretive insight to the treatise. The frame for the work is that Pseudo-Dionysius, as “the Elder,” a presbyter, is writing an instructive letter to Timothy. While named “Fellow-Elder,” it is clear from the tone of the treatise that Timothy is a junior colleague. Thus, Pseudo-Dionysius positions himself (or an editor does so on his behalf) as a teacher, which renders a parallel to the relationship between Paul and Dionysius in Acts 17. The latter suggests that Paul wandered Athens and spoke to many of its citizens and foreign residents before it concisely records his speech that earned him Dionysius as a convert. Thus, while it seems that Pseudo-Dionysius tells us “the goal,” mentioned in the title, in his very first sentence—“an explication of the divine names, as far as possible” (585B)—if the parallel is true between our author and Paul, this is not the full story. Instead, it is only through Pseudo-Dionysius’ wandering, in great but obtuse detail, through the whole text that Timothy or we, his readers, will come to our conversion point. The stumbling block to the suggested and proposed goals, however, is well established right away—even if its most concise statement does not come until the seventh chapter: “If God cannot be grasped by mind or sense-perception, if he is not a particular being, how do we know him” (869C)? The tradition of how we go about knowing God, then, and how PseudoDionysius will augment this tradition, will be the emphasis of his first chapter and can be summarized by his methodological mantra: “through knowledge and through unknowing” (872A). Within that same first sentence of the chapter, Pseudo-Dionysius informs us that this work conceptually follows from the (questionably existent) Theological Representations, summarized several pages later as concerning the procession of God from simplicity to plurality. 13 He also states that Symbolic Theology (also potentially fictitious) will follow after The Divine Names. His genealogy around

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the sandwiched treatise defies a certain chronological comprehension while, nevertheless, offering an informative framework: to know the names of God is the endeavor of the work that follows from a delineation of His creative powers and precedes the mundane modes of knowing Him. Here, though, our task is to explore the divine names by which we call Him, and Pseudo-Dionysius cautions us immediately to not surpass the truth of what can be said about the unknown, that “we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed” (588A). The Scripture writers, who were graced with a power to say more than what normal human wisdom is permitted, shall be the sources of these names. God’s knowability and unknowability are both solidly affirmed by the terminology within the first section of this first chapter: He “transcends being,” is “beyond being,” “beyond speech, mind, or being itself,” demands an “understanding beyond being,” is “infinity beyond being,” “beyond intelligence,” is the “inscrutable One,” the “inexpressible Good,” “mind beyond mind,” and the “word beyond speech” (588A-B). Within this first segment of text, we have been introduced to his peculiar theological disposition. The authority of the Scriptures is established straightforwardly and the Neoplatonist inheritance is acknowledged implicitly. The names delineated above and supplemented with “One,” “Cause,” “Source of all unity,” and “supra-existent Being,” reveal a blending of Christian and Neoplatonist philosophies (588B). Textual evidence for these names identified as easily in Plotinus or Proclus as in the Scriptures, to which he claims to limit himself. One important and immediate, clearly Platonic reference is that divine truth is “revealed to each mind in proportion to its capacities” (588A).14 If God was as inscrutable as the numerous names above suggest, however, there would be little more that his treatise could say. And, an investigation of divine names is not, nor can it be, a simple dictionary of names. The knowable must be brought into balance with the unknowable; every name must affirm a scrap of knowledge that we have about God and every name must reject that scrap as essentially inadequate knowledge. “There is no name for it [God] nor expression. We cannot follow it into its inaccessible dwelling place so far above us and we cannot even call it by the name of goodness” (981A). Thus, just as God is “invisible and incomprehensible . . . ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’” He is, at once, “not absolutely incommunicable to everything” (588C). Thus, God is and is not utterly inscrutable. This means that we cannot, and yet can, know God. Fidelity to this revelation means that Pseudo-Dionysius’ method must speak and un-speak everything. It must affirm each name of God as it denies each name. Ultimately, it is only God, in His grace, who grants one “a firm, transcendent beam, granting enlightenment,” in proportion to each person’s capacity or allotment, so as to draw “sacred minds upward to its permitted contemplation,”

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and, if permitted, to “participation,” or divine union wherein one’s knowledge can then be complete (588D). Following Scripture as much as Greek philosophy, Pseudo-Dionysius illustrates throughout his text this play of knowing and not knowing through the imagery of light and darkness. God’s light that draws the mind upwards hearkens Plato’s allegory of the cave where, from the shadowed underworld of unknowing, the higher ground’s blinding sun, the light of reason, draws us up to the truth. Hearkening Plato’s metaphor of the soul as winged horses and charioteer, Pseudo-Dionysius’ divinely enlightened minds “with a love matching the illuminations granted them … take flight, reverently, wisely, in all holiness” (589A). Diverging from Plato, however, is PseudoDionysius’ rigorously mystical insistence on the unknowability of God, on how He is “out of the reach of every rational process” (588B). The claim that this is a divergence, however, is interesting and misleading at once. Just as Plato’s affirmation of reason never neglects the important role of ignorance in wisdom, Pseudo-Dionysius’ affirmation of the unknowability likewise does not resolutely neglect reason. Plato’s ignorance and Pseudo-Dionysius’ reason are both inextricably linked with desire—recognition of either is an incitation of desire. God may be unknowable, but His unknowability challenges our being rational creations and ignites our desire to know Him. The Divine Names, then, is one piece in Pseudo-Dionysius’ endeavor to complete a systematic examination and justification of every name of God so as to attain some degree of knowledge. This endeavor is as honorific as it is transgressive—as an activity seeking affirmative knowledge, it affirms the desire to transgress the epistemic prohibition and, thereby, affirms the power of reason to know what is unknown. Perhaps self-consciously transgressing the command that the Scriptures alone comprise his source, Pseudo-Dionysius elaborates this conjunction of the knowable and unknowable through Neoplatonist justification that he repeatedly ascribes to the Scriptures. In brief, these include “scriptural utterances” about the procession of God, His being a monad or henad, His form as a trinity and as Cause of all that is, His sacred beauty, and loving nature (589D-592A). These utterances come to us “wrapped in sacred veils of that love toward humanity” and we respond by envisioning the Transcendent “clothed in the terms of being” (592B). Utilizing the Neoplatonic theory of emanation—until we achieve a union with Him—we must try to think Him as His creation, thus, in the terms by which we think earthly things. Until then, and in order to achieve that union, “we use whatever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God” (592C). “How then can we speak of the divine names” (593A)? By speaking and unspeaking His names. In other words, Pseudo-Dionysius will radically conjoin cataphatic (affirmative) and apophatic (negative) theologies to affirm and deny all of our knowledge of things as knowledge of God. In his Mystical Theology, he writes, “Why, you ask, do we begin the divine clearing off from the last of all, when we set down the settings starting from the most outstanding?”15 To “set down” or “affirm” a name, methodologically, is affirmative theology; to

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“clear off” the name is to erase it, negate it, and, methodologically, is negative theology. When the names are spoken, they must then be unspoken because no name that we know can be appropriate to name He who surpasses our possible knowing. Andrew Louth, in his work Denys the Areopagite, explains how PseudoDionysius’ method is clearly situated in Neoplatonist theories of emanation and naming God, but also how it differs. This difference is predominately found in the unique balance of both affirmation and negation concerning a singular source: For Denys, however, the reference of both apophatic and cataphatic theology is the One God: they are apparently contradictory or paradoxical. It is of the same God that we are to make both affirmations and denials. Denys has, as it were, identified the hypotheses of the Parmenides. . . . What Procline Neoplatonism kept, logically and ontologically apart, Denys brings together in stark paradox.16

The juxtaposition of Pseudo-Dionysius and Plato’s Parmenides is profitable. Plato’s dialogue posits the first hypothesis as identifying the One of whom nothing can be spoken. Pseudo-Dionysius posits the first as the “Transcendent [who] surpasses all discourse” (593A). Plato’s second hypothesis acknowledges the manifestations of the divine that can be spoken. Pseudo-Dionysius’ second acknowledges the “Good [who] is not absolutely incommunicable to everything” (588C). However, for Pseudo-Dionysius and against the Parmenides and its Neoplatonist interpretation, the two counter hypotheses productively refer to a singular reality. Paul Rorem affirms, “the ‘divine names’ are all considered attributes of God, not names for hypostases (gods or henads) that depend upon the ultimate One, as in previous Neoplatonic interpretations of divine predicates or names.”17 Pseudo-Dionysius uses both affirmation and denial to name God, although his full argumentation as to why and how he only cursorily explains, suggesting that he has already done so in his Theological Representations. Instead of reexhausting the argument, he only repeats his formula that while we cannot know that which is beyond being, we can speak of it because of the precedent of those divinized minds who can speak truthfully about the ineffable: “the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings” (593C). His non-argument, however, contains a clear example of his apophaticism: it is through the negation of being that we can speak about the being beyond being. Through the denial of being comes forth its affirmation: “no lover of the truth which is above all truth will seek to praise it as word or power or mind or life or being. No. It is at a total remove. . . . And yet, since it is the underpinning of goodness, and by merely being there is the cause of everything, to praise this divinely beneficent Providence you must turn to all of creation” (593C-D). We cannot speak of God so we speak of God

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by unspeaking what we speak. We copy our speech from that speech from those divine-like minds who have, through His grace, experienced a greater degree of union with Him so as to “know” He who is incomprehensible and beyond all that can be known and speak of Him by denying all beings. We copy their denial to affirm Him. Our mimesis is motivated by our longing to praise Him, He who cannot be praised. Thus, in like form, we praise Him by praising all that He has made (praise Him as what He has done) and denying that He is all that He made. We are impertinent, speaking praises we know do not match His glory, but we do so because “all things long for it. The intelligent and rational long for it by way of knowledge, the lower strata by way of perception, the remainder by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition” (593D). Desire may have gotten us kicked out of the Garden but, now, our immense desire is acknowledged as honorific, even if a bit impertinent. Aware of our impossibility of actually knowing God, we still so long for Him that we name him in our incomplete and darkened ways. While Pseudo-Dionysius does not cite 1 Corinthians 13:9, it is a beautiful expression of this incomplete knowing: For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.18

Nearly concluding his first chapter is a furious survey of roughly one hundred names of God in the Scriptures. These names cover every range of created thing: from being and life to truth and word, from still breeze and dew to feet and crown, and from cups to mixing bowls. 19 Nestled within this tirade of names is an addendum, brief yet critical, as to why we can name Him: “And so it is that as Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is” (596C). As Creator, He is “their cause, their source, and their destiny” (596C). As this origin, He “actually contains everything beforehand within itself. . . . Hence the songs of praise and the names for it are fittingly derived from the sum total of creation” (597A). Emanation theory, an explanation for creation, has thus become our justification for this epistemological method that uses and undoes reason so as to know the unknowable God. An awareness of the task’s radicalism is palpable throughout the severity and intrigue of the chapter’s closing warning and prayer. The warning is to Timothy (and perhaps all readers) to guard this knowledge as by divine command, to never divulge this information to the uninitiated, while Pseudo-Dionysius offers the beseeching prayer to God to never take away his ability to praise Him, the “unutterable and unnameable Deity,” through His divine names (597C).

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The trepidation that lurks in the chapter’s closure may be the reason for there being two more chapters of justification, keeping us from beginning the work of naming and unnaming God that this first chapter has just prepared us. These two chapters follow suit by offering Neoplatonist justification for his Christian work, namely through an explication of the subsistence of God and its connection to the problem of participation. They are spectacular elucidations: the delight of poets, the bane of logicians. Considering the current project’s task as delineating the problem of bearing witness in Pseudo-Dionysius’ text, their exploration is called for before turning to an explication of Pseudo-Dionysius’ most important names of God.

Subsistence and Participation Chapter two, lengthily entitled “Concerning the unified and differentiated Word of God, and what the divine unity and differentiation is,” begins with the assertion that God is all that He is; “It is the entire divine subsistence” (636C).20 Subsistence is hypostasis—the divine underpinning or that unity of diversity. The assertion is thoroughly a Neoplatonic merelogical concept concerning the One and the Many, and an important inheritance for the Abrahamic tradition. In Neoplatonism, subsistence concerns the establishment of objective reality, which is defined as an inner reality of something and is not objective in the sense of being empirical, but as substantive: the being-reality of something. In Christianity, this understanding is most often used to grasp the trinity being three and one at the same time.21 The necessity for the theory is merelogical—it stems from the need to explain how the many names all name the same one, without conflating the one’s distinctions, and how the same one can, at once, be and be named by the many. For Pseudo-Dionysius, subsistence guarantees that all of the many names of God are praised as regarding the whole that He is. The identification of any one name of God, then, is not a false representation of the whole, but serves us as a piece that is only such by being of the whole—which he justifies through Colossians 1:16: “in him all things hold together” (637B). One obvious problem, however, is explaining (beyond citing Neoplatonic bits of Scripture) how any one name can give us truthful knowledge about God, when that which it names is not God, while this same one name that can give us knowledge about God must also give us knowledge about that which it names that is not God. Another problem concerns the clarification as to how, if all names equally can name the one, they are not equal to another; this clarification must address how the things named are as different (a chipmunk is not an angel) as the names of God are different (God’s superabundances are not His powers), without then undoing the justification of their equality. These problems are amplified by linguistic and logical challenges, as well as by how many other critical theoretical arguments bear relation to the doctrine of subsistence. Linguistically, subsistence’s

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mereology makes for wracked, repetitive sentences; logically, it challenges us to try to think how A is and is not B. Theoretically, it relies upon and feeds into the justifications for emanation as a theory of creation and an epistemological method, and how both are hierarchically proportionate. Despite the enormity of the challenge, we must recall how PseudoDionysius’ project necessitates the argument’s success—as he affirms: “This is necessary in order to clarify all that I have to say” (640D). The project avows that to know God’s names is to know God, consequently: to speak these names as demonstration of our having to come to know them is to praise God; to come to know these names, we must piously commit ourselves to the task of dedication to God; and, only by active self-cultivation, praise, and knowledge, can we be worthy of the return to God, which is the satisfaction of our desire, thus our happiness. The project is a necessary command to come to know by coming to be, and our ever being happy (with its corollary right, good, and true attributes) depends upon it. And this very possibility depends upon our ability to actually know God through His names, which come from His creations. In order to justify this ability, Pseudo-Dionysius must establish the ultimate unity, God’s subsistence, as an underpinning of diversity. He does this most effectively through three examples. The first concerns lamps: envision a room full of many lamps (the many creations); each lamp (every differentiated creation) produces its own light; together, however, they enlighten the whole room (the many lights are the one light): “there is nevertheless a single undifferentiated light and from all of them comes the one undivided brightness” (641B). If one proceeds to carry out one lamp, its light, too, will be carried out; this removal or differentiation of one from the many, however, neither diminishes the room’s being-lit-up (for, together, the many lamps form a unity of one light), nor increases the light of the remaining lamps (for each differentiation is a particular unto itself). The second and third examples seek to clarify how the unity is participated in by all, and how none participates in only a part, but in this wholeness. He proposes that: “It is rather like the case of a circle. The center point of the circle is shared by the surrounding radii” (644A). Envision a wagon wheel: the outer rim of the wheel is composed of discrete points from which each has a spoke that leads to the very same hub; thus, while every spoke points to a differentiated particular, they are all unified together as a wheel by their equal share of the wheel’s center—there is no wheel other than the whole in which every point participates. “Or take the example of a seal. There are numerous impressions of the seal and these all have a share in the original prototype; it is the same whole seal in each of the impressions and none participates in only a part” (644A). Envision this lovely tool from the days of actual letter writing: the stamp-like tool’s surface was carved so as to emboss its own re-presentation into warm wax. The one tool would mark its image many times; every differentiated impression would be but an instantiation of the one. Anticipating a complaint, Pseudo-Dionysius quickly adds: “Maybe some will say that the seal is not totally

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identical in all the reproductions of it. My answer is that this is not because of the seal itself, which gives itself completely and identically to each. The substances which receive a share of the seal are different. Hence the impressions of the one entire identical archetype are different” (644B). And, thus, this last example reminds us that the diversity of the unity must be established as clearly as the unity of the diversity. Pseudo-Dionysius’ explanation is that while there is only one seal, and there is no difference between its activity of sealing, it is the “material” that has inherent differences accounting for the possible differences discerned between impressions made by the one seal. That is, we must say that the unity is the same in its differentiations (every impression is an impression), but must also say that the differentiations are different (the wax for one was more runny, for another too firm). This is identical to saying that every creation is a creation, but, at once, one is a chipmunk, another is an angel, for all creations are obviously different, and (in obedience to the Neoplatonist theory of proportionate creation), each received its proper share according to its nature. Regardless of the product having fur or wings, this cannot mean that the activity of the creating by the seal differs, for then it would violate the unity of the creations as the one. Granted, his attempt to clarify the logically confounding may make matters more confusing because he presents examples that suggest logical analogy. With his explanation of the difference of the “material,” analogy would seem to suggest that as the wax preexists the stamp, creations preexist the creator. Obviously, this cannot be the case: the material is just as much created by God as the form of the creation. Thus, while the “nature of the material” determines the share of existence given it, it is God who determines this nature as well as does the giving. Now, given these complexities, we may quickly accede to Pseudo-Dionysius that “divine unities are the hidden and permanent, supreme foundations of a steadfastness which is more than ineffable and more than unknowable [and] . . . the differentiations within the Godhead have to do with the benign processions and revelations of God” (640D). The key consequence being that unity is beyond our capacity to experience or conceive—it is the totality of God—while differentiation is that by which we can experience and know some of God—it is that by which He creates and lets us know Him. Subsistence, then, justifies all of the many names of God’s creations as applicable to Him, thereby granting us access to knowledge of Him. As subsistence, God is the divine unity underpinning the multiplicity that is of Him, as His processions, and share in Him by participation. The delicate question, however, is the length and/or limit this share permits us to have knowledge of Him. The unity above being so vastly surpasses our reach; we participate in this being, as processions from it, and our participation is proportionate to each, and yet that in which we participate so far exceeds us, even our participation cannot let us approach its grasp. “For the truth is that everything divine and even everything revealed to us is known only by way of whatever share of them is granted.

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Their actual nature, what they are ultimately in their own source and ground, is beyond all intellect and all being and all knowledge” (645A). We know the truth by what it reveals to us; we know it in its differentiations—for example, PseudoDionysius tells us, when we give the name “God” to that transcendent hiddenness, or any other name, “what our minds lay hold of is in fact nothing other than certain activities apparent to us, activities which deify, cause being, bear life, and give wisdom” (645A). Having composed this negative aspect, he compounds to it the affirmative: “For our part, as we consider that hiddenness and struggle to break free of all the workings of our minds, we find ourselves witnessing no divination, no life, no being which bears any likeness to the absolutely transcendent Cause of all things” (645A-B). We grasp differentiations that point us to their source, that unity that is neither any differentiation nor its collaged differentiations together—it is no-thing at all, no thing that bears any resemblance to a part or accumulation of parts; it is that unity that is beyond our experience and conception. And yet, this passage also shows process—we “consider that hiddenness” and “struggle to break free of all the workings of our minds” (645A). We struggle to know, and then we struggle to un-know, to work towards the true “knowing” that is no knowing (in our human understanding of knowing). Our struggle is a witnessing; it is not something born witness to, for we see no-thing, we see only that we do not know. Our struggle is also our testimony, our saying the pieces, and that testimony that is reduced to stuttering and silence. We are and are not witnesses in the etymological and everyday, in some intentional sense of being those who know or have knowledge of something—the knowledge had is that there is something that is no-thing: it is knowledge of our lack of knowledge. We know something because we know that there is something that we cannot know: “But we can neither say nor understand how this may be so” (645B). This becomes a qualification of procession. We are of God, and our intellectual knowledge can go that far back to knowing God, but: “In reality there is no exact likeness between caused and cause, for the caused carry within themselves only such images of their originating sources as are possible for them, whereas the causes themselves are located in a realm transcending the caused, according to the argument regarding their source” (645C). This is certainly in accordance with what Pseudo-Dionysius has previously argued, although its addition dilutes the strength of his justification for the differentiations being true (even if always partial) knowledge.22 The struggle between possible knowledge and respect for its impossibility is key and productive of a provocative dance back and forth across their borders. On the one hand, Pseudo-Dionysius affirms the “entirely mysterious” nature of the incarnation of Jesus—we cannot enclose it in words or grasp it by the mind, nor can the angels even understand it—and, yet, Hierotheus, his “teacher,” has learned sacred things and experienced them (648A-B). His “experience” is a “sympathy” (648B).23

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“Sympathy” is a term born from Neoplatonic theurgy, which, born from the conjunction of theos and -ergos, “god” and “working,” concerns the operation or effect of the divine in human affairs and its study as composing the practical side of alchemy, and is sometimes interpreted as the attempt to manipulate the gods through ritual. Here, I intend the “sympathy” to more generally designate mystical experience wherein the “ritual” concerns the very struggle we are called to undertake to know God through his names. It demands our attempt to begin with the rational, for it is a knowing and a speaking, but the experience is truly sympathy for it occurs on the passionate (pathos) level, one of feelings, that one suffers. Pseudo-Dionysius affirms Jesus’ unknowability while offering knowledge about it as attained by his teacher’s sympathy, and recounted by the latter in “his” The Elements of Theology. This inclusion accounts for a creation’s “participation” in the gnosis of God as greater than, more intimate than, the average participation by being a mystical experience—and does so through attributing Proclus’ text, a Neoplatonic text, to his Christian teacher. The content of Hierotheus’ teaching is simply a restatement of what Pseudo-Dionysius has established about God’s subsistence, now explicated through Jesus. 24 And this recount leads to the close of chapter two and the start of chapter three telling us we now must move to the “object of our discussion,” the “common and united names that are applied to the differentiated being of God,” that is, to move to the actual act of testimony. However, Pseudo-Dionysius does not immediately make this move. Instead, chapter three just moves from the consideration of Jesus to one of the trinity, and offers more on his teacher’s sympathy. This prolonged stall before beginning the consideration of proper names clearly tells us something. Thus, before we start at the beginning, we must start before the beginning, with a consideration of the trinity. Why? Because it “shows forth every one of its most excellent processions and we should be uplifted to it and be shaped by it so as to learn of those good gifts which are gathered together around it” (680B). Pseudo-Dionysius’ concern hardly seems to be the establishment of God’s relation to the trinity, but, more so, the further word about the “lifting to it” and the “shaping by it.” With the addition of a further story of his teacher’s sympathy, the point of this prolonged interlude seems to be the insistence on preparing ourselves to receive this knowledge, thus, as a further indirection about the treatise’s being as a spiritual exercise as much as, if not more, than being a mere treatise cataloging divine names. While explicitly analyzing the trinity in the same manner as God and Jesus, as unity and diversity at once, Pseudo-Dionysius’ analysis reestablishes the possibility of a greater, more intimate participation. He writes: “For the Trinity is present to all things, though all things are not present to it” (680B). The point is consistent with what he has already taught us, but it is also doing more. PseudoDionysius is clearly referencing Proclus’ proposition 142 in his Elements of Theology, which begins: “The Gods are present with all things after the same

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manner present with the Gods. But every thing participates of their presence according to its own order and power. And this is accomplished by some things uniformly, but by others manifoldly; by some things eternally, but by others according to time; and by some things incorporeally, but by others corporeally.”25 In his proof, Proclus expands: “other things are present with them as far as they are able, and according to the manner in which they are present they enjoy their illuminations.”26 In Proclus, as in Pseudo-Dionysius, the point suggests that if we invoke the divine with holy prayers, in the right state of being (that is, pure, untroubled minds suitable for union), “then we are surely present to it” (680B). “Presence,” however, is a troubling word for our dear Areopagite, as it implies thingliness that can be somewhere, bound by space and in time; obviously, God is that which transcends space, place, being, and time, being as he is, the creator of all these and more than them. And, equally troubling is the degree of affectation our ritualistic utterings of divine names has upon God. Beginning with the latter problem, Pseudo-Dionysius tries to work out the directionality and movement of affectation through several examples that offer us depictions wherein, at once: we stretch ourselves upward; God is a shining ray, shining outward; He is a shining chain, hanging downward; we reach up and grab it; we pull it down to us; we are pulled up to it; we are on a boat pulling a rock to us and ourselves to a rock; the rock both retreats as we push from it and is immobile as we move away; and that we do not pull down God’s power, but are uplifted by it (680C-D). However, this last affirmation, that we are pulled to Him even as it seems we are pulling Him to us, comes to clash with a latter affirmation wherein it is clear that God, by his own desire, leaves His transcendent dwelling to come to us (712A-B). The critical question is the nature of this affectation between creation and God. The specific question as to whether prayer affects God is a thorny one: Iamblichus and Origen may have argued that prayer does not affect the gods, but the one who is praying, but Pseudo-Dionysius wavers—although, he is obviously not saying that somehow we, in ourselves, have power over God, because all of our power is His power granted us in an appropriate share. This will be explored more thoroughly in this project’s next chapter as to how the force of this desired communion is most intense and yet it may not be entirely improper to denote this force as so great as to be capable of moving God (just so long as we respect his affirmation and negation of all claims). The other question, as to whether prayer can affect us so as to move to God is the critical one here. Pseudo-Dionysius’ movement to an anecdote about Hierotheus’ sympathy suggests much here for us. Hierotheus, his student proclaims, was present at the “vision of that mortal body, that source of life, which bore God,” which is presumably the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, the “falling asleep” or death of Mary, at which all of the Apostles were said to be present (681D). There, his teacher was said to have had a mystical experience, an ecstatic one: he was “so taken outside of himself” the

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divine spoke through him (681D-684A). While Pseudo-Dionysius defers further explanation—“I say nothing of those mysterious experiences. You know them well, and they cannot be explained to the multitude”—his inclusion of this anecdote, at this precise point in his elucidation, seems to be demonstrating that ability some have to become more intimate in the participation with the divine (684A-B). He humbly proclaims his inferiority to his lineage of teachers—“I know I lack the words to articulate such knowledge of God”—but justifies why, nevertheless, he is writing a treatise: “I would not even . . . speak of, the divine philosophy were it not that I am convinced in my mind that one may not disregard the received knowledge of divine things. I believe this not merely because one’s spirit naturally yearns for and seeks whatever contemplation of the supernatural may be attainable but also because the splendid arrangement of divine laws commands it” (684B-C). And, again: “We are told not to busy ourselves with what is beyond us, since they are beyond what we deserve and are unattainable. But the law tells us to learn everything granted to us and to share these treasures generously with others” (684C). Thus, it is obedience that makes him speak, as much as it is his desire to know; it is, then, our duty and desire, too. We are called to transgress the limit of knowledge by making ourselves worthy of God’s notice by striving passionately to Him through His names.

Good and Light Chapter one introduced us to the impossibility of naming God while allowing for its possibility and closing with a plethora of possible names. Chapters two and three further delineated problems of the accuracy and extent of these names to yield truthful knowledge of God while allowing us a theoretical justification and a strong indirection to the practical solution through spiritual exercise and divine union. Now, the work of naming can actually begin. The fourth chapter, then, concerns itself with some of the most important. It is entitled: “Concerning ‘good,’ ‘light,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘love,’ ‘ecstasy,’ and ‘zeal’; and that evil is neither a being, nor from a being, nor in beings” (693A). This chapter transitions the treatise from theoretical exposition to application: to the actual endeavor of understanding the divine names of God. The name Good occupies an important position, “which the sacred writers have preeminently set apart for the supra-divine God from all other names” (693B). The Good is what accounts for all goodness in all things in a manner he likens to how the sun, without rational process, extends light into the world (693B). There is a procession downward of this goodness. Pure Minds, angels, that is, owe their presence to this light of goodness from God, and “their longing for the Good makes them what they are and confers on them their well-being. Shaped by what they yearn for, they exemplify goodness and, as the Law of God requires of them, they share with those below them the good gifts which have come their way” (693C-96A). Pseudo-Dionysius refers to these angels as “messengers of the divine source,” and gives them the

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capacity to “lift up the lower to the higher” and “enable the superiors to come down to the level of those beneath them” (696B). The hierarchy below these Minds proceeds to the Souls, which designates humanity, then those irrational souls or creatures, plants, and finally objects (696C-D). The hierarchy does not diverge widely from that at work in Plato, Aristotle, or the Neoplatonists. The procession and reversion operates as an inheritance of existence from the Good at the highest tier, which is dissimulated down to creation and then initiates a return by creations’ longing for assimilation back into those upper echelons. All creation strives to be like the goodness it has received. The Good, itself, transcends everything yet creates everything because, “in its nonbeing [it is] really an excess of being,” and in everything He forms, He instills the desire to be with the formless (697A). A curious addition to this dynamic interrelation is Pseudo-Dionysius’ comment, “and one might even say that nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above all being. Repelling being, it struggles to find rest in the Good which transcends all being, in the sense of a denial of all things” (697A). 27 While Pseudo-Dionysius doesn’t offer any further comment on his interesting remark, it is striking to note how superlative he is casting the Good so that even that with no soul is vivified with desire for the Good. Pseudo-Dionysius may acknowledge the radicality of his statement by so abruptly moving to elaborate his hierarchy of creation by addressing the Good as Cause of the heavens, space, time, and light, awkwardly transitioning away from the privilege of desire in nonbeing by the mildly humorous remark, “in my concern for other matters I forgot to say that the Good is the Cause even for the sources and the frontiers of the heavens” (697B). As creator of the heavens, God is also responsible for celestial movements, light, and its resultant enumeration of time (700A). Light is a persistent theme and is now addressed as a proper name for the divine: “the Good is also praised by the name ‘Light’” (697C). In case Light seems less dignified than Good, Pseudo-Dionysius quickly notes that divine names will come from across the entire range of creation, “from the highest and most perfect forms of being to the very lowest . . . superior to the highest and stretching out to the lowliness” (697C). He illustrates the fittingness of this name by likening God to the Sun, “it illuminates whatever is capable of receiving its light and yet it never loses the utter fullness of its light” (697D), and finally makes the metaphor more conceptual noting that “the Good is described as the light of the mind because it illuminates the mind of every supra-celestial being with the light of the mind, and because it drives from souls the ignorance and the error squatting there” (700D). Making the name hearken both physical and metaphorical light, PseudoDionysius is alluding to and, interestingly, reversing the Platonic responsibility of the captive to become accustomed reason’s glare to light being a tender gift given by the grace of the divine. For Pseudo-Dionysius, God “deals out light in small amounts and then, as the wish and the longing for light begin to grow, it

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gives more and more of itself, shining ever more abundantly on them because they ‘loved much,’ and always it keeps urging them onward and upward as their capacity permits” (701A). Pseudo-Dionysius’ Light is gentle; it seduces the attention and love of darkened souls. Plato’s light comes as a violent assault that hurts, blinds, and instills reverent fear into the deluded prisoner. PseudoDionysius concludes, invoking the gentler pedagogue of Plato’s Cratylus, by pronouncing that the sun “makes all things a ‘sum’ and gathers together the scattered” (700B-C).28

Beauty and Eros This tonal shift toward seduction and from violence is further discernible in the next two names for the divine: Beauty and Yearning, Kallos and Eros.29 Beauty bids [kallos] to us, gathers all things together like the collection by the Good (701C-D), as is well noted by Plato and throughout his intellectual legacy. 30 Pseudo-Dionysius’ Greek inheritance is also made apparent in his linkage between beauty and harmony. The aesthetics of harmony inspire him to reflect on the arcs rendered by the movement of creation and the heavens, which invokes the Neoplatonist image of the flow of emanation (704A, 704D-705B).31 Beauty does not, however, remain an abstract invocation. Just as the good in the lowliest forms was from and directed our attention to the Good by which it was created, beauty is acknowledged in all its forms. This parallel actually becomes a synthesis of the two: “the Beautiful is therefore the same as the Good” (704B). Merging the two and offering an allusion that could point equally to Plato’s Symposium or Cratylus, Pseudo-Dionysius affirms that all that is beautiful, ultimately, is the eternal beauty.32 The eternal beauty “is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community” that powerfully “bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty” (704A). Beauty either initiates desire or is desire. “And there it is ahead of all as Goal, as the Beloved, as the Cause toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually beings them into being. It is a model to which they conform” (704B). Beauty inspires communion. This communion invokes, once more, a reversion to an originary source. All is from beauty and all “return upward” (704B). Echoing the non-contradiction between unity and differentiation in his second chapter, he re-emphasizes that creation, by procession, is a differentiation of all things, yet reversion returns all things to identity, to reveal the “innate togetherness of everything . . . the intermingling of everything, the persistence of things, the unceasing emergence of things” (704C). All created things participate; and even those things that are not share in Beauty: “And I would even be so bold as to claim that nonbeing also shares in the Beautiful and the Good, because nonbeing, when applied transcendently to God in the sense of a denial of all things, is itself beautiful and good” (704B). Pseudo-Dionysius’ bold claim is a peculiar one. The inclusion of nonbeing into

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participation with beauty suggests that it, too, turns towards beauty, which contradicts his apparent equation between nonbeing and the turning away from and the denial of all things. For desire to compel even the ascetic to participation with the beautiful renders this desire an immeasurably powerful force and a radically new religious insight. Yet, however bold this claim may be about the allpervasiveness of desire, even by nonbeing, for the Beautiful, it pales in comparison to Pseudo-Dionysius’ consequent assertion. Beauty is so beautiful and desire is so powerful a force that even the Creator Himself falls prey to its charms: “And we may be so bold as to claim also that the Cause of all things loves all things in the superabundance of his goodness, that because of this goodness he makes all things, brings all things to perfection, holds all things together and returns all things” (708A-B). God, too, yearns by nature of His goodness; “The divine longing is Good seeking good for the sake of the Good” (708B). His yearning is creative and beckons to us as our curative; “and so it is that all things must desire, must yearn for, must love, the Beautiful and the Good” (708A). All things must desire the Good, even the Good, Himself. Soothing his “we may be so bold,” Pseudo-Dionysius adds that “Let no one imagine that in giving status to the term ‘yearning’ I am running counter to scripture” (708B). His claim, though, is a challenging one to support; this project necessitates that it be neither a blasphemous name for God nor one too mundane. The complete diagnosis of his radicalism of discerning Yearning as a name for God and characterizing our relation to God as erotic will be the concern of the following chapter; here, it is important to note only two important features. First, the divine name Yearning is a translation of eros, as opposed to agape, which is the traditional (and, one could say, the more sanitized) instantiation of desire (cleansed of both sexual and Neoplatonist, pagan suggestions). Yearning as eros, then, is a maintenance of overtones of explicit sensuality, eroticism, and Neoplatonism. These allusions are bolstered throughout his investigation into the name, for example, by his rewriting of the Septuagint’s “lovely verse” in two Samuel 1:26, “Love for you came on me like love for women” (709C). Eros is the most intense instantiation of love, as noted in the scholarship: “The power in dynamic love (eros) for the ‘upward striving toward the Divine’ that the Greeks taught ought still be present in a fully understood eros.”33 Maximus Confessor argued a notably similar interpretation, “that love is that by means of which the human soul can transcend the dichotomous divisions of nature and enter into union with the First Cause.” 34 The second important feature to immediately note is that God’s yearning is superlatively powerful. Its power is identified as the very cause of His creative act and one so strong that it even draws Him to us. Jesus may have resisted the temptation of the devil, but God, as Yearning, succumbs to this desire. Yearning is so strong that it is ecstatic; it makes us, both humanity and God, stand outside of ourselves: by desire, we ascend to Him and He descends to us. 35

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If beauty bids us and draws us to the other, the intensity of eros most vigorously propels us, ecstatically, to the object of our desire. Ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, is derived from the word for trance and distraction. Its spirit is captured by the idiomatic expression, existanai phrenon, to drive one out of one’s mind. Eriugena accentuates this etymological spirit when elaborating on love in the Song of Songs: “Love [dilectio] surpasses knowledge, and is greater than intelligence. He [the beloved of the Song] is loved more than understood, and love enters and approaches where knowledge stays outside.” 36 Love drives us outside and resides beyond our minds. It is derived from the prefix ex-, out or outside, and -stasis, to stand. Ecstasy, as a rapture that is a standing outside of oneself, can be designated, variously, as a fearful state, a stupor, “a wildly excited state with loss of self-control,” and/or an utter happiness and good feeling.37 For Pseudo-Dionysius, ecstasy is the immensely important power of being detached from one’s mortal body and reason so as to be outside of one’s self. Copp argues that, for Pseudo-Dionysius, “religious ecstasy has a place, and a high place, in the devotional return to God.”38 It is a power God has, naturally, by his nature, and humanity tries to achieve through erotic meditation in order to experience the ultimate oneness with Him. Its attainment is primarily through the power of erotic yearning and pleasure, although Pseudo-Dionysius does also name inebriation as another cause and symbol for this power. In the ninth of his existent letters, he writes, “one says of God . . . that he is ‘inebriated,’ and this is to convey that superabundance of delights unfathomable to the mind. . . . He is beyond being itself. Quite simply, as ‘drunk’ God stands outside of all good things, being the superfullness of all these things.”39 God, supremely endowed, is also supremely affected by this passion of which we feel only a slight shade and only in moments. Because His desire is more perfect, it is also more crippling for Him and empowering for us: he descends to us as we ascend to Him. As Riordan notes, “The act of loving, which follows upon the act of knowing, moves in a reverse order: the beloved draws the lover toward itself.” 40 Ecstasy’s effect on God and humanity is the empowering and weakening that permits divine union. This is, quite obviously, a radically feisty and utterly treacherous argument for Pseudo-Dionysius to invoke, and he quickly cites Scripture to support his naming of God as Yearning. His claim to be following the traditional authority, however, is tentative, at best. His citations predominately reference instances of humanity’s desire for wisdom, not God, per se, and erotic longing of humans for one another. Chapter four will return to a close analysis of Pseudo-Dionysius’ name Eros and the role that eros occupies in this project and the grander history of philosophy, but it is worth briefly underscoring, again, the degree to which Pseudo-Dionysius’ employment is unique. Louth plumbs the tradition for examples that may support him; ultimately, however, he determines PseudoDionysius’ use of yearning, and its implication of ecstasy as creative, to be utterly unique, that is, without Scriptural or philosophic support: “The idea of a di-

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vine ‘providential love’ (eros pronoetikos) is found in Proclus, but not the idea of God’s ‘ecstatic’ love. Nor is Proclus’s divine ‘providential love’ quite the same as Deny’s notion of God’s ‘providential love,’ for Eros is one of the gods for Proclus, and not indeed one of the highest of them.” 41 Plotinus’ Enneads offers a moving ode to beauty and Proclus’ depiction of love is powerful, but neither thinker extends love outside of itself as much as Pseudo-Dionysius. Louth’s search for a historical foundation is not unique; he notes John Rist’s claim: “The first person to combine the Neoplatonic idea about God as Eros with the notion of God’s ‘ecstasy’ is Pseudo-Dionysius. . . . Dionysius has in fact adapted Eros to the Christian demand that God love all things, and he is the first person to do so.”42 Ovid’s epic poem Ars Amatoria, crafted on the cusp of the common era, intimately delineates the plays of power and weakness in eros, but it explicitly concerns desire between men and women and not humanity and God. Plato’s Symposium partially divinizes love, but our relation that invokes eros is always with another person, not Eros himself. The Symposium does employ love as an ecstatic force wherein eros draws one beyond one’s tie to the beautiful body to admire the form of beauty itself, thus spurring the teaching of the erotic arts to others, but this exteriorizing force is not creative in the mode Pseudo-Dionysius ascribes to God. Despite the profound influence of The Divine Names, few authors or works match the purity and intensity of his invocation of eros. The closest inheritance may be found in medieval female mystics, including Marguerite Porete, Marguerite D’Oingt, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich, each of whom variously eroticized the ideal relation to God but also censored themselves or met with fiery ends for these depictions. 43

Evil and Proportionate Privation As is all too common in everyday experience, Pseudo-Dionysius turns from a consideration of love (eros) to the question of evil (kakos). It must be noted that “evil” is not a name of God; its inclusion in the treatise, and here, is critical, however, to clarify the nature of the dangerously shocking last name, Yearning, and illustrate its particular utility in the very activity of knowing God. Evil’s extended commentary, however, is arguably the most complex consideration within the treatise. Like the problem of the ineffable itself, his argument first defies any linear sketch, his incessant descriptions and conflicting questions further defies its sequential address, and his method actively involves the noncontradictory embrace of these contradictions. But what must be excavated is how the question of evil impinges upon that of desire. This relation will be found to necessitate the possibility of a proportionate privation—which will be a necessary premise for this project’s following chapter. Pseudo-Dionysius has posited that all must yearn for the divine, and not just as a matter of piety, but also as an attribute of being: that which is, is good, and yearns for the Good. In his hierarchical delineation of creations, as there are

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angels, so are there demons. Thus, in his assertion that all must yearn for God, does this absolute truly include the demons? If it does, then how are they evil, and not good, if what is is good? Are there variations, then, in being and yearning that determine good and evil, since yearning is that which can be “responsible for that state in others which we characterize as evil” (716A)? But, God is good and yearning is good; demons are evil and “evil does not come from the Good,” for, if it did, it could not be evil, it would be good, just like how “fire cannot cool us, and likewise the Good cannot produce what is not good” (716B). But, if evil does not come from the Good and demons do not come from God, from whence does it and do they come? How can the Good create all, if not, also, evil? The already thorny problem of classic theodicy is being further complicated here because, for Pseudo-Dionysius, there are beings who are evil: demons. This permission of evil beings complicates the traditional solution that all things surely come from the good and evil does not, because it is not a thing. PseudoDionysius does affirm that evil “is not among the things that have being,” but adds that “nor is it among what is not in being” (716D). There are evil beings, demons, but, even if he struck them from existence, evil cannot be a non-thing because he has already affirmed that even “nonbeing also shares in the Beautiful and the Good, because nonbeing, when applied transcendently to God in the sense of a denial of all things, is itself beautiful and good” (704B). Evil, then, cannot not be, because nonbeing is good; and, yet, evil cannot be, because being is good; and, yet, evil is and it is not and “it has a greater nonexistence and otherness from the Good than nonbeing has” (716D). Evil, then, to put it mildly, is an utterly perplexing, utterly confounding problem: what is its source and ontological status? Evil’s being threatens a conflation between genus and species: evil itself and those who are, the “multitude of demons” (716A). The treatise’s distinction is murky and, ultimately, unnecessary; but the primary focus clearly concerns the species: if all must yearn for the divine, does this not include the demons?44 Demons are not evil itself, but those beings who have evil as an attribute, and are, thus, most relevant for this project that needs to establish how evil impinges upon desire, and how this can be soothed by the theory of privation as that lack that can, nevertheless, be had, in degrees. 45 Pseudo-Dionysius quickly aids this thesis, however slow he is to confirm it, by answering, yes, all yearn for the Good, even the demons: “They too desire the Good, at least to the extent that they have a wish for existence, for life, and for understanding, and their desire for what has no being is proportionate to their lack of desire for the Good. Indeed this latter is not so much a desire as sin against real desire” (733D). As attributes, good and evil have meaning insofar as they have some relation to desire: good is full desire, which necessitates evil to be its privation. The scholarship, as succinctly demonstrated in a remark by John Dixon Copp, concurs:

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“The cause of evil in Dionysius is privation of the Good.” 46 However, what such a privation is, remains ambiguous. Privation is lack. No accounts of lack, of the nothing, are easy to briefly review, but a mere quick sketch of its considerations is sufficient here. In general, it is logically and commonly assumed to be the ready opposite of both having and being; as the opposition, one can argue that it is either not at all, or that it is only insofar as being a logical contrary. For Parmenides, the nothing is simply not: “For in no way may this prevail, that things that are not, are.” 47 In consequence, “that it is not and that it is necessary for it not to be, this I point out to you to be a path completely unlearnable, for neither may you know that which is not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor may you declare it.” 48 Thus, nothing is precisely nothing, and cannot be something one can learn. This conception of lack can be seen akin to Aristotle’s account of the void. The void, he argues, is commonly presumed to be “place with nothing in it,” a “place in which there is no body,” in which “there is nothing,” “in which there is not ‘this’ or corporeal substance,” and the like; a set of presumptions that, he argues, are “easy to refute.”49 The refutation results in the clear affirmation that the void does not exist. The primary explanation for there being theories of its existence is that they rest on a misunderstanding of what the word “void” means. There is another side of philosophy, however, that will work from the linguistic or logical to demonstrate lack as something that is, but only insofar as it is the conceptual opposite of something. Here, nothingness is that which counters fullness. This dichotomy is not one of degree; being and nothing or having and lacking are opposites wherein definition of one requires definition by the other. Thus, a privation is, even if it is nothing, but only by being the opposite of something. If one commits the error of presuming its logical existence as ontological, one has nothing but a material falsity. Such an error issues from the opposite’s false divorce, as Descartes’ Third Meditation explains, and one represents a non-thing as if it was a thing. For example, if one defines cold as the privation of heat, one cannot, then, legitimately ascribe properties to that which is, itself, no more than a mere lack of something else—thus, cold cannot be 32 degrees (for this ascribes a property to it, and, as it is no thing, it cannot have properties); it can only be that which has no heat.50 These two ways to conceive lack prove to be insufficient when considering Pseudo-Dionysius’ account of evil. If evil, for our Syrian mystic, is privation, and thus nothing, how can evil be something, as evil itself and as demons? The existence of evil forbids us to see its privation as making it nothing, as Parmenides declares or the void in Aristotle demonstrates. But, too, the acquiescence of privation as having logical existence fails. Not only is the evil that is the demon substantial existence, evil, too, for Pseudo-Dionysius, is privation, and privation is non-being, and even non-being must be good—with seeming delight, he declares: “evil is not entirely evil but has something of the Good within it which enables it to exist at all” (716C) and “not even the devils are evil by nature”

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(724C)—thus, the good would be evil, as opposed to its logical opposite. Enhancing the logical absurdity and pushing the utter perplexity even further, it is true that our good Areopagite contradicts both claims—that the evil has good and is not evil by nature—by the chapter’s end. Nevertheless, his account (and its absurdity) is important and necessitates privation to be far more complex than non-being or a mere logical counterpoint. While Aristotle’s account of the void in his Physics rejects the possibility of its existence as anything more than a misuse of language, Aristotle’s Metaphysics can also aid us in beginning a reconnoitering of privation. Copp’s analysis of metaphysical evil in The Divine Names directs our attention to its genealogy through Plotinus to Aristotle, explaining that, for the latter, privation is “a description of the ontological moment that lies between unformed matter and formed matter. It was, in short, non-being.”51 Here, I want us to temporarily disregard his summation of evil as non-being and, instead, consider Aristotle’s opening of privation as naming that moment in between being and not being. Privation, this then shows, is potentiality—more precisely, the other sense of potentiality (dunamis) that Aristotle develops in book nine of his Metaphysics. The sense of potentiality “meant most properly” is a power “which is a source of change in some other thing or in the same thing as other.”52 This is neither the sense upon which he focuses here, however, nor the one that aids our understanding for Pseudo-Dionysius. Instead, this other sense of potentiality is not a power of change as movement, but is understood as a capacity in relation to actuality (being-at-work, energeia), that is, a capacity to be in some other, more complete state. Aristotle sketches this relation by analogies: actuality is to potentiality as “the one building is to the one who can build, and the awake to the asleep, and the one seeing to the one whose eyes are shut but who has sight, and what has been formed out of material to the material, and what is perfected to what is complete.”53 Potency is my capacity, for example, to build, awaken, see, be formed, and be perfected. All being is being-at-work (actuality); potentiality is that innate capacity for something to be in the ways it is given by what it is actually: “material is in potency because it goes toward a form; but whenever it is at work, then it is in that form.”54 Thus, it is not the potential of matter that defines the essence of a thing, but its form. Turning to Pseudo-Dionysius, this sketch of potentiality is beneficial in many ways. First, it helps us to at least broach an understanding of how he proposes that demons are and are evil, and yet are not evil by nature. If primacy is given to form, not matter, a thing actually is as the persistent work of form on matter; thus, it can be, even if its matter is lack. And, if nature can be understood as essence, as one’s actuality, the demon as the demon-being, can be evil by having this potential, an inherent capacity, and yet have a nature that is good. With this aid, we can propose that privation, for Pseudo-Dionysius, is not simple non-being, but instead an absence of the actualization of either what has the potential to be or what ought to be present. To have a capacity that is a lack could

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be understood as having a capacity that hasn’t the conditions to emerge as something. Aristotle proposes several options to understanding incapacity as a deprivation that need not be opposite of potency: “it is the not-having what something would naturally have, either at all, or when it would naturally have it, such as completely, or just in any respect whatever.” 55 Opening these many options for thinking a lack of capacity as still something had in some respect is critical, too, for Pseudo-Dionysius because he proposes that demons are evil “to an extent” (cf. 716C, 720B-C, 733D-736A). This proposal commands us to think of privation as proportionate. While this hearkens an inheritance of the proportionality of procession (“the things of God are revealed to each mind in proportion to its capacities” [588A]), and possibility a proportionate privation derived from Plato’s idea of a varying lack dependent upon one’s exposure to the forms and the degree of their cultivation, its true conceptual understanding comes best from Aristotle’s conception of potency.56 Since being and non-being are both good (693B-697A, 704B), and evil is neither being nor non-being properly (716D), and yet is (716A), it is only by following Aristotle’s idea of potency as leading into a theory of proportionate privation that we can make sense of evil’s being. The origin of evil further lends support to this thesis. Pseudo-Dionysius affirms that “evil does not come from God and it is not in God either absolutely or at some stage in time,” because “scripture truly states that ‘a good tree cannot bear evil fruit’” (724A, 721C). What, then, is evil’s origin? All things come from God. If evil was an actualized thing, as opposed to a capacity had as a deficiency, then its source would have to be God. Since this is not the case, Pseudo-Dionysius proposes another source for evil: “Good comes from the one universal Cause, and evil originates in numerous partial deficiencies” (729C). These partial deficiencies can be unfulfilled capacities. God, as pure actuality, would not have potentiality, and, thus, not create evil.57 The Good “extends as far as the lowliest of things. In some beings it is present in full measure, to a lesser extent in others, and in the least measure in yet others” (720A). If good is proportional in all things, the degree to which it is lacked can be understood as the degree to which things have the capacity for a degree of evil. Privation is not a complete privation; all things, to actually or potentially be, must desire the good in some degree: “all things in being will have more or less of being according as they share more or less in the Good. . . . The same applies to evil” (720D-721A). Privation is in between being and having; it is a capacity more or less present. Evil does not actually inhere in the form of things, as his surrounding sections 22 to 28 affirm: it is not in actualized angels, devils, souls, animals, nature, bodies, or matter, even though they all can have attributes of evil as emerged potential. These attributes are not deterministic to make one evil, because they are also capable of good; for example, mindless desire can be evil, yet it is also capable of assuring the reproduction of life and formation of nature (725B). Thus, it seems that privation in proportion to

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the being is the key to understanding embodied evil: “the tribe of demons is evil not because of what is in its nature but on account of what it is not” (725C). It remains an ontological attribute, without being a complete ontological status, that one may have or lack.58 But, then, suddenly, one line down he writes, simply: “No.” In challenge, he proposes that the demons “have fallen away from the complete goodness granted them” (725C). I propose that we read this “No” not as a rejection of the foregoing, but as an ellipses that means to tell us that his account is not yet complete. What he must continue to do is to link this metaphysical account of evil to a moral one. His choice of language, that the demons have “fallen away,” suggests that their goodness is not taken from them, but that their unnatural acts became obstacles to an actual, native goodness. In other words, that their acts have allowed the deficient capacity to emerge. Elaborating this conception, Pseudo-Dionysius merges proportional privation with this moralized definition of privation as a turning away from the good: Whatever is, is from the Good, is good and desires the beautiful and the Good, by desiring to exist, to live, and to think. They are called evil because of the deprivation, the abandonment, the rejection of the virtues which are appropriate to them. And they are evil to the extent that they are not, and insofar as they wish for evil they wish for what is not really there (725C).

Linking a turning away from the Good to having an absence of something one ought to have, Pseudo-Dionysius affirms the activity of potentiality while converting the moral definition of evil into a restatement of evil as a degree of privation of the good. This conversion is seen in his reemphasis of proportion with the qualifications “appropriate to” and “to the extent that.”59 By using a theory of proportion to account for creation, being, the existence and nature of evil, and evil’s moral dimension, Pseudo-Dionysius reveals the mistake that we will make if we presume that evil is a result of a mere lack of right will or reason caused by inordinate desire. Inordinate desire, Augustine’s libido that is simply the translation of eros, is the principle and canonical account of evil. Eros, however, for Pseudo-Dionysius is not evil. Instead, it is truly of God and a gift from God; it is a proper name for God; it is that which propels the faithful to strive to know God; it will be, too, that which permits the possibility for divine union. In this clarification of eros as otherwise than evil, albeit through a terribly complex trek, we have redeemed yearning and begun the revelation of its utterly critical role in knowing and returning to God. Thus, this account of evil has again revealed how The Divine Names ought not to be considered merely an accounting of divine knowledge. The text works on many levels, and it is our mistake if we take the epistemic as distinguishable from the ontological and practical (in the sense of being a prescription of spiritual exercise).

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Mystical Language and Spiritual Exercise “Oh taste and see that the Lord is Good.” —Psalm 34:860

The last section closed with the reminder about The Divine Names being more than a mystic’s dictionary of divine names. True to mysticism itself, it is an account of esoteric knowledge that, at once, is the enactment of its content and demonstration of its being a spiritual exercise. It is appropriate, then, to close this chapter by following out this reminder (and, too, to complete the circle from which it began) with a closer and broader consideration of the ties between mysticism, best captured in mystical language, and spiritual exercise. The “hidden tradition of our inspired teachers, a tradition at one with scripture,” PseudoDionysius writes, has granted us “theurgical light,” “divine enlightenment,” that “we now grasp . . . in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils of that love toward humanity with which scripture and hierarchical traditions cover the truths of the mind with things derived from the realm of the senses” (592B). As mystical knowledge is not gained by reason and its grasp is not logical, it must be sought through the sensory encounters of these veils and revealed experientially. Its transmission, then, can hardly be by premise and proof or deduction. Until divine union, when “we shall be struck by his blazing light. . . . We must use whatever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God” (592C). By analogies, we will proceed, with affirmation and denial, into and through stuttering to silence and through that too, to something else inconceivable. This transmission cannot be wholly said, and thus its receipt can neither be simply heard nor learned: it must be undergone. A common trait shared through the many historical permutations of mysticism is the adoption of an emotionally and sensuously vivid prose. Its language operates through allusion and intimation. Dramatically embellished description, infused with mood, more effectively captures and reveals the impossible divine presence, than does a language like that in science that is claimed to connect words, meanings, and things without fluctuation or interpretation. Description can allude to truth, even when identification fails. This is elaborated in de Saussure’s seminal Course in General Linguistics as the radical proposition of the “arbitrariness” of the sign. He argued that there is a basic arbitrariness or difference between the word and the thing, the signifier and the signified. This undermines and dismisses a theory of language that says that there is a one to one correspondence, an unbreakable bond, between, for example, “desk” and a desk. De Saussure liberates language from being chained to its static instantiation in a particular reality and instead reveals that there is no ultimate rule or set of structures for a relationship between a word and that which it represents. 61 Ludwig Wittgenstein argues a similar proposition in the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations and destroys the idea of a one to one correspond-

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ence between the utterance and thing and thereby further liberates language from both the binds imposed by the conflicting schools of psychologism and behaviorism.62 Lyotard is making a very similar argument in The Differend by arguing that there is always another phrase and the flexibility of linkages that develop between different phrase events. It is precisely because of the ultimate arbitrariness of the sign and infinite possibility for linkages that perplexes the philosopher when an event is confronted, a differend, which is so superabundantly full of meaning that no one phrase or collection of phrases can begin to express it. When the object under consideration is God, He who, by definition, exceeds all that is, there is no single name that can properly capture His being. Language that describes all one can say of Him and alludes beyond itself to all that one cannot say better expresses His being-event. As McGinn notes, in his massive tome on mysticism, the encounter with God “defies conceptualization and verbalization, in part or in whole.” 63 Gershom Scholem, in his seminal study of Jewish mysticism, notes that mystical speculation, any reflection on and description of the mystical experience, “is of a highly contradictory and even paradoxical nature.” 64 But any event that defies its certain capture calls to the curious animal of humanity to get at it in any way possible. What perplexes us presents itself to us as a question, and every question calls for its answer. Jean-Louis Chrétien notes, “The appeal must answer for the very possibility of being heard, of being a call for someone and to someone, lest it fail to be a call at all.” 65 The elusive event calls to the faithful and philosopher to employ indirection and suggestion to proffer an answer that is prohibited from reason’s realm of possibility. McGinn argues that this philosophic poeticism uses language “not so much informationally as transformationally, that is, not to convey a content but to assist the hearer or reader to hope for or to achieve the same consciousness.”66 Indirect and poetic language, the most effective tool for trying to capture what evades capture, is effective precisely by cultivating in one the correct disposition for seeing the unseen. The cultivation is for both the addressor and addressee wherein the latter can be both the object of address, God, as a form of prayer to Him, or to the fellow faithful who hear the confession. The indirection of the language does not teach what is ineffable, but how to hear what does not speak. This is not an unacknowledged knowledge, according to Gersh, in the specifically Christian Neoplatonism that grounded Pseudo-Dionysius, “in every external object there is an inexpressible element not assimilable in the cognitive process.”67 Teaching and receiving this inexpressible knowledge through something other than the rational, cognitive processes is the endeavor of mystical language and spiritual exercise.68 The emphasis on the sensible in the wake of the intelligible’s unreliability—on seeing the unseen, speaking the unspeakable, hearing the inaudible—indicates that the receptivity that is being trained by mystical poeticism is not rational, but its opposite, the passionate. 69

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Reason’s ideas are reiterable; it takes presentations and submits them to a synthesis that comprehends and contextualizes them and then yields that which can be represented. The passions, passio, are “affections of the mind,” born from pathos, a feeling the mind suffers. They can include desire and fear, delight and distress. While there is a cognitive dimension to the passions, their immediate data is as presentations that resist their encapsulation and reiteration but exude meaning insofar as they move us. The passions are the antithesis of ataraxia, the tranquility, and apatheia, the lack of upset, sought by the Epicureans, stoics, and ascetics. But the perfect calm prohibits inspiration, and by what else can we “catch a glimpse” of the ineffable? The indirection of mystical language cannot entirely capture the object of investigation, but can convey His meaning by its expression of struggle and attempt. For example, the lover of another, human or God, who prostrates himself as he speaks conveys more than he who puts forth nothing more than the linguistic utterance. The act of prostration is a phrase spoken alongside his actual verbalization. Mystical language’s poeticism or indirection can accomplish what the body does as it throws itself to the ground. These other phrases demonstrated in mystical language, however, do not simply convey more information— instead, they convey something more akin to mood. When the event of the differend surpasses our rational address, when it confounds our language, confronts us passionately, when we desire to respond to its call and find ourselves silenced before it because it surpasses what our mind could conjure for us to speak, we must come to listen to the passions and let them teach us how to reply. Augustine’s Confessions reveals the difficulty of this lesson. His autobiography chronicles his coming to know God and conversion to Christianity. His path is guided by his desire to know God, “Let me know you, my known, let me know Thee even as I am known,” and his acknowledgement of his ignorance in knowing how to know Him: “how shall I find you if I do not remember you,” and “how can one pray to you unless one knows you,” and “But what do I love when I love you?”70 Much of his book chronicles his intellectual pursuit of this knowledge, but when he asks the question about what does he love, his ruminations veer from the intelligible path.71 He first answers the question by admitting his love is “not [for] the beauty of the body nor the glory of time, not the brightness of light shining so friendly to the eye,” because God is not his creations, but the perfection of them all, and so it is God who is like, but not, the beauty of this body and brilliance of this light. He then asks again, “And what is this God?”72 He answers: I asked the earth and it answered “I am not he,” and all things on earth confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things with living souls, and they replied: “We are not your God. Look above us.” I asked the blowing breezes, and the universal air with all its inhabitants answered: “Anaximenes was wrong. I am not God.” I asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, and “No,” they said, “we are not the God for whom you are

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looking.” And I said to all those things which stand about the gates of my senses: “Tell me something about Him.” And they cried out in a loud voice: “He made us.” My question was in my contemplation of them, and their answer was in their beauty.73

The response of every creation Augustine asks is: “He made us”—thereby answering his methodic seeking with a display of their beauty. It is their beauty, it is their selves as creations, that is his answer. So, Augustine looks to his own self, and asks, what am I? A man, a thing that is body and a soul; and he asks himself, which of these should I use to find God? With his string of questions, Augustine reveals that he did not listen properly to all of creation. He asked them in contemplation, and mistook them all. He turned to reason, which cannot supply him with an answer, instead of listening through the passions to how they answered in beauty. He continues seeking an impossible answer through contemplation, through reason, whereas, had he listened to the beauty of creation, he could have “learned” how he is to respond and know God. The mythic dialogue with creation, the demonstration of truth through beauty—like God speaking through Monica and the child’s “tolle lege” in the garden to inspire his conversion—is not the testimony this confessor knows how to hear or, to which, properly respond. Philo, the Neoplatonist and monotheist just prior to Pseudo-Dionysius and like him, substituted the faithful one for the Dyad in the cycle of emanation as the one who desires both what comes from God and to return to Him. The faithful’s desire leads him, Philo proposes, to philosophical exercise as the practice of a lesson on how to achieve that “certain state of soul denominated ‘enthusiasm,’ a ‘reposeful divine rapture,’” the overwhelming, yet peaceful, excess of sense that permits a senselessness, “in which the soul, liberated from sense and absorbed in itself, is fructified by God.”74 This is a state wherein one can listen to the affectations of the mind (the feelings that may have come had Augustine listened to the beauty of the birds and intoxication of the breeze). The affected mind is felt forth as desire, and one ought then let this desire arouse a knowledge forbidden to reason. This knowledge may be expressed though something much like Pseudo-Dionysius’ radical conjunction of affirmative and negative theologies that works through each name for God. But, as Augustine demonstrated, this “knowledge” still does not permit him to “know” God. That can only be achieved, for the mystic, when the harmony of equally given desire accompanies God’s grace in granting His faithful merger in divine union. That knowledge will hardly, too, be knowledge in the sense of how “two” is the answer to “one plus one.” But, it will be complete in another sense the mystics described as fulfilled knowledge. What has just been described is a philosophy of spiritual exercise. The goal is the knowledge that surpasses our conception of knowledge. The means is the attempt to acquire knowledge, not for its satisfaction, but as an exercise of our desire as homage and an act of making oneself worthy of God’s desire. Thus,

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Pseudo-Dionysius’ method, too, may best be understood as a philosophical exercise motivated by his desire to give praise to God and, with Him, seek divine union. An actual systematization of the divine names is not Pseudo-Dionysius’ goal—as demonstrated by his admittance that God is He who surpasses reason’s encapsulation. Instead, his activity of delineating the names is best considered to be an act of praise and the active cultivation of the desire that yields ecstatic rapture that may permit him reunion with the One.75 This conception of spiritual exercise replaces the whips of the flagellants with epistemological exercises wherein reason is a minor muscle and the aim is a full, embodied and impassioned reception and processing of knowledge in its broadest sense. While many may raise a banner of asceticism for fear of the passions clouding, rather than permitting, the exercise to be productive, I strongly protest. (Besides, the “passionless,” as Michael McGhee writes, “is not the same as ‘emotionless,’ far from it,” and emotion can cloud one’s experiment as much as passion.)76 Historical survey may demand a broad definition of the passions for this spiritual exercise to be widely justified and demonstrated, but if reason is the only option otherwise to productivity, I propose that such an alternate path will make one fit to be an accountant, and no more. That the passions must be our base is demonstrated in how PseudoDionysius’ spiritual exercise enacts a certain absurdity: expressing the inexpressible. It is motivated by and receives its content from the sensuous, rather than reason. While it is inextricable from language, which is grammatically based, and thus rational, it also actively undermines its logical binds through his stuttering method and blunt reminders to be wary of an overly constrictive reading. Pseudo-Dionysius’ spiritual exercises are remarkably akin to Lyotard’s insistence upon the necessity of seeking the impossible idiom by which the silenced witness could testify to the logically impossible. No expression can capture the inexpressible, but to fail to express it is nevertheless productive and, perhaps, the only manner by which to pay due honor and memorialize what ought not be forgotten. The synchronicity between the unknown but presumably Syrian faithful and difficult to characterize French postmodernist suggests that their pedagogy of spiritual exercise as an activity of productive failure may be at the heart of the philosophical life. Pierre Hadot makes a compelling case for such a universality of spiritual exercise as the attempt to achieve active repose and the intention embedded in philosophical method from the ancients to contemporary thought.77 If his argument is given credence, then it is beyond legitimate and more so an obligation to fuse together, once more, philosophy’s branches of epistemology and ontology and ethics and possible all others, to view with equal importance philosophy’s content and its conveyance, and to let the anonymous mystic share with the rigorous postmodernist another, two-part potential solution for the silenced witness.

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Notes 1. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymn 31 on the Faith, 1 ff., in Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Prientalium 154, ed. E. Beck, Scriptores Syri 73 (Louvain, 1955), 105 ff; quoted in Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 1989), 79. 2. “We should not overlook the brilliant choice of the . . . pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite for the author himself. Just as Paul’s starting point for his sermon in Athens was the ‘unknown god’ (Acts 17), so also the writings attached to the name of his Athenian convert are especially concerned with God as known and unknown” (Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 7). See the contextualization and analysis of this premise and Acts 17 in the section “The Difficulty of Characterization” in chapter four of the current work. 3. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 47-131, 588C; all following references to this text will be parenthetical by original pagination. 4. This last clause is key as broaching why we are seeking this knowledge. As a preface to its direct address, consider Pseudo-Dionysius’ loose citation of Judges 13:17: “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful” (596A)? The question to which God’s question was a response proposes an explanation of why, for Pseudo-Dionysius, we are seeking this knowledge: “What is you name, so that we may honor you when your word comes true” (Judges 13:17, NIV)? To seek knowledge is to do honor and to be pious. Equally telling is a similar request from Jacob: “Please tell me your name,” to which God replied by asking “why?,” but also by blessing him (Genesis 32:29). A blessing may come from God for those who seek this knowledge. This Scriptural sketch as to why we do this task will be filled out as the chapter progresses—although, it must be admitted that PseudoDionysius’ account may read as perplexing as God’s response to the same question posed by Moses: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). 5. The Biblical precedent can be established variously, including: “To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed” (1 Peter 5:1, NIV), and where the elders are implied as authority figures in the Church (cf. Acts 20:17, 1 Timothy 5:17, etc.). 6. Ronald F. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order in the Letters of PseudoDionysius (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 64 ff; noted by Luibheid and Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Op. Cit., n. 1, 261. 7. Naomi Janowitz, “Theories of Divine Names in Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius,” History of Religions 30, 4 (1991): 359-72, 360; she underscores her argument by citing Hadot’s claim that Pseudo-Dionysius influenced “all later Christian theories” (Pierre Hadot, “Neoplatonist Spirituality, Part I: Plotinus and Porphyry,” Classical Mediterranean Spirituality, ed. A. H. Armstrong [New York: Crossroad, 1986], 239). 8. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 7. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Kent Emery Jr., “Untitled Book Review of Paul Rorem’s Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence,” in Catholic Historical Review 80, 4 (1994): 780-5.

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11 . Ibid., quoting Thomas Aquinas, In librum Beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio, ed. C. Pera (Turin: Marietti, 1950), 1-2. 12. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 5, n. 6, quoting Eriugena, Periphyseon 1, 509C, 106. 13. The Theological Representations is also summarized at 593B-C. 14. Cf., Plato, Phaedrus 246a-50c, wherein Socrates delineates how souls will be embodied as determined by the degree of the Forms appreciated, which is, in turn, determined by one’s capacity of moderation and degree of philosophical cultivation. 15. L. Michael Harrington in his Pseudo-Dionysius, A Thirteenth-Century Textbook of Mystical Theology at the University of Paris, trans. L. Michael Harrington (Paris: Peeters, 2004), 89. 16. Louth, Denys the Areopagite, Op. Cit., 87. 17. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 140. 18. Pseudo-Dionysius may or may not hazily invoke this passage in his The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’s section on “Contemplation,” 397A-B. An inspiration born from this passage is Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film entitled “Through a Glass, Darkly,” which beautifully personifies the rationalist’s reaction to this mystical goal as it unfolds the story of a young wife who spends countless nights trying to discern the mumblings of God through the wall of an abandoned room in her attic until his revelation of Himself to her (as a giant spider) sends her into a fit and her husband once more commits her as psychotic to a hospital. 19. Selected Scriptural references, respectively: Ex 3:14, Jn 11:25, Jn 14:6, Jn 1:1, Wis 7:27, Is 18:4, Ex 24:10, Rv 14:14, Ps 75:8, and Prv 9:2. Mixing bowls, receptacles for blending holy nourishment, reappear in an existent letter and are described as “being round and uncovered . . . a symbol of the Providence which has neither a beginning nor an end, which is open to all and encompasses all” (Pseudo-Dionysius, “Letter Nine: To Titus the Hierarch,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Op. Cit., 1109B). 20. The uniqueness (better, the peculiarity) of subsistence can be grasped through its comparison and contrast with the Latin haecceity and quiddity. Haecceity is the “thisness” of something, which makes it particular or having discrete qualities. It can be what makes something essentially what it is, but this “making,” unlike subsistence, is in terms of its particularity as opposed to unity. On the other hand, Quiddity is the “whatness” of something that more greatly concerns the thing’s essence in terms of genre as opposed to species, and thus, better approximates subsistence’s unity, although misleadingly tends to a substantiality that still favors particularity. 21. The thesis was further critical within the Abrahamic tradition due to the raging debate between Monophysiticism (born from monos, “one,” “alone,” and physis, “nature”), a Christological argument that Jesus has only one nature, that his humanity is a part of his divinity, and not distinct from it, and the Chalcedonian argument that Jesus has two natures (thus, his humanity is distinct from his divinity). Essentially, the former view was considered heretical, while the latter was deemed orthodox by the Western and Eastern Churches—although, there were numerous stages of Church development wherein either/or/both/and views were in and out of favor in various forms, e.g., in Nestorianism (which held the opposite of Monophysiticism), Eutychianism and Apollonarianism (as variants of Monophysiticism), monothelitism (a synthesis of the opposing positions), Miaphysitism, etc.). It thus becomes apparent how easily Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings

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could be guilty of either position, as his is a synthesis that maintains unity and distinction at once. 22. Luibheid, the translator, adds a remark about how this restatement, with its slight weakening, may be to protect himself from the charge of pantheism, which holds there being divinity throughout all creation, as opposed to the doctrinally obedient position that divinity is transcendent to, while also in creation. 23. Luibheid notes: “‘Each god has his ‘sympathetic’ representative in the animal, vegetable, and mineral world’ (E. R. Dodds, “Theurgy,” in Proclus, The Elements of Theology, 292).” 24. “Jesus is the fulfilling cause of all, and the parts of that divinity are so related to the whole that it is neither whole nor part while being at the same time both whole and part” (648C). The whole is all its parts and is before and beyond parts. “It is the form which is the source of form for the formless. But it also transcends the formed. It is the Being pervading all beings and remains unaffected thereby. It is the supra-being beyond every being. . . . It is inexpressible and ineffable. . . . And out of love he has come down to be at our level of nature and has become a being. He, the transcendent God, has taken on the name of a man” (648C). Like God as Jesus who has come down to the grasp of human knowledge, all of God’s processions, as differentiations of the one, are His gift and come as given bits of the knowable. 25. Proclus, Elements of Theology, in The Six Books of Proclus, vol. II, trans. Thomas Taylor (London: A. J. Valpy, 1816), CXLII, 396. 26. Ibid. 27. Jean-Luc Marion notes the radicality of Pseudo-Dionysius’ insistence, “without reservation,” on the “audacity of his thesis” of the good, given by God, surpassing all being to the degree that it even encourages nonbeing itself to tend towards the Good as God (Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 76). Marion addresses the justifications, namely by Aquinas, that Pseudo-Dionysius intends to name matter without form, rather than non-being, although Marion, himself, repeatedly intonates his own skepticism (“one still would have to wonder” [Ibid., 77]), pointing to Pseudo-Dionysius’ use of onta and Aquinas’ use of esse to support the former’s radicalism (Ibid., 77-8). The full extremism, however, of PseudoDionysius’ interpretation of desire has yet to be revealed. 28. “The origin of the sun will probably be clearer in the Doric form, for the Dorians call him , and this name is given to him because when he rises he gathers ( ) men together” (Plato, Cratylus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 409a). For further reference to the Cratylus with the verbal play on kallos and kaleo, cf. Cratylus, 416c, and The Divine Names, 701C-D, and about the existence of an absolute beauty, cf. Cratylus, 439c-e. 29. Pseudo-Dionysius intends and primarily uses the term eros, although other terms for love do appear, as John Dixon Copp points out, “Agape does appear in Dionysius, about eight times in all his pages, and translators into English have tended to translated with ‘loving care.’ Agape becomes the expression of love rather than love (eros) as a name of God to be meditated upon” (John Dixon Copp, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite: Man of Darkness/Man of Light [Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007], 52). 30. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 149-50; he also notes its allusion to Plotinus while Luibheid and Rorem, in their translation of the text, note its allusion to Proclus’

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Theologia Platonica, 1.24, 108.6ff and In Platonis Alcibiadem 53.6. For an impressive interpretation of the import of Kallos, cf. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), esp. the first essay, “Call and Response.” 31. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, Op. Cit., 150. 32. Pseudo-Dionysius writes: “It is not beautiful in one place and not so in another, as though it could be beautiful for some and not for others. Ah no. In itself and by itself, it is the uniquely and the eternally beautiful” (704A). Note the similarities between PseudoDionysius’ account and that within Plato’s dialogues: “It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshipper as it is to every other” and a few lines later, the beautiful is “subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it” (Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 526-74, 211a and 211b, respectively). And, Socrates asks Cratylus, “Tell me whether there is or is not any absolute beauty or good, or any other absolute existence,” to which Cratylus accedes and Socrates suggests they seek it, “not asking whether a face is fair . . . for all such things appear to be in flux, but let us ask whether the true beauty is not always beautiful” (Plato, Cratylus, Op. Cit., 439c-d). 33. Copp, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Op. Cit., 53. Copp also acknowledges that “By using eros rather than agape, Dionysius is grounded in Greek philosophical usage, at least in the Platonic/Neo-Platonic line that most interested him.” He firmly continues, “In my opinion, he would still be inclined to do so were he writing today” (Ibid., 52). 34. Maximus Confessor, Ambiguorum Liber, ed. F. Oehler (Patrologia Graeca XCI, Paris, 1860), 7. 1153B; cited in Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), n. 77, 277. 35. William Riordan notes how ecstasy is the response to the “bidding” of beauty: “For Denys, the beauty and goodness of God eternally move Him to love of Himself and to an ecstatic creative act. It is this same divine beauty and goodness (. . . kallos and . . . agathos) that ‘calls’ (. . . kalei) the great multitude of various kinds of creatures into a symphonic, tidal movement back to God” (William Riordan, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008], 199). 36. Eriugena, Periphyseon 175, 1038D; quoted in Paul Rorem, “The Early Latin Dionysius,” in Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, ed. Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 71-84, 80. 37. Quotation from Copp, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Op. Cit., 54. Ecstasy’s contrast is enstasis, a standing within oneself or interiorized contemplation. 38. Ibid. 39. Pseudo-Dionysius, “Letter Nine: To Titus the hierarch,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Op. Cit., 1112B-C. “Inebriated” cites Song 5:1: “Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat the fruit of his apple trees. I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse . . . I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved.” The dangers of superabundance may not just be God’s descent to union with humanity, but also alluded to by how Pseudo-Dionysius concludes his ninth letter: with a brief consideration of the symbols of God waking and sleeping,

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which “has to do with the mixing of wine and the hangover of God after his inebriation” (Ibid., 1113C). 40. Riordan, Divine Light, Op. Cit., 199. 41. Louth, Denys the Areopagite, Op. Cit., 95. 42. John Rist, “A Note on Eros and Agape in Ps-Dionysius,” Vigiliae Christianae 20 (1966), 238; quoted in Louth, Denys the Areopagite, Op. Cit., 95. Louth makes a similar argument in his The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), esp. 36-51. Kevin Corrigan argues that this is a radical departure from, although not entirely opposed to, earlier Neo-Platonism, “in the fact that it develops and transforms precisely the Platonic tradition.” Cf. Kevin Corrigan, “‘Solitary’ Mysticism in Plotinus, Proclus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius,” The Journal of Religion 76, 1 (1996): 28-42, 41. Jean-Luc Marion also briefly analyzes the unique erotic dimension of Pseudo-Dionysius’ name of Love for God; cf. God without Being, Op. Cit., 74. 43. Porete was put to death at the stake in 1310 for heresy for her erotically charged The Mirror of Simple Souls and D’Oingt asked Hugues of Amplepuis to acquire approval of the Chapter General in 1294 for her writings before releasing them (even then keeping her most erotic letters private during her life). 44. The argument about the symmetry between being and having (evil itself and those who are) would be a distracting tangent to establish at length, but can be suggested here by saying that their false division is illustrated in his entire project of knowing God through knowing his attributes; that is, what He is is equated with what He has. The equation’s legitimacy is born through the Neoplatonic theory of emanation that argues, in brief, all that is, is in God before it is in existence, and thus all that exists was/is part of what He is. 45. Privation has played a crucial role throughout the history of philosophy in epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, ethics, and many other matters theological to psychological, as the definition of desire, evil, and woman. Its problems are ancient, yet resurface as central conundrums in late modern and contemporary philosophy—the tradition is long and diverse, from considerations of being and non-being from Heidegger to Hegel and Aristotle, who also addresses its relation in having, to desire from Plato to his critique by Derrida and Levinas, and evil and sin, most notably in Augustine. The perplexity led many, like Otto Weininger and Jacques Lacan, to logical absurdities, and most postmodernists to simply reject it. This book, especially the final chapter, contends that we should, indeed, reject the absolute simplicity of such a definition of lack, but not lack itself as a viable theory. 46. Copp, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Op. Cit., 55. 47. Parmenides, “On Nature,” DK28B7, in Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Philosophy before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), 151-57, 153. 48. Ibid., DK28B2, 152. 49. Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 315446, IV, 7, 213b32-4, 214a12, and 214b10-1, respectively. 50. Cf. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Third Meditation, 44, in his pagination. 51. Copp, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Op. Cit., 55.

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52. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Joe Sachs (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1999), 1045b38, 1046a10-13. 53. Ibid., 1048b1-5. 54. Ibid., 1050a15-17. 55. Ibid., 1046a32-6. 56 . Acknowledgements of proportionality are numerous and throughout The Divine Names, another superb instance being: “Perfect goodness reaches out to all things and not simply to immediate good neighbors. It extends as far as the lowliest of things. In some beings it is present in full measure, to a lesser extent in others, and in the least measure in yet others. It is there in proportion to the capacity to receive it” (717D-720A). Concerning Plato’s demonstration of a proportionate privation, the Phaedrus has a clear illustration: “the one that has seen the most things [in the realm of the forms] shall implant in that which will engender a man who will become a philosopher or lover of the beautiful or someone musical and erotic; the second in that of a lawful king” all the way to the lowliest rungs, “the eighth, a sophistic or demagogic; for the ninth, a tyrannical” (Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995], 248d-e). To offer an elliptical further support for Aristotle’s contribution being most beneficial, we can also witness Pseudo-Dionysius’ preference for Aristotle in his assertions that evil is also intemperance and that one may knowingly sin (717A, 720A-D), which hearkens the Nicomachean Ethics’ akrasia, a clear theoretical divergence from Plato’s principle that no one knowingly desires evil. 57. As Copp’s analysis concurs, “Nothing ‘evil,’ whether as absence of Good or absence of Being, is found in God” (Copp, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Op. Cit., 56). 58. To borrow clarifying language from the first chapter, this would be akin to a distinction Heidegger would make between Being itself and the existential constitution of Being as, for example, attunement. 59. Pseudo-Dionysius’ moral definition of evil mimics a Platonic notion of the disordered soul taken up and expounded by Saint Augustine (and, his agonized route to it, too, mimics the Saint’s tortured considerations of stolen pears in Confessions, book II and On Free Choice of the Will). Both consider evil to be a privation and both consider it to be a turning away from the Good. They differ significantly, however, in two ways: first, by Pseudo-Dionysius’ embrace of the degrees of privation, and second, by how evil, for PseudoDionysius, is not caused by inordinate desire. (This last difference will be critical for the current project’s final chapter.) 60. Gershom Scholem, concerning this passage, notes: “It is this tasting and seeing, however spiritualized it may become, that the genuine mystic desires. His attitude is determined by the fundamental experience of the inner self which enters into immediate contact with God or the metaphysical Reality. What forms the essence of this experience, and how it is to be adequately described—that is the great riddle which the mystics themselves, no less than the historians, have tried to solve” (Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schoken Books, 1974], 4). 61. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966). 62. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).

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63. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1995), xvii. 64. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Op. Cit., 4. 65. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, Op. Cit., 5. 66. McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, Op. Cit., xvii. Curiously, mysticism’s pedagogy is remarkably akin to asceticism’s program of the exercise of absence and prohibition despite the former’s embrace, rather than rejection, of the sensuous and desire. 67. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Op. Cit., 276. Gersh turns to this doctrine of Neoplatonism because, he explains, “the writer [Pseudo-Dionysius] does not give any further details of the type of cognitive activity visualized here [how the human soul approaches objects beyond perception]”; and affirms that Neoplatonism offers the best aid to any further explanation and elaboration (Ibid.). 68. Gallus’ interpretation of the connection between love and knowledge in PseudoDionysius likewise supports this argument about a knowing that is beyond reason alone; the essence of his affirmation is paraphrased by Boyd Taylor Coolman as: “in the soul’s ascent, knowledge ultimately fails, while love presses on to union with God” (Boyd Taylor Coolman, “The Medieval Affective Dionysian Tradition,” in Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, Op. Cit., 85-102, 91). 69. Cf. the concluding remarks in chapter one and the second section of chapter four for further argumentation on the passions as an epistemological base. 70. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Signet Classic, Penguin Putnam, Inc., 2001), X, 1; X, 17; I, 1; X, 6, respectively; the italics cite 1 Corinthians 13:12. 71. The process of his intellectual conversion is far more pronounced; for example, he begged God to forgive children of their sin from ignorance, spent anguished pages seeking the reason why he stole pears, turns away from Christianity for its use of parable and non-literal account, and turns to and then away from the Manicheans for their ability to give rational answers to his questions. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., X, 6. The last sentence reads: “interrogatio mea intentio mea et responsio eorum species eorum.” R. A. Markus’ translation, “My question was the attention I gave to them, and their response was their species,” justifies his dropping of the last word, beauty, and maintenance of the Latin species as more truthfully revelatory of the intention of the original (R. A. Markus, Signs and Meanings: Word and Text in Ancient Christianity [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996], 27). However, I understand the key of the sentence to be the word “beauty.” 74. Benjamin Chapman Burt, A Brief History of Greek Philosophy (Boston: Ginn and Company, Publishers, 1889), 264-5. 75. The merger of epistemic and mystical union goals is echoed in Scholem’s quotation of a Hasidic mystic, Levi Isaac: “He who is granted this supreme experience loses the reality of his intellect, but when he returns from such contemplation to the intellect, he finds it full of divine and inflowing splendor” (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Op. Cit., 5). 76. Michael McGhee, Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 230. 77. Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 79-144.

CHAPTER SIX: SILENCE AND EROS Introduction to a Last/Further Solution The last four chapters have contextualized Jean-François Lyotard and PseudoDionysius into the traditions from whence they came and brought to light the raw material that bridges their heterogeneous times, influences, and intentions. Their inherited theories and respective resounding wakes may differ in character, but they rival one another in size and scope. Both thinkers have been demonstrated as struggling with the problem of how to let the witness to the ineffable give forth meaningful testimony. Pseudo-Dionysius amalgamates Neoplatonism and monotheism with an insistent mysticism to produce a radical method of the affirmation and denial of the names of God. His intention is to let the witness give testimony to He who evades one’s capacity to know Him as a mode of praise and means of return to the One. Other than by offering remarks that humble him before his teachers and the Scripture writers, Pseudo-Dionysius does not question the success of his method, even as he leaves us no evidence that it yielded him divine union. Lyotard hybridizes the phenomenological epoché with avant-garde aesthetics and post-structuralist linguistics. With this pluralistic method, he enacts a careful rereading of texts to unravel their paradoxes anew and reveal the unfixed diversity of their meanings and inherent plethora of linkages they open up to other ideas. He rereads texts in the spirit of therapy that does not only rework the written, but founds and clears a variety of innovative paths forward, which prove, too, to be therapeutic, even if they ultimately end in impassable thickets. Both thinkers are driven to engage radical methods to accomplish the impossible.

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Lyotard’s goal is to give voice to the logically impossible testimony. His most poignant provocation follows from examining the rigidity of logic in Faurisson’s claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. This odious allegation gagged the survivor and prohibited her testimony of the death camp to be deemed true, since she was alive. Exploring the circularity and violence of this revisionist logic, Lyotard began to discern the bounds of meaningful and meaningless phrases and how the ineffable both operates and cannot within an argumentative frame of a rational tribunal. One way of interpreting The Differend is as his search for the unknown idiom that could be understood by the tribunal as it unwinds the bind of logic and expresses the inexpressible. This interpretation understands Lyotard’s writing to be mimetic of the witness’ struggle to testify. Both fall silent as they come to understand the implications of the logical bind, and then fall quickly from silence to a fury of incessant phrases. Phrase after phrase is tried out as phrase regimes are diagnosed, experimented with, and then undermined in the pursuit of a means of rationally expressing what falls outside the bounds of reason. Amongst many other testimonies taken up and tried out, Lyotard’s principal considerations concern the writings of Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, and the oral history style of the native Cashinahua tribe. His focus to each is with an eye to appraise the flexibility of its linkages and whether any permits an avenue to make the meaningless more meaningful—for such a route could lead the witness’ testimony into the tribunal’s realm of comprehension. Yet, despite Lyotard’s persistence in unfolding and elaborating many diverse options, each one meets its own differend. Ultimately, all of the possibilities fail the survivor. This mass of failure, however, grates against Lyotard’s critique of Adorno, which, in large part, was that his work forged a bind as strangling as the revisionist’s when he refused his project to have any positivity. Thus, we confront a difficult question: can there be, for Lyotard, if not a solution, another form of testimony that offers forth a true productivity to the differend? I propose that there are two possible answers to this question. One possibility is that Pseudo-Dionysius’ radical method can aid or permit a solution. A second is that, with Pseudo-Dionysius’ aid, we can propose a theory of the productivity of failure as a productivity for a positivity to come from the differend. Both possibilities are exciting, even as the latter is as tenuous as it is complicated. The latter would demand that we read Pseudo-Dionysius’ incessant naming and Lyotard’s continual destruction of possibilities as activities that fail to actualize solutions, and yet or as such, prove to be productive. If such a reading can be satisfactorily established, it must then be pushed to further demonstrate their productivities as models for the witness to replicate—a single clause in The Differend kindles our hope: “the model is the name for a kind of para-experience”1—and, better yet, as pedagogically already enacting this replication by their very being. A common anecdote tells how the Caribbean natives, once upon a time, could not see Columbus’ clipper ships approaching their shores because such

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ships so exceeded what they were capable of conceiving by their past experiences and collective wisdom. A shaman, however, was said to have noticed the wake of the ships in the ocean. After studying this wake, day after day, inventing and elaborating numerous, various causal hypotheses for the water’s ripple, at last and finally one day he was able to see the ships. Because the tribe unquestionably trusted his ability to see what they could not, when he shared with them his story of the clipper ships, they, too, were able to see them. The shaman’s story of the inconceivable was heard by an audience conditioned to his authority and trained to attentive repose; under these conditions, his account rendered for them a mystical experience. Pseudo-Dionysius’ discerning, speaking, unspeaking, and analyzing of the names of God gives him access to an impossible knowledge—the first step towards the mystical experience of divine union. Embedded in a tradition of spiritual exercise, Pseudo-Dionysius presents himself as a practitioner and, even as he denies it, he is as much the practice’s founder. He is as much a student as he is a teacher. He humbles himself before the Scripture, vowing it to be his guide to the divine names; he names himself as the student of Paul and Hierotheus; he assumes the tone of a teacher to Timothy, although affords him the title of “Fellow-Elder.” Consequently, however indirectly, his treatise invokes the pedagogic as often as it selects a name from the Scriptures. His theology is pedagogy: his method is as critical to achieving divine union, as is the actual content of divine names. If the shaman’s story can bring the tribe to see the inconceivable, and Pseudo-Dionysius’ affirmation and negation of names can inculcate divine union, can a faithfully Lyotardian reading of the Syrian saint’s treatise teach us a way to express the inexpressible? Or, can it teach us a way to read The Differend passionately, performatively, and thereby enact a mimicry of Lyotard’s pursuit of the unknown idiom that permits the witness, and us readers, to give meaningful testimony to that which defies demonstration? This final chapter takes up these questions. It imitates Lyotard’s method of taking up an example of phrasing that challenges the limits of comprehension and working through it to explore its potential to found new theoretical linkages that may, possibly, meaningfully, bridge the differend. It conducts this mimesis as a spiritual exercise, as an enactment of Pseudo-Dionysius’ pedagogy. More precisely, this chapter will seek to enact a Pseudo-Dionysian-informed, Lyotardian reading (using their own texts as much as possible) of Pseudo-Dionysius’ vital, however dichotomous, premises that let him speak of God: silence and eros. And if, like Lyotard’s other lines of enquiry, these premises fail to overcome the differend, fail to let the tribunal comprehend the witness’ impossible witnessing, the exercise will then be explored as to its fertility of offering forth a thesis on the productivity of failure—for, even if the shaman had not brought sight to the whole tribe, and even if The Divine Names did not initiate infallible divine union, one’s knowledge of impending ships would still be pragmatically

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valuable and the exercise of reflecting on and speaking the divine names would still be a sincere act of faith, and, even if, in the wake of Lyotard, we cannot find the impossible idiom that could testify to the impossible, the endeavor will still be philosophically valuable for the tradition and humanistically valuable by means of tribute and memorial to the primary and secondary violences of the holocaust. The possible conclusions to this chapter do stand in a relation of tension. If Pseudo-Dionysius’ silence and eros are ultimately productive for Lyotard’s witness, it cannot form another failed option, and, thus, the thesis concerning failure as ultimately productive for both thinkers as a spiritual exercise cannot be established. Thus, the success of one method is the end of the productivity of failure. This tension, however, quickly dissolves if one steps back from the problem to look at the entire picture. Essentially, productivity for the witness, be it of the horror or the divine, is that individual coming to the production of an expression reflective of his or her comprehension. It is the expression of what one knows. Thus, the actualization of knowledge does not destroy the potentiality of its utility; as Aristotle makes plain in his elaboration of potentiality, he who speaks Italian does not cease to know Italian when he is not speaking it. A witness coming to express the inexpressible does not nullify the likelihood she or he will encounter new differends or continue to reflect on the original one. Spiritual exercise does not end with a single, successful expression, just as one’s ability to speak a language does not cease when one is not speaking. Therefore, the project, however ironically, is ensured success. Either the other language will be mastered and spoken and the last option will be successful, or the mastery will fail, and it will have become simply a further option explored and successful as a spiritual exercise rather than an end. The following endeavor will begin with a brief account of how silence and eros co-implicate each other as options for the meaningful expression of the inexpressible. The next section must address and overturn Lyotard’s dismissal of silence, delineated in the first chapter, as a viable option for the logically bound witness. The final section will be a Lyotardian rereading of Pseudo-Dionysius’ eros introduced by and supplemented with a distinction of agape and eros from The Differend and Lyotard’s posthumous writings on Augustine’s Confessions.

The Symbiosis of Silence and Eros “The lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.” —Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse2

Silence and eros, in Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names, occupy ambiguous roles and states. Silence is the philosophically proper and faithfully reverent response to God’s incomprehensibility and is indicative of the state of active

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repose achieved after the exercise of speaking God’s names. It is how we should approach God and how the approach to God leaves us; but, in between the approach and conclusion, it demands its necessary violation. Its ambiguity heightens if one considers, too, Lyotard’s account of its inherent nature to wreak violence on those who suffer it. Eros, too, occupies a markedly ambiguous place, being a force responsible for creation and reversion, a state shared by both humanity and the divine, and a uniquely important name of God. Its ambiguity heightens if one considers it with the tradition as the source of evil and reason for sin. And yet, here, silence and eros take on renewed importance as forming a foundation particularly viable from which to give voice to the expression of meaning outside of the grasp of reason. Silence evokes the possibility of expressing the power and sensation of eros as meaningful, without reducing it to a logical representation of the experience of an erotic sensation. Eros illuminates how a motivation or force can be universally, unquestionably comprehended and capable of an exteriorization beyond subjectivity, or what an individual could comprehend through self-reference. The question, then, becomes the possibility of silence to be expressive of a truth beyond what logic can understand, and whether this truth is eros. For silence to say something, as opposed to being the absence of something said, silence must be heard by a faculty other than reason. 3 Silence must speak to the passions. Finding the language to elucidate silence and the passions is an obviously ironic challenge. We are trying to capture the expressivity of a saying that is not verbal and a hearing or receptivity that is felt, not understood. Indirection is, perhaps, the best way by which to begin this quest—to trace a serpentine line back and forth and around and between related questions: those concerning seeing and hearing, performative writing and persuasive speech, the sublime and aesthetic experience, the call of beauty and repulsion by monstrosity, and analyses of love. This can only be by indirection, ideas pointing allusions to these considerations, with the aim of establishing a symbiosis between silence and eros. Their symbiosis is, on the one hand, already apparent from the foregoing chapters, and, on the other, the central problematic underlying the project and remains to be developed. Although it properly cannot be called a duty, Lyotard has established the necessity of breaking the witness’ silence through listening to and by the command of feeling. The stakes are inordinate and the command comes from sympathy and acts by empathy—thus, we wonder about the possibility of love, in all its intensities of passion and commitment and rage and pain, merging with silence so as to accomplish their blossoming into expression. From Pseudo-Dionysius, we have seen God’s creation, the obliteration of nothing by the overflowing of creation, the void being filled by The Word being spoken, and how His motivation was His love, how His act was its expression. Both call to us, the recipients of reality formed of speech and silence, to be brave—to speak in that absence of knowing, from love, by love, with love.

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And yet, within the situation of silence, what is this emotive expression? “The scholar claims to know nothing about it,” Lyotard tells us, “but the common person has a complex feeling, the one aroused by the negative presentation of the indeterminate” (§93). And, thereby, venture forth, he encourages us, by lending our ear “to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (§93). Jean-Luc Nancy explores, too, this lending of the ear that is a true listening. 4 French reveals the challenge better than English in how the verb entendre means both “to hear” and “to understand”—although, English also uses “hear” idiomatically to indicate the cognitive, as in “I hear what you are saying,” meaning, “I understand.” Nancy, then, as we must also think through for Lyotard, explores whether philosophy can listen without this listening always being a superimposition of cognitive activity over the receptivity needed for a true lending our ear to the unpresented. Much of philosophy, and especially phenomenology, seeks the truth of the phenomenon as that which appears, the manifestation of being, even as it has also acknowledged the phenomenon as that which appears and disappears. Thus, Nancy asks, “shouldn’t truth ‘itself,’ as transitivity and incessant transition of a continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen?” 5 Because isn’t the “itself” of truth the moment not of revelation, “no longer the naked figure emerging from the cistern but the resonance of that cistern—or, if it were possible to express it thus, the echo of the naked figure in the open depths?”6 We must strive to listen to the environmental resonance of concealed nudity, the resounding of the absent revelation. All listening [écouter, or tendre l’oreille, “stretching the ear”] is a tending to, “an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety,” while hearing [entendre] suggests the tension has come to and overcome the ear. The dynamic directionality, the giving of receptivity and receipt of giveness, sets up for us the activity we must undertake as the formation of a relationship. But, since that to which we must truly listen is silent, this relationship is not the sort had between two known parties. Describing non-representational modern art, George Steiner remarks that, “Where they succeed, their assertion of immediate sensuous energy provokes in the viewer a kinetic response,” some, by drawing us “after them into a counterpart of their own motion,” some, bypassing language, “play directly on our nerve ends,” and some conveying “only the rudimentary pleasures of decoration.”7 This relationship to silence is not had between parties, but forms between, and kinetically forms the form of the parties, and is tensely “felt”—“a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating.”8 Lyotard seeks to clarify, that “This feeling does not arise from an experience had by a subject. It can, moreover, not be felt,” and, further, it “is not a state of the mind” (§93). To grasp the feeling that is not felt, Nancy redirects to Aristotle, wherein sensing (aisthesis) is feeling-oneself-feel. “To be listening will always, then, be to be straining toward or in an approach to the self,” wherein this self is no subject, the approach is “neither to a proper self (I), nor to the self of an other, but to the form or structure of self as such, that is to say, to the form, structure, and move-

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ment of an infinite referral [renvoi], since it refers to something (itself) that is nothing outside of the referral.”9 The relation is between parties and directs them to the very structures of being parties. The emotive expression is not cognitive, but that which we hear, that to which we listen, generates a “complex feeling” that is not a feeling, properly had; it excites us, pulls us, pains us, and gives us something that is no thing, but it resounds as a “sign that something remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined,” a sign that “affects a linking of phrases” (§93). The receipt that is not a having something is critical in this attempt to discern the symbiosis of silence and eros. The receipt is an entry. “To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a ‘self’ can take place.” 10 Writing on Augustine’s Confessions (to be explored more below), Lyotard weaves together sensuous snippets of the Saint’s relation to God as such an entry: “you sweep down upon him and force entrance through his five estuaries. . . . You open them and turn them, unfurling, inside out. . . . The flesh, forced five times, violated in its five senses, does not cry out, but chants, brings to each assault rhythm and rhyme, in a recitative, a Sprechgesang.”11 This Sprechgesang, a speech-song, a psalm as a singing praise, is the resonant receipt and response of and to hearing The Word that is not speech. The zoon logon echon, that creature whose Being is essentially determined by its being able to speak, cannot merely speak when it has been brought properly, tensely, up to this space of silent word: it re-sounds the tensive given beyond conception. “‘Silence’ in fact must here be understood [s’entendre, heard] not as a privation but as an arrangement of resonance”12 And, the receptivity is a play, “beyond a simple opposition between consonance and dissonance, being made of an intimate harmony and disharmony among its parts: being made . . . of the discordant harmony that regulates the intimate as such.”13 Silence, listened to and heard as an emotive expression of the truth in itself as no thing that is present, generates a “complex feeling” that is not felt in a subject, but as a formative tension of a between, a sign of the unpresented, that rings within so as to affect a linking of phrases as resonances. Suffering the assault of the un-hearable heard, which excites a listening as an intending towards and entry into this affective space, “Listening thus forms the perceptible singularity that bears in the most ostensive way the perceptible or sensitive (aisthetic) condition as such: the sharing or an inside/outside, division and participation, de-connection and contagion.”14 To listen to silence is to enter this unifying and shattering relation that I will now label (and slowly continue to defend) as erotic. We do not hear silence cognitively, but passionately. But the purpose of this revelation of the symbiosis of silence and eros is practical: we need to learn how to sing that Sprechgesang, how to make the resonance a phrase that links silence to sense. Thus, we need to explore how aisthesis, the

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motivating sensation, becomes the aesthetic, as the creation that captures sensation, that is, how to make an expression that says the form or sense of materialfree silence. That the aesthetic can affect the transition into this sensuous space of hearing, open the receiving, can be established. But what we need to know is whether the aesthetic can permit a meaningful linkage from the sensation to something sensible (the sense, meaning), without a necessary detour to cognition, which demands a translation of the silence into its approximate. (For, we need to know, ultimately, whether the witness, in this situation of silence, can create some testimony from the silence of the truth itself that is mere form and have this make sense.) The transitive capacities of the aesthetic are demonstrable. And Nancy proposes that “the visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion), which does not mean that these tendencies do not intersect,” thus suggesting the invitation into silence can yield an activity of reproduction, which would be an adequate linkage.15 And this can be supported further by considering the demarcation of ethos, logos, and pathos as the three modes of persuasion in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Ethos is the act of establishing of one’s knowledge, expertise, or competence in the mind of the audience. Logos is an appeal to the audience through reason or logic. And pathos is an appeal to the audience’s emotions.16 Each of these tactics is a disposition from within which one persuades, thus affects something in the other, thus are actions that link. Philosophy fears, reverently and justifiably, the passions. Ethos, indirectly, and logos, explicitly, however, have content universally recognized as a proper expression (phrase). The question will be whether pathos, the passionate whose passion is not an ostensive something, can be a phrase that is silent, yet speaks so as to meaningfully link. The symbiosis of silence and eros points to a spacing of contradiction, a “complex feeling” of a coming and passing, enticing and repulsing that, thought aesthetically, conjures the conception of the sublime. From the Latin sublimis, the “uplifted” or “lofty,” and despite its many more or less subtly varying interpretations, the sublime is an affective elevation born from a collision with pain and its collusion with or oscillation into pleasure; it is, according to Edmund Burke, “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” and, according to Immanuel Kant, “That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”17 Beauty may transport us to a “state of pure cognition,” according to Schopenhauer, but the sublime forces a state of “elevation above the interest of the will.”18 Following Kant, the sublime is that which overwhelms the rational capacities of the mind, temporarily freezing the mortal in awe and fear, before one’s apparatus reignites and grants a pleasurable overcoming of sensation by rational comprehension. For Burke, “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about ter-

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rible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”19 Kant and Schopenhauer seek greater precision, and divide the sources of the sublime into two categories: the dynamic and the mathematic. While objects of nature are not, properly speaking, sublime—for sublimity is the feeling—both lushly illustrate the two categories of the sublime with natural images. 20 The dynamic sublime is illustrated in Kant as the violent storm at sea, so fierce, man stands paralyzed at its display of incomprehensible force, before affirming himself as safe. Awareness of his safety results from his capacity to rationally distance himself from the danger and grants him ecstatic power over its ferocity. In addition to “Nature in stormy motion; the gloaming through threatening black storm clouds; enormous, barren, hanging rocks that interlock so as to cut off our view; rushing foaming masses of water; complete desolation; the howling of the wind as it cuts through a ravine,” and less dynamically, Schopenhauer also proffers the “solitary region with a boundless horizon under a completely cloudless sky,” as offering a “tinge” of the sublime. 21 Just as the ferocious require one’s security to be rationally certain before resulting in pleasure, Schopenhauer proposes that the solitary surroundings “provide a standard for measuring our own intellectual value.”22 The mathematical sublime, for Kant, is illustrated as a ravine cut across the earth, so deep, man stands aside it, overwhelmed by vertigo. In the experience’s immediacy, he is incapable of assigning a concretion to the infinite or counting the miles or minutes of its depth. Or, in Egypt, the dizzying approach to the pyramids, or, in Rome, entering St. Peter’s Basilica, standing below either: dumbstruck. But, beside or below each, one’s reason reawakens: you step back and measure the scene before you as the power of knowledge pleasurably overcomes the split of the earth, the towering wedge up from it, and the millions of vignettes arching and soaring above you. 23 The condensed account of the sublime typically concludes with an affirmation that reason, philosophically, is the conqueror of passionate thinking, although, passion puts up a venerable fight. If this is the case, sublimity best expresses the passionate space of silence, but its actual expression can be spoken by reason’s re-ignition and the translation of the truth itself into its logical representation. Silence, then, would not be, itself, expressed meaningfully. Yet, as the conqueror writes history, he or she demarcates an unwritten tale. Lyotard’s revelation of bounty of possibilities beyond the recurrent grand narratives, of which reason’s conquer is one, demonstrates that alternate accounts always exist, even if they do so without attributes, eulogies, or even sound. 24 It is this other tale, the unexpressed testimony, that speaks of the power of the erotic; it is the sublime before its overcoming we must strive to hear. Paying closer heed to Kant’s analysis itself, with the aid of Lyotard, gets us started as to how to think silence’s bypass of reason: We hence see that true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the [subject] judging, not in the natural Object, the judgment upon which occasions this state. Who would call sublime, e.g. shapeless mountain masses piled in wild

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In other words, the judgment of sublimity is a productive failure. The productivity is an elevation of the mind. The failure is imagination’s incapacity to capture that which has sparked the experience of sublimity. How does the productivity come to be? Reason suggests that we can comprehend every phenomenon that can be given in intuition. However, while imagination exerts the greatest effort to do so, it confronts its own limitations and inadequacies when it tries to comprehend the formless totality of the object. As Lyotard describes it, imagination discovers the “infinite import of Ideas, its incommensurability to all presentation” (p. 166). Nevertheless, this failure shows imagination’s true destination: (again, as described by Lyotard) “to supply a presentation for the unpresentable, and therefore, in regard to Ideas, to exceed everything that can be presented” (p. 166). Our destiny is to make ourselves adequate to this Idea of Reason, and thus achieve total comprehension. “The feeling of our incapacity to attain to an Idea, which is a law for us, is RESPECT.”26 The feeling of respect initiates the receipt of the pleasure in the sublime. But, humbling this immensity by reference to “adequacy” and the denomination of “respect” can hardly belie the true ecstasy of the pleasurable sensation garnered from this realization. Kant deems this intensity to be “an extreme mode of the sublime” wherein imagination creates a “presentation of the Infinite,” but, ever staid, acknowledges “that extremely painful joy that is enthusiasm is an Affekt, a strong affection, and as such it is blind and cannot therefore, according to Kant, ‘deserve the approval of reason’” (p. 166).27 With the disapproval perhaps fueling our respect, our pleasure issues “from our own destination, which by a certain subreption we attribute to an Object of nature (conversion of respect from the Idea of humanity in our own subject into respect for the Object).”28 This attribution may prove to be what we are seeking under the name “linkage,” and is helpfully suggestive as an instruction of being “by a certain subreption.” Subreption is an inference drawn from misrepresented facts or a purposefully concealment of facts to obtain a certain result—which hints toward that persuasion by pathos—and should not be interpreted to be malicious deception, as the term originally had ecclesiastical overtones: it was a sanctified indirection so as to direct one to truth that eluded ostension. So, again, what happens in the judgment of the sublime? Our confrontation with the object results in our quick oscillation between attraction and repulsion to the sublime; this feeling of awe is both pain, from it being unthinkable, and pleasure, from the idea we can think it. This quick vibration occurs when we overcome the lapse of our imaginative ability to think the unthinkable, even as

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an answer is impossible. This conquer of pure passionate free play of the Imagination by the supposition of a conceptual answer produces a feeling of respect— seemingly for the object of raw nature, but truly it is for our ability to strive after and conquer the idea. Reason, then, is certainly reignited after the assault, and productive of concepts, but it is the failure of understanding that sparks the ignition of the conceptual, which then operates as an indirection. Kant cannot get us to the expression of silence, but his analysis has provided a map to show the possible moment of rational interruption from within which our sought expression could come. From this point, let us turn to Julia Kristeva’s analysis of Proust, which best explores the possibility of the purely sensuous expression, and will transition into a more explicit demonstration of silence’s symbiosis with eros. Kristeva’s investigation, “Is Sensation a Form of Language,” from her Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature argues that Proust discovered a language capable of expressing sensation, the “opaque, nonverbal, sensory experience of deep sleep in the same way he discovered a language capable of expressing the sensations of perverse pleasure [in its immediacy].”29 And, further, that Proust believed that the very aim and purpose of creative writing was to capture the “inexpressible sensory experience of a painful jouissance.”30 If her, and his, hypotheses bear out, then Proust will be a model of a witness giving testimony to that which defies logic’s grasp and the tribunal’s standards of evidence. While Kristeva’s analysis is far more concise than Proust, here, it still exceeds any productive summary; instead, faintly mimicking Lyotard’s Notices, I will excise a single example to draw out her argument: Kristeva traces a scene from Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah back to its first inscription in a letter he wrote to his housekeeper Céleste: My dear Céleste, what I have witnessed this evening is unimaginable. Le Cuziat told me there was a man who goes there to be whipped, and I saw the whole thing from another room, through a little window in the wall. . . . I wanted to see it for myself. Well, I saw it. It is a big industrialist. . . . Imagine— there he is in a room, fastened to a wall with chains and padlocks, while some wretch, picked up heaven knows where, who gets paid for it, whips him till the blood spurts out all over everything. And it is only then that the unfortunate creature experiences the heights of pleasure.31

Proust makes the unimaginable palpable for Céleste’s imagination: it “is unimaginable,” he writes, “Imagine!” He strives to draw her into the pleasure that exceeds the event of one man’s masochism: a secret knowledge was shared with Proust, he desired to see it, he bore witness to it, clandestinely, through a crack, he shares the knowledge and vision with Céleste in speech, and then in writing, finally, he weaves it into his novel for his characters to reenact, and thereby multiply, all the levels of pleasure.32 According to Kristeva’s hypothesis, the experience of pleasure coincides with its expression and this is uniquely captured in Proust’s writing. How is

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this? What is it about his writing, uniquely, that captures the immediacy of sensation that all other writing falsifies through its re-presentation?33 The aspect deemed unique in Proust’s writing is that it reveals the sensation of the paradox of pain and pleasure. Only in writing, is his pleasure consummated; yet, it is consummated in the paradox of guilt and delight, which serves to rupture the finality that consummation implies. Proust reveals an apologetic delight and delighted need to share the pleasure that he took in the act of experiencing another’s masochism, that is, to extend the experience of pleasure out in time and beyond itself through its expression. Kristeva writes that Proust’s account of his experience leading up to and following his spying, like his experience, itself, “goes from one sensation (sadomasochistic, voyeuristic) to another until it reaches ‘the pleasure of the text,’ which is conveyed through a language nourished by all the sensations, thereby becoming music, style, and flesh.” 34 And, thereby, sensation climaxes into its sensuous expression having bypassed its codification in understanding and its re-presentation through the logic that shapes language. But, has Proust’s sensation spoken? His language is spectacular and agile: it mimics the dual movement of the sublime through an expression of being overwhelmed before pleasurably coming to understand. However, his words describe experiences of painful jouissance: for the man from the whip and for himself from the act of spying, confessing, writing. His language does not express sensation in the sense of being its immediacy; it describes various persons’ experiences of it. His writing makes sensation into spectacle. Sensation becomes a representation of sensation. There is no way to argue that the description of the scene and sensation of the industrialist, “there he is in a room, fastened to a wall with chains and padlocks, while some wretch . . . whips him till the blood spurts out all over everything. And it is only then that the unfortunate creature experiences the heights of pleasure,” is the sensation rather than its description.35 If we read Proust from the witness stand, how do we prove we are reading sensation? If, by reading it, we each feel it, we could argue that his writing is generative of sensation. His writing could be a perverse instance, then, of the spiritual exercise of the cultivation of capacity, for example, of dwelling on God’s love so as to feel His love so as to love to become worthy of His love. 36 We could argue that if Proust’s description can ignite our desire, then it may be a productive model for the witness to imitate through testimony that would prime the tribunal’s understanding and cultivate their capacity to hear it. But, here, we have only another illustration of how very well the aesthetic can affect the transition into the sensuous space of hearing and open the receiving. This is not what we need: some affirmation that a specific sort of aesthetic expression can permit a meaningful linkage from the sensation to something sensible (the sense, meaning), without a necessary detour to reason. Proust’s prose may serve as a valuable model for the witness, but his capture of sensation, his description of the sadomasochistic pleasure, only generates

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a disruptive and compelling awareness of absence. As defined by Plato, desire is a lack whereas understanding must have its object.37 The witness’ testimony, to be valid, needs to generate an understanding of something—even as this something is no thing that can be said. To simply stop here is to affirm the impossibility of the task: the something that the witness must make the others aware of having is something that cannot be demonstrated. But, there is something in Kristeva’s analysis that suggests a further path to try: Proust’s erotic experience is profoundly, perversely sexual. If he succeeds in generating an awareness of absence in his pornographic prose, silence’s partner, eros, demands a closer investigation as to whether its lack says something—and this is the quest to which the second half of this section will concern itself. Justice cannot be done to the entirety of philosophy’s engagement of eros in debates as varied as those concerning human nature, political organization, ethics, and epistemology (as it is clear that “Love is a philosophically unruly being, and the despair of moral epistemologists” 38). Instead, the following will attempt its general description to contextualize a few of its key aspects that elucidate and justify its frequent consideration. For, even within just contemporary Continental philosophy, the many, divergent strains of the consideration of eros are equally difficult to disentangle. Contemporary philosophy’s engagement with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis resulted in its ready adoption of eros as a significant and foundational human drive. French feminism took up a definition of eros that echoed both ancient and psychoanalytic readings to explicate gender difference. Post-structuralists identified and reinterpreted the ancient conception of eros as a lynchpin to uncovering the logocentricism of Western philosophy. And the diverse philosophers engaging contemporary readings of Judaism and Christianity, including those working in a vein of a religious post-existentialist or theologically-inclined phenomenology, proposed an ethical-religious dimension of eros exemplified in hermeneutical readings of sacred texts, underscoring religious and secular ritual, and explaining both our knowing of and being in the world. The rich, and possibly sordid, history of eros justifies the necessity of an excursus into the understanding and significance of eros for the current endeavor’s conjunction of it with silence as the most productive means of expressing the inexpressible. This necessary digression will walk through a brief review of eros’ difficult linguistic heritage to forge a working definition that then will be conceptually analyzed for what account it may offer on the intentional relation it establishes and the nature of the knowledge that it yields. There are many ways to define eros. The most common translation into English is as “love,” but always carries an implicit asterisk signaling the necessity of understanding that there are many variations of love. 39 The main variants of love, in ancient Greek, include: eros, agape, philia, and storge. Commonly, these differentiate sexual love, chaste love, friendship, and familial affection. Unfortunately, these differentiations are timorous for both the disparity of the precedents in translation and for the disparity in their long history of conceptual

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considerations. Most sources do not keep the distinctions rigid and partially or fully synthesize them under a single term for “love.” For example, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s standard A Greek-English Lexicon acknowledges the sexual dimension of eros without limiting it therein when it translates eros as desire and love. It continues, at length, to include variations of its definition, such as: “love, mostly of the sexual passion . . . love for one, love of a thing, desire for it,” “object of love or desire,” “passionate joy,” “the god of love,” “at Nicaea, a funeral wreath,” and “the name of the klêros Aphroditês.”40 With an allusion, but without a specific reference to sexual activity, William J. Slater’s Lexicon to Pindar defines eros primarily as passion and love and, secondarily, as desire and longing. 41 Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, likewise, suggests sexuality without therein limiting the term when it defines “erotic” as an adjective meaning sexual desire that is derived from eros, defined only as “love,” and related to erâsthai, defined as “to love, desire.” 42 In contrast, Douglas Harper’s electronic dictionary of etymology, however, clearly defines eros as “sexual love,” agapao as “have regard for,” phileo as “have affection for,” and stergo as “used explicitly of the love of parents and children or a ruler and his subjects.”43 Harper also quotes the Oxford English Dictionary’s note about the lack of fixity in the Vulgate’s translations of dilectio, caritas, and agape, rendering all of them, four times to one, as “love” instead of “charity.” 44 Even if the Greek terms were translated consistently into a fixed set of Latin terms to minimize the ambiguity of love’s different forms, the Latin terms, themselves, embody the same laxity between the chaste and sexual intonation in the definitions of love. Amor, for example, embodies this dichotomy in the definition by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary, which includes, even as it differentiates, its high and low senses, its internal as opposed to external meanings, and, specifically, its chasteness and sexuality wherein the latter is further rendered ambiguous as lawful or unlawful. 45 This indistinctness in the Latin is further captured in the Oxford English Dictionary’s identification of “love” as etymologically derived from both the Latin lubet, pleasing, and lubido, desire or libido.46 In light of the non-rigidity of definitions for the various terms for love across different languages, this project feels justified in employing some of this ambiguity in its own definition of eros: the term is not assuredly chaste, yet it is not limited to being a definition of mere sexual love. I feel confident that this interpretation of eros is likewise validated by its long history of conceptual interpretation. The dominant aspect of eros that this project seeks to maintain and emphasize from this tradition is its necessary implication of a relationship founded by a unique directedness and response that then founds and motivates action. I use the term eros rather than the other variants of love because its indication of the sexual alongside other impulses serves to best underscore the necessity of a specific intentional object to which one is most intently directed. The other terms for love lack this emphasis as they can more easily be used to indicate general and vague objects (children, a nation,

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etc.) and with greater looseness of necessity (a love of all children in history or one’s country in the past and future). Eros more clearly designates you are my obsession now; I want you and want you to want me and I immediately act upon it to engage, maintain, and increase this reciprocity. Eros’ indication of an utter reciprocity also best promises the possibility of transformation: the two of us into one (who will ever, also, remain two). This possibility owes its expression to the sexual intonation of eros and its incorporation of the transformative dimension of love as the cause of ecstasy. It is possible that other affectations may achieve this same series of attributes, but it will be demonstrated through this chapter that eros is the most effective state and term, and provides the greatest point of commonality for dialogue between the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius and Lyotard. Both thinkers, in the face of that which exceeds reason’s grasp, seek a powerful engagement with the other that will permit some means of comprehension. The knowledge they seek is more like a communion than a definitional mode of expression. The relationship that is founded by eros is likewise a knowing that is a radical conjoining with the other. The history of philosophy has repeatedly affirmed eros to invoke a most powerful mode of intentionality, although the nature of its knowledge yielded and the self and the other thus intended do vary between accounts. The relationship between love and knowledge, however complex, has been asserted from its conception in Plato. Socrates, who reputedly declared himself ignorant, insisting, “I have no claim to wisdom, great or small,” in the Apology, announces, in the Symposium, that there is one thing of which he knows: love— “love is the one thing in the world I understand.”47 What is the nature of the knowing of his knowing of love? What is the nature of knowledge that love is tied to, by etymology and the account of love’s parentage, if knowledge requires its object to be fixed and love’s object is absent? Philosophy is, etymologically, the love of wisdom; philosophers, then, are wisdom’s lovers and wisdom is our beloved. If wisdom is knowledge, like that which the Meno instructs us to keep chained as it is so quick to flight like the statues of Daedalus, we philosophers must forever be bereft of it, for our love implies its content to be a lack, to be the precise opposite to captured statues. 48 This is the standard critique that contemporary philosophy poses to the Platonic conception of eros. This critique, however, ignores the fact that eros is born of both Poros and Penia: “as the son of Resource and Need, it has been his fate to always be needy . . . [but] he brings his father’s resourcefulness to his designs upon the beautiful . . . at once desirous and full of wisdom.”49 Eros may be a privation, but its object and content are neither nonexistent nor vacant of attributes and potential for action. Eros’ nature is akin to the compatible contradiction in Pseudo-Dionysius’ depiction of God both as and exceeding any attribute and to Lyotard’s witness’ testimony that is both speechless and overfull of speech. Yet, the remaining question, what is the nature of the knowing of his knowing of love, is rendered more urgent in light of eros being both a poverty and

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plenitude of knowledge at once. Logic declares this formula to contain a contradiction and be an impossibility: if a is not-b and b is not-a, c cannot be both a and b at once. Even to designate eros as an attribute of being, or a potential state, rather than its actual state of being itself, does little to ease the problem— for we neither sensibly speak of a woman having on a dress and not having on a dress at once, nor of a man both having the ability to play the guitar and not having the ability to play the guitar at once. Nevertheless, it is sensible for us to conceive of eros as both a lack and plenitude at once. As with silence, the meaningful understanding of eros as a knowing must be situated within the passions, as opposed to reason. Understanding silence and eros as passionate commands that we return to the idea of mysticism as that which cannot be put into words and thereby propels one, with all of one’s passion or faith, to endlessly attempt to put it into words (further delineated in the third section of chapter four). Mysticism’s object evades empirical demonstration as its expression evades a language that promotes a rigid one to one correspondence between a sign and referent. Instead, as de Certeau argued, mysticism is the very “conjunction of a passion (which desires and suffers the other) with a meaning (which is offered or refused).”50 This posits mysticism as an erotic relation, and “introduces an erotic element into the field of knowledge. It impassions the discourse of knowledge.”51 The knowledge thus impassioned is, as Anselm deduced from the Psalms, one we “know in our hearts.” 52 This does not discount the rational arguments that Anselm, Pseudo-Dionysius, Lyotard, and others make; it merely affirms that its truth exceeds reason, even as it provides the raw data submitted to it and, with which, reason then works. The erotic relationship is infinitely entangled with the relation of knowledge and both relations invoke the question of the nature of the relating, that is, a question of intentionality. Love, like knowledge, is love of someone or something. Plato’s notion of eros is clearly intentional insofar as it is a direction by one to his or her lack of the other. But, is this direction truly towards the other, him or herself, towards the self’s lack of the other, towards the self’s desired end with the other, or towards the self’s representation of the other, or, otherwise, still? It can be argued that the Symposium’s “ladder of love” reveals that the erotic relationship does not yield knowledge through an intentional direction of one person to another, but that it merely trains us to learn of a universal love. This raises a question as to whether eros is, truly, the best indication of the specificity of a relation that says: I love you, here, now, and in such a way that I want you to love me and will act so as to encourage this end. This demands a closer investigation into the nature of intentionality. For Husserl, “The peculiarity of the intentive mental process is easily designated in its universality; we all understand the expression ‘consciousness of something,’ especially in ad libitum exemplifications.” 53 Likewise, Danto easily captures the basic essence of erotic intentionality as “since to love is to love something, there must in every case be something that is the object of love.”54

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Love, he argues, is like belief; therefore, love is an intentional state, but, just as Husserl also posits that “‘consciousness of something’ is therefore something obviously understandably of itself and, at the same time, highly enigmatic,” Danto concludes, quite unlike other interpretations, that this makes love’s object the content of that state.55 This means that love intends one’s representations of the beloved, “the lover loves the beloved only as he or she represents the latter. The beloved is then the individual represented—or misrepresented—by the lover.”56 While this interpretation of the nature of the other loved easily permits us to conceive of loving a fictional or unknowable being, it prohibits love from founding something like an ontological proof of the existence of the other or using love as a means through which to attain an immediacy of or with the other. For this project, eros as a potential solution to grasping the ineffable, this conception’s permission of extending the relation to all that we can represent, even to what we cannot empirically demonstrate, aids the project. God and “Auschwitz” are two inexpressibles that evade empirical demonstration. This project is seeking how one represents them, but must also pursue a possible representation that permits misrepresentation, since both, by nature, exceed their encapsulation. And, while this definition of intentionality that prohibits immediacy prohibits one conception of the faithful’s goal of divine union, the possibility of any language expressing immediacy, as was explored through Kristeva and Proust, above, has already been addressed and found to not violate the overall productivity of eros as a potential solution for expressing the inexpressible. Despite the prohibition, the intentionality of eros can be conceived as a relation that better approximates immediacy between individuals, even if it cannot maintain this modality when it is re-presented or expressed as such. In this, the parties’ dynamic reciprocity undermines the typical subject-object and active-passive conceptions of knowledge. Each gives oneself to the other, rather than being passive matter determined by the other alone. The intentional erotic relation is a full communion between two that founds knowledge and action, rather than being a relation of the intellectual conjunction of perspectives, that is, as a relation wherein love expresses the content of representations. A relation of complete communion is best expressed through Georges Bataille’s definition of eroticism as “the quest for continuity of existence.”57 This communion cannot be conceived of as purely sexual or biological. Instead, Bataille carefully differentiates strictly physical eroticism and emotional eroticism from his object of inquiry, true eroticism, which he designates as religious. Its truth is because the quest for continuity “systematically pursued beyond the immediate world signifies an essentially religious intention.”58 It captures the impulse and movement by which creation is called to and seeks the love of its creator. Outside of a reunion, the state of humanity is as dissolution; thus, erotic desire is the desire for “a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution. The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives,”

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which is as isolated.59 The non-erotic dissolution is isolation whereas the dissolution attained through the erotic fusion is ecstatic union beyond individuality. This definition of the intentionality at work in the erotic relationship better captures the spirit of eros at work in Pseudo-Dionysius and Lyotard. Here, then, Eros is to be understood as the relationship founded by an intentionality, a unique directedness and response between two parties, that provokes the parties to action. Eros proceeds by a relation that can be described as one of knowledge that is less the order of reason and more that of the passions and indicates a state of affected being. This state of being affected by another commands one to take a stand, which is to say, to act upon one’s knowing and being in the world in regard to the other. The call to action generated by the erotic relationship can be expressed as the drive to union with the other. This desired union—be it the faithful’s union with God, or the survivor’s with the horror of Auschwitz—indicates a coming together that defies reason and yet, out of a painful clash of pleasure and pain (for the resolution is wanted, but horrendous), yields a knowledge and forces our reaction. The testimony from the survivor or the faithful cannot simply mimic the example of Proust and just generate the sensation of knowing in his or her skeptic, judge, and jury. This may persuade them and yield a single successful win here or there, but it will not withstand their close scrutiny according to their own rules. This persuasion is not the erotic relationship that this project will proceed to explore more closely. Instead, the erotic relationship must be conceived between the survivor and faithful and their respective objects, that is, between Auschwitz and God. This command, needless to say, generates an intense repulsion—neither God nor Auschwitz is a proper erotic object!60 But, if the foregoing analysis of eros can be granted, the following will further demonstrate how both cases demand our humanly desperate, passionately motivated attempts to express that which exceeds expression—for God is far more than an infinitely empty justification for the Church and Auschwitz is far more than a place, even a place where infinite horror took place. Both “objects” are inexpressible, and both call us to communion and testimony. The expression of the inexpressible will be generated through the engagement of an erotic relationship with the desired object so as to try to yield a “knowledge” that transcends its limitations of not being rational. This “knowledge” will found their testimony. In the communion founded by a true listening to the unpresented and infused through by eros that compels reaction, silence must say something, and not be merely the absence of testimony. To succeed as testimony, it must be an account given to others according to their rules and by a way in which they can understand it, but it must also be true: it must present the truth itself, that bare form or essence that isn’t present, but is only “the echo of the naked figure in the open depths?” 61 In silence’s symbiosis with eros, and eros’ revelation as not being a pure privation, we have established some degree, be it scant, of substance to this echo, some hint of impossi-

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ble flesh. But if the testimony cannot be the nude sensation of truth itself, if it cannot be the originary, immediate resonance of truth, and if this echo cannot be sensuous enough to generate sensible linkages, but, instead, is only the representation of experience had by a subject, it will fail, even if it proves productive. If the testimony is only re-presentation, it will be a proffering of some knowledge akin to the consummation of desire wherein all of eros’ truth, born in a passionate knowing, has been turned over to reason’s cogitations wherein it is ordered and fixed, chained tight, and readily re-presentable. It will fail to be a revelation of the event itself, the form of truth, although, surely, this is still productive: it has broken a silence, even if not the silence of the differend. Lyotard addresses several examples of “differends” that can be arbitrated and, therefore, basically overcome, the most poignant being the formation of the State of Israel. Its formation signaled the rupture of a silence so ruthlessly imposed by the Nazi’s Final Solution, their attempt to eliminate every elimination of a people. Practically, politically, and ethically, its formation was right and a victory. However, its formation was the transformation of the true differend into a litigation, which could not exhaust or undo the still silenced event. The survivors put an end to a silence, “but the reality of the wrong suffered at Auschwitz before the foundation of this state remained and remains to be established, and it cannot be established because it is in the nature of a wrong not to be established by a consensus” (§93). Thus, the definition of the differend itself rejects the possibility of its being bridged. Most strictly, then, my proposition of a symbiosis of silence and eros to overcome the differend of Auschwitz and God must fail. If it does not, then either Auschwitz and God are not true differends, or differends themselves are not (and, perhaps, that interpretation of Hegel is right, that there is no noumena, that sooner or later, one day we will know, and be able to say, it all). I doubt both options. Thus, I admit, even as my proposition’s precise failure eludes me in this chapter, its existence must be, by definition. I think that Lyotard is truly right— not just about differends specifically, but about them generally: what we know with certainty is something felt, a feeling of there being something to be, and is not, said. The continuing chapter, then, focuses upon silence and eros as the most productive option, as opposed to the method, by which to testify to the ineffable. And this productivity is not in any practical—worldly, political, or ethical—consequences that may ensue from failure, but one that is a matter of practice itself. This means that there is an ultimate productivity uncovered in the analysis of silence and eros’ activity: that intentional erotic relation, inseparable from the pursuit of wisdom and lacking in any teachable doctrine, feeds its own maintenance and serves to keep alive what inexpressibility lets fade. Luce Irigaray poignantly captures this insight, despite minor divergences, when investigating the name of the other in her work, The Way of Love:

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Even in light of the impossibility of union, defined by the conception of the differend, we can still succeed, before and after failure sets in, when engaged in steady alteration, an endless series of trials. This optimism in the face of inevitable failure is implicit in Lyotard’s concluding dialogic lines to The Differend: “But the occurrence doesn’t make a story, does it? —Indeed, it’s not a sign. But it is to be judged, all the way through to its incomparability. You can’t make a political ‘program’ with it, but you can bear witness to it. —And what if no one hears the testimony, etc. (No. 1ff.)? —Are you prejudging the Is it happening” (§264)? Therefore, in light of this awareness of necessary failure for an option of silence and eros, nevertheless so productive so as to here evade revealing its error, and the revelation of the option’s own elucidation as a more fundamental productivity for expressing the inexpressible, this undertaking finds its success: in providing a means to expressing the inexpressible through either the symbiosis of silence and eros itself as a solution that currently lacks the identification of its failure or the activity of eros as spiritual exercise. Synthesizing this either/or into a both/and, the rest of this chapter will seek to elaborate the speaking of a passionate testimony that has to cultivate the audience’s attunement while simultaneously erasing itself in order to permit its meaningful coagulation of sensation into their understanding. As cultivation, the testimony must call to the audience. This call will also grant them permission to feel and process its words, that is, to stand in them as a way of understanding. The call of testimony is its linkages, its capacity to come into play in the system of comprehension. But this testimony, like desire, points to an object that is both lacking and greater than itself: the faithful cannot express the inexpressibility of God as the survivor can neither demonstrate her death when she comes before them as living or either way express the totality of Auschwitz. Thus, the testimony is absent demonstration even as it must give them something, link to other phrases so as to be meaningful, provide them with knowledge. It must be crafted to speak, so as to call, yet not to speak, as that speech is impossible. Can a testimony be just that, an account of the witness, and silent at once?

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Lyotard on the Possibility of a Just Silence “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus63 “What cannot be put into words should not be suppressed.” —Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance64

Our notion of justice often hinges on being able to tell one’s own side of the story: it is only fair! Thus, we dictate that every trial must have, at odds with one another, two sides that can be told. We require each party to act rationally, and enforce this command with the necessary addition of an impartial arbitrator. We demand, all around, the suspension of biases and hasty judgments. While a trial seems pitched to the declaration of a winner and a loser, the banner of justice mutates the opposition from a battle, from competition, to rightful resolution. We envision objectivity as the determinate of truth that proves to render a balance between the two sides—be it by restoring equilibrium by rectifying a wrong or yielding a neat mean between two demands. This objective scale is noble: not the merchant’s but Lady Justice’s. But does her blindfold obscure the inherent clash in justice’s conjunction of truth and equality? Is justice truly a perfect balance, a perfect equalizing of positions? Lyotard problematizes the notion of justice in multiple, discordant ways. The Differend arouses an intense commitment to the inherent injustice of a voice being silenced, but it also reveals “fair” redresses to be obfuscation of true justice. Equality is suggested for the productivity of communication and verification of reality, even as most examples of the transference of meaning happen in situations of inequality. The political and ethical question of justice will lead us into its aesthetic consideration, and ultimately to whether the symbiosis of silence and eros, proposed in the previous section, can ever be, for Lyotard, just. Thus, to best enter the fray concerning the possibility of a just silence for Lyotard, consider the image of the fair Lady Justice. She stands, often blindfolded, with a scale in one hand by which to balance each side of the case according to their respective merits and drawbacks. But, she also stands with a sword in the other hand and her breasts bared. You are hidden from her sight while she reveals herself to you. Do the blindfold and bare breasts, classic elements of seduction, here function as a sign of radical openness? She reveals herself to you as she judges you. She does not hide her sword, her capacity to enforce her judgment. She reveals herself to you, not hiding her steel demand for reason and fairness, although she cannot hide her vulnerability, her blindness, which is also her perfection as ultimate arbitrator. From Plato’s cave onwards, our idea of truth has been connected to the blaring light of the sun making things as they are come to presence. Lady Justice’s blindness shows us a contrary form of revelation: “and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules

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of knowledge,” Lyotard writes (§93). Let us listen to Lady Justice’s many revelations as they strike together a discordant note: appealing and intimidating, at once; a sign of love and threat of violence, at once; a capacity to judge and incapacity to see, at once. If we listen to these revelations, we hear the balance of justice to be hardly simple. Beyond the crass scale in the market place of judgments, the scale of justice is the promise of something more powerful, more pure, beautiful and terrifying, a true justice. Beyond economy, the scale of justice doesn’t afford a simple exchange. It silences certain means for knowing and validation; it offers a tender ear and an absolute judgment. Instead of being our impartial judge, we must upset the balancing scales and enter into a relationship with Lady Justice. Typically, injustice is seen as a tilting of the scales, often the result of one or more parties being unable to tell their sides of the story. “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (§1). And, one side’s lack of testimony does not cancel the other’s but, rather, ignites it. Revisionists, like Faurisson, seize upon silence to demand how one can know of the existence of gas chambers, death camps, the Final Solution, and so forth; if no one can come forward and prove it, by which they mean, come forward and show it, tell about it, how can its truth be determined? But, obviously! No victim of a gas chamber can testify: he or she would be dead, forever silenced. And survivors? To what would they testify? Not their own deaths. They find themselves as silenced as those whose lips were sealed by death (§§1, 14). But it is not just the vicious who make such presumptions: “Just as these juries presuppose that the opponents they are supposed to judge are in possession of something they exchange, so do the human and linguistic sciences presuppose that the human beings they are suppose to know are in possession of something they communicate” (§20). A courtroom only heightens the expectation that a person or witness is one who possesses knowledge, has it, and thus can show it, can share it in testimony. So, let us ask more generally, why is one ever able to find oneself unable to testify? One, perhaps, cannot speak. We first set aside the possibility of being physically mute or gagged, or being unable to speak in the way a stone is unable to speak (§15). But, still, we find so many possibilities. What they share is that the “cannot” has something voluntary about the impossibility—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics would name it a mixed intention that sits between the voluntary and involuntary—that the “cannot” is a conditioned “will not,” be it conditioned by pure choice or as the result of being threatened (§14). The threat, being exerted against what is not currently existing (the testimony), is posed against “the one who would speak (an unreal, conditional state),” and this one, who is currently not, thus “has no life, no happiness, etc., which can be threatened” (§15). Nevertheless, this does not mean that these threats carry no binding force. “What is subject to threats is not an identifiable individual, but the ability to speak or to keep quiet. This ability is threatened with destruction” (§15)—

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and the two routes of destruction include making it impossible to speak (perhaps by incarceration), or impossible to stop speaking (perhaps by torture). Such a threat “is only a threat because the ability to speak or not is identified with x’s existence” (§16). This linkage between one’s being and being able to speak, and Lyotard’s problems with it, has been explored in the first chapter. Here, it is recalled only to remind us of why it is one may be silent. A further delineation of several possibilities as to why one may not speak by choice can be found in George Steiner’s essay “Silence and the Poet,” and allows us a first sketch of what may permit an emancipatory silence that is not the enclosing reserve Lyotard critiqued in Heidegger’s retreat to silence. The first “frontier” of language the poet encounters, that at which, the word retreats, is the failure of language in the “great light” that is “the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.”65 This silence is that of the mystics; it is carried out through a progression of poeticism to a refuge in the mute when “words grow less and less adequate to the task of translating immediate revelation.”66 Akin to the mystic’s poeticism, is the second chosen silence’s turn to music: “music is the deeper, more numinous code,” and, when language is “truly apprehended,” it is found to aspire “to the condition of music.” 67 Concerning these first two proposals for the choice of silence, Steiner writes: “Although they go beyond language, leaving verbal communication behind, both the translation into light and the metamorphosis into music are positive spiritual acts. Where it ceases or suffers radical mutation, the word bears witness to an inexpressible reality or to a syntax more supple, more penetrating than its own.” 68 Steiner captures the heart of the final reason, “the most honest temptation to silence in contemporary feeling,” by a quote from James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins: “I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present.” 69 Reminiscent of Adorno’s refusal of poetry after Auschwitz, explored in chapter three, Steiner is positing the third choice for silence to be a socio-ethico-political decision, a reaction to the “inhumanity of the twentieth century and certain elements in the technological mass-society which has followed on the erosion of European bourgeois values.”70 This reaction may generate absolute silence, “the suicidal rhetoric of silence,” or the silence implicit in the perverted idiom designed to reveal the “precariousness and vulnerability of the communicative act.”71 As in his response to Adorno, Lyotard would reject a pure negativity that permits no, no matter how absurd, possibility of productivity; instead, seeing the possibility of subverting the logical as more valuable for the creation of new linkages. Lyotard may not go so far as to call this the most honest form of silence, and while he diagnoses the failures in both, Lyotard, like Steiner, holds out the most hope for this class of silence. Lyotard’s affinity can be seen to Steiner’s description of this silence as that when “language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. . . . Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.” 72 In Lyotard’s analysis of André Malraux’s anti-aesthetics, he affirms the loss of one’s voice (by the other’s loss) as

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leading to not mere solitude, but unleashing the full non-presence of a dark night: “The cosmic night is there, as close as can be: enormous fact, without opposite, night to which no day corresponds,” which leaves “the ego in mortal agony,” touching “the immutable night for an instant. That touch by which not even nothingness is experienced.”73 If a work of art engenders in another the universal aesthetic experience, Lyotard explains, “the artwork owes this transitivity in history to the intransitive ‘presence’ of the night within it. Presence in absentia. Experienced on the fringes of singularity, the silence of the night, being nothing, seals the universal.”74 Of all the possibilities for silence for those capable of speech otherwise, their first shared trait was a degree of the voluntary in their refusal. Another aspect that the possibilities share is that their testimonies’ apparent nothingness— their silence—was still deemed existent enough to be judged against. While this affords us evidence of there being something in the nothingness of silence, this is also a paradox that brings forth the wrong against the already silenced victims. Silence upends the scale of justice, which says that truth needs its demonstration.75 In one’s reticence, the court can only determine that testimony to be untrue. Lyotard offers us a conceptually elusive infinity of interpretations of silence (which I have filled out with the aid of Steiner) because, he notes, “silence does not indicate which instance is denied” (§26). To ask the reason for one’s silence is to explore only one event of silence, and it may well be that this silence is a reaction to one more originary. Thus, to seek the possibility of a silence that can be silent and say something, one that can be heard as more than one’s own condemnation, we must seek to grasp not the reason for, but the logic behind the survivor’s not speaking. Logically, the survivor’s silence “substitutes for phrases,” and the “phrase replaced by silence would be a negative one” (§24). Silence negates at least one of the four instances in a phrase universe: the addressee, the referent, the sense, or the addressor (§25). The addressee can be silenced by the addressor or a referent that is “none of his business” (§26). The addressor can find herself silenced by sense, in a “senseless, inexpressible” situation where “there is nothing to say about it,” or by the referent, where it is not her own “business to be talking about it” (§26). Or, silence may result from a combination of these reasons because there may be more than one negation, or one negation at work in more than one instance, within the structure of the phrase universe. A negation becomes most frustrating when its silence prohibits any of the other instances to point toward the idiom wherein it would not be silenced—which we find to be the case in the differend. Only by coming to better understand the relation between the phrase universe and its negations can we begin to uncover and judge the options for the survivor’s speech, thereby being able to determine if there is a silence that may be just. Between these instances obstructed by silence, can a new idiom come from the communion of silence and eros that can speak? Can the erotic addition

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permit silence to slip from its role as a symptom of oppression? For silence, too, is a phrase; sometimes it shows only negation, obstructs an instance, or blocks meaning’s linkage, but sometimes it expresses when words cannot and what words cannot express (§§24, 26, 105, 110). Why can the witness not turn her vicious bind into these latter sometimes of silence; let them speak her impossible meaning without the destruction sound wrecks on the non-demonstrable? Silence is a wrong, an exemplar of injustice, when it negates one or more instances in a phrase universe that call to be spoken. “In the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away” (§23). As a wrong, silence’s injustice can be understood as the abatement of the force of justice, of that striving against an inability to speak. A wrong begets pain; often, simultaneously with our awareness that the phrase we need does not yet exist. This silence hurts; a new idiom brings pleasure.76 Lyotard argues that the wrong’s attendant pain and pleasure teaches its victims that they do not use language, but are used by it; it summons them, not to all that they know, but to the recognition that “what needs to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” (§23). Being silenced is a learning experience. When a child gets an answer right, we say, she has learned it. But, this does not mean that she does not learn answers that are wrong and learn through answering incorrectly. Likewise, a wrong is not pain, alone, but also that which permits the possibility of pleasure. A wrong is not obliterated in speech because its obliteration is the realization of not being able to obliterate it. Silence brings us to know that its alleviation is beyond us, but yet, we must be permitted into this beyond. Silence is much like desire as it points outside of itself to that which will undo it and, yet, that which it wants. Silence cannot be held only in the category of the unjust and as the enemy of testimony. It cannot be conceived only as a violence done unto the witness. It is also something that is meaningful and propulsive. The phrase universe sketches a system of power where the negation of instances can render injustices. Instead of interpreting this system only through the lens that shows silence as violence, we should become eavesdroppers and voyeurs who can be called by silence and call through it the evocative descriptions, as meaningful linkages, therein that evade their demonstration. Silence needs to desire its own transgression, and one that fulfill itself as itself, as silence. This will permit something like a most peculiar love story to unfold inside of the logical system of speech that is meaningful even as it points beyond the bounds of understanding. To open this possibility of silence as pleasure, we must clear the obstructions from the witness’ silence that prohibit its linkage into meaningfulness. According to the binds imposed by Faurisson, the witness’ silence only means proof of the nonexistence of the case. But, Lyotard shows that silence can occupy any instance or many within the phrase universe and “can just as well testify against the addressor’s authority . . . the authority of the witness him- or herself

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. . . [as it can testify] against language’s ability to signify gas chambers (an inexpressible absurdity)” (§27). To validate these possibilities of silence, Faurisson’s logical bind must be cut: we must “establish the existence of the gas chambers” by withdrawing “the four silent negations” (§27). This renders a new dialogue, one that undoes the condemnation by making the silences speak “yes:” “There were no gas chambers, were there? Yes, there were. —But even if there were, that cannot be formulated, can it? Yes, it can. —But even if it can be formulated, there is no one, at least, who has the authority to formulate it, and no one with the authority to hear it (it is not communicable), is there? Yes, there is” (§27). Seeking the logic behind silence, Lyotard uncovers the possibilities for absent phrases within the whole of instances of a survivor’s phrase universe. To lift the muting bind, we must ensure the possibility of speaking each of these possible absences, even if the possibility currently exceeds our capacities (§23). To ensure the possibility is to establish the possible “reality of a referent,” in each instance of the phrase universe by erasing the imposition of obstructions (§28). Lyotard instructs us to work through the complete phrasing of the witness’ testimony, erasing its negations; thus, work through the establishment of existence, “in reverse order: there is someone to signify the referent and someone to understand the phrase that signifies it; the referent can be signified; it exists” (§28). The logical bind is much like a trap, from which one cannot escape. Lyotard moves forward in his solution by treating the trap more like a dead end in a maze; he turns her testimony around and works back through it to eliminate every wrong turn. This method will not deliver her to the finish line, but take her back to the start to begin again. Ultimately, this method will permit Lyotard to reveal the type of game that Faurisson’s revisionism is playing, differentiate it from other genres of language games, and determine its rules. This knowledge will permit him to know the rules to which the witness’ testimony must conform and which of his own rules that Faurisson violates. 77 This knowledge may prove to test the possibility of an idiom formed from erotic silence. Lyotard is revealing the depth to which silence can lurk. Faurisson’s logical bind presented a flat concept of logic wherein truth is determined by demonstration, and demonstration consists in an addressee presenting the referent and its sense to the addressor. Within this strictness, the addressee’s silence is condemning: either she is guilty of contempt, or the referent doesn’t exist, or it does not mean what she alleges—regardless, any option proves Faurisson’s claim. If this were an accurate representation of logic, any lawyer could work through the bind, string together enough of the witness’ idioms to present a case, and then dismiss Faurisson’s as frivolous; Lyotard would not waste his time on such considerations. Instead, Lyotard engages with Faurisson’s bind to show how, despite its pallor, it does point to something theoretically vicious and worthy of philosophical attention: it points beyond itself to a differend that is truly impassable because language is not a simple system with a single source of authority wherein silence only blocks one or more of four instances and renders some-

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thing permanently inarticulate. It is more complicated, and thus, more dangerous. Language, instead, must be conceived of more like the night sky: the cosmos that one sees, that one knows one does not see, and that one could imagine when laying upon one’s back in the damp grass in one’s hometown and then, again, a million miles away. It is a vast scatter of stars and planets in regular flux and subject to the unexpected change. But, it is also determined by the existentially situated person who uses it and by its use. Its system is neither rigid nor totalizing, and we can speak of discrete systems within it. Lyotard’s conception of this system is that, like the infinity of stars and planets, there are innumerable phrases. A phrase is not just a clause of words; phases include speech acts, gestures, the flick of a cat’s tail, a mathematical formula, and so forth. 78 Phrases are constituted by rules; these rules are the phrase’s regimen. Regimens can include “reasoning, knowing, describing, recounting, questioning, showing, ordering, etc.” (p. xii). These regimes can be entirely heterogeneous to one another, in which case, no translation of phrases is possible from one to the other. It is possible, however, to link heterogeneous phase regimes. Such linkages are determined in accordance with an end that is prescribed by a genre of discourse. Genres of discourse supply the rules to link heterogeneous phrases; these rules are determined by their fact of being proper for a set goal, be it to know, to teach, to seduce, or otherwise.79 For example, the genre of dialogue can link ostensive phrases to a question to the goal of coming to an agreement with the addressee about the sense of a referent. While this deposition makes the problem seem to be merely a cleaning up of language, when one attempts such housework, attempts to construct concrete examples, the true murkiness of common speech becomes apparent. Everyday language employs numerous phrases, complex regimens, and multiple genres in even the briefest, mundane exchanges. “Language . . . [is] the house of Being,” Heidegger wrote, capturing how naturally we live in language and illustrating the degree to which communication is no more foreign to us than doors and floorboards.80 Thus, its murkiness is only put into relief when we engage this delineation as a philosophical exercise or when we are called to fix a wrong. Wrongs signal a breakdown in the use of language: a phrase happens; provoked, an addressor initiates a genre of dialogue (in accordance with an end it has determined) by supplying X, Y, and Z as possible phrases (that are in accord to their rules given by the genre); the addressee, however, responds in a fictive genre (in accordance with an end it has determined) by supplying 1, 2, and 3 as possible phrases (that are in accord to their rules given by the genre); X, Y, and Z cannot communicate with 1, 2, and 3; this creates a differend that calls for a linkage; if the linkage cannot happen, no further phrases can occur, and a wrong is committed. Differends happen frequently due to the immense mutability of language. Faurisson’s overly simplistic logical bind, that the living witness cannot testify to her own death, illustrates a heterogeneity that arrests communication and is-

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sues a differend: the witness is forced into a genre of language wholly foreign to the tribunal and entirely repellant to translation. However, the true differend within Faurisson’s revisionism is not captured by the illogicality of being an eyewitness to one’s own death. Instead, his bind only provides contrast to highlight the radical limit of meaning one confronts with the differend of Auschwitz. Limits: we can only bump up against; we can never span them, so as to justly size them up and think them through. We experience them much like the first moment of Kant’s sublime: reason is overwhelmed by fear and awe. A limit is no different than a differend, except to designate one that is not overcome—for how does one establish, let alone validate, the existence, boundaries, and truth of a differend like Auschwitz? “Validation is a genre of discourse, not a phrase regimen. No phrase is able to be validated from inside its own regimen: a descriptive is validated cognitively only by recourse to an ostensive (And here is the case)” (§41).81 And what if this ostensive is the invisible? What if the description blurs the boundaries of its rules (eliminating the distinction between the imaginary and real, ignoring the material and sensory, concluding with a prayer)? What if the cognitive expounds an absent and impossible referent? “The silence that surrounds the phrase, Auschwitz was the extermination camp is not a state of mind [état d’âme], it is the sign that something remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined” (§93). The indeterminacy of this phrase, and the violence its silence ensues, calls to us to found the phrases that can link with it and give it meaning, even as its indeterminacy and silence precisely result from the inability to discover or create these phrases. This stings especially because Lyotard’s demonstration of the state of the witness reveals two parts, like the sublime: first, the violent silencing, and second, the vertiginous realization that phrasing is, in fact, endless. 82 Were the differend more mundane, it is conceivable that enough of these phrases could be compounded so as to construct a web of meaning to throw light to even its most obscured elements. Auschwitz is different. This confrontation with that which is allergic to expression and systematization reveals the “inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions” that made us believe that if it was, we could express it and, if we could express it, it was comprehensible.83 Yet, when the system of language confronts something radically unique, it falters; the possibilities of communication break down. Language may continue, but something is lost; there is either an elephant in the room or a conceptually insurmountable absence, an obstruction or equally perplexing nothing. Neither can be ignored, but neither can be comprehended and phrased. Nevertheless, our impulse is to try: the search must continue for another universe of phrases. Our impulse is necessary (§§40-1, 101-3, 105, 136-40, 174, 263). While he asserts, repeatedly, that “it is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is never necessary,” there are linkages that work and those that fail (§42). The witness’ bind reveals that she cannot express the inexpressible in the manner a child could point to her broken tricycle and say, brother broke it, or,

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here, look! Those forms of testimony are comprised of denominative and ostensive phrases. They are better employed within the logical genre of language use—that which Faurisson wished to use and that which is antithetical to any productive linking for the witness. Even switching into the different and distinct genre of the cognitive phrase regimen, wherein phrases signify, fails to aide the victim. “The ‘revisionist’ historians understand as applicable to this name [Auschwitz] only the cognitive rules for the establishment of historical reality and for the validation of its sense” (§93). While it is a historical occurrence and real place, its meaning cannot be validated in these strictures, for they would deny its range of meanings that extends beyond them. Lyotard warns us that the revisionists will dismiss the importance of further possible meaning, that: They will say that history is not made of feelings, and that it is necessary to establish the facts. But, with Auschwitz, something new has happened in history (which can only be a sign and not a fact), which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of here’s and now’s, the documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possible (§93).

So, we must “break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regime of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (§93). But what regime is left to make sense of what we hear? While we have discarded the regimens governing ostensive, denominative, and now the cognitive phrases, this does not mean that we can only turn to nonsense. To the contrary: “Auschwitz is the most real of realities in this respect. Its name marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned. It does not follow from that that one falls into non-sense. The alternative is not: either the signification that learning [science] establishes, or absurdity, be it of the mystical kind” (§93). We do not need to be recluses cast to silence and asceticism: “phrases can obey regimes other than the logical and the cognitive. They can have stakes other than the true” (§99). What are these other regimes left us when we have shown the failures of those that govern how we typically use and judge knowledge and are instructed to not turn to those that abstract from the world and the comprehensible use of language? The only apparent path to explore is that which seeks to neither quantify the world nor leave it, but the one that engages worldliness in action: the genre of praxis. The practical problems Auschwitz clearly present are certainly amenable to the genres concerning justice’s exercise in law and politics, but this is not the praxis we need to seek. For, in the practical as political, the differend will continue to loom. On the one hand, “The differend attached to Nazi names, to Hitler, to Auschwitz, to Eichmann, could not be transformed into a litigation and regulated by a verdict” (§93). Which is to say that the differend will remain un-

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addressed, even while, on the other hand, our practical transformation permits us to take war criminals to trial, hear testimony establishing and challenging Auschwitz’s existence, and draft laws founding it as a memorial. These actions simply do not speak to the differend; they respond “6:15” to a question about the nature of time. Even founding the State of Israel fails to breach it, for, by this practical action, “the survivors transformed the wrong into damages and the differend into litigation. By beginning to speak in the common idiom of public international law and of authorized politics, they put an end to the silence to which they had been condemned. But the reality of the wrong suffered at Auschwitz before the foundation of this state remained and remains to be established” (§93). Auschwitz is a wrong whose salvation by proper address is unattainable through the regime of practical justice. These acts can only put salve about its periphery. To address aspects of Auschwitz that are comprehensible and even to transform some of its horrors into an idiom capable of being processed by the courts, still, will never get to the originary wrong and ease it up into speech. That which cannot be juridically rendered is more nebulous than any instance of a person, place, or word could capture; it concerns originary causes, inconceivable quantities of extermination, unraveling postulations of human nature, and an overwhelming number of additional questions always and ever beyond these. The attempt to work at the originary wrong through piece-work from its periphery relies upon the presumption, articulated by Lévi-Strauss, that, “the world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signified is given without being known.”84 This suggests that we only need to keep chipping away the problem and the new idiom will be found. Such action lets us respond to the call of the differend, even if this response is only making phrases impertinent to the core of its meaning. Nevertheless, this impulse even finds encouragement from Lyotard’s assertion that silence teaches that “they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” (§23). Il faut que . . . But, in the face of the necessity, the radical limit of Auschwitz reveals this to be a “tragic regime,” where the limitless possibilities of signification operate over the impossibility of direct designation of the differend.85 Phrases continue to link with other phrases around its periphery, but the referent the victim cannot demonstrate is a “form of content . . . inseparable from and independent of the form of expression.” 86 This is to say once more that Auschwitz is a “descriptive,” and an ineffable one at that, one that cannot be “validated cognitively . . . by recourse to an ostensive (And here is the case)” (§41). The tribunal that requires a demonstration cannot hear the description of Auschwitz. What are we left with? The standard regimes to which we would turn to know and to act, have failed. While Lyotard indicated the uselessness of nonsense, the only options left to us, in some sense, are nonsense: those genres of discourse that sought to unsettle the authority of sense and understanding, such as the writing styles of Gertrude Stein and Adorno, delineated in chapter three.

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Lyotard took up the consideration of these radical genres with enthusiasm and an eye that was as acute to their productivity as to their ultimate inadequacy. Phrasing is endless (§17). But, is the answer proving itself to be located more within the series of failures than in further, possible idioms? Outside of nonsense, there is another way to interpret the genre of praxis. Nearing the end of plausible genres of discourse to explore, the better inquiry is not another instance of trying to make sense of a differend, so isolated from universes of meaning with which we are familiar, but whether the witness could speak so as to teach the tribunal to listen better.87 The differend overpowers our expressive capacities. Weak, we stand before it; weaker still, are we, when it calls us to respond; weakest at last, are we, when others command us to give an account of it. It robs us of speech and leaves us vulnerable to harm. The differend signals a relationship of injustice. Justice, at the start of this section, was defined as a relationship of power and was classically depicted by Lady Justice, standing blindfolded, breasts bared, a scale in one hand, a sword in her other. But, she is not the impartial judge; there is no entirely exterior and objective authority that could rule upon the differend. No, she is a site of contradiction. One of her dichotomies is between the nudity and the sword. The attempt to overcome the violence resulting from the differend has led us though an examination of a series of genres of discourse that have all failed to produce an idiom that bring forth the start of the differend’s comprehension. To approach the differend as an erotic relation of silence, however, can be to see these failures as productive. Changing the genre to one of praxis that is less practical than it is seductive changes the goal and the rules assigned to its regime of phrases. Seduction is a long dialogue that requires frustrations, operates by far more than words, and whose consummation is better understood as a merger with the other than an obliteration of itself. Seduction, then, will not seek to get the right idiom to express the differend and make the tribunal understand; it will seek to persuade the tribunal to come and see the differend alongside me and through my eyes and acquiesce to me as I give myself over to it. Step over this gulf between our language genres. Step out of your I and give yourself over to your eye that can see by listening. Before we were divided, bereft the possibility of translation, we were privy, together, to the phrase that happened. Before there was an I against You, we were witness to the phrase event, the Arrive-t-il? and Ereignis, “it is to it that the phrases which happen call forth” (xvi). Proust was unable to capture it in his writing, but his descriptions of the raw immediacy are generative of desire. For Heidegger, the presencing of Ereignis reveals the shifting of power in the relation of I to eye. Nancy led us from the eye to the ear. Steiner carried us into the dark night, wherein Lyotard felt the weight of nothingness as something. The phrase as occurrence awakens this sense of something that is not there by an emphatic feeling: that is my story, too. The Kantian enthusiasm or Pseudo-Dionysian sympathy painfully strikes us when we find in ourselves a loss of ourselves. The immediacy is my loss as I

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lose you, my loss as my merger into you, then divided just enough to reveal that you, who is my story, is me, who is your story. Without the differend, to each his own, to me, what is mine. But, there is never no differend. The intensity is just the aesthetic experience, the most intense assault of the sublime, that shows that there is no me without you and no you without me by ripping one from the other in this dark, dark night. In the dark, the genre of the erotic brings us the bitter medicine of consolation.88 In the dark moment, we will always affirm that there is “At least one phrase” (§100). And, it is “in keeping silent, [that] authentic being-one’s-self does not keep on saying ‘I,’ but rather ‘is,’” yes, more. The persistence of failure provokes the question of its productivity and prompts the inversion of tactics in the relationship of power from exploration to invitation. The erotic genre of silent discourse invites and persuades the other to come see, through my eyes, what I cannot say: the occurrence of the phrase event that was initiatory of the differend. This genre of discourse is a reflection of Pseudo-Dionysius’ spiritual exercise in The Divine Names, wherein silence is not a passive nothingness, but a space cleared free that permits desire to activate the radical stuttering that affirms and denies the names of God. This space permits him freedom from the entanglement of logic that condemns his prayer and solicitation to God as a mere contradicting ramble. Eros permits him freedom from the entanglement of his materiality so as to be able to return to union with God. Pseudo-Dionysius harmonizes contradictions without destroying them in a way to make him worthy of becoming the model for that postmodernist who could appreciate atonality as the acoustic and theoretical capture of an experience of suspended sublime.89 In Kant’s sublime and Adorno’s culture of the sensational, Lyotard diagnoses an identical movement arising from their inverse theories: the forgetting of sensation (an anesthesia of aisthesis) that permits the sensation of a not-present presence.90 Lyotard introduces this reflection by considering silence as an aesthetic theme when using those two thinkers to approach the question of Heidegger’s relation to “the jews.”91 The forgetting of sensation is an aesthetic silence. But, sensation, as aisthesis, is the perception of formed matter that permits judgments of taste and feelings of pleasure. How can aesthetics (that judgment and feeling) proceed if its referent is forgotten (or rendered impossible)? This question brings into relief how aesthetic silence is a question of expressing the inexpressible. Language, for Heidegger, was mostly inextricable from Being. For Lyotard, language is integrally related to human beings insofar as meaning is continually determined in its use of and by humans. Engagement in language, let us call it our phrasing, is expressive of human activity: how we know, how we constitute reality and the self, how we behave. Phrasing is a phenomenologicallyontologized aesthetics: it is our activity of perception wherein this perception is not a matter of an all-powerful subject gathering information from an utterly passive, objective world. Perception is the process of a give and take engage-

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ment (phrasing) that yields (causes to occur, ereignet) representations (phrases) that are vivified with meaning determinable by use that are governed by mutable rules. Yet, in our activity as human beings, we encounter, or are encountered by, things we perceive that exceed our capacity to constitute their representation. These things are the inexpressible: God, death, love, Auschwitz, etc.—they are the insoluble differends. These things have a reality that we really encounter, yet between the perception of these things and their representation is a disrupture of the process of phrasing. What Lyotard discerns, however, in the philosophies of Kant and Adorno, is that there is a forgetting of sensation that permits the sensation of a not-present presence. And, this is a way that has been used to represent these things that we perceive that resist representation. He sees this path utilized, also, in avant-garde art, considerations of the holocaust, in anxiety, and Heidegger’s lichtung, that “veiling unveiling,” as he calls it, of Ereignis.92 In these, as in all texts he takes up, Lyotard hones in upon the movement that gives rise to a feeling of contradiction as a designation of the theory’s lynchpin. This feeling reveals that this path is not a singular, linear projection of how to express the inexpressible (there is no one formula by which to construct that unfound idiom). Instead, to traverse it, one must enact several movements back and forth. The first relay is that a concealment of perception, a mental stepping back, is necessary to be able to re-present perception’s raw data into a framework that can give it meaning. But, the creation of the representation requires the presentation’s presence. The second relay is that it is only in the moment of forgetting the immediacy, the rawness of perception, that the feeling of what cannot be presented is felt. To feel something is a presencing, but what is presenced here (felt) is what cannot be represented and what is not present (since its occurrence follows the forgetting of the presentation). How can we sense when sensation is suspended? It is an impossibility. It also grounds the final relay. This impossibility we feel, which prohibits its representation, prohibits its being known and expressed, and, nevertheless, must be expressed. Its impossibility issues us its command. The concealment, the anesthesia or the forgetting of sensation, reveals the sensation that was perceived, yet cannot be represented, yet must be. This is only an expression of the thesis underlying his entire efforts within The Differend, yet, his revelation of these movements of contradiction, united under the theme of a reflection on the aesthetics of silence, reveal its viable solution. What must be expressed is what is shown to us and what we feel when all sensation is rendered absent. Eros, for Plato, is a motivating lack. We are beckoned to express the having (of desire, as an agitation) of what we lack. We need to learn to feel an overfull nothing; we must learn an erotic listening to the unjust, the speaking of the palpable nothing, in order to know how to respond to it, which is how we are to express it.

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What sound, then, does concealment make? What echoes from forgetting? Silence. Which is its truth. Silence is a phrase (§§105, 110). Phrases occur; thus, they are representations (p. xii, §104). The expression of the phrase of silence is the only representation to capture the immediacy of the perception being concealed, which is when the presence of that inexpressible is felt, thus sensible, truthfully meaningful. Through eros and with silence, one can express the inexpressible.

For the Love of God: Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius on Eros “Therefore the effort to arrive at the Truth, and especially the truth about the gods, is a longing for the divine.” —Plutarch, Isis and Osiris93

Silence, as the last section argued, is the most viable option for a meaningful phrase to express the having of an absence—that concealment of sensation Lyotard described as the moment when the presence of the unpresentable was felt. This final section is going to give itself over to a closer consideration of aisthesis: this sensation that motivates the expression of silence to occur, this “matter given in form, which occasions taste and aesthetic pleasure” that must be forgotten to reveal “this contradictory feeling of a ‘presence’ that is certainly not present,” this sensation of eros.94 Aesthetics and silence are omnipresent through Lyotard’s oeuvre, but their connection, here, with eros is most fitting, considering Lyotard’s confessional remark that “Nothing else, with the exception of love, seemed to us to be worth a moment’s attention.”95 Alain Badiou likewise affirms that Lyotard “always give[s] love an exceptional status, even when his political abnegation was at its most intense.” 96 For, when words run out and when concepts elude us, when we are exhaustedly most inclined to turn a blind eye, it is love that permits us to speak. It is by love that we speak of that which we cannot. But, just as love fits with silence, it also fits within another ever-present theme for Lyotard: grand narratives. Hence, our initiatory endeavor will be an elaboration of two contradictory feelings of love that Lyotard engages in The Differend and then his posthumous writings on Augustine’s Confessions. The concluding endeavor of the synthesis of the two forms of love will be conducted as a spiritual exercise, a Lyotardian rereading, of Eros as a unique name of God in Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names, that solves the stutter of affirmation and denial, dissolves the differend, and initiates union with the divine. Narratives are powerful means to unite, and love may be the most powerful amongst all narratives. The Christian chronicle of love “vanquished the other narratives in Rome,” Lyotard argues, by dictating a “love of occurrence” into the

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narrative fabric of the growing community (§232). The love of occurrence owed its particular power to it designating, precisely, both what is at stake in the genre of narrative itself (that a phrase always occurs) and what is at stake in its Christian instantiation (God’s commandment to love). In synthesis, the Christian narrative of love told its followers “to love what happens as if it were a gift, to love even the Is it happening? [Arrive-t-il, Ereignis, the occurrence] as the promise of good news” (§232). And the command then enacted a certain synthetic magic, in that it “allows for linking onto whatever happens, including other narratives (and, subsequently, even other genres)” (§232). This narrative succeeds in precisely what the differend of Auschwitz fails: to have its expression designate its originary cause and to cause the proliferation of flexible and productive, possible linkages. Christian love reveals itself to be a consummate narrative that proves capable of saying what cannot be said otherwise: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”97 By this principle of love, the narrative is absolute. It thus becomes an “antidote to the principle of exception that limits traditional narratives” (§232). As a preeminent example of this exception, the miyoi, the traditional myths of the native Cashinahua Indians, granted their power by their strict denomination of who amongst them was included and constitutive of the history of the tribe (p. 152-4). In contrast, the Christian narrative does not found its own history by demarcating the included from the rejected; instead, it bids everyone: “Love one another” (§232). The community is authorized as such by this “command of universal attraction” given through the “primordial story in which we learn that the god of love was not very well loved by his children and about the misfortunes that ensued” (§232). The narration of the origin of and command to love makes love an obligation, one that is universal and circular, and its force is in its being also conditional: “if you are love, you ought to love; and you shall be loved only if you love” (§232). The exceedingly powerful, universalizing logic of love that ensnares all creation seems to solve any and every differend by making any phrase that could occur linkable by the command to love that which occurs as God’s gift. But, two stark clues erupted in Lyotard’s narration that suggest this narrative of love to be no solution for the witness. First, his conception of language, never laid out as a theory, yet demonstrated throughout the work, rejects its encapsulation in a closed system that could allow for a single, universal authority: “There is not yet one world, but some worlds (with various names and narratives)” (§235).98 Second, the universal, circular, and conditional logic of love too closely mimics that bind of Faurisson’s that opened the work and the investigation into differends. Love takes on an authority beyond even that of the tribunal; its logic becomes inescapable as its circularity entraps all, universally.99 A singular authority over love, and love’s consequent restrictive operation, undermines the origin to which it first pointed and by which it received its power: the occurrence. Love united all events that had happened into a founding

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narrative of its tradition and could be projected onto those events not yet actual, thereby problematizing any possibility for the occurrence. Further, universal love becomes so systematically restrictive that it eliminates the role of responsibility one has to respond to the occurrence: “Christian narrative not only tells what has happened, thereby fixing a tradition, but it also prescribes the caritas for what can happen, whatever it might be” (§233). Herein is the paradox. The occurrence is a call, it institutes responsibility, but once the meaning is given in advance, given in a way already fixed and situated, we are kept from the free commitment to respond. The Christian narrative of love forbids us the activity of taking up the many pieces of the occurrence and situating them into reality, thereby forming reality. It thus divorces us from our responsibility and keeps us from making ourselves the subjects capable of giving ourselves to obedience to the transcendent. Thus, in its success, this interpretation of love fails. The universalization that love engenders undermines itself and burns itself out. It prescribes love without offering us permission to become true subjects who constitute its loving moments. Its success, however, is its undeniable power as a grand narrative, and its many variations live on as “secular, universal history in the form of republican brotherhood, of communist solidarity” (§235). Nevertheless, these variations of Christian love cannot claim the original’s universal status and, thus, lack the capacity to unravel all differends. Thus, we uncover love’s paradoxes. The first is that which permits love to accomplish what no other narrative has been able to do, to undo differends, is also what undoes it. The second paradox is that, while in The Differend, the Christian narrative of love fails, in Lyotard’s posthumously collected writings on Augustine’s Confessions, Christian love loses its automatic totalization and is elaborated as an instrument of weakness as well as authority, thereby exponentially increasing its power. 100 The two main differences between the accounts of love concern variants of love and style. In The Differend, the love of which Lyotard writes is caritas, while in his writings on the Saint, love has become eros. Concerning style, his first exposition into love is brief and fairly analytic, whereas the latter entangles nineteen fragmentary sections on Augustine’s yearning for God over fifty-seven pages of poeticism. Yet, there are two equally powerful consistencies between the two accounts: the persistence of love as a theme and how their forms speak as profoundly as their prose. Love, for Lyotard, is a paramount example of optimism in the face of deflation and failure. And, thus, a work uncovering the ferocity of Augustine’s desperate love for a remote lover is not unexpected amongst the concerns of his other, many titles. While its form is extreme, a radically unique reflection of how Lyotard read the Saint, the texts style is not wholly unlike the nonlinearity of The Differend or the art of his notices, wherein intense textual analysis is sometimes engaged precisely through the words of the object of his critique. But, the breakage from linearity stands in sharp relief against the very linear, temporal chronicle of Augustine’s autobiography. While it is thick with margin

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notation indicating linkages to Augustine’s work, it is as if Lyotard has taken up the lines as questions to be engaged in dialogue. Though, even further, one may wonder if the incessant repetition and alteration of fragments of quotations is less a dialogue and more Lyotard’s merger into the Saint, or the Saint’s submersion into the father of postmodernism. Is the work a mirror, Lyotard’s creation of an autobiography out of an autobiography? 101 There is a real cohesion between the two thinkers—both alternate between deeply personal, phenomenological writing and the detachment of the scholar and critic of narratives and both are profoundly seeking a way to express the inexpressible. Lyotard begins his engagement with Augustine in a section entitled “Blazon.” Blazon is a prominent, vivid, or sensational display, whose archaic use designated a coat of arms or the action of inscribing something with one’s heraldic arms or name, as born from the Old French, blason, shield. This beginning hearkens the Neoplatonist connection of knowing the One’s names so as to know the One’s nature, as seen in how Pseudo-Dionysius likewise begins his treatise by considering the importance and difficulty of discerning the names of God through their imprint upon all of creation. Lyotard quotes Augustine’s Confessions, Book X: “Thou calledst and criest aloud to me; thou even breakedst open my deafness: thou shinest thine beams upon me, and hath put my blindness to flight: thou didst most fragrantly blow upon me, and I drew in my breath and I pant after thee; I tasted thee, and now do hunger and thirst after thee; thou didst touch me, and I even burn again to enjoy thy peace” (1).102 Blazoned across these lines is Augustine’s erotic desire, fed by sensation rather than reason, to know, name, and return to union with the Thou.103 But there is an undeniable paradox to this desire. God may call to us and we may long for Him, but, as Pseudo-Dionysius asks, “If God cannot be grasped by mind or sense-perception, if he is not a particular being, how do we know him?” (869C) and, if we cannot know Him, “How then can we speak of the divine names” (593A) and respond to Him? There is an incomprehensible obstacle, according to Lyotard, in the instance of the addressor in the phrase universe (§25). How can I love You, Augustine demands, if I cannot know You, God? Pseudo-Dionysius responds, it is true that God is “invisible and incomprehensible,” and “‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity,” but He is also “not absolutely incommunicable to everything” (588C). Therefore, “We now grasp these things in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils” (592B). His truth does not come to us clear and evident truth, as it appears to the divinized minds of angels, but it comes how it can in accordance with the capacity of our minds that are divinely embedded in our bodies. Augustine captures this, according to Lyotard’s reading, “Whenas I love my God, I love a certain kind of light, and a kind of voice, and a kind of fragrance, and a kind of meat, and a kind of embrace—embrace, taste, fragrancy, voice and light which are of the inner human

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in me” (5). Our flesh, “the most repugnant and the sweetest Christian mystery,” that was created in His image, cannot be forgotten when we ask how we may know Him (4).104 The way Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius know God, love God, is not through a rational deduction of absolutes; instead, the Absolute is woven into a tale of love and calls us, first and most powerfully, by love, by the sensual, though the flesh: “It invites a fairy-story, a fable, not a discourse” (6). The witness feels God; he does not know God. When we read the names of God through His creations, “since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself” (588A), when we know that God is “nameless and yet has the names of everything that is” (596C), we know that God is Light, Beautiful, Zeal (693A), Greatness and Smallness, Immovable and Moved (909B), we know, then, that “one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being” (588A). Because “He is power insofar as he exceeds all power,” He must be the names beyond all names, all names at once and none of them at all (889D). The names we use must capture the paradox that God is and is not what we can have knowledge of; God, like desire, is that motivating force of lack that vivifies us, that, while to have it, we cannot have anything at all. Lyotard makes Augustine’s eroticism for God apparent by weaving together run-on sentences parataxtically composed of the most profoundly sensationalist words within Augustine’s autobiography: “groan,” “moan,” “force entrance,” “the lover excites the five mouths of the woman,” “he protests,” “it piercest,” “thou strokedst us,” “victorious,” “you took him as a woman,” “cut him through,” “turned him inside out,” “forced five times,” “violated in its five senses” (2-3). He ensures that we feel the excess of the confession and that we see the hint of accusation, “apologized,” “accused,” “never being on time,” as if from a jealous lover, towards God: “you left me by the wayside, why did you abandon me” (1)? It is impossible not to read Lyotard’s Augustine’s Confessions as a lover’s diary and more impossible to read the love as anything other than eros. Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names is also an ode of love. As it is a letter written to a colleague, it includes and encourages prayer, which is more than just a reflection on one’s love for God, but an initiation of love and its enactment or demonstration. As it is a treatise, his reflection on God underpins the progress of his argument: God is Good, the Good is Beautiful, and we love the Good and Beautiful that is God; thus, our love motivates us to name Him. 105 “All things long for it. The intelligent and rational long for it by way of knowledge, the lower strata by way of perception, the remainder by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition” (593D). The motivation to name God, born from desire, guides his philosophical style of transcribing what fragments we come to know of Him into recollection to dwell on, to use, to feel closer to Him. God’s creation, as procession, was a differentiation of Himself into all things; reversion, achieved through dwelling on the source, returns all

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things to identity, to the “innate togetherness of everything . . . the intermingling of everything” (704C). Therefore, we seek as many of these fragments as we can acquire from Scripture and sensory observation of all His creation, yet their nature keeps our meager knowledge more of a stutter than a narrative. 106 According to both etymology and experience, beauty calls to us; God’s goodness is a gift as is beauty. When we seek names of His creation to apply reverently to Him, those things that are beautiful call our attention more readily. Pseudo-Dionysius and latter thinkers are compelled to provide more argument for the less glorious names applied to God than to the name Beauty, itself. All beauty is from and powerfully points to the eternal Beauty that is God. It impels us to seek that Beauty, as Augustine desperately implored, “Oh where, where, shall I find you, my truly good, my certain loveliness?” 107 This power of beauty makes it stand out as a name in The Divine Names. While Pseudo-Dionysius repeatedly delineates hierarchies—God’s names, the capacities of His creation and, in other treatises, the ranks of angels and religious figures—his arguments for unity purport that all created things long for God and participate in Beauty, even those things that are not: “And I would even be so bold as to claim that nonbeing also shares in the Beautiful and the Good, because nonbeing, when applied transcendently to God in the sense of a denial of all things, is itself beautiful and good” (704B). The unifying power of Beauty renders it, however paradoxically, the first name that suggests a distinction, perhaps even a hierarchy, in the names for God.108 The Divine Names is clearly an ode of love; but, it is also more than an ode as a reflection upon, for his descriptions also excite us up to God. The merger of the good with beauty makes the name Beauty inspirational: it wakens desire for God by inoculating the behavior of a lover being awakened by a passing beauty. At first, the character of its love seems virtuous, while Lyotard’s portrayal of Augustine’s seems bawdy. The acute erotic force of Pseudo-Dionysius’ work is not clear until the call of Kallos, of Beauty, makes us captives of Yearning, Eros. Beauty is so potent that even what is not is drawn in by it. Beauty is so vigorous that we do not merely know it to be a name we give to God, because He created it, but it is a name whereby we feel God. We feel drawn to Him by bodily sensation distinct from how the sensation of sight prompts our cognitive reflection to call Him Light or Rock.109 Yet Beauty is most powerful because it awakens desire, even in God. Beauty is so powerful in its call and founds so extreme a response by desire to embrace it, even the Creator Himself falls prey to its charms: “And we may be so bold as to claim also that the Cause of all things loves all things in the superabundance of his goodness” (708A).110 Beauty’s inspiration of desire reveals God’s yearning to be radically circular: yearning is creation: from His yearning, He creates; we, creation, are of His yearning and yearns for Him; the intensity of his yearning that made us, gave us an intensity of yearning that, too, ensnares Him: “and so it is that all things must desire, must yearn for, must love, the

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Beautiful and the Good,” even the Beautiful and Good, Himself (708A). Beauty beckons God’s yearning to beckon to us to beckon to Him. 111 God’s superabundant yearning, which inspires all yearning, grants the legitimacy to the divine name Eros. Pseudo-Dionysius’ anticipation of the degree to which this revelation will shock us is revealed doubly. First, with the repetition of the phrase “we may be so bold” (708A) to acknowledge His eros, and, second, with his cautious offer of the very first apology within his consistently challenging treatise: “Let no one imagine that in giving status to the term ‘yearning’ I am running counter to scripture” (708B). His “boldness” asserted that both the nothing and God are called to desire by beauty (704B, 708B). Is this repeated phrase coy or a hesitant affirmation? Can it be bold if it is true that it does not run counter to Scripture? Further ambiguity lurks in his apology as it acknowledges his “giving status” to the scandalous name as he denies its scandal. If no scandal, then why an apology? He attempts to deny its scandal by trying to erase the difference between the love we presumed he was speaking of when he told us all things long for the One—agape, in the Scriptures, from the love we condemn as turning us from Him to sin—eros, in the Scriptures. How can his use of the opposite term in the Scriptures not run counter to the Scriptures? Finally, if there is no scandal here, why does he not erase this difference of terms by using both terms as names for God? Instead, his employment of the single form of love, eros, and his singular instance of the breakage of his own technique of the conjunction of affirmation and negation—he never negates the name Yearning; instead, he emphatically emphasizes the very distinction of the name. When Lyotard begins The Differend with the guiding example of Faurisson’s denial of Auschwitz’s gas chambers, he does not dismiss him, as he easily could, by showing its motivation to be hate-led denial or by undoing the simple logical bind by showing it to confuse premises from two conflicting phrase regimens. Instead, Lyotard engages the argument on its own terms and with a spirit of impressive philosophical honesty. Lyotard treats Faurisson much like many of the young men in Plato’s dialogues engage Socrates, except that Lyotard does not flee when his attempts to work within the other’s logical framework keep failing. In this spirit, then, and lacking an unarguable answer with which to begin, let us ask why does Pseudo-Dionysius use the term eros, instead of agape, as the conspicuous, suggestively crucial name for God? If they are truly one and the same, then why bother employing the term that he must justify and risk, if his justifications are rejected, having his work censored? Sometimes a little scandal helps a book’s notoriety, but this fails to be a persuasive explanation for Pseudo-Dionysius, the author who refuses us his own name, and who already employs a scandalously innovative conjunction of apophatic and cataphatic theologies, equally shocking, crassly material divine names, and hardly hidden pagan philosophy. Instead, it further problematizes the genuineness of his claim that eros is not a remarkable innovation and, thus, po-

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tential for scandal. There are four major implications of eros that challenge its suitability as a name and descriptor for God’s love: eros carries an implicit suggestion of sexuality; intimate to its sexual connotation, eros is inseparable from the physical or material; eros, classically, has been defined as a lack; and, finally, eros, classically, has been the source for deviancy from the good. If eros is to be neither scandalous nor even contrary to the spirit of love designated in the Scriptures, then these four factors must be addressed. Pseudo-Dionysius quotes and references many Biblical passages to support his case that Eros is a legitimate name for God. Many of the passages, however, constitute weak evidence; either they invoke a love closer to agape than to eros or they cite eros in a relation very distinct from that proper for God and humanity. 112 It may be most productive to explore only the strongest of his evidence. Eros is laden with connotations of sexuality in opposition to the spiritual love implied by the Scripture’s frequent term, agape. Instead of approaching his attempted erasure of scandal by arguing eros to be chaste, Pseudo-Dionysius successfully amplifies the name’s sexuality by quoting Samuel 1:26: “Love for you came on me like love for women” (709C). 113 Classically, chaste love is envisioned as a mother’s love for her child; erotic love as a man’s love for a woman. Pseudo-Dionysius is describing humanity’s love for God, and God’s love for humanity, within the latter idiom: love awakened and fed by the physical beauty of the other and driven to seek its consummation in the pleasure of union. He obfuscates this blunt pronouncement, however, by adding the chastisement that, “to those listening properly to the divine things the name ‘love’ is used by the sacred writers in divine revelation with the exact same meaning as the term ‘yearning’” (709C). This chastisement more clearly argues that the Scriptures recognizes the eroticism of the divine relation than it argues that his reading is nothing different than the common Scriptural chaste love, and thus, nothing scandalous.114 The materiality of eros is a second essential argument against its use in the Scriptures. The attribution of bodily sensation spawned from the perception of the beauty of the body to He who is not material poses a contradiction. 115 Yet, again, Pseudo-Dionysius’ Scriptural quotation, from the Song of Songs 8:2, emphasizes the materiality of eros, rather than erasing it: “I yearned for her beauty” (709B). The Song is his best evidence of a Scriptural precedent for a sexualized, physical love. Its attention to the material surpasses notable examples in the histories of both monotheistic writings and erotic poetry. 116 The male lover in the Song audibly engages a physical revelry of his beloved’s beauty that moves from an exclamation, “How beautiful your sandaled feet,” up her body, noting that her “graceful legs are like jewels, the work of a craftsman’s hands. Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies. Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like an ivory tower,” indulging further lines on her face and hair, before culminating in a reflection on what her physical beauty compels him to:

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“I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.” 117 Her beauty spawns his desire, which drives him to seek unity with her parallel to Pseudo-Dionysius’ invocation of the movement of beauty and desire between God and His creations. In his emphasis of the materiality of eros in the Song of Songs, PseudoDionysius uncovers an unarticulated argument for the greater appropriateness of eros than agape to name God. The Song shows the beauty of the beloved’s body to be the very same as the material beauty of God’s other creations: goblets and wine, wheat and lilies, fawns and towers and palms. The imagery of the Song is thoroughly sexual, dwelling on physical beauty and the tortuous pursuit of love’s consummation, but its materiality also points beyond itself to all of creation in a manner agape could not have captured. This mimics the overflowing of procession that elucidates how all of creation points to their cause, which underpins Pseudo-Dionysius’ method of discerning God’s names. The Song and Pseudo-Dionysius both affirm that all that is beautiful, ultimately, is the eternal Beauty; all desire for the beauty here is desire for the eternal Beauty. Beauty ignites the intensity of desire that mightily “bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty” (704A). Beauty’s call commits us to responding to the other as “a model” who inspires us to “conform” to his or her beauty (704B) in a manner illustrative of Lyotard’s contrast of model, which seeks engagement, to example, which is indifferent (§152). Beauty’s call inspires us to give ourselves up to the other; “this divine yearning brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs not to self but to the beloved” (712A). It inspires the aim of humanity, “there it is ahead of all as Goal, as the Beloved, as the Cause toward which all things move” (704B), as it inspires the endeavor of mystical theology, the desire for communion of the lover with the beloved, expressed in Song 7:10-1: “I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside, let us spend the night in the villages.” Communion is the completion and consummation of emanation as the reversion to our originary source: all is from Beauty and all “return upward” to Beauty (704B).118 If eros has been shunned from designating God’s love because of its classical definition as a lack, which would contradict His superabundance, its preceding revelation as an aim and a motivating force has already forged the counterargument. The lover desires his beloved because he does not possess her; how could he? Desire’s satisfaction is only in its sustenance, its maintenance as a lack; it cannot be possessed. God exceeds our capacity in every way to capture Him. This impossibility is at the heart of Pseudo-Dionysius’ invocation of the imagery of God as overflowing and Lyotard’s description of any event’s evasion of its singular encapsulation. Pseudo-Dionysius names the One as the “mind beyond mind, word beyond speech,” which designates the contradictory having and lacking that must be thought in order to think eros (588B). In addition to the spatial disruption of something and nothing, conceptions of both eros and God

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must also suspend the linearity we impose into time. Pseudo-Dionysius writes, “Here is the source of all which transcends every source, here is an ending which transcends completion” (708A). Divine union cannot be a final event and obliterate faith in the Other, just as eros’ consummation cannot end desire for pleasure; instead, God and eros must both function according to PseudoDionysius’ formula as the site that evades situation and the satisfaction beyond conclusion. The final, dominant qualm concerning Eros as a name of God is fed by the term’s classical representation as the source for all deviancies from the good. The origin may be found in Plato’s representation of eros as the base part of the soul that, like a wild horse, constantly pulls us to acquisition and away from harmony.119 The clearest linkage of this assault upon harmony to sin is made by Augustine: “the reign of lust rages tyrannically and distracts the life and whole spirit of man with many conflicting storms of terror, desire, anxiety, empty and false happiness, torture because of the loss of something that he used to love, eagerness to possess what he does not have, grievances for injuries received, and fires of vengeance.”120 According to the Saint, the reign of lust distracts us from the truth of faithful life and our faith in the truth granted by God. However, the “storms” born from this reign of lust mimic the emotional and spiritual ill-ease, described by his Confessions, that was born out of his pursuit of faith and knowledge of the truth of God. While in his On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine defines libido as sin, as a turning away from the eternal to the temporal, in obedience to Lyotard’s persuasive reading of his Confessions and PseudoDionysius’ employment in The Divine Names, we must define eros as that intense drive to pleasure without cessation, as an intensity turning us towards the eternal.121 It is nonsensical, then, to name a reverent turning towards the divine as sin. If the four dominant arguments rejecting Eros from the legitimate designation of God, themselves, are rejected, the only remaining question is to fill the clearing in the argument with an affirmation of why Pseudo-Dionysius would name God Yearning. Let us “be so bold” so as to suggest that Eros best captures the spirit of excess that Pseudo-Dionysius must attribute to God’s love because God exceeds all that we can fathom (704B, 708B). Chaste love is a love without the physical; its definition gives it limits. To confine God’s love to a chaste interpretation would be to deny His love from a possible expression. This denial would be an imposition of an impossible limit on He who exceeds all limits. Eros, unlike agape, resonates with the transgression of limits. 122 A necessity of naming God must be the methodological permission for any name to be transgressed by He who transgresses every understanding and all bounds of thought. God’s yearning is superlatively powerful. Its power is identified as the very cause of His creative act and one so strong that it even draws Him to us. 123 Eros’ excess, existanai phrenon, drives us out of our minds, and into the most powerful union with the beloved: “This divine yearning brings ecstasy so that the lover

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belongs not to self but to the beloved” (712A).124 Eros best captures He who cannot be captured and our relationship with Him. We are driven by beauty to a most passionate desire that drives us outside of ourselves to union with God, but what is it that bears witness to this inexpressible? It is not truly the Scriptures, for Pseudo-Dionysius, but the body as the site of sensation: it sees beauty and gives itself over to desire. It is not truly any proper testimony by the witness, for Lyotard, but our persistent attempt in the face of failure to find the unknown idiom. According to Lyotard, it is not the memory, for Augustine, that bears witness to the inexpressible, but the “inner human” (7-8).125 He arrives at this conclusion by understanding the Other, that is Augustine’s addressee, as the interior intimo meo, superior summo meo, as the other more intimate to me than I was to myself, as the other more superior to me than I was to myself, as the Other who was within as I was outside. 126 The inner human is the site for sensation, he who feels God instead of trying to find Him and define Him. There is no concept of the inexpressible in Pseudo-Dionysius’ naming of God or memory that could be fetched from Augustine’s storehouse and proffered by Lyotard’s witness before the tribunal. The witness is the “inner human,” the embodied aisthesis of eros who speaks from within so only silence is heard without. Is the silent speaking ever heard? While writing of André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence, Lyotard answers us: “Never may this gesture be expressive. On principle extreme stridency has no expression in the auditory system. It is thus with great pain, with great joy, both of which we say are rending: they rend and the wound that they inflict remains gaping, mute.” 127 But, in unabashed contradiction, by way of quoting Malraux’s Lazarus, he also offers us hope: “‘If we did suddenly hear a voice other than our own through our own throat, we would be terrified.’ Is this even possible? It’s the definition of love.” 128 Thus, to become one’s beloved, to become one with one’s lover, one truly listens, and one may be able to hear this passionate silence. “Because in battle or in love a single throat fuses the various passions refractory to any account that might stir singly in lovers”—while Lyotard names these to be loves “of literature, music, painting,” the qualification seems unnecessary, as all lovers have been established already to be aesthetic.129 The sensuous receptivity of the other’s voice within one’s own being promises the possibility of there ever being a new linkage. With this love, comes the pain, too; they are inseparable, but this price ensures their power: “The gods may die and humanism as well: anguish is immortal. Whatever may be the figures by which it is presented in the course of ages, it will not fail, one day, somewhere, to be shared.”130 Anguished, but hopeful. Aisthesis, according to Lyotard’s definition, is the sensation that motivates, through its own erasure-as-revelation, its expression in silence. This final section has explored aisthesis as eros. Eros speaks most eloquently to each of Lyotard’s requirements. It is a sensation that is, by nature, intentional; it points towards that which caused it: it points to the object of its desire. Its intentionality moti-

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vates it most intensely; its attainment of its object, logically, would be its own destruction. But desire must erase this risk of its own self-annihilation in order to be desire. This precarious, contradictory nature feels “a ‘presence’ that is certainly not present.”131 This feeling is a bumping up against a limit of thought and expression. The Christian narrative of love as agape, as Lyotard revealed, can celebrate this limit, radically unify parties with disparate definitions through it, and overcome all differends. But, it, too, falls prey to the totalizing impulse of logic and undoes its own power. The power of love can only be maintained so long as love can maintain its inner contradiction. This love that succeeds is eros. Lyotard’s rereading of Augustine’s Confessions uncovers the possibility of reading God’s love and our love for God as eros. This rereading becomes a model, a spiritual exercise, demonstrating this possibility through Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names. Eros, then, is demonstrated as the sensation whose forgetting permits the not-present presence to appear. Eros bears witness to the inexpressible, which is then permitted its expression in silence, be that inexpressible Auschwitz, God, or a differend undetermined here. If one retains the restrictive, and self-violating, logic of Faurisson, one will argue that, still, the tribunal cannot understand the phrase of silence given meaning by the sensation and its forgetting of eros and, thus, this final solution is still one that fails. But, this critique simply keeps alive the necessity of reflection and rereading all questions. The Nazis employed the euphemism “Endlösung der Judenfrage,” the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, to name the complete termination of the Jewish people in death camps. 132 Mass murder was their attempt at a response to their intolerant question. The employment of such an expression, that someone is a “question” to be solved, happens frequently but only by suspension of the reflection upon its shift between phrase regimes. We need to be reminded of the importance of reflection when confronted with this expression and its dubious linkage between language games. It is our obligation to the occurrence of the phrase. Not only because it made so many think that they could think mass extermination, but also because this expression bolsters a common interpretation of humanistic ethics, the other is a question who calls to me, and a common interpretation of deontological ethics, it is my duty to interpret my actions and their logic according to their effect upon the other. To make the other a question that can be solved can guide us to phrases in entirely opposing linkages. To turn to extermination and its justification, the addressor must suspend the possibility of the ethical linkages. One logic of suspension was seen in Faurisson’s adoption of (however perverted) phenomenological and scientific phrase regimes: ethics is empathy and soft thinking and taints objective inquiry into the gas chambers. But Faurisson suspends his own, human acuity in the name of a deceptive objectivity parallel to the Nazi suspension of the humanity of the Jews in their solution to the Judenfrage. Ethics, too often, also suspends the most extreme cases of extermination because the ex-

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treme skews statistical probabilities or, as Lyotard expresses, the singular event overflows its possible encapsulation. But, as Lyotard shows us by becoming our model, we must work up against these events in an attempt to work through them in the face of their conceptually impossible encapsulation. It is our obligation to reread events even with the knowledge that our attempts will fail. And, he shows us that all final solutions fail. For this, we can be thankful.

Notes 1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), §152. All further citations to The Differend will be parenthetical by section and utilize this translation unless noted as my own, for which the French original will be noted. 2. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 1. 3. Concerning a similar distinction, Oliver Davies, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, turns to the differentiation offered by two Russian terms, tishina and molchanie, where the former designates what we might call “stillness,” a silence that is the absence of noise, and the latter is a silence that is the cessation of speech. He reveals, between the silence designated by these two terms, their opposing directionalities and their tension: the former is broken by speech, whereas the latter is a break in speech (Oliver Davies, “Soundings: Towards a Theological Poetics of Silence,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 201-22, 202-3). 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 5. Ibid., 4. 6. Ibid. 7. George Steiner, “The Retreat from the Word,” in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 12-35, 22-3. 8. Nancy, Listening, Op. Cit., 13. 9. Ibid., 9. Soon after, Nancy further explains: “To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relationship to ‘me’ (the supposedly given subject), or to the ‘self’ of the other (the speaker, the musician, also supposedly given, with his subjectivity), but to the relationship in self, so to speak, as it forms a ‘self’ or a ‘to itself’ in general, and if something like that ever does reach the end of its formation” (Ibid., 12). 10. Ibid., 14. 11. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2-3. 12. Nancy, Listening, Op. Cit., 21. 13. Ibid., 15. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. Ibid., 10.

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16. Aristotle, Rhetoric, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: Volume Two, edited by Jonathan Barnes (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2152-2269. 17. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 113-22, §VII, “Of the sublime,” 114, and Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §25, respectively. 18. Author Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 240. 19. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, Op. Cit., 114. 20. While objects of nature may be beautiful, such are not, most properly speaking, sublime. The “sublime object” is an object fit to receive the presentation of a sublimity where the sublimity is actually found in the mind. No sensible form can properly contain the sublime. As Kant writes: “This [the sublime] concerns only Ideas of the Reason, which, although no adequate presentation is possible for them, by this inadequacy that admits of sensible presentation, are aroused and summoned into the mind. Thus the wide ocean, agitated by the storm, cannot be called sublime. Its aspect is horrible; and the mind must be already filled with manifold Ideas if it is to be determined by such an intuition to a feeling itself sublime, as it is incited to abandon sensibility and to busy itself with Ideas that involve higher purposiveness” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Op. Cit., §23). 21. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Op. Cit., 240. 22. Ibid. 23. Cf. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Op. Cit., §26-8 ff. 24. Cf. Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, 3, 54 (1987): 3-9; “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” trans. Brian Massumi, Cultural Critique 5 (1986-87): 209-19; The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1992); and the discussion of postmodernism in this work’s first chapter. Throughout Lyotard’s oeuvre the sublime is invoked and interrupted so that awe is sustained and reason held back to express the hidden (be it in Kant’s text, abstract minimalist art, or the inexpressible); notably, cf. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 25. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Op. Cit., §26. 26. Ibid., §27. 27. Lyotard is quoting Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Op. Cit., “General Remark Upon the Exposition of the Aesthetical Reflective Judgment.” “Enthusiasm” also bears a marked similarity to the terms “ecstasy” and “sympathy” used by Neoplatonism to connote mystical experience; cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in PseudoDionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 47-131, 648A, 681D-684A. 28. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Op. Cit., §27. 29. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 235-6. 30. Ibid., 240.

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31. Ibid., 239; quoting Proust’s letter to Céleste, reprinted in Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 196-7. Proust works this scene into his Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume, itself in two volumes, of his À la recherche du temps perdu. 32. The jouissance is not proprietarily, or even properly, the industrialist’s; Proust’s jouissance forswears its end/consummation by eroticizing every step up to and after the voyeurism. Even guilt and mortification become pleasurable: Céleste’s mortification spawns his pain, guilt, and need to explain; his explanation begets his pleasure in vivifying what he witnessed and being able to now write. She reports his confession, “I can only write things as they are, and to do that I have to see them,” and that they “talked about the horrible flagellation scene for hours that night. I still horror-struck and he going over it as if not to forget anything, and no doubt thinking aloud, as usual, of what he was going to write” (Kristeva, Time and Sense, Op. Cit., 239 and 241; she quotes Albaret, Monsieur Proust, Op. Cit., 196 and 198, respectively). 33. For instance, René Girard argues a similar hypothesis with evidence in Roger Vailland’s Monsieur Jean, Stendhal’s Red and the Black, Sartre’s peeping Tom in his Being and Nothingness, and various works by Dostoyevsky, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett; cf. Girard, “Pride and Passion in the Contemporary Novel,” Yale French Studies 24 (1959): 3-10. 34. Kristeva, Time and Sense, Op. Cit., 241. Her quotation is to Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. 35. Kristeva, Time and Sense, Op. Cit., 239, quoting Albaret, Monsieur Proust, Op. Cit., 196-7. 36. Divine union, of course, is only given to us by God’s grace, but our inner capacity to desire it and be receptive to it can be cultivated through our engagement in spiritual exercise. 37. “All who feel desire, feel it for what is not provided or present; for something they have not or are not or lack and that sort of thing is the object of desire and love” (Plato, Symposium, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, trans. Harold N. Fowler [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925], 200d-e) and Plato Meno, wherein knowledge, like the statues of Daedalus, must be chained down (Meno, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 353-384, 97e ff.). The communion, however, between eros and knowledge is hardly impossible; the continuing argument will reveal the natural necessity of their link in this project and that has been broached and validated in the canon. Contemporary philosophers, notably Immanuel Levinas, have importantly hesitated at this conjunction and revealed the problems of too rigidly defining eros as lack rather than plenitude. The following analysis will reveal the project’s definition of eros, as well as its use in Pseudo-Dionysius and Lyotard, to evade the problem by synthesizing lack and plenitude. 38. Arthur C. Danto, “Forward,” in Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1991), x. 39. The Oxford English Dictionary requires nearly five massive columns of minuscule text to define “love”; in addition to being both noun and verb, a base for nearly every other grammatical construction, and employed in innumerable colloquial expressions, the preeminent guide distinguishes between (non-exhaustively) romantic love, sexual love,

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chaste love, familial love, and national love with reference to the Bible, presidents, classical and contemporary literary authors, scientists, and mythology. 40. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the Assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). Despite the length, it is valuable to note the literary precedents that the editors cite to see how little the act of sex factors into the definition. For the primary definition, “love, desire,” they reference Homer’s Odyssey 18.212 and Illiad 1.469; Hesiod’s Theogony 1064 and 910; Sophocles’ Electra 193; Euripides’ Medea 148, Hippolytus 313, and Electra 262; and Lucretius’ Asin. 33. The precedent singled out by the editors for the definition that includes reference to “the sexual passion,” is only Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers [Thêlukratês], 600. Further references supporting the definition of eros as love and desire include: Sophocles’ Trachiniae 433; Euripides’ Ion 67; Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 540 and Eumenides 865; Plato’s Laws 782e; Lucretius’ Nigr. Praef.; Herodotus’ The Histories 5.32 [whose reference to eros concerns a documentation of betrothal]; Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women 521 [“Now stay here and beseech the gods of the land with prayers to grant what you desire, while I go to advance your cause. May persuasion and efficacious fortune attend me!” (ed., tran., Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph.D., l. 520)]; Sophocles’ Tracking Satyrs [Ichneutae] 953 [a questionable precedent; possibly indicating the English reference to a “wretch,” but the Greek rendered as “tis, o poner’, echei” and “thanonti keinôi sunthanein erôs m’ echei”]; Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 367; Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 341; Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War 6.24 [“All alike fell in love with the enterprise” “kai erôs enepses tois pasin homoios ekpleusai” (xxiv, 3)]; Antiphon 212.3; Anaxilas 21.5; Pindar’s Odes 3.30; Euripides’ Hippolytus 765; Aristophanes’ Birds 1316; Sophocles’ Antigone 617 [“Chorus: [615] See how that hope whose wanderings are so wide truly is a benefit to many men, but to an equal number it is a false lure of light-headed desires. The deception comes to one who is wholly unawares until he burns his foot on a hot fire. [620] For with wisdom did someone once reveal the maxim, now famous, that evil at one time or another seems good, to him whose mind a god leads to ruin. [625] But for the briefest moment such a man fares free of destruction,” in the Greek: “Choros: [615] ha gar dê poluplanktos elpis pollois men onasis andrôn, pollois d’ apata kouphonoôn erôtôn: eidoti d’ ouden herpei, prin puri thermôi poda tis [620] prosausêi. Sophiai gar ek tou kleinon epos pephantai. To kakon dokein pot’ esthlontôid’ emmen hotôi phrenas theos agei pros atan. Choros: [625] prassei d’ oligiston chronon ektos atas” (Sophocles, The Antigone of Sophocles, ed. Sir Richard Jebb [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891]]. The reference for the definition of eros as an object of love or desire is to Pindar’s Odes 11.48 and cf. Lucretius Tim. 14. The reference for eros as passionate joy is Sophocles’ Ajax 693 [“shiver with rapture; I soar on the wings of sudden joy!” “ephrix’ erôti, pericharês d’ aneptoman” (Sophocles, The Ajax of Sophocles, ed. Sir Richard Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893)]. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon more succintly defines eros, primarily, as love with the variations of its use in tragedy as love or desire of a thing (from Aeschylus) and passionate joy (from Sophocles), and, secondarily, as the proper noun of the god of love (Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate GreekEnglish Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the Assistance of Roderick McKenzie [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889]). 41. Lexicon to Pindar, ed. William J. Slater (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969).

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42. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert K. Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz (New York: Larousse Kingfisher Chambers Inc., 2006). 43. Online Etymology Dictionary, ed. Douglas Harper (2001); available at: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=eros&searchmode=none. Harper’s definitions, however, do concretely emphasize an interpretation of eros as the most powerful form of love in comparison to regard, affection, and a strictly familial or political emotional response. 44. Ibid. 45. Amor: “I. love (of friends, parents, etc., and also in a low sense; hence in gen., like amo, while caritas, like diligere, is esteem, regard, etc.; hence amor is used also of brutes, but caritas only of men” and, further, “(but amor is related to benevolentia as the cause to the effect, since benevolentia designates only an external, friendly treatment; but amor a real, internal love)”; finally, in its literary usage, they differentiate in paternitatis amore, brotherly love, from sexual love, whether lawful or unlawful. They designate its secondary meanings to include: A. For the beloved object itself; B. Personified: Amor, the god of love, Love, Cupid, Eros; C. A strong, passionate longing for something, desire, lust; and D. Poetical, a love-charm, philter (Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879]). Cupīdo and Libido both follow this same model of bifurcation with a differentiation of good desire as desire, wish, longing, and eagerness from bad desire as desire, passion, lust, and greed, in the first case, and between pleasure, desire, and longing versus unlawful desire, inordinate desire, and lust (Ibid.). This same encompassing of chaste and sexual love in the definitions is echoed in Hebrew, as well, for example in the verb that transliterates as ‘ahab, which includes, amongst its many definitions, familial and sexual love for another human, human appetite, human love for God, God’s love for humanity, and the act of being a friend as chaste or as lover (Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, ed. James Strong [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007]). Gesenius’ lexicon beautifully defines ‘ahab, primarily, as “To desire, to breath after anything,” and secondarily, simply, as to love,” and finally, “to delight in anything, in doing anything,” where this can designate “to be loved, amiable,” as in 2 Sam. 1:23 or as a friend or lover; it further notes its root to be mostly unused in Hebrew but indicative of the production of fruit and flowers and that which is verdant and “germinating with impetus, shooting forth” (quoted in Ibid.). 46. It further includes separate, brief entries for agape, eros, and storge; but the first two simply highlight the terms’ uses for Christian festivals and the mythological god of love with only the last offering a more standard definition, i.e., “Natural affection, esp. that of parents for their offspring.” 47. Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), trans. Hugh Tredennick in Plato: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Op. Cit., 3-26, 21b, and Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce in Plato: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Op. Cit., 526- 574, 177d-e, respectively. 48. Cf. Plato, Meno, Op. Cit., 97e ff., and Symposium, Op. Cit., 200d-e. 49. Plato, Symposium, Op. Cit., 203b-d. 50. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 98. 51. Ibid., 98. 52. “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Psalm 14:1, which is the counterpoint for Anselm’s ontological proof for His existence; cf. Anselm, Proslogion, with

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Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. Thomas Williams [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001], chs. 1-4). 53. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), §87. 54. Danto, “Forward,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, Op. Cit., xi. 55. Husserl, Ideas I, Op. Cit., §87. Husserl’s clarification of its enigmatic nature is partially captured in his following section’s elucidation and expresses its tie to knowledge: “Owing to its noetic moments, every intentive mental process is precisely noetic; it is of its essence to include in itself something such as a ‘sense’ and possibly a manifold sense on the basis of this sense-bestowal and, in unity with that, to effect further productions [Leistungen] which become ‘senseful’ precisely by ” (Ibid., §88). 56. Danto, “Forward,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, Op. Cit., xi. Here, one can emphasize the difference between eros and the sexual act; the latter better captures the immediacy of flesh. 57. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957, 1986), 16. 58. Ibid. One may argue that eroticism may be religious but that religion is not erotic; this, however, is hard to support. In brief, while two opposing trends in religion, mysticism and asceticism, may practice faith in divergent manners, abide by opposing rituals, both are religiously engaged in an erotic quest for union with the Other. Mysticism demands ecstasy to achieve divine union and asceticism demands a sensuous disinterest that cannot function outside of the central erotic principles of prohibition and transgression. 59. Ibid., 17. 60. This project has nothing to do with theoretical possibilities or historical cases of sadomasochism aroused by the atrocity of the holocaust. For consideration of that topic, cf. notably the film “The Night Porter” (1974) by Liliana Cavani, its discussion in Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and its broader consideration in the two volumes of Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989). 61. Nancy, Listening, Op. Cit., 4. 62. Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London: Continuum, 2002), 157. 63. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness (New York: Routledge, 2001), §6.54. 64. Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance. Cinq études (Paris: Grasset, 1977), 232: “Ce qui ne peut pas être dit, ne doit pas être tu.” Cited in Victor Kal, “Being Unable to Speak, Seen as a Period: Difference and Distance in Jean-Luc Marion,” in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, ed. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 144-65, 144. 65. Steiner, “Silence and the Poet,” in Language and Silence, Op. Cit., 36-54, 39. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 43. 68. Ibid., 46. 69. Ibid., 49. 70. Ibid.

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71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 46. 73. Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics, trans. Robert Harvey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 90. 74. Ibid. 75. The revisionists insist on this; Faurisson, in particular, is known for his scientific testing of sites; cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “On Faurisson and Chomsky,” in his Assassins of Memory, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 76. Lyotard does not elaborate on the “pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom” (§23), whether pleasure is only resultant from that which erases the negative instance in the phrase universe and soothes the violent bind, or, if it results from the creation of any phrase, even one that fails to restore the linkages that permit meaningfulness. I would argue that his work necessitates pleasure to have gradations. Even if his silence can operate metaphorically, Lyotard designates literal instances. For literal silence, any sound is its destruction; if its destruction entails pleasure, then speaking any idiom would be pleasurable. Clearly, though, for the witness, the most pleasure would be an idiom that the tribunal would understand. 77. Faurisson claims to be operating within a logical “game” (in Lyotard and Wittgenstein’s sense, as a mode of language, amongst others, that operates by its own rules) as opposed to sociological, psychological, or biological games. But Lyotard reveals that the logical game must be differentiated from the rhetorical and the scientific, which Faurisson does not do and, thus, obfuscates their rules (§24, 28-30). Lyotard elaborates their distinct rules through an analysis of Wittgenstein, Gorgias, historians, and Plato; a single, clear example can be demonstrated by reference to Wittgenstein’s differentiation, in his Philosophical Investigations, of how the linguistic form “X in Y” can mislead us because it is invalid for some contents; for instance, “pain in my hand” is a language game distinct from “car in my garage,” and entails entirely different rules for comprehension and use. Faurisson’s slip into the scientific game misuses forms like “X in Y,” through presuming the phrase “death in a gas chamber” operates identically to “bacteria in the Petri dish.” Lyotard’s example is exclaiming “inhuman!” to testimony’s about Auschwitz; “Inhuman means incompatible with an Idea of humanity,” not that the testimonies were not about real humans or did not “offer material for verification, even if they are incompatible with any Idea of humanity” (§31). 78. Further: “It’s daybreak; Give me the lighter; Was she there? . . . ax2+bx+c=0; Ouch! . . . This is not a phrase; Here are some phrases” (§109) and, the “raised tail of a cat” (§123). 79. Lyotard describes his own genre (in the singular) in The Differend as “Observations, Remarks, Thoughts, and Notes” (p. xiv). 80. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1982), 5. 81. While Lyotard’s text actively dialogues with Wittgenstein, there is a notable accord with the work of his contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Lyotard’s phrases, Wittgenstein’s sentences, and Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual regimes parallel one another; all are expressions broadly understood as linguistic that found and operate within a structure. Lyotard’s phrases most explicitly include the nonverbal, but the others would not disagree. Lyotard’s phrase universes, Wittgenstein’s context, and Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotic systems likewise parallel one another; all

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are the theoretical containment around their respective signs or phrases. Finally, Lyotard’s differend and Wittgenstein’s “that of which we must not speak” parallel Deleuze and Guattari’s potentially inexpressible “form of content” they broach when discussing the difficulty of interiorized validation: “A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves: there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 111). 82. “The irrefutable conviction that phrasing is endless” (§17). Deleuze and Guattari capture the cause of the endlessness as the possibility of linkage itself: “There is a simple formula for the signifying regime of the sign (the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign’s relation to a state of things it designates, or to an entity it signifies, but only the formal relation of sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The limitlessness of signification replaces the sign” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Op. Cit., 112). 83. Ibid. 84. Claude Lévi-Stauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1973), 48-9, cited in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Op. Cit., 112. 85. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Op. Cit., 113. 86. Ibid., 111. 87. This echoes an argument in Wittgenstein scholarship concerning private language, illustrated by the question whether, abandoned on the island, Robinson Crusoe could teach Friday his invented language; cf. Rush Rhees, “Can There Be a Private Language?,” in The Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. John V. Canfield (New York: Garland, 1986) and Alfred J. Ayer, “Can There Be a Private Language?,” in Ibid.. Both essays were originally published in the 1954 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 88. Lady Philosophy, in Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, as his nurse with both gentle and harsh medicine cures Boethius of his suffering. She may begin by throwing out the “whores of the theatre,” the “Muses of poetry,” those “Sirens” whose “sweetness leads to death,” but she, herself, works through prosimetrum, intertwining dialectic and poem to flush out his fever and bring him tranquility (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard H. Green [Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002], I, 1). 89. The importance of aesthetics to both thinkers is immense and permits only its elliptical reference, here, to emphasize the importance of a consideration of acoustic arts to understanding their primarily linguistic endeavor of expressing the inexpressible. The difference between standard genres of discourse and those explored by Stein and Adorno parallels that one could draw between classical, jazz, and (predominately atonal) avantgarde composition; cf. Lyotard, Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon (Cambridge: The MIT Press, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series, 1984) and “Preliminary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren,” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 10 (1979): 59-67. The Differend references John Cage as taking the musical phrase to the finality proscribed in its genre (§180) and includes his citation within the Gertrude Stein Notice: “To save the phrase: extract it from the discourses in which it is subjugated and restrained by rules for linking, enveloped in their gangue, seduced by their end. Let it be. The way Cage writes

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from sounds. . . . ‘Nothing is noisy.’ As in Silence” (p. 68). The allusion is to Cage’s composition 4’33”, a three-movement work in which the musician(s) do not play their instruments to reveal silence (of the musicians) as revelatory of noise (of the environment). On Lyotard’s contrast of Adorno’s preference for Schönberg’s atonality to the experimentation in Cage, et al., cf. Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2005), 329 ff. For Pseudo-Dionysius, cf. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982). 90. At length, “this theme of silence, an ‘aesthetic’ theme . . . touches upon a concern I share that arises from Kant’s analysis of the sublime and Adorno’s last texts, texts devoted to a critique, let’s say, of the ‘culture’ of the ‘sensational.’ In both cases, it seems to me, and quite differently (almost inversely) in each, ‘sensation,’ aisthesis (as matter given in form, which occasions taste and aesthetic pleasure) is forgotten, is rendered impossible, conceals itself from its representation (through art). But this concealment lets something else show, this contradictory feeling of a ‘presence’ that is certainly not present, but which needs to be forgotten to be represented, although it must be represented. Now, this theme (which is not only that of the so-called avant-gardes but also that of ‘the jews’) is apparently not without resemblance to that of the ‘veiling unveiling’ in Heidegger and to that of anxiety. In all these cases, even if they are approached from very different routes, the same theme of ‘anesthesia’ is evident” (Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 4). 91. Lyotard uses the quotes and non-capitalized letters in “the jews” to designate what they represent as a theme, as opposed to a concrete ethnic or religious group, akin to how The Differend encloses “Auschwitz” within quotes to designate its meaning that overflows a geographical location or history. 92. On Lyotard’s elaboration in avant-garde art, cf. “Newman: The Instant” and “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” in his The Inhuman, Op. Cit., 78-107. On anxiety, cf. the second section of chapter one of the current work. Heidegger’s Lichtung and Ereignis resist sharp differentiation; his End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking utilizes Lichtung to designate the preparatory space needed to accomplish the task of following the call of Being to re-evaluate the tradition’s unthought thought. His etymology of Lichtung is en-light-ened, but his translation avoids “light” or a derivative; instead, he cites open, airy, the clearing of Being, which mimic his “Nothing” in What is Metaphysics?, luminosity, and that place that has been cleared. His frequent translator, David Ferrell Krell, uses “shine forth” and “presence” (as a verb) to capture its occurrence from and within luminosity necessarily accompanied by concealment and requiring an openness of space (Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986], 80-94). 93. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, in Moralia (Boston: Loeb Classical Library Ed., 1936), 2, 351e. 94. Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,”Op. Cit., 4. 95. Jean-François Lyotard, “Afterword: A Memorial of Marxism,” trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia Press, 1988), 47. The “us” Lyotard references is he and Pierre Souyri, his friend and colleague with whom he wrote much of his early work on radical politics.

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96. Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2009), 92-3. 97. 1 John 4:8. 98. This rejection is demonstrated throughout The Differend, but presented more explicitly in his The Postmodern Condition. Therein, the State and Capital serve to close systems by taking control over scientific knowledge production—which works from a stance of truth’s fallibility and develops theses requiring demonstration by a community—and enforcing a “performativity criterion,” whereby value is determined by efficiency (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 63). Those who refuse this end have their “move,” their attempt to proffer a different end, “ignored or repressed . . . because it too quickly destabilized the accepted positions” (Ibid.). For Lyotard, “Such behavior [this silencing] is terrorist. . . . By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. . . . It says ‘Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else’” (Ibid.). In contrast to closing the system so as to permit only a single authority, Lyotard insists upon openings: “There is not yet one world, but some worlds (with various names and narratives)” (§235). 99. After mentioning the terrorism of a singular authority in his The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard footnotes Orwell’s paradox, quoting the bureaucrat from 1984: “We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When you do finally surrender to us, it must be of your own free will” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Op. Cit., n. 222). A closed system’s universality and circularity necessitates paradox because it is a system with a single source of authority that enacts this “terror” not through explicit force, but through context control. The sense, the meaning, has been given in advance; this meaning—love—necessitates one’s free commitment. 100. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Citations will be parenthetical and refer to pages in the English translation. 101. Two reviews also note the work’s authorial ambiguity: “So the book is essentially an early draft. But a draft of what? This is no orderly commentary, but a personal reflection, wherein L. has returned to his phenomenological concerns, in a lyrical discourse mixed with Augustine’s, with God the addressee of both” (J. Kevin Coyle, “The Confession of Augustine [book review],” Theological Studies [June 2002]) and “This book is a meditation that takes places not on the text of Augustine’s Confessions but from within it, blurring the distinctions between Augustine’s voice and Lyotard’s” (Graham Ward, “The Confession of Augustine [review],” Biography 24, 4 [2001]: 942-43, 942). Ward also notes their synchronicity on eros: “In line with another early preoccupation—desire as a disruptive force—L., favors the imagery of the ‘spiritual eroticism’ he perceives to be a main motif of the Confessions” (Ibid., 943). 102. Lyotard quotes Augustine, Confessions (two volumes), trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1912, 1989), bk. X, ch. XXVII. 103. Augustine’s religious desire is fed by the passions rather than reason, which seems ironic given that Augustine’s search for God most literally consists of his repeated demands to know God. The current expression of Augustine’s sensuous desire is constructed by Lyotard so as to emphasize the sensuality and illuminate this irony. Yet Lyotard

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only pedagogically amplifies the undertones already in Augustine and initially discussed in chapter three, section two e, above, in order to show the duality of Augustine’s search for God through faith and through reason and how it is in the sensuous that his faith is given truthful credence. In the passionate suffering, Augustine can begin to grasp the metaphoric and “understand” and respond to the highly physical and sensory account of God: He called, cried, broke open deafness, shined light against blindness, was fragrant against not-smelling, taste, thirst, touch, etc. His account of his awareness of God is entirely tied to the inner and exterior senses of the mind and body. He says his love for God was fueled in this way; fueled by what he can capture and express passionately, not rationally. God is intelligibly unknowable, but we ‘know’ (love) Him how we can, which is through the sensory. This openness to passionate, rather than narrowly rational knowledge, applies equally to Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius, as well. 104. The flesh is also how God called us though His son and how the latter (and latter priests) reveal the truth of the Father to us through the transformation of the sweet wine and dry cracker into the blood and body: a transformation made “without the concept, next to the flesh, in a convulsion” (4). The Eucharist, Lyotard writes, defies any juridical logic: “This spasm is the sole witness to grace. It cannot be submitted as evidence to the tribunal of ideas, which declines comment: confession does not come under its jurisdiction” (4). No matter how capable flesh is to sully the spirit, grace is demonstrated with and through it and it is by the flesh and not mind, that we may know the inexpressible. 105. “The Beautiful is therefore the same as the Good” (704B). 106. The fragments compounded lend speech a staccato that becomes a stutter of repetition and difference through his methodology of the affirmation and negation of names. A productive illustration could be borrowed from Johannes’ obsession with the green cloak as the material symbol of what he knows, in the beginning, about Cordelia in Kierkegaard’s “Seducer’s Diary” (cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard and Edna Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 301 ff.). 107. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Signet Classic, Penguin Putnam, Inc., 2001), bk. X, ch. 18, p. 221. 108. Pseudo-Dionysius claims that Good is “the most important name” for God when elaborating it as his starting point (because it “shows forth all the processions of God” [680B] and is the name “the sacred writers have preeminently set apart for the supradivine God from all other names” [693B]), but, I would argue against the absolutism of this claim of importance because, first, he does not describe it as necessitating reciprocity, as in Beauty and Yearning, and, second, that the lack of a strong Neoplatonic distinction between Good and Beauty may nullify the argument that Pseudo-Dionysius intends a fixed, substantial difference (like Proclus, he argues, begin with the “superior of what is good” [680B]). 109. Heidegger alludes to an argument to be made concerning Augustine’s unique promotion of the role of sight, “Above all, it was Augustine who noted the remarkable priority of ‘seeing’ in conjunction with his interpretation of concupiscentia. Ad oculos enim videre proprie pertinet, seeing truly belongs to the eyes. Utimur autem hoc verbo etiam in ceteris sensibus cum eos ad cognoscendum intendimus [yet we apply this word to the other senses also, when we exercise them in the search after knowledge]” (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh [New York: State University of New York Press, 1996], I, v, §36, p.171; Latin translation, my own). However, I want to highlight the difference between what the sight, crucial to the perception of beauty, leads to: either under-

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standing or to a knowing-feeling much like the sensation that Kristeva argued Proust’s writings to capture (cf. chapter two of the present work). 110. “He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things” (712AB). 111. Riordan, while perhaps too strongly suggesting succession in love following knowledge, nevertheless, succinctly captures the circular feel of love’s reciprocity while highlighting the radical role reversal: “The act of loving, which follows upon the act of knowing, moves in a reverse order: the beloved draws the lover toward itself” (William Riordan, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008], 199). 112. Pseudo-Dionysius’ key evidence is his quote of Proverbs 4:6-8: “Yearn for her and she shall keep you; exalt her and she will extol you; honor her and she will embrace you” (708C); however, the “her” signified in Proverbs is revealed in lines just before: “Get wisdom, get understanding . . .” and “Wisdom is the principle thing” (Proverbs 4:5, 7). He also quotes 2 Samuel 1:26: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” This passage may be love less chaste than that for wisdom, but the love of a comrade still lacks the sexual impulse that could offer Pseudo-Dionysius true support. 113. Luibheid’s translation includes the delicate note “This text is not exactly that of the Septuagint” (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, Op. Cit., p. 81, n. 155). In a notable parallel, Lyotard excises this same verse for comment from Augustine’s Confessions, rewriting it, as well, as “you took him as a woman,” which even more dramatically emphasizes its sexual tone (3). 114. Is Pseudo-Dionysius implying that if we do not understand agape and eros to be one, we simply are not listening properly or, perhaps worse, we have not been graced with initiation into the divine wisdom? Cf. divine knowledge requires initiation (597C); God’s meaning is “hidden” for all but the initiated (640D). 115. Albeit, a weak contradiction that has been undone by many accounts. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “nothing and no one is untouchable in Christianity, since even the body of God is given to be eaten and drunk” and “Christianity will have been the invention of the religion of touch, of the sensible, of presence that is immediate to the body and to the heart” (Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], 14). 116. Paradoxically, religious eroticism tends to describe the ineffable, more than the physical, whereas asceticism focuses on the material, so as to delineate what one must avoid. Yet, still, asceticism’s tendency to fetishism (the meaning of the material becomes symbol) is distinct from its sexualization. Most erotic poetry mimics religious eroticism; when it does not, it leans to asceticism by rendering material sexuality into a means of social control and/or commentary (cf. “Men’s sex-urge is less primitive, less raw, / Our lust is bound by the limits of the law. / But for women . . .,” Ovid, The Art of Love, trans. James Michie [New York: The Modern Library, 2002], 21). 117. Song of Songs 7:1-9. Walsh, commenting on the unity of the Song within the Bible, expresses an insight equally pertinent to its relevancy to Pseudo-Dionysius: “The God of the Bible is a God no one gets to see, so the search and struggle during a prolonged and painful absence by the loved other [in the Song] is, in a very real sense, the theme of the

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Bible. Belief in an unseen God, amid a life full of joys and sorrows, is about the human experience of wanting without consummation” (Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000], 32). 118. This sense of communion concurs with Georges Bataille’s central premises and definition of eroticism: “Eroticism cannot be discussed unless man too is discussed in the process. In particular, it cannot be discussed independently of the history of religions,” which rests upon the definition of eroticism as a longing for continuity; continuity that is systematically pursued beyond this world is his definition for religion (Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957, 1986], 8 ff). Further congruity between Bataille and Pseudo-Dionysius is their differentiation of agape and eros intoning that between stillness and agitation; love can be declared and rested within contentedly whereas desire agitates and impels us to action. Cf., section two of this chapter for more. 119. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995), 246a-250c. 120. Saint Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff, (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merril Company, Inc.), 78. 121. Ibid., bk. I, ch. 3-4. 122. Most notably, eros transgresses the limits of logic. For Lyotard, the libidinal is the superior force of disruption of linearity (cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant [Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993]). Linearity entraps us in a thinking that forces us to silence because within it, we can never express the differend captured by Lyotard’s Auschwitz and Pseudo-Dionysius’ God. Eros, like the first moment of Kant’s sublime, can make us gasp and open the space of interruption; Pseudo-Dionysius captures this in his instruction: “we call a halt to the activities of our minds . . . we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge . . . that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of . . . it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it” (592D). Eros’ interruption and opening a productive space of silence permits us to transgress impossibility. But transgression requires limits to transgress. Silence and eros, in order to be, risk their own destruction: silence can only be heard in contrast to noise and eros seeks consummation in having its lack. But, since silence is a phrase and divine union does not destroy faith, the transgression of their limits yields an impossible affirmation instead of finality. Bataille captures this spirit in his seminal work, arguing, “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death” (Bataille, Eroticism, Op. Cit., 11). An affirmation of life beyond the risk of death also defines faith in PseudoDionysius’ mysticism; this, again, is captured by Bataille: “the erotic moment is also the most intense of all (except perhaps for mystical experience); hence its place is at the loftiest peak of man’s spirit” (Ibid., 273). Or, for Pseudo-Dionysius, the affirmation finds its encouragement in that “we shall be united with him and, our understanding carried away, blessedly happy, we shall be struck by his blazing light” (592C). The only question that truly remains is, in the disruption that risks the rupture of common communication, can silence and eros successfully rupture only the linearity that prohibits thought of the unthinkable without erasing all other possibilities of expression? 123. “And love is defined as essentially ‘ecstatic’, that is: the one who loves is drawn out of himself and centres his being on the object of his love. Love is ecstatic, because it is

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unitive: the lover is united to the beloved, who is, for him, a manifestation of beauty” (Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite [London: Continuum, 1989], 94). 124. The reciprocity of eros between God and humanity does not imply equalization or permit ecstasy to diminish the lover. Our ecstasy can bring union with God, but never make us God; God’s union with us never dilutes His omnipotence or transcendence, which would be His destruction and make yearning evil, and not His creation: His yearning is only goodness, as is ours. When He gives Himself to us, “he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself” (712A-B). Further, God is the “superabundance of delights unfathomable to the mind. . . . He is beyond being itself. Quite simply, as ‘drunk’ God stands outside of all good things, being the superfullness of all these things” (Pseudo-Dionysius, “Letter Nine: To Titus the hierarch,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Op. Cit., 1112B-C; “inebriated” cites the Song 5:1). The reciprocity is captured in its conclusion: God must sleep due to the “mixing of wine and the hangover of God after his inebriation” (Ibid., 1113C). 125. The “inner human” does not need to remain an elusive denomination; it may be understood to be the same as the “inner self” that is identified as that which merges with God in divine union, for example, Aquinas’ definition of mysticism as the cognitio dei experimentalis, the knowledge of God through experience, that Gershom Scholem explains as “the fundamental experience of the inner self within enters into immediate contact with God or metaphysical Reality” (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schoken Books, 1974], 4). A similar move is found in Lyotard’s work on Malraux, who proposes, “we hear the voices of others with our ears, but our own through our throat,” later adding that this throat is one’s “inner ears,” suggesting another way in which we know the self not through the exterior whole of the self, but through something inner, some inside site of the self that is truly the self (Lyotard, Soundproof Room, Op. Cit., 84, 88, respectively). 126. “Interior intimo meo . . . superior summo meo” (cf. Confessions, bk. III, ch. 6) and “You were within, but I was outside” (Confessions, bk. X, ch. 27). Cf. Eugene TeSelle, “Review,” The Journal of Religion 83, 3 (July 2003): 458-60, 460, especially, “the You to whom confession is addressed is the heteronomous Other, a feature of the Jewish tradition that so repelled and fascinated Lyotard” (Ibid., 459). 127. Lyotard, Soundproof Room, Op. Cit., 98. 128. Ibid., 92. 129. Ibid., 94. 130. Ibid., 94. A similar sentiment follows shortly thereafter: “It follows that each person could be and that each may at least be accessible to the stridency by which artworks vibrate similarly to one’s throat. But art and writing demand, in addition, that the excess be begged and wanted” (Ibid., 96, 98). 131. Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,”Op. Cit., 4. 132. Cf. Omer Bartov, “Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Reinterpretation of National Socialism,” The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 75-98.

CONCLUSION: THE EXPRESSION OF THE

INEXPRESSIBLE To declare an expression inexpressible is to make a logical judgment about the validity of the possibility of its expression. To express the inexpressible violates logic’s command about the bounds of meaning. Nevertheless, the expression is possible and is meaningful, even if it remains outside of the permissions of the tribunals of logic. Thus, such a declaration ought to be understood more properly as an ethical provocation: it is a challenge from and to custom and habit; it proposes a judgment about character that we can accept or seek to refute. This current work, through reading the compatibilities between Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend and Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names, has demonstrated the universality of this command, the weight of its stakes, and a multiplicity of ways to attempt to express what resists expression. As an event that overflows itself in such a way that it washes away the normal constructs we would use to grasp it and conceptualize it into a narrative expression, the inexpressible demands this multi-pronged reflection. Every inadequacy uncovered in these attempts only feeds the justification of the importance of the undertaking. Lyotard’s witness is the holocaust survivor who is confronted by a logical bind from historical revisionists: while she lives, she cannot testify to her internment at a death camp. The survivor is silenced: damned if she testifies to a logical impossibility, and damned if she does not, remains silent, and gives no testimony. Being forced into silence provokes in her a nauseating awareness of the endless possible phrasings, the infinity of linkages her sentences could make, but do not, before the tribunal. Lyotard takes up this logical bind to see how it was tied and how to undo it, instead of dismissing it as hate speech that says

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nothing. Engaging it, he eventually unravels it from within its own logical framework: it violates its own presumptions about the validity of communicating across phrase regimens. This study reveals the method by which other binds can be undone, but it also reveals how there are true differends that cannot be spanned. Lyotard cannot grant the survivor’s testimony true redemption because he reveals the power of the revisionist’s logic to be founded in its pointing beyond itself to the truly insurmountable differend of “Auschwitz.” Pseudo-Dionysius’ witness is the religious faithful who is called to testify to what he cannot: knowledge of God. Yet, his faith commands him to bear witness and to give testimony—however impossible this act of faith may be. God exceeds what we can know of Him, even as we are called to praise Him. Theology, traditionally, responds by naming Him in the face of uncertain knowledge or remaining silent to honor His unknowability. But, Pseudo-Dionysius re-engages the logical bind; instead of choosing one means of response or the other, he synthesizes the impossible into an expression truly worthy to express it. He names and un-names God all that we know and could know and do not know of Him. His most honest and all-encompassing expression does not abide logic, but redefines the possibilities for meaningful expressions. The inexpressible upsets our perceptual and rational exercises and confounds our tongues. Its pure, immediate expression is impossible, but our stammering and trembling before the abyss of meaning does give us a clue to its most productive expression. Reason commands us, be it by a tribunal of law or faith or out of living a philosophical life, to seek its comprehension by analyzing its components, establishing the hierarchy of its aspects, and discerning its instruction. Reason’s path forever frustrates us, as its object is essentially elusive. Lady Philosophy’s diagnosis uncovered that the true cause of Boethius’ suffering was neither his unjust imprisonment and torture, nor his loss of possessions and reputation; instead, it was his exile from the truth. While the path back home, in The Consolation of Philosophy, is, instead, demonstrably possible and successful, it is revelatory to see how its consolation is contained in the cure that comes from trekking this steep road, and its guide of reason employs both dialogue and song.1 The inexpressible prohibits our true homecoming to the truth, but its occurrence is a command that impossibility be held as possibility, as a regulative principle, that fuels our attempt, too, to trek this road. Our attempt renders the impossibility to be a fulfillment of its command: our absurd, necessary activity is the exercise of the act of faith and philosophy. Reason’s frustration compels us to keep on and compels it to utilize the passions. Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius are otherwise heterogeneous thinkers who both open reason to listen to the passions. They engage two sides of an identical problem in methods remarkably similar for their radical embraces and rigorous workings through of absurdity. Both approach the impossible, acknowledge its call, and honorably commit to its engagement. They, themselves, become models of what flourished throughout ancient and medieval philosophy as spiritual exercise.

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This project is its own spiritual exercise with Lyotard and PseudoDionysius’ content as its model. As explored in chapter two, Lyotard reveals postmodernism, inspired by Freudian Durcharbeitung, to be an activity of rereading and re-writing. Postmodernism, like faith, is an activity, and not a singular and solitary route to a predetermined answer. As Lyotard took up the bind of the Holocaust survivor and undertook the endeavor for a new idiom by which she could testify, this project has taken up his inexpressible and endeavored to express it through re-reading Pseudo-Dionysius’ most productive names for God: silence and eros. This activity, within the current work, diagnosed many paths and found the most rewarding to be the one wherein one enters the perplexity and persistently works through the many idioms that could promise to solve it. This intensely aestheticized, phenomenological situation (as the activity of trying to fix reality by playing it through) of Lyotard’s problem permits the final chapter to employ the agitation of eros and the garrulous expression of reverent silence, both demonstrated by each, to most truthfully begin to express that which resists logic. The sixth chapter began from a plateau that had firmly established the necessity by which the inexpressible must be expressed and how Lyotard’s every attempted expression of it had failed in some regard. Lyotard, initially, had rejected silence as a productive response for the survivor, as chapter one revealed. Initially, he had likewise rejected the Christian narrative of love as an ultimately productive address to the differend, as chapter three suggested and six revealed. Nevertheless, this final chapter conducted a co-re-reading of Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius that founds a conceptual symbiosis born from the compatible natures of silence and eros as simultaneously void and overfull of meaning at once that was consistent with both thinkers. This necessitated that silence had to be heard through the passions and eros had to be addressed with reverence and a logical-abatement of silence and opened a path for the formation of an impossible idiom. Silence and eros combined permits an idiom that peaceably maintains multiple inner contradictions of lack and plenitude. This synthesis ultimately demonstrated its productivity by undermining the limitations of the revisionist logic while also evading the varying faults to which narrow conceptions of love or silence, and the diverse reasons to which Stein, Wittgenstein, Adorno, and the Cashinahua, fell prey. The idiom born from the symbiosis of silence and eros is a productive solution for speaking the unspeakable even as the verification of its truth before a skeptic or court re-invokes all of the questions arising mid-way through The Differend. How can they hear silence when they forbid its legitimacy? This stumbling block, however, may be the point. To live the reflective life is to pick up the argument and re-read it through again—as opposed to becoming yet another interlocutor who runs from Socrates and forces the end of dialogue. Continuation may seem futile, as Nietzsche implies at the end of the second essay of his Genealogy of Morals, by asking: are you constructing an ideal or destroying

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one? What new altars would we have to raise in order to destroy old ideals? 2 But, he proffers us his implication through a wearying series of questions. Overlook the intonated answer and see how many questions come forth. Nietzsche shows us what Lyotard tells us, that questions call for response, however impossible a final answer may be: “The question already has its answer: another question” (§104). Understanding the answer to be a question reveals an even deeper implication of the very value of continuing, according to Nietzsche: “One skill is needed—lost today, unfortunately—for the practice of reading as an art: the skill to ruminate, which cows possess but modern man lacks.” 3 The truth that burdens the lovers of wisdom is that we must express the inexpressible, and that there is no single expression, and neither is there an end. The awareness of the müssen invokes our responsibility, and that responsibility is heightened when awareness of its eternal engagement emerges—but, is the responsibility we bear to responding to the inexpressible responsibly borne out when no political program can come of our response? The deflation of the task’s impossibility is revealed in Lyotard’s final passage of The Differend: “But the occurrence doesn’t make a story, does it? —Indeed, it’s not a sign. But it is to be judged, all the way through to its incomparability. You can’t make a political ‘program’ with it, but you can bear witness to it. —And what if no one hears the testimony, etc. (No. 1ff)? —Are you prejudging the Is it happening” (§264)? Yet, this conclusion to his work also reveals his sly smile, his optimism that must be considered absurd in light of his work and its demonstrated impossibility of erasing differends. Ereignis, the arrive-t-il, the occurrence, the Is it happening?, does not make a story that the survivor can tell the revisionist, the witness can tell the jury, the grandmother can tell her young grandchild, the activist can tell the populace, the senator can tell the senate. Yet, every event must be judged, analyzed to its moment of collapse, have its translation into practical action shown to be a mistranslation that missed expressing the event itself, and every event must be witnessed, must be impossibly expressed even if there are no ears capable of hearing it (as in the case for silent, erotic testimony). Why? Because we cannot prejudge the occurrence. Of course the necessity of witnessing and realization of deaf audiences throws us back to the beginning of the book. Of course to hope at the end that the book will turn out different upon rereading is absurd. But, this absurdity, in full awareness of its nature as absurd, is what Lyotard is revealing throughout the work as the necessity for the work. Thus, we must ask, why can we not prejudge the occurrence even when it cannot found an ethical maxim, draft a law, form a society, give us a platform to preach from to prevent the next holocaust or, at least, give us a few party lines with which to concretely respond to the revisionists and hate mongers? A critic has a surplus of fodder to identify Lyotard’s conclusion as an eschewal of action parallel to Heidegger’s shameful, silent retreat to his hut after World War II and to the disdain held against Adorno for his political silence in obedience to his negative philosophy that refused a positive stance from which something could

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be done. The parallels may be accurate, even if the disdain for all three may be rash; irrespective, I maintain that Lyotard, still, differs. Some political programs could easily be grafted upon his words or germinated from within them. They are not impossible, nor forbidden—they are just not successful in undoing differends and wholly encapsulating events. All political programs will become narratives; they will transmodulate into their own representation and undo their own productivity. 4 Nevertheless, in the face of their failure, in some instances, they may be called for: they may be productive even when they will ultimately fail. Politics is a dynamic practical science. As Augustine diagnoses and Aquinas concurs, temporal law can and must justly change. Programs and policies will fail because they do not address the sublime totality of the event. Working through failures is an active and living therapy that never ends and never remains static long enough for the possibility of the construction of a perfect political program. Lyotard, himself, in 1966, experienced this painful coming to awareness of political failure during his resignation from “Pouvoir Ouvrier,” an intellectual activist group born from the schism of “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” that published a journal of the same name and to which Lyotard had been a foundational member and writer for over a decade. His resignation from this group and his dearest friends, from political action, and from his theoretical base in Marxism was spurned by a creeping awareness of dialectical materialism becoming more an idiom than a universal reality. He writes, “These questions frightened me in themselves because of the formidable theoretical tasks they promised, and also because they seemed to condemn anyone who gave himself over to them to the abandonment of any militant practice for an indeterminate time.” 5 His awareness of the failure of the political program was accompanied by the overwhelmingly fearful and inspiring realization of the plethora of possible responses. His awakening to the fault lines of Marxism prohibited his honest and wholehearted participation in militant action. This prohibition did not then limit his action, but focused its form to becoming the seeker in aporia, uncertain of the truth but certain of the pursuit. The clash between clarity and uncertainty has long resounded: Your words had stuck in my heart and I was hedged around about on all sides by Thee. Of your eternal life I was now certain, although I had seen it in an enigma and as through a glass. But I had ceased to have any doubt that there was an incorruptible substance from which came every substance. I no longer desired to be more certain of you, only to stand more firmly in you.6

These words are from Book Eight of Augustine’s Confessions and reveal a harmony between the thinkers and between the clash’s discordant contradiction and defined sensibility. Their radical collusion with and difference from Lyotard illuminate the persistence of faith, an absurd optimism, in an awareness of the disintegration of previous beliefs, and an explanation of how one’s oeuvre of

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radical politics naturally led to penetrating notebooks on the Saint. By no means am I suggesting Lyotard “found God” after giving up Marxism. No, rather, he found himself, like the Saint, surrounded by questions and hedged about by the truth. He, like Augustine, sought to find how one memorializes truth. Both wanted to keep alive in memory the event that brought them to the truth’s command to know it. Lyotard had never not known the questions against Marxism or against the success of political programs, but he had always been able to reconcile them and arbitrate away their differences. It was not necessarily a concrete truth he sought to replace what truth Marxism had been, but to embrace the truth that is to stand firmly in active engagement with the productivity of philosophy that persists through the eventual failure of all paradigms. Lyotard, like Augustine before God, finds himself enraptured, in fear and awe, by the radical unsettling of the ground beneath his feet when Marxism’s totalizing message ruptures. How does one begin to know what cannot be known, memorialize what resists its grasp from the recesses of memory? When every attempt to encapsulate it and express it fails, Lyotard still invites the event and asks us to judge it to and through its incomparability. But, to what can he proceed to consolidate his search, and to what ground can he stand upon to have the possibility to judge? The final chapter has shown how he can proceed to silence and eros. If these prove not to be the last option, then he can proceed to other, further forms of linguistic game play to endeavor, again, to capture the inexpressible in every object of knowledge. If they do dissolve that differend, he can still, then, proceed on to other, new logical binds. These binds, likewise, he can address through other investigations or mediums of representation, such as art or music or, like the Saint, autobiography. Thought must, to use his own, preferred images, cast itself adrift between the archipelagos of thought, or become like the shape-shifting clouds, always open to new configurations and reinterpretations. As he drifted from (Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud), he had to drift to something: “We have to drift.” 7 Lyotard claimed that when he was a boy he desired to become “a monk (especially a Dominican), a painter, or historian.”8 He admits these youthful desires because he was once asked to lecture upon his “position,” and the path that had led him there. He was led to his position, that of a positionlessness, by his three desired vocations: “The monk seems to be suggested by the law, the painter by forms and colors, the historian by events.” 9 Thus, that to which Lyotard may proceed and that by which he may judge, and his position therein, is the drift between law, form and color, and events. In legal language, Lyotard begins The Differend to explore the nature of binds that violently wrong the witness unable to bear witness to those events that overflow their encapsulation. In the court or under the law of religion, such testimony is absurd—one can neither point to or offer up as evidence something that says the whole truth of the even, nor can one find the reason by which the faithful is called to confess to an omniscient God. But, to honor the call, one

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must and can give forth testimony by presenting oneself as the activity, condition, and state of being (-monium) a witness (testis-).10 The religious and legal blur together as the activity of trying to capture events, and as the revelation of Lyotard’s “position” to be both historian and monk. The blurring itself, enacted rigorously and shockingly in every work he left us, is also aesthetic, and shows him, too, to be the painter. Just as Plato’s dialogue on justice, The Republic, concludes, not with a rational delineation of legal or ethical maxims, but with a myth, Lyotard’s exploration into the prohibition of testimony by narrow logic ends in reason’s passionate rupture by the force of the aesthetic.11 Just as Plato’s myth of the soldier Er witnessing the judgment of souls may be interpreted as aesthetic pedagogy—proffering an image one ought to emulate in order to lead one’s own life to the good life—Lyotard’s engagement of the plethora of responses to the inexpressible represent his aesthetic response to the sublime and its address through the spiritual exercise of philosophy. Er may well be eros. He, Er or Lyotard or Pseudo-Dionysius, interchangeably and equally, is/are the model(s) for our desire to live the good life. The just life is a life well lived, even as any life is more than can be captured by naming the just as any single rule or law. Plato could not conclude with a delineation of just action, but can inspire us toward the good life by a story. A story can better represent that which is mutable and more than we can delineate and universalize. Lyotard cannot conclude The Differend with a political program, a final solution, nor even a story, because the event is more than any single narrative. But, he can refuse us a story, tell us it is fiction, and give us a wink. Lyotard found the truth—the faithful persistence in the face of impossibility (that every wink is propaedeutic to a new story)—in that which Corinthians captures and the Saint above referenced: For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. . . . For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. 12

This truth, for Lyotard, is not divine union wherein the “perfect is come,” but the abidance by faith, hope, and charity in training one’s eyes to see through the darkened glass. This is most accurate for Lyotard if one opens up the notion of charity into that of love (and the Oxford English Dictionary did note the deplorable lack of fixity in the Vulgate’s translation of charity, four times to one, into love), into that exception he holds out against everything else. 13 All humanity has a responsibility before and to the inexpressible. To act is to live up to the responsibility, even when the outcome fails. To recognize the inevitability of failure and act anyway is the only possible way by which we may be surprised. And, only thus, is there the possibility of an otherwise-ending, the possibility that a miracle may happen. Abraham raises his axe to kill his son.

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Only with the intention of his action succeeding is his action true and, therefore, interrupted by the hand of God. Had he expected a miracle, his action could not have been a genuine act of faith. For any of us to expect an answer to a logical bind, whether as an expression of an impossible testimony or an empirically verifiable fact about God, is to foreclose the very possibility of their expression. To expect an expression of the inexpressible as an answer to its own question is to discount the genuine nature of philosophy as a striving to know in aporia.

Notes 1. Cf. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard H. Green (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), esp. I.6. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), essay II, §XXIV. 3. Ibid., Preface, §VIII. 4. Outside of Lyotard, this has been broadly discussed and invoked in the Nietzsche comment, above, concerning the altars that must be constructed to replace all those one breaks. Further, cf. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion of how the majority co-opts and corrupts, ultimately undoing, all minoritarian programs (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980]). An interesting analysis can also be found in the introduction to Joshua Landy and Michael Saler’s The ReEnchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1-14, concerning what a secular re-enchantment must include so as to fill the “God shaped void” of our disenchanted modern age (Ibid., 2). 5. Lyotard, “A Memorial of Marxism,” trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 45-75, 50. 6. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Signet Classic, Penguin Putnam, Inc., 2001), Bk. VIII, 150. 7. Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Galilée, Union Générale d’Editions, 1973), 12-3. 8. Lyotard, “Clouds,” in Peregrinations, Op. Cit., 1-15, 1. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Implicitly religious and initially a denomination of the Ten Commandments, “Testimony” comes from the Latin testimonium, by composition of testis, or witness, and monium, which signifies an action, condition, or state of being. 11. Cf. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 614b-621d. 12. 1 Corinthians 13:9-13. The collusion of intellectual therapy and desire, in conjunction with religion, is provocatively captured in Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 Swedish film that borrows this text for its title: “Through a Glass, Darkly” [“Sasom i en spegel”]. Therein, the protagonist is stricken by the realization that her mental health and comfort, that she felt granted as an acknowledgement by God, is granted, instead, by a horrific spider, thus collapsing her growing health, stability, and faith in reality.

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13. Lyotard remarks, “Nothing else, with the exception of love, seemed to us to be worth a moment’s attention,” and Alain Badiou confirms “[Lyotard] always give[s] love an exceptional status, even when his political abnegation was at its most intense (Lyotard, “Afterword: A Memorial of Marxism,” Op. Cit., 47, and Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey [London: Verso, 2009], 92-3, respectively).

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INDEX addressee, see phrase universe addressor, see phrase universe Adorno, Theodor, 8-9, 75, 90, 103, 126, 137, 140-3, 146-7, 155n74, 224-25, 254-55 aesthetics, 70, 74, 79, 82, 89, 125, 127, 132, 148-9n18, 154n56, 155n74, 223, 227, 230, 234, 256, 266; defined, 254 affirmative theology, see cataphatic agape, 7, 44, 51-53, 180n43, 202, 217n29, 218n33, 226, 235-36, 262-65, 267, 272n46, 279n114, 280n118 apophatic, negative theology, 6-8, 47-49, 51, 54, 164, 188, 190-1, 196, 198, 206, 210, 213, 246, 262 Aquinas, 44, 174, 187, 217n27, 281n125, 287 Aristotle, 2, 10n4, 58n51, 93, 9798, 103, 148n18, 150n34, 151n39, 166, 178n17, 178n20, 200, 206-08, 220n56, 226, 228, 230, 244 Augustine, 42, 70, 78, 86n45, 9294, 149n24, 225-27, 229, 256, 258-61 “Auschwitz,” 5-6, 11n11, 15, 94, 101-3, 115, 126, 140, 142-43, 147 Badiou, Alain, 256, 291n13 Barthes, Roland, 97, 149n20, 226 Bataille, Georges, 83n1, 176, 180n43, 239, 280n118, 280n122 beauty, 65n145, 161, 164, 166-70, 188, 190, 212-13, 227, 230, 261-66; defined, 201-04

Boethius, 139, 275n88, 284 Buber, Martin, 182n79 Cashinahua, 39, 75, 90, 98, 104, 120, 126, 143-47, 224, 257 cataphatic, affirmative theology, 68, 47-48, 51, 164, 188, 190-91, 196, 198, 206, 210, 213, 22324, 256, 262 de Certeau, Michel, 173-76, 181n64, 182n65, 238 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 211, 218n30 The Cloud of Unknowing, 46, 53, 63n122 Da-sein, 29, 31-32, 40-43, 58n50, 59n59, 125 Deleuze, Gilles, 72, 156n78, 274n81, 275n82, 275n82, 290n4 Derrida, Jacques, 71-72, 77, 83n1, 120, 123, 158n99, 219n45 Descartes, René, 24, 42, 59n61, 9293, 95, 103, 129, 206 differend, 5-6, 8-9, 71, 81, 90-92, 100-06, 108-09, 111-13, 11524, 131-3, 136, 138, 142-44, 224-26, 241-42, 246-56, 267 Durcharbeitung, free association, 80-81, 87n49, 139, 157n86; also see working through ecstasy, 8, 43-44, 48-49, 62n105, 63n132, 64n136, 166-67, 171, 188, 199, 202-04, 214, 231, 240, 264 emanation, 6-7, 12n14, 48-50, 55, 62n105, 63n132, 64n136, 78, 165-70, 179n35, 179n36, 179n38, 190-92, 194, 201, 213,

311

264, also see procession, reversion Ereignis, see event eros, 7-8, 44, 51-54, 64-5n145, 65n153, 65n156, 152-3n46, 170, 180n43, 180n51, 209, 226-42, 256-68; defined for Pseudo-Dionysius, 201-04 event, occurrence, is it happening?, Ereignis, 5, 9-10, 29, 40-43, 55, 58n47, 74, 78, 80, 96, 10202, 105, 110, 134, 136-38, 144, 148-9n18, 253, 255, 257, 259, 268 evil, 116, 148-9n18, 178n20, 199; in Pseudo-Dionysius, 204-09, 227 Faurisson, Robert, 5, 18-19, 21, 26, 34, 54, 56n1, 105, 113, 115, 117-18, 150n27, 224, 244, 247-48, 250-51, 262, 267, 274nn75-77 Feyerabend, Paul, 114 Foucault, Michel, 72 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 8, 12n18, 37, 72-74, 80-82, 84n9-10, 87n48, 137, 139, 156n78, 235, 285, 288 genres of discourse, 91, 101-02, 104, 108-12, 114-21, 123-25, 129-30, 132, 142-43, 248-54, 257 Gilson, Étienne, 24, 149n20 good (as a divine name or belonging to God), 165-67, 186-87, 189, 191, 199-201, 260-62 grand narratives, 2, 92, 99, 104, 127, 139, 231, 256, 258

INDEX

Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 72, 77, 90, 98, 103, 125, 141-43, 150n26, 150n35, 158n101, 241 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 29-34, 38, 40-43, 50, 54, 56n3, 58n47, 58n50, 58n51, 59n59, 59n61, 60n62, 60n63, 61n93, 61n102, 64n142, 83n1, 125, 146-47, 151-2n39, 245, 249, 253-55, holocaust literature, 18-25 Husserl, Edmund, 3-4, 61n89, 70, 72, 76-78, 99, 116, 149n24, 155n74, 238-39, 273n55 inexpressible, expression, 1-3, 1517, 51, 54-56, 101, 104, 113, 127, 136-38, 141, 225-26, 233, 239, 242, 266-67 is it happening? (arrive-t-il?), see event James, William, 127, 177n3 Julian of Norwich, 46, 62n121, 63n122, 204 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 43, 70, 81-82, 89, 98-99, 103-04, 122-23, 125, 138-40, 151-52n39, 23033, 250, 254-55 Kierkegaard, Søren, 29, 58n45, 92, 94-96, 103, 138, 141, 162, 177n5, 278n106 Kristeva, Julia, 87n49, 233-35, 239, 279n109 Levi, Primo, 18, 20 Levinas, Emmanuel, 98, 104, 219n45, 270n37 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 252 light (as a divine name), 199-201, 245 linkage, 9, 34-5, 42, 48, 73-4, 8182, 91, 95, 101-05, 120-21,

INDEX

123-24, 127-47, 223, 230, 232, 247-50 Maimonides, Moses, 46 Marion, Jean-Luc, 63n124, 64n142, 65n146, 83n1, 217n27, 219n42, 221n75, 243 Marx, Karl, 69-70, 72-74, 77, 80, 100, 104, 149n24, 287-88 mereology, 193 mysticism, mystic, mystical, 1-2, 45, 43, 47, 51, 54, 68-69, 71, 74, 104, 131, 136-37, 162, 164, 166-68, 170, 197-99, 204, 21014, 238, 245, 251; defined, 171-76 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 83n1, 228, 230, 253, 268n9, 279n115 negative theology, see apophatic Neoplatonism, 3, 12n17, 48-49, 53, 56, 64n136, 69, 78, 147, 161, 178n17, 179n35, 179n38, 181n61, 186-87, 189-91, 193, 195, 197, 200-02, 204, 211, 213, 219n44, 221n67, 224, 259, 269n27, 278n108; defined, 164-71 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 80-81, 86n47, 152n39, 285-86 occurrence, see event Ohlendorf, Otto, 23-24, 34 d’Oingt, Marguerite, 66n161, 204, 219n43 paradox, 2, 11n9, 18, 27-29, 31, 41, 45-47, 73-75, 82, 85n32, 9495, 99, 101-02, 105-08, 110, 114, 122, 126, 138, 143, 153n48, 162, 191, 211, 223-24, 246, 258-61, 277n99

312

parataxis, 8-9, 11n9, 73, 90, 126, 137, 140-43, 147 participation, 49, 169, 171, 190, 193, 195, 197, 199, 202, 22930 Pascal, Blaise, 174 passions (pathos), 5, 7, 9, 43, 50, 66n164, 112, 117, 197, 203, 212-14, 230-31, 238; defined, 55-56, 170-71 phenomenology, 4, 8, 11n8, 17, 3031, 42, 50, 59n52, 68-70, 7274, 77-79, 82, 83n1, 86n45, 87n49, 92, 101, 107, 116, 127, 132, 136, 139, 149n24, 151n39, 155n74, 157n86, 175, 182n65, 223, 228, 232, 235, 254, 259, 267, 277n101, 285 phrase, 16, 21, 25-28, 33, 35-38, 40-43, 95-97, 102-15, 118-38, 141-42, 230, 246-56 phrase universe, 41, 61n89, 75, 81, 96, 99-102, 111-14, 116, 11820, 131, 136, 138, 142-43, 145, 246-56, 259, 267 Plato, Socrates, 7, 64-5n145, 97-98, 101-03, 106, 112, 118-21, 126, 150n33, 152-3n46, 153n48, 162, 164-71, 200-01, 204, 208, 235, 237-38, 243, 255, 262, 265; also see Neoplatonism Plotinus, 7, 50, 65n145, 167-70, 179n42, 180n43, 180n51, 180n52, 189, 204, 207, 217n30 Plutarch, 166, 178n20, 256 Porete, Marguerite, 66n161, 204, 219n43 postmodern, postmodernism, 4-5, 35, 68-72, 75-82, 97, 104, 139, 148-49n18, 254, 259 post-structuralism, structuralism, 4, 72-74, 77-79, 96-97, 100, 127

313

procession, 4, 12n14, 31, 48, 50, 87n49, 165, 167-69, 188, 190, 195-97, 199-201, 208, 217n24, 260, 264, 278n108, also see emanation Proclus, 7, 12n14, 48, 164, 167, 170, 189, 197-98, 204, 217n23, 217n30, 278n108 Proust, Marcel, 233-35, 239-40, 253, 270n32, 279n109 referent, see phrase universe reversion, 4, 12n14, 48, 50, 165, 167-68, 200-01, 227, 260, 264, also see emanation re-writing modernity, 4, 11n9, 30, 77, 79-82, 85n36, 86n37, 99, 139, 148n18, 285, also see postmodernism Sartre, Jean-Paul, 33, 97, 149n20, 151n39, 162, 270n33 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 61n89, 100, 210 Scholem, Gershom, 211, 220n60, 281n125 sense, see phrase universe silence, 5, 8, 10, 17-18, 20-23, 2530, 32, 36, 38, 40, 42-43, 45, 50, 54, 67-68, 74-75, 97, 10102, 105-07, 111-13, 118-19, 121, 126, 134, 136-37, 140, 143, 147, 171, 175-76, 266-67; synthesis with eros, 236-42; in Lyotard, 243-56 spiritual exercise, 10, 17, 46, 623n122, 67, 79, 132, 140, 166, 168, 171, 197, 199, 225, 234, 242, 249, 254, 256, 267; defined, for Pseudo-Dionysius, 210-14 Stein, Gertrude, 8-9, 75, 98, 103, 126-32, 137, 146-47, 154n56

INDEX

sublime, 43, 79, 227, 250, 254; defined, 230-34 subsistence, 193-99 sympathy, 196-98, 201, 227, 253, 269n27 testimony, 101-02, 119-22; etymology, 25; in Lyotard, 18-30, 33-40, 127-47; in Nuremberg Trials, 22-25; in PseudoDionysius, 45-53, 188-93 truth (concerning knowledge of God or as divine name), 7, 10, 45, 47-49, 51, 65n147, 69, 165, 175, 187, 189-93, 196, 199, 210, 213, 256, 259, 265, 278n103, 278n-104, 284, 28889 Vaillant-Couturier, Marie-Claude, 22-23, 34 Wiesel, Elie, 21 Wiesenthal, Simon, 20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 3, 60n68, 75, 87n48, 99, 114, 117, 123, 125-26, 129-41, 143, 146-47, 150n26, 154n66, 155n74 working through, re-writing, 4, 87n49, 95, 97-98, 109, 139, 149n23, 225; also see Durcharbeitung, postmodernism yearning, see eros zero degree, 96-98

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mélanie Victoria Walton is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. She earned her B.A. in philosophy, creative writing, and comparative religions from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her area of specialization is historically focused on questions linking late modern and contemporary Continental philosophy with the Neoplatonism and mysticism of late antiquity and the early middle ages. Such specialization has led her areas of competency across the canon on questions of lived experience and the expression of meaning as they surface in aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of religion, critical race and gender theory, environmental philosophy, and Eastern thought. Her recent and forthcoming scholarship includes chapters on phenomenology and guerilla gardening, racism and sexual stereotypes in film, and Lyotard on caritas and eros in collected volumes, as well as articles on Lyotard’s book on Sam Francis, reason and myth in Augustine and Heidegger, and collage art.