Fragility and Transcendence: Essays on the Thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien 1538153211, 9781538153215

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction • Jeffrey Bloechl
1. Knowing a Secret After and According to Jean-Louis Chrétien • Jean-Luc Marion
2. Blessed Failing • Jérôme de Gramont
3. Fatigue, Illness, and Joy • Rudolf Bernet
4. The Body of the Response • Emmanuel Housset
5. Wrestling with the Angel • Emmanuel Falque
6. The Poetics of the Symbolic Body in Chrétien’s Symbolique du corps • Stephen E. Lewis
7. Hospitality and Responsibility: The Possibility of an “Antiphonal Ethics” in Jean-Louis Chrétien • Christina M. Gschwandtner
8. Praying with Jean-Louis Chrétien • Andrew Prevot
9. The Cosmic Poetics of Jean-Louis Chrétien • Catherine Pickstock
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Fragility and Transcendence

REFRAMING CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Series Editors:

Steven Shakespeare, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Liverpool Hope University Duane Williams, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool Hope University Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion aims to revitalise continental philosophy of religion. It challenges the standard Western Christian framework which has dominated philosophy of religion in the academy. It provides a platform for voices, theories and traditions which have been suppressed or marginalised by that framework and offers genuinely new and constructive openings in the field. It is motivated by an imperative to liberate original thinking about religion from the legacy of Empire. The series is experimental, creative, subversive and risky. It promotes work which brings continental philosophy of religion into fruitful dialogue with postcolonial theory; Islamic studies; heretical, esoteric or mystical or otherwise marginalised Western traditions; non-Western philosophical traditions; and critical studies of power, race, gender and sexuality. Taking seriously the fertility of European philosophy, it does not, however, merely subject ‘other’ discourses to a European gaze but allows different discourses to interact and mutate one another on a mutual basis. Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion will not leave continental philosophy of religion as it finds it. The series is published in partnership with the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion at Liverpool Hope University. Titles in the series: Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, edited by Joshua Ramey and Matthew S. Haar Farris Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, edited by A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone The Art of Anatheism, edited by Matthew Clemente and Richard Kearney Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy: The Centrality of a Negative Dialectic, by Colby Dickinson Esoteric Lacan, edited by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage Transforming the Theological Turn: Phenomenology with Emmanuel Falque, edited by Martin Koci and Jason Alvis Fragility and Transcendence: Essays on the Thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien, edited by Jeffrey Bloechl

Fragility and Transcendence Essays on the Thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien Edited by Jeffrey Bloechl

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 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 Available ISBN 9781538153215 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538153239 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538153222 (epub) 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.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii ‌‌Introduction Jeffrey Bloechl

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‌‌1: Knowing a Secret After and According to Jean-Louis Chrétien Jean-Luc Marion ‌‌2: Blessed Failing Jérôme de Gramont ‌‌3: Fatigue, Illness, and Joy Rudolf Bernet

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‌‌4: The Body of the Response Emmanuel Housset ‌‌5: Wrestling with the Angel Emmanuel Falque





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‌‌6: The Poetics of the Symbolic Body in Chrétien’s Symbolique du corps Stephen E. Lewis

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‌‌‌‌‌7: Hospitality and Responsibility: The Possibility of an “Antiphonal Ethics” in Jean-Louis Chrétien Christina M. Gschwandtner

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‌‌8: Praying with Jean-Louis Chrétien Andrew Prevot



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Contents

‌‌9: The Cosmic Poetics of Jean-Louis Chrétien Catherine Pickstock Index



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About the Contributors



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Acknowledgments

The present volume of essays was conceived in Paris, during the few days between when some of us gathered there received word that Jean-Louis Chrétien had lost consciousness and when we received word that he had passed away. It is a small, beautiful testament to the man and his work that there was immediate and universal agreement to publish a collection of papers engaging his work—specifically in English, where it remains too little known. I am grateful to the contributors to the resulting volume, for their commitment to this project. I am also grateful to the editors at Rowman & Littlefield, where the importance of Chrétien’s work is recognized, for their support and patience: Frankie Mace, Scarlett Furness, and Nathalie Mandziuk. Duane Williams and Steven Shakespeare have graciously welcomed it into their fine series, where it now has a home among other excellent works.

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‌‌Introduction Jeffrey Bloechl

The present collection of essays offers the reader a number of ways into the thinking of Jean-Louis Chrétien. What it does not do is introduce the thinker, and for more than one reason. To begin with, as a matter of ordinary respect, one ought not to propose to render public, or bring to light, the interior life of an author for whom privacy was plainly of considerable importance. Behind this moral concern is a more general warning against appeals to a form of psychological explanation whose philosophical status is at best unclear. At any rate, this is an author who has committed considerable effort to helping us to think anew about the very constitution of our interiority. Perhaps most famously, in his writings on prayer, Chrétien brings it into contact with a primal woundedness and thus the openness of what has already been dispossessed of any possible self-enclosure. Such a wound, of course, can hardly be without meaning, even if the meaning ascribed to it is necessarily given in a word said after the fact of its occurrence. We are always already in the wake of a first word, even in our claims for solitude and soliloquy. This would be no less true of the philosopher, whose genius has never been nor ever could be set apart from language and community. We must begin by letting the work itself say what can be said. Fragility and Transcendence. The first of these two terms holds in view an effort to think being, existence, or subjectivity according to conditions that would subtend them. In Chrétien’s work, the word fragility appears with this meaning as early as his second book, L’effroi du beau (1987), in which it expresses our susceptibility to a shock that throws back upon our finitude. It is also the title of his final book, Fragilité (2017), in which such events are interpreted as opening us to a fulfillment that would be impossible without them. As for the second term, transcendence, it has been the site of an equivocation in which many religious thinkers have identified the crisis of our modernity. Whether one only insists on preserving a sense of the difference 1

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between our horizontal transcendence of objects and our vertical transcendence toward mystery (G. Marcel), or one takes the further step of arguing that the former is made truly possible only by the latter (H. de Lubac), the eclipse of verticality is undoubtedly one important mark of the present age. It is not difficult to find indications of this concern in virtually all of Chrétien’s works, and yet most often they address it only obliquely—that is, neither in the mode of simple refusal, as when one would retreat to a prior way of thinking, nor however with a strong apologetics, as when one would dissect or deconstruct arguments thought to be inconsistent or ill-founded, but instead by the longer, more painstaking route to restoring our access to concepts and phenomena that recent philosophies would otherwise have us forget. I propose to think of this as the labor of reinstatement, and to recognize its proximity to the most profound meaning of a search for sources driving the nouvelle théologie that informs so much of contemporary French Catholicism. In Chrétien’s work, its success is due in no small part to three remarkable gifts: a startling mastery of texts (philosophy, spirituality, literature . . . ), a keen sensitivity to the original givenness of things, and an uncommon willingness to find partial agreement even with opposed views. All of these are present in his treatment of “transcendence,” and among other things this means that he patiently explores the evidence in favor of what I have just referred to as the ‘eclipse of verticality.’ Readers who come to these essays with some familiarity with Chrétien’s work will not be surprised to find that many of them take up his philosophy of religion. This has certainly been his orientation since the beginning, as Jean-Luc Marion shows in his careful study of Lueur du secret (1985). Chrétien’s philosophy of religion, more generally, is also at the center of the essays by Jérôme de Gramont, Emmanuel Falque, Andrew Prevot (especially on prayer), and Catherine Pickstock, with these latter two especially interested in its import for theology. But as Rudolf Bernet shows in his essay on fatigue and related themes, one can certainly take Chrétien seriously without making entire themes essentially a matter of religion. Somewhat in this same vein, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Emmanuel Housset, and Stephen Lewis shift religion slightly into the background, in order to engage the phenomenological work that informs Chrétien’s conceptions of ethics and the body, and indeed, this is also the case for long passages by de Gramont and Falque. The essays in this volume thus can be distinguished by the topics that they emphasize—chiefly, religion, the body, and language—but also, in several cases, by the books that they place front and center. In order, these are Lueur du secret (Marion), De la fatigue (1986; Bernet), Corps à corps (1997; Housset), Symbolique du corps (2005; Lewis), and L’Appel et la Réponse (1992; Gschwandtner). De Gramont’s essay is something of a tour de force,

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on one hand, identifying three fundamental theses at work in Chrétien’s mature philosophy—Housset proposes five, in his concluding lines—while, on the other hand, proceeding through several of the major works. One might begin by reading this essay and then proceed by one or another order into the others, whereupon one is likely to find oneself already immersed in the philosophical enterprise that for Jean-Louis Chrétien is essentially a vocation. —Foligno, July 2021

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Knowing a Secret After and According to Jean-Louis Chrétien Jean-Luc Marion

The most difficult part is in the beginning. But this is especially the case for a true thinker, for whom the beginning immediately and definitively fixes the low-water mark and the stakes. It is the case for Jean-Louis Chrétien, especially since this beginning is dedicated to thinking the secret. Because all his work is accomplished in and as a secret. There is a secret. To begin with, his profession as a writer bears witness to this. Was he a historian of ancient philosophy, a phenomenologist? A poet? Or, in a later period, an eminent literary critic? If he was all of them, each time in a different style but all of which remained inimitably the same and his own, this was precisely because he wrote from another point of view, secretly inhabited another site. Which? Then there is the fact that his person followed suit in the same secrecy. He shone, if I may say so, with his humility, but it was a humility full of authority, to the point of sometimes becoming disturbing. Indeed, on some, including me, though I was his elder, he had a sort of moral authority. I have often experienced it and even claimed it when I had the greatest need of it. This humble authority was made all the more pressing in that it claimed no exemplarity, not even that of fallibility, although it remained, in him, always on edge. He knew he had never exercised the ministry of a guilty accuser, like the hero of The Fall. His person was also intriguing. The strangeness of his dress, at once careless and yet, in its detail, almost that of a dandy, matched the strangeness of his voice, which constantly exuded smoke, and came out choppy, breathing badly, with difficulty, and was loaded with repetitions, and sometimes interjected disturbing aphorisms between two inconclusive utterances. A heavy 5

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smoker, fine drinker, cook on occasion, he also gave a silent example of genuine asceticism and unwavering piety. How, then, to analyze and recognize the secret of Chretien? In fact, we have all known and read enough to measure what we are left with and what will remain, fortunately I would add, inaccessible. We might at least try to access his thought of the secret. I hypothesize that this secret unfolds from his first published book, precisely entitled Lueur du secret (1985). I will try. Is this the work of a phenomenologist? Certainly, but here, at the very beginning, it is without much of the exegetical practice of canonical texts by Husserl or Heidegger, or at any rate only a little. For its point of departure was not what Dante calls the selva selvaggia e aspra e forte (Inferno, I, 5), the dark forest of the texts of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy (thus also of its often-indecisive distinction with metaphysical philosophy), as was the case for those in my promotion (and others afterwards) who met in those days for the seminars of the “Archives Husserl de Paris,” at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Chretien directly confronted the question and the secret of phenomenality itself. But then where to meet it, experience it, and thus describe it from the outset? One answer seems obvious: in and through poetry. However, this is not enough, because not all poets confront the phenomenality of the secret as such (Mallarmé or Rilke, and a few others perhaps being exceptions). It could be that the urgency and the evidence of confronting it as such, that is to say as a secret, occurred to Jean-Louis Chrétien before the writing of poetry and even before the logic of philosophy, directly and by experience, which is to say the experience of the Revelation of Christ. Hence the enormous misinterpretation of having accused him, along with others, of promoting an alleged theological shift in French phenomenology. For Chrétien only became a phenomenologist and, in this respect, a strict philosopher because, at his point of departure, a theological question first imposed itself—he spoke of an intertwining of theocryptics and theophany: “If [. . .] a theocryptics makes sense only view of a theophanics, it is nevertheless the gauge of the truth of this theophanics.”1 Or again: “All Christian thought [. . .] has the task of uniting the theocryptic and the theophanic, of veiling and revelation” (Secret 17). And finally: “The first and last horizon of the theocryptic is theophanic” (Secret 18). The secret cannot be summed up either as an absence (because we would not have any access to it and it would therefore be of no concern to us), or in an enigma (which disappears as soon as we solve it), nor in a problem (which dissipates as soon as we have fixed and therefore dissolved it). Not only does “revelation arise from the secret” (Secret 17), but once manifest it remains there, manifest as “an essential secret, remaining secret even when it is known

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to all,” a “secret in itself, “open like a temple” (Rilke), watching us advance toward discovering it, yet without our ever managing to see it, still less to speak it. This temple that welcomes us and hold us back: it certainly “includes us in itself” (Secret 9), for “the gleam of the secret not only illuminates the secret itself, [but] illuminates us with it” (Secret 8), and “presupposes a relationship of our being to the secret” (Secret 10). Hence the consequence that the secret never belongs to us even while including us in itself; the two do not contradict each other, because together they attest to the fact that the “secret is given freely,” without preliminary, without prologue either in heaven (Goethe) or on all the earth, for there it is never possible to truly prepare the way to the Lord (Barth). It arrives and “gives itself gratuitously,” because in it “excess is first.” By its precedence, we “discover that we ourselves have been covered” (Secret 11), already by definition and without even knowing it. In this way, the manifestation of the secret also, and perhaps first of all, shows that we were closed to it and at the same time included in it. We see ourselves there as not seeing it. Thus can the glory of God, transparent only to itself, in the free and absolute play of Trinitarian communion, reveal itself only to those who, in the valley of darkness, remains ignorant of its transparency. For the secret “is hidden only where it manifests itself to an other than itself. It is hidden only where, in many ways, it is revealed” (Secret 12). Dionysius, the Mystic, the one some persist in calling “pseudo,” had laid down this rule concerning the secret: “It is hidden even after his manifestation (ekphansin), or rather, to speak more divinely, to say more and better than Pascal (Secret 30), [it is hidden] in its very manifestation (kain en tê ekphansei)” (Secret 28).2 Or again, “nec revelator ipse erit, qui absconditor non fuit” (Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, IV, 25, 3). We thus understand why Chrétien took as his first point of departure what exegesis is accustomed to calling “the messianic secret” in the Gospel of Mark. And such was the case with this seminal text, Lueur du secret. Chrétien explicates this inclusion in the secret, which reveals itself and in that same stroke remains veiled, in terms of two analyses. The first of these is addressed to the miracle. “The miracle is the very irruption of the word into the event” (Secret 43). Indeed, the “miracle therefore also falls under the glimmer of secrecy” (Secret 51). However, the miracle, as Christ performs it, is not, strictly speaking, where a curious but basically indifferent spectator would imagine it. The physical healing that occurs as a visible event is only the prologue to true, spiritual healing: so it happens that before a bedridden patient, Christ says, “Your sins are forgiven you,” thus arousing both the disappointment of the beneficiary and the indignation of the scribes; for both, spiritual healing remains either abstract or illegitimate. It is only in order that it be recognized that “the Son of man has the power to put sins back on earth” that Christ, in a second time (second in every sense of the

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term, chronological and theological) orders the paralytic to get up and carry his pallet (Mark 2:1–12). We see without seeing, observe without understanding, if we do not see the secret as a mystery: “To the word of the miracle must respond the listening of faith” (Secret 47). If, on the contrary, the physical miracle opens onto the miracle of liberation from sins, then the manifestation of salvation dissipates what would otherwise remain a simple thaumaturgy. Thus, remarks Chrétien, one can say, in the language of Levinas, that the sacred is found to be surpassed by the Holy. We understand better “the messianic secret” from this consideration of the event as a word performing salvation, and why this secret imposes the repeated recommendation of Christ, after each of his first miracles, that one is not to speak about it: “see that you say nothing to anyone” (Mark 1:44), “and he strictly charged them that no one should this” (Mark 5:43). This prohibition is certainly valid for the recipients of a miracle [les miraculés], who do not know who Christ really is, but first of all for the demons, who themselves know it too well: “he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him” (Mark 1:34; see 3:12). Both share the same difficulty: to pass from the miracle to the confession of the Messiah, from the event to the word; for thus we can better conceive the conclusion of Mark, that “the Lord confirming the message by the signs that attended it” (Mark 16:20)—and vice versa. Moreover, this prohibition is also exercised on Peter, who is nevertheless the first to confess Jesus as the Christ: “And he charged them to tell no one about him” (Mark 8:30). Indeed, at this pre-Paschal moment, Peter does not really know what he said when he confessed Jesus as the Christ, since he would have liked to turn him away from his Passion. Moreover, never did the secret grow so clearly with its manifestation than during the Transfiguration: before the evidence of the dazzle, Peter “did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid,” still having no idea that the glory of this miracle referred to the mystery of death and Resurrection. Very logically, therefore, Jesus “forbade them to tell anyone what they had seen, except when the Son of man should have risen from the dead” (Mark 9:6, 9). How and why can one reject the miracle, if it is by definition patent? Because the miracle shows only by giving a word, and a word can only be heard by responding to it. It is this plot [intrigue] that Marcion, the first among so many other Gnostics down to our day, has failed to understand: by separating on the one hand the Creator, totally manifest, and on the other the good God, totally hidden, it dissipates the secret, or rather tears it apart. With this “separation of the theophanic and the theocryptic” (Secret 65, see 78), one ends up with “the theocryptic of the superior God and therefore an absolute secret, without light, and the theophany of the creator God, a manifestation without remainder” (Secret 74). All this would be opposed to

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“a universal requirement of Christianity: the inclusion of the theocryptic in the theophanic” (Secret 80). We can now move on to the examination of parable. For it is in it that “Revelation forms a question” (Secret 56), the question that the miracle poses precisely but which it can also cause to be missed or even masked. The parable begins by relying on the most down-to-earth empirical evidence (a sower, a traveler attacked by robbers, two sons and a father, etc.), but, in a few sentences, this banality becomes enigmatic—not because some extraordinary episode would intervene, but because a single question gradually arises: in this story, in this plot, what role would I play if I were involved in it, and even, did I allow myself to feel involved in it? The manifesto of history produces the secret of a decision that one makes or else flees. “The word, whose first end is to manifest, will be, in the parable, veiled, ciphered, covered, manifesting only under and through secrecy” (Secret 51). “Jesus’ preaching blinds, and blinds those very people it strives most to enlighten” (Secret 55). Thus is imposed “the disconcerting link between the revelation of God and the blindness, in the active sense, of human being” (Secret 53). Unlike a riddle, a fable or an allegory, we cannot draw any conclusions or morals from the parable, because we cannot judge it, since it is what ultimately judges us. “We are no longer so much the interpreters as what is interpreted” (Secret 182). However, this last indication puts us on the way to an understanding of the paradox: when Jesus reveals God by revealing himself to be the Son of the Father, he says everything, He has said everything and discovered everything, according to the argument of Saint John of the Cross taken up by Chrétien: the Father has said everything by saying and giving his Word. “As soon as he gave us his Son, who is his Word, he has no other word to give us. He told us everything at once and all at once [ephapax repeats the Epistle to the Hebrews, 7:27; 9:12; 10:10], so there is nothing left to say to us. [. . .] God made himself mute; he has nothing more to say, for what he said in part to the prophets, he said in its entirety in his Son, giving us all that is in his Son.”3 Not only “in Christ is everything said,” but “there still shines the answer to questions that we cannot ask ourselves” (Secret 21). The Gospel of John will confirm this by adding these words of Christ: “I have yet many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them (bastazein) now” (16:12). Put another way by Chrétien: “God has only one word” (Secret 21), “God has no other word than that which he has given—and which he has given once for all—but listening to this word is endless for us” (Secret 22). The secret results from manifestation, because the manifestation of God cannot but burst into excess, therefore cannot but dazzle, even blind, with a light too white for our obscure vision. Chrétien quotes Mark: “There is nothing hidden that except to be made manifest, nothing secret except to brought to light” (Mark 4:22, Secret 52). This

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not only assumes the so-called phenomenal function of secrecy, but explains it: if God, and God alone, will manifest everything, then it is appropriate that we do not see everything, which however has never been so visible. We must therefore tell ourselves what Chretien notes about the disciples: “The disciples want to speak when they should be silent, and are silent when they should speak” (Secret 63). IV. The inseparable link between theocryptics and theophanics therefore does not lead to any contradiction, but it indicates the depth or height of the secret manifestation of the secret. Chrétien locates this, in the final instance, in kenosis. “The truth of the secret is kenosis [. . .] Jesus delivers his secret only by delivering himself into the hands of men in his trial and his passion, and men do not want, then, to seize it” (Secret 63). The secret of the mystery is that God is given and gives himself without return, therefore giving himself up. This manifestation thus contradicts so frontally what men have expected from glorification, that they imagine the crucified only as the opposite of God; during the trial and then death of Christ, they condemn him as “son of God” (Mark 14:2) and in the same stroke mock him as “king of the Jews” (Mark 15:18, 32), in this way proclaiming it a contrario as such. The secret is thus revealed thanks to the refusal which denies it. This is what Chrétien means by obliquity: “The obliquity of God gives to the irony of human beings a truth which it intends precisely to deny. [. . .] Obliquity transforms the human obliquity of irony into direct proclamation. The ironist is himself the prey of a superior irony” (Secret 61). Let us note the irony: mockery actually tells the truth, but in the mode of denying the truth. The fact remains that the supposed “blasphemy” fulfills the highest theophany: “I am” (Mark 14:62, echoing Exodus 3:14). The paradox of secrecy, resulting in the obliquity of kenosis, also reveals that the gift, accomplished in abandonment, deploys the logic of forgiveness. “Forgiveness is a gift. The gift, to be a gift, must be able to be refused. [. . .] No gift without ingratitude, no ingratitude possible without gift” (Secret 56). But the freedom of this possible refusal does not pre-exist the gift; on the contrary, it is the gift itself that opens the possibility of a freedom, even if it is able to receive it and therefore also—incidentally, although often—to refuse it. Hence the inescapable paradox that “revelation enlightens us in such a way that this clarity can blind us. Blindness—the second blindness, as there is a second death—is a dimension of revelation itself” (Secret 56). “Revelation must by definition reckon with blindness” (Secret 55).

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As a result of this multiple obscurity of the revelation of the secret (dazzling or refusal), there can be only one appropriate posture for it: humility. “By becoming incarnate, God gives us a hold on ourselves, and also exposes us to misunderstanding” (Secret 42) and contempt. “The truth of Christ is revealed to him [i.e., the demon, but also every human being] in hatred and fear” (Secret 37). This humility of God opens only to the humility of human being. “The humility of the Word ecstatic until silence, and of the love given until a death that kills death, is the place where the secret is illuminated forever” (Secret 83). “The focus of the theocryptic is the same as that of the theophanic: love itself” (Secret 248). In a later text, Chrétien lays it out very clearly: “The secret of Christianity, that secret which humility hears in the hollow of its ear and which love then goes crying from the housetops (Matthew 10:27), this secret entrusted to attentive humility, but to which only love serves as a spokesperson, proclaiming it to all comers, this secret resides in these simple words: there is no humility but love, for only love is truly humble.”4 Here we must understand humility as a fundamental disposition of man (we dare not say of I, even less of Dasein), in a sense often quite close to what Jean-Yves Lacoste has proposed. However, humility first designates a quasi-divine name, which denominates the elucidation of the secret, or in other words its transparency. “The mystery of the Trinitarian life is a mystery of manifestation. Entirely and without reserve, the Father says himself in his Word, is the Spirit, is the very transparency of the love of the Father and the Son. [. . .] This glory is not then glimmer, but splendor, not secret, but transparency” (Secret 12). “The night of Golgatha is of another order than the darkness of symbols. The glow of the secret sparkles forever only because it has it done so once, only once, once and for all” (Secret 182). The holy is no longer sacred, as we have seen. For the holy no longer confines itself, nor closes itself, but finds itself exposed forever and to all—exposed to the double meaning of manifested without withdrawal and handed over without defense to worldly death: “The secret of Jesus is not an enigma deciphered by human efforts, it is a public mystery, opened to us by God and by God alone” (Secret 65). “The absence of secrecy leads to the greatest secrecy, because this publicity of the manifestation is not for all that the transparency of human beings to the being and the mission of Jesus” (Secret 40). V. We can now find our bearings in the rest of the work. Or at least in one of the most significant sequels, Call and Response (L’Appel et la reponse, 1992), because the depth of the intrigue of the secret mobilizes the width of the gap

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where call and response play out. “Does the intertwining of call and response [. . .] form a vicious circle, or does it reveal that [. . .] all originary speech, like that of poetry, responds and originates only in responding?”5 (Call 6). From this question arises what seems to me one of the achievements, if not indeed Chretien’s theorem in phenomenology, on which we all (or almost all) rely: “The past of the call is the future of the response” (Call 10–11). “We hear the call only in the answer” (Call 27 and 30, 31). “The originary call, which delivers us and sends us to the world, can only be heard in the irreducible delay of our response, through our altered voice” (Call 44 and 81). And a corollary follows: since from the outset there is “infinite excess, first of all, of the call over the response” (Call 17 and 31), the response that makes the call heard does not yet ever hear except late and in part. Much more, our response only lags behind the call because we ourselves lag behind it, come after it, or better according to it: “We are called before we appear in the world, before being ourselves, except in this call” (Call 81). In fact, this phenomenological theorem can be illustrated with our concept of the gifted [l’adonné] or our principle that, if everything that shows itself gives itself, still, everything that gives itself does not show itself for all of that. In principle, it undoubtedly comes from the poetry of Chrétien, who had already said it: “Listening alone allows the response, yet it only takes place in the response itself,” for one must write “poetry as an answer.”6 In any case, if “no one can respond to him [sc. God] or answer for oneself before him, if his word has not reached him” (Secret 127), then the first word is in the call and above all it is never a human being who says, “[i]t is not man who first speaks of God in human terms, but God: anthropomorphism is of divine origin” (Secret 93). From this there follows another paradox, that there is no anthropomorphism of man with regard to God, but, on the contrary, that one must admit a “divine anthropomorphosis” (ibid.), implying an “anthropophatism” (Secret 82). “Anthropomorphosis of divine origin, by which God takes our language to speak to us, our passions to purify us from them, our imperfection to free us from them, is in itself the revelation of the meaning of theocryptic” (Secret 115). God’s wrath and jealousy remain effects, modes, and epiphanies of his love: “The debate over wrath is a debate over grace” (Secret 95). More generally, in the end, negations are not much more suitable for discourse on God than affirmations, since our negations open, at best, only to what we conceive as transcending ourselves. There is some metaphysical naivete in identifying what is unthinkable for us with what is immediately conceivable of God. “God transcends this transcendence [of the philosophers] which resides simply and unilaterally in an impassable distance” (Secret 94). For “the discovery of our estrangement from God is for us one of the fundamental forms of closeness to God” (Secret 111). It must be admitted that “without anger, love could not reveal itself” (Secret 128). But to achieve

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this, we must not start from the treatise of the passions of man, but from the way in which he, God, loves, that is to say from “the oblique call of love” (Secret 109). Luther is right on this point: it is sub contraria specie that the secret of God manifests itself. “More than the opposition of two theologies [gloriae/crucis], it is [here] the opposition of a theology and a theopathy, of suffering, of undergoing God, of suffering under divine action. The theology of obliquity is an immediate and direct theopathy” (Secret 230). This is how the secret is articulated: opening in the withdrawal itself, unfolding in the fold of the call and the response, the oblique of a humility that imposes itself sub contraria specie. But despite the constant confrontation with philosophy, the place of the search for the phenomenality of the secret remains, ceaselessly privileged, that of the biblical mystery, in the sense of the Pauline musterion and the messianic secret of Mark. This characteristic of Lueur du secret will remain constant to the end. We will not be surprised at this, even less will we be scandalized by it as a theological turning point: Chrétien’s implicitly phenomenological inquiry is focused from the outset on the secret; and it is spontaneously that he settled on the privileged place of secrecy. The fact that he happens to have found it in the biblical texts simply proves that these record a crucial experience more than do other texts (even those of Plotinus and Proclus), and they are all the more accessible because ‘they have already retained profound commentaries (from the Fathers to Luther or Pascal and Kierkegaard). Just as some atoms turn out to be more unstable than others and open up more perspectives on the depths of energy because they can split, so phenomenological research has the right and the duty to venture in the most unstable, fissured, and, so to speak, catastrophic grounds, if only to open up certain phenomena at the limits of manifestation. Rationality has no limits, or it should not. Only possibilities guide it, not boundaries. VI. There remains a question, which we will perhaps say philosophical, or simply conceptual: How can we articulate the achievements, in our eyes indisputable, for example of Lueur du secret, but also of L’appel et la reponse or of L’inoubliable et l’inespéré, with all the phenomenological discourses that are remote or even foreign to the theological field in the biblical sense of the term? Asked another way, what impact does Chrétien’s thought have on common phenomenology, revolving or not, theological or not? Ricœur criticized (and others since) Heidegger for maintaining a principled silence on the biblical event; could we not reproach Chretien for having left undetermined

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the relation of his discoveries made in theological field with other domains conquered, during the same period, by other phenomenological enterprises? Undoubtedly this cut was not absolute, and to hypostasize it would be an artifice, even an unjustified polemic. But the question remains posed, if only because by Jean-Louis Chrétien himself, who wondered about the “oblique appearance of the truth” of Christ during his Passion, about his “singular mode of giving the truth” (Secret 60, 59). Even more clearly, this time about the call in general in strict philosophy, he (himself) wondered: “What is the phenomenological mode of its givenness?” (Call 46). We have already compared to the given what Chrétien described as “this being [who] is called comes first, and being affected precedes any determination of the identity of what calls me” (Call 47). Couldn’t we also try, on this model, to take up the results of his analyzes of the secret as sufficiently soberly conceptual theses to be accepted into the common good of phenomenology in general? There would be at least six. First, one cannot. One must seek to know only what at first sight and most often cannot be understood and above all not as an object. Because what we can understand in anticipation and which we have the means to reduce to an object, does not surprise us, does not grab us, does not instruct us, nor enlightens us. The method reproduces us in the past state in a future identical to what we already are. The secret, by its surprise and its unforeseeable event, can on the contrary alone enlighten us, even save us. Second, the secret lights up like a light because it signals itself without being seen, or rather makes itself seen without making itself available. It opens up a thinkable and incomprehensible space, where I discover myself as no longer at home or mine. The intentional gaze must therefore move by anamorphosis to the point assigned by the secret, where only it will become visible because received. Third, the secret does not come and go as a call. This call can only be heard by me and resonates in me in the response (or responses) that I will address to it. These answers, which can cover the entire arc between denial and acceptance, will in any case attest to the excess and the immemorial anteriority of the call. Fourth, even refusal, indifference, denial, misunderstanding of the fact of the call or its meaning accomplish the inexorable delay of the response and attest to its insufficiency with regard to the call. The silence, even the very anonymity of the call qualifies it and forever attests to the overhang of its sound over any response. Fifth, the call indeed exceeds any response because it precedes, again silently, not only any response, but any answering. Or more exactly, the one who responds to the call responds to it late since he himself receives the call and is awakened by it as his addict. The call resounds in him more than

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himself, more interior to him than himself, more immanent to him than any transcendence, even and above all that of a supposedly transcendental ego. The call elicits the given. Sixth, the secret, by its light, opens the mystery: not what is hidden, but on the contrary, what is given so publicly, so banally, so thoroughly that it definitively goes beyond the one it summons. So, the mystery shows itself only to the always limited and late measure of its reception. Everything that shows itself gives itself first, but everything that gives itself does not show itself—except in proportion to its receptions. VII. We can discuss these theses, but we can also gather them from the first texts of Jean-Louis Chrétien. At least that is how I read them and learned about them. It would probably be useless to suspect that such was perhaps not the intention of its author. Because this time under the regime of poetry, didn’t he write to me one day already long ago: “I have nothing to say about my poems except that they are the only words written by me and that I can then read, because I don’t know at all in this order what the notion of ‘author’ can mean. [. . .] That moreover our paths go more and more towards the same [the same who?], I have known for some time from reading you” (Letter, 27/10/1990). Besides, now that he sleeps more awake than ever to his secret, doesn’t he remind us that “your sleep gently/harbors the secret of the unfulfilled/in the youth of your breath”?7 The gleam of secrecy precedes all research and commands it all. She set out from meditation on the Scriptures, traveled with dizzying erudition through the Fathers, ancient or medieval thought, modern metaphysics and no less all the resources of phenomenologies; it inventoried novelistic writing and relied on the power of epiphany that things themselves sometimes achieve in poetry. These continual metamorphoses of writing, however, always come from elsewhere—from the glimmer of secrecy. They define, better than all the psychological, even anecdotal approaches, that our memories and our friendships could make us privilege, the secret of the person of Jean-Louis Chrétien himself. Of his person? It would be better to say—from his soul. NOTES 1. J.-L. Chrétien, Lueur du secret (Paris: L’Herne, 1985), p. 25. I will henceforth cite this book in the body of my text as Secret.

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2. Letter III, PG 3, 1069b.. Let us note that, anticipating the debate that I later had with Jacques Derrida, Chrétien underlines well the irreducibility of Dionysius’s “mystical theology,” which “links dissimilar symbolism and negative theology, which, as important as it is for mystical theology, is not to be confused with it, union also being beyond negations” (Secret 170). 3. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, II, 20, in Obras de Juan de la Cruz, (Burgos: BAC, 1973) p. 534 (which, however, notes II, 22). 4. See Chrétien’s essay, “Humility according to Saint Bernard,” in his Le regard de l’Amour (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000). 5. J.-L. Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 6. I will henceforth cite this book in the body of my text as Call. 6. J.-L. Chrétien, L’Antiphonaire de la nuit (Paris: L’Herne, 1989), pp. 98, 111. 7. J.-L. Chrétien, Joies escarpées (Paris: Obsidiane, 2001), p. 22.

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Blessed Failing1 Jérôme de Gramont

We read the following in the Vita Nova, as Beatrice is about to die and Dante to become the immense poet that he is today: “it seemed to me that I had taken on a theme which was too difficult, so that I dared not begin; and I remained that way during several days, wanting to write but afraid to start.”2 The words are from Dante, but they could be from any writer who, between an infinity of possibilities to write and the great demands of the work, does not know where to begin, and finds himself trembling in this unknowing. Between desire and fear, between the infinity of the possible and the first reality, but also between the beginning and what precedes it, we glimpse a beat of time in which the adventure of the work is played out. Unless these are only the words of someone who is doing his job as a human being, living obliged to speak. To begin, to risk a first word: the most important thing is also the most difficult—but do we ever truly begin, we who take to speaking in the midst of so many others, we who invent a first word after so many others who precede us, invite us, show us, question us, call us? It is a matter of the adventure of these first words—when in the singularity of the beginning our dream of the faultless, definitive, yields to the plurality of first times, but also when this first word now in the plural is slow in coming, and comes up only second. Like a falsely inaugural word whose entire essence is, in fact, to respond. If there is a beginning we miss it first, and then speak in that mistake. We never really speak except to respond (here we encounter the first strong thesis in the phenomenology of Jean-Louis Chrétien). In the beginning was the word, but not ours. We can certainly dream of a first word, which would rise on the very first morning of the world, yet ours is only ever second, never inaugural, coming after the call that precedes it or the unheard of which, by coming to wound us, opens our lips—the unheard 17

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of beyond our expectations, which gives more than we can receive but nonetheless demands that we receive it. Never first, our word retains an echo of what precedes it, overturns it, and raises it up. “No human word is first, as if it merges with the origin and inaugurates meaning, but any word worthy of the name is nevertheless matinal, and rises trembling in the uncertainty of dawn.”3 In the beginning is the beautiful or the unheard of, from which our voice then draws its resources. The beauty of the world, the first beauty, is nothing that we produce of ourselves, but what calls us and what we may only celebrate. Let us think of Rimbaud’s words in Alchimie du verb: “All of that is over. Today I know how to celebrate beauty.”4 So likewise is the unheard of, exceeding our expectations, giving more than we can receive but demanding that we receive it, properly the unpredictable to which the present attends, so that our speech is now born from this excess of the event. On our side, everything begins in surprise—whether this becomes a question or an exclamation, or a song5—tearing from our voice its first but resting our voice in an anterior presence. Everything begins in the unheard of, and it continues when the time comes for us to risk facing the impossible (the unexpected, excess of what comes to us over what is present, and which surpasses all possible human measure): to name it, recognize it, welcome it, celebrate it, respond to it, in a word, offer it the hospitality of our voice. In the beginning is the unheard of—whether it is then called the world (always greater than what we can perceive6), the beautiful (always more luminous and present than what we can commonly see), or God (always higher than our most elevated thoughts7). In the beginning is the call, but this, too, is expressed in many ways. There is the call of the beautiful, on which the 1992 book on The Call and the Response meditates from a Platonic tradition—from an etymology of the Cratylus (416 cd) often read too casually and which derives the beautiful, kalon, from calling, kalein.8 There is also the call of the world for which Noah built his ark (in a way, even if L’arche de la parole only briefly mentions it in its first pages, the whole book is, in fact, written under the sign of Noah). There is the call of the night, magnificently described in L’antiphonaire de la nuit, and which seems to be the shadow cast by this call of the world.9 Finally, there is also the call of God, because the same books that describe in the first place the call of the beautiful set things right: there are other calls to praise than that of the beautiful, other “songs broken by shadow” [chants fêlés d’ombre] yet which will rise,10 and the last lines of L’effroi du beau are dedicated to the song by which those who pray may ascend toward God, that is to say to the song that will never exhaust what is to be praised, but that in heaven will have no end. The Call and the Response repeats this same movement from the call of the beautiful to the call of God, the one who calls all things to be because he creates them, but this time meditating on a Christian tradition that takes its impetus from



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a verse from the Apostle Paul, where it is written of God that he “calls into being things that were not” (Romans 4:17).11 Everything begins outside of us, but everything proceeds with the speech that is specific to us, as necessary for us as to allow the call to be heard. Let us not imagine that the delay implied for a word that must necessarily be second therefore robs us of the urgency and power to speak. The one seized by beauty truly experiences it when he exclaims and, in some sense, already sings. It therefore matters little if in this case we have neither the initiative nor mastery, or if our responses are not commensurate with the call addressed to us. Belated, fragile, at times wounded,12 the miracle of the word lies not in being first but simply in taking place. “Being responsive, it has no less possible novelty or force of rupture, for it is always only within a dialogue, and against the background of other words, that this novelty and this rupture occur.”13 But let us now add a word that is no little importance: that of body. Because if there is a response, it comes from our whole humanity, soul and body.14 This phenomenology of responsive speech is therefore coupled with a meditation on the glimmer [lueur] of the body.15 But the voice, this motif that runs through all of Chrétien’s books, is on the side of the body as much as on that of speech and prohibits us from dissociating these two dimensions of our humanity. “The Logos indeed speaks only through a human voice, and speaks only if our body, with our breath, our vocal cords, our teeth, our tongue, our palate, serves him for a moment as a place of repose and ease.”16 In order for speech to arise, or dawn, linking word and the body, there must first come to us a call to which we can respond. Yet in order for this call to really come to us, we must respond to it. Without a response from us, the call would resound in vain—between a voice that is inaudible because no other voice hears it and a mute voice that, to be sure, crosses a difference, but without perceiving it. It is not enough to say that there is a call and there is—or may be—a response, where one must still describe the ‘and’ of the call and the response, in order to show not only how our response occurs only thanks to this call (which is a truism), but above all to show how the call is heard only in the response (phenomenology obliges us to think that we can say something of the origin only where the call and the response intersect, or in the delay in which a voice altered by the call, seeks a response). It is not enough to say that our voice is never first, but only exists traversed by what precedes it and promises it to itself—this call that does not come from us and to which we now have to respond (“We always speak to the world, we are always already in the act of speaking, always in the world still, so that the initiative to speak always comes calibrated with a past speech, with a charge to speak, which it accepts and takes on itself without having given rise to it”17). To this, it must be added that the call is manifest only in the sense that it is properly heard only in the response, at the moment when our voice

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welcomes it because it has begun to respond (this is the second strong thesis of Chrétien’s phenomenology). This thesis was worked out most clearly, though not exclusively,18 in a book entitled, with some precision, The Call and the Response (1992): “We hear the call only in the answer, in a voice that has been altered by it”19 and “Any radical thought of the call implies that the call is heard only in the response.”20 Let us briefly open L’intelligence du feu, the 2003 book devoted entirely to multiple exegeses of a single verse of Scripture, that of Luke 12:49: “I have come to throw fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” The word is enigmatic, but one immediately guesses that it touches on the essential because it is at the heart of Christ’s mission and thus because this fire will not leave us unscathed. It is an old word, but one that makes itself contemporary in each of us and reaches us in what is specific to us, so that what we are and what it is then take on meaning. Understanding is more than understanding, it is responding to what calls us and “[exists in] our response.”21 To understand, one must allow oneself to be interpreted by this speech and try to respond to it, so as not only to read it but to be read by it.22 In a formula that seems taken from Ricœur, Chrétien thus can write: “To understand is also to understand oneself in the light of what it [i.e., the Bible] addresses to us, enjoins us or delivers to us, here and now.”23 Understanding is always more than understanding, and the art of reading is not without a way of life. But it is also singularly from this art altogether of reading and living that we will be able to understand this verse of the Scriptures on fire. This confirms the phenomenological principle according to which a call can only be heard in response. In other words, “from where would we learn what fire is, and what it can do, if not from burning?”24 Altered voice, wounded word, burned existence—these expressions that appear here and there throughout this description of responsive speech, far from being mere rhetorical excess, are to be understood rigorously, as the specific manner of ‘existing’ our response. A certain dream is shattered as soon as the call reaches us and changes us—shattered dream of an existence that draws from itself, and itself alone, its own resources. It is the dream of a flawless existence, capable of flawless presence to oneself. That of an existence closed in on itself, transparent to itself, at the same time capable of calm self-possession and looking down on the world from a bird’s-eye view and dominating it. Perhaps this dream has crossed modern philosophy (that of a perfectly autonomous subject) or even historical phenomenology (that of a constituent subjectivity). But now it breaks in contact with the call, provided we know how to hear it, not only because the call dispossesses us of all power of the origin, but also because our response fails to completely correspond to it (who could say that our thought can go around the world, our word of praise do full justice to the beauty that elevates it, or that one day our contemplation



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of God might be fulfilled?).25 But the fact that our response is not without fault—because it is born with a delay that it will never be able to fill—does not mean that it is therefore unfortunate [malheureuse]. It does not matter that the voice trembles if it manages to arise, since this arising is a question of being born—of being oneself, finally.26 We do not exist in any other way than this that is forever ours: fragile, crossed by faults, bending under the excess of what calls us to sing and ‘to exist’ our song.27 Chrétien’s description of the way in which we relate to the call is thus decisive—not only in the delay of our response but in its failure, in the impossibility of corresponding perfectly to what exceeds us and lifts us up. Phenomenology obliges once more: we only hear the call in the response, and in its how. We access the unheard-of origin only in the wound that opens our lips at the moment when we let loose our song. The failure of the response is our only way to go to the thing itself, which is to say to what calls us. This is so, provided we understand this failure as linked to our humanity and its highest possibilities, and on condition, then, of imagining a blessed failing [une défaillance heureuse] (this being a third strong thesis of Chrétien’s phenomenology). This brings us to a metamorphosis of the first principle of historical phenomenology, the correlation of consciousness and world, henceforth to be thought from an encounter (with things, others, the world, God . . . ) of which we do not have the initiative (according to an inversion of intentionality already described in Levinasian phenomenology), and in terms of a relation between failure and excess. The excess can be read only in the failure, and the blessing only in the wound, just as the call can be heard only in the response. We should recognize that in this rewriting of phenomenological principle, Henri Maldiney has been first. What he calls “transpossible” signfiies the excess of the event over our expectation, and what he calls “transpassable” signifies our way of entering into a relationship with it by opening ourselves to what exceeds measure.28 It will not be difficult to show how all of Chrétien writings are arranged around this third thesis. Let us begin with two pages that in a certain sense constitute royal paths to entering his thought. They are taken from the introduction to La voix nue and from the afterword (“Retrospection”) of the second edition of The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. The four pages that introduce La voix nue can, if one takes them up early enough, serve as a preface to Chrétien’s entire oeuvre. A few lines say more than all of our commentary: Origin of any beginning, call gaping at the heart of every call, it is not, however, first. Every human voice responds, and every inauguration is in suffering and in passion by an earlier voice that it hears only by responding to it, one

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which precedes it and which exceeds it. It speaks only hearing, hears only in responding, and continues to speak because there is no full or perfect response, no response that is not most intimately in default, coming after what it alone makes heard.29

Only a steep path can lead to the beginning—one that is taken by a naked, trembling, altered, wounded voice which carries in its passion the trace of what exceeds it and gives it to itself. From this central thought follow the bankruptcy of a dream and the rehabilitation of what could pass for default— bankruptcy of any thought of perfectly transparent consciousness, of a response that would entirely coincide with what calls us, or of total presence, in a word, of the dream of parousia that crosses our modern metaphysics of subjectivity.30 But this is a failure not of our doing, a defect that should not grieve us. These descriptions of the naked voice show “irreducible rifts that defeat all total presence”31 (this is the concern of the entire first part of the book, entitled “Critique of Transparency”) yet do not signify our failure, as long as the rifts, which should rather be called happy [heureuses], reveal our most specific possibilities (this is the concern of the second part of the book, “The Past of the Promise,” where “it is shown that dark flaws in the way of any plenitude are also that by which the excess of the gift over speech gives itself to in the speaking that seizes it”32). Hence is there no truth except in suffering, in a trial that is partly in shadow. The only guardian of the truth, or its witness, is the one who does not possess it. The one who responds is unable to do so fully, but only in delay, in a manner of failing, in this other name of the word given in return that is the promise, in “the luminous insecurity of the promise”33 beyond all certainty. A promise is fragile, committing us more than we are able by ourselves to the future of which we are not the masters. A second text that casts a glance over the entire oeuvre is the retrospective but entirely programmatic conclusion of the second expanded edition of The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (2000). Let us begin with the argument of the book: it is about loss and excess—but a happy, even joyful loss,34 which must be thought of as both a flaw in our existence, the failure of our memory, and as the other side of an excess, which is presented here in the forms of the unforgettable (or the immemorial) and the unhoped for.35 Forgetting gestures toward what exceeds forgetting, as an oblique revelation of what cannot appear in full light but only from the failure of our response. Paradoxically then, but it is a paradox that is constitutive of this thought, only weakness speaks well of what it fails to speak totally, here as what exceeds all memory and all expectation, and as what both hurts and gives. The “Retrospection” also gives us the formula of all the books (including those which will come):



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It is a matter of thinking loss, wound, passivity, as well as forgetting fatigue, which are phenomena where the trace of the excessive shines through, outside the idealistic and dialectical language of “negativity,” in which all of this is vanquished and surmounted in advance. There is no philosophical parousia.36

From there, and from the first book, there arises a criticism of all the philosophies that, in history, have placed their ideal on the side of the parousia.37 The criticism will one day have to be confronted with the phenomenology of Jean-Yves Lacoste (2006), which urges that the concept of presence should not be abandoned, but rather corrected.38 In Promesses furtives, Chrétien does just that. Anyone wishing to enter this work by its title will do well to read it from its adjective rather than its noun. Hence also so many monographs that discover in our weakness the reverse side of a gift and its excess: on the secret (Lueur du secret, 1985), the night (L’Antiphonaire de la nuit, 1989), nudity (La voix nue, 1990), oblivion (The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, 1991 and 2000), fatigue (De la fatigue, 1996), and fragility (Fragilité, 2017).39 Blessed failing: there is certainly a paradox here, an affirmation that is resisted by common sense yet one which, far from dismissing thought, in fact demands it. All of Chrétien’s work is devoted to deploying this very paradox, which he situates at the confluence of a phenomenology of the call (where the excess of the event seizes us and calls for us),40 the philosophy of Plato (where the call is presented under the privileged figure of the call of the beautiful), and Christianity (where everything begins with the call of God). And it is indeed the originality of the phenomenology of Chrétien to rediscover, by paths of thought stemming from Heidegger (phenomenology of the call) and Maldiney (phenomenology of the event), old thoughts that might otherwise pass as foreign to this current of the twentieth century, because they belong to metaphysics or theology, as if such words only designate so many faults. To speak of the beautiful and thus respond to it, Plato has recourse in the Phaedrus to a myth, perhaps the most beautiful dialogue that he wrote. We know that this detour of thought is not merely poetic ornament, but indeed is sometimes the only authentic way to continue to philosophize. The entire second chapter of L’effroi du beau is devoted to reading this myth: “The Human Ordeal [l’épreuve] of Beauty according to Plato.” That the experience of beauty here takes the name of “ordeal” is due to the fact that this experience is ours, as human beings and not gods. For human being and gods do not engage being in the same way in order to become what they are. Indeed, if the gods are gods by a faultless vision of the Ideas, it is quite different for human beings, who only glimpse the Ideas fleetingly, and first of all the most manifest and luminous of them: the Idea of Beauty, ​​ by an ordeal begun in a 41 dread that the gods do not know, undergone in an agonistic relationship to being, a struggle where one is always in danger of not being oneself, of failing

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to become human,42 and where there is joy, certainly, but one that is crossed by pain43—all of these being the marks of a fragility that is our own.44 Human beings as much as gods relate to being, but entirely according to a difference in manner that Plato translates by the opposition of two adverbs: easily for the gods, and with pain for human beings.45 In this attention to the how of the relation to being, Plato becomes almost a phenomenologist, even if for he has to resort to a writing that seems farthest from the rigor of the concept, that of myth: Human truth, the truth of the human, is truth in suffering. A truth in suffering, a truth that is only reached by and in the pain of a trial; a deferred truth, which is not immediately given, nor given entirely, but presupposes and suffers patience and the work of time. This passion and patience can only be told by myth.46

Reading these lines, we will not forget, however, that this suffering truth is that of the beautiful that manifests itself to us as “what is most luminous and what arouses the most love” (Phaedrus 250 d), and that this suffering that we endure is the reverse side of a joy that uplifts us. To speak of dread shock is not to say everything about an ordeal where joy is mixed with pain yet remains joy.47 To speak of an ordeal is to admit our fragility, and in what way we fail to see beauty entirely, or to say it, to welcome it and respond to it, but this does not take away the fact that we are beginning to sing.48 To exist fragilely: Would this be to exist only in the mode of the beginning? We might, therefore, continue this reading of the Phaedrus through the other chapters of L’effroi du beau (“Proximity to the Elusive,” which deals with the initial event of the encounter and its dimension of ordeal, “Impossible Answers” and “Envoy,” on our response to the impossible which nevertheless is a response). What we can read there about the encounter is in line with Plato’s lesson: “There are joys that overwhelm, and the encounter is one of them,”49 especially since the experience of beauty (its ordeal) appears as an example of the encounter. It is said repeatedly that the beautiful both elevates our joy and overwhelms us, and that the joy “ripples [veinée] with suffering.”50 This is due to the difference between the advent of the beautiful and the trial that it imposes on us, since what comes in the beautiful “always catches our welcome in fault,”51 so that we fail to respond fully to it. Yet the fact that our heart is never commensurate with the beautiful still does not exempt us from responding. And the same beauty that hurts us thereby opens our lips, calling forth this “impossible song,” or this praise of the impossible52 that both responds to it and yet fails to respond perfectly. To be sure, the joy that is born of beauty suffers from not being able to be whole, but to faint [defaillir] under the excess of the beautiful is perhaps the highest joy that we



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may experience—and this is why can we speak of this blessed wound and this fruitful dread.53 Blessed failing: the paradox also takes on its full meaning in Christian soil. Let us add a few words, taken quickly, from Regard de l’amour. Chrétien presents the work as follows: “A thought of the excess of the call over the response, and of our ways of existing in accordance with it, is at work here as in all the other books by the signatory.”54 In this way of existing, it is possible to recognize the blessed fault of the one who bends under grace. No matter how far we advance on this path of existence that is consigned to chiaroscuro, we will not be able to rid it of all ordeals or achieve full transparency. However far we may advance towards joy, we still will not be able to prevent that it be mingled with shadow—which Augustine to see in a trembling joy not a passing affect linked to certain circumstances, but indeed a fundamental tonality of Christian existence, an essential dimension of our being before God.55 How could we not tremble, if our highest joy is received even as we know that it does not belong to us?56 What else can we hope for but a perfection that rests on failure?57 Let us advance as far as possible towards the final end. Do not imagine that our last moments bring to an end the tension of existence. We love from this life and we will love in the future life. The same wound of love touches us here and there, today and tomorrow, however different the present life may be from the life we hope ​​ for, because “in love we are already experiencing here the God who is semper major. Only the experience of excess can make us hope beyond all measure”58—only the excess, that is, of what God has already given to him who gives himself to us. Here and there, today and tomorrow, we are loved with the same love and we fail under the same excess, so that we hope for nothing other than to continue to fail (for it is the same thing to hope for the excess that does not cease,59 and to consent to our own defection). One figure runs through many of Chrétien’s books to illustrate this theme of blessed fault: that of Jacob struggling with the angel, in what is surely one of the most enigmatic episodes of the Old Testament (Genesis 32:23–33), a struggle that lasts an entire night and ends with the equivalence of a wound and a blessing.60 This recurring figure, almost a signature of the author, appears for the first time in L’effroi du beau.61 That we must think through paradoxes, this story shows in all clarity, as indicated, if there is need of this, by a page of the “Retrospection” in The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For: [Our failure]constitutes neither a contingent deficit nor a regrettable imperfection in the response we give to the manifestation of beauty in the form of a request. It is the very event of a wound by which our existence is altered and opened, and becomes itself the site of the manifestation of what it responds to. There is true force only in weakness, a weakness opened up by what comes

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towards us. That fact that the wound can bless, and that benediction can wound are the locus of meditations at the heart of Hand to Hand, concerning Jacob’s struggle with the angel.62

In the first chapter of Hand to Hand, Chrétien not only pauses at greater length over the biblical episode, but also attempts an interpretation from Delacroix’s painting of it. He describes not only Jacob’s struggle63 but also the painting that is its repetition in this other fight with the angel undertaken by Delacroix in painting these bodies struggling with each other.64 It is thus a matter of more than an ancient story, and more than a work of art worthy of contemplation, but a story that must not be forgotten and must even be repeated, because it is about ourselves, our wounds, and the possibility of being blessed. “There are wounds that one must not heal, for they are source of our loving intimacy with our highest task, the one that we have received, impossibly, without having sought it.”65 Le regard de l’amour returns to this repetition by noting that in his own way every believer, as soon as he prays, is a new Jacob. Which makes Kierkegaard write in an edifying discourse of 1844 that “True prayer is a fight with God where one triumphs by the triumph of God”: “For this fight is a contest of love, as the mystics have seen with regard to Jacob’s struggle and the angel, and the yes is entirely foreign to any heart-rending reversal of contrary to contrary.” Is there anything better that could befall us than to be wounded by an angel in the manner of Jacob? There remains only one thing still to be shown: how, from book to book, this thought of fault and excess originates in a phenomenology of promise. The subtitle of La voix nue—“phenomenology of the promise”—announces it, but on condition that we do not hear this word only as the promise of the impossible that comes from us and in which we engage a future of which we are not the masters, but according to what The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For begins to think, as a promise made unceasingly to us, and which always comes. This would be a promise that precedes us, exceeds us and requires us, a promise of a God present at the extremes: in the unforgettable and the unhoped for. It would be the excess of a promise that never fails because it comes from God. NOTES 1. In French, De Gramont’s title is “La défaillance heureuse.” The likely English translations do not capture its nuance. Heureuse: blessed, fortuitous, or perhaps happy. Défaillance: failure or collapse. Catholic readers will think of the “happy fault” (felix culpa) appearing in the Exsultet.  De Gramont’s notion is phenomenological before



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it is theological. In any event, he makes explicit use of it on pages 21 and 24 of this essay. -Editor 2. Dante, Vita Nuova, X, trans. Frisardi [modified slightly]. 3. J.-L. Chrétien, The Ark of Speech, trans. A. Brown (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 12. 4. [“Alchimie du verbe,” is the fourth poem in Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer. De Gramont cites the two prose sentences that follow the poem.] 5. Consider Plato’s expression in the Symposium, when the absolute of the Beautiful becomes present: “conception and generation that the beautiful effects” (206 e)—first human logos that responds to a prior presence, that of Being as beautiful. [Plato, Collected Dialogues, eds. E. Hamilton and E. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 558.] 6. Of the beautiful, we may also say what Rilke writes of the Angel in the first of the Duino Elegies: that it is endowed with a “stronger existence” (the formulation is cited in L’effroi du beau, Paris: Cerf, 1987, pp. 24, 27, 88). 7. According to Anselm’s well-known formulation: Id quod majus cogitari nequit. 8. J.-L. Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 5–32. See already L’effroi du beau (pp. 70f): “if as is said in Cratylus the beautiful calls us, we are well and truly required to respond to it, and this response takes the form of praise.” 9. L’antiphonaire de la nuit also shows how our speech is never inaugural but always secondary, and how it never arises except as a response. “If poetry names and approaches things for the first time, or as if for the first time, according to a thought often repeated, this first time does not belong to a first voice, and in answering, it already differs from the origin.” J.-L. Chrétien, L’antiphonaire de la nuit (Paris: L’Herne, 1988), p. 99. 10. L’effroi du beau, p. 85. 11. The Call and the Response, pp. 15–19. 12. We will have to come back to this. The fragility of beauty (title of a beautiful article by Oskar Becker from 1929) is also the fragility of the voice that seeks to praise beauty without ever managing to reach it. And “the wounded word” serves as the title of the phenomenology of prayer collected in the second chapter of L’arche de la parole—a title that may surprise but which the author justifies as follows: “Why call it wounded word? It always has its origin in the wound of joy or distress, it is always heartbreak that makes him open his lips” (L’arche de la parole, p. 53). 13. J.-L. Chrétien, Répondre. Figures de la réponse et de la responsabilité (Paris, PUF, 2007), p. 121. 14. The Call and the Response, pp. 1–2 and passim. 15. J.-L. Chrétien, Symbolique du corps. La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: P.U.F./Épiméthée, 2004). 16. J.-L. Chrétien, Promesses furtives (Paris: Minuit, 2004), p. 28. 17. J.-L. Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 1. 18. Hence do we read in Symbolique du corps (p. 7): “All calls are heard in its response [i.e., that of the body], and only there where it responds.”

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19. The Call and the Response, p. 27. 20. Ibid., p. 30. The claim is repeated by Jean-Luc Marion in Being Given, trans. J. Kosky (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 287. 21. J.-L. Chrétien, L’intelligence du feu. Réponses humaines à une parole de Jésus (Paris, Bayard, 2003), p. 196. 22. Ibid., p. 160. The theme is given further amplitude in Under the Gaze of the Bible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), where the one who reads discovers himself as the one who is read. 23. Ibid., p. 21. 24. Ibid., p. 10. The affirmation is repeated on p. 193: “one can speak of fire only from burning.” 25. This distinction between responding and corresponding is advanced in a critical remark on Heidegger, to whom Chrétien, precisely on the matter of the call, nonetheless sometimes seems close. “In an implicit manner, though at certain points unmistakable to some, and made explicit in Call and Response, this was a critique of Heidegger on speech as correspondence (Entsprechung), since this was one aspect of the concept of a falling-short of the response.” J.-L. Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. J. Bloechl New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 122–23. 26. It is in perfect fidelity to Chrétien’s thought that Emmanuel Housset can write in a recent work that our identity is broken in the call of God but nascent in our response: “these phenomena open up a new understanding of our humanity as possessing an identity shattered by the love of God. The call of God frees one from the solitary project of the self, it makes it possible for us to suspend, at least momentarily, the desire to understand the world starting only from an elucidation of the self, and it then projects us towards unimaginable possibilities. (. . .) One is then oneself only in the event of one’s response, which the further it comes, the more it is one’s own.” E. Housset, La différence personnelle. Essai sur l’identité dramatique de la personne humaine (Paris, Hermann, 2019), p. 55. 27. “The plenitude of the human is where a fault crosses us, it is not the closure of a sphere” (Promesses furtives, p. 84). If we are even to live inside ourselves, God must come to visit us, which shows that there is no interior space except through an ability to open up. See J.-L. Chrétien, L’espace intérieur (Paris: Minuit, 2014). 28. Maldiney is cited discretely in Chrétien’s “Retrospection” of the second edition of The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, the last lines of which pay him homage (pp. 120, 124, 129). He is also secretly present in the fourth and last chapter of the book (“The Sudden and the Unhoped For”) where we see fragment 18 of Heraclitus (“If you do not hope for the unhoped for, you will not find it. It is difficult to find and inaccessible”), on which he himself has commented so many times. On the “transpassible” as another name for response, see also Promesses Furtives, p. 82. 29. J.-L. Chrétien, La voix nue. Phénoménologie de la promesse (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 7. 30. Even if the expression must be used with some prudence. Concerning the critique of the “modern metaphysics of subjectivity,” Chrétien notes that it “has become so conventional and so selbstverständlich that its familiarity should worry us” (ibid.,



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p. 174). Only precision in our analyses permit us to avoid formulations that are too facile. 31. Ibid., p. 8. 32. Ibid., p. 9. 33. Ibid., p. 80. 34. Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, pp. ix–xii. 35. For this and for what follows, see ibid., pp. 121–24. 36. Ibid., p. 126. 37. Ibid., pp. 65f, 67, 75 (“Forgetting prohibits not only a parousia of the past, but also any full presence in the present.”) 38. See especially J.-Y. Lacoste, Présence et parousie (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2006). 39. This last title could be that of all of Chrétien’s books. Not one of them does not describe this happy weakness by which we bend under the excess of a call or a promise, not one does not decline the signs of our finitude but also shows its paradoxical glory, not one which does not go back to this first event, in which excess and failure intersect, and where the failure is also the possibility of our victory, and not one which does not illustrate this affirmation: fragility is capable of blessings (J.-L. Chrétien, Fragilité, Paris: Minuit, 2017, p. 166). 40. This phenomenology of the call is as close as possible to the phenomenology of the event of Henri Maldiney, where the unexpected of what comes or rather occurs (the real) both divests us and returns us to our only real task, which is to exist. As Emmanuel Housset writes, this time closer to the Maldinian formulas: “Thus, it is the very surprise of reality, the unimaginable of what happens, which puts you on notice to exist” (La différence personnelle, p. 242). 41. “[Beauty] has reserved for man the weight of dread, and has given it to him to bear as man’s way of welcoming its radiance” (L’effroi du beau, p. 34). 42. “Man alone is close to being in such a way that he can move away from it. And he distances himself from it without this distance being able to abolish all proximity, in which case he would cease to be human” (ibid., p. 41). 43. “Man is, like the god, a being who looks towards Being, but his look is a painful look” (ibid., p. 39). 44. “Dread [the shock] throws me violently back into my fragility, and overwhelms me with all the weight of my finitude” (ibid., p. 56). Even if thirty years later Chrétien will explain that the concept of fragility is Latin (the Latins speak of human fragility and the Greeks of his weakness), the word is in its rightful place. Without forcing the anachronism, we will not forget that it is from our historical situation that we read Plato. 45. Ibid., p. 49. On the importance of the adverb in philosophy, and whether it takes precedence over the substantive or the verb, see J.-L. Chrétien, Pour reprendre et perdre haleine (Paris, Bayard, 2009), p. 42 (“as the genius of Saint Augustine showed, everything depends on the adverb”). 46. Ibid., p. 36. 47. We will not forget that this phenomenology of trial and fragility is also a phenomenology of joy, for which it is necessary to open J.-L. Chrétien, Spacious Joy. An Essay in Philosophy and Literature, trans. A Davenport (Lanham: Rowman &

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Littlefield, 2019). But the fact that a collection of poetry is called Joies escarpées gives food for further thought. 48. Just as, theologically, one can only ever begin to contemplate the glory of God (see “Beauty as an inchoation of glory (on Hans Urs von Balthasar),” the final study appearing in see J.-L. Chrétien Reconnaissances philosophiques (Paris, Cerf, 2010). 49. L’effroi du beau, p. 24. 50. Ibid., p. 25. 51. Ibid., p. 30. 52. “This is why the reality of praise is its own impossibility, or more rigorously exists its own impossibility” (ibid., p. 78). 53. Ibid., p. 88. 54. J.-L. Chrétien, Le regard de l’amour (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000), p. 8. 55. Ibid., pp. 56, 59. 56. Ibid., p. 63. 57. Ibid., p. 8. 58. Ibid., p. 208. 59. “Only participation in the divine life can will its own increase [accroisement], and only excess can hope for excess.” Ibid., p. 224. 60. “Struggling like Jacob, all night in the dust, to wrest God’s blessing, and retaining the sign of a wobble and a limp by which the word is all the more confident as it is less sure of its own approach” (L’arche de la parole, p. 53). 61. “But Jacob will go further in his uncertain step, because he was wounded in this ardent combat where no one knows who won” (L’effroi du beau, p. 85). Other references include: Saint Augustine et les actes de parole, Paris, PUF, 2002, p. 176; Répondre, pp. 27 and 29; Sous le regard de la bible, p. 62; Conscience et roman I. La conscience au grand jour, Paris, Minuit, 2009, p. 185; Pour reprendre et perdre haleine, p. 114. 62. The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, p. 122. 63. On Jacob’s side: “There are victories that weigh heavily and overpower. There also defeats that revive, where new and unlooked-for strengths spring forth from the wounds received.” J.-L. Chrétien, Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art, trans. S. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 1. 64. On the side of Delacroix: “what from a distance had seemed easy to surmount presents me with horrible and incessant difficulties. But how is it that the eternal combat, instead of killing me, lifts me up, instead of discouraging me, consoles me and fills my hours when I have left it?” (Journal de Delacroix, quoted ibid., p. 9). 65. Ibid., p. 2.

‌‌3

Fatigue, Illness, and Joy Rudolf Bernet

How to talk about the work of Jean-Louis Chrétien today? How to pay homage to him? How to distinguish between the friend who disappeared too suddenly and his work, itself so personal and through which he continues to address us in each page that we reread? And how to write in the singular about the work of an author whose many books are so different from one another? He, whose books are made of chapters lined up like one strings beads, would have strongly protested against any global or final presentation of his thought. Fortunately, the friend did not take the author with him in his death, and his books challenge us all the more strongly as gifts that he continues to give us. Still, our respect for the author and our responsibility for the transmission of his thought should not prevent us from trying, again and again, to respond to him and question him. This requires some violence to ourselves, as we need to come out of mourning, overcome our regrets, and reread his books in order to bring them back to life. This is the least we owe to an author who, from book to book, has not ceased to meditate on the mystery of death and resurrection—resurrection in the flesh, as he seldom failed to point out. As long as the books of Jean-Louis Chrétien will find readers, he will remain present among us in the flesh. We, therefore, can and must continue to question Chrétien’s thought without being stopped by his death or the pain it continues to cause. In doing so, we are already imperceptibly following in the wake of an author whose reflections regularly returned to the question-call-response triad. The author who still lives will then replace the deceased friend in order to answer our questions. Neither the friend nor the author, both of whom are concerned about our freedom, will reproach us for not taking the main paths of his meditations, which are centered on speech and the promise, joy and love, flesh and beauty, call and response, prayer and redemption, and so forth. An 31

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often poetic and sometimes incantatory celebration of great and beautiful human experiences, of events opening countless new perspectives, of sublime works and creations has not prevented our author from showing himself to be sensitive to the difficulties and discouragements of our existence. It is to his understanding of this field of problematic or negative human experiences, because they rebel against the artifice of a negation of the negation or the prescription of a hasty remedy, that we will address our questions. And among these negative experiences, we will be particularly interested in those that involve the experience of a loss. There are at least two negative experiences of loss to which Chrétien, with all his characteristic erudition and subtlety, has devoted an entire book to, namely forgetting (L’inoubliable/Unforgettable) and fatigue (Fatigue).1 These two experiences also have in common the fact that they go beyond the field of speech, to which our author has devoted his most beautiful pages. We will limit ourselves here to the consideration of fatigue. It is a strange phenomenon, in fact, and one is hardly surprised that it has passed almost unnoticed by most philosophers. If our author lingered there for so long, this is certainly because his meditations on the nature of human flesh had prepared him for it and attracted him to it. Nevertheless, in fatigue we encounter a phenomenon that, in many respects, lies outside the field of investigation with which Chrétien has made us familiar. For where is the place of the other in our fatigue, of what help is any appeal to the logos, what new perspective and escape from our all too human condition does it offer us? The book on fatigue is unique in Chrétien’s work in yet another way. There is abundant questioning of forces in it and indeed of forces that must be called ‘physical’ or even ‘material.’ It is true that our author has often considered the great battles of the ‘agonal’ humanity of the Greeks. But what have been his reasons for allowing himself to be questioned by these miserable phenomena that bring wear and tear, weakening and exhaustion, in short, loss of our strength? And what led him to move, in what may seem a great leap, from careful phenomenological description of the triad of fatigue-weariness-exhaustion to questions about illness and death, and even about “the great fatigue” of a culture dominated by nihilism? ON THE EXPERIENCE OF FATIGUE AND ITS CAUSES In his book on fatigue, Chrétien does not content himself with presenting us with an entire series of ways of accounting for the experience of fatigue, in authors as diverse as Aristotle and Plotinus, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Descartes and Malebranche, Lucretius and Nietzsche, Husserl and Sartre, Heidegger and Levinas, Rilke and Mallarmé, John Cassian and Simone

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Weil, Laforgue and Pessoa, Plato and Bernanos, and even Pierre Janet. He also wants to be attentive, within this broad panorama, to the difference between historical periods and systems of thought. Beginning quite naturally with the Greeks, he underlines how much Judaism and Christianity, despite their encounters with Greek thought, have changed the game. The same goes for modern or contemporary thought, whether philosophical or literary. For Chrétien, these different eras are distinguished both by their system of thought and their mode of experience. As far as thought is concerned, it is the relationship between human fatigue and different conceptions of divine indefatigability that serves as its main thread. This means that his phenomenological descriptions most often fall within a metaphysical and even onto-theological perspective. As far as experience is concerned, it is undoubtedly corporeal experiences and feelings that guide his reflections. Through different eras, it is not only the relationship of human beings to the gods or to God that changes, but also, and in a closely related manner, the relationship to their own body. In what follows, I will scarcely bother with this historical periodization, retaining only the analyses of fatigue that speak explicitly of a loss of strength. I will therefore take as my guiding thread the notion of ‘force.’ I think there will be agreement, at least initially, on the fact that the experience of fatigue finds its source in a great expenditure of forces, followed by a more-or-less extended loss of these same strengths. This is equally true of fatigues of body and mind. It is also reasonable to assume that all fatigue is the result of an activity—whether that of the person who tires while exercising it or through experiences of another agent whose action fatigues him or her. This immediately raises the question, and it is present already in Aristotle, of how we are to understand why certain activities, whether actively exercised or undergone passively, are more tiring than others. For we have all had the experience of a great expenditure of strength and energy, which, instead of tiring us, has given us new strength. Aristotle approaches this problem through his conception of the Prime Mover, which, while being characterized by pure and total activity, never tires. His deceptively trivial explanation is that this incessant activity costs the Prime Mover nothing because it requires no effort. It is therefore necessary to refine our initial affirmation: it is the expenditure of forces or energy that requires an effort that is tiring. Expenditures that consume much or even all our strength are especially tiring. So then, what is the kind of activity that requires such effort that it exhausts our strength and tires us? And what are the activities that, despite their great intensity and expenditure of strength, make us stronger instead of tiring us? We know that for the author of the Nicomachean Ethics, it is the theoretical activity of contemplation that tires us so little that it makes us almost equal to the admirable indefatigability of the divine. If the activity of thought is so little tiring for

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us, it is because it is continuous, detached from bodily needs, and gives us great pleasure. To the contrary, discontinuous activities, which involve a great expenditure of bodily strength, and which repel us, are particularly tiring. In short, it is a matter of those activities that are tiring and require a great effort, are interrupted, and have to be started repeatedly, of heavy bodily activities, and above all activities that we do without pleasure or joy. This means that already in Aristotle it is difficult to make a distinction, concerning the experience of human fatigue, between what is attributable to the efforts of the body and to the efforts of the mind. With his usual care, Chrétien draws our attention to the fact that this conception of fatigue-effort in the Ethics does not entirely coincide with that found in book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In the Metaphysics, the Aristotelian reflection on the activities that cause us fatigue moves from an ethico-theological-psychological perspective to an ontological perspective that dispenses with any comparison between human acts and powers and divine acts and powers. As a result, human fatigue is no longer related to divine indefatigability. Rather, it fits into the framework of a general reflection on the nature of change and more specifically on its conditions of ontological possibility, namely, on the one hand, power or possibility (dunamis) and, on the other hand, action in the proper sense or actuality (energeia). It is known that Aristotle analyzes change and movement in terms of an actualization and realization of a power or, as we say more familiarly, the passage of a power into act. Adapting this analysis of change to human action, we can therefore say with Chrétien that the passage to acting is never without effort; and that it is this effort involved in the actualization of our virtual powers which is the most fundamental source of human fatigue. If this is the case, then are we not authorized to think, a contrario, that not only pure real activity, but also purely virtual power involves no effort and thus spares us all fatigue? Let us admit that pure activity is reserved for the gods and that every human act results from the actualization of a virtual power which requires effort and tires us. This still does not rule out that humans may have virtual powers or restrained forces the possession of which does not incur effort or fatigue. We therefore hesitate to subscribe fully to an assertion by Chrétien, according to which: “the possibility of fatigue is the possibility as such [?], the potentiality as such [?], a power of being that must [yet] be actualized [!]” (Fatigue 43). Beginning his reading of the book Theta of Metaphysics in chapter 8, which deals with the superiority of energeia over dunamis, Chrétien does not dwell on the earlier chapters which are devoted to the examination of dunamis as such, or rather insofar as it is in lack (steresis) of actualization. It is to Heidegger that we owe an interpretation of these introductory reflections by Aristotle on the nature of dunamis and its different modalities in terms (certainly modern) of “force” [Kraft], but also of “capacity” [Fähigkeit],

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“art” [Kunst], “talent” [Begabung], “capability” [Vermögen], “competence” [Befähigung], “aptitude” [Eignung], “skill” [Geschicklichkeit], “violent force” [Gewalt], and “power” [Macht].”2 What then is the effect of this understanding of dunamis as a force on the question of the ontological origin of human fatigue? If, on the one hand, ‘strength’ is indeed the antonym of ‘fatigue’ (18 and passim), and if, on the other hand, strength is what characterizes dunamis, then why would the actualization of a virtual force require effort and why would it be a source of fatigue? It must be admitted that one searches in vain for an answer to this question in Aristotle and indeed in Chrétien. What in the passage of a human power to act requires an effort that fatigues us? Is it not because the actualization of a powerful force encounters resistance or has to overcome inhibitions, impediments or obstacles? This is the answer we find in Leibniz.3 It amounts to locating the source of the fatigue that results from certain human activities neither in the act itself, nor in the power, nor even in the passage of the power into act as such, but in the obstacles that this passage encounters on its path and which it must strive to overcome. Leibniz borrows this solution from his dynamic physics and completes it with the onto-theological observation according to which, in humans and other creatures, the power of all force is by essence limited, which is to say finite. There would thus exist two causes of human fatigue and even two kinds of fatigue. The first would be linked to our ontological nature, which is to say to our finitude. It would therefore be permanent and in a sense congenital. We would be fatigued already before we begin to act, and we would be born fatigued. Fatigued not by the weight of our power (as Chrétien sometimes seems to suggest), but by the limits of our power that place us at the mercy of other agents. Our ontological lack of all-powerful active forces would make us dependent, that is, partially passive. Only a finite being, whose action is always partially passive, can fatigue itself in acting. This is a position that Chrétien attributes to Thomas Aquinas (44f). Following the same line of thought, Leibniz lets us see that our passivity makes us dependent not only on other agents, but also on what, in ourselves, passively undergoes our own action, namely our “mass” or material composition. Besides the active forces (vis activa) that give shape to its actions, every finite substance also contains the passive forces (vis passiva) of matter that are shaped or moved by its action. Leibniz describes these passive forces alternately as forces of “inertia,” “laziness,” or even “weariness.”4 The ultimate, necessary, and sufficient cause of our fatigue would therefore be none other than our ontological passivity, the mark of our finitude. The second kind of fatigue would result not from ontological passivity as such, but from our effort to overcome it as soon as we act. In this case,

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passivity is not only an ontological obstacle to our actions as finite agents, but it becomes a contrary force that resists the action of the active force. It is almost imperceptibly that Leibniz passes from an ontological conception to a dynamic conception of passivity. Without contradicting Spinoza’s view, according to which any conatus or any action can be accompanied just as much by joy as by sadness, Leibniz insists more on the fact that any action requires an effort from us, and that this effort is painful to us and tires us. In acting, therefore, we not only undergo the action of other agents (as Spinoza, after Aristotle, never ceases to repeat), but we also come up against something in ourselves which does not want to act, which resists or opposes our action. It is therefore not so much the action itself that tires us, nor even the passage to the act of our active force, but it is the effort that we must make in order to overcome the resistance of the counterforces of our passivity. What is most tiring in our activity is not the adversity of things, of others, or of circumstances, but the struggle against ourselves. Rather than congenital fatigue, we must, in this case, speak of agonal fatigue, that is to say the fatigue that results from struggle. To act is to struggle against oneself, and struggling is tiring. Even if fatigue is incontestably a state in which a subject-substance finds itself deprived of strength, it is therefore in the register of the action of forces, and more precisely of antagonistic forces, that it is inscribed. This means not only that one cannot think of fatigue outside of the concept of force, but also, inversely, that it is mainly in the experience of fatigue, that is to say in a lack of strength, that a force manifests itself as an acting force. It is well known, in fact, that a force, as such, does not know its own strength. An unthwarted acting force is content to act or to take action. It is not endowed with any kind of reflexive consciousness. While being the antonym of strength or force, as Chrétien observes, fatigue, or even illness and exhaustion, still is an experience in which a force can originally gain access to awareness of itself—as lacking. When he writes that “we are never contemporaneous with an inaugural fatigue” and that “[it] has always already been there” before we became aware of it (23, cf. also 15), we must add that there does not exist, among us finite beings, a purely active inaugural force conscious of its own power. Not only were we always already fatigued by life, before realizing it in a kind of weariness, but our vital forces themselves, because of their antagonism, were always already weakened and overwhelmed with fatigue. One therefore can only follow Chrétien in his critical reading of Janet’s conception of fatigue as a cause of disease, and more particularly of nervous disease (chap. XIV). According to Janet, the disease would be caused by an excessive expenditure of forces, and the patient would be a kind of gambler who squandered his capital of strength, especially in futile feelings. Chrétien concedes to Janet that feelings or emotions can tire us just as much as actions.

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But he takes offense to the fact Janet measures our feelings, which are essentially for other people, by the economic yardstick of a costly expenditure of one’s own energy and strength. For Chrétien, “[e]very encounter is priceless” and to speak of “an ‘expensive’ or ‘cheap’ individual” is extremely “vulgar” (119). Certainly! and we will take this up immediately by addressing, in turn, the fatigue and exhaustion of the patient and the right way to help him or her heal through a true “encounter” and “relationship.” But the cost of the expenditure of force and a failure to find a way to avoid tiring ourselves too much in the feelings we have for others, are not all that is at stake here. It is equally problematic to conceive of what Janet calls an individual’s “psychological strengths” (115) as personal capital. All our reflections lead us to instead think that, far from being the owners and managers of our strength, it is the forces and drives that possess us and precede us. An individual is constructed with and on the basis of the forces that inhabit him. Up to a certain point, as Leibniz has suggested, he even merges with them. He much more is his forces than he has them. And given their multiple and antagonistic character, these forces are a source of fatigue for the individual even before he has spent them. The deepest fatigue therefore does not consist in being “without strength,” but results from our permanent effort to harmonize the contrary forces that inhabit us. We lose ourselves far more often in our forces than we lose the forces themselves. FATIGUE AND THE PAINS OR SUFFERINGS RELATED TO ILLNESS It is often said, and rightly so, that an illness leaves the patient “without strength.” Basically, a disease is nothing other than a loss of vital forces. This is why we take great fatigue, insurmountable weariness, and deep exhaustion as signs of an illness. This goes for both illnesses of the mind and illnesses of the body—so much so that fatigue of the body is usually accompanied by fatigue of the mind, and vice versa. It is not self-evident that, in the case of a disease of the body, only an external agent would be the cause of the disease, whereas in a disease of the mind, it would be only the mind that makes itself ill. For it is well established that a body can make itself ill, and that a mind can be made ill by the body as well as by external circumstances. Nevertheless, all illness is much more deeply marked by the experience of pain and suffering than by that of fatigue. An illness tires the patient by making him or her suffer, often for a long time. But what is suffering? We do well to distinguish the experience of suffering from that of pain. Not only because pain is often throbbing and quite precisely localized, while suffering

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persists for a long time and spreads throughout the body and mind. But above all because pain can monopolize an individual to the point of almost erasing it, whereas suffering is an eminently subjective experience, even more subjective than fatigue. In violent pain, the subject is nothing more than pain, his toothache for example. His consciousness shrinks to the point of merging with his pain. Suffering, on the contrary, is never anonymous. In suffering, the subject appropriates his illness, not only by becoming aware of it, but also by recognizing himself as suffering. Even if it is our pains that make us suffer, at the same time our suffering distances us from our pains by allowing us to adopt an attitude or behavior towards them, a subjective position. It is not, of course, a question of denying that suffering is painful, but of emphasizing that in the experience of suffering, the subject gives his pain a place in his life, instead of being swept away by it. Suffering can have meaning; pain, however sensitive it is, is senseless. It is true that pain is just as fatiguing as suffering, and that illnesses are most often accompanied by both pain and suffering. But that does not erase the difference between pain and suffering. A subject who suffers cannot ignore his suffering, and a subject too overwhelmed by his pain is easily lost in his illness. Pain takes away all one’s strength, it makes one helpless. Suffering, on the contrary, even if it seems unbearable, is already a response that one makes to pain, a response that willingly extends into a call for help. While pain monopolizes the subject and closes him in on himself, sometimes until he loses consciousness, suffering, in which he appropriates his pain and his illness, establishes the possibility of a relationship with another. Pain makes you scream, suffering usually leads to a complaint. In the best of cases, this complaint is accompanied by a desire for healing and a request for treatment. Let us recall that, in his more recent book on call and response,5 Chrétien not only draws our attention to the simultaneity of call and response, but also to their possible asymmetry. In the case of sickness and suffering, this means that the call of someone suffering in illness need not precede the response of the doctor. A deeply ill patient is often quite incapable of calling on the doctor for help or even of wishing to be cured. It is therefore up to the doctor or caregiver to hear the silent call of suffering and to respond to it. To hear suffering is already to respond to it; and it is within this response that suffering is constituted as a call. But should it be specified? It is not the suffering itself that calls, but rather a subject who presents himself or herself as suffering too much to be able to effectively ask for help. And it must be admitted that a subject who has appropriated his or her anonymous and foreign pains in a personal suffering, a subject who recognizes himself or herself as ill and has come out of his or her isolation, has a better chance of being heard and of being cured than a subject who stubbornly denies his or her illness. For even a patient too overwhelmed to be able to call for help must at least lend himself

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to the intervention of the doctor, that is to say to the response he makes to his illness and his suffering. He must welcome the treatment as a response to a request that he was unable to formulate. WEARINESS, EXHAUSTION, AND DEATH DRIVES We have seen that the action or, more precisely, the efforts that the realization of a power requires of us are not the only cause of our states of fatigue. There is also an ontological passivity or fatigue that is the expression of the weight of our finite existence. In this connection, Chrétien cites what Heidegger says of the “Dasein’s character of burden” (29). Both kinds of fatigue have in common the fact that they are inevitable. Yet it is not inevitable that they lead to illnesses and their suffering, for illnesses and their successive suffering attack less our power to act, our ability to be, or our original passivity, than our vital forces—whether they are those of our body, of our mind, or both. The opposite of disease is not indefatigable and infinite power, but health of body and mind. There would be a lot to say about what our conception of health owes to our experience of illness, as well as about the states of fatigue caused by illness. But there is no doubt that it is the experience of suffering, long before that of fatigue, that constitutes the most personal expression of illness and the pain that accompanies it. Fatigue is an effect (even contemporaneous with its cause) of the disease; suffering is its most intimate expression, of which we have nevertheless underlined the character of call that is addressed to another subject. Chrétien repeatedly returns to what differentiates fatigue and suffering from illness, on the one hand, and from weariness or exhaustion, on the other. He sums up this difference by making a distinction between a “no longer being able to” [ne plus pouvoir]and a “no longer being able to bear” [n’en pouvoir plus] (30). But isn’t it true that the one who is tired by excessively heavy efforts, and the patient whose sufferings are too great, can’t bear it anymore? To be sure! But the fact remains that there is also “[a] fatigue without weariness, [. . .] a fatigue that still has a future and reserves, a fatigue that still has good days ahead of it” (28). Likewise, suffering can still be the expression of a subjective power; and he who would be exhausted to the point of having lost all his powers, would no longer be able to suffer either: “He who could no longer at all [ne pourrait plus du tout], would also have finished with fatigue, as with suffering” (30). It therefore seems that for Chrétien, weariness would be the experience of a fatigue that no longer leaves any hope; and that exhaustion would consist in an abolition of all power, even that of being able to suffer (from it).

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One may wonder, however, if it is still true that the weariness of life “[t]he taedium vitae [which] weighs on a life that does not experience its strength” (26), and excessively exhausting suffering truly robs us of all power. Is it not also the case that the despair caused by excessive fatigue and unbearable suffering is often accompanied by the desire and the will to put an end to one’s life? When we lack the strength to continue living, there arises from out of nowhere the strength or rather the drive to end life. This force of despair that seizes a subject exhausted by his sufferings is what is commonly called a death drive. This is not the place to go into the Freudian doctrine of the death drives and more particularly of the death drives as disunited from the drive for selfpreservation.6 Let us just remember that no human life, however harmonious it may be, is totally exempt from death drives. Even when they act only in mute form, death drives are such a part of human life that they must also be understood as vital drives. It is true that death drives only rarely triumph completely over our desire to continue living. But it is no less true that our whole life is marked by the conflict between our will to live and our will to die. Before taking the extreme form of a desire to end life, death drives already manifest themselves in multiple forms in our life. We recall that Freud mentions (somewhat out of order, it is true) behaviors as diverse as blockages due to inertia, sterile repetitions, and hateful and destructive aggressive behavior. There is no doubt that our contrary impulses and the conflicts that result from them account for much of the fatigue and the suffering of our lives. Neurotic conflicts can be as exhausting as the suffering caused by physical illness—to the point where it is often difficult to distinguish the contribution of one or the other to our states of exhaustion and discouragement, and to our desire to end a life that is too painful. Our disagreement with Chrétien is therefore much less profound than it may appear at first sight. It is limited to the observation that a state of exhaustion, far from depriving us of all power and all strength, can on the contrary give free rein to our death drives. Whether the exhaustion due to the fatigues of life and the sufferings of illness (physical and mental) leaves us “without strength” or, on the contrary, arouses the force of our death drives, is immaterial to the essential question of how one can face and overcome a state of exhaustion. Because it is certainly not by giving free rein to our death drives that we get out of our fatigue, our suffering of life and illness, our discouragement, and our exhaustion. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of the force of death drives has the great advantage of allowing us to understand that, ultimately, none of our vital forces or counterforces has the power to help us overcome our fatigue, our weariness and exhaustion. To get out of this, we must radically get out of the regime of our own power, that is to say of what we can do by ourselves. Even

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if exhaustion does not deprive us of all force (such as that of death drives), it is quite true that it leaves us “without strength” to remedy it on our own. The strength of our patience is never enough, even if it goes beyond the acceptance or endurance of a state of exhaustion and culminates in a voluntary suspension of the use of all our force. We truly come out of fatigue and exhaustion only by getting out of the regime of the use of our own forces, and we only leave the regime of our own forces by getting out of ourselves. JOY, LOVE, ADMIRATION, AND HOSPITALITY To get free from our fatigue or exhaustion, from ourselves, and from the regime of our own forces, several paths are then available to us. Chrétien devotes a large part of his book to exploring them. A first way is that of joy, of the joy that Descartes recommends to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who was overwhelmed by her reversals of fortune and melancholic (25). Surprisingly enough, Chrétien quotes only what Descartes says about “the contentment of the soul” which results “from exercises of the body, such as hunting, tennis and the like.” One would therefore be cured of one’s melancholy and of the fatigues of life by a fatigue of the body that uplifts the soul by making it “notice the strength, or the skill, or some other perfection of the body to which it is joined” (i.e., these are still Descartes’s words). No mention is made, by Chrétien, of those other joys of the soul that may be procured, according to Descartes, by contemplation of the colors of flowers, the graceful flight of birds, and other beautiful things that we encounter in nature, that is to say outside of ourselves. A second restful joy that Chrétien explores at length in the Conclusion of his book is that of the gift of “tireless love” (153f). Whether it is the indefatigable love of God for his creatures or of a parent for his child, or the love within the couple, this is a love that may turn “towards the man of fatigue” (153), that is to say towards a person who does not have all his or her strength. The true joys of love also result from receiving a love that is given in such a way as “not to tire the other by loving him and by dint of loving him, which would be to love only oneself and the affirmation of one’s love” (154). He who is thus loved beyond all personal merit and beyond all expectation or hope is “dispossessed of the place and the role that I assigned to myself. One is irreplaceable only in ignorance of one’s place” (155). At the same time, this love that dispossessed us of ourselves is also “terrible” (155), because it recalls us to our powerlessness. We may in turn love the other who loves us so much, but the love we give him or her will never be commensurate with the love we have received, for when we love the other in return, “this turn is not a mirror response, nor a correspondence to the love that we have received, it is

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[. . .] the passage to another order, to another dimension of existence. And to an even livelier exposition” (157). What is “terrible” in the love that is given to us is therefore not the force of a love that would fatigue us by dint of doing violence to us and that would dominate us by imposing itself on us against our will. A gift is not a force, and the gift of love precisely has the effect of taking us out of the regime of forces and counterforces. What is terrible in “the love that is borne to us” is to be “exposed” to it without being able to respond to it with an equivalent love. This “other dimension of existence,” inaugurated by love given and received, is characterized precisely by the fact that we no longer belong to ourselves, and that our personal forces are without place and without weight. If it is true that the joy of the love received takes us out of ourselves and out the fatigue that we have of ourselves and of our life, this therefore happens quite differently than from the joys we are given by contemplation of beautiful things and creatures. This is true, first of all, because in true love we turn less towards the other than the other turns towards us. To be sure, for Chrétien beautiful things, too, have already manifested themselves to us and have already called us, before we have turned toward them in aesthetic contemplation. In that sense, they respond to us before we have questioned them.7 But for all of that, the beautiful things that come our way and refresh us and delight us do not love us. A second difference is that, unlike beautiful things, the people who love us do not offer themselves to our contemplation and do not allow us to look back on ourselves and on the joy they give us. Instead, they dispossess us of ourselves. There is a real joy in being thus delivered from oneself, at least when one is loved with “consideration. This is to not throw the other into the situation of being loved with the violence of a claim” (156). Yet the joy of “receiving more than we can” (157) while being loved with an indefatigable love is an “even livelier exposure” (157) than any fatigue that deprives us of the free use of our strength. It is the greatest joy imaginable and also the most powerful remedy for fatigue in ourselves and in our lives. But this joy is not restful and easy. Are there not other joys that Chrétien does not mention, joys that somehow hold the middle between the joy of aesthetic contemplation and the joy of being loved with an indefatigable love? Joys that result from a free exit from oneself, without therefore bringing us back to ourselves? Joys, too, which owe nothing to our own strength, without “exposing” us to the debt of “receiving more than we can”? It is again Descartes, this time in his treatise on The Passions of the Soul, who shows us a path to those median joys which take us out of ourselves and from the register of a free exercise of our power, without putting us in infinite debt to another. Let us remember the eminent place he reserves for “admiration” and “generosity”! These two positive passions deserve to be

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called joyful virtues. Their joy is distinguished both from the joy that beautiful things give us and from the joy that is given in receiving untiring love. Their joy neither brings us back to ourselves nor puts us in debt to others. In admiration, we are elevated in placing the other above ourselves. In generosity, we expand by making room for the other. In admiration of what is greater than us, we are carried to heights beyond us. However, this flight or momentum is not accompanied by any submission to the other, and it knows no return to oneself. To admire is to leave the horizontal dimension of petty envy and venomous jealousy; it is to leave the laborious field of forces and counterforces below. To admire is to access the true freedom that consists in being freed from the care of oneself and the weight of one’s own existence. This joyful liberation requires no effort from us and causes us no fatigue, because it is the object of our admiration that attracts us and fills us with its perfection. It is this aspiration that comes from above that distinguishes admiration from any idealization or idolatry. Admiration is characterized by a humble self-effacement in favor of the other—unlike idealization, which magnifies the other for one’s own benefit. Admiration is a response; idealization is a projection. Even if the object that we admire for its perfection is generally not a sacred object, admiration shares with the veneration and glorification of the divine the same submission to what is better and higher than us. As with “admiration” and veneration, it is tempting to make a connection between Cartesian “generosity” and hospitality. Letting the other enter your home is no less liberating than getting out of yourself to soar towards the height of the other. The same true joy prevails in openness to others and in opening oneself. Welcoming the other into one’s home is also a way of renouncing the use of power. Is it necessary to recall that the laws of hospitality require visitors to lay down their arms at the entrance of the house that welcomes them? And that the host owes the visitor, even his worst enemy, protection and security under his roof? By making room for the stranger in his house, the host gives him, for the time of his visit, a place and a home. As long as the visitor stays there, the house of the host is the house of the stranger, and the host who welcomes him remains at his service. The house itself is thus enriched with a new meaning. It is no longer a home, but it becomes an open place, a place no longer physical but symbolic. The symbolism of hospitality is particular in that it abolishes property rights and suspends the economy of exchanges, based on the reciprocity of agents and the equivalence of goods. The laws of hospitality also shed new light on what we have said of the relationship between doctor and patient. We have emphasized that even when it is the doctor’s response that transforms the patient’s mute suffering into a call and a request for healing, this patient must still welcome the medical treatment and allow the doctor to enter the intimacy of his suffering. But there

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is also the hospitality of a doctor who allows himself to be challenged by the suffering of the patient and who puts his knowledge and his power at the patient’s service. These are two different forms of hospitality, and they cannot even be considered reciprocal. But giving back to the exhausted patient his lost hope and his joy of life also brings joy to the doctor and allows him to overcome the exhaustion that comes in his service of the patient. It is only in joy can one give joy. Joy is therefore the only remedy against the discouragements of fatigue, illness and exhaustion that lock us in on ourselves. The joys of aesthetic contemplation, love, admiration, and hospitality have in common the fact that we cannot give them to ourselves by our own strength or capacity. No personal force or counterforce can come to the aid of those who are left without forces. Help must come from elsewhere, from an external event or from a relationship with someone other than oneself. And it is only relationships that renounce the use of force that can restore hope and the joy of living to a subject overwhelmed by his own lack of strength. This is because joy, whatever Spinoza thinks, is not the effect of personal strength, but of openness to a gift that one cannot give to oneself. Joy is our response to a gift received that is undeserved and unexpected, even if, secretly, we have always hoped for it. NOTES 1. Respectively, L’inoubliable et l’inespéré (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1991) and Fragilité (Paris: Minuit, 2017). I will henceforth cite this latter book in the body of my text as Fragilité. 2. M. Heidegger, Aristoteles, Metaphysik Theta 1–3: Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), GA 33, p.72. Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 60. 3. Cf. R. Bernet, Force, Drive, Desire. A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), pp. 36–64. 4. Ibid., pp. 58–59, 62, 70. 5. J.-L. Chrétien, Répondre. Figures de la réponse et de la responsabilité (Paris: P.U.F, 2007). 6. Cf. R. Bernet, Force, Drive, Desire, pp. 214–95. 7. J-L. Chrétien, Répondre, p. 10.

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The Body of the Response Emmanuel Housset

Jean-Louis Chrétien has sought constantly to show that it is through the body that we are a dialogue. Yet he never wanted to write a “phenomenology of the body,” because on the one hand it seemed too pretentious to him, while, on the other hand, the body is not merely one phenomenon among others but what gives access to phenomena; it is a condition of phenomenality itself. With his philosophy of the responding body, Chrétien follows the path opened by Husserl, which continued with Merleau-Ponty, and more recently with Didier Franck and Jean-Luc Marion. Indeed, the question of the body is at the heart of every philosophical analysis that would go beyond the philosophy of the subject, which is to say that of representation, in order to discover the excess of what is given and the irreducibility of the phenomenon to the a priori conditions of subjectivity. The body is thus the place of an encounter with the world, of hearing one’s neighbor and of a confrontation with God such as in Jacob’s struggle with the angel. It is the body of a subjectivity exposed and even wounded by what it encounters, but which becomes truly aware of itself only through this injury. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD With all the rigor of the phenomenologist who wishes to avoid simply clothing things in words, but on the contrary wishes to first listen to the word coming from things, Chrétien describes the pure phenomenon of the body as the place of our response to the call, which also means the place of our listening, since, according to a thesis that he develops in his own way, the call can only be heard in our response, which for its part is always fragile and stammering. The body, by its own historicity, is the reality of our presence already before 45

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any representation. Against any thought of passing over the world and the self in order to claim an external face-to-face, Jean-Louis Chrétien elucidates our presence as a body-to-body in which one responds with one’s whole body to what affects us, and he shows that this response is always already beginning. Thus, the insufficiency of our response is not a failure of speech, but in fact the very modality of a speech seeking to express the excess of what is given over what can appear and which is never fully possessed but can only be transmitted and shared. Being is not given to possessing, but to saying. From this we can see that a philosophy of the body is possible only if it is also a philosophy of the word, because it is through our speech that we are present in flesh and blood to the world, to others and to God. In other words, our body only becomes a body by being speech and any incorporation is an act of speech. The body becomes truly a body in the response it gives to a first word addressed to us, like the father standing and welcoming with open hands the prodigal son who now returns to him, as we see in Rembrandt’s painting of that scene. This means that our body is not merely that by which we make our way in the world, wandering with an indifference that arises from a sense that everything is ultimately on the same plane. Beyond what Chrétien often calls an “aesthetic” conception of the body, by which it would be only the external instrument of a sterile “repetition” enacted by who is “ready for anything,” the body is the site of an event that transforms us forever, that opens up a future and puts an end to an epoch. In the “Retrospection” added to his The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For,1 Chrétien specifies that this response of the body, which calls into question any project of transparency linked to the definition of human being by reflection alone, can be elucidated not only by fulfilling the promises of certain philosophies of past, but also those of “religious and mystical thought and speech.”2 There is in this work a phenomenological method which, by drawing on thoughts that conceive of an interiority that is well prior to the philosophies of subjectivity, makes it possible to put aside the project of perfect self-knowledge and total self-control. This is not in favor of a laborious doxographic project of its own, and to which current philosophy is sometimes reduced, but only a willingness to take up a questioning present in the thought of the body since Antiquity as a way to reviving essential possibilities for approaching the phenomenon. Chrétien thus takes up, but also significantly transforms a method inherited from Heidegger: philosophy is a virtuous circle between an elucidation of the phenomenon, without which no history is possible, and a history without which the phenomenon in its irreducible plurality cannot be illuminated. He is particularly attentive to what each figure possesses of the irreducible, though the term of figure is undoubtedly inappropriate here, since there is no project of a teleology, even in the soft form that would come in the form of a genealogy. It is rather a question of

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seeing in these conceptions of ipseity involving both soul and body the possibility of thinking beyond the subject, and without either seeking to make the historical present the measure of the past or simply ignoring the historicity of thought. Wanting therefore to escape, equally, a teleology of history, historicism, and an ahistorical understanding of philosophy, Chrétien tried to show that listening to the promises of the past is precisely what makes it possible for us to see a future open up, now in the present, that was unforeseeable. We can only be born to ourselves as philosophers by discovering in the past a thinking that is older and newer, and which thus becomes the event by which we are brought before a promise. For we live not only on the promises that we make to ourselves, but also on those of the past that are sent to us. By this “method,” it becomes possible to avoid the pretention that is expressed in anthologies or panoramas, in which the past is frozen, no longer bearing a promise addressed to us, since it has been reduced to a single chapter in a manual. In the relation to the past that Chrétien insists on, the necessary condition for access to the phenomena, humility—which is not at all voluntary abasement—becomes the condition of all philosophy, and it is with fear and trembling that we may speak of the philosophers of the past, and indeed may speak from them. This is why it is necessary to denounce the profanations of interiority which wanted to find there the site of transparency, of control, of self-creation by oneself, so that we may instead order reawaken a sense of our eccentric identity and in so doing also regain the patience of the soul and body by which our word is attentive to the heart of things. Chrétien defines for us the two rules of his method: “The first opens us to the polyphonic character of intellectual and spiritual history, against the overwhelming uniformity of an alleged ‘spirit of the times’ (Zeitgeist) that in our age is present in ever-changing names.”3 The second rule of the method is to avoid great simplifying theses (e.g., Nietzsche or Foucault) about history that level the complexity of human experience when in fact “several paradigms always coexist.”4 This method requires that we describe what takes place without crushing the different paradigms under or into a single one among them, because this openness is the very condition of access to the object of the question. These two rules of method allow us to better pose the question of the body, without restricting it to a one-sided perspective. I AM MY BODY, BUT MY BODY IS NOT ME With De la fatigue (1996) and then Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art (1997; translation 2003), Chrétien expands on these possibilities of the responding body, in particular by considering forms of response that are

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not verbal. He applies himself now to thinking about the historicity of our response as well as that of the body itself, by describing the “how” of this response of the body. In this phenomenology, one sees that the human body does not answer for itself alone, since “its task and its dignity are to speak for all that does not speak, to be the place where the world transforms its light into song.”5 Thus, following the phenomenological requirement of a return to the things themselves, Chrétien does not start from an abstraction such as the biological body, the body of drives (le corps pulsionnel) or any form of represented body, but applies himself to the experience itself of the body which has its unitary structure before its division by the multiple disciplines that study it. The primary experience of the body, the one that makes all the others possible, is that of the responding body, the one that makes the world visible while also making the soul that animates it visible. The body is then the place in which two invisibles meet, two excesses touch and are born together (co-naissent): “This manifestation, of which the body is not the instrument but the place, has in its very clarity its secret, the secret that it delivers without betrayal, and which it exhibits without developing it, namely the secret of its perpetual birth.”6 The gaze of the other is what is shown and what nevertheless escapes any attempt to grasp it, making it the object of an appresentation and not of a presentation: it is perceived as non-perceived. Chrétien can then develop the idea that whatever ugliness belongs to the body is due above all to the fact that it is deserted by spirit, thus to the shamelessness by which it may be exhibited purely as an object of spectacle, without any reserve, so that in the movement to show everything in fact nothing at all is shown. This transformation of human beings into objects is constantly increasing in today’s world, and its attempts to challenge it come inevitably to showing that the responding body is a body of modesty in that it manifests itself while reserving itself. Chrétien writes, “That I am my body is not convertible for us: I am my body, but my body is not me. This is shown in modesty, which arises from unity without either confusion or separation.”7 He adds, “It is because I am my body that a gaze upon it can confuse me or make me ashamed, ashamed of myself and not of it as of another substance, reaching me in my very being. It is because it is not me that this disturbance is precisely shame, since this gaze grasps something about me and assigns to it without any possible evasion a totalization that I do not recognize.”8 My body can betray me, but it cannot deliver me transparently, and that is why it is only itself in responding and not by becoming an object of adoration by the soul. The current idolatry of the body-image, staged in every possible way, is part of a much more radical forgetting of the body than any that has taken place in past eras. It is not the least paradox of our time that the cult of the body is so linked to the forgetting of one’s being in a purely aesthetic relationship to one’s body, neglecting the other stages on life’s way, to speak

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with Kierkegaard. In such a cult, the body offered to the admiration of the greatest number is no longer human, but to the contrary is nothing more than a machine that always improves it performance of a function9 (Fatigue 17). Again, the body is a body only insofar as it refuses to truly become a pure object of spectacle so that instead it may be rediscovered in its nascent state, that is to say in giving birth to the world through a look, a gesture of the hand, a movement that opens up the space of the landscape, an attitude opening the space of a meeting, or an open face by which we are addressed to which we respond. But this responding body is not a body that is master of itself, and it grasps itself in the fullness of manifestation, but is the finite and vulnerable body exposing itself to the world and to others. Forgetting the body is nothing other than ignoring its vulnerability, which is also inattention to its historicity. For our body bears not only the wounds of time, those of age, but also all the wounds that have marked our existence, and it is through these wounds, and not in spite of them, that we give birth to the world and welcome others. If it is natural to get up to receive someone, beyond mere politeness, the one who gets up, or if he cannot get up, the one who turns his face towards us, opens a space of presence for us in which we can exist. Thus, there can be a beauty of the body which is not beauty in a body, and which derives from a radiance of goodness that is inscribed there. The flesh becomes word without losing its history, but to the contrary does so through all this history which participates already in its nascent state. Concerning fatigue, Chrétien highlights the impossibility of distinguishing between fatigue of the body and fatigue of the soul and he shows that this is not a marginal question, since it constitutes our very relationship to being. A consideration of the humanity of fatigue sheds light on the carnality of our response, in its obscurity and its fragility. A philosophy of the body that would not take fatigue into account would risk remaining quite abstract, which is to say, distracted from experience and especially time. After all, what could be the time in which we would not tire? Moreover, a phenomenology of the body seeking to elucidate the being of the body cannot do so directly, as if the body were a simple sentient thing. There is a phenomenality peculiar to the human body that cannot be approached according to Husserl’s model of sensitive perception, and this becomes clear when we attend to the concrete situation of fatigue in which the body endures and thus gives itself to be seen. In short, there is an essential link between “corporeality and fatigability” (Fatigue 11) so that we cannot think of the body without fatigue, nor for that matter fatigue without the body. From these two eidetic laws, the impossibility of thinking about the body without fatigue and fatigue without time, Chrétien studies the different figures of fatigue so as to show what each brings to the description of the phenomenon of the body. This raises the question is then to know if it is a question of multiple essences of body (the Greek body, the Christian body)

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or if we can speak of a multiform essence of the body. Be that as it may, such questions arise only on the condition of escaping the abstraction of a dualism, including in the philosophies of existence, in which there would always be a radical exteriority between my ipseity and my body, and which in turn would allow, for example, my mind to pass into an augmented body without anything changing in my mind. Transhumanism and its fantasies arise only for those who have not thought philosophically in this way about the human. More generally, no strictly empirical research gain access to the being of the body, for it will always hold the body as a simple thing among things. Chrétien specifies the only possible way of questioning the being of the body: “Of the original call, the body is always the respondent, and perhaps even more than the response, exceeding any response” (Fatigue 15). But this can only be understood by attending to the chiaroscuro of fatigue, that is to say by recognizing the fact that “use of the world wears us out” (Fatigue 19) and that it is through this finitude that we encounter the world and the others. However, if there is a first time when, for example, we see a pair of scissors, there is no comparable first fatigue, for to exist is always to have already experienced fatigue, even before saying “I.” We are thus called to elucidate the transcendental significance of fatigue as a condition of the possibility of any ordeal, even that of the gift. For human beings, not even untiring love can be without fatigue, and indeed this fatigue is part of the love of itself. This is how the body responds, without ever being separated from the soul, until when it can do so no longer, when we are wounded in our power. Fatigue has an irreducible facticity. It does not depend on me to decide from the height of my consciousness the meaning of its suffering. To be embodied is to have a freedom that is not infinite but finite, and ignorance of this finitude leads us to miss what it means to exist as a body. INDEFATIGABLE LOVE The body responds only because we think with our body, which is unique to human beings, and this act of thinking, like any transition from power to action, tires out. “Fatigue thus establishes our incarnate condition” (Fatigue 58–59), and Greek philosophy shows us this when it opposes the human and the divine. The meaning of fatigue is therefore not physiological, but transcendental, for it is an essential dimension of thought. It is therefore not only a question of wanting to answer from the world and to the world, but also of the necessity of accepting the cost of such a response in the pain it entails. Our task is not only to accept human finitude but, more than that, to accept tiring oneself out in love and then making the suffering body a mode of opening to the world. Love can at the same time and without contradiction

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be tiring and tireless; he is finite, and it can do anything, because he is supported by what it bears. This means that the responding body does not derive its strength only from itself, which is why it does not seek to preserve it or to make economic use of it. Its strength is received, and the more that it gives the more it earns. This is also why fatigue does not justify relying on one’s own accomplishments, for our strength comes from what we must do and be. My body is there specifically in its responding, and I can find real rest only in the tension between this presence and my future. This rest, then, occurs in the act of responding, soul and body, and not through our past responses, like the mountain dweller who finds his rest only in the well-defined path by which the world opens up to him. Of course, everything does still depend on the intention behind the response, and the responding body is always at risk of being only a responder. This is especially what happens when we try, in everyday life, merely to our hands busy, as when we seek to fill the void of our being with an activism that aims at doing everything yet proceeds with indifference. One cannot truly respond to the world and others merely to “kill time” or overcome self-boredom, and anything that comes out of that will never be good. This is a philosophy of the body that is strongly attentive both to the misery of the world and the insertion of time in the body through work, but is central aim is to distinguish two styles of existence and therefore two understandings of the body: a fatigued existence that does not cease to preserve itself, and an existence that does not count its strengths because it draws from a source other than itself. While describing the different figures of nihilism that miss the essence of fatigue, Chrétien tries to show that if fatigue is in our relationship with being, still it is not a fatigue of original being. Fatigue destroys us in one way or another when it is not supported by love, and only love can bear us through all fatigue without us getting lost. Such a thesis is directly opposed to one of the strongest modern theses on the body, namely that of Nietzsche, in whose work we find a thought of fatigue that detects nihilism in the form of Christianity, Buddhism, or even democracy or romanticism. For Nietzsche, we can free ourselves from fatigue only by committing ourselves to the thought of the eternal return, in a yes to the world which makes possible a certain constancy in our response. One is freed from one weight only by another weight, and the eternal return is the heaviest weight, the one that opens a new relationship to the body and to time. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this response can only be that of a body that is a plurality of impulses, forces, and spirits, and whether it is anything more than the act of incorporating all things by the will to power. The confrontation with Nietzsche is decisive for Chrétien, not only because Nietzsche’s conception of life is that of an entire epoch of thought, but also because it is always a question of passing from one thought of incorporation into another. If Nietzsche can think that Ariadne

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is fatigued by his compassion, this is perhaps because he did not know how to take its measure—the measure of the caritas that animates him—because he has reduced caritas to a simple moral standard. In an important sense, it is above all Nietzsche who must be overcome in order for us to truly envision the responding body. EXISTING IN IGNORANCE OF PLACE Chrétien can then show that only love is indefatigable because it does not consist in overcoming the finitude, fragility, and obscurity of our carnal existence, but in transfiguring them so that these three dimensions participate in our response. Being loved is what summons me to my most authentic being more truly than any reflection or any being-toward-death, because this call does not assign me a place. In a passage that condenses his entire philosophy of existence, Chrétien writes: “To become irreplaceable for the other is not to take possession of a place that I can myself know and situate in a system of possibilities. It is rather to be dispossessed of place and the role that I have assigned to myself. One is irreplaceable only in ignorance of one’s place, and in the patience required to sustain this unsurpassable non-knowing [nescience]. It is there, and only there, where I answer, that my word becomes truly mine, according to an authenticity that is traversed by the other, and only therefore unsubstitutable, an authenticity of transit and of exodus” (Fatigue 153). Beyond the analysis of the authentic according to Husserl and according to Heidegger, and even beyond the asymmetry according to Levinas, Chrétien instead takes up a course of analysis of selfhood that we find in the Bible and is developed, among others, by Saint Augustine and Kierkegaard, according to which the other, by loving me, gives me the possibility of revealing myself. By loving me, the other person casts on me a light that cannot come from myself and that dislodges me from the places with which I have been able to identify myself, give me to understand that I am not myself except in my response to this call, without my being able to secure a place by social or patrimonial status, and so forth. Everything that assures the “I” of a certain stability, of an identification in a space already there, distorts it by causing it to lose the capacity to respond, in an instant which does not number among the other instants, in a space that is opened by the one who loves me. This love summons me to myself, and refusing it is only another way of responding to it. Chrétien thus emphasizes that a love of which I would be the origin can only tire and that only the love that passes through me is indefatigable in its transitivity. If love can do everything, it is not that one has conquered all finitude, but instead that one draws from a source other than oneself. This is how it is possible for the humblest, the most mundane and most discreet

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forms of love to be highest, and how we see people taking care of those who they love all the way to the end, through their own exhaustion. This love does not eliminate suffering and fatigue, but it allows you to be reborn every day without falling into despair. There is an obscurity of our response that is ignorant of place, inasmuch as we never quite know what to do or what to be, yet in this transfiguration of fatigue with love there is at least one thing that is given in evidence without remainder, and that is that it is up to us to do something. Of course, such a first summon can lead to devotion as well as to the greatest violence. Be that as it may, fatigue can be something other than a limitation and a darkness in the path to contemplation, and this is why Chrétien presents Christian fatigue not as an obstacle to the journey as instead itself a place of light and even the way itself—the one that leads from Babylon to Jerusalem. When it becomes the way, thus when the body participates in our response, fatigue is no longer the despair of being closed into oneself without possibility of being the truth. This again emphasizes that there is no direct access to the truth and that everything depends on giving up the mortal dream of being a closed totality. From then on, the path of fatigue is also the one in which I gradually free myself from my untruth to understand that the ego is never anything but a restless and stammering response to what calls for it. But this body in which love can be indefatigable is not an isolated body, and one is never alone on this path. It is collectively that we respond in our finitude. Any philosophy of the body is also a philosophy of time, and the time of this progression is not time always taken up anew and totalized by an “I” of reflection. Nor is it the eternal return that would be an intensification of life. It is rather the “time required and offered” (Fatigue 166) of true patience, which consists in responding to others only in listening, in trying, at every moment, to respond on the basis of their own words. This is no longer the endurance of one who holds his place through thick and thin, but it the restless perseverance of one who is astonished at being reborn in each encounter. The body is thus what brings to our existence this dimension of exposure and of injury without which we would not be truly alive, that is to say, on the way to the truth that continues to transform us. THE HUMAN CHORUS In Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art, Chrétien continues his phenomenological analysis of the body that responds and bears witness to spirit, by highlighting acts of the body that can respond to the presence of a body. The painter’s hand and the poet’s voice are acts of presence that make us live in the joyful restlessness of being. For this it is necessary to leave the attitude

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projecting an overview such as we often find in aesthetics and the history of art, which always speak of the exterior of works of art, that is to say of their place, and are inclined to make inventories. Faithful to the Platonic refusal of any rational aesthetic, the phenomenological method puts in parentheses all these discourses on works in order to return to the “burn of the visible” [brÛlure du visible]10 so as to be able to bear witness to precisely to this, without drowning it in our words. In the course of this effort, Chrétien takes up Jacob’s struggle with the angel in order to show that “No one is stronger than when he gives place in such a way to that which surpasses him, without, however consenting to separate himself from it, but, instead, following it and pursuing it with a limping step” (Hand to Hand 4). If there are victories which are defeats, there are also defeats which are victories, when they are the reception of what is beyond us. Such a relation is more binding than any other, and if we have not decided it this is because it decides us. Thus, there are wounds that are blessings and to make an act of presence it is necessary to renounce taking up arms in order to defend oneself from any wounding by the truth. Whoever builds an inner fortress is, in fact, weak and ends up deprived of any real privacy and ultimately any real body. Our hands are lost to us when they become fists but fulfilled in welcoming what surpasses them. Those of us not in the world cannot see the world except through them. In a study of silence in painting, Chrétien argues that the true word does not speak, but is received from a listening that is both patient and obedient in the etymological senses. The question of silence is a common thread in his work, and he explains here that silence makes us listen to the song of the soul, itself a silent music, which though inaudible can nevertheless be heard with our hands. The body is entirely present to a first word that makes possible a listening and a responding that are well beyond the audible: “Ever since there has been painting, man has translated his listening to the silence of the world into forms. For every act of listening responds, and it is with his hands that the painter responds, in turn giving something to listen to. Painting makes us inhabit silence: that of the world, a musical silence” (Hand to Hand 57). Thus, painting does not represent bodies but, to the contrary, teaches us what the body to body [corps à corps] of listening is. It teaches us to be a responding body through which the soul does not speak to the place of the world, but “inhabits” the world by obeying a first word, and thus by being attentive to its offering of the world. Our speech, and this is what the body teaches, is only possible through an event preceding our own possibilities. The silence of painting is not that of failure or of solitude, as if of one who has shut himself up within himself, but it is the rustling silence of another word. Painting opens a path to saying yes to the world in a manner that delivers us from the permanent temptation of a no.

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Our voice is never so much our own as when it participates in the chorus of human beings who praise the gift of the world. In this way, our voice becomes our own through our body not because it would be individualized by any matter, but instead because it is engaged in a listening and responding that are both entirely unique and fully collective. However, if my responding body is inseparable from a community of bodies, this membership still is not an additional identity that would come on top of an identity already there. Indeed, this community of bodies which is much more than sheer intercorporeality is itself what makes our very identity, never as fixed substance but instead as verb. Our responding body becomes ours in this carnal community because it is there that it is fulfilled, exercised, and enacted. Becoming truly oneself thus cannot take the form of seeking to distinguish oneself from others according to some exclusionary difference, but on the contrary, occurs as one’s voice participates in the choral response of our humanity, without concern for relative place or importance. Only the one who speaks can be heard and this is worth all the recognition that might flatter our vanity. The response of the body, when free from all pursuit of personal glory, is what unifies the world. This continues even in sleep: “In falling asleep, the body deserts neither the word or the spirit—it does not become an uninhabited body. It still and always delivers trust or anguish, doubt or peace” (Hand to Hand 77–78). This sleeping body carries the glow of its secret, and it is to this that our gaze must respond. By describing painting as body to body [corps à corps] with the visible, Chrétien is able to show that the body remains responsive even in its sleep or its nudity, but also that when a painting only exhibits a body in complete transparency, the latter speaks no more, for the gleam of its secret is extinguished. In relation to what is thus essentially ungraspable, the melee [corps à corps] of call and the response must maintain a proximity that is never direct access. This obliquity of manifestation makes the encounter live from the space opened by the double reserve of both seer and the visible. To be sure, it is not simply that the body hides the soul, but rather that the body and the soul reserve themselves while manifesting themselves. The responding body is thus a body that exhibits modesty, and one that avoids impropriety of word, gesture, and posture. Modesty permits the gathering, the unity of body-to-body that keeps distance, knowledge that the other is never given immediately. The secret is then the condition of possibility of the encounter, but also its very modality, since any true encounter consists in letting this secret of the world and of the other person come forth in our own speech. The responding body approaches in and through secrecy, and this is why it does not fix in advance, according to the concern of all formal ethics, what should be said or done, but only it seeks the appropriate way to the very heart of the meeting, without wishing to master it. If the other person was transparent to us, if he

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or she did not give himself in reserve, there would be nothing more to reveal and there could be nothing visible. Chrétien takes from Heidegger the thesis that the reserve of being is not simply what is not yet revealed, as if it were a simple horizon of potentialities, but is the very heart of all manifestation. So, the secret is the very story of our encounter with the visible, and our body is essential to it. It is insofar as the body of the other absents itself, is reserved, that it calls us and permits us to manifest ourselves. The responding body inhabits this proximity to the ungraspable that calls for our speech and our gesture, and it is thus that the body’s response takes place in a nudity that is not the result merely of undressing but, on the contrary, is an exhibition of “someone who attests to himself or herself as exposed presence” (Hand to Hand 93). One who is naked arrives ceaselessly in the unimaginable,11 and if nudity is of both the soul and of the body, this is because it is uncovered under the gaze of the other and in the trust of an encounter. It calls for speech, the response of others, which may appear in thirst and tears, that are also expressions of the essential dimensions of our existence. Thirst drives us forward, “it calls us to the future, a future beyond human measures and calculations” (Hand to Hand 140). Once again, this nudity and thirst are not states of a subject that is already there, not something that happens to it. These dimensions of existence are ours only through our participation in their being. The body thus exhibits a vigil prior to that of the “I” and which makes the “I” possible. Of course, consciousness is also the power to hide, to mask oneself, but the possibilities of consciousness presuppose the body that is nothing in the world and that is the very mode of our presence to the world. The body is the way in which I am taken by the world and in which I take part in it, which is why it is not found in a temporality made up of successive instants but must instead be understood as the moment of contact with being, of the event of the origin. THE TREMBLING PRESENCE Chrétien is deliberately going against the contemporary trend toward breaking philosophy into increasingly distinct disciplines so that in imitating science it ceases to be science. There is no philosophy of art alongside philosophy, but only philosophy deploying its unitary meditation on the meaning of being beginning from art. Nevertheless, a philosophy “listening to the work of art” does not aim either to offer one-off studies of works in such a way as to illustrate a philosophical thesis that is already intact, or to elucidate a phenomenality specific to the work of art that would differ from that of sensible things and objects of understanding. It is more essentially a matter of proposing a new determination of phenomenality that is neither

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Husserl’s nor Heidegger’s. The experience in question does not relate to the hylomorphic relationship that would give voice to an initially silent world, but, on the contrary, consists of listening, of making oneself its spokesperson. It is about lending one’s voice to what manifests itself so that others can hear and can respond in turn. Listening to the work of art is therefore not at all a regional form of listening, but what teaches us to listen to everything. There is an obliquity of access to the phenomena that nevertheless manifest themselves—such is the general phenomenological thesis of Chrétien. This is also why we never listen and never see alone, but in a community of speaking and listening in which we can respond “in person.” We see here that Chrétien does not fall at all into a philosophy of pure feeling that Hegel mocked so insistently and that Husserl showed to be impossible. A pure appearing, free from all apprehension, would be appearing from nothing. Yet he changes the meaning of apprehension by decoupling call and response and according to the strict impossibility of their adequacy. The human voice responds to what is given to it to hear, and it only hears it responding to it. The present of our response thus is always born out of the future of the call that reaches us, a future that can never be abolished in a pure present. To feel is to listen in the sense of being summoned by the event of the world. It is on the condition of being a responding body that subjectivity can be constitutive. For Chrétien, such a body, both fragile and wounded, must be the ultimate source of phenomenality. In other words, there is no phenomenality without responsibility, there is no data without the prior “yes” of our body, without the carnal “here I am,” always fragile, of our trembling, groping presence in the world. Our way of feeling thus does not depend on our way of thinking, and this we truly learn only by listening to the work of art that defeats our expectations, so that we are returned to the obliqueness of what he calls body to body. And by this is meant precisely the listening which does not circumscribe the phenomenality of what is given, but allows itself to be taught by its surplus. Thus, for example, the one who cries out gives voice to an excess of meaning that cannot yet be articulated in words, so that one must first listen before consoling—with a listening that is not yet knowledge, a listening that makes ready, and attends, according to the meaning that Simone Weil has given to this term. The tears of the other are not an explanation, an interpretation, or an understanding, and our humanity consists in accompanying the other towards the horizon of their meaning. The bodyto-body presence that is attentive does not aim to dry the tears but first to listen to them.12 But let us not forget that this listening is not without words, because it is in speaking that we hear. Everything in us hears when we truly listen, and this listening is therefore also an act of the body. It is also through the body that we are a dialogue, according to a phrase from Hölderlin that

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Heidegger has commented on, and that for Chrétien directs us to think about the corporeality of our presence (Call 5–6). THE INCHOATION OF THE “I” All of this enables Chrétien to describe existence as a vocation, and to emphasize that the first vocation is that of being. To be is to have always already answered a call to be and indeed to be in a “here I am” elicited by it (Call 19). The primordial here, that of original spatiality, is not the zero point of reflection described by Husserl, but the here of my always hesitant and stammering response. All of my decisions, my commitments are only extensions of the “yes” that is linked to being itself: “Infinite excess, first of all, of the call over the answer, since the call is of the infinite: by calling me as a person, it calls me not as an isolated and abstract being, but calls the totality of the world in space and time along with me, in the inexhaustible chorus of which only one voice enduring its perpetual inchoation” (Call 19). This means that the carnal voice altered by the call is the only voice in which speaking oneself, in person, can be something else than speak about oneself. This leads Chrétien to call for a liberation of philosophy from the philosophy of subjectivity in all its forms, since for the latter every elucidation of the meaning of the world can only be a self-elucidation of the “I.” It is therefore a question of a new way of thinking about selfhood beyond subjective idealism or empiricist realism and not simply access to one more self: “There is no inner voice except through some intimate alteration, which constitutes genuine interiority. To listen is to be open to the other and transformed by the other at our most intimate core. Intimacy, in these ways of thinking, is neither escape nor shelter, but rather the place of broader exposure” (Call 63). Listening is therefore not simply what precedes speaking, but what accompanies it over and over again; it is the very patience of speech without which one sees only oneself in the world, and without which presence to oneself remains the a priori condition of any other presence. All of Chrétien’s work tries to show why, out of fidelity to the phenomenon, we must return to an experience more original than that of the “I” of reflection, whether by breaking the encapsulation of the subject in the manner of Heidegger, or its diabolical dimension in the manner of Kierkegaard, and which in all its forms leads me to take myself as the light of the world. At risk of employing a term that Chrétien found too overused, we may observe that there is an entire labor of deconstruction in his work, one which truly respects each moment without which, in our philosophical present, it would be very difficult for us to return to what older philosophies have been able to develop in their engagement of the body. Deconstruction is always bifurcated: it frees subjectivity from a

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certain metaphysics, but it also brings to light more discreet and lasting filiations. It is especially in this manner that Chrétien deconstructs the analysis of the spatiality of the body in Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to show that the other person, before being a body similar to my own, thus before any grasp by analogy, is one who, like me, has a voice that calls and responds. When it responds, when the other voice therefore is its future, and in the awareness that speech is it being, though not a speech that it will ever own, the body is speech before it is Körper or Leib. Chrétien thus deploys a phenomenology in which the body does not give itself, first of all, as a thing in the world, but as a “speechbearer” and therefore as the highest manifestation of spirit. (Call 82) It is still an abstraction to say that the other manifests itself first in my perceptual field as a thing that is there in relation to my central here, because it gives itself first of all as it bears a word and thereby gives me a here—the here of my response. Chrétien does not say this as explicitly as do some others, but because he is a thinker of obliqueness, a thinker who refrains from any claim to inspect and judge the world as it were a totality, he is also a thinker of the end of metaphysics, or at least the metaphysics that makes the “I” the sole origin of all knowledge and all action and that would make of this the foundation from which to reach the heart of the world. This is why, for example, he argues insistently that “touching yourself” cannot be the truth of touch. In this sense, he carries out a non-metaphysical reading of the history of philosophy, in the line of Heidegger and Derrida, of whom he was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. And yet, whatever deconstruction this involves does not go so far as to leave aside questioning the things themselves. What we can therefore call his “positive method of deconstruction” teaches us the need to understand selfhood in a non-metaphysical way, that is to say no longer as a stable substance and the foundation of others, so that we may instead recognize in it the wounded speech of reply. The “I” is not the a priori condition of possibility of all that is thinkable. It is not any such beginning, and to cling to it can only end in being seized with the “transcendental disgust” that Sartre calls nausea (Call 120–21). This is the body’s response to such a self-isolation. If Chrétien undertakes a non-metaphysical reading of the history of philosophy, and if he comments on the Fathers of the Church, as well as poetry, literature and painting, this is in order to that elsewhere than in metaphysics “sensitivity is given to itself only in the profusion of the world, it receives itself through the other and by means of the other, and even in self-delight, should it occur” (Call 122). However, only this thought of the responding body will make it possible to expose this idea, at once so old and so new, that it is not to oneself that one responds and yet that one is only oneself in the response. To renounce metaphysics is to renounce making “feeling oneself” the common thread of our thought of the body. To think is

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not to place the thing in front of oneself, to reduce it to the status of an object constituted by a subject, but to undertake an endless approach to the thing that lives from its distance, from the glow of its secret. There are five fundamental theses in Chrétien’s phenomenology of the responding body, which shows that the phenomenon is what appears in the original dialogue as the co-birth of otherness and my ipseity. 1.  It is necessary to put aside any metaphysical conception of being and of being oneself because it is linked to the project of self-control and usurpation of the world. This new phenomenology discovers a self which is verb, speech, that is to say a response to what wounds it, and a response to a world which is itself speech. This is only possible through a questioning back to the philosophies of the past and to the forms of religious and mystical thought which make it possible to suspend any metaphysical conception of subjectivity in order to access, through a historical reduction, the pure phenomenon of the called and responding self. 2.  This overcoming of metaphysics supposes a thought of the body-response [corps-réponse] in which one sees that before any other consideration the body is a “spokesperson.” This philosophy of the body, in all its facticity and finitude, makes it possible to elucidate the concrete modes of our presence in the world (fatigue, modesty, mortality). These present themselves as existentials resulting from our embodied condition (fragility, nudity, humility). Everything listens, and everything is given in us. Because the body listens, it can also give itself, even sacrificing its life. 3.  Selfhood is not a place in the world, a role. It is a property crossed by the other, a property of transit and exodus. We are non-substitutable only in our response. Existence is a vocation, and we speak only when called. Interiority is a place of exposure to otherness and not the enclosed space of a pure relationship with oneself. From this comes all beauty, all goodness, all truth, and all strength. I have nothing that I have not received and love can do anything. 4.  The call is heard only in the answer, and that call is an infinite call. This is the continual inchoation of my word, which is constantly reborn in this response to what surpasses it. Such an original surplus is missed by the metaphysical conception of the phenomenon as constituted by the subject. The word of truth listens to more than it can hear and bears witness to a glimmer of secrecy that it does not extinguish. 5.  From the obliqueness of the event it necessarily follows that we never listen alone and that every response is choral. It is in a community of speaking and listening that it becomes possible for us to respond “in

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person.” From feeling to knowing and doing, the experience uniquely of oneself is not the truth of existence. It is together that we permit ourselves to be taught by the surplus of what is given, and the way is open to us in the words of someone more wounded than oneself. Our own voice assumes older voices and any true voice does not come to conclude anything but instead invites future voices to speak for itself. The wounded word does not enclose but sends. NOTES 1. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. J. Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 119–29. 2. Ibid., p. 124. 3. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’espace intérieur (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2014), p. 249. 4. Ibid., p. 251. 5. The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, p. 128. 6. Jean-Louis Chrétien, La voix nue. Phénoménologie de la promesse (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), p. 14. 7. Ibid., p. 20. 8. Ibid. 9. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Fatigue (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1996). I will henceforth cite this book in the body of my text as Fatigue. 10. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art, trans. S. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 26. I will henceforth cite this book in the body of my text as Hand to Hand. 11. See the chapter “L’âme nue” in La voix nue. Phénoménologie de la promesse. 12. See Jean-Louis Chrétien, Promesses furtives (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 2004), p. 86.

‌‌5

Wrestling with the Angel Emmanuel Falque

A TRIBUTE TO JEAN-LOUIS CHRÉTIEN The purpose of this tribute to Jean-Louis Chrétien is not to express deference for the man or his work. While he was still alive, in my book, The Loving Struggle, I acknowledged both his towering achievement and my own departure from his major work (The Ark of Speech) in a chapter on “The Ark of the Flesh.” My task now is simply to be present and to offer my personal meditation on what his absence has left in its wake. Nothing could have been more conducive to this process than returning, in the days following his death on 28 June 2019, to the Chapelle des Saints-Anges in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris for hours at a time, and writing there, “from life”—like a painter filling his canvas, or rather outlining his mural. In front of Delacroix’s masterly work, and with Jean-Louis Chrétien’s fine text, “How to Wrestle with the Irresistible,” at the forefront of my mind, these pages unfurled, reawakening recollections of him and celebrating his memory.1 Jean-Louis Chrétien knew all about the “great silence” that falls after words have been uttered. In the fitting form of a meditation, may these few thoughts on a seminal biblical episode (Genesis 32: Jacob wrestles with the angel), which retrace the movement of such a rich work of art (Delacroix), bear witness to the debt that we owe him. THE FORD OF THE JABBOK “To paint Jacob, Delacroix had in some way to become Jacob.”2 Jean-Louis Chrétien’s words in his well-known essay “How to Wrestle with the Irresistible” (Hand to Hand 1–17) could also be applied to the author himself. 63

Figure 5.1.  Detail from Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (Eugène Delacroix, Saint-Sulpice, Paris, 1861)

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For he, too, wrestled, and even made of wrestling, the good fight—that of Jacob with the angel—the locus of existence. He understood this better than anyone, often citing Kierkegaard’s famous Edifying Discourse (1844): “one who prays aright struggles in prayer and is victorious—in that God is victorious.”3 To say that God’s victory, rather than that of humanity, defined Chrétien the philosopher and poet would be an understatement. Or rather, failing to see or understand that while there is, indeed, a victory for humanity, it never occurs or comes to pass without God, would be to fail to grasp the scope of his work. Indeed, the extent to which this professor at the Sorbonne (an institution which he never left), avoided encumbering himself with disciplinary distinctions is curious; he was perhaps following the example of his contemporary Michel Henry, albeit in his own very distinctive way. The word theology never reared its head, and neither did philosophy, even in the work of one who was so aptly named: a “Jean-Louis” who became chrétien, Christian, by breaking with communism and being baptized at the age of twenty-eight on Pentecost Sunday, 1980. Nor did his books ever dwell on disciplinary boundaries or ponder the possibility of breaking down those barriers. It was almost as though they did not exist, or rather as though we should still be living in the age of the Church Fathers, who quite rightly (or at least in their own time) did not trouble themselves with such disputes, which, ultimately, may well have appeared outmoded to him. Paradoxically—and happily—a “special privilege” was extended to Jean-Louis Chrétien, and to Michel Henry (albeit only in his later years), which allowed him to speak as a philosopher of theology, even in the university. However, we must exercise caution. This special privilege never usurped the rights of, or demonstrated any kind of irreverence towards, a secularism [laïcité] that was ailing (then and now), due to its inability to open itself up to those other traditions that might nourish it (Judaism with Emmanuel Levinas and Christianity with Jean-Louis Chrétien). Whatever confessional dimension there might have been in Chrétien’s work or personal life, he was in no way an apologist. Of the four senses of Scripture, he retained only the allegorical or mystical sense (oriented towards God), but never the moral or tropological sense (oriented towards man), to the extent that he actually rejected a hermeneutics overly focused on the reader. He insisted on the Bible as “‘a drama [. . .] of which I will not say that we live it, but rather that it lives us, just as it has lived its anterior actors,’” quoting Paul Claudel’s The Essence of the Bible (J’aime la Bible, 1955) in “Allowing Oneself to Be Read Authoritatively by the Holy Scripture.”4 With Jean-Louis Chrétien, there was no “crossing the Rubicon,” no rebound from one discipline to another, but rather a “crossing of the ford of Jabbok,” without institutional or disciplinary questions—here, now, or ever.

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In the act of writing, as in life, there is no substitute for remaining locked in one’s own one-to-one struggle with the angel. This is where the act of philosophizing, and indeed of existing, is at its most intense: “The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. [. . .] Jacob was left alone” (Genesis 32: 22–24, New Revised Standard Version). The Rubicon—the small river that separates Emilia-Romagna from Rome, and which set the stage for the conquest of an emperor’s throne (alea iacta est, “the die is cast”)—is a long way from the silent crossing of the Jabbok, the “blue river” east of the Jordan. This is where Jacob’s entire family is left behind, or rather diverted, so that the prophet can fight with his bare hands before facing his brother, Esau: “He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had” (Genesis 32:23). All suffering is a crossing, thus making Jacob a ferryman. In his wrestling (his suffering), his own true crossing plays out: a crossing of the Jabbok, but also the pathei mathos, his own “learning through suffering.” In the depths of his solitude, the patriarch lays down his weapons in order to confront his destiny “with his bare hands” (a recurring theme in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s work), but also so that his true vocation might be born and reveal itself in him, in the relentless pursuit of benediction: “the intimate solitude of the wrestlers, figuring a separation that is an election,” as we read in Hand to Hand.5 No one knows or can tell us how many times Jean-Louis Chrétien visited the Chapelle des Saints-Anges (Saint-Sulpice, Paris) in solitude, but the fact that he took the mural as his starting point, or rather his account of crossing the threshold of this holy place, suggests an answer. Perhaps, like Delacroix painting the two facing murals, Jean-Louis Chrétien was Heliodorus before he became Jacob, a secular minister to the king of Syria before he wrestled with the angel of God: “If, to paint Jacob, Delacroix had in some way to become Jacob, this was in no way the case at the outset. Rather, he was first like Heliodorus, to whom the other wall of the chapel is devoted: he allowed himself at several junctures to be thrown to the ground by his work, so frequently interrupted or suspended.”6 Transformation, even conversion, are therefore at work in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s writing, even though they would remain modestly concealed in what his first book aptly termed The Glow of the Secret (La Lueur du secret, 1985): “There is a circle of secrecy just as there is a circle of understanding. [. . .] In uncovering the secret, I uncover myself as my own secret, a secret unknown to me.”7

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THE ORIGINARY AGÔN From the outset, Jean-Louis Chrétien understood that there was an originary struggle, even an agôn. In L’Effroi du beau (1987), which was virtually his first work, every truth is “agonistic, as though a good fight—expected and desired—were the essence of that famous Platonic dialectic according to which we must always ascend. He argued that we should reject the “erroneous reading” of Plato’s winged chariot as always already at rest, ready to collapse or plummet. The “chariot of men” differs from the “chariots of the gods,” for “the horse that is partly bad weighs them down, inclining them towards the earth through its weight, if any of the charioteers has not trained him well.” Indeed, Plato concludes the Phaedrus with a phrase on which Jean-Louis Chrétien duly provided a commentary: “Here it is that the final labor, the final contest, awaits a soul [ponos te kai agôn eskhatos]! (Phaedrus 247b).”8 This has nothing to do with the “final struggle” to which our author’s “communist” early childhood might have committed him. Rather, it is in the beginning, and as the beginning, that the agôn, or “good fight,” is lived and experienced as the very essence of our humanity. There are those who would believe—with reference to Plato, but also to a falsely paradisiacal vision of an agôn-less, and therefore lifeless, Eden—that there was first “peace” (eirênê) and then “war” (polemos), in order to then return to “peace” (eirênê). I would invite them to see that a third term, or rather another mode of being, precedes and grounds the essence of all life in general. The agôn or good fight is—in my eyes at least—neither the “war” of someone who crushes others (polemos), nor the “fall” of someone who refuses to turn to others for support (ptôsis). Being in the midst of a struggle or agôn, a bout or ordeal, is not a flaw; but not being caught up, or refusing to be caught up in one, is. It is precisely in order never to stop wrestling, or to preserve the memory of the struggle, that the man or angel in the biblical episode puts Jacob’s hip out of joint so that he will always have to lean on the other, who allows him to exist. From the outset, I am leaning on the other for support, like a musical counterpoint or the buttress which keeps a cathedral from collapsing; leaning on the other so as not to fall. There is therefore a “fall” in both the physical and theological senses of the term when, through cowardice, I fail to lean on the other who holds me back and holds me up, and instead fall back on myself. There is therefore still a “war”—but not a “struggle”—when I recklessly flee the fight in order to crush the other and prevent his continued existence or resistance. Whether from below (fall) or above (war), I fail to recognize the balance of opposites and sharing of strength which Jacob’s fight with the angel already proposes. When we do not recognize this and cling to a false version of peace in which

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beings are wholly isolated or prepared to fuse completely in equal measure, we forget that personal existence only ever limps along, from the beginning and forever, clinging onto the other so as not to collapse: When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. [. . .] The sun rose upon him [Jacob] as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle (Genesis 32:25, 31–32).

The agôn, or “good fight,” expresses the truth from the very beginning, in both the Greek world (the myth of the winged chariot) and the Jewish world (wrestling with the angel). Perhaps it was in an attempt to forget this that Christianity did not, or could not retain truth’s agonistic dimension, with the exception of Kierkegaard’s notion of true prayer as a struggle with God through God’s triumph. It is as though the pacified being (or fusional being, in the case of Eden), would always prevail over the tension of desires which actually constitutes us, every day. In L’Effroi du beau, Chrétien highlights and affirms that “man’s relationship with truth, through which alone he becomes man, does not have this harmony, order or peace,” as proof of the originary “(good) fight” or “test of the other.” As he puts it, each soul struggles against this weight within it which oppresses it and distances it from the heights. Each soul struggles violently with others who also wish to contemplate what lies beyond the sky. Humanity’s relationship to truth is agonistic. In its burning desire for truth, the human soul finds before it the ponos te kai agôn eskhaton, ‘the final labor, the final contest’ (Phaedrus, 247b).

Chrétien goes on to specify an absolute extension of the agôn or “good fight,” which is the essence of our act of existence, in a note: “Whether athletic, musical, poetic, or philosophical, the agôn—in which the aim is not to annihilate the opponent or competitor, but rather to prove one’s own excellence—permeates every area of Greek existence. The myth of the Phaedrus has ontological import.”9 A QUESTION OF METHOD: “IN ANOTHER SENSE” A method, or principle for reading, therefore, emerges across Jean-Louis Chrétien’s body of work. This is less about “overcoming metaphysics” and more about “transforming metaphysics” or other traditions. In a rare interview (Nunc, September 2005), he admitted: “I don’t claim to be an adherent

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of phenomenology, it’s more that phenomenology claims and calls me.”10 However, this vocation, perhaps even commandment, was not dogmatic— quite the reverse. Chrétien did not stop to wonder whether he was operating in the purely philosophical sphere, or whether he was stepping on theology’s toes. Nor did he mull or in any way “tie himself in knots” over the question of whether he was “inside” metaphysics or “outside” it. It is certainly the case that nothing in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s work could have been said or thought without the legacy of Martin Heidegger, particularly On the Way to Language (which Chrétien once told me he deemed to be the philosopher’s magnum opus). But Chrétien always considered these borders to be barriers. He was no surveyor, tracing lines on maps and establishing the “correct” record of what philosophy, past and present, is or should be. He was more like the walker who veers off the beaten track, chooses the Holzwege or “paths which lead nowhere,” and therefore invites us first and foremost to lose our bearings. Some have lamented a diffuse body of work, or an excessively descriptive approach that can make it difficult to discern his own arguments. However, this overlooks and misunderstands the haecceity and singularity of thought. Anyone who met him knew, or rather sensed, it. He belonged in a different century, or at least not in our own; he greeted computers and mobile phones with a wry smile. Many of us received a letter, a book, or a dedication from Monsieur Chrétien. His spidery hand must have been a nightmare for the postman, who was nevertheless proud to “still” be delivering a properly stamped missive to “an actual letterbox,” no less! When we retrace his words and his thinking, we see that Christianity is the ultimate target throughout. The glory of the “convert,” which was an open secret, wrought a change. Many of his works do not take the “theological corpus” as their sole point of reference. From Lueur du secret (1985) to Fragilité (2017), his work is primarily philosophical, or rather phenomenological, and not theological. Nevertheless, throughout we find a trace—left behind or emerging—which whispers that with Christianity the world “is not the same,” or rather that we need to understand concepts “in a completely different sense” [en un tout autre sens], to echo Chrétien’s constant refrain. His text on “Prayer According to Kierkegaard” (1989; published in Le regard de l’amour, 2000), also demonstrates this, with the agôn understood in Christian terms as the struggle with the angel: “It is not only the Greek man who is ‘agonal,’ as Jacob Burckhardt said, but also the Christian man, and in another sense.”11 This is also true of his reworking of the concepts of “strength and weakness” in his final book, Fragilité (2017). In Christianity and the letters of Saint Paul, these concepts receive an absolute and novel meaning that is rooted in the Greek tradition and yet transforms it:

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However fine the consequences which Diodorus draws out, his remains a weak concept of weakness itself. By contrast, the New Testament sets in motion a strong concept which is wholly novel compared to the Greek tradition, particularly in the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians. The opposition of strength and weakness is radically transformed, and its usual interpretations waver and pale before this new meaning, which is linked to divine action itself, and to the Cross.12

He even introduces God, who retains his name but adopts a capital letter, shedding his anonymity and revealing himself according to his own wishes and desires for humanity: This opposition of strength and weakness now participates in another way of thinking about relationships with God and humanity, in which, moreover, the word ‘god’ no longer has the same meaning at all. The crucified Word in the naked exposure of his weakness becomes the sole locus where the terrible power of evil and injustice is brought low and vanquished at its core. [. . .] In that same instant, human weakness, instead of being what must first be conquered—even eliminated—so that strength may take its place in a solitary victory over the self, becomes the crack through which the thunderbolt of grace can cast its dazzling and transfiguring light.13

JACOB AND JEAN VALJEAN Furthermore—and it is crucial to consider this—when Chrétien discusses and comments on Victor Hugo in Conscience et roman I (2009), he cannot help but cite Genesis. He clearly sees the extent to which, at the hands of the author of Les Misérables, Jean Valjean’s relationship with his conscience rivals Jacob’s own struggle with the angel. While respecting and understanding Jean Valjean, Chrétien is secretly working to reestablish the “rights of Jacob.” To return to Kierkegaard, prayer is always for God’s victory through God’s strength rather than one’s own, and so Jacob demands that his opponent bless him. In Hand to Hand, Chrétien is precise: “Jacob does not fight to throw his adversary, but to obtain a word, a word of benediction [. . .] though he had to hear it at the cost of never again being able to walk straight by himself and on his own.”14 Curiously, within the space of two verses (Genesis 32: 26–27), it is by playing a game of “loser takes all” (“I will not let you go, unless you bless me”) even as his divine adversary (or human or angelic partner) advises him to flee the fight without making further demands (“he said: ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking’”), that the patriarch enters into, and even makes God enter into, a new form of struggle: one of alterity rather than identity, of the victory of the other, rather than the assertion of the self.

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One man (Jean Valjean as described by Victor Hugo) struggles with his own conscience, “a storm in the mind” lasting far longer than a day.15 The other (Jacob as described by the author of Genesis) needs only one night to see that everything has changed. Jacob wrestles with the angel—this time no longer “in the same way,” but rather, “in another sense”—“learning through suffering” in the pathei mathos of Aeschylus, whose legacy stretches from Maldiney to Chrétien. These two fights, or two scenes, both give meaning and “another sense,” or direction, to the significance of the agôn, or struggle. In one corner, we have Les Misérables and Jean Valjean, who struggles with, even fights, his own conscience in order to become only what he is: “Jean Valjean—Jean Valjean.” As Victor Hugo declares: “The terrible struggle of old, of which we have already seen several phases, began once more. Jacob wrestled with the angel for only one night. Alas! how many times have we seen Jean Valjean forced to grapple with his conscience in the dark, and struggling frantically against it! A desperate struggle!”16 “Become who you are” was Martin Heidegger’s first theme, endlessly reworked and transformed by Henri Maldiney, Jean-Louis Chrétien’s greatest influence. It was to this phrase that Chrétien dedicated a long passage of “Lumière d’épreuve,” his only text focusing solely on Maldiney (aside from the introduction he wrote for the latter’s Œuvres philosophiques).17 In the other corner, we find Genesis and Jacob, who could decide not to struggle or fight, and yet demands that the bout continue—“I will not let you go, unless you bless me” (Genesis 32: 26)—until “benediction” (speaking well) replaces “malediction” (speaking ill). This is no longer a case of “become who you are” (straightforwardly fulfilling a nature that is already given, even preprogrammed), but of “be who you are becoming,” or rather (to return to Maldiney and Chrétien), “you are only truly something if you become it.”18 This is no longer “Jean Valjean becoming Jean Valjean” by accepting and taking responsibility for his own demons. Nor is it “Jacob staying Jacob,” as though the man whose name means “God is on his heels” would be content simply to start a fight. The very words of Genesis state that Jacob is transformed by another—man, angel, or God, no matter—into Israel (“God strives,” or “the man who wrestles with El” in André Chouraqui’s translation of the Bible). Here, at the ford of the Jabbok, he sees “God face to face” and accordingly names the place Peniel: You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed. [. . .] And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel [meaning ‘Face of God’], saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved’ (Genesis 32:28–30).

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In Christianity, to cite the “wounded speech” of The Ark of Speech (1998), “this manifestation of self to other through speech is agonistic and transformative,” and not simply a mere call to “answer” words addressed to you, or a vocation to receive.19 Transforming the meaning of the agôn in yet “another sense,” Jean-Louis Chrétien mentions Jacob in passing, yet with particular emphasis, even though his text only pertains to Hugo, and only aspires to comment in literary terms on what Hugo would later call his “poem of the human conscience”: “At the end of this struggle, Jean Valjean receives the blessing of his conscience. In the Holy Bible, the blessing obtained by Jacob is accompanied by a change of name, to Israel. Here, Jean Valjean is transformed into Jean Valjean, and it is the very meaning of the name itself which changes. His final sacrificial act is to proclaim his name to Marius.”20 THE IRRESISTIBLE The “good fight” is therefore not the sole preserve of Christianity—far from it. It was first uttered and invented in Greek, by the Greeks. We need look no further than Heraclitus’s bow and lyre to be reminded that we “do not comprehend how a thing agrees [eôutô homologeeï] at variance with itself [diapheromenon eôutô]; it is an attunement turning back on itself [palintropos armonin], like that of the bow and the lyre.”21 If we follow the pre-Socratic or natural philosopher, there is something Heraclitean about the balance of opposites and sharing of strength in Jacob’s struggle with the angel. As Jean-Louis Chrétien observes in Hand to Hand, “This combat is not about an annihilation of the force of the other, but rather a communication of force.”22 What changes is the meaning of the fight—not just its sense, this time, but also its direction. Several questions present themselves. Why would the patriarch send or compel his father, mother, children, and whole tribe—whom we can see in the distance in Delacroix’s mural—across the Jabbok (Genesis 32:22)? Why did he send across or leave behind “everything that he had” (Genesis 32:23): his nomad’s hat to shield him from the sun, his shield and lance for conquering a new land, and his hunter’s arrows to feed his people, all condensed in a rare “still life” in the foreground of the mural in the Chapelle des Saints-Anges? The only possible answer is: “to wrestle with his bare hands.” This is what Jean-Louis Chrétien observes in Voix nue (1990) with a view to a “phenomenology of the promise”: What does it mean to decide for oneself? How are we giving ourselves when we give our word? Do the faithfulness of the promise and the irreversibility of the decision stem from the imperishable nature of that which, having become

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nature, cannot shirk its responsibility? [. . .] These questions invite us to re-evaluate critically the confrontation of man and angel, untimely though it might be, as a dimension of the history of philosophy which is as essential as it is little-known.23

To think the agôn of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Christian terms (but also in keeping with Jewish tradition), means coming back to the “hand to hand” dimension that gives the work that contains Chrétien’s famous text on Delacroix and “wrestling with the irresistible” its title. For if there is something specific, original, and perhaps insufficiently articulated or observed in this new struggle, it is the fact that this time the “irresistible” resists, rather than resistance itself. It is like the vulnerability of the face in Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, which becomes the beacon of “ethical resistance”: “The infinite paralyses power by its infinite resistance to murder, which, firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other. [. . .] There is here a relation not with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance—the ethical resistance.”24 A lover can be “irresistibly” attractive, just as laughter can sometimes be irresistibly infectious. In both cases, and in every case, there is someone or something that we cannot resist (and which would therefore be the essence of the exposed face in Levinas) but that we are always confronting and almost leaning on for support in that very “irresistance” [irrésistance]. It is because I find you attractive and continue to see you that you are and become ever more irresistible to me. It is because I am choking, doubled up with “irresistible laughter,” that I stay facing you, laughing until I cry. I cry with laughter that exposes me to you, rather than with sadness, which focuses my attention inwards and turns me in on myself. The irresistible places me in a relation to the other so that I cannot leave that other, even by the same impulse which attracted me to it. The man or angel saw that “he did not prevail against Jacob,” and that is why “he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint” (Genesis 32:25). But it is precisely the angel or God’s irresistance, his acknowledgment that he is cornered and therefore defeated, which renders him so irresistible to Jacob. Rather than vanquishing him or letting him go, the man or angel allows himself to continue being wrestled with, and his defeat only becomes a victory because sharing his own strength with Jacob is the very thing which also means that he too has won. It is not the victory that is a defeat—like the master-slave dialectic in which the first to win (the master) is ultimately the one who loses, having become the slave of the slave. Rather, this is the defeat turned into victory—the man or angel who loses without giving his name, but who nevertheless blesses Jacob to the extent that

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he gives him a new name (Israel, or “God strives”) in a new place (Peniel or “the face of God”). If this is and always will be a “loving struggle”—whether we think of this in the context of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism or my own book of the same name (The Loving Struggle)—then the episode of Jacob wrestling with the angel reveals the love or embrace that unites lovers, rather than wrestlers testing one another’s limits and undergoing mutual exposure in their differences and differences of opinion. Jean-Louis Chrétien underscores this perfectly in Le regard de l’amour [“Prayer According to Kierkegaard”]: “It is by letting himself be defeated that God truly wins, because we have defeated him only thanks to the forces that he himself gave us. Even if the formula is similar, these are totally different possibilities from those evoked by Hegel in connection with the unhappy consciousness, when he speaks of a struggle with an enemy ‘against whom victory is rather a defeat’ (gegen welchen der Sieg vielmehr ein Unterliegen ist). For this struggle is a loving duel, as the mystics have clearly understood with regard to the struggle between Jacob and the angel, and the ‘yes’ is foreign to any harrowing inversion of the contrary on the contrary.”25 To express and understand “God’s irresistibility,” Chrétien gives the last word to Baudelaire, this time focusing on the angel’s impassibility and immobility faced with Jacob’s ram-like charge. According to Chrétien in Hand to Hand, this is the poet’s greatest innovation: seeing Delacroix’s mural in Saint-Sulpice come to life “with his own eyes” and “before his eyes” and understanding, as Chrétien stated repeatedly, that Jacob is not wrestling with an equally matched opponent, but rather one who is “unmatched.” As he puts it, Baudelaire stresses the angel’s calm. Certain sketches [by Delacroix] show it troubled, unbalanced by Jacob, which conforms more closely to the narrative account, while one among them goes so far as to depict the angel with a terrible and fierce expression. In the finished work, the angel’s situation is not without complexity. On the one hand, he seems to be the assaulted more than the assailant. [. . .] On the other hand, details such as the serenity of his handsome face crowned by blond locks, and the firm and already blessing gaze he places upon Jacob, against whom his powerful wings, unmoved by the least quiver, form a definitive counterweight, make of him this unshakeable wall against which human effort will vainly break. The certain and precise wound that his right hand inflicts upon Jacob’s thigh seems to cost him nothing.26

In an article for La Revue fantaisiste (15 September 1861), Baudelaire, then in the prime of life at the age of thirty-nine, explains how he was deeply affected by the mural of the Chapelle des Saints-Anges as it gradually unfolded before his astonished gaze. This is quoted in full by Jean-Louis Chrétien and contains the inspiration for the title of his book, Hand to Hand:

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On the grass, in the foreground, lie the clothes and weapons Jacob has shed to fight hand to hand with the mysterious man sent by the Lord. The natural man and the supernatural man wrestle according to their natures: Jacob thrusts his body forward like a ram, every muscle flexed, while the angel obligingly joins in. He is calm, gentle, like a being who can prevail without deploying his muscles and so refuses to allow anger to contort the divine contours of his limbs.27

THE ANGEL’S WEARINESS AND JACOB’S FRAGILITY Should we, therefore, refer to (a) the “angel’s weariness” and (b) “Jacob’s fragility”? Might this potentially instructive switch of perspective allow us to draw conclusions about the thrust of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s interpretation of “wrestling with the angel,” which almost bookends his career in De la fatigue (1996) and Fragilité (2017)? (a) Arriving at “Jacob’s well”—curiously named after our patriarch as though to indicate the possibility of the same struggle—“Jesus, tired out by his journey [kekopiakôs ek tes hodoïporias], was sitting by the well” (John 4:6). What conclusion can we draw from his encounter with the Samaritan woman, other than that God himself, in a Christian mode this time, “has made himself weariness, has made himself the possibility of being weary by becoming man, in the incarnation. He has taken on a weary body”?28 Saint Augustine writes that “Jesus is not wearied without a reason [frustra].” Jean-Louis Chrétien returns to this theme: “for the Force of God is not wearied without a reason. [. . .] The road which Jesus has travelled and which has caused his weariness is the flesh he took on for our sake.”29 Jesus’ weariness “is his incarnation,” John Scottus Eriugena adds, noting that, “he took on our nature, wearied as it is by the toils and sufferings of this world due to original sin.”30 Theologically speaking, the experience of the “weary man” or the existenzial of weariness, could also stem from sin—but in this case, first and foremost, it stems from the incarnation. This is how we need to understand weariness “in a different sense,” that is, in the “Christian sense,” of the term: “For, if Christ is weary, according to the Christian faith he is so entirely for our sake. This tiredness of the tireless [in the same sense as the resistance of the irresistible demonstrated above], opens up entirely new possibilities compared to Greek philosophy.”31 In the words of Jean-Louis Chrétien, the pinnacle of novelty is that “Jesus was weary for us, that is to say that he suffered for us: weariness, too, is part of the redemptive incarnation.”32 We can be “tired of ourselves,” and of our own bodies because of the weight and heaviness of our incarnate being (Jesus sitting by the well), but we can also be “tired of others” (or “by others”) and their psyches, when their lives weigh on ours so that we have to be compassionate or at least go

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to meet them (the conversation with the Samaritan woman and the account of her seven husbands). The double salvation—by solidarity (incarnation) and redemption (sin)—compounds our weariness twofold. This might be what the man or angel wrestling with Jacob (at least in a New Testament–inflected rereading of this episode in Scripture) experienced: “When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob [. . .] he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking’” (Genesis 32:25–26). It is a strange sort of defeat for an angel, or even God, to flee the fight, as though he had been suddenly beaten by the man. We are far from the Greek notion and defense of the agôn by force, but not from the Jewish notion, in which Yahweh also leaves man the freedom to “retreat,” just as he does in the divine tzimtzum. Jacob alone will drive him to return to the fray: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me” (Genesis 32:26). Could a possible “weariness of the angel” be to blame? For, in a Christian mode this time, the angel prefigures Christ incarnate. He takes full charge of the “hand to hand” combat and shows compassion to Jacob, or the disciple, who is preparing to confront his brother Esau in a battle so fratricidal that the twelve tribes of Israel will stem from one twin (Jacob) and not the other (Esau, whose name means “uncertain”). We might even say that the angel teaches him through experience. (b) Contrary to the angel, or rather alongside him, might Jacob then demonstrate “vulnerability,” or, more precisely, “fragility”? For it is indeed a “wound” (vulnus), even a trauma, which the angel inflicts on Jacob’s hip: “he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out joint as he wrestled with him” (Genesis 32:25). We must distinguish between two types of wound, particularly in Hand to Hand (2003), where only the second type belongs to the “good fight,” or agôn, as it is so well described by Saint Paul in his Letter to Timothy in an almost implicit revisiting of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Book of Genesis: “As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight [to kalon agôna egônismaï], I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day” (2 Timothy 4:6–8). First and foremost, then, there are the “wounds of our moans”—wounds that must not be treated, must even be forgotten, for they overpower and lock us into a solitude akin to solipsism: “There are wounds in which we find satisfaction, and that we maintain and deepen with our moans and our morose delight, savoring our weakness. They need not even be cared for; one must simply leave them, forget about them, for they will heal over on their own, because they exist only to be looked at, told about, recalled to mind.”33 And then there are also, in a positive sense, those open wounds which never close—the vulnus, the wound or lesion—which are impossible to heal and

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which we must not bandage, for the open wound forever remains the mark of our eternal leaning on the other: “And then there are wounds that one must not heal, for they are the source of our loving intimacy with our highest task, the one we have received, impossibly, without having sought it.”34 For Chrétien, only this second wound, which opens up never to close again, becomes Jacob’s emblem: “Jacob is forever the eponym of such wounds, a strange eponym, because in the course of the very struggle with the angel during which he was finally wounded, he also received a change of name, becoming Israel from that point forward.”35 This is an everlasting trace, an ineradicable wound. Jacob’s flesh is burdened with a “limp” or “weakness” that will never be healed, for him or the twelve tribes after him: at Penuel he was “limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket” (Genesis 32:31–32). Does this mean that we should always speak in terms of the “vulnerability” of Jacob and humanity at large? This is highly doubtful, and we should be wary of this term, which is bandied about from psychology to philosophy, and even theology. It has become an oft-repeated leitmotif of a contemporary humanity which has forgotten the benefits of the originary agôn, or struggle, in favor of the other’s easily won acceptance, which is both seemly and simple. Jean-Louis Chrétien saw, understood, and even articulated this, in the introduction to his last work, Fragilité. We would do well to heed its warning and lesson, even if only as a final tribute to him: Something is fragile if it can break. [. . .] There is nothing to indicate whether that break occurs internally or externally. We can break on our own, without experiencing an external impact or assault. This is an important difference to vulnerability—which is often confused with fragility and is very fashionable today—because something is vulnerable if it can be wounded, which presupposes an attack from outside.36

It is therefore “fragility” (from the Latin fragilis, “being shattered or broken from within”), and not simply “vulnerability” (from the Latin vulnus, “being wounded or struck from the outside”), which Jacob demonstrates as he wrestles with the angel. It is as though, to follow Gilles Deleuze’s reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up (1936), there were on the one hand “the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember,” akin to volcanic eruptions, and then “another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again,” akin to a crack in porcelain.37 In this sense, there is certainly a “dramatic” blow in the external wound that the angel inflicts on Jacob (“he struck him on the

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hip socket” [Genesis 32:25]), but there is also that “blow [. . .] from within,” which leaves a crack such that he will never be the same again: “Jacob called the place Peniel [the face of God], saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved’” (Genesis 32:30). However, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived. Jacob may indeed be more than “vulnerable” in his combat with the angel, but we are wont to run the risk of merely reducing him to his “wounded being” and forgetting completely the “good fight” of strength. However, he is not just “cracked” [fêlé], broken from within and incapable of getting back up on his feet. The difference between being “cracked” and being “fragile”—the difference which separates Gilles Deleuze from Jean-Louis Chrétien—lies in the word or “benediction received.” It may not prevent us from falling, but it reminds us that we have always already leaned on the angel or on God for support, and that it is by returning to the fight—the “good fight”—that we will be able, if not to win, then at least not to fall forever. This is the final reminder of Hand to Hand, one that we must not forget: To give up all defenses and weapons to enter into the fight, to confront the irresistible assailant counting on nothing more than one’s own presentation, to come at him openly: such are the conditions of combats that are in truth a matter of life-and-death, combats in which something of ours must die, and a new life enter to dwell within us. Only the disarmed can grow in strength.38 —Translated from the French by Madeleine Chalmers

NOTES 1. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “How to Wrestle with the Irresistible,” in Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art, trans. S. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 1–17. 2. Hand to Hand, p. 7. 3. Cited explicitly as an example in Chrétien’s chapter “Wounded Speech,” in The Ark of Speech, trans. J. Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 25: “The Christian tradition has particularly insisted on this agonistic dimension. A very fine discourse by Kierkegaard is called ‘One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious—in that God is Victorious.’” And, of course, in a topical and explanatory text: “La Prière selon Kierkegaard,” in Le regard de l’amour (Paris: DDB, 2000), pp. 107–24 (text from 1989). This has been translated into English: Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Prayer According to Kierkegaard,” trans. Filippo Pietrogrande, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 3, no. 2 (2021): 188–202, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​/1163​ /25889613​-bja001. Further references are to this translation. 4. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Allowing Oneself to Be Read Authoritatively by the Holy Scripture,” in Under the Gaze of the Bible, trans. J. Dunaway (New York: Fordham

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University Press, 2015), p. 13. On this position, which I have corroborated and on which I have drawn, see my chapter “Is Hermeneutics Fundamental?” in Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology, trans. Reuben Shank (New York, Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 29–54. 5. Hand to Hand, p. 12. For the astute suggestion I received to turn from “crossing the Rubicon” to the “ford of the Jabbok,” see Philippe Nouzille, “D’un gué à l’autre: le Rubicon et le Yabboq,” in Une analytique du passage: Rencontres et confrontations avec Emmanuel Falque (Paris: Editions franciscaines, 2016), pp. 351–64. 6. Hand to Hand, p. 17. 7. Jean-Louis Chrétien, La Lueur du secret (Paris: L’Herne, 1985), p. 10. 8. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 27. 9. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “L’épreuve humaine du beau selon Platon,” in L’effroi du beau (Paris: Cerf, 1997), p. 35 (and corresponding note 5). 10. “Linéaments d’une œuvre: entretien avec Jean-Louis Chrétien,” Nunc 8 (September 2005): 38–42. 11. Chrétien, “Prayer,” p. 193. My emphasis. Translation modified by Madeleine Chalmers. 12. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Introduction,” in Fragilité (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2017), p. 15 (my emphasis). Translation by Madeleine Chalmers. 13. Chrétien, Fragilité, pp. 15–16 (my emphasis). 14. Hand to Hand, pp. 3–4. 15. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Christine Donougher (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), p. 201. 16. Hugo, Les Misérables, p. 1237. Quoted and analyzed in Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Hugo et le poème de la conscience humaine,” in Conscience et roman I, La conscience au grand jour (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2009), p. 85. I am grateful to Jérôme de Gramont for directing me to his “non-exhaustive” list of possible references to the episode of “wrestling with the angel” in Jean-Louis Chrétien’s works: (1) in notes to his chapter “La phénoménologie comme lutte avec l’ange,” in L’autre et les Encyclopédies (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes 1999), pp. 248–51; revisited in Au commencement, Parole, Regard, Affect (Paris: Cerf, 2013) pp. 246–49); (2) in notes to his chapter “Kierkegaard, Petite phénoménologie de la donation?” in Kierkegaard et la philosophie française, Figures et réceptions, ed. Joaquim Hernandez-Despaux, Grégori Jean and Jean Leclercq (Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2014), notes 34–35. 17. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Lumière d’épreuve,” in Henri Maldiney, Une phénoménologie à l’impossible, ed. Serge Meitinger (Paris: Le Cercle Herméneutique, 2002), pp. 37–40; and “Introduction aux Œuvres philosophiques,” in Henri Maldiney, Regard, parole, espace (Œuvres philosophiques), (Paris: Cerf, 2013), pp. 7–29. This almost-exclusive kinship with Henri Maldiney was explicitly recognized as such by Jean-Louis Chrétien, cf. “Linéaments d’une œuvre,” p. 38. In response to the question, “There is a life before the work. What aspects of your life might shed light on your work? Some important encounters, perhaps? Or can we get by without them?” the only answer and reference, Chrétien gave was: “So you need names? I have

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already expressed the personal and philosophical debt I owe Henri Maldiney, an admirable philosopher. Meeting him opened up all sorts of avenues, including my own.” Translation by Madeleine Chalmers. 18. Henri Maldiney, “L’irréductible,” in Epokhé (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 1993), p. 44. Revisited and explored in Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Lumière d’épreuve,” p. 40. The crucial reversal of terms in this phrase was frequently repeated and developed by Henri Maldiney. See, for example, his Penser l’homme et la folie (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2007), respectively “De l’existant,” 228; and “De la transpassiblité,” 285. My own reworking of this phrase can be found in my chapter “La crise,” in Hors phénomène, Essai aux confins de la phénoménalité (Paris: Hermann, 2021), pp. 363–65. 19. Chrétien, The Ark of Speech, p. 25. For an acknowledgment of my debt to, and position vis-à-vis, this major work by Jean-Louis Chrétien, see my chapter devoted to him, “Adam or the Ark of Flesh: Jean-Louis Chrétien,” in The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates, trans. Bradley Onishi and Lucas McCracken (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), pp. 175–92. 20. Chrétien, “Hugo,” 185. 21. Heraclitus, “Fragment LXXVIII,” in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: A New Arrangement and Translation of the Fragments with Literary and Philosophical Commentary, ed. and trans. Charles Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 65. 22. Hand to Hand, p. 4. 23. Jean-Louis Chrétien, La voix nue, Phénoménologie de la promesse (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), p. 8 (my emphasis). 24. Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics and the Face,” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1980), p. 199 (my emphasis). 25. Chrétien, “Prayer,” p. 194 (my emphasis). Translation modified by Madeleine Chalmers. 26. On the “unmatched” or ill-matched adversary, see Hand to Hand, p. 1: “It is a fine thing to seek out fitting adversaries, rather than those whom we have already defeated by sight before even engaging in a struggle. But it is an even finer thing to receive an adversary who exceeds our measure, an irresistible adversary, for where else might we deploy ourselves to the unknown ends of our strength?” (original emphasis). 27. Charles Baudelaire, “Peintures murales d’Eugène Delacroix à Saint-Sulpice,” La Revue fantaisiste (15 September 1861): p. 184 (my emphasis). Reprinted in L’Art romantique. Reprinted in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Yves-Gérard Le Dantec and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 1109. Quoted and analyzed in Chrétien, “How to Wrestle,” p. 13. 28. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Jésus près du puits de Jacob,” in De la fatigue (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1996), p. 71. 29. Augustine, “Tractate 15 on John 4.1–42,” in Tractates on the Gospel of John 11–27, trans. John W. Rettig (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), p. 81. Revisited in Chrétien, Fatigue, pp. 68–69.

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30. Jean Scot Erigène, Commentaire sur l’Evangile de Jean, IV, II, ed. and trans. Edouard Jeauneau (Paris: Cerf, 1972), pp. 288–89. Translation from the French by Madeleine Chalmers. Revisited in Chrétien, Fatigue, p. 70. 31. Chrétien, Fatigue, p. 71. 32. Chrétien, Fatigue, p. 71 (my emphasis). 33. Hand to Hand, p. 2. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Chrétien, Fragilité, p. 7 (my emphasis). 37. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” in The Crack-Up: with other Uncollected Pieces, Note-books, and Unpublished Letters, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 69. Revisited and analyzed by Gilles Deleuze in “Twenty-Second Series—Porcelain and Volcano,” in The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (London: Continuum, 2004), 176– 85. On this development, see my Hors phénomène, 304–06 [“Ouverture du chapitre V, “La crise”: “Autant d’exception, autant de modification”]. 38. Hand to Hand, p 14. Translation modified by Madeleine Chalmers.

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The Poetics of the Symbolic Body in Chrétien’s Symbolique du corps Stephen E. Lewis

During the last fifteen years of his life, Jean-Louis Chrétien pursued, across several books, an exploration of “personal identity” as figured in the works of numerous authors, primarily but not exclusively belonging to the Christian tradition.1 Through these books’ diverse approaches to human interiority, there runs a single guiding thread: a constant reference to the biblical notion of the heart and its relationship to human embodied speech. At various points in his exploration, Chrétien shows how the ways of figuring personal identity that are rooted in the heart differ from later, modern models of subjectivity; as a result, this project also offers the reader insights into the philosopher’s critical understanding of modernity.2 This project is not in any way a rupture with Chrétien’s earlier explorations of such topics as the immemorial, the call and the response, or his phenomenology of speech; rather, it builds on these as it patiently describes a symbolic language that, Chrétien argues, has historically in the West allowed for a heightened expression of the human, an expression that remains available to all peoples regardless of where in the world they find themselves.3 The book that begins this project is the 2005 study of the Christian interpretation of the Song of Songs, entitled Symbolique du corps. La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques. We know that this book inaugurates the project because Chrétien himself explicitly connects several of his later books to the biblical anthropology, centered on the heart, that he first describes in Symbolique du corps.4 For example, in the 2009 first volume of the two-volume study Conscience et roman (volume I: La conscience au grand jour, 2009, volume II: La conscience à mi-voix, 2011), Chrétien states that this lengthy study of the ways in which the dominant literary genre of the 83

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last two centuries, the novel, describes the life of consciousness, is “a moment in a much greater design, that of a genealogy of the figures of interiority, and of the way in which interiority becomes ‘subjectivity,’ [a genealogy] in which, for example, my book Symbolique du corps (2005) participates.”5 Similarly, in his 2007 book, La Joie spacieuse. Essai sur la dilatation, Chrétien identifies “the heart” (the “dilation” of which is the principal focus of the book) as a “key term of biblical anthropology, distinct from the anthropology of the Gentiles, wherein ‘heart’ designates man’s very ipseity and guiding center, including both intellect and will,” and then refers the reader to the pages of Symbolique du corps that present the biblical understanding of the heart.6 While La Joie spacieuse investigates the spatially and temporally expansive effects of love on this human interiority, L’Espace intérieur explores the topoi used over the centuries by various writers to express the inner dwelling place of human consciousness, figured as a bedroom, a temple, a mansion, a castle, and so on, where the human person withdraws to be alone with God. The two-volume study Conscience et roman, because of its focus on the literary genre of the novel, and thus modernity, stands out of genealogical order in relation to the books published before (La Joie spacieuse) and after it (L’Espace intérieur). Nevertheless, in its description of the modern “overturning” (renversement) of the figure of human interiority as inviolable secret known only to God, summed up by the neologism “cardiognosy” (knowledge of the hearts of others), Conscience et roman clearly provides an endpoint for the genealogical trajectory.7 The richness of this project is evident, teeming as it is with fascinating aspects inviting investigation. My contribution here will be limited to the isolation and explication of a particularly fundamental aspect of the project: its poetics, as laid out in Symbolique du corps. At one point in Symbolique du corps, Chrétien, in the course of discussing biblical commentary by Wolbero of Cologne, writes that every scriptural commentator “is a praegustator: he is the first to taste, and learns how to open, bring to room temperature, and serve the wine of the word” (Symbolique 33). By enabling a better grasp of the poetics of the language of the heart that is so central to Chrétien’s project, I hope to open the way for many distinguished palates to receive and in turn give language to some of the deeper and more intense philosophical and theological notes that Chrétien’s study of interiority has to offer. As we shall see, understanding the poetics of the language of the heart that speaks human identity is fundamental to any subsequent attempt to understand the story Chrétien is telling about human interiority, in both its past and present states. What then is the story that this genealogical project tells? Here we’ll focus on its beginning, Symbolique du corps, and start our investigation with that book’s very first paragraph, which offers a present tense account of how the human body, the bearer of speech, possesses an unlimited power to “make

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meaning.” Chrétien does not overtly signal the importance of this opening passage, but the reader who returns to it after reading the rest of the book will recognize it as foundational to everything that follows, because its very language both represents the human body as inexhaustibly meaningful and illuminative of meaning, and performs what it describes: There is nothing that the scintillating glow of the human body cannot illuminate. The slightest gesture, in its fragile seriousness, possesses an inexhaustible significance; that is, each gesture has an unlimited ability to make meaning. For this body is the body of one who speaks, it is the bearer of speech [le porte-parole]. Without speech, this glow would die. But without this fleshly lucidity, speech would collapse into an exhausted emptiness. The body responds to and answers for all that happens and all that can happen. The potentialities of the world already have secret dealings with the body’s own power. All the appeals are heard in its response, and solely there in that very place where it responds. This is why the body’s glow, barely perceptible as it may be to itself in the immensity of space, gives form to what is more serious, and yet without being the sun of justice and meaning: instead it is this palpitation in which, with each beat of cordial light, the sun itself is called upon. Idolatry of the body goes along with its desecration, and dissolves it into insignificance. For the body’s meaning does not stem from a tautology according to which it would affirm only itself (Symbolique 7).

Poetics, as I am using the term in this essay, refers to any account of the relationship between language, thought, and the real.8 Each sentence in this opening paragraph from Symbolique du corps serves to articulate such an account. The real, or the world, is charged with meaning, and the human body, as an entity in the world that is always already speech-bearing, reveals that meaning by illuminating it with its gestural glow and meaning-sustaining speech. The two—glow and speech—can never be separated from one another. (We all know and recognize, I think, the “glow” that Chrétien is talking about, a perceivable phenomenon that announces the presence of a living human being in both his or her visibility and deeper invisibility.) In these sentences language and thought are presented as intricately involved with one another within the behavior of the human body itself, while the world, not only in its actuality—“all that happens”—but in its potentialities as well is connected in “secret” ways to the potent powers of this glowing body (the “secret” is of course one of Chrétien’s earliest themes, and one which he returns to frequently9). Invoking the organ of the heart, Chrétien writes that this glowing body beats with “cordial light” as it responds to the world’s appeals and gives them form—form that is “serious” yet never self-imposing. The poetics of this passage both represents and, in its non-metaphorical speech, speaks with the voice of the symbolizing human body, whose genealogy the book will

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itself establish and explore. It is the philosophical dimensions of this poetics as presented in Symbolique du corps that I wish to focus upon and present in this paper. Particular attention will be paid to Chrétien’s characterization of the body as “schema,” in a sense analogous to Kant’s meaning of that term. In order to set up that argument, we will need to trace how Chrétien arrives there. Following on this initial characterization of the speaking human body and its relationship to meaning as a starting point, Symbolique du corps proceeds to discuss an array of authors from the immense library of Christian commentary on the Song of Songs, the book of the Bible most commented upon in the Christian tradition, in order to describe and explain a certain logic of the human body found there. In particular, Chrétien focuses on the unfolding of this logic in a double symbolism, one individual and the other communal. With regard to the individual, the commentaries on the Song of Songs (generally speaking) interpret the Bride as standing in for each one of us, “at least potentially,” while the Bridegroom’s praises of the bride’s beauty, body part by body part, are seen to apply to the different members or parts of our “inner man” or soul; thus the soul is understood to have “a mouth, teeth, hair, cheeks, and so on”—all parts that are “immaterial, and which correspond to the soul’s faculties, operations, and possibilities” (Symbolique 15). Chrétien explores how this logic of the body, with its organs and parts, develops from and in relation to the biblical “heart” (which, Chrétien shows, itself traditionally has no organs or parts, Symbolique 18), and becomes interchangeable with Saint Paul’s notion of the “inner man” and the philosophical tradition’s notion of the soul (Symbolique 10). With regard to the community, the commentators interpret the Bridegroom’s appraisals of the Bride’s body parts, and vice versa, in terms of specific orders or groups of members within the body of the Church and their tasks (for instance, the Bride’s teeth stand for ministerial preachers and teachers who cut into and chew the Word for the faithful [Symbolique 73–88]). Chrétien shows how the symbolism of the body, as developed through the Song of Songs’ tradition of commentary, names the body’s organs and their inter-relations, again in conjunction with Pauline thought, in order to give corporal form to Christ’s Church and its members (Symbolique 10). In other words, through this double symbolism, individual and communal, “[t]he organicity of the body serves to name, to differentiate, to describe, and to interrogate the organization of our spiritual being, and that of the community” (Ibid.). Chrétien stresses the importance of the understanding of two further aspects of this symbolism of the body and its function. Both have to do with the fact that, historically speaking, this thinking about the body in relation to individual and communitarian identity precedes and thus differs radically from the modern conception of identity in terms of subjectivity. Chrétien

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states that one of the reasons for this difference lies in the fact that, over the centuries, this symbolism was “never frozen into a ‘key’ or lexicon, and none of its defined forms have been officially adopted by the Church.” This lack of static definition, writes Chrétien, makes for the symbolism’s “richness and its interest.” He continues: [This symbolism] is caught in the inventive mobility of an ever-renewed interrogation, which is simultaneously an exegesis of the Song of Songs in the context of the whole of the Bible, a joint deciphering of the possibilities of the body and of the mind, and a meditation on incorporation into a community of which we are the members. A perpetual back and forth takes place between these dimensions, as well as between the physical body which serves as support to the symbolism, and the body of the inner man, or that, collective, of Christ. The movement occurs in both directions, because the stiffness or the flexibility of our neck is already heavy with the meaning, proud or humble, of our conduct, just as inversely one feels in obstinacy a stiffening of the neck of the soul. Each level contains the others in potential, even if they remain distinct, and the authors studied here can move quite naturally, sometimes in the same sentence, from an anatomical or physiological consideration of the body that later thought would call “objective” to remarks on virtues and vices, and on the laity or monks. There is no dualism between an “objective” body and a “subjective” body, because the sovereignty of subjectivity is not yet established, and all these levels of the being of the body are equally experienced, with the same intensity, both spiritual and carnal (Symbolique 11).

Here we start to notice the unique poetic characteristics of this inventively mobile symbolic thinking and speaking. Language is used in seeming ignorance of, or inattention to, fixed objective and subjective poles. The body and the mind, the individual and the community, the physical body and that of the inner man: these elements figure one another in a “perpetual back and forth,” where one part of a pair never stands as the fixed point for the other to pin down, and mutual figurings among pairings can occur. “Each level [of figuration] contains the others in potential, even if they remain distinct,” we read. Thus, there is no basis for stable metaphorical figuration. Chrétien’s investigation of the consequences of this absence of metaphor is something we will focus on in a moment. But first, in order to understand this non-dualistic multiplicity that characterizes the symbolic body as developed in commentaries on the Song of Songs, let us look more closely at Chrétien’s guiding thread in this multi-book project, the biblical notion of the heart. The “heart,” as Chrétien explains, describes an understanding of identity that is antiphonal, or responsorial, rather than subjective in the modern sense. Its status as at once both organ of the body and spiritual center of the person is key: in the Bible, the heart, Chrétien writes, “far from being reduced to the

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organ of our body, [. . .] forms the very location of our identity, of our ipseity. It is what we most properly are, and thus also the place where we can shirk what we most properly are” (Symbolique 16). He then goes on to enumerate the various actions of the heart, as they are detailed in the Bible. Of particular interest in this list of verbs, Chrétien points out, is the fact that the heart is just as much a center of decision (of thought and of will10) as of affectivity: What does the heart do in the Bible? It rejoices or grieves, it rises or sinks, it hardens or softens, it opens or closes, it expands [se dilate] or contracts, it turns away from God, from other people and from its task, or it turns towards them, it trembles or it strengthens itself. It murmurs, cries, sings, scolds, praises, gives thanks, groans, and speaks, or speaks to itself. It searches and knows, or gets lost. It attaches or detaches itself, it forgets or remembers, it hides or shows, it is faithful or unfaithful, twisted or upright, it is purified or defiled, it becomes sclerotic or is renewed, it overflows or remains parsimonious, it becomes calm or anxious, it hears or does not hear, it understands or does not understand, it decides or remains indecisive. And this enumeration is not complete. Most of the time, we could replace “my heart” with “I,” whereas in a physiological sense I do not confuse myself with my heart (Symbolique 16–17).

The Fathers, Chrétien proceeds to show, take this interplay between mind and body, thought and affect presented in the biblical discourse of the “heart” and develop it in the direction of a language of the human body as symbolic. An important aspect of this development is its tendency to avoid employing metaphorical language. For example: Origen, the third-century Church Father, is according to Chrétien the first to formulate differentiation among organs within the body of the Pauline “inner man” (Symbolique 19). Essential to this differentiation, explains Chrétien, is Origen’s emphasis on the equivocity of the language St. Paul uses to describe the outer man and the inner man. Indeed, the language Paul uses to write about the two bodies (inner and outer) is, Origen says, homonymic, rather than metaphoric. Origen writes of Paul, “I have found that noncorporeal things are given names by the homonyms of all the corporeal things. The result is that bodily things refer to the outer man, but the homonyms for bodily things refer to the inner man. [. . .] For just as the outer man has the same name as the inner, so too with its members; thus one can say that every member of the outer man is also the same thing in the inner man.”11 Chrétien comments, “there is an originary equivocity in language, which can designate under the same terms two different realities” (Symbolique 20). Chrétien then turns to Saint Augustine, who, across many writings, develops the biblical discourse of the heart and its relation to the Pauline inner man, with his various organs, in such a way that the heart itself becomes endowed with organs. Chrétien shows that, for Augustine, the heart becomes

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the seat of the inner man’s spiritual senses, and as a result is endowed with ears, eyes, a mouth, a palate, even a hand (Symbolique 23, 24, 25, 27–28, 30). Origen’s and Augustine’s two different, yet relatedly biblical, ways of speaking about the outer and the inner man, and the heart, flow into the subsequent tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs. Chrétien writes, “Through the repeated enumeration of many parts of the body, the Song of Songs will lead its commentators, in the Patristic and medieval periods, to expand, refine, and multiply this symbolism and this language of the heart. But it is decisive to see that symbolic heart-language is not created for some immediate purpose or artificially forged, and that it is ultimately rooted in biblical language and anthropology even if the name ‘heart’ or ‘inner man’ may give way to that of ‘mind’ or ‘soul’” (Symbolique 32). Chrétien moves in his second chapter from discussing the Song of Songs’ commentators’ interpretations of the body’s parts in terms of the “inner man’s” bodily members or the organs and functions of the soul, to the discussion of how these same body parts speak of a collective body, made up not only of individuals, but also of orders of classes of individuals (Symbolique 46). Thus, the language of the symbolic body is extended to collective human identity. One of the most important biblical texts for this development of an interpretation of the Song of Songs in relation to a collective body is I Corinthians 12:12–14. Chrétien makes three important remarks about St. Paul’s discussion of parts or members of the body of Christ, and they all relate importantly to the question of poetics, because they deal with parts and wholes and thus the possibilities of figuration. First: our body, which is the unity in action of multiple members or parts, can become a part of a higher body into which it is integrated, without however ceasing to be what it was, even though its “economy” is not necessarily the same.12 Second, “incorporation into Christ through baptism implies a double corporeal relation [. . .]: the relation of our body that has become a member to Christ as its head, and the relation of our body as member to other bodies as members”; and third, “these members that we have, or are, are never considered in themselves in a static manner, [. . .] but always [. . .] in terms of their usage and their function” (Symbolique 47). The usage of these members is never neutral or automatic, like seeing for the eye; instead, the use always results from our decisions. This leads Chrétien to articulate a conclusive key point about the fact of being incarnate: “there are several ways to be incarnated, several ways one can exist one’s incarnation, several meanings of the flesh, which are just so many modes of the self, and of its possible alterations” (Ibid.). We see now more fully that this poetics of the symbolic body and its organs as developed out of the biblical material never functions merely metaphorically to figure a spiritual state of the soul or the inner man, or of the collective, that could be conceptually translated; this language is not simply a

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scaffolding that could be cast off without ill effect once the conceptual meaning it points to is grasped. Rather, as Chrétien will go on to show, this symbolic language both incarnates and heuristically builds up the body it speaks of. Here we come to the heart of the poetics that Chrétien has discovered, and indeed to questions that are, he writes, “in one sense, the object of this entire book” (Symbolique 35). He proceeds to lay out the philosophical “meaning, [. . .] legitimacy, and [. . .] pertinence” of this “investigation of the history of these organs of the heart” in a concentrated series of paragraphs that repay close attention. In these paragraphs, we move from the question of the body as metaphor to that of the body as “schema.” First, then, the question of metaphor, and the emergence in its place of an understanding of the poetics of the symbolic body as incarnational and heuristic: it is clear from the outset that we cannot reduce these words on the members of the heart to a metaphor, as if it were a neutral description: that is to engage oneself in a fundamental philosophical thesis without providing the foundations, to beg the question, and thus to express a mere opinion. No X-ray of the neck will show humility or pride, obedience or rebellion, but in the posture or the gestures, in the bodily bearing of the other, we see it immediately, sometimes even before having seen the body, just as an abnormal gesture seen from the side and indistinctly makes us turn around to consider whoever did it, and to see if there is a threat there. We do not need explanations to know what it means to keep our head up, or to have a stiff neck, or what the difference is between the two. The stiffness of the neck expresses and manifests the obstinacy of pride, it is not a more or less arbitrary sign that we would go take from an order distinct from it. It is not an “image” of pride, it is pride incarnate. To which is added what the consideration of the usage of this organic language can show us. Leaving aside the case, evidently frequent, where an author mechanically takes up ready-made formulas and does not give them their power of naming, this language is not ornamental, but heuristic (Symbolique 35–36).

There is an important phenomenological point made here13: the poetics of the symbolic body found in use among the commentators on the Song of Songs allows for a faithful expression of the experience, in oneself and as observed in others, of inner states that make themselves visible in gestures and body carriage.14 Hearkening back to our analysis of the book’s first paragraph, this poetics allows for the speaking of the body’s meaning-making “glow”; here, this is exemplified by the biblically resonant adjective “stiff-necked.” The descriptor expresses a state that is at once corporeal and spiritual—it is, as Chrétien writes, “pride incarnate.”15 And just as we had noted that the language Chrétien uses in the book’s opening paragraph is “performative,” Chrétien here makes the case for the “heuristic” power of this language: it is

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as if the recognition of the phenomenological accuracy of the speech, the fact that it names an experienced apparent reality, in turn encourages and builds up our inner capacity to experience it. In the language of the opening paragraph of the book, the speaking of the experience confirms our sense that our body contains a spiritual capacity to respond to and for everything that happens, and the realization that there are “secret dealings” between the world’s potentialities and the body’s powers (Symbolique 7). The heuristic power of this language of the symbolic body folds into Chrétien’s striking characterization of the “body with its members and gestures” as a “schema,” and thus we arrive at the core of this poetics.16 The flexibility of the body as a symbolically “inexhaustible” source of “ever new figurations” gives voice to phenomenal realities that “can often be given to us with precision and clarity only by means of it”: More than a reserve of possible metaphors from which one would draw in order to adorn the discourse, the body with its members and gestures plays the role of a schema (in a sense that is analogous to the one Kant gives to this term): it allows the construction of the figurations and the images of what otherwise would often remain unimaginable. This schema of the body is a dynamic schema, a source of ever new figurations, but also of questions and possibilities. What appears thanks to this language can often be given to us with precision and clarity only by means of it. This is why, even if certain historical constants can be identified, this language does not become fixed in a definitively established lexicon. It is supple, labile, constantly renewed, due to the very fact that the body possesses a power of figuration, or of figurability, that is inexhaustible. The point is not to end up in a sort of heraldry of the soul, where each symbol would have a univocal significance. Such would merely be a spiritualist and poetic form of phrenology. It is the schematic flexibility that gives this language its strength (Symbolique 36–37).

The analogy Chrétien draws with Kant’s “schematism” is worth pondering, and here we will do so in light of this quotation as well as several of the theses Chrétien offers in the book’s “Conclusion in the Form of Theses.” If for Kant the schema is the “third thing, [a mediating representation,] which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter,”17 can we discover analogous poles between which the body “with its members and gestures” operates? Terms analogous for Chrétien to category and appearance would seem to be, on the one hand, the interrelated biblical duo “inner man” and “body of Christ,” and, on the other, the phenomenal human being. That is, while for Kant a schema for a concept is the “representation of a general procedure of the imagination for providing [that] concept with its image,”18 for Chrétien the human body with its organs and gestures

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is a schema providing biblical figuration to the human being throughout “the whole of [his or her] individual and collective existence” (Symbolique 293). It, of course, goes without saying that there are key differences between Chrétien’s philosophical understanding of the relations between concepts, sensation, and phenomenality, and that of Kant. Nevertheless, in pursuing Chrétien’s suggestion to see the schema of the body as analogous to Kant’s, we can propose further that, in place of the Kantian categories there stands for Chrétien biblical anthropology, summed up by the heart and the Pauline body of Christ, and, in a manner analogous to Kant’s schema as “sensible concept of an object in agreement with the category,”19 there stands Chrétien’s schema of the body constructing from the glow of the embodied human person appearances and names, or in other words “symbols,” and eliciting in us associated “questions and possibilities” (Symbolique 36, quoted above). The “supple, labile, constantly renewed” features of this schema, this figuring language of the human body, on the one hand accords with and draws from the multiplicity of meanings found by the “attentive and faithful” interpreter of the Bible, and, on the other, puts into focus specific images arising out of the “inexhaustible meaning of the body” (Symbolique 37). Four of the concluding theses that close Symbolique du corps lend support to these speculations regarding this analogy. Theses I and II speak of the Song of Songs as a part of the Bible that reflects the whole, using the Bridegroom to convey the “un-circumscribable character” of the event of God who “came, comes, and will come towards man and in man in the person of the Word” (Symbolique 291). The love story that the Song tells, using the very language of love, “calls forth an inexhaustible response” of speech from each new reader (ibid.). This response of gesture and speech involves the body as “speech-bearer” [porte-parole] and “universal signifier,” “translating,” with both gestures and language, the biblical inner man and member of the body of Christ into human personal identity, and vice versa. And the symbolic language that in this activity of “translation” speaks of the body and its parts “in order to say the whole of our individual and collective existence” (Symbolique 293) powerfully expands, rather than diminishes, the disciplinary and conceptual languages it engages with. In an essay on Emmanuel Levinas, Chrétien writes of the transformative, “irreversible” effect on the Greek language (and thus on philosophy) of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible.20 Here, the Bible, as presented in miniature by the Song of Songs, becomes a kind of incarnational matrix out of which the symbolic language of the body forms and draws power to generate new meanings within other languages, including conceptual ones, and which themselves return the favor, contributing further to the symbolic language’s meanings and power (thus the continuing equivocity of the symbols). The “heuristic” power (once again) of this symbolic

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language not only makes new phenomena appear; it also enriches the meanings available in other “tongues” with which it engages: this symbolism, even when it would only strive to be illustrative and intend to translate word for word the operations of the spirit and the tasks of the collectivity into actions of the body, in reality always does something more and other than that translation alone. This is why this symbolism never congeals into a definitive lexicon. Itself on the move, it makes what it translates move, and enriches it. This symbolism has a powerfully heuristic role: it is a place of growth and generativity of meaning, because all that is corporeal burst its banks, thus escaping in part our intentions. Its flexibility and its fluidity, which prevent it from coming to rest, also make for its richness. But it does not follow that we should only ever speak about the hair of the soul and the teeth of the Church, abandoning conceptual language. The movement studied in this book always goes in both directions. For a word only lives on the differences of potential between the languages or tongues that it haunts. There must be at least two languages in a word for it to be rich, and this takes place in many different forms. Citing only two examples: Plato’s integration of the language of the mysteries into philosophical speech gives the latter an unprecedented power, while the massive infusion into the words of Saint Augustine of Latin as the language of translation of the Bible, with all its oddities and weirdness, gives to his entirely classic language (no offense to Latin teachers!) an imbalance which makes it advance, and an uneasiness which is its signature. Speech dies when its language is an only language, without an other or an outside (Symbolique 293–94).

In developing this symbolic language of the body in their commentaries on the Song of Songs, the writers Chrétien discusses not only figure forth and “complete, so to speak, the organism of the inner man” (Symbolique 38) and provide organic form to the collectivity; they also generate new meanings in every realm of conceptual expression with which their speech enters into contact. The generative power of this poetics of the symbolic body is evident. What has become of it since the high point of its practice among the Song of Songs’ patristic and medieval commentators? Chrétien addresses this question via reflection on recent ecclesiological statements that demonstrate a reticence to employ the symbolic language of the body. Chrétien’s reflection occurs only after many pages devoted to describing the flexibility and descriptive rigor that the symbolic language of the body has manifested over the centuries in speaking of the collectivity. In this part of the book, the non-metaphorical, heuristic power of this symbolic language is once again an important focus (see, in particular, Symbolique 53 and 65). Chrétien shows that, as the “precision of the thinking about the organicity of the body” increases in the commentary, so there

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develops “the definition or the figuration of the various orders of the Church by as many parts” (Symbolique 59). There is an evident “mutual enrichment between ecclesiology and thinking about the collective body, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic of the Song of Songs on the other” (Symbolique 59). Indeed, he writes, the “interpretation of the Song of Songs is the questioning, heuristic, and abounding place where theologians go for insights, just as new theological developments come to enrich and transform the interpretation of the Song of Songs itself” (Symbolique 60). A decline on one side of the balance tends to bring with it a weakening of reflection on the other: “when reflection on the Church as body weakens, the interpretation of the Song of Songs becomes either scarce or marginalized, or moves in completely different directions” (Symbolique 60). It is thus at the end of this second chapter of Symbolique du corps that Chrétien makes his observation about the attenuated use of this poetics of the symbolic body in the very recent history of the Church, and he raises a pertinent question about what might be its root cause. He observes that in the twentieth century, the Catholic Church’s magisterium, in the form of Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Mystici corporis Christi, directly addressed the Church as body with “a thorough exposition of the Pauline theology of the Body of Christ and its repercussions over the centuries,” providing a “strong emphasis” on the “organicity of the Church” (Symbolique 71), and warning against the erroneous view that the “ordered or ‘organic’ structure of the body of the Church contains only hierarchical elements and with them is complete” (Mystici corporis 17). So far, so good. However, Chrétien points out, in the encyclical “a determined category of the faithful is never named by a part of the natural body. There is no mention of the neck, arms, or nose” (Symbolique 72). This reticence to employ the poetics of the symbolic body is also present in authoritative twentieth-century theological studies of the Church, such as Charles Cardinal Journet’s Theology of the Church (1958, rev. 1987). The “organicity” of the Church is insisted upon, and the biblical passages out of which the commentary tradition once developed the symbolic meanings of the body’s organs are cited, but the actual practice of this symbolic poetics is neither acknowledged nor pursued. Chrétien asks, Is this prudence with regard to a symbolic language, the detail of which has never produced unanimity, merely a sober prudence, or does it have a deeper meaning? It does not indicate a crisis of the organic model, which is reaffirmed, but rather a deficit of the realism with which this model is said, and expresses itself. Is there a change on the side of the natural body, as if its symbolizing capacity were collapsing, as if it no longer offered the basis, in its modern objectification, for such an open symbolization? Let us leave the question in suspense, but retain it in memory (Symbolique 72).

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Symbolique du corps does indeed leave the question in suspense; yet it usefully hovers over the subsequent books Chrétien has dedicated to his genealogy of human interiority, breaking out at times explicitly, especially in the two volumes of Conscience and roman. But that is the subject for another study. We can wonder whether an idolatry of the body has indeed dissolved the symbolic body into “insignificance,” and what the outlines, causes, and consequences of this “idolatry” might be; but at the same time, the opening paragraph of Symbolique demonstrates that the thought and language of the body described in the book is not lost. Indeed, as Thesis I in the book’s conclusion implies, its ongoing availability is first and foremost the result of the risen Christ’s continuing presence among human beings (Symbolique 291). While the subsequent books in Chrétien’s project explore the heights, the dissolution, and even the reversal of certain additional schemata of human interiority, the philosopher’s conviction nevertheless remains that the symbolic language of the body is available to speech and thought as a viable means for the construction of images of the inner life of the human being, and that this construction is not merely metaphorical but heuristic, changing the languages and concepts it engages. The commentators on the Song of Songs have irreversibly translated the biblical understanding of the human being, particularly as presented by the heart and the Pauline body of Christ, into the symbolic human body. And yet, if it is to be spoken accurately and fluently, this language of the symbolic body must be freely taken up anew, by each speaker. Chrétien’s genealogical investigation invitingly makes this case over and over again. NOTES 1. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’Espace intérieur (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2014), pp. 9, 20: “l’identité personnelle.” Unless otherwise indicated, translations appearing throughout this essay are my own. Subsequent citations of this book will be given parenthetically in the text, using the abbreviation EI. 2. See Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Attempting to Think Beyond Subjectivity,” an Interview with Camille Riquier and Marc Cerisuelo. In Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. Translated by Tarek Dika and W. Chris Hackett. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 228–38. Pages 232–233 address the rise of “subjectivity,” while pages 232–234 discuss “the heart.” 3. J.-L. Chrétien, Symbolique du corps. La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), p. 12. I will henceforth cite this book in my text as Symbolique. 4. In addition to the interview mentioned in note 2 above, “Attempting to Think Beyond Subjectivity,” see also “Sens et formes de la fragilité: Entretien avec Jean-Louis Chrétien,” with Michaël Fœssel and Camille Riquier. Esprit 5 (May

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2018), 100–11. The inaugural role of Symbolique du corps in the project is assumed in the first question, p. 100. 5. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Conscience et roman, I: La conscience au grand jour (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 40. 6. La Joie spacieuse. Essai sur la dilatation (Paris: Minuit, 2007), p. 10; trans. A. Davenport, Spacious Joy (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), p. 3 (translation modified). 7. See EI 23 for Chrétien’s aside on the timing of the publication of Conscience et roman, the “renversement” of the Christian understanding of human interiority ushered in by the novel, and his statement that the conclusions articulated at the end of EI serve to sum up the lessons to be drawn from the entire multibook project on human interiority that begins with Symbolique du corps. 8. Here I am inspired by the discussion found in Olivier-Thomas Venard, Thomas d’Aquin, poète théologien, vol. 1: Littérature et théologie: Une saison en enfer (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2002), of a poetics premised on the “convenance de l’être et du langage, la vérité et l’efficacité de la parole,” 272, and, in the absence of such “convenance” and its accompanying question of meaning (signification), struggles within the “décalage vécu” between “la parole, la pensée et le réel” to find linguistic origin mythologies to lean upon and draw from (306–07). See the English translation of selections from Venard’s three-volume opus: Olivier-Thomas Venard, A Poetic Christ, trans. Kenneth Oakes and Francesca Aran Murphy (London: T&T Clark, 2019); to rephrase the above, Venard discusses a poetics premised on “the fittingness between being and language, between the truth and efficacy of speech” (155), and shows how, in the absence of meaning and under the assumption of “the discursive character of all human thought,” modern poetics search for temporary, mythic linguistic origin points to fill in the “lived difference [. . .] between language, thought, and the real” (197). 9. See Philippe Grosos, “L’irréversible excès: Sur la phénoménologie de Jean-Louis Chrétien,” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 135 (2003), 235–36. 10. Symbolique, 17: “the heart is as much the center of thought and will, or in any case of decision, as it is the center of affectivity.” 11. Origen, Dialogue with Heraclides 11 and 16, 66, and 70 (translation modified), quoted by Chrétien in Symbolique, pp. 19, 20. 12. On the meaning of “economy” here, see EI 37, where it names the “nature of the exchanges between the outside and the inside” associated with a given figure (in the case of EI, the figure of a bedroom within the soul). Catherine Pickstock notes how the human collectivity figured here by the commentators Chrétien studies crucially extends beyond metaphor: “the ‘bodiliness’ of a social body is not a fiction; it is literally the case that human beings physically and culturally depend upon one another, and one could argue that this is our primary source for one’s understanding of embodied unity, since one’s psychic unity first arises as a reflex from social responses, as Jacques Lacan and others have shown” (Catherine Pickstock, Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020], p. 137; see pp. 137–38).

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13. Chrétien evokes both Heidegger here on the relation between the ear and hearing, and Sartre on the relation between possessing a sexual organ and one’s status as a sexual being (see Symbolique p. 35). This moment in Symbolique du corps links up with what Jérôme de Gramont calls Chrétien’s “explication avec Heidegger” (Jérôme de Gramont, “L’aventure de la parole selon Jean-Louis Chrétien,” Comprendre, vol. 19/2, 2017, p. 11). Philippe Grosos, in an incisive discussion of Chrétien’s phenomenology in relation to that of Heidegger, points out Chrétien’s early description of the “flesh that listens,” which precedes this evocation in Symbolique—see Appel 153, quoted in Philippe Grosos, “L’irréversible excès: Sur la phénoménologie de Jean-Louis Chrétien,” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 135 (2003), pp. 234–35. 14. As Catherine Pickstock puts it, “it is the case that sensing has a double aspect, outer and inner, from the very outset, in accordance with the double biblical meaning of the term ‘heart’” (Pickstock, Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020], p. 132). 15. Taking the example of the relationship between the bride and bridegroom in the Song of Songs, we can make a similar point, but this time about love rather than pride. Catherine Pickstock, commenting on Chrétien’s observation that the relationship of lover and beloved in the Song “is not exhausted by any conceptual equivalence”— e.g., God and Israel, Christ and the Church, Christ and the soul, as well as human marriage partners and, by extension, any human loving relationship—concludes that “a sensory image [in the Song] elevates the [human loving relationship] participants’ spiritual perceptions, but it does so because of, and not despite the fact that it is a sensory image” (Ibid., p. 137). 16. In “Attempting to Think Beyond Subjectivity,” Chrétien speaks of the important role of “schemata that organize actions and practices and also arouse specific affects” in establishing the relation between the “exterior and the interior,” described both in Symbolique du corps and in L’Espace intérieur (the schema of the inner dwelling place). See “Attempting to Think Beyond Subjectivity,” op. cit., pp. 233, 232. 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A138/B177, p. 272. 18. Ibid., A140/B180, p. 273. 19. Ibid., B186, p. 276. 20. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “La traduction irréversible,” in Emmanuel Lévinas, Positivité et transcendance, suivi de Lévinas et la phénoménologie, ed. Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), pp. 309–28. For Levinas, Chrétien writes, the Septuagint testifies to a necessity that “l’hébreu doit se traduire en grec pour que le grec aille jusqu’au bout de lui-même, et que son projet passe à l’acte” (p. 325): this power that translation possesses to push Greek (and thus, for Levinas, philosophy itself) to its own end is, writes Chrétien, “irreversible.” The poetics of symbolic languages, or schemata, which Chrétien subsequently develops in Symbolique du corps, La Joie spacieuse, and L’Espace intérieur, extend, through the “figuration,” “symbolism,” or “translation” that they operate, this transformative and generative power of the revealed Word among the human tongues.

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Hospitality and Responsibility The Possibility of an “Antiphonal Ethics” in Jean-Louis Chrétien Christina M. Gschwandtner

Jean-Louis Chrétien’s work is marked by a profound and persistent emphasis on fragility, vulnerability, precarity, and other dimensions of human finitude. Such an emphasis on vulnerability has generally been read or portrayed positively in philosophical and theological treatments in the last decades, as a way to combat the legacies of the strong Cartesian subject and as a way to temper languages of autonomy, power, authority, and self-sufficiency, which mark the modern and Enlightenment projects that were deeply implicated in colonialism, imperialism, slavery, globalism, and two horrific world wars. A strong Cartesian subject, defined by autonomy and power, is seen to be a fundamental culprit for the exercise of violence and injustice, while vulnerability and fragility are interpreted to have greater potential for openness to other people and more attentiveness to them. Fragility and vulnerability are thus suggested to enable greater ethical responsibility and care. Indeed, speaking of the ethical self in terms of vulnerability or precarity has been employed in recent philosophy in multiple ways. For example, for Emmanuel Lévinas it seems to become the very ground of the ethical call: the vulnerability and precarity of the other calls me to absolute obligation. The other imposes the call upon me and commands me to respond to it. Yet, this raises the persistent question why or how precarity accomplishes this and whether one needs to be hermeneutically predisposed to hear this call and to recognize vulnerability as imposing an ethical obligation.1 Drawing explicitly on Lévinas but also trying to go beyond him, Judith Butler has suggested in several treatments that precarity might become an impetus for 99

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ethical consideration due to our shared precarity, allowing for an ethical communitarianism.2 The awareness of my own vulnerability enables me to recognize, respond to, and protect the “precarious life” of the other. In Paul Ricœur and, somewhat differently, in Julia Kristeva, it is by recognizing the alterity within myself that I become open to the otherness of the other and am able to respond to alterity in more generous ways.3 Emmanuel Falque, in a critique of many of his French philosophical predecessors, and in particular of Lévinas, instead emphasizes the need for strength and support in the face of vulnerability, especially in cases of suffering and death, such as those in palliative care. He criticizes what he calls a “hypertrophy” of passivity and weakness in French phenomenology and calls instead for a recovery of language of force and power, at least in a qualified fashion.4 Ethics must sustain, support, and care for the other, and this requires not weakness but strength.5 Despite all the recent celebrations of precarity and fragility, surely these are not unmitigated goods. Especially when people find themselves in situations of oppression and abuse, increasing their autonomy and empowering them to change their situations may well prove more effective than hymning woundedness and precarity. It matters profoundly how one speaks of fragility and vulnerability—and how one frames what one thinks they will be able to accomplish philosophically, theologically, and ethically. Sometimes the emphasis on vulnerability can itself become violent.6 Does Chrétien’s language run the danger of a similar violence or at least possibility for abuse? What exactly is the character of this vulnerability, weakness, or even woundedness in Chrétien’s work? The present contribution will examine closely Chrétien’s discussions of fragility and response to the call, in order to understand how they function for him and whether they can avoid some of the dangers of too great an emphasis on precarity as a good in itself. Chrétien does not articulate an ethics. Even his extensive discussions of Kant in several of his books remain mostly explications, with little indication of where he himself would go on these topics. One of the difficulties in interpreting Chrétien’s work lies in tracing his own voice in the polyphony of voices and the cross-fertilization of sources that mark all of his texts. It is not always clear when Chrétien is simply weaving other voices together and when he is speaking in his own voice or taking a particular stance. While this presents some challenges for ascertaining and representing Chrétien’s own position, this method is itself an important dimension of his thought and method, showing that we do not think alone, that only such a conversation with a large variety of voices enables meaning to flourish. In this way, the fundamental tenor of his work, the ways in which he describes fragility, responsibility, and hospitality through the voices of others, serve as important pointers to what an ethics of hospitality might entail for him.

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Ultimately, so this contribution will seek to show, although woundedness, vulnerability, and even self-effacement are important themes in his work, they do not constitute an embrace of fragility for its own sake, but they become the ground for articulating a responsibility for sheltering, gathering, and healing others. His particular configuration of human finitude might thus lend itself to an ethics of vulnerability that avoids some of the dangers of other proposals. It is neither an ethics of autonomy nor of substitution, neither an autarchic elevation nor a complete erasure of the self, but rather a particular way of establishing relation and the possibility of response, a shared responsibility that is not solely individual and that includes not just the human but also a responsibility for things and for the world. This is a much broader and more generous hospitality than that on offer by some other recent thinkers. In order to show this, the present contribution will focus on three important loci for investigating the possibility of an ethical dimension or ethical implications of Chrétien’s work on hospitality and precarity: his 1998 meditations on hospitality and the word, his 2007 discussion of response and responsibility (as an extension of his earlier 1992 book on call and response), and his consideration of ethics in the context of his 2017 examination of fragility, the final book to be published during his lifetime. Yet in order to explicate the possibility of an ethics in these meditations, it actually makes sense to proceed backward: first exploring the context and need for ethics as it becomes evident in the rupture of fragility and the use that can be made of it, then seeing how this gives rise to a call or appeal that evokes responsibility, and finally culminating in a fundamental stance of hospitality as providing protection and shelter to the vulnerable. THE FISSURE OF FRAGILITY In the final work published during his lifetime, Chrétien engages in an extended meditation on fragility.7 Although this is a theme that has marked his work in some form or other since the beginning, starting with discussions of the “shock of beauty” and the “naked voice,” this most recent treatment can surely be regarded as the fullest and most mature expression of his views on fragility and vulnerability.8 Interestingly for the present purposes, it culminates in a discussion of Kant’s ethics and the role fragility plays in it. Throughout the book, Chrétien highlights that fragility is not only a lack or break (like weakness or frailty), but always also a condition of possibility. After a brief “phenomenology” of fragility, in which he compares it to various other related phenomena, such as weakness, vulnerability, lability, caducity, and so forth, the first part of the book considers several crucial images or metaphors that have often been employed for the fragility of the human

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condition, such as birth/infancy, glass or clay, the crack or fissure, the ruin, and the association of beauty and fragility. In this kaleidoscope of images and metaphors Chrétien makes clear the importance of fragility for understanding the human condition, which always teeters on the border of caducity and lives under the threat of ruin. This crack or fissure that is the mark of the fragility of our finite human condition must be taken seriously as expressing our frailty in manifold fashion. Chrétien affirms a fundamental precarity to our condition, as it is illustrated in the imagery of the nakedness and vulnerability of the infant, the fragility of glass and clay, especially when cracked, the disintegration of the ruin, and the elusiveness of the beautiful. The second part of the book traces a “use of fragility” through three periods and representative thinkers—Seneca, Ambrose/Cassian/Augustine, and Kant—each representing a particular, usually dual, interpretation of the fragility of the human condition. While each of these advance a specific way of grappling with fragility, he argues that only in Kant does this take on an explicitly ethical dimension. Chrétien shows how different uses are made of fragility in the three distinct contexts or figures he highlights. In his view, Seneca, and Latin Stoic thought more broadly, interprets fragility as caducity, as fissure or crack that warns of breakage. In this interpretation the apprehension over our fragility as caducity can become a source of resilience and strength and also a challenge to make good use of our time, to avoid procrastination, and thus to strive for vigorous formation of the self. Fragility is here closely linked to finitude, and forgetting our finitude is an evil we must combat by developing the self. Chrétien draws on the Jansenist Pierre Nicole, author of a text on human weakness, to show another iteration of this interpretation, in which one strives vigorously to overcome the breaks or cracks in human nature. Meditating on our finitude opens a space for self-knowledge (Fragilité 157). The second use, in Ambrose, Cassian, and Augustine, interprets fragility instead as a “state of death” and “spiritual slavery” that must be strengthened by divine grace (Fragilité 161). Here remembering our fragile condition becomes a way to open ourselves to the work of God. Human fragility is seen as a result of the fall and involves fault, even when not personally perpetrated, yet that itself can become a kind of “remedy or medication” (Fragilité 164). It is within the fissure or break of our fragility, within our flesh, that redemption becomes possible as Christ shares our human condition and takes on our fragility (in all respects except sin), thus communicating salvation to us. Chrétien shows how Ambrose, Cassian, and Augustine articulate this positive rule of “the weakness of the flesh” as a possibility for grace (Fragilité 180). Fragility is here interpreted primarily as fallibility and infirmity, but closely linked to hope. One makes “use” of this fragility by allowing God’s power to be at work within our condition of fragility (Fragilité 202). Neither of these

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iterations of the use of fragility is explicitly ethical in orientation, although they already indicate possible positive uses that can be made of fragility. In Chrétien’s discussion of Kant, however, the interpretation of fragility does take on an explicitly ethical tenor. Chrétien argues that Kant, influenced by Baumgarten, thinks of fragility in terms of the Augustinian notion of the servile will and the habitual bent toward evil, although he does not go so far as thinking of our nature as fundamentally corrupt. Later in the chapter, Chrétien will show that Kant has a notion of the diabolical or demonic as the other than human, thus the human can never be fully evil, that is desire evil for its own sake; something good always remains (Fragilité 237–43). In this respect Kant differs from Augustine for whom the human can will evil for its own sake. In contrast, for Kant we never lose our intelligence entirely; we are not as wholly corrupt as we are for Augustine (Fragilité 242). The spirit of falsity is the root of evil in us, but it is “irreducible to fragility” (Fragilité 243).9 Yet in Kant, fragility is also not only weakness but an inclination or bent of the will that must be actively combatted. He does not follow the Aristotelian, Stoic, or Thomistic interpretations that think of virtue as the cultivation of habit, but considers an action done out of habit as having no or much lower moral value. We must continually struggle to do the good, precisely via always battling anew the evil bent of our will. Chrétien points out that this evil tendency is for Kant not actually about the inclinations of desires, but about the will itself, the voluntary disregard for the duty the moral law imposes on us. Fragility for Kant ultimately becomes “the condition of what is noblest in us, virtue as perpetual combat and infinite progress” (Fragilité 244). This is why humility is sublime for him: “In each of my free acts I decide anew the meaning of my entire life” (Fragilité 246).10 Chrétien argues that this represents the culmination of Western notions of subjectivity, in which the individual person counts as autonomous, self-sufficient, and meaning-giving. Chrétien thus shows that far from serving as a counterpoint to the strong Cartesian subject or the autonomous Kantian rational being, fragility can actually become the ground for autonomy and self-sufficiency, if it is understood as a crack or fissure in the self that can be glued together or plastered over by a continual exercise of the will. Fragility then becomes a defect for which only those are at fault who have not sufficiently exercised their will and rationality, in order to rise above their finitude and frailty. Freedom compensates for fragility, as individual subjects take charge of their lives and destinies. Although Chrétien does not provide an explicit critique of this, it is clear from the treatment overall that he sides instead with Ambrose and Augustine.11 His epilogue highlights his own commitments more clearly than many others of his treatments: it not only returns to Augustine and Ambrose (though not Cassian) explicitly, but it employs George Herbert and Charles Péguy to speak of fragility as a constitutive dimension of finitude that requires

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assistance from another. Fragility is not only a moral bent to an evil will in a fundamentally good human nature, but instead a weakness or vulnerability that borders on corruption and must be redeemed by divine assistance. Our fragility is a more fundamental frailty that requires support and sustenance, not only an exercise of the will. The introduction mentioned briefly Chrétien’s propensity to speak through and via the voices of others, making his own voice sometimes difficult to distinguish. He alludes to this method of weaving voices together in the conclusion to this final published text by contending that the human voice is the “highest manifestation” of our fragility inasmuch as its “nudity” and possibility of “breaking” can allow other voices to resound in it and meaning to become possible (Fragilité 254). The fragility of the human condition resonates most profoundly in the voice (Fragilité 258). The fragility of the voice can thus function as a “medium and token of testimony” if it “opens a demand that is stronger and purer than I” such that the hearer and speaker of this voice can be “directed to new possibilities of existence and of justice,” while testifying at the same time to the inability of incarnating such possibilities or keeping the promise (Fragilité 256, 258). Fragility must always be thought of in the context of hope, as “receptacle” for “the divine promise” or as “abode of the imperishable in the world” (Fragilité 262–63). Fragility thereby can become the condition for our response. An alternative to the Kantian use of finitude for the moral struggle of an autonomous and self-sufficient individual subject is thus envisioned here. Fragility can become an occasion for a plural dimension of openness to the other in a shared orientation toward justice. Although Chrétien does not employ this language in the present context, one might say that a further “use” that can be made of fragility is one of hospitality. Fragility serves as the ground or condition for the call and response structure and gives rise to the need for gathering, sheltering, protecting, and healing that he illuminates in his work on hospitality. Such hospitality would offer the human voice to express the shared human condition of fragility and employ it as a place both of receptivity and protection. This possibility is only indicated briefly here, and in a theological mode, but it is in keeping with the emphasis on responsiveness within responsibility that Chrétien has articulated elsewhere. THE RESPONSE OF RESPONSIBILITY The phenomenon of response to a call or appeal is, of course, a central theme in Chrétien’s work. It appears not only in the seminal 1992 The Call and the Response,12 but also in many other texts, culminating to some extent in his 2007 Gilson Chair lectures at the Institut catholique, in which he explicitly

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considers response in the context of responsibility.13 The earlier Call and Response says already: “In order to think responsibility, we must philosophically think what is involved in responding” (Call 30). The book undertakes to do this in four essays: the first chapter is a reflection on the call of beauty, a topic he also explores in several other contexts,14 the second focuses on the relation between the voice and the senses, the third chapter reflects on the idea of an “inner voice” or the call of conscience, and the fourth chapter explores how hearing is always embodied in touch. While not all these give rise to an ethical responsibility, they all highlight the importance of response. The Gilson Chair lectures push this analysis of response further into an explicit consideration of responsibility. Like the book on fragility, the book on response begins with a “phenomenology” of response considering various uses of the term and distinguishing it from others,15 then moves through figurations of response and responsibility in poetry, tragedy, art, and ethics, and culminates in a theological treatment.16 Three important dimensions emerge in Chrétien’s discussions: first, responsibility occurs within the context of a plurality of voices; second, responsibility is not absolute and does not result in complete self-effacement; third, the responsibility of response consists in granting “shelter” or hospitality to what is more vulnerable and fragile. The very opening of the earlier text already stresses how responsibility arises not only from the possibility of response to a prior call or appeal, but always already implies a context of plurality: speaking is, first of all, a response to what one hears and therefore always implies the plurality of previous voices. In my voice “vibrates the whole thickness of the world whose meaning my voice attempts to say, meaning that has gripped it and swallowed it up, as it were, from time immemorial” (Appel 9; Call 1). The lectures on responsibility also stress this importance of plurality, of standing within a tradition and history of response, and employ it as an explanation for his method of proceeding by tracing this history in multiple differing contexts, including literary, philosophical, and theological (Répondre 35). The impossibility of giving a full response to the call similarly points to the need for plurality: “The necessarily choral character of any response reinforces the impossibility of any correspondence . . . in order to respond, a voice must have all voices in it” (Appel 43; Call 32, trans. mod.).17 Alterity always already “inhabits” the voice in some way (Call 78). Others precede me and have called me, thereby enabling my voice and giving it a future: “Other voices are at once the past and the future of my own voice. The past because they have always already called me and even named me, and through their immemorial past, immemorial as far as I am concerned since they precede the I, they have always already gathered lights, no matter how obscure, in the place that becomes, little by little, my place. Future of my voice also, since it

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is only through them that I can learn to speak and to say something” (Appel 98; Call 81).18 My voice thus becomes mine only in responding to these other voices (Répondre 237). Beauty serves as a first and repeated example for a call that can proceed from things (or from God), not only from other humans. Beauty calls out to us in the sense that it gathers or collects us, returns us to ourselves in some way, not in the sense of self-sufficiency but in disquieting or destabilizing us (Call 9–10). Chrétien shows how in some thinkers (like Ficino), the call of beauty moves us to offer ourselves to it unreservedly, while in others (like Dionysius) it resonates with “the harmony of the world” such that we are called to be present to it: “The first vocation is the vocation to be, the first answer, to be there” (Appel 28; Call 18). Alluding to Lévinas with the biblical phrase me voici, he says of this availability: “Every response and responsibility stem from this summons, and only deploy it under new modes” (Appel 29; Call 18). He highlights, however, that this is not an individual call made to “an isolated and abstract being”; instead, it “calls the totality of the world in space and time along with me, in the inexhaustible chorus of which I am only one voice enduring a perpetual inchoation” (Appel 31; Call 19). Chrétien draws no explicitly ethical conclusions from this, but he is quite clear that we are not isolated subjects in our response but always part of a plurality of voices. Similarly, in his discussion of the “inner voice,” or the call of conscience he disputes the possibility of a solely individual and interior voice.19 This implied dialogue of the self with itself suggests that modern accounts of morality, such as those of Fichte or Kant, might require a split in the self (Call 73–74). Here also he stresses that other voices precede and follow me, and I can respond only because I am always already called, and they teach me to speak and to respond (Call, 81). He returns to this theme in the context of a tentative critique of Lévinas and Sartre in the later discussion, although even here it is more implied than explicated: being responsible “for everything and everyone” is a “forgetting of finitude” (Répondre 181). An unlimited responsibility would have to be a responsibility for the future (Répondre 184).20 In response to Sartre, Chrétien argues that to extend my responsibility such that I can be said to bear the weight of the whole world is “to remain in egology” rather than participating in collective responsibility (Répondre 193). Chrétien shows how there is an inescapable aporia at work here. On the one hand, the unsubstitutability of responsibility is conceived as singularizing and constituting me, yet on the other hand, it must always be a practical and collective responsibility, a co-responsibility (Répondre 194). If responsibility is always “a response to what precedes us and to what surrounds us” (Répondre 195), then it implies a communal dimension to responsibility. Responding only for oneself is not

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truly responding (Répondre 196). Simply expanding individual responsibility is not sufficient for arriving at communal responsibility (Répondre 198). The priority of other voices before mine show that the responsibility of response cannot be solely individual: “Individual responsibility is only a knot or a point in communal responsibility and is only possible starting from it” (Répondre 200). This means that absolute responsibility is not just a denial of finitude, but it remains an autarchic position: “I could not know how to be responsible for everything and everyone without making myself the center of the world.” Instead, he suggests: “We are responsible for everything and for everyone; that is the only receivable meaning of omni-responsibility” (Répondre 200; emphasis his). I can only respond to the meaning and weight of the world together with others (Répondre 201). The Cartesian or Kantian autonomous subject is displaced not by a greater emphasis on vulnerability, but by recognizing the plurality and diversity required for response and responsibility. Although Chrétien does show that the priority of the call implies an element of deficiency or even “destitution” (Call 25), inasmuch as it makes clear to us “the impossibility of responding, of corresponding to it, as itself a resource for responding” (Appel 35; Call 23, trans. mod.), he does not follow thinkers like Claudel to total dispossession of the self (Call 27). Rather, the call or appeal actually enables our voice: “It gives us a voice in the true sense: our voice is not abolished as our own voice by the act of resaying, since this silent voice requests ours in response” (Appel 39; Call 28).21 He insists that the naked or raw voice “does not constitute itself by itself, does not give itself to itself since it always responds, but it does give voice to whatever calls it, which becomes voice only in it, if it is not a voice already” (Appel 58; Call 45). The analysis of beauty, here and in other contexts, repeatedly stresses that our voices can become capable of bearing the call and to become responsible for it in some fashion. In a more theological mode, Christ’s response of substitution responds for us in places where we are unable to do so (Répondre 229). This, he suggests, opens the possibility for a “mutual substitution” where I see and am oriented toward the entire human community (Répondre 235). Therefore, this appeal can ultimately become a call not just for response but an appeal to responsibility: “To see the pain and beauty of the visible in the form of voice is to be dedicated to providing it forever with the asylum of our own voice. When the eye listens, we must respond to what we have heard and what we will hear” (Appel 55; Call, 43, trans. mod.).22 In the response to beauty we are enabled to provide a kind of shelter and to become dedicated to its protection. Chrétien speaks of call and response as an “antiphonic” model rather than a hermeneutic one: it both always already implies relationship or reciprocity and commits itself more fully by the request to become question

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in “body and soul” (Répondre 29). This calls for hospitality to the “voice of the other” (Répondre 34). In the final chapter, too, he affirms that our voice is responsible for those that have been stomped out or suppressed or interrupted, though this also is a communal not an individual task (Répondre 237). This allows for both singularity and community: my voice becomes mine in the response to the other voices that enable and sustain it, while in turn participating in the communal struggle of responses in the context of life and death (Répondre 237). The hospitality to other voices is continually implied, but not worked out fully in either of these books on call, response, and responsibility. What does become clear, however, is that Chrétien questions an ethics of individual responsibility or absolute self-sacrifice. He thinks of this as characterized by a kind of hubris that implies that I can bear the weight of the whole world on my shoulders in some singular fashion. Instead, our responsibility is both called forth and made possible only by all the voices preceding us that have taught us to respond and call us forth into a response to the future. We begin in plurality, not in singularity, and individuation occurs only within that context and as part of a broader struggle for response and responsibility. Our finitude and fragility is an important part of that dimension, but it has to be recognized as a shared finitude, caught up in the continual struggle of appeals and replies. The other voices both teach us how to respond and show us the insufficiency of our replies, thereby always calling us to further responsibility. This is not a homogenous communitarianism, where I draw conclusions from or parallels to my condition for all others. Rather it is an “antiphonic” situation: a choral back-and-forth in which voices are diverse and must struggle with each other, yet never exist or sing alone, never act only from themselves but always in a broader context that enables their response and sustains the exercise of their responsibility. THE HUMILITY OF HOSPITALITY The Ark of Speech, or maybe better “Arc of the Word” (L’arche de la parole), is an extended meditation on the hospitality of the voice, employing the imagery of Adam’s naming of the animals, Noah’s ark as a shelter from the flood, the promise of the arc of the rainbow, the arc established by the incarnation of the word, but also any arch that connects us to each other, providing a bridge or possibility of traversal. It includes a brief reflection on hearing and listening, a phenomenology of prayer as wounded word, an extended meditation on the hospitality of silence, and two discussions of beauty as a “eucharist of speech” or offering of the world (he describes the first as examining the “way” and the other the “destination”). Chrétien here explores hospitality as

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what gathers, shelters, and safeguards, especially through attentive listening. The voice or word thus can become a welcome and an offering, even a protecting “hearth” for the wounded and vulnerable. In responding to the potential objection that the fundamental human task would consist “in giving each other this world as a place to live in,” he points out that “the word ethical comes from the Greek ethos, which first and foremost means abode or dwelling place.” Therefore, it would seem that making “the world an authentic dwelling place” for humankind would be “the first and the last moral task” (Arche 155; Ark 114).23 Ethical responsibility involves protecting the earth such that it can become a home. Chrétien does not consider this care for creation as incompatible with the possibility of offering it to the divine as gift, even if the latter is a more distinctly theological than ethical task. Chrétien begins by associating hospitality with listening, as his more-or-less contemporaneous treatments in Call and Response (1992) and Hand to Hand (1997) also do. Hospitality consists in listening and exchange, allowing others to inflect my voice: “The first hospitality is nothing other than listening” (Arche 13; Ark 9). As in the other treatments, it is response to a prior address, but here the form of this response receives much fuller consideration. Listening creates a shared space, but it is not anonymous or interchangeable. We must listen with our heart and our whole body, be fully attentive to the other: “When I really listen, I occupy the place of any other” (Arche 14; Ark 9). But this is not an argument for substitution: “When I really listen with the other to what he himself, as he speaks, is listening to or has listened to, then it is really he to whom I am listening. And it is when I listen in this way that I really listen, for listening with the other is not the same as fusing with him, or coinciding with him” (Arche 15; Ark 10; emphasis his). Neither I nor the other becomes erased in this situation, but it opens a place where exchange and mutual listening can become possible, such that “encountering the other and allowing the other to encounter you and speak to you” becomes possible (Arche 17; Ark 12). This requires an essential humility. It is important to note, however, that this humility is not tantamount to total self-effacement or to an erasure of the self. Hospitality is not possible “without our weariness having been welcomed and respected” (Arche 13; Ark 9). While the appeal is prior, it does not oppress me but invites me. It is insistent, but not violent. Even Chrétien’s emphases on the voice “breaking” and on the “woundedness” of the word in prayer, is not about silencing the voice but about “catching one’s breath” (Arche 149; Ark 110). This does involve transformation; I do not remain the same: “This is the only way to listen, for it is only in this way that I can let myself be shaken and transformed, rather than just instructed, by what occurs” (Arche 19; Ark 14). I become affected and changed by speaking to the other: “The words of our speech affect and modify the addresser, and not the addressee. We affect

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ourselves as we stand before the other, in a movement towards him” (Arche 29; Ark 21). He stresses here also the communal and temporal dimensions of this: “As soon as you speak to me, we are already all there, even those who have disappeared, and those who will also come one day” (Arche 14; Ark 10, trans. mod.). Chrétien uses the imagery of respiration for this, which he had already stressed in earlier texts and will return to again and again in his work: “The movement of speech is like that of air breathed out and in again. It brings me together before the other, it gives me a being for him” (Arche 30; Ark 22).24 He interprets prayer, too, as a kind of self-manifestation, “a manifestation of oneself to oneself through the other” (Arch 31; Ark 22). This leads him to the conclusion that we are obligated to give “voice to everything that has not voice” (Arche 52; Ark 36). Hospitality thus implies a kind of self-exposure to the other, an attentive listening to the other, which enables the other to be heard within the shared space of this hospitable listening and at the same time allows me to become myself through this exchange. This is not a “flight from finitude” but a use of finitude as a space of hospitality for the manifestation of the world (Arche 53; Ark 37). This contention is worked out in his discussion of the hospitality of silence, in which we are enabled to hear the song of the earth and to offer the world back to God. The response of gratitude is elicited by “the provocation of beauty.” Silence is marked by the hospitality of listening: “It is through silence and within it that our existence can truly welcome other silences just as much as other voices” (Arche 103; Ark 74). Our voice is “responsible for the world” and this responsibility is expressed in the song that offers it back to God (Arche 129; Ark 95). This is elicited on the one hand by the beauty of the world: “If things in their radiance are charged with a mission to us, we too have the mission of welcoming them, gathering them in, bearing them by means of our voice to where they cannot themselves go” (Arche 133; Ark 98, trans. mod.). On the other hand, it is modeled on Christ: “To see, or try to see, Christ means, first and foremost, welcoming, one way or another, his face into ours, allowing it to work on ours” (Arche 146; Ark 108). Thus, we must respond to the world’s beauty in gratitude and take responsibility for it by this hospitality (Ark 116). This is both a philosophical and a theological response.25 Chrétien repeatedly stresses our responsibility not only for each other, but for the whole world, for all of creation. There is a sort of reciprocal, albeit not totally mutual, exchange even here. Although other creatures might not offer words or song in the explicit way in which humans do—thus giving us the responsibility for voicing their chant of praise—they provide the prior context and call that elicits our words: “The world itself is heavy with speech, it calls on speech and on our word in response, and it calls only by responding

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itself, already, to the Word that created it” (Arche 175; Ark 129; trans. mod.). Chrétien emphasizes that “this possibility of welcoming things into our song cannot rest on violence or disrespect” but must involve genuine dialogue (Arche 179; Ark 132). He contrasts Maximus’s theological account of “cosmic liturgy” with a more philosophical celebration of the beauty of the world in Stoicism. Philosophical admiration does envision the task of expressing the gratitude of the world, but Chrétien thinks that this is not an offering in the Christian sense (Ark 135). He draws on Augustine to articulate a responsibility for all of creation (Ark 136). The “hymnic possibility of offering the world to God in such a way that the world offers itself in our song” draws others into this choral song or chant of praise (Arche 186; Ark 136; emphasis his). This speech is hospitable, because “it gives voice within itself to the polyphony of the world” (Arche 189; Ark 139).26 We respond for the world and take responsibility for it, while being dependent upon it and accompanied by it (Ark 143). Chrétien again concludes that one becomes truly oneself within this choral response, that the plurality of voices is not an erasure of one’s own voice, but actually makes it possible: “To chant the song of the world in the choir is to become oneself, irreplaceably” (Arche 200; Ark 147; trans. mod.).27 Our voice is thus able to provide shelter and safeguard for the vulnerability and fragility of others, including all of creation. This is, of course, a profoundly theological meditation on the possibility of the hymn of praise to offer the world as a form of hospitality. Can such language be broadened or translated into a more general idiom without either losing its distinctive character or suggesting that something is generally true or obligatory that might apply only within a specific hermeneutic context and tradition? Chrétien himself points to places where such a philosophical responsibility or possibility is implied, even if he thinks it cannot constitute a genuine offering to the divine. Can the possibility of offering shelter or safeguard for the vulnerable in our voice and in our actions be articulated without linking it to such an offering? His broader insistence on our response to a prior plural call and participation in a choral rather than autonomous individual responsibility together with his many explorations of the ways in which art and poetry respond to the call of beauty certainly seem to suggest as much, even if he himself does not work out such a broader responsibility or explicitly put it in terms of ethics. Chrétien is clear that other voices have always already served as such a shelter for my own voice, enabling it to speak in response, and that this always occurs in concrete embodied ways within the world (Call 81–82). This is what enables us also to offer such hospitality and shelter to other voices in turn. Thus, while Chrétien follows many other 20th century philosophers in challenging the account of the autonomous, self-sufficient, and rational modern

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subject, he does so quite differently. He acknowledges and even emphasizes our fragility and finitude, but he shows how it can be used both in an autonomous sense in modern accounts of subjectivity and how they can become a possibility for a different response. Chrétien recognizes that self-effacement or self-destruction do not necessarily lead to ethical treatment of others, but it may, in fact, just do further violence. Undermining the autonomy and autarchy of the modern Western self, while surely important, do not as such accomplish greater attentiveness to the vulnerable and marginalized. While Chrétien does often speak of our weakness, fragility, and even destitution, showing that we are dependent on others who precede us and are helpless without them, becoming a self only within the context of the structure of appeal and response, he balances this with a call to protection and shelter for the vulnerable, both by outlining how this call is addressed to me and by suggesting how it might become possible for me to offer it to others. While he provides an account of shared precarity, this is not Butler’s or Kristeva’s version of a personal realization of vulnerability or displacement that then potentially enables a recognition of the other’s precarity or strangeness, such that the need for violence is stifled. For Chrétien, this is not about extension or similarity of an insight about the self to that of others. Rather, it is a recognition and affirmation of a prior plurality, of being always already part of a shared creaturely condition, a dependency that includes the earth and all its creatures, not just the other human. The attempt to shelter or safeguard other creatures can surely go wrong when it is not entered into with sufficient knowledge or sensitivity, but it is certainly a more ethical response than ignoring others or effacing the self entirely. Responsibility—whether aesthetic, ethical, or theological—is response, but a response that is enabled by others or even by things and responds to them. This is not a generic plurality in which each other is any other, infinitely replaceable, but always a unique and specific other within this plurality of diverse voices, where no voice should be missed and each contributes something to the harmony, itself sustained by being called forth to contribute, to shelter, and to safeguard. NOTES 1. This theme is so central in Lévinas’s work that one would have to reference almost all of it. The seminal texts are, of course, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, but many of his shorter essays, such as “Peace and Proximity,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 161–69, bring out the themes of vulnerability and precarity even more clearly. I have tried to work out the

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need for such hermeneutic “predisposition” to the call in my “Can We Hear the Ethical Call? In Honor of Scott Cameron,” Environmental Philosophy 15.1 (2018): 21–42. 2. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/New York: Verso, 2004), and “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2 (2012): 134–51. 3. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); the final chapter includes an explicit critique of Lévinas. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 4. Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 21–24. See also the chapter on Lévinas in his The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates, trans. Bradley B. Onishi and Lucas McCracken (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pp. 77–96. 5. Emmanuel Falque, “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body,” in Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought, ed. Sarah Horton et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), pp. 91–116. 6. Some have argued this in regard to Lévinas’s work, from Derrida’s probably most famous treatment in “Violence and Metaphysics” onward. Yet, sometimes this accusation is itself marked by profound rhetorical violence, as for example in David Bentley Hart’s Beauty of the Infinite. 7. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Fragilité (Paris: Minuit, 2017). Henceforth cited as Fragilité parenthetically within my text. 8. See his L’effroi du beau (Paris: Cerf, 1987) and La voix nue. Phénoménologie de la promesse (Paris: Minuit, 1990). See also the chapter by Jérôme de Gramont in the present volume and my “Vulnerability, Fragility, and Humility: Jean-Louis Chrétien as a Thinker of Precarity,” Finitude’s Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chrétien, ed. Philip Gonzales (Wipf & Stock, 2023), pp. 66–89. 9. It becomes fairly clear in the treatment that Chrétien actually disapproves of this and sides with the Augustinian position. 10. Thus, we can transform the passions so they become moral (Fragilité, 249). This is also a use of or play with fragility (Fragilité, 250). 11. His treatment of Cassian is also more ambivalent, and he claims several times in the treatment that fragility is an explicitly Latin term that does not exist in the Greek tradition (Fragilité, 10, 159, 252). It is one of the very few of his books that has no consideration of Eastern Christian authors at all, although Cassian was obviously profoundly influenced by early Egyptian monasticism and Eastern writers like Origen and Evagrius. 12. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse (Paris: Minuit, 1992), trans. Anne A. Davenport as The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), henceforth cited as Appel and Call within my text. 13. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Répondre. Figures de la réponse et de la responsabilité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007). Henceforth cited as Répondre parenthetically within my text.

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14. These include his early text L’effroi du beau (1987), as well as chapters devoted to the topic in Corps à corps. À l’écoute de l’œuvre d’art (1997), L’arche de la parole, and Fragilité. 15. These distinctions concern especially the difference between responding to a question and responding to an appeal or call. Call and response have a kind of simultaneity that both question and answer lack in their more chronological temporality. The response to the call confers responsibility in a way that response to a question does not. Call and response are always held together and open further space, while the question-response structure closes things down rather than opening them up. 16. In the chapter on ethical responsibility Chrétien describes Kantian and Lévinassian imputability as having four dimensions: it has a continuous history/self-identity, it is always temporally finite, there is a link between responsibility and speech, and the implication is that one answers to and before someone (Répondre 164). He shows that for Lévinas and Sartre, the philosopher has a special responsibility that is unlike that of others, “because it is the responsibility for the meaning of the world as a whole, and from this its vocation receives a sui generis imprint” (Répondre 183). The final chapter considers various accounts of substitution in theology. 17. He stresses this also in Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’arche de la parole (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998; trans. A. Brown as The Ark of Speech (London: Routledge, 2004): “What haunts the human voice at its very heart as what it senses to be its highest possibility is also its impossibility” (Ark 146). Here also he affirms that this means that the response has to be “choral” (ibid.). I henceforth cite this book within my text as Arche and Ark, respectively. 18. He stresses, however, that “this inner voice has never been a ‘voice’ present in the depth of my mind or conscience: it has always resounded in the world, right here, where we are” (Appel 99; Call 82). 19. On the topic of an inner voice or space, see also his text L’espace intérieur (Paris: Minuit, 2014). 20. In a different context he says of the notion of diachrony in Lévinas that “what characterizes this ordeal is that no one is ever or has ever been contemporary with it” (Ark 67). 21. In this context he briefly mentions Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger (Call 29–30). 22. Chrétien often deliberately tries to erase the firm distinctions between different senses, describing the ways in which paintings speak and we can listen to them or the ways in which hearing is also a kind of seeing. 23. This occurs in the context of the suggestion that praise should consist in offering the world to God and that this “ethical” dimension might be in conflict with it. 24. Aside from the aforementioned La voix nue, see also La joie spacieuse. Essai sur la dilatation (Paris: Minuit, 2007), trans. A. Davenport as Spacious Joy: An Essay in Phenomenology and Literature (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and Pour reprendre et perdre haleine (Paris: Bayard, 2009). 25. It can also be a poetic one. See especially the final chapter of the essay on dilation, where he discusses “Paul Claudel’s cosmic respiration” (Spacious Joy, 166–87).

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26. Chrétien explores this in regard to Augustine far more fully in his Saint Augustin et les actes de parole (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), in which each of the twenty-three chapters explores one speech act. 27. The text also concludes on a theological note: It is in Christ “and by him alone that the world is gathered and unified so as to be offered to the Father. In the profusion of the hymns we chant, in their most intimate womb, there is always this light tremor, suspended, as it were, on the edge of silence. Thereby, the expression of thanks wounds a human voice with a blessed wound, and enables it to give itself, within the voice that offers all” (Arche de la parole, 201; Ark of Speech, 148; translation amended). These are the final lines of the book.

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Praying with Jean-Louis Chrétien Andrew Prevot

To understand Jean-Louis Chrétien’s thinking about prayer—and, indeed, his thinking from, within, and as prayer—it is beneficial to read all of his writings, not merely his much-cited essay on the phenomenology of prayer called “The Wounded Word” or “Wounded Speech” (“La parole blessée”), though this essay does gather together many key themes.1 According to Chrétien, prayer is a chorus of responses to the excess (sucroît) of divine love, beauty, and gift. It is a practice through which multiple bodies, souls, voices, and silences answer the call of that creative, promising mystery that precedes and transcends them. To pray is always to pray-with, to join a communal reply. The sociality at the center of Chrétien’s thought is not the mere existential togetherness of Martin Heidegger’s “being with” (Mitsein) but the choral, responsorial togetherness that unites all those creatures—not only human beings and certainly not only Christians—that are given, moved, and wounded by the distance and nearness of God. This responsorial condition has many aspects that Chrétien distinguishes. It opens the creature to an expansive joy and an intense flame of love, but it also manifests the creature in all its fragility and suffering and exposes it to struggle and conflict (agon). It is vocalized as both the hymn of praise and the cry of distress. It is there in both seeking and finding, both desire and delight. It activates and blends all the senses, whether corporeal or spiritual. It grounds an ethics of hospitality and responsibility. It is a thread that runs throughout Chrétien’s phenomenological and theological studies and his many forays into the history of Western ideas, literatures, and works of art. Make no mistake, Chrétien’s writings are intellectually demanding. They contain careful interpretations, comparisons, critiques, and syntheses of a vast assemblage of sources. To understand them well, one must read and think with them, reexamining the same texts Chrétien discusses and attending 117

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to the various layers of argument that he develops through his responses to them. At the same time, Chrétien’s works are also spiritually edifying. They invite one not merely to think but to pray with them. Indeed, I believe it would be possible to turn to Chrétien as a spiritual guide, to go on a personal retreat structured by his books (perhaps especially the ten meditations in Pour reprendre et perdre haleine),2 and to let his ways of describing the dialogue of Creator and creature enliven one’s own adventures of prayer. Even if one does not take up such a practice of intentionally praying with Chrétien, his work challenges one to recognize aspects of life that are always and inescapably acts of praying-with. Linguistic, bodily, and social phenomena that are not explicitly identified as prayer may nevertheless participate inchoately in that responsorial chorus of creatures that gives prayer its most plenary sense. Praying-with can and should be an intentional—that is, freely chosen—activity, a practice pursued by religious seekers and perhaps especially by the devout. But for Chrétien it is also the very essence of phenomenality. The relational interplay of call and response is an unintended condition of any possible appearance. It is a defining characteristic of creaturely existence, disclosed by close phenomenological attention to “the things themselves.” Phenomenality has such a prayerful constitution because—or only if—it takes place in relation to a divine beyond that is more than what one can remember and more than what one can anticipate. Chrétien calls this excess the “immemorial” and the “unhoped for.” This radical anteriority and posterity show themselves in history, speech-acts, and phenomena as that which calls them to respond and as the promise that is “furtive” within them. It appears in ways that are “unforgettable.”3 It makes indelible marks on temporal experience and language. Therefore, the divine excess of which Chrétien speaks is not absolutely unknown. It is revealed in creaturely replies to it, desires for it, and the “wounds” of joy and suffering it leaves in its recipients.4 Yet this does not mean that one can reduce it to transparency or gain conceptual control of it.5 Chrétien prizes various Hellenistic, biblical, and mystical traditions that appreciate this excess and the limits of human consciousness in relation to it, and he critiques modern philosophical projects that seek to master it, whether in the form of a priori reason, transcendental subjectivity, or encyclopedic knowledge.6 Chrétien demonstrates that, when it is a question of the “God of the philosophers,” one needs to specify which philosophers one means, because the prayerful, excess-respecting thought of Platonists and certain theo-poetically inclined phenomenologists is not the same as the anthropocentric, excessdenying thought of modern idealists, metaphysicians, and rationalists. Skeptical readers who insist that any positive divine excess, in which Chrétien and his sources appear to believe, is a mere human illusion or projection— nothing like a real, living God—will not be persuaded by him to abandon

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their skepticism, but this is not his primary concern. He is content to write for those who inhabit traditions of theological and philosophical thought for which a positive divine excess is revealed and thinkable, especially as call and promise. Chrétien’s interpretation of the divine excess as call (l’appel) draws on a Platonic play of words: the same root, kalein, gives rise to thoughts of the beautiful as such, which transcends and appears in various beautiful things; the act of naming that is the origin of speech; the summons to others that is meant to draw them in; and practices of recall, recollection, or remembrance. To utter a word is to answer, inadequately, that immemorial beauty that calls for speech and calls things into being. Chrétien gives Heidegger credit for approaching this insight into the meaning of the call, but Chrétien augments Heidegger’s account by exploring textures and layers of this Greek word play in Plato, Hermeias of Alexandria, and Proclus and by connecting it with biblical (specifically Pauline) and mystical (specifically Dionysian) accounts of the calling beauty of God’s creative and redemptive activity.7 Although Heidegger’s philosophy of language and especially the Platonists’ thoughts of beauty have certain theological features that might be unveiled by readings oriented toward this end, the theological aspects of Chrétien’s expanded theory of the call are explicit and explicitly Christian. Although his claims about the call are phenomenological in the sense that they seek to clarify the essence of phenomenality, he does not ground his arguments for these claims in the transcendental observations of a self-reflective consciousness (as Husserl would have prescribed) but rather in readings of an elastic Christian and Platonic canon that he regards as authoritative.8 A similar treatment of sources is evident in Chrétien’s interpretation of divine excess as promise (la promesse). Any given utterance that occurs only as an answer to an immemorial call also occurs only as a promise of a fullness of language or presence that it does not possess. Words do not have meaning on their own. They acquire and express it only by gesturing to a wholeness of speech—the Logos—which outstrips them. Once again, although Chrétien finds support for this idea in Heidegger, he turns back to the Platonic tradition and biblical and mystical forms of theology for an understanding of the promise that is more satisfying to him.9 He arrives, finally, at the promise of the Word made flesh and the related promise of the flesh that, only together in chorus, can be made one with the Word.10 Chrétien suggests that there is something “impossible” about the type of speech or song that seeks to respond appropriately to the divine excess of the call and the promise. Words cannot do justice to the calling and promising Word that brings them forth. In the face of this impossibility, language often falters and gives way to a listening, adoring silence.11 The abandonment of the creature to the divine voice reaches an apex in biblical prophets who

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disappear in their utterance of the Word and mystics who experience the birth of the Word in their souls.12 But this abandonment, this reverent hearing, also takes the quotidian, interpersonal form of striving to understand what is not said in others’ words: the “unheard-of.” Chrétien advises the listener to avoid attempting to detect “symptoms” in others’ words or to “decode” their meaning (as though one were their psychoanalyst). Instead, he suggests adopting a receptive posture that is open to the surprises and discoveries that may happen in a conversation. That divine excess to which and for which one listens has its own eternal silence, which, as John of the Cross indicates and Chrétien emphasizes, is paradoxically musical. Listening is a silent response to a Word that, at its hidden origins, is a silent music. The words one speaks, if well said, are wedded to these two silences. And one must dare to speak them if one hopes to listen well: “We are all ears only if we are all lips, just as we are all lips only if we are all ears.”13 There are numerous acts of speech that may take hold of the creature’s responsorial voice and draw it into deeper communion with divine excess. Highlighting this point, Chrétien analyzes Augustine’s vocal practices of questioning, teaching, confessing, crying, singing, witnessing, blessing, and more.14 Chrétien avers that the world is full of countless voices that are meant to speak and be heard. Each voice offers singular, irreplaceable gifts that are necessary for the polyphonous chorus of responses to be all that it is called to be.15 He not only cites Joseph Joubert’s adage that many voices are necessary to make an individual voice beautiful,16 he puts this principle into practice through his almost dizzying invocation of source after source in each of his texts. The beauty of Chrétien’s style of written response is in part due to its great inclusivity and plurality. His respect for others’ words, even those with whom he disagrees, is undeniable. He does not seek to impose silence on the world but rather to let it make the most of its loquacious capacities. The chorus of responses that is prayer is not limited to human beings. Skies, seas, rivers, birds, cattle, trees, and all creatures offer themselves— their splendor, beauty, and goodness—as homage to their divine source. Chrétien highlights the psalmist’s intuition about the doxological character of the natural world and likewise embraces Augustine’s and Francis of Assisi’s biblically informed ways of recognizing songs of praise in non-human things.17 He notes, as well, that God’s voice becomes visible in creation and in the glorious deeds that make up the history of salvation. To hearken to this voice, one must “see” it in action (Call 40–43). Although human language has the sacred task of sheltering the gifts of nature in its words, and although humanity enjoys a certain privileged microcosmic status that distinguishes it from non-human modes of existence, this does not mean that humans have exclusive rights to the practice of response.18 Human beings do not only pray with each other. They pray with a diverse panoply of creatures.

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If prayer is not limited to human beings, it is certainly not limited to those human beings who call themselves Christian. Chrétien does not hide his commitment to this faith tradition. He writes as a believer who is confident that the essential things affirmed by Christian scripture and tradition are true. He submits himself to the authority of the Bible and encourages others to do so.19 At the same time, he welcomes thoughtful and prayerful voices from other religions. As a scholar of Greek antiquity, he develops charitable interpretations of this (pagan) culture’s mythological and philosophical ways of approaching the divine.20 He embraces the insights of Muslim mystical poets such as RÛmi, who writes about Allah’s hidden presence in vocal prayer, and Farid-od din Attar, who writes about prayer as a silent plunge to the depths.21 He frequently cites the ancient Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria, particularly regarding the ways the creature’s entire body participates in the act of hearing the divine call (Call 14 and 40). He engages with more recent Jewish thinkers such as Emmanuel Lévinas, on the relationship between response and responsibility, and Walter Benjamin, on the apocalyptic promise of the dangerous memory of the victims of history.22 Chrétien is clear that Christianity does not have a monopoly on prayer or on the thoughts and practices that arise from it. Whether faithful followers of Jesus recognize it or not, they pray in the company of others who either do not believe he is the Messiah or are unaware of his teachings and saving mission. Christian responses to the divine excess revealed in Christ are part of a larger chorus that reflects the glories of the divine Creator and Redeemer in countless mysterious ways. Although Chrétien acknowledges the contributions of other religions, some practitioners of phenomenology, who would like it to be a universal science in which all presuppositions are bracketed or at least an open-ended hermeneutical enterprise in which no single tradition is favored, could object to the fact that Chrétien prioritizes Christian materials. This priority is evident in the sheer quantity of his references to them and the substantive points he draws from them, including for instance the claim that the fullness of the world’s prayer occurs in Christ.23 Those Christological features of his thinking that may be especially attractive to Christian readers are the same features that may incline others to argue that his work has only limited value for a non-Christian audience. If it includes some passages that count more as philosophy of religion than as theology, because faith is to some degree bracketed in them, even these passages may appear to favor a Christian perspective. Consider, for example, Chrétien’s argument in “Wounded Speech”: “Even if, as a phenomenologist, one does not posit the existence or non-existence of the [addressee of prayer], the fact remains that the way we address him, name him, speak to him, the nature of what we ask from him and feel able to ask from him, the fear or the trust with which the person praying turns to

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him, all depend on the being of this addressee as he appears to the believer.”24 Here Chrétien allows for the phenomenological bracketing of the question of God’s existence while turning his phenomenological attention to practices that stem from a belief in God. Although Chrétien’s essay incorporates some pagan, Jewish, and Muslim expressions of this belief, he gives pride of place to Christian interpretations by figures such as Augustine, Cassian, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Claudel. This choice to do philosophy through a discussion of particular historical religions, especially Christianity, would not necessarily distinguish Chrétien’s work from other projects in the modern Western philosophy of religion, by the likes of Kant or Hegel, whose preference for Christian-derived concepts is likewise evident, but these associations would not be sufficient justifications from the point of view of a more contemporary, pluralist philosophy of religion that resists any lingering Christian hegemony in philosophical thought. Nevertheless, the observation that Chrétien’s contributions to the worldwide, communal work of phenomenology are shaped by his faith perspective need not be treated as an objection, let alone a devastating one. Chrétien can be appreciated precisely for his refusal to feign an omnicompetent vantage point. He can be honored for the specific ways he responds to the traditions that he knows and experiences. Others from different cultural and religious backgrounds are free to do the same. The conversation that may be possible among such interpretive practices—not the ambitious strivings of an individual mind—would be the place to look for an approximation of philosophy’s desired yet always elusive universality. The positive references to other religions in Chrétien’s theory of prayer are signs that his ideas can participate in such a larger conversation, not signs that he should be expected to orchestrate it singlehandedly or be judged for failing to accomplish such a momentous task. There is no question that Chrétien’s treatment of prayer, though phenomenological in many of its aims, also belongs to the traditions of Christian theology and spirituality and develops them in ways that are particularly appealing to their adherents. Instead of apologizing for these aspects of his thought before the secular tribunals of modern or postmodern reason, Christian readers may prefer simply to embrace the gifts of tradition-specific insight that he offers them. Some non-Christian readers may also be open to inquiring—in a curious, non-polemical fashion—how he thinks about prayer precisely as a Christian. This may be something worth knowing even if one does not share his faith commitments. In this spirit, I would like to take a closer look at what Chrétien contributes to a Christian theological understanding of prayer. In addition to thinking of prayer in broad terms as a chorus of responses to divine excess, Chrétien comments on many particular motifs, experiences, and teachings from the

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history of Christian thought and practice and sheds new light on them. In some works, he takes a biblical passage that conveys a particular aspect of prayer and then studies a range of responses that it has received among early, medieval, and modern theologians and mystical authors (these two categories often applying to the same figures). For example, in Spacious Joy, he turns to the thirty-second verse of Psalm 118 of the Vulgate (Psalm 119 in the New Revised Standard Version), which speaks of the dilation of the heart. He explores how this passage has inspired meditations on the conditions for such a cardial expansion by the likes of Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, and Francis de Sales, to name only a few. He finds that such spiritual widening occurs both when one begins a life of obedience to the divine Word and when one reaches the highest mystical peaks of such a life. He shows that it includes both intellectual and affective forms of growth. He argues that this dilation is not merely a psychological phenomenon but “the personal dwelling of God in us.” It comes with gifts of joy and freedom that attract others like perfume. Therefore, the graced expansion of the soul is not a private happening but a newfound capacity for greater sociality.25 Chrétien undertakes a methodologically similar type of investigation in L’intelligence du feu. The biblical passage that forms the nucleus of this book is Luke 12:49. In this verse, Jesus promises to bring fire to the earth and expresses a desire that it was already ablaze. Chrétien traces an exegetical tradition from Origen through Elizabeth of the Trinity, with numerous respondents in between, which draws out many layers of spiritual meaning from this biblical image of fire, including gifts of light, warmth, sweetness, desire, and all-consuming mystical union. Although he acknowledges that some interpreters associate this passage with an apocalyptic violence that will bring destruction to the world, he is more drawn toward certain pneumatological and eucharistic interpretations that emphasize the “warmth of peace” that comes from the Holy Spirit and Christ’s body.26 In these two undeniably theological books, Chrétien gathers an ecumenically and historically diverse chorus of mostly Christian voices that have responded to particular verses in scripture. The respondents Chrétien chooses highlight complex transformations that are undergone by the prayerful soul, including both spiritual expansions and spiritual conflagrations. These books are largely about what happens experientially in prayer—and, in this sense, they retain a certain phenomenological agenda. But they are also a hagiographical record and even a performance of prayer. They praise God for the wonders of a dilating and enflaming grace. They constitute an elaborate, intergenerational lectio divina. Each book is meticulously researched and argued. It would take considerable labor to track down each of its references and match Chrétien’s level of scholarly preparation. However, they are not the work of a neutral, distanced observer but rather of a thinker who seems to

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find his own heart in the hearts of those to whom he listens and whose words he repeats. His understanding and affection are expanded into these historical witnesses, and they are caught up in the same living flame. Although Chrétien spends time thinking with Christian mystics about peak experiences of divine joy and fiery union, he remains cognizant of the struggles that are typically involved in prayer. For a model of such agonistic spirituality, he turns to the biblical story about Jacob wrestling with the angel and receiving a wound (blessure) and a blessing from him (Genesis 32:25–29). Chrétien touches on this motif in several works, including one devoted specifically to Kierkegaard’s understanding of prayer (in Le regard de l’amour).27 Chrétien’s point is not to glorify suffering or to suggest that any wound one receives in life is, ipso facto, a hidden work of divine grace. On the contrary, his argument is that the intimacy with God that prayer both presupposes and seeks to cultivate challenges the creature to overcome its sinful dispositions and to become more loving and Christlike. This is a difficult, purgative process. There are no shortcuts around it. This amorous battle is oriented toward the possibility of praying in truth, offering thanks and praise, and finding an appropriate stance of humility before God. It is a check against any self-satisfied philosophical mysticism that would verge on self-deification. It is a bulwark against cheap grace. In the final analysis, it is a call to confession and repentance. Prayer is a struggle, in part, because there is no hiding in it. It is by definition a self-disclosive act, in which one’s soul and all its weaknesses and vulnerabilities are laid bare before the divine gaze. Chrétien explains, “This act of presence brings the whole of man into play, in all the dimensions of his being; it exposes him in every sense of the term.” Prayer is “first and foremost an anthropophany, a manifestation of man.”28 Persons at prayer offer themselves, including their sufferings and incapacities, to an invisible divine excess. In the process, they offer even their inability to offer themselves. Their ignorance about how to pray rightly is part of their prayer, part of what they can give. They take up a spiritual posture that can only be described as “nudity.”29 The goal is not to look good in God’s eyes but to appear exactly as one is, to hold nothing of oneself back. One is called to submit everything to God’s judgment, mercy, and loving attention. No words are off limits, no emotions forbidden. Each body part and every bodily sensation are welcome in this radical phenomenalization of oneself.30 Prayer is a trial of “the flesh” (la chair), in the phenomenological sense of the term that refers to the auto-affective condition of the self that feels itself in its tactile relations with the world. Chrétien illustrates the phenomenological meaning of “flesh” in this way: “To feel the heat or the cold of the ambient air or water is never anything more than to take note of their qualities by feeling oneself warmed or chilled.” One might fear that such an auto-affective

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condition encloses one in a solipsistic prison of one’s own feelings and sensations, but Chrétien contends, on the contrary, that the flesh is an ecstatic openness to the other. The flesh allows one to receive calls from things and from the divine excess that transcends them and to respond to these calls. It is the bodily ecstasy that makes possible an answering voice or hymn. It is not the lowest aspect of creaturely existence but rather its highest excellence, which enables the loftiest forms of mystical contemplation. Although Chrétien acknowledges Bonaventure’s distinction between a carnal and a spiritual sense of touch, for Chrétien the spiritual sense is wrapped up in the exercise of the carnal. The soul and the body feel together, inseparably, even when receiving what John of the Cross calls “God’s touch” (toque de Dios) (Call 83, 103, 117, 129, and 130). Chrétien sums up his understanding of bodily participation in the prayerful activity of call and response in the following lines: “To be thus touched in one’s very substance by the Word, beyond all image, is, properly speaking, to listen, to listen with one’s whole being, body and soul, without anything in us that escapes hearing and stands outside of it, thanks to the gracious transfiguration accomplished by this very touch. Nor does the ear alone listen; the eye also listens and responds. The possibility of their listening, however, ultimately takes root in the totality of the flesh. The flesh listens. And the fact that it listens is what makes it respond” (Call 130). In prayer, the auto-affective flesh is transfigured into a site of maximal openness to other creatures and the Creator. The inside becomes a place of hospitality for the outside and the other.31 The prayer of the flesh is singular—one’s flesh is one’s own—yet because of the ecstasy of the flesh it is inescapably social. The prayer of the flesh is praying-with. Chrétien closely associates prayer with hospitality. What he has in mind is not only the welcoming of the divine other in one’s interior depths but also the welcoming of the neighbor and the stranger into one’s home and community. As a practice of hospitality, prayer demands an ethical relation with fellow human beings and fellow creatures, which gives them a prominent place in one’s heart and one’s life. It requires a practice of care that attends not only to others’ bodily voices but also to their bodily needs for food and shelter. It calls for a practice of empathy oriented toward the sufferings and joys of the chorus of creation. Chrétien encourages us to enact a “double hospitality” in imitation of Martha and Mary, who welcome Jesus into their house and offer him the generosity of their material goods and spiritual devotion.32 For Chrétien, prayer is not only a struggle to cultivate peace in oneself—to get beyond the combat between God and the sinful soul—it is also a struggle to let this inner peace bear fruit in a more peaceful and just world, without violence and war, a world in which all embodied lives would be held dear.33

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Just as Chrétien perceives a close connection between the prayerful hospitality toward the divine guest and the ethical, peace-seeking hospitality toward others, so too he suggests a tight affinity between the prayerful act of response to God’s call and the ethical work of taking responsibility for one’s actions and the well-being of others. He critiques the modern (Kantian, Nietzschean, and Husserlian) tradition of “auto-responsibility,” according to which the human subject would be its own moral foundation and savior. He argues instead for an understanding of responsibility rooted in one’s responses to the obligating calls of divine and human others and ultimately to the gift of the unique divine-and-human “Respondent” who is “stronger than our questions and our crimes.” Although Chrétien believes that Christ’s self-sacrifice for sinful humanity accomplishes redemption, he agrees with certain theologians such as the Lutheran Paul Althaus and the Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar who emphasize that Christ’s saving response includes cooperative, human responses within it. Understood in this “inclusive” way, soteriology does not replace ethics but incorporates and grounds it. Although the human subject is not its own moral foundation and savior, it has a role to play in the healing of the world.34 Chrétien’s preference for a Christocentric, as opposed to autonomous, account of responsibility does not lessen his sense of the moral obligation that each human being has to respond in active ways to the suffering of others. His theological perspective merely lets him resituate such a moral obligation in the context of an excessive gift of divine compassion that has already been given. Although Chrétien acknowledges that not every sin can be imputed to each individual, he affirms a real sense of “omni-responsibility” which he believes each person must accept: a duty to everyone and to the whole. Recognizing the impossibility of fulfilling this infinite duty does not remove it. With Dostoyevsky, he agrees that one must find ways to respond to the demands of omni-responsibility in one’s finite and limited spheres of activity, especially through “acts of prayer, humility, and charity.” He suggests that knowing one’s responses will be united with those of a whole chorus of irreplaceable respondents and included in the one sufficiently strong response/ respondent that is Christ himself, may empower one to engage in ethical practices not with a sense of crushing futility but with an encouraging feeling of hope, joy, and gratitude. One cannot and does not have to save the world on one’s own.35 In his writings about prayer, Chrétien’s goal is not merely to have his readers understand prayer better, as though it were a mere object of study. He wants them to put it into practice and to let it shape their hospitable, responsible, and embodied actions with others. He demonstrates that prayer is social in at least two respects. First, even when one prays alone, one does not pray alone, because one inevitably responds to and joins a great chorus of voices

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and silences. Second, the benefits of prayer are supposed to be discernible in the kinds of social action and community that it promotes. Praying-with implies living-with. It is a practice that exposes the self before God at least partly so that the self can experience greater conviviality with others. When this does not seem to be the case, when people pray while acting unjustly toward their neighbors, this means that the struggle to pray rightly must continue, because there is something in these praying ones that is resisting the transformative presence of divine love. There is something in them that remains closed, unreceptive, and unresponsive—that is, antithetical to prayer. The practical conclusion to draw, then, when prayer fails to do socially meaningful work, is not that we ought to attempt to live without prayer but rather that we ought to live in it and from it more seriously and deeply, because its promise of peace and togetherness has not yet been realized. One must, as Augustine stresses, continue “to search for that which has already been found.”36 One must struggle to receive the gift that has already been given, to answer the call that one’s speaking voice and embodied senses already reveal, and to accept the painful blessings of conversion that God has in store for one’s still sinful heart. Although Chrétien does not naively believe that prayer is a quick fix to all that ails the world, he remains convinced of its as yet unfulfilled promise. Its beauty consists in—and is tested by—the “radiance of justice” that it may bring to our relational lives.37 Through his books and essays, Chrétien prays with countless others who have gone before him. He prays with those who are dead to the world but alive in God. Readers who want to receive spiritual benefits from his work (whether these readers are Christian or not) may choose to pray with him in a similar way. They may choose to receive his words as though they were not merely printed on a page but coming from one beautiful, irreplaceable voice in a heavenly chorus of redeemed sinners and saints. They may let their own voices be made more resplendent by the inclusion of his. They may listen for what is unheard-of in his always artfully constructed phrases and sentences. They may pray for him, offering his struggles, sufferings, and human fragilities along with their own. And they may rejoice with him, singing praises of the divine excess that he never stopped loving and desiring. This practice of praying-with need not exclude, or even dramatically differ from, a practice of thinking-with, through which one would respond to his responses with retrievals, questions, and arguments of one’s own. Chrétien has given us the gift of thinking prayer and praying thought, in various philosophical, theological, and poetic modes that invite diverse kinds of engagement and interaction. For me, this gift has been an unforgettable one, which does not cease to call and promise.

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NOTES 1. There are two English translations: J.-L. Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,” trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham, 2000), pp. 147–75 and “Wounded Speech,” in Chrétien, The Ark of Speech, trans. Andrew Brown (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 17–38. 2. J.-L. Chrétien, Pour reprendre et perdre haleine: Dix brèves meditations (Montrouge Cedex: Bayard, 2009). 3. J.-L. Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. J. Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 1, 89, 116. I will henceforth cite this book in my text as Unforgettable. 4. Chrétien, The Ark of Speech (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 37. 5. Chrétien, La voix nue: Phénomenologie de la promesse (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990), p. 11. 6. Unforgettable pp. 4–8, and J.-L. Chrétien, Répondre: Figures de la réponse et de la responsabilité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), pp. 150 and 188. 7. Call and Response, trans. A. Davenport (Fordham University Press, 2004), pp, 5–12, 15, 18. I will henceforth cite this book in my text as Call. 8. Chrétien, The Ark of Speech, p. 18 and Unforgettable, p. 128. 9. Chrétien, Promesses furtives (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2004), pp. 29–34. 10. Unforgettable, p. 116 and The Ark of Speech, p. 146. 11. J.-L. Chrétien, L’effroi du beau (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), p. 74. 12. Call 26 and The Ark of Speech, p. 53. 13. The Ark of Speech, pp. 10, 14, and 72. 14. J.-L. Chrétien, Saint Augustin et les actes de parole (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). 15. The Ark of Speech, p. 147. 16. Répondre. Figures de la réponse et de la responsabilité (Paris: PUF, 2007), p. 2 and Call, p. 1. 17. The Ark of Speech, pp. 113 and 127–29. 18. Ibid., p. 2. 19. J.-L. Chrétien, Under the Gaze of the Bible, trans. John Marson Dunaway (New York: Fordham, 2015), p. 6. 20. L’effroi du beau, pp. 33–71, and Répondre, pp. 79–120. 21. The Ark of Speech, pp. 29 and 57. 22. Répondre, p. 200, and Chrétien, Promesses furtives, pp. 51–52. 23. The Ark of Speech, p. 146. 24. Ibid., p. 18. 25. J.-L. Chrétien, La joie spacieuse: Essai sur la dilatation (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2007), pp. 88, 96, and 132. 26. J.-L. Chrétien, L’intelligence du feu: Réponses humaines à une parole de Jésus (Paris: Bayard, 2003), pp. 8, 19, 103, 135, 165, and 199. 27. Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art, trans. S. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 3–4; The Ark of Speech, p. 37; Pour reprendre et

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perdre haleine, pp. 191–211; and J.-L. Chrétien, Le regard de l’amour (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer), pp. 114–16. 28. The Ark of Speech, p. 19. 29. L’effroi du beau, p. 80. 30. J-L. Chrétien, Symbolique du corps: La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), and Call, p. 83. 31. J.-L. Chrétien, L’espace intérieur (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2014), p. 8. 32. J.-L. Chrétien, “La double hospitalité,” in Marthe et Marie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002), pp. 9–53, at 50. 33. Pour reprendre et perdre haleine, pp. 127–47. 34. Répondre, pp. 168, 183, 203, 216, and 225. 35. Ibid., pp. 171, 181, 183, and 234. 36. Promesses furtives, pp. 194. 37. The Ark of Speech, p. 100.

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The Cosmic Poetics of Jean-Louis Chrétien Catherine Pickstock

Responses to the singular oeuvre of Jean-Louis Chrétien are haunted by the question of genre. Is it a philosophical oeuvre, or is it inflected with theology and poetry? If it is philosophy, is it pure phenomenology, or is it afflicted by a covert return to metaphysical speculation? All this is further complicated by the fact that all he has left us with is a vast series of essays on disparate topics and writers, in which his own views are not always brought to the fore, and insofar as they are articulated, are not also co-articulated. The philosophy of Chrétien can only be written by his readers in retrospect and is bound to remain both somewhat conjectural and inevitably contested. Perhaps his achievement is to have produced a hybrid and transgressive discourse: simultaneously the work of a poet, literary interpreter, theologian, phenomenologist and—even if he would not have admitted it—metaphysician. If so, his achievement is nothing less than to have sown the seeds of a new kind of European culture, which renounces the artificial separation of the two sources of the Western tradition: Greek, on the one hand, and biblical, on the other. It is especially apparent that Chrétien’s work of dissemination involves the articulation of a kind of sacred poetics, commencing as early as his translations of Philo of Alexandria. By giving pride of place to this dimension, he avoided the overstated contrast between the two sources, rejecting, for example, the received idea that the Greek tradition is concerned only with the visible and the Hebrew tradition with the auricular. He demonstrated that the Hebrew emphasis on poetics necessarily includes an aesthetic counter-current, whilst the Greek emphasis on aesthetics is only possible because it is aware of a poetic appeal to an absence that exceeds aesthetics, whilst also being constitutive of it. Similarly, he showed how both cultures 131

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are aware that human existence, in order to be irreducibly human, must appeal to an inaccessible ‘pre-history’ that comes ‘before’ normal historical time. He also showed that Greek culture did not unfold without some notion of eschatology, in the sense of the arrival of the absolutely unexpected.1 Yet at the same time, Chrétien insisted that with the biblical inheritance comes something that philosophy cannot attain: a personal God of Love, to whom we can make an equally personal offering and with whom we can even enter into a relation of ‘mutual touch,’ in the words of Saint John of the Cross. (Call 83–131) But the personal status of a God who gives also guarantees that his mystery is more inscrutable than rational speculation could have imagined. It would seem that Chrétien was a post-Heideggerian thinker, preoccupied with the idea that humanity is constituted or conscious by virtue of a summons to which, in language, humanity has always already responded. Yet one can hazard a comparative observation here. Those French poets influenced by Martin Heidegger—René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Henri Michaux—seem to have recognised the concept of a Being mediated to us by nature, as for the late Heidegger, who suggests the ways in which human beings need to feel at home in the cosmos. On the other hand, those French philosophers influenced by Heidegger—Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida, Christian Jambet—seem to have minimised the influence of cosmic, natural, and embodied mediation within the Humanity-Being relation, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty being an exception. These philosophers have tended to modify Heidegger through a return to Edmund Husserl and even René Descartes, often associating the visible and material world with an alienating stasis, objectification and the dominating gaze.2 While Heidegger seemingly wanted to save nature as such from technocracy (given his fatalism, this was a decidedly ambivalent desire), it is as if these French philosophers thought that only the kingdom of subjectivity could be secured, by protecting it from the objective treatment to which the visible is allegedly condemned. However, as Chrétien suggests, we must ask whether our treatment of one another is not directly linked to our treatment of the cosmos. Our disastrous contemporary situation might well reinforce the sense that this is so. Accordingly, Chrétien, who was himself a distinguished and decorated poet, gave the impression in his philosophical writings of being closer to the poets than the philosophers. It is true that he followed Emmanuel Lévinas in reading the ‘summons’ in a more personalist, ethical, Neo-Platonic and monotheistic fashion than Heidegger. Yet if Lévinas emphasised the ethical, then Chrétien drew more attention to the religious and apophatic, in such a way that resonates with a new emphasis on the cosmic and bodily mediation of the call as well as the response. This emphasis allowed Chrétien to make

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use of theology and pre-critical philosophy with more confidence than other thinkers associated with the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, such as Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion (though this is less the case for the latter’s more recent work). The implications of this usage are complex and will be considered later in this essay. But what this suggests is that reading Chrétien is rather more like reading Hans Urs von Balthasar than is the case with these other thinkers, although he arrives at a more exacting fusion of philosophical and theological themes than the Swiss theologian. LANGUAGE, HUMANITY, AND THE COSMOS How does Chrétien interpret the notions of call and response? He rejects the idea that we are reflexively self-addressed. He does not see our self-relation, our gift to ourselves, or our self-affectivity as the transcendental condition for our receiving a word from another or even the touch of another created body. In this respect, his opinions are closer to Aristotle and Saint Thomas than to Avicenna and Emmanuel Kant or—in more contemporary terms—Michel Henry. While it is the case that sensitive and conscious creatures must be self-reflexive (as for Thomas), this is the result of an immediate movement of return from the ecstatic touch and knowledge of things external to us— extending from the finite to the infinite.3 One can assert that Chrétien is committed to a more realist phenomenology than self-confessed strict Husserlians. He does not appear to speak of the ‘other’ as only affecting us in the immanent space of our own thoughts or noema, as is the case even for Lévinas and the ‘pre-historic,’ constitutive rupture of our self-hood [égo-ité] by the ethical demand of the always already present other. On the contrary, Chrétien cites Saint Thomas, for whom sight and touch, in contrast to smell and hearing, attain the very things that are the object of the senses in question. In addition, in his beautiful discussion of touch, Chrétien seems to reject the widespread idea in phenomenology (the early Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Henry) that touching oneself—as when one hand touches the other—is the transcendental foundation of all touch, in such a way that when we touch water, for example, we touch a modification of our own self-contact. By contrast, Chrétien, who is inspired by Aristotle and Saint Thomas, uncovers—in a natural and realist way—the undeniable fact that I cannot touch water without experiencing my body anew as it is affected and qualified by the water (Call 111f). Touch is, in this respect, a more exposed, kenotic, vulnerable, and reciprocal sense than vision and hearing: one cannot touch without sharing to a certain extent the qualitative condition of what one touches. For example, in the case of water, one shares a certain degree of cold or warmth. Moreover,

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we can only touch to the degree that we are touched in return, a fact that is (apparently) less obvious when it comes to the sense of vision (always more detached, as Plato celebrated) though ultimately true here also, as in the case of a blinding ray of sunlight. Chrétien argued that reflexive touch is no more primary and immediate than touching something else, since touch, as for Aristotle in De Anima, is grounded in a hidden phenomenological distance, despite Plato’s marking of its apparent lack of medium in contrast to the mutual implication of sight with light. If there were no alterity or separation in the case of touch, then nothing would be felt at all. One could not experience pure self-affection, even if it were rendered as the perpetually obscure accompaniment to all sensation. Chrétien maintains, citing the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Michaux against Cartesian philosophers, that when we seem to experience only our own bodies, this is an instance of pathology with attendant nausea (as Jean-Paul Sartre perceived) (Call 116–23). To be unwell is to lose the healthy lack of consciousness of one’s body, which first orients it toward contact with other bodies. Chrétien’s realist presentation of touch is important for his whole philosophy, because for him embodiment mediates human intelligence and language. If there is indeed an original, pre-historic call, then it is the whole world that allows this call to resound, since the response of our bodies is essential. He recognises that every time we speak, we are responding to a call that, as for Lévinas, is always filled with the suffering plea (and request for a shared tribulation) of other human subjects. However, if language requires speakers who are always respondents, then such a response is, as for Heidegger, only possible through the always given presupposition of language itself, in such a way that we cannot respond to the call of others without also answering the cosmic call of language through us, a call which poets such as Paul Claudel experience most intensely, when they speak of themselves as nothing more than a medium for the works that are born through them (Call 1–43). It would appear that for Chrétien, the ethical call presupposes the call of language as such. But, in contrast to Heidegger, he does not analyse this call as the impersonal process of Being hidden in its manifestation, to which we can ‘correspond’ perfectly with an authentically poetic use of language that manifests the concealment of Being. This renders language essentially pre-human and opens onto the idea, contested by Chrétien, that language is a matter of purely self-referential ‘writing’ or ‘intertextuality.’ Against such a closed view of language, Chrétien emphasises the gift as much as the word. Every sign is proffered, and therefore every sign is also a gift. But there cannot be a gift humanly given or received (or given by God and to God), that is not a sign of the real personal other who gives the gift and a sign of the promise of this other’s favour. In addition, the density of the gift as thing cannot be elided from the character of a gift, even if the thing is only a sign-vehicle.

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Both the subjectivity and the objectivity of sign as inevitably also gift exclude linguistic self-referentiality.4 So, for Chrétien, although we can only apprehend the world through language, we do not only apprehend language. How can this be? Not because we can sneak behind the mirror of language and glimpse those bare realities that words merely index, but because words only make sense by providing or giving access to something more than themselves, to which they are nonetheless perpetually attached. We can only apprehend the rock as the meaning ‘rock’ (as otherwise it would be at most an amorphous mass), yet the rock is more than its meaning. Meaning and content in excess of meaning, the experience of a rock is a gift to an observer, since it is a source of pleasure. In elaboration of Chrétien, we can say that the rock self-manifests through language as beauty, since the brute and bare rock is always more than our comprehension of it, and yet the rock, even as rock, is never merely brute and bare. Within and through this tension it is manifest to us as beauty, because it seems to intimate a more ideal rock that would fulfil a sense of hidden solidity and unexhausted significance by fusing them both.5 It is perhaps necessary to gloss Chrétien in this way, in order to clarify how he seems to distance himself from Lévinas as well as Heidegger. Primordially, language is neither the call of the suffering other, nor the impersonal and temporal passage of Being. Refusing both the transcendental ‘humanism of the other’ and the nihilistic rejection of all humanism, Chrétien—together with numerous poets, as well as with Philo and a host of Christian theologians— speaks of the way in which language oscillates between the human and the cosmic, in an interval that is both rupture and suture. If human beings speak themselves, and this process must have always already begun, then this is because language is inherently a response to the call of the cosmos. Contact with material natures enables our intersubjectivity through touch and the other senses. Thus, human language is a kind of interpretation or translation or non-identical repetition of nature. This suggests, as Chrétien shows, that language is and is not the voice of the cosmos, and conversely, that it is and is not an entirely human utterance. He draws upon the resources of monotheist reflection on the cosmos and the cosmic liturgy. Is it the cosmos or humanity that finds itself in need? The answer is both, and this is why there is mutual supplementation, a reciprocal healing of indigencies (see Ark passim). Indeed, in a problematic sense, need begins with God Himself. According to Philo (and Pierre de Bérulle), God has need of nothing except to be praised, in the radical sense of receiving adoration and offering from a dependent creature, whose praise derives from God’s own surfeit. (Ark 121–24) This cannot occur in the apparently reflexive perfection of auto-adoration, since in Himself, reflexively, God really has need of nothing. All that he has need of

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externally is his proper due, and yet this derives from what is not Him and can be sinfully withheld: according to Bérulle, cited by Chrétien, ‘The only thing in Creation with which God does as he wants is nothingness’ (Call 22). To speak of ‘need’ here is aporetic: the praise offered to God by creatures is less than God’s plenitude from which nothing is missing or could be missing, even ‘externally,’ and yet there is a purely dependent experience of gratitude here that God ‘does not have.’ Chrétien follows both the great Jewish philosopher and the Oratorian Cardinal in emphasising that purely receptive gratitude for everything, including everything that it is, is all that is appropriate to the creature, and yet that this very capacity for radical gratitude, perpetually realised in active reception and response, is the ‘extra’ to God that is apparently proper to the creature. Although Chrétien rarely seems to invoke the notion of methexis, or participation, one could suggest that the paradox of participation is in play here: the more the creature receives its being from its creator, the more this receptivity emerges as the impossible ‘alongside’ of finite being in relation to God. He does, however, touch this paradox from the other side: if creation is simply ‘less’ than God, a diminishing series of examples of his fullness, then why was it necessary for God to create anything at all? Chrétien observes that, in being confronted with this mystery, Nicolas Malebranche spoke of the creative act as an act of kenotic self-diminishing, since nothing in the finite divine work can match his infinite art.6 Nonetheless, if this is so, then—as Chrétien seems to suggests—this is only because the radical receptivity of being-oneself-as-gift, which is proper to the created state (since before receiving itself, the creature is nothing), is not simply a diminution, but in some sense a new good that is proper to pure weakness and not present in God Himself—since the eternal Son cannot really ‘adore’ the Father with whom he is equal, as pointed out by Jean-Jacques Olier, the founder of the Sulpicians (Ark 125–26). His slight predecessor, Bérulle, is here the theological master. For him the paradox appears in the most acute degree at the Incarnation, where it is also mysteriously resolved (Ibid.). On the one hand, Bérulle held that Christ is unsurpassingly human because the quality of being created reaches the new and extreme degree of being enhypostasised by God Himself. On the other hand, this does not negate the finite human nature of Christ, since, through this enhypostasisation, God disturbingly creates something ‘more’ than Himself that nonetheless remains Himself. Bérulle thus demonstrated that in order to be a true (neo)Chalcedonian, one must be simultaneously (as it were) more of a Nestorian and more of a monophysite than mechanical orthodoxy allows: Christ does not possess a human esse in addition to a divine esse, and yet the divine esse itself is, in Christ, more than God. The aporia of creation and participation is ‘resolved,’ because here God Himself becomes the subject

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of the finite extra towards God: infinite Adored and finite adoring infinitely coincide. At this stage, we see above all that participation is also a kenosis to radical deficiency, which also involves something impossibly ‘more’ for sufficiency itself. Malebranche, within the same Oratorian tradition of metaphysical Christology, pursued similar lines of reflection which Chrétien also discusses: the ‘more’ of Creation cannot of itself adopt a valid attitude of submission to God, because we cannot be sure that even our creaturely humility is compatible with an unknown infinity of glory.7 Only God incarnate can bridge this gulf, and so it is only in the idiom of Christ’s praise of the Father that we glimpse a secure humility with which we can now validly identify: ‘far from humility being able to render praise possible, it will be when this word of praise becomes possible that humility will become equally so.’8 By token of the same logic, not even as ‘its own’ humility could the Creation constitute a justifiable ‘addition’ to God, worthy of His glory. Rather, it only becomes justifiable when the addition is also no longer an addition, with the hypostatic union. Thus, for Malebranche, the Incarnation was the sole goal and reason for the Creation, though he also insisted to an extreme degree on the Augustinian Christus Totus: by assuming the human mind and body, God united himself not just to the principles of all humanity, but to the principles of the entire universe, which were thereby sanctified. Chrétien cites John of the Cross to the same effect: ‘He quickly walked across These woods, and turning his face on them Enriched them again By imbuing them with his beauty.’ (Ark 109, citing Spiritual Canticle V.5)

As the created cosmos, when consummated in Christ, supplies what could be termed the lack of lack in God Himself, its character is—for Chrétien— liturgical by nature, just as it was for Philo and Maximus the Confessor. Things, considered not in their inter-lexical interactions, but insofar as they are created, exist only as gifts. But this means that they also exist only as self-offerings, since Chrétien (against a number of other phenomenologists, notably Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, and in agreement with his stringent realism) underscores that a gift is only a gift when it is recognised as such with gratitude; otherwise, it would be merely an overlooked or abandoned item. Conversely, a giver must attend to the person to whom they are giving, if they are to give properly: without such attention, there would be no gift at all, but rather something discarded without reflection. Thus, the giver has already received something from the recipient. Equally, a gift is always

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subject to interpretation and judgement: if the gift is not recognised as a gift, then (rightly or wrongly) it has not been realised as gift. As in the case of touch, Chrétien here situates a genuine ontological circulation in the place of self-reflexive a priori categories, however independent these can be of the empirical ego. It follows from this that the creature, as ontological gift, is also ontologically adoring, at least insofar as it has not been corrupted in some way. But it is here that the second need comes into view. Chrétien, again citing Philo, refers to the famous passage in De Plantatione, in which Philo invokes a pagan creation myth. God asks what is lacking in the cosmos that he has created and realises that it is the voice of praise provided by the Muses (Call 26). In other words, nothing is lacking, other than an admiring perspective or view of things. And so that the Muses can provide a means of expression for their inspiration, human beings must be brought into being. As Chrétien explains, this means that without humanity, nature’s manifestation falls short: how can we believe that an unrecognised manifestation is there at all? He describes a quasi-phenomenological response to reality, which only the poets have attained: the beauty of things does not merely consist in their allotted order, but rather (as Balthasar had already insisted) in the way in which they hold our attention, always suggesting something more, and, in truth, always provoking something new in us as observers. In this way, the visibility of beauty also ‘calls’ in a voice that exceeds its appearance (Call 33–43 and Ark 77–110). For Chrétien, this vindicates the view that the ‘anthropomorphic illusion’ or ‘apostrophe’ of the Romantic poets, which he demonstrates is as present in Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire as it is in William Wordsworth and P. B. Shelley, is in no way an illusion, but is a gloss upon Augustine and other Church Fathers (Ark 129–30). For Hugo, the entrance to a cave resembles a sigh that, to the extent that it cannot express itself, sighs all the more, like the bare rock, deprived of the meaning that constitutes its rockiness. Thus, nature calls human beings to proffer what nature herself cannot fully express, indeed, to show her what this thing is: this, according to Hugo in his Contemplations, is ‘What the mouth of shadow says’: ‘all is a voice and all is a perfume. [. . .] Everything, just like you, groans, or sings like me; | Everything speaks’ (as cited in Ark 130). And again, ‘To the deep-seeing eye, all caves are screams’ (as cited in Call 43). Conversely, every human utterance is nothing other than the fulfilment of latent material and bodily expression: is our mouth not also an oracular cave, and do we not interpret all physical openings as petitions, since, without the experience of physical openings, we could not formulate even the faintest idea of a ‘request’? Chrétien demonstrates a subversive meaning of the poetry and metaphoricity hidden in all language,

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which implies that human beings can only possess meanings insofar as nature exhorts them for us.9 Since the cosmos is, for Chrétien, lacking, it cannot be invested with the kind of negative plenitude proper to Heidegger’s temporalised Being. However, its visible objectivity is not a sinister trap, as is sometimes the case with Lévinas, and with Michel Henry or Christian Jambet. Rather, its deepest visibility speaks of a beyond that is proper to it. It would seem that the perspective of Balthasar nuances that of the two philosophers: Being is first mediated by the beauty of things, and beauty, as for Plato, is constituted by its call beyond itself to an erotic response.10 As created beauty, it is already, as for Saint Augustine, the beginning of an utterance and a reply, and yet this reply refers in a non-idolatrous way to a hidden creator that it only partially reveals. This is the non-self-sufficiency of mute created expression, which requires an explicit response from a conscious and non-idolatrous human adorer. Otherwise, as Philo, Maximus and Bérulle suggest, it is as if the cosmos fails to ‘refer’ to God. But does this mean that, for human beings, the fullness of utterance corresponds to divine plenitude? Chrétien vigorously rejects this, criticising both Heidegger and Lévinas. Human response cannot ‘correspond’ to the call in the way that the authentic opening of Dasein can correspond to the nullity of temporalised Being. But one does not abolish such a correspondence by saying, with Lévinas, that our response is already given in the transcendental constitution of the human subject, as it is called forth by the suffering other. Here the ineluctability of the response is held to guarantee its coincidence with the call. In both cases, coincidence seems to be tied to a philosophy of immanence, since, according to Lévinas, the divine is present in the trace of the human other in me. For Chrétien, by contrast, the response can never fully correspond to a genuinely transcendent dimension. The integrity of this dimension is partially secured by the fact that the Absolute (Being, the One or God) only speaks to us through the cosmos, which is itself incomplete without human supplementation. But it is only sufficiently secured by invoking a third need, namely that of humanity itself. Chrétien invokes the reference to the myth of Epimetheus by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (and Bérulle after him) (Ark 122–27). This myth is effectively the primordial episode after the myth invoked by Philo. Once God had created humanity, he realised that there was no particular attribute left to give to this species. As a result, all that remained for humanity was to be an epitome, a microcosm that contained in miniature something of everything else. This implies that if human beings can give their adoration in the name of the cosmos, they are nonetheless constrained to express the liturgy at the heart of all language, by means of their constant expression and re-description of the cosmos itself. Maximus the Confessor, as Chrétien notes

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after Balthasar, was conscious in the Mystagogy of the most radical implication of this microcosmic theme: if the humanly-focussed visible alone leads us to the invisible, or to the spiritual and noematic, this implies that the invisible also bends back through to the visible though the human authentically expresses it by transcending it.11 So true is this for Maximus that, for him, at the eschaton, the visible will become equal to the angelically invisible, since both are created realities. And one can even speak of a double return: the visible leads us to the invisible and thus gathers us to God. But to return to God is to return to the Adored who desires for all eternity the act of adoration, that is to say the being and work of creatures, including the most fragile and ephemeral of things. Thus, it is also a return to the Creation. As Chrétien puts it, ‘The song of the world returns to the world the light it took from it, but now made even brighter, in an increase of prayer and hymn’ (Ark 132–34). Elsewhere he describes this astonishing parity as a horizontal as well as vertical dilation.12 It is possible that Maximus was here under the distant influence of Proclus, for whom the simplicity of material things was in one sense closer to the simplicity of the One than the reflexivity of intelligence.13 What is certain is that the question for Maximus is not just why God created something rather than nothing, but also why he created the sub-angelic, material world. Given the fact that this latter exists, then, as Maximus says, the human response of adoration is supreme because it combines the angelic and the earthly. But why the earth at all? Perhaps because what is weakest most reveals the ‘extra’ that God is seemingly without. Chrétien seems close to this observation in at least three respects. First, he invokes the French Romantic Joseph Joubert, for whom God, in creating out of nothing, works with the slightest and most constricted media of all, which is the true sign of divine artistic genius (Hand to Hand 94–129). The fullness of the cosmos, akin to the series of infinitesimal fragments that makes up the faintest line and the vast expanses of the universe, filled with echoes, appears to show us this, as much as the thin and fragile skin of earth that covers our planet. All the reality we know is precarious. For Joubert’s mystical Newtonianism, it is only the predominance of the nothingness of empty space that allows the separation of individual things, their scope for interaction and development and a certain penumbra of haziness around each thing, so pivotal for its liberty and reserved integrity.14 The same lack of ‘continuity’ in reality (later insisted upon by Pavel Florensky)15 ensures that the real content of spiritual understanding is a series involving a leap from one stage to the other. For Joubert, in a way that Chrétien’s radically realist phenomenology seems to endorse, discursivity and argument are at best short hands, at worse the fantasising of false connections, interrupting a necessary silence (Ark 40).

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In a finite reality created out of nothing, the only ‘joins’ between things are aesthetic ones, confirmed by a subjective judgement in spiritual attunement with the voice of God. Secondly, Chrétien makes much of Aristotle’s insistence in De Anima that human receptivity, or, in the phrase of John Keats, ‘negative capability,’ connects to the possession of the most vulnerable and sensitive animal bodies. As Chrétien remarks, the Epimethean theme can be related to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as ‘to a certain extent, all things.’ (Chrétien maintains that this provides a way around the idea of the microcosm, yet is not the omni-resonance of the soul mediated by the unique pan-sympathy of the human body?) However, this holds true only for the specifically human soul, since it is the form of an animal body specifically exposed by its bare, sensible, touching surface, heightened by the rational power of reflexivity. By taking this into account, as Saint Thomas does later, it becomes possible to say that human beings are not a grotesque amalgam—in the manner of Caliban—of the bestial and angelic, but rather, that they touch upon the angelic because they are hyper-animal animals, prone to spiritual office by virtue of being intensely open to all the traffic of the earthly cosmos. In the third place, Chrétien alludes to the tradition of the Verbum infans in French spirituality: ‘the infinite Speech that does not speak, that cannot speak, Speech deprived of speech’ in the incarnation of the Logos (Hand to Hand 44–46). We are confronted here with the suggestion that the eternal is not participatively approximated simply by magnitude or expression, but as much by absence and silence and room for manoeuvre. If the Christ-Child does speak, it is in stammering cries and inchoate gestures. Yet, suggests Chrétien, authentic finite speech must itself stammer, like the poetry of Charles Péguy, and the Adamic language, according to Malebranche, was originally one of perfect gesture, or of consonance between thing, sound and image.16 The Fall was peculiarly the corruption of gesture, in such a way that we now typically repeat signals of anguish, hatred and rivalry. But for this reason, our language, and so our culture, could not be purified by mere rhetoric or philosophy: it required the assumption by the Logos of our fallen gestures, which Christ endured, instead of repeating in mimetic rivalry, their contaminated and contaminating fallaciousness.17 The entirety of Christ’s earthly sojourn, culminating in the Cross, is then the restoration of the Edenic gesture. Within this gesture, declares Chrétien (citing yet another Seventeenth Century French mystic, Louis Chardon OP) for now joy is always interwoven with sorrow, but sorrow is inversely, in the personally-fused double nature of Christ, interwoven with a strange and unknown joy.18 Not merely because our joy is for now imperfect, but also because a certain sweet-bitterness is necessary to the intimation of eternal joy, just as in finitude, the emptiness of space is needed to intimate eternal plenitude. Christ’s infant mixture of

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tears and delight speaks to us this truth, which he will later articulate in both word and deed. There is, nonetheless, for Chretien a possible pathology of even the saving conditions of vacuity and vagueness. It is not the case that our fallenness consists only in a denial of the benign prevalence of the void, after the manner of at least some Asiatic philosophies. For the empty and the silent and the scarce are not for him the ultimate, but they are signs of a distant transcendence. That which lies within the intervals, both of space and time, like leaves whirling in the wind, are equally such signs. It is rather the interplay of shape and space, mediated by light, and of sound and rest, mediated by resonant harmony, that composes respectively the pictorial and the musical. A squeamishness about the preservation of our own imperfectly expressible identity can try to deny this, as in the case of the Nineteenth Century Swiss diarist ‘Amiel’ whose refusal to commit himself, Chrétien nonetheless regards as negatively exemplary.19 More than anyone else, Amiel recognised that every small commitment and entailment can potentially contaminate and betray us, as well as lead us where we eventually do not want to go. Yet refusing this, he became doomed to an incessant vigilance, requiring the ceaseless closed self-confidence of the diary (necessarily private in order to guard against exterior influence) in such a way that his life became a substitute one of seeking to ensure against the acquiring of any alien identity. Of course, in even such a minimalised external process, a shadowy identity perforce emerges, exposing the futility of the enterprise, as the publication of the diary exposes. Our integral identity, argues Chrétien, depends on our undertaking the impossible risk of losing it. Every engagement with the world is a kind of promise which we cannot know whether we will be able to keep (circumstances may drastically alter and we may have misread our own capacities), and yet unless we make these promises (archetypally in marriage, for Amiel as for Kierkegaard) we cannot form ourselves as human. Such promises, or, in other words, any action at all, are only construable or bearable within an eschatological horizon: we have to hope, beyond the ethical (but as the precondition of the ethical), that all our promises can in some unknown fashion at last be redeemed. Far more balanced than Amiel’s neurotic preciosity was, for Chrétien, the insight of Joseph Joubert, who realised that, while none of our actions or artistic works are adequate to the intentions that gave them birth, equally this can imply that our intentions are not equal to our own performances. Their failure of fit with our intentions may have a positive besides a negative aspect: something more than us is inspirationally born form us and assumes a life of its own. In other words, the ground of possible personal contamination in alienating exteriorisation is also always a ground of possible redemption: others may make of what we have done or made, more or better than we have

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done ourselves. For this reason, eschatological hope is ontologically warranted, since hope is never for ourselves alone, in which case it lapses into aporia or hopelessness. But collectively, and across the unfolding of time, it is conceivable. Without this eschatological horizon that looks for the advent of grace in both the theological and aesthetic senses, ethics will for Chrétien lapse into the dissolving dilemma exemplified by Kant’s writings on practical reason: either we will remain in permanent uncertainty as to the purity of our intentions, even though this privately ‘owned’ purity for Kant defines the moral as such, or impure intentions are politically and economically harmonised by providence to engender an ‘unsocial sociability,’ rather like the operation of Adam Smith’s hidden hand.20 In the former case, the ethical may not exist at all; in the latter case, it has become simply irrelevant. Chrétien relates this to Kant’s failure to sustain the Pauline and Augustinian sense that the content of our actions, and not merely our motives, is mysteriously corrupted, in such a way that we can only hope for their mending through grace, via participation in the perfect redemptive and liturgical gesture of Christ. This hope beyond the ethical is the very ground of the ethical because the inner core of all human activity is ‘impossible’ promise and ineradicable hope which nonetheless has an experienced ontological warrant in everyday, as well as epochal instances of reparation, recovery and reconciliation. The practical medium between hope and promise is therefore pardon which, as much as promise, is the content of the ethical in a fallen world and not something belonging to a special department of mercy. All this, of course, is Kierkegaardian. One sees how for Chrétien, as for his predecessors, everything comes together in humanity. The weakness of created dependence is also the opportunity for finite intelligence (whose integrity of limitation is guaranteed by space, silence, and rarity), since this latter is nothing other than poetic praise, perpetually renewed, of the divine. Equally, the fragilitas of our fallenness is not something to be eschewed, because the myriad ways in which we are ‘breakable’ (rather than merely lacking in strength as ‘feeble’) are points of possible recovery of the reality of our dependence upon God, the source of all that we are. We could only be redeemed when God himself assumed all this breakability and was himself broken in order that light and air might flood back in and around the collective human body to restore it. If, therefore, humanity is the ultimate locus of language, then this is on account, and not in spite of, human neediness, fallibility, and friability. An overall fragility which is also cosmic, since the slipperiness and ‘lubricity’ of our lives concern also the unreliability of the ultimately death-dealing surface of the earth, according to Chrétien’s subtle exploration of Biblical and Patristic metaphorics. Nature and humanity perpetually assist and amend each other to engender truly gestural speech, or else the gesture of writing

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when the hand brings together the audible with the visible. Chrétien cites the modern Argentinian poet Roberto Juarroz (Ark 41): ‘The white page is a listening that waits. Writing is the voice Which can be combined with the whiteness . . . At certain moments the hand senses the density that awaits it and its trace on the whiteness finds the necessary pressure to reach the music from below.’

Since nature (the ‘white ground’) and Humanity (the ‘writing hand’) revolve around each other in a virtuous spiral (as opposed to the mutual cancelling of Being and beings in Heidegger), both point above each other to a higher giver. The one who calls is ‘God’—or rather, it is shown to us by the theophanic disclosures recorded in the Bible that the caller is God. Reason, which is poetic reason in order to be true reason (after Joubert) seems to indicate such a conclusion, but only the informing of human inspiration by the divine Logos himself can confirm this for us. According to Chrétien, we receive this call through a cosmic mediation that our response completes. He insists that the call has no other purpose for us than our liturgical response, since God is not a perceptible point in the world that might be manipulated for our use, and we only apprehend him through the praise of the world. This suggests that the overarching perspective of Chrétien’s writings is a ‘poetics’ or ‘liturgics,’ rather than a simple ‘aesthetics,’ confirmed by his view, following Charles Péguy, that we must nurture the divine word that nurtures us, if this nurturing of us is to remain alive and possible.21 It is not a matter of a mere insistence on the passivity of human beings qua recipients, which tends to be the case for Jean-Luc Marion. It is too easy to say, as commentators such as Anne Davenport have done, that human response is negatively adequate when its pure receptivity reflects divine apophasis.22 This is an overly simple rendering of Philo’s theme of ontological praise, which Chrétien continually invokes. Such a reading would merely be a new mode of straightforward ‘correspondence,’ albeit of a negative variety, between the fact of calling and that of responding. Chrétien instead underscores that the inadequate nature of the response to the call is also its place of incontrovertible justification, following the logic of praise as an ‘extra’ towards God. The totality of the response is undoubtedly received, but its inability to be adequate implies an oscillation between the apophatic and the cataphatic fulfilled by the liturgically Christological. The response

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which is our nurturing (within the Body of Christ) of divine nurture permanently ‘alters’ the call in such a way that is both valid and erroneous because necessarily inadequate. And this response encompasses the entirety of human endeavour. It is unified by a prophetic anticipation of humanity’s future and of all the artisanal, human work that fashions the world for the sake of further beauty, including the supreme beauty of a just social settlement. A beautiful work is ‘fragile’ because it depends on every line, gesture, colour, and note or word being ‘exactly right,’ but beauty herself is fragile because, beyond aesthetic preciousness, there is no work that might not have been otherwise, no work that does not remain always in gestation and no artistic fashion that will not one day be abandoned or superseded.23 The biblically prophetic is thus in excess of a merely classical sense of form and manifestation. THE MEDIUM OF TOUCH Our response to God, as mediated through the cosmos, is, as we have seen, grounded in touch, and is pursued with greatest intensity in language. But how does this mediation work? For Chrétien, apostrophe is enabled (as for Charles Baudelaire or Olivier Messiaen, and also Plato), by the mystery of synaesthesia (Call 83–131). He seemingly wishes to establish that language and intelligence emerge, as for Plato and Aristotle, from our ‘common sense,’ or from the fusion that we effect of sensory experience and diverse communications. Here the question, which Chrétien never completely resolves, is as follows: does such a common sense emerge as an imaginative, or even simply intellectual fusion, after the individual senses have done their work, reaching the level of the genetically ‘ideal’ that remains invisible and yet guides the shaping of every manifest form? Or does a certain kind of synaesthesia and ideality operate on the level of the body? If it is the latter, this would appear to suggest that the senses are modes of a single and unique sense shared (analogically?) between them (following Aristotle), or that the senses are inexplicably intertwined (following Maurice Merleau-Ponty). In the first example, there is only one possible candidate: the sense of touch. But in both cases, ‘signification’ and ‘cognition’ seem to flow from the body itself at the moment when the senses call to one another, in such a way that no doctrine of pure sensibility can explain; when, according to Messiaen, we see colours in sound, or the blind sculptor sees what she is making through touch, or a perfectly mute landscape speaks to us in such a way that we are compelled to cry out, or even when our spoken words ‘show’ things to our interlocutors with an irresistible and immediate force.24

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Nonetheless, it seems that, for Chrétien, the more privileged sense is hearing, because the primary frame of his philosophical, poetic, and theological reflection is that of ‘call and response.’ For him, beauty resides in the visible insofar as the visible also addresses us. How then does touch enter this schema? Seemingly because touch reveals how our body is involved in receiving the call, as mediated to us by the physical cosmos. The experience of beauty reveals that the way in which the visible addresses itself to us prohibits any pure objectification or dominating gaze on our part. On the contrary, even the most careful and effective mastery, insofar as it is made possible through touch, is still necessarily subject to the way in which things affect and modify our bodies in return, as when we touch something with our hands. This is the price we must always pay for the right to touch anything at all. Yet inversely, and in confirmation of the poetic, besides aesthetic dimension, only touch can access the call of things because, in contrast to sight and hearing, it has already, in the very act of feeling, affected or modified in some way the felt thing. Consequently, if, in order to touch something, we must always attend to the call of the other, the phenomenon of touch also more directly demonstrates that this happens only with our response, in such a way that, paradoxically, we cannot be affected before we have already responded. It would therefore seem that by attending to touch, rather than listening alone, Chrétien, more than some other ‘theological phenomenologists,’ emphasises the active character of our receiving the call, as the condition of possibility for hearing the call in the first place. As we have seen, such an emphasis signifies that Chrétien is inclined to see the gift as something made possible by the fact of reciprocal exchange, rather than seeing reciprocity (as for Marion) as something that an act of giving can hope for, but does not require in order to be a gift. And if touch always implies the fact of mutual affection, then touch, more than hearing or vision, brings mutuality to the fore, as Chrétien explicitly indicates elsewhere: ‘touch is the perpetual place of the exchange through which the non-identical is identified, through which we are given to the world and the forms of the world are delivered to us.’25 This dense definition suggests several things at once: first, that touch as a paradigm concerns ‘exchange’ more than either vision’s subjective and one-sided conspectus, which can fix an object in space before it, or else the passive dependence of hearing, that is beholden to the whims of its sourcesound, which comes and goes with time. Touch is a temporal event but also a spatial circle. Secondly, it suggests that touch is a kind of magical and analogical mixing of the disparate, in keeping with the Aristotelian understanding of the body’s surface as metaxu or ‘in-between.’ Thirdly, it suggests, whether Chrétien explicitly intends it or not, that the forms of the world are not exhausted by their appearance to our vision, but that these appearances are meaningful forms or genres that are their own

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identities, and yet are also the very things that, as for Aristotle, can traverse material manifestation to sensory and ultimately intellectual experience. They are, in short, as manifest forms or shapes also ‘ideas,’ whose vital moulding, both generic and engendering, remains invisible to us, in such a way that we only intuit the substantively formal via the accidentally qualitative. This coheres with Emmanuel Gabellieri’s recent thesis that we have to conceive of a ‘medium’ between being and appearance, and so, consequently, between ontology (or metaphysics) and phenomenology.26 To foreground touch would seem to be of a piece with foregrounding the exchange of gifts, analogical mediation, and the realist treatment of the relation between person and thing, in opposition to either the active distance of the dominating subject from the known object (associated with visibility), or the passive distance of the subject from the other, calling subject (associated with auricular experience). Touch shows us that mediation is more fundamental than distance, which is Marion’s focus. This is why Chrétien cites Saint Bonaventure and Saint John of the Cross as having understood the highest and most intimate relationship to the divine not principally in terms of vision, but in terms of spiritual touch and taste, and, in truth, as ‘mutual touch.’ (Does God really touch us? In one sense, he does not, since he possesses fullness; but in another sense he does, since God himself ‘reaches out’ to what is not-God, whose absolute receptivity can only be destined, through humanity, for deification, in such a way that ultimately, when we touch God, he touches us as if we were a ‘deity’) (Call 129–30). As far as the question of the foundation of Aristotelian ‘common sensing’ is concerned, Chrétien gives credence to the theory that it is based on touch ‘giving more’ to the other senses than it receives from them. Every act of understanding begins as a kind of apprehension that is also our own exposure. He shows that this is the case for practical as well as theoretical intelligence. As he observes, synaesthesia primarily signifies ‘consciousness’ for Proclus (in a sense, akin to our own), but also a kind of ‘co-sensoriality’ and a ‘feeling with’ (Call 44–82). Following his lead, one could suggest that just as ‘signification’ implies formal or ideal models that can become incarnate in various sensory modes, so too ‘the good’ implies harmonies and mutuality that move from one sensory idiom to another. Is not there something missing in another’s word when what their voice promises is not confirmed by a visual manifestation? Conversely, does not the intimacy of touch become betrayal, as with Judas, when refuted by lying words? Is the archetypal traitor not also the one who denies the human encounter where eating is a shared celebration? Chrétien points out that touch, in contrast to the other senses, belongs to the ethical ‘environment’ to the extent that it cannot operate as a sense without being itself a medium for the qualities it feels, such as hot and cold: burnt flesh can no longer register temperature. Similarly, he links

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our vulnerable embodiment to temporality and the endless possibility of the revision of what has gone before: either as betrayal or restoration, either as cognitive dissonance (the conflicting witnesses of the different senses) or as integral confirmation.27 If Chrétien nonetheless says relatively little about the link between ethics and inter-sensibility, he remains faithful to the most realist roots of the original idea of ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience,’ and in opposition to the Rousseauian notion of supposed pure self-presence, rivalling that of God, on a solitary ramble. The connection of conscience to common sensing and the phenomenon of ‘feeling together’ suggests that it is only an ‘inner voice’ because it is the voice of the various real and particular others within us, rather than our own, hidden voice speaking of our generalised and abstract obligation. One can say that Chrétien offers a more satisfactory solution to Immanuel Lévinas’s aspiration to surpass formalism. The voice of consciousness in us is the voice of the real other because it is grounded in our touching other physical bodies, and so, in order to attain consciousness of the world and oneself (since Chrétien in effect rejects Michel Henry’s idea that touching the other is made transcendentally possible by our touching ourselves), we must always already be ‘wounded’ by the world we inhabit.28 Our human, ethical response, and our intelligible language are founded on the inter-sensibility that is opened by touch: words that resonate reveal, instigate, and impress at the most intimate felt and inhabited level. If language receives the call, then this is possible because our body also receives it. However, Chrétien in no way intends to make our embodied insertion in the world the primary, founding reality of being human. This insertion must always share this role with human language. In effect, we apprehend and act upon the world as hypersensitive animals, which is to say, as speaking animals. But also, in the case of language, Chrétien rejects the notion of primary auto-reflexivity: he criticises Husserl’s idea that babies know themselves first by hearing their own gurgling (Call 78–80). On the contrary, as for Jacques Lacan, they can only come to know themselves when they experience articulate language, and this happens to them for the first time when they hear themselves addressed by another. THE CALL FROM BEFORE TIME It is here that the theme of a spatial, embodied-cosmic circle, mediated by touch, which Chrétien shares with Merleau-Ponty, is balanced by the more Lévinasian theme of a primordial temporality. The call of consciousness comes from the real other, and yet, inconceivably, this must always have

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already arrived and there cannot have been a ‘first’ human individual for whom the call had not yet come. As a consequence, although we always hear anew, in historical time, the call as it comes from the cosmos, from other human beings and divine revelations, to hear this summons is constitutive of the human race as such, and so the call must, in some sense, transcendentally precede humanity.29 For Chrétien, following Lévinas, this is what Plato understood in his theory of ‘recollection.’ One must not reduce this, in Neo-Kantian fashion, to the theory of an a priori located exclusively in the given structures of subjectivity, because there is no critical warrant for this: even if the call of consciousness and language is always already presupposed, it can only be identified and specified through its historical mediations. If, nonetheless, there exists no conceivable humanity prior to this call, it follows that the mythical form of Plato’s doctrine is, as later for Friedrich Schelling, critical and indispensable. One may speak of a kind of immemorial history, of a metahistorical pre-history of humanity which belongs neither to human nor cosmic time. There is affinity here with Aristotle’s ‘unforgettable,’ which Chrétien invokes when he says that one cannot really lose the habit of prudence, as opposed to the habit of art: ignorance is never an excuse in the case of the moral law, because such an ignorance is perforce impossible. Chrétien does not interpret this affirmation simply in terms of a law of conscience inscribed upon human hearts. For him, the interiorly unforgettable is always mediated by the unforgettable character of other specific, historic human beings (Unforgettable 78–98). He demonstrates that the atheism and immanentism of modernity are themselves beholden to myths about time that tend to deify human memory. Many modern authors have assented to the Bergsonian idea that ‘nothing is ever lost for memory,’ or indeed the idea that it is good to forget, since ‘we only remember what really matters.’ In qualifying these seductive theses, Chrétien combines empirical honesty with greater phenomenological, even ontological, sensitivity. To remember is not, as for Prometheus, to regain what has been lost by retaining what is essential about the other (and Chrétien does not absolve Marcel Proust on this score). Since memory seeks to attain to a vanished other, it also recalls an ‘original forgetting’ that concerns what we cannot grasp about another person, which guarantees that only their genuine presence can satisfy its ambitions, by ‘reminding’ us of that very thing which eludes us. We can explicate this in Pavel Florensky’s terms by saying that the ‘personal’ (to which Chrétien appeals) is that which manifests as consistency of ‘character’ an ‘idea’ that never actually appears.30 The ‘unforgettable’ is therefore also what is necessarily forgotten, and to remember is also to forget, just as to forget is also to remember, because we cannot know that we have forgotten something that we do not remember at

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all. Chrétien’s realism about memory leads him to see in forgiveness, following Kierkegaard, a ‘forgetting’ of a regrettable past (Unforgettable 40–77). One can nonetheless maintain that realism demands that we should balance this with the idea that, in an active reconciliation, one can ‘re-make’ the past, since, without such a repairing of damaged relations, forgiveness tends to be nominal and lacking in the dimension of substantial reciprocity that Chrétien defends elsewhere. Given the ‘ecstatic’ character of time, past moments contain in their own ipseity a ‘prophecy’ about their own future, which allows the past as past to be redeemed.31 This does not necessarily contradict Chrétien’s insistence on the past character of the past, as that which has disappeared, since the aporia of time would seem to suggest that this cannot be the only dimension of the past: every past moment is entirely, and yet since there is no present moment that is not already past, the present itself would seem to consist in what has ineluctably vanished. Yet it is that which has gone that the present sustains insofar as it projects the future. Is a past event not abandoned to its own autonomy and without further consequence, to the extent that it is bad and therefore incomplete, incapable of influencing the future in any positive way? By contrast, to the extent that one can redeem something from a past event, that something constitutes its authentic truth, which continues to be ‘prophetic’ and to echo in our own present moment. In that sense, the past can be altered, as otherwise no future could arise. To say this is not to revitalise those theories of ‘absolute memory,’ or ‘only that which should survive survives,’ which Chrétien rightly rejects. Rather, he seeks to give the redemptive mediation of memory a more positive function than he himself recognised, though in keeping with the more general thrust of his philosophy. Concerning the mediation of redemption, Chrétien strongly criticises Lévinas for not having clarified the relation between the historic and revealed call, on the one hand, and the pre-historic, transcendental call, on the other. And yet, perhaps he himself does not clarify this relation, even if clarity is simply unattainable on this issue. One can nonetheless grasp the outline of what he thinks about this relation. The forgotten unforgettable in every other is itself a call from beyond this other, who, for this simple reason, remains incomplete and demands our modification of the call in a supplementary response. More than Lévinas, Chrétien seems here to introduce something like a hermeneutic dimension: we cannot hear another ‘speaking’ without also hearing what they ‘say,’ which is always more than their alterity alone—just as for Joubert, the work breaks away from its author. And this saying has to be interpreted or ‘nurtured’ by us, if it is even to speak to us at all. In this way, the past horizon of the forgotten unforgettable is always receding, and one is confronted with the Platonic theory of something originally lost, which one nonetheless obscurely remembers and without which being

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human would be impossible. Language is forever condemned to catch up with itself, and yet there is nothing that would allow us to interpret this in terms of impersonal linguistic solipsism: language continues to call and to give (as Derrida himself increasingly suggested, though if he saw in this an ‘impossible’ regulative horizon that does not admit of relative degrees of approach). Chrétien understood this in eschatological as well as protological terms: if, according to Plato, we strive to know what we already know obscurely, we must therefore be covertly attracted by the very thing for which we search. According to Chrétien, this remained for the Greeks (despite some isolated suggestions otherwise) the return of the original, but for the biblical perspective, this has become ‘the unhoped for’ eschaton, which, when it comes, surpasses and will surpass all expectations (Unforgettable 99–118). The implication of Chrétien’s discussion seems to be that if, as for Friedrich Nietzsche, we must recognise with realism our relative situation within the physical cosmos and in human language and history, and yet continue to affirm the reality of signification and value, then we are led to a theological vision, and even a Christian theological vision. Philosophical reasoning cannot, of itself, offer glimpses of the ‘unforgettable’ and the ‘unhoped for,’ but it can reach a point where the confession of its own limits (which is, at the same time, the foundation of its possibility) naturally leads it to embrace the gifts of revelation. QUESTIONS ABOUT THE OEUVRE AND ITS POSSIBILITIES At the beginning of this essay, I suggested that Chrétien seems—more than thinkers such as Lévinas, Henry, and Marion—to situate himself within the French poetic reception of Heidegger, and that he foregrounds theories of cosmic mediation of the Absolute. I supported this claim through an exploration of his emphasis on touch, which is tied to exchange, mediation, the analogical ‘between’ and the circulation of form, rather than the Lévinasian or Marion-esque trope of ‘distance.’ His insistence on the fact that we only hear the call in the first place through an active, poetic response (though this is also transcendentally ‘given’) enters into these considerations. It suggests that we begin to be fulfilled as human beings not only because we hear the Word of God, but also because we perform liturgical acts, nurturing the Word in order that the Word might reach us. Such acts imply an intense form of touching and rehandling the world, rendering it more worthy of offering. This insistence upon a cosmic insertion within space is then intensified by Chrétien’s deepening of the Lévinasian theme of the metahistorical—our

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calling from before time is inseparable from our calling by a real past that perforce empirically precedes us. There are, however, five ways in which it becomes apparent that Chrétien’s ideas on mediation and exchange are problematic. I have so far described the way in which, echoing Merleau-Ponty, his cosmic-spatial concerns are balanced by ethical-temporal, Lévinasian concerns that are themselves significantly modified, as just described. However, this balance seems occasionally to lean in favour of Lévinasian frameworks. PLOTINUS OR PROCLUS The first example is perhaps the least clear, and yet it opens onto significant questions. When he discusses Platonic recollection, Chrétien compares interpretations of this doctrine by Plotinus and Proclus, suggesting that the latter best preserves it. As a ‘theurgic’ Neo-Platonist, for Proclus, we need the cosmos, liturgical acts and perpetually renewed encounters in time that ‘trigger’ a recollection of the intelligible world (Unforgettable 15–16, 34–37). It follows from this that Chrétien’s defence of cosmic liturgy is close to this ‘theurgic’ model. However, Chrétien also correctly notes that it would be wrong to claim that Plotinus abandons the theme of recollection, in favour of an interior ascent within the soul itself. One can see this in Plotinus’ understanding of the Good. In contrast to the Beautiful, the Good is a trace in us of something that surpasses us and that surpasses every imaged degree of the manifestation of being. It makes us remember what we do not in any way possess (and which therefore is in no sense an a priori); that is, the One before Being, from which Being proceeds (Unforgettable 24–34, 52). Chrétien sometimes entertained different possibilities without resolving their differences. Such is the present case: does he favour an approach like that of Proclus or Plotinus? Perhaps it is not necessary to choose, and yet Plotinus’s approach goes in a somewhat different direction. Although the trace of the good in us is in no way a priori, we nonetheless only know it in a decidedly ‘interior’ way. This need not be in any obvious conflict with the Proclean view, as Chrétien recalls that, for Saint Augustine, interiority concerns the depth of all creation, and turning inward is simply the most immediate encounter with this depth, and not a turn to oneself rather than the other. But Plotinus’s position also implies that the call of the good is elevated above the manifestation of the good, and that there is a correlation between the recollection of what we cannot possess and the gift that we receive from the One (which we cannot possess) of what the One does not possess but which we do, namely, being.32

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As Chrétien correctly concludes, the equivalent of participatory ‘analogy’ in Plotinus (though he scarcely uses this term) in terms of qualitatively different degrees of beauty, negotiated by a purified love, extends only as far as the intelligible sphere, to which the unknown Good or One are in a negative excess. It is rather Proclus who speaks of an analogy of attribution, and the analogy of all first principles of every ontological series to the One itself.33 He implied a giving of being in all its degrees by the ultimate One from its own plenitude, in such a way that participatory analogy extends ‘all the way up.’ For Plotinus, by contrast, the One is like fire that gives the warmth and light that it does not itself possess, a circumstance that later becomes one basis for the Christian mystical theme of a purgative fire that only appears to destroy.34 BEAUTY OR GLORY It is not altogether clear whether Chrétien is not sometimes a Plotinian, as his frequent fascination with the topos of the unburning fire sometimes implies. This is suggested by the second example: his treatment of the theme of the good. Chrétien is reluctant to see beauty within the species of analogical relations and seems to emphasise (after Balthasar) the distance between divine glory and human beauty. This relates to his idea that the visible is only beautiful to the extent that it elicits our response. While this affirmation is persuasive, it raises the question as to whether one can conceive of the invisible that calls within beauty as a hyper-visibility or hyper-formation, and not only as a hidden voice. The question of privileged metaphors is not incidental here. It is striking that in his studies on inter-sensibility, Chrétien insists that the visible speaks, without a corresponding emphasis on hearing making things visible. The latter emphasis seems valid, even where our responses to nature are concerned. In his painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed,’ J. M. W. Turner seems to transform the sounds of nature into colour, just as Edward Munch in his painting The Scream; and today, in Kurt Jackson’s paintings of Cornwall, the use of actual pieces of the landscape alongside paint facilitate a move from the visible to resonant sound, to the metallic clamour and echo of the sea, the rocky coast or fields filled with birds. Yet more strikingly, the composer Olivier Messiaen reverses the direction of the habitual poetic or musical relation to visible nature, in which music is seen primarily as a repertoire of sounds and not spectacle. He restores the metaphor of celestial music in Des Canyons aux Étoiles, by demonstrating that it is not simply a metaphor, and by mixing the acoustic echoes of interstellar space with the heavenly aspirations of earthly birdsong. Moreover, just as he hears the cosmos more than he sees it, he conversely perceives his own human music in terms of vibrant colour. In his first performed work, Offrandes Oubliées, he confronts us with

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‘sin,’ a forgetfulness of divine gifts, and the two gifts of the Passion and the Eucharist. A frenetic musical tempo represents the Passion, but the Eucharist is rendered by the passage of the music into the stasis of musical resonance and colour, an effect realised to the highest degree at the end of Des Canyons aux Étoiles. In his notes to Offrandes Oubliées, Messiaen declares that this work musically describes the Cross with colours of ‘mauve and grey,’ whilst the Eucharist was described ‘in reds and golds.’35 It would seem that, as visible nature is, for Chrétien, an unfulfilled discourse, so for Messiaen resounding nature is a beautiful, ‘grey’ sound, linked with the Passion and demanding fulfilment, even redemption in the work of the human composer. In the Passion, this grey is coloured with a mauve that changes to red and gold in the Eucharist. There is nothing in Messiaen’s position that would not delight Chrétien. But he does not seem to reckon with the implications of this idea that sound can make vision present, to the same degree that he considers the implications of a vision that in some sense speaks (to us). This suggests a remnant of the ‘denigration of the visible’ already alluded to. Of course, there is an anxiety about the domination of the other by the gaze, but one can ask in response to this whether it is possible to say that the other is, beyond the idea of presence before us, and whether there is anything that makes us see this with as much force as visibility. In the case of the visible, there is presence and distinct alterity. If the appearance of the other as manifest to our vision risks domination, then this is because the other cannot appear with such fullness without this risk: the reverse instance of the risk of our investment in commitment to the external world, on which Chrétien insists against Amiel. Just as we cannot touch something without risking injury, so the other cannot display their full alterity without the risk that someone will exploit such a manifestation. In other words, the other subject can only be reduced to objectivity because their alterity needs to be demonstrated by the condition of objectivity, in the sense of something that is before and yet separate from us, as is less obviously the case with the sense of touch. It is possible that we are victims of the post-Cartesian representation of the visible in spatial and geometric terms, which tends to make the objective something that we can circumscribe. To the extent that something exists in the visual field that surpasses this, we tend to be content with thinking of it as if it were light, that is something impossible to see that nonetheless permits us to see, as is the case with Marion’s ‘saturated phenomenon.’ It is more helpful to allow that vision is always caught up in ‘reverse perspective’ which Marion also invokes: our vision of anything is only possible because to a degree it is also situating and positioning, and thereby ‘envisioning’ us. Vision is also a mode of touching and encounter, and remains subject to its rule of reciprocity,

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albeit with a telescopic extension and a far greater allowance of the interval of light and space. There are also other lost aspects to visibility. One can consider, for example, certain tendencies in medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought, which suggested that vision is oriented toward colour in the same way that hearing is oriented toward sound.36 Since Descartes, we have tended to conceive of the world as if it were a black and white photograph in which colour is merely an optional extra supplied by our vision. But it may well be the case, as a phenomenological approach could suggest to those who do not suffer from achromatopsia—i.e., a deficiency in the apprehension of colour, rather than the total absence of this apprehension—that colour is the middle term between the invisible medium of sight, which enables everything, and which is light, and the forms that colour illuminates. In the case of certain traditions of medieval thought, or one might mention the work of the English painter Ivon Hitchens, it is not that colour ‘fills in the outline,’ as in a child’s colouring book, but rather that with colouration, light itself is fixed in formed realities. Such a conception would suggest that one cannot master the visible even in the case of ordinary, and not just ‘saturated’ phenomena. Let us say, for example, that I do not see the table at which I am working as a geometrical circle, but rather as a brilliant brown and amber, which presents itself to me as a certain unnameable form, but which also surpasses this form at its centre and circumference, where it mixes and contrasts with other colours. For Saint Thomas, the beautiful is ‘that which delights vision,’ and as a consequence, the beautiful was first and foremost the coloured, which is the true object of vision and a metaxu between things and sensation (or being and appearance, as for Emmanuel Gabellieri) since colour emanates in our direction with the refraction of light. But if the beautiful is the coloured, and if form is in the gift of colour, then one can more easily understand how the visible ‘calls us,’ whilst remaining within its own visible medium, in such a way that painters can translate this call into a still more intensely lively manifestation, just as poets can translate it into language. Why does this matter? Chrétien’s preferred paradigm suggests that the call of glory ‘gives’ the formed visible, whereas the paradigm of beauty remaining in the field of vision suggests that light, as the source of colour, is not so much transparent, neutral, and colourless as secretly hyper-coloured, unfolding its oblique rainbow as it traverses the earthly atmosphere. The veil of the air becomes a multi-coloured swathe since it unfolds radiance as such. Chrétien carries over the logic of his perspective to the divine itself. Whilst he rejects definitions of divine beauty that confine it to a perfect self-identity or a perfect imitation of the Father by the Son, he does not foreground, or perhaps even allow those traditional understandings of God as eminently containing the radiance of form as such (which is related to the idea that every

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form gathers, manifests and disperses itself, as happens with material form in the mode of colour). Chrétien certainly sees God as that which manifests itself and calls to the highest degree, but in such a way that this manifestation is thought in more economic terms, whilst the call is seen as more essential. He cites Saint François de Sales, for whom the hidden character of God’s beauty infinitely exceeds the beauty of His appearing.37 Chrétien sees this first and concealed beauty as ‘glory’ and not as beauty properly speaking. This would seem to suggest that beauty is not fully a transcendental, but rather that it is only secured as beauty because it is surpassed by something greater. One of the consequences of this understanding is that beauty remains something simply created and does not possess a genuine, analogical continuity with the divine inner divine manifestation. What is essential about created beauty is that it calls us to something beyond beauty and not that it partially reveals an eminent beauty to us: this is one reason why beauty is primarily ‘terrible,’ always of itself (and not by contrast) ‘sublime.’38 Chrétien here seems to reject the idea, widespread in the patristic and medieval sources that he prefers, that created beauty is a ‘copy’ or ‘imitation’ of the divine archetype. This cannot of course mean that we ‘see’ first the invisible, divine model and then copy it. Rather, we come to see by copying, just as we first hear in responding. However, if God is the source of the plenitude of being, and if the call offers the response, then created beauty is a radical mimesis, to the extent that the different means are themselves borrowed, including the mode of copying itself. Such is the nature of metaphysical participation, to which Chrétien does not obviously adhere. Rather, he tends to emphasise the alterity of creation vis-à-vis God, and the fact that he feels no ‘resentment’ toward the plurality that it does not possess. As a result, if beauty is only found in creation, it is concomitantly the case that Chrétien often conceives of divine glory effectively in light of the Plotinian One beyond Being, which ‘does not have’ what it gives. As for Marion, he effectively understands Dionysian or Thomist eminence, in contradiction to the original texts, as if it implied only the hyperbolic distance of a distinct source, and not also a super-maximal and mysterious degree of what proceeds from it, in a more Proclean manner. There is a danger here of granting such an importance to the alterity of creation with respect to God that one ironically drifts into an onto-theological contrast between two different ontic ‘beings.’ That God can be conceived as the One beyond Being changes nothing here. The problem of something apparently standing outside of God, in the same way that one subject stands outside another, remains. At this point, the intersubjective model of call and response needs to be refined by the metaphysical and paradoxical conjoining, in the mode of Platonic methexis, of the physical model of the whole and its parts with the physical model of original and imitation, if we are to avoid

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thinking of God and His creatures as if they were subject to rivalry or mutual displacement. Chrétien undoubtedly holds that beauty mediates God to us via the cosmos and that this is inevitable. To be human, as he says, means to be ‘wounded’ by beauty and subjected to her terror and the profound disturbance that she provokes.39 He is right to say of Beauty that she ultimately disturbs rather more than she consoles, and yet this is manifested as much by the immanent turbulence of colour (as an attention to cinema, in which space itself becomes temporal movement, would demonstrate further) as by the implicit voice within the visible. The joyful anguish elicited by beauty is intrinsic to beauty and therefore need not be taken as pointing beyond beauty, so much as to its infinite intensification in transcendence as glory, where the contrast between rupture and connection is incomprehensibly surpassed. Should beauty be taken, as for Chrétien at times, simply as an important mode of manifestation? The experience of manifestation is necessarily the experience of beauty as such, if all that appears is always coloured and always illuminated. He is nearer to such a position when he discusses the way in which, for Plotinus, beauty need not denote formal harmony, but can arise as the flash of flame or the joy of a fleeting moment, even the ‘bonheur’ of every temporal moment in its disclosure of being. Because the manifest as such is the beautiful, beauty is shown in the very motion (kinesis) associated with appearing, and which, for Plotinus (unlike Aristotle), is ineradicable from the nature of being, including intellectual being.40 It is not clear, however, that Chrétien consistently remains with beauty as motion any more than he remains with touch as circulation. The point of the ‘flash’ for him concerns an invitation to an exit more than a ‘sudden’ conjoining of the eternal with the temporal, after Plato. Of course, he is right to say that mediation and reciprocity cannot be easily transferred to the relations between God and creatures. According to Maximus, the exchange between the visible and invisible domains is primarily a matter of relations between the visible world and the angelic world. There is, by contrast, ‘nothing,’ no domain of mediation that extends between God and His creation. But does this mean that our access to God is not mediated? We cannot go towards God by crossing a domain between ourselves and God, but we cannot move towards God at all except by ‘setting out as pilgrims’ or by ‘welcoming strangers’ within the created order. We only reach the supernatural through the supernatural that is perpetually revealed to us by the everyday; it is as if every other in its real fascination were for us a beckoning but benevolent mystery, leading us horizontally astray in order to divert us upwards through an experience of the angelic. And yet, to climb this hierarchical ladder means arriving at a lower and more distant position, because it is solely a matter

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of catching a glimpse, albeit via supernatural mediation, of the absolute and non-mediated gulf between ourselves and the supernatural. Does this suggest that we should gradually leave behind the mediation of created beauty, as we ascend the distance that separates us from the One? Not necessarily, because the meaning of mediation for Christianity is not simply the offering of signs. Mediation itself is rather the supreme sign, as when the Johannine writings refer to the mystery of our co-inherence with Christ. Mediation does not only indicate the One, but rather the One which is itself also the ultimate mediation. This is what is demonstrated by the revelation of the Trinity. To the extent that He is triune, God is not only eminent qua super-formal beauty; He is also eminent insofar as He infinitely realises the disclosure of an excess. In effect, the divine glory is not an infinitely reserved call; it is rather an infinitely perfect manifestation by the Father of the Son, who is not a mere ‘copy’ of the Father, but the original paternity of the Father, who Himself does not exhaust his fecund mystery with such a perfect expression, but rather renews it in His Spirit, testimony at once to the excess of the origin and of the ‘work’ that is manifested. Despite his numerous references to revealed truths, Chrétien is hesitant about mentioning the immanent Trinity, as if doing so in a philosophical register would be to risk going beyond phenomenology into speculation. This stands in contrast with his ready philosophical engagement with Christology. And here we can identify a convergence between his phenomenological commitment and the French Oratorian Christological themes which he invokes, with more boldness than that ventured by Balthasar. As we have seen, he follows Malebranche’s intensification of apophasis, by insisting that even to offer our humility to God is a kind of subtle presumption and temptation. Nothing can be added to the unknown divine glory, and therefore the addition that is Creation only makes sense as a prelude to the Incarnation, by which the addition paradoxically ceases to be an addition at all, since through Christ (who will be, for Paul, ‘all in all’) created nature is personally and eternally joined to the unchanging divine nature.41 Concomitantly, our access to God and our speaking of him can only validly be Christological: beyond apophasis, just because we have taken this to the ultimate extreme, our talk about God is now always also talk about the God-Man, just as for Maximus the infinite will eschatologically return to the finite as much as vice-versa, and for Chrétien, after Thomas Traherne, the expansion of the soul is as much cosmically outwards as transcendentally upwards. It is also in specifically Christological terms that Chrétien amends the Plotinian view that the One gives what it does not have. Instead of contesting this in terms of Proclean analogical eminence (of which he is chary, as we have seen), he contrasts a Neoplatonic reserve with the kenotic giving of himself by God in both Creation and Incarnation.42 We can therefore readily

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see a certain fit in Chrétien between a radical apophaticism, a radically strong Christology and the insistence that we can only know that which appears: God is only known through Christ. Yet there is an obvious tension between his presentation of Malebranche as ‘surpassing’ metaphysics in the direction of Christology (not, of course, how Malebranche understood himself) and the intensely speculative metaphysical mode of Christology that Chrétien endorses. The view that Christ’s incarnation is required in order to complete the Creation and not simply to redeem us from our sin is not something that appears to us with intuitive directness, rather than being an interpretation of Christ’s appearance in relation to the appearing of everything else? And to be able to say that only in Christ is God shown to us, requires a metaphysical account of the unbridgeable distance of finite from infinite that is not just ‘manifest.’ A strictly idealist and pure phenomenology would maintain that we know only that which is finitely donated to us, including the infinite. But even this claim involves, in reality, a speculative and therefore metaphysical separation of what appears from what does not appear, and so of appearance from being—even though, by definition, that relation can never become apparent. But in Chrétien’s case, he seems to allow certain Lévinasian intimations of the nature of the infinite as the call of the ethical, and so forth, as we have described. This is already speculatively to trespass upon realist terrain, and the confining such trespass to ‘the call’ and refusal of its extension to an analogical account of the eminence of truth and beauty would seem to be arbitrary as well as problematic, if one wishes to talk about the Christian God. The inherited discourse of orthodox Christology, moreover, is manifestly interpretative and speculative. The subtleties of the Chalcedonian formulae are not just ‘given’ to us, though they seek to be loyal to the divine theophany. More importantly, these formulae do not abolish the apophatic distance between God and creatures, but paradoxically uphold it while simultaneously supressing it. For this reason, the admitted truth, endorsed by both Dionysius and Augustine, and later by Aquinas, that we can only name God by naming Jesus, does not substitute for the discipline of analogical eminence. In Christ, God is revealed to us, but also concealed, revealed sub contrario, as Martin Luther insisted. Therefore, our grace-given encounter with God in Christ remains an ascent, a constant participatory passage from his humanity to his divinity, though this is also a passage into our transfigured humanity, since deification is as much a dilatory expansion of the known, as it is an ascetic rise to unknown glory. It follows that the claim that the infinite is only mediated by the finite in Christ cannot be a purely phenomenological claim, as it ambivalently appears to be for Chrétien. The need for a speculative ascent is not removed by the event of the Incarnation, but rather rendered possible and redefined as cosmic transformation. If the mediation of God appears to us, then it can only appear

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as the mediation between appearing and being that lies beyond appearing: a mediation grounded in the Trinitarian God Himself. As such, it elicits our authentic reception, but also our creative interpretation. After John Scotus Eriugena, to know the God who created us through the angels, we have as it were to create and imagine both the angels and God in turn. ART OR CREATION A third question naturally follows. To what extent is Chrétien inclined to see in human poiesis something that reveals the divine? He is inclined to do so to some degree, since we can only hear the divine call through the supreme poetic, collective and cosmic effort that is the liturgy. God creates, he writes, through His gaze, and we gaze ‘by analogy,’ and in this gaze we also ‘gather’ and ‘name’ things in an active and poetic way. But does it flow from this that, for Chrétien, human art participates in the divine creation? He is as wary of this idea, as he is of the theory that created beauty has a distant share in divine glory. And he does have apparently powerful reasons for this wariness. First, Chrétien maintains that divine creation only came to be seen as a divine ‘art’ with Saint Augustine (Hand to Hand 94–130). In the Bible, he contends, creation is caused by the proffering of the divine word and is not a productive shaping akin to that of an artisan. As Creator, God is always ‘more’ than what He gives, and once again Chrétien conceives this in somewhat Plotinian terms as the surpassing of being by the One who gives being. This notion of a creator that exceeds its creation is nonetheless balanced by the insistence that God feels no ‘resentment’ toward the plurality it does not possess. In the case of Saint Augustine, however, this latter theory—according to Chrétien—is secondary to a conception of divine excess vis-à-vis creation as an exemplary pre-containing of created excellence in the divine Logos. This ensures that the description of divine creation by analogy with human art becomes a retroactive loop, for which human art understands itself through the model of divine creation, borrowing the idea of the creator as always in eminent excess of what is made. For the Greek conception of art, this was not the case: poiesis, for Aristotle (according to Chrétien) had to do with the ‘clarity’ of the thing to be caused, and there was no sense of the latter being a diminished expression of the idea or genius of the artist. For Plotinus, however, it is true that the work of art can never fully equal in excellence the ‘art’ that resides in the mind of the contemplating creator, even though the latter would be deprived of its object if it were not directed outward. Yet only with Augustine does art become emphatically ‘creation.’ Thus, for him the human artistic work is ‘dead’ in matter, but ‘alive’ and superior in the mind

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of its creator, just as created things are dead in themselves but alive insofar as they are sustained by the Spirit of God and are more perfect in their original models, contained in the divine mind, than in their created instantiation. Here, once more, the question that haunts Chrétien is the Malebranchian one of why God produced something necessarily inferior. Secondly, while Chrétien maintains that the extreme claims made during the Renaissance on behalf of human creativity ought not be seen as neo-pagan deviations from the Western Christian tradition, but rather as one culmination of that tradition, he nonetheless discerns in this ‘titanism’ (as he regards it, after Balthasar) a development that is false in both phenomenological and theological terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that he sees something amiss in the Augustinian analogy between human artistic production and creation. If human art participates in divine creativity, then the products of human artistic endeavour will appear inferior to their conception in the mind of the artist. This signifies a devaluation of the material process of human art and the introduction of a false division between art and craft which seems to be of a piece with the separation of the essence of art from touching things with one’s hands, where modification continues to be a kind of reception. According to this latter model of craft, the mutual gift is judged to be central and tightly bound to the destiny of all human work to become an inter-human gift that passes ‘from hand to hand.’ Opposed to this, divine creation is not in any way an artisanal work or work of craft, but a call in which a voice makes things pass from nothing to existence. As soon as the artist is elevated above her work, confusing art with creation, human art will be interpreted as the act of leading something absolutely new from nothing into being, through the power of the mind. Nicholas of Cusa arrives at this conclusion in his famous example, cited by Chrétien, of the emergence of the novel reality that is a ‘spoon.’ Likewise, if a human being received this divine capacity, it would be as if she had gained a perfect insight into the divine process of creation and as if she could herself effectively generate a cosmos, do everything that God can do, if only she had the power and the materials. Chrétien cites Marsilio Ficino as an example of this vision of the human productive power. From there, the road to the Romantic cult of the genius lies open; if art resides in the personality of the artist, then licence is given to a kind of artistic indolence. But most of this history is open to challenge. First, it is the case that, according to Genesis and Isaiah, divine creation happens through divine language, but one finds elsewhere in the scriptures, a presentation of the divine act of creation by analogy with the human act of making. It seems somewhat sophistic to maintain that the comparison between God and a potter merely serves to emphasise the fragility and dependence of what is created. Further still, the Bible describes divine action, which is always presented as a creatio

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continua that is capable of bringing about any effect by any means, as the work of God’s hands. And, when Moses enacts divine power, he holds out a staff with his hand and separates the waters, in an echo of the initial, divine formation of the cosmos (Exodus 14:16). Moreover, it would seem that Ezekiel applies a complex inter-sensibility to God, when he says that God holds out His hand in his direction and gives him a scroll covered in writing to eat (Ezekiel 3:3). It seems strange that Chrétien, who writes of God that He ‘touches’ us, does not see in God one who metaphorically creates ‘by the work of His hands.’ Secondly, the idea that precedes the work of art in the mind of the artist can imply two distinct things. It can signify that the artist has a project or a repertoire of rules that they subsequently apply to matter. The classicism of their art suggests that this notion was not alien to the Greeks. When Aristotle speaks of the art of medicine in Metaphysics, this seems to be what he has in mind.43 However, Chrétien describes things as if the Greek conception was equivalent to the quite different ‘Modernist’ conception (he cites Paul Claudel as an example) in which the artist effaces themselves before something that they set in motion and do not understand in advance. Here it is valid to ask whether this Modernist conception in fact remains within the Romantic paradigm, according to which the artist is a prophetic medium, even if there is a shift away from the prophetic artist subject himself. Such an understanding forcefully emphasises, in a manner incompatible with Classicism, the work of art as the occasion for something new, something which, nonetheless, as illustrated by Nicholas of Cusa’s example of the spoon, remains compatible (as for the British poet David Jones) with the conception of art as, first and foremost, craft. If this is the case, the kenosis of the artist before the emergence of the work of art, privileged by Chrétien, remains indebted to the post-Christian analogy between art and creation. One could articulate this in simpler terms, by recalling that the human response to the divine call is not only the work of human hands but also a work of language that gives new names to things. Thirdly, Chrétien would seem surprisingly to misrepresent both Plotinus and Augustine. Far from Plotinus’s compromising the priority of the work of art over the artist, it is rather the case that he abandons the ‘classical’ view, suggesting that art is not premeditated but immediate and spontaneous, famously citing dance not craft as his paradigm, as an instance where the artist and her art arise simultaneously.44 One could argue that his perspective was retained by Augustine insofar as he insists at Confessions XI that the immediate and non-pre-considered arising of the Creation through the Divine Word (or even Song) is a more appropriate analogue than that of craft, implying a pre-formed material waiting to be conjoined with a pre-existing form.45

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From this perspective, Chrétien seems to have things somewhat back to front; it is art as craft that seems to depend on the pre-artistic idea, whereas it is art as ‘creation,’ human and divine, that (at first tentatively) moves away from this, in combination with the Neoplatonic idea of art as ‘emanation’ towards the primacy of the work to be produced. Moreover, notions of inspiration and genius do not necessarily align with an emphasis on the mind of the artist; rather, they are always, even before modernism, connected with the idea of the artist as mere vatic vehicle, denying himself in the face of a divine efflux coursing through him and aiming towards the eventuating opus. Fourthly, Chrétien does not seem to take into account an important episode in the genealogy which he traces. Before Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham had articulated a certain human creation ex nihilo. This was the direct consequence, not of an analogy between art and creation, but of adherence to a univocity of being between God and creation. If being is the same, whether it is finite or infinite, then just as the infinite God can be the cause of every finite being, so human beings may cause a finite being. Despite his Neo-platonism, Ficino seems to echo this univocal perspective, as Galileo later with similar affirmations concerning the possibility of a human vision of divine creation. Conversely, Nicholas of Cusa, whose mind was more analogical in tendency, came to see the divine, infinite mathematics that created the world as inaccessible for us, save for our distantly ‘conjectural’ understanding.46 This suggests that the participation of human art in divine creation need not be condemned to rivalry, as it is for Ficino, between the human artist and the divine artist: it is rather a case of discerning whether the analogia entis is abandoned. Even if Nicholas of Cusa speaks, like Ockham, of a human creation ex nihilo, he does not here deny that Creation from Nothing is an absolute principle without transition, which therefore does not admit of degrees, as Saint Thomas emphasised. Rather, it seems that this absolute divine principle is continually manifested in time by the emergence of new things, and that this manifestation finds in humanity a site of mediation at the level of secondary causes. Saint Thomas suggests a similar mode of participation in the absolute creative principle, when he writes that light proceeds without transition from its source and that the same is true of the verbum mentis in relation to the human mind.47 He compares these processes to the absence of transition in divine creation. Similarly, for Cusanus, as the new form ‘spoon’ emerges, there is a series of material movements and formal modifications which precede it, and yet there is no spoon in existence antecedent to ‘the creation of the spoon’; a new eidos is posited absolutely. This invocation of the verbum mentis gestures toward a fifth possible problem. When Saint Augustine referred to the highest excellence of the ‘art’ in the mind of the artist, was he speaking of the pre-eminent excellence of a

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‘project,’ as in the case of the house—mentioned by Saint Augustine—that is always more ideal in the mind of the architect than the houses that he builds? This may be the case in a certain sense, but one can also maintain that the invocation of the ‘art’ in the mind displaces the focus of interest: this shifts from Greek Classicism’s nominality of principles and method, together with its antecedent projects, towards the verbal process of an inspiration that is continually renewed, in keeping with Augustine’s preference for the ‘language’ model over the ‘art model,’ mentioned above. One can maintain that, in the case of both Romanticism and Modernism, the two models are capable of mutually encouraging one another, though the emphasis frequently falls on one rather than the other. If one thinks not of an antecedent project, but rather of inspired genius (which was often taken to be the lurking spiritual genius of every single human being—as in Grey’s Elegy—and not the treasured possession of an elite), the conception of art as verbal process can marry a sense of being oriented toward what has emerged, with the sense of an origin that nothing can exhaust. This coheres well with Joubert’s positive linking of inevitable artistic ‘disappointment’ with the exceeding of her intentionality by the artist’s own work. In an eminent sense, it may help us to understand how the divine Father is an inexhaustible origin and yet nothing but the originating of his Son. The shift from a pre-existing plan to a preliminary and emergent process was encouraged by both Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, according to whom, inner human thought, whether it be theoretical or practical cognition, implies the emanation of an ‘interior word’ that echoes the generation of the Son, who is the Word, by the Father within the Trinity.48 Such a conception implies that the idea, which precedes a work is already in itself a kind of interior work. In addition, the Trinitarian context reveals that in the case of God, it is erroneous to say that the creator is in excess of what is created. This is true of His external work, but not of His internal work. Here the Father is an inspired origin to the extent that He fully expresses Himself in the Son, even if a surplus of inspiration remains as the Holy Spirit. This also shows that the ‘call’ of the divine glory is not in excess of the interior divine manifestation, as the infinite plenitude of beauty. In an Augustinian frame, where human art not only participates in divine creative power, but also in the infinite Trinitarian art, the emphasis is placed as much on the excess of the work of art with respect to the artist, as on the excess of the artist with respect to the work of art. Ficino lost sight of the first of these emphases, perhaps for the sake of a ‘Plotinian’ account of recollection as a retreat into the pre-given ideas within the soul. Conversely, Cusa emphasised the necessity of ‘conjectural’ works of art for the accomplishment of the process of human thought, which seems more compatible with a ‘theurgic’ description of recollection, as for Proclus.49

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There are, it seems, good reasons for scrutinising the idea that an analogy between human art and divine creation inevitably minimises the importance of artisanal work and the primacy of the work as emergent. If an absolute abyss is placed between human art and divine creation, refusing all analogy and participation, it will no longer be possible for the gift-exchange implicit in craft to reveal anything about God as He is in Himself, as opposed to what He has ordained. We saw in the foregoing that without participation, God ceases to be mediation and figured presence in Himself; equally He ceases to be in Himself creative production, joyful generation of the surprising and marvellous. But if God is not by nature the origin of this production, then His decision to create a finite world becomes baffling and compromising of His simplicity. In the case of a refusal of the analogies of beauty and art, the divine call of language is enthroned above divine manifestation as visibly produced. This suggests a relation between, on the one hand, this twofold refusal, and on the other, a minimisation of the visible. And this leads to a further complication concerning the work of Chrétien in general. HEARING OR VISION We have seen how both language and touch are implicated in inter-sensory mediation. For Chrétien, both seem, for insufficient reasons, to mediate a hierarchy between a lesser vision and a superior hearing, rather than maintaining a balance between the two. The eschatological touch of God achieves a more intimate contact than hearing, but Chrétien again emphasises that touch is without image and representation, whilst continuing to realise a call that reaches the totality of human flesh (or spiritual flesh). But why must this be the case? What becomes of the blind sculptor who sees? And the promise of the beatific vision? If touching and being touched are the most intimate ways of being called, is not seeing with clarity the most blinding, not with domination, but to the extent to which, and according to the way in which we are ourselves seen? That we have been called and have seen the other, surely meet in the reciprocity of vision and hearing. Chrétien tends to assimilate language solely to the passage of sound, whilst this role assuredly applies just as properly to music. Language does not only translate image into sound, but also the opposite: it is here that music becomes most programmatic and sounds make us imaginatively ‘see’ something. This is the kernel of truth in Derrida’s insistence on the fact that language is as primordially ideographic as it is spoken sound.50 In effect, if touch gives birth to a common sense by mixing all other senses in touch itself, it would seem that ‘signification’ is born in language through the impenetrable mixture of the

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musical and pictorial. Poetry cannot give the upper hand to one or the other. Vision without sound imprisons the other, but sound without vision makes the other evaporate and traps them in an ideal abstraction. BODY AS ORGAN OR MEDIUM A fifth and final critical point concerns the mediating role of touch. Aristotle, in De Anima, does not see the body as the organ of touch, but rather as its sensory medium, equivalent to light in the case of vision. This is how he explains our phenomenological experience of distance in the case of touch, despite an apparent absence of any spatial interval between touching bodies.51 If the body is the medium, then the organ of touch becomes the soul. Yet Chrétien prefers the position of Aristotle in later texts, which makes the body the dispersed and direct organ of touch, and he suggests that this was subsequently confirmed by neurological research. Yet this scientific advance does not seem to affect the phenomenological problem of the coincidence of immediacy and distance. Chrétien indeed focusses on this problem and maintains that one can localise a coming together and a distance that do not pertain to the spatial distinction between ‘near’ and ‘far.’ But does this co-incidence of distance and proximity suggest, and more metaphysically, a psychic relation with the physical world? Is this what Aristotle means when he says that ‘touch proves the soul,’ because even in the experience of physical immediacy, we remain separated from what is immediately felt, since this is the necessary condition for encountering another reality: this echoes Joubert’s insistence on the necessary role of emptiness If all sensations are modes of touch, we can accordingly relativise the contrast between organ and medium for all the senses. For example, my eye and light together form a continuum, a screen between me and the thing that I see. For Aristotle, I can only see, because sensation is completed in an awareness endowed with self-reflexivity. Merleau-Ponty took this further, saying that such self-reflexivity begins in the self-relation of the body, even though, as for Chrétien, this self-relation is occasioned by relation to the other.52 This means that ‘distance’ in sensation is enabled by a reflexive, psychic displacement, rather than primarily by a spatial displacement through a medium, though this is essential for vision and hearing. It is possible to think the body and the sensory organs in terms of metaxu, or medium, in the sense developed by Emmanuel Gabellieri. This would be the case for the sense of touch, where, as both Aristotle and Merleau-Ponty observed, there is a continuity between the surface of the body and the physical surface of the world in general. It is true, as Chrétien maintains, that we experience our touching flesh as our own body, which is not the case with the medium of light, and that we feel touch on the surface of our body and

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not only ‘inwardly.’ However, as far as the first point is concerned, the body is only ‘our’ organ because we ‘are’ simply this bodily folded upon the continuum of the surface of the earth. As for the second point, although we experience touch in our flesh as we experience vision through our eyes, one can also say that, phenomenologically, we see ‘inside’ the medium of light and ‘at the edge’ of the seen object. We touch at the surface of our body because it is the medium as much as the organ of touch. By avoiding the more realist Aristotelian theme of the body as the medium of touch and of all sensation, Chrétien tends to see ‘my body’ as that which primarily belongs to ‘my subjectivity,’ rather than as a moment within a continuous screen. This latter conception suggests that the I and the other object or subject are always-already mediated, and that mediation itself gives birth to differences that always remain mediated. Without this conception, one would be inclined to see sensation as the meeting of two originally isolated realities, in the form of an ‘I-You’ encounter. Although Chrétien emphasised touch as a site of exchange, he might have gone further and recognised that exchange is the primary transcendental reality. For this, he would need to make the idea of flesh a medium as much as an organ of sensation. Being appears, yet it retains a manifest surplus to its appearing. In this sense phenomenology registers something more than the phenomenon: a ‘medium’ between being and appearance that takes it beyond appearance and so beyond phenomenology into a speculative and so metaphysical ‘seeing.’ Conversely, metaphysics never simply ‘takes off’ from the phenomenological dimension. As for Plato, it does not recognise any being that does not, by virtue of its existence manifest itself, and is therefore in some degree manifest to us, however disguised and however far its very manifestness reveals something concealed concerning which we must perforce ‘conjecture’ if we are going to interpret that which appears to us. With, but beyond Chrétien, we can construe this to be the very phenomenon of beauty as accessed by the imagination, after Joubert: here the abstract is rendered definite, but the definite somewhat abstracted, just as something emerges from the mists of the vague and yet the penumbra of the vague remains, if we are to do any justice to reality. Chrétien’s unintegrated opus would seem to imply the threefold interaction of phenomenology, hermeneutics, as much by its mode of practice as by its specific articulations, and yet this threefold balance is never quite arrived at: the phenomenological moment holds sway and distorts some of his conclusions and textual readings, in ways that I have suggested.

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CONCLUDING WITH A CAT The five critiques that I have proposed above suggest further supplementations that would reinforce the vision, central in Chrétien’s work, of a cosmic liturgy that implies mediation, inter-sensation, the touch of manipulation, and the response of language as poetry. I maintained in the foregoing that his philosophy requires, more than he perhaps recognised, the admission of participation in eminent divine beauty, in mediation, and in art. However, Chrétien rightly insists on the fact that a participatory vision should not leave us without a response to Malebranche’s question as to why the all-sufficient God created something alongside Himself. Although ‘everything’ that pertains to created being derives from God, it is the case that, in some way, created being is ‘not’ God, that in some sense Plotinus was right and that God has given what He does not have. At its most extreme point, such an emphasis can encourage affirmation of the univocity of being: finite being as wholly ‘exterior’ to infinite being, because they are ‘the same’ insofar as they are ‘being.’ Chrétien does not suggest this direction, since he is content with recognising that reciprocity and adoration are exclusively proper to the finite. This means, however, that the extreme participatory emphasis on dependence, that ‘everything’ that pertains to created being derives from God, is what enables recognition, with discernment, of that which is a paradoxical ‘extra’ towards God. Chrétien seems to recoil from analogy and participation because phenomenology deals only with what is manifest. I have already alluded to some reasons as to why such a restriction is impossible. Yet has he indirectly introduced the ‘always already’ of speculation and interpretation into phenomenology, by adopting the liturgical paradigm? In effect, if we hear the call primarily in our response, and if this actively ‘alters’ what is given through the play of imagination, then if this act of conjecture ‘sees’ something, one cannot reject this moment of conjecture. If the response hears the call, the response is only offered if the doxological act is also a speculative one. Our first response to God certainly must be doxological, because God is not an object in the world to be studied. Likewise, He is not a simple subject in a world of other subjects, about whom we know something before responding to them. But, since God is not a subject in the world but the call of the world to the estate of being in the world, we only know that He is there when we respond to Him, and this means that the response must also imagine that to which it responds. The voice of this cosmic theatre must imagine the theatre in itself, as well as the one who designed or conceived it. As a consequence, a theological discourse that is not onto-theological must be speculatively metaphysical as well as phenomenological. Analogy, participation, and eminence effectively prevent

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the arising of a new onto-theology of the distance between the divine subject and human subjects that could be fostered by a phenomenology that supposedly prides itself on being free from speculation. Chrétien’s astonishing work, so suffused with Neoplatonism and speculatively cosmic Christology, seems to hover on the verge of this insight. It appears to call for an interpretative repair and fulfilment by re-situating it within a novel generic mixture of phenomenology, hermeneutics, theology, and metaphysics, a transposition into a metaxological key. Perhaps one of his more enigmatic essays can be read slightly against him here. In ‘The Cat as instrument of nudity,’ Chrétien points out how nudity must be indicated in painting not by direct showing, but by means of contrast: discarded clothes or the unclothable furry nature of the lurking cat, as in Manet’s Olympia and other examples (Hand to Hand 85–93). This is because only the human being is naked, nakedness being a convention of absence. Since nakedness is not just ‘there,’ it must always be metaphorically, metonymically, or synecdochically indicated. But this is also impossible if nakedness is unique and (rather like the Plotinian One) absolutely unlike anything else in not being there at all, even though it is our universal human fatality. Thus, nudity is the purest ‘presence,’ and yet ‘the event of nudity is not implemented.’ Further undressing is always required, and endless reverting allusions to clothing as witnessed by so many artistic depictions. It seems that nudity is neither natural and self-evident, as J.-K. Huysmans noted, nor even possible as cultural contrivance. The sub-text of this seemingly non-theological essay may be that the ‘knowledge’ of Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, in reality lacks an object. For the content of their fallen awareness is shame at their very selves. Covering up this shame, they only increase it, and yet removing the garments does not diagnose the object of shame, nor alleviate it through a rediscovery of innocence, because every nude and every depiction of a nude is never free from a coy knowingness. It would seem to be the mystery of our fallen condition that Chrétien is obliquely observing. But if we take nakedness as a cipher for being and clothing as a cipher for appearance, what seems to be lacking to human beings is the natural clothing of the cat, its very fur, purring and contentment. Our fallen estate is to oscillate between an impossible attempt to confine ourselves to mere appearances and an equally impossible attempt to know being in its purity, as if the separation of phenomenology from metaphysics were the theoretical mark of our lapsed condition. Our recovery of unfallen knowledge must be summoned by way of a trust that appearances can convey being, and that all beings can convey the very source of being. The implications of Chrétien’s atypically Derridean short essay would seem to be deconstructive as to the possibility of either phenomenology or of metaphysics, unless we allow the

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theologically and Christologically mediated interplay between the two, as the present essay has argued. NOTES 1. See especially Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. J. Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), passim. This book will henceforth by cited in my text as Unforgettable. 2. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of the Visible in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Oakland CA: California University Press, 1993). 3. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 20024), pp. 44–131. This book will henceforth by cited in my text as Call. 4. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Offering of the World,” The Ark of Speech, trans. A. Brown (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 111–48. This book will henceforth by cited in my text as Ark. The theme I touch upon here recurs in J.-L. Chrétien, Promesses Furtives (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2004). 5. See Pavel Florensky, The Meaning of Idealism: The Metaphysics of Genus and Countenance, trans. B. Jakim (New York: Semantron, 2020). 6. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Hand to Hand. Listening to the Work of Art, trans. S. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 114. This book will henceforth by cited in my text as Hand to Hand. 7. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “La Limite de la Métaphysique selon Malebranche,” in La Voix Nue: Phénomenologie de la Promesse (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 295–315. 8. Ibid., p. 301. 9. In this respect, Chrétien shares something with the English writer Owen Barfield. See Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (London: Barfield Press UK, 2011); and Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (London: Barfield Press UK, 2010). 10. As developed in the chapter entitled “Does Beauty say Adieu?” in Ark. 11. Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2020). 12. Rather in the way that English cathedrals are as long as the height reached by their spires. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Return to Eden with Thomas Traherne,” in Spacious Joy, trans. A. Davenport (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), pp. 126–49. 13. See Jean Trouillard, La Mystagogie de Proclos (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982). 14. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Joseph Joubert: une philosophie à l’état naissant,” in Reconaissances philosophiques (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2010), pp. 257–94. 15. Pavel Florensky, Imaginaries in Geometry, trans. A. Oppo and M. Spano (London: Mimesis International, 2021), and At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism, pp. 15–37. 16. Jean-Louis Chrétien “L’obliquité humaine et l’obliquité divine dans la Conversations chrétiennes de Malebranche,” in La Voix Nue, pp. 99–142.

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17. The echo of René Girard is appropriate, because he drew upon Rousseau, who in turn drew upon Malebranche. 18. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Penser le style de Louis Chardon,” in Reconnaissances philosophiques, pp. 93–104. 19. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Amiel and the Pathology of Dilation,” in Spacious Joy, pp. 110–25; and “Amiel et la parole donnée,” La Voix Nue, pp. 143–58. 20. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Fragilité (Paris: Minuit, 2017), pp. 159–61. 21. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Under the Gaze of the Bible, trans. J. Dunaway (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 1–22, 85–103. 22. Anne A. Davenport, ‘Translator’s Preface,’ in Call, pp. vii–xxvii. 23. Chrétien, Fragilité, pp. 108–33. 24. See Catherine Pickstock, “Messiaen and Deleuze: The Musico-Theological Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism,” in Theory, Culture and Society, Dec 2008: pp. 173–99. 25. Call, p. 117 [Translation modified]. See also John Milbank, ‘The Soul of Reciprocity,’ Part One, Modern Theology (July 2001): pp. 335–91 and Part Two, Modern Theology (October 2001): pp. 485–509. 26. Emmanuel Gabellieri, Le phénomène et l’entre-deux: Pour une métaxologie (Paris: Hermann, 2019). 27. Chrétien, Fragilité, pp. 159–210. 28. For his more explicit critique of Henry, see “La Parole selon Michel Henry,” in Reconnaissances philosophiques, pp. 169–90. 29. The theme is developed at length in the chapter of The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For entitled “The Immemorial and Recollection.” 30. Pavel Florensky, The Meaning of Idealism: The Metaphysics of Genus and Countenance, trans. B. Jakim (New York: Semantron Press, 2020). 31. See John Milbank, Being Reconciled (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 44–60. 32. ‘L’Analogie selon Proclus,’ Reconnaissances philosophiques, pp. 51–70; “Le Bien donne ce qui’il n’a pas,” La Voix Nue, pp. 259–74. 33. “L’Analogie selon Proclus,” p. 52; Proclus, Elements of Theology, p. 100. See John Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festchrift in Honour of Andrew Louth, eds. Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 107–60. 34. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Le feu selon Plotin,” in La Voix Nue, pp. 316–28. 35. Olivier Messiaen, Les Offrandes Oubliées (Paris: Durand, 2001). 36. See Spike Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages (London: Marion Boyars, 2009). 37. “Does Beauty say Adieu?” in Ark, p. 98; see Jean-Louis Chrétien, “La Beauté Comme Inchoation de la Gloire (Sur Hans Urs Von Balthasar),” in Reconnaissances philosophiques, pp. 295–308. 38. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’effroi du beau (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2008). 39. This is a central theme of L’Effroi du Beau. 40. “Plotin en movement” and “Bonheur et temporalité,” in Reconnaissances philosophiques, pp. 13–33, 35–49. 41. “La Limite de la Métaphysique selon Malebranche,” art. cit., see note 5.

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42. “L’Analogie selon Plotin,” art. cit., see note 27. 43. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1048b, pp. 18–35. 44. Plotinus, Enneads, III.2.6; IV.4.33. 45. Augustine, Confessions, XI. 5–13. See John Milbank, “The Confession of Time in Augustine,” Maynooth Philosophical Papers, 10. 2020: pp. 5–56. God does not ‘pre-think’ His Creation: this is too anthropomorphic. He thinks and performs it at once, just as the Father eternally thinks and performs Himself in the Son/Word. 46. John Milbank, “Afterword: The Grandeur of Reason and the perversity of Rationalism: Radical Orthodoxy’s First Decade,” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 367–404, esp. 384–87. 47. Thomas Aquinas, ST I. q.45 a.2 ad 3. See John Milbank, ‘On “Thomistic Kabbalah,” Modern Theology, 27:1 (January 2011): 147–85. 48. J. Milbank, “On “Thomistic Kabbalah.” 49. See John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), passim. 50. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 51.Aristotle, De Anima, 422b–435b, 26; John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 60–87. 52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The interwining—The Chiasm,’ The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 130–55.

Index

absolute memory, 150 admiration, 43 Aeschylus, 71 aesthetics: of body, 46, 48–49, 53–54; of responsibility, 112; in touch, 146 agôn (good fight), 67–68, 69, 72–73, 76, 78 agonal fatigue, 36 Alchimie du verb (Rimbaud), 18 Althaus, Paul, 126 Ambrose, 102–3 Amiel, Henri Frédéric, 142, 154 anamorphosis, 14 angel: Jacob and, 25–26, 30n62, 63–78, 64; weariness of, 75–78 anthropomorphosis: in cosmic poetics, 138–39; in secret, 12 L’antiphonaire de la nuit (Chrétien), 27; call in, 18 L’Appel et la Réponse (The Call and Response) (Chrétien), 2, 11–12, 18–20, 104–5, 109 Aquinas, Thomas, 32, 35, 122, 159 L’arche de la parole (Chrétien), 27n11; call in, 18 “Archives Husserl de Paris,” at Ecole Normale Supérieure, 6 Aristotle, 32, 133, 145, 149, 160, 166–67; De Anima by, 134, 141,

166; Metaphysics by, 34–35, 162; Nicomachean Ethics by, 33–34; on soul, 141; on touch, 147 The Ark of Speech (Chrétien), 63, 72, 108 art: in cosmic poetics, 160–65. See also specific artists and works atheism, of modernity, 149 Augustine, Saint, 32, 102–3, 111, 120, 122, 123, 127, 139, 159; on art, 163–64; Christus Totus by, 137; Confessions by, 162; on creation, 160, 161, 162; on evil, 103; on heart, 88–89; interiority and, 152; on joy, 25; on selfhood, 52 authority, 99; humility with, 5; in prayer, 121 Avicenna, 133 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 126, 133, 138, 140, 153, 161 Baudelaire, Charles, 74–75, 138, 145 beauty, 27nn4–5; in Being, 27n4; call of, 105, 106; in cosmic poetics, 139, 153–60; dread and, 23, 29n40; fatigue and, 42–43; fragility of, 27n11, 102; of gifts, 135; joy in, 24–25, 27n11, 157; love and, 42–43; 173

174

Index

manifestation of, 25–26; shock of, 101; touch and, 146; truth and, 159 Becker, Oskar, 27n11 Being, 46, 52, 132, 156; beauty in, 27n4; in cosmic poetics, 139; of Heidegger, 139 Benjamin, Walter, 121 Bernanos, Georges, 33 Bernard of Clairvaux, 123 Bernet, Rudolf, 2 Bérulle, Pierre de, 135–36, 139 blessed failing: call in, 18–23, 24nn24– 25; first word in, 17–18; forgetting in, 22–23; fragility in, 21; love in, 26; paradox of, 23, 25 body, 2–3; aesthetics of, 46, 48–49, 53–54; call in, 19, 50, 60; in cosmic poetics, 166–67; excess with, 48; fatigue of, 33–34, 49–54; first word and, 46, 54; fragility of, 52, 57, 60; human chorus of, 53–56; humility with, 47, 60; ignorance of place and, 52–53; love and, 50–53; manifestation of, 48, 49, 56; modesty with, 48, 55, 60; obliquity of, 59, 60–61; phenomenology of, 45–61; prayer and, 124–25; as schema, 86, 91–92; secret of, 55–56, 60; selfhood in, 58–61; soul and, 47, 48, 50, 54–56, 86; subjectivity and, 45, 46, 58, 60; Symbolique du corps and, 2, 83–95; touch and, 146; transparency of, 46; trembling presence of, 56–58 body of drives (le corps pulsionnel), 48 body-response (corps-résponse), 60 body to body (corps à corps), 46, 54, 55, 57 Bonaventure, 122, 125 Bonnefoy, Yves, 132 Burckhardt, Jacob, 69 Butler, Judith, 99–100, 112 call (and response): for art, 161; of beauty, 105, 106; in blessed failing, 18–23, 24nn24–25; in body, 50,

60; of conscience, 105; from consciousness, 148–49; in cosmic poetics, 132, 133–45, 148–51; excess of, 25, 119; gifts and, 134–35; for glory, 155, 164; hearing in, 146; with illness, 38–39; manifestation of, 19, 152; phenomenology of, 19–20, 21, 23; in prayer, 119, 121, 127; promise and, 134; redemption and, 150; for responsibility, 101, 104–8, 114n15; in secret, 12–15; suffering in, 21–22; in Symbolique du corps, 83; touch and, 146; understanding of, 20 The Call and Response (L’Appel et la Réponse) (Chrétien), 2, 11–12, 18–20, 104–5, 109 Cassian, John, 32, 102–3, 113n11, 122 “The Cat as instrument of nudity” (Chrétien), 169–70 Char, René, 132 Chardon, Louis, 141 Chouraqui, André, 71 Chrétien, Jean-Louis. See specific topics Christus Totus (Augustine), 137 Claudel, Paul, 65, 107, 122, 134 common sensing, 145, 147, 148 Confessions (Augustine), 162 congenital fatigue, 36 conscience: call of, 105; of heart, 149; of Jacob, 70–72; touch and, 148 Conscience et roman (Chrétien), 70, 83–84, 95, 96n7 consciousness: call from, 148–49; in cosmic poetics, 148–49; in illness, 134; in prayer, 119; in Symbolique du corps, 84; touch and, 148; transparency of, 22; world and, 21 Contemplations (Hugo), 138 I Corinthians 12:12–14, 89 corps à corps (body to body), 46, 54, 55, 57 Corps à corps (Chrétien), 2 le corps pulsionnel (body of drives), 48 corps-résponse (body-response), 60

Index

cosmic poetics, 131–70; anthropomorphosis in, 138–39; art in, 160–65; beauty in, 139, 153–60; Being in, 139; body in, 166–67; call in, 132, 133–45, 148–51; consciousness in, 148–49; creation and, 160–65; fragility in, 143; gifts in, 134–38; glory in, 153–60; grace in, 143; hearing in, 165–66; humility in, 137; joy in, 141; Logos in, 141, 144; mystery in, 136; oeuvre in, 131, 151–52; ontology of, 143; paradox of, 136; phenomenology of, 131, 133, 155, 167; Plotinus and, 152–53; Proclus and, 152–53; promise in, 142; selfhood in, 133; silence in, 140, 141; subjectivity in, 132, 149; touch in, 133–34, 145–48; transcendence in, 133; truth in, 142; unforgettable in, 149–51; vision in, 165–66 The Crack-Up (Fitzgerald), 77–78 Cratylus (Plato), 18, 27n7 creation, 136; cosmic poetics and, 160– 65; fragility in, 111; gifts and, 109; vulnerability in, 111 Dante, 6, 17 Dasein, 11, 29, 147 De Anima (Aristotle), 134, 141, 166 death drive, fatigue and, 40–41 Delacroix, Eugène, 26, 30n63, 63–65, 64, 66, 72–73, 74 De la fatigue (Chrétien), 2, 47–48, 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 77–78 De Plantatione (Philo), 138 Derrida, Jacques, 16n2, 113n6, 132, 137, 151, 165–66; on selfhood, 59 Des Canyons aux Étoiles (Messiaen), 153–54 Descartes, René, 32, 41, 42–43, 132, 155 Dionysius, the Mystic, 7, 16n2, 106, 159 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 126

175

dread: beauty and, 23, 29n40; fragility and, 29n43; joy and, 24 eclipse of verticality, 2 Ecole Normale Supérieure, 59; “Archives Husserl de Paris” at, 6 Edifying Discourse (Kierkegaard), 65 L’effroi du beau (Chrétien), 1, 23, 24–25, 67, 68 eirênê (peace), 67 Elegy (Gray), 164 eschaton, 140, 151 L’Espace intérieur (Chrétien), 84 Essence of the Bible (J’aime la Bible) (Claudel), 65 Evagrius, 113n11 evil, 70; fragility and, 103–4; selfhood and, 102 excess: with body, 48; of call, 25, 119; failure and, 21, 29n38; in gifts, 23; in Logos, 160; loss and, 22; prayer to, 117, 119 exhaustion, fatigue and, 39–41 Ezekiel, 162 failure, excess and, 21, 29n38 Falque, Emmanuel, 2, 100 fatigue: beauty and, 42–43; of body, 33–34, 49–54; death drive and, 40–41; exhaustion and, 39–41; experience and causes of, 32–37; illness from, 36–39; joy and, 41–44; love and, 41–42, 50–52; ontology of, 34, 35–36; passivity and, 35–36; phenomenology of, 33; from struggle, 36; suffering from, 37–39; transcendence of, 50; virtual power and, 34–35; weariness and, 39–41 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 106 Ficino, Marsilio, 161, 163, 164 first word, 1; in blessed failing, 17–18; body and, 46, 54; secret in, 12 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 77–78 Florensky, Pavel, 140, 149

176

forgetting: in blessed failing, 22–23; with body, 48; in responsibility, 106. See also unforgettable forgiveness: in secret, 10; unforgettable and, 150 Foucault, Michel, 47 Fragilité (Chrétien), 1, 69–70, 75, 77 fragility: of beauty, 24, 27n11, 102; in blessed failing, 21; of body, 52, 57, 60; in cosmic poetics, 143; in creation, 111, 161; dread and, 29n43; fissure of, 101–4; hope and, 102; hospitality and, 104, 111; of Jacob, 75–78; manifestation of, 104; meaning of, 1; phenomenology of, 101–2; prayer and, 117; of promise, 22, 104; responsibility and, 99, 100, 101; in Symbolique du corps, 83 Francis de Sales, 123 Francis of Assisi, 120 Franck, Didier, 45 François de Sales, Saint, 156 Freud, Sigmund, 40 Gabellieri, Emmanuel, 147, 155, 166 Galileo, 163 Ghostics, 8 gifts: beauty of, 135; call and, 134– 35; in cosmic poetics, 134–38; creation and, 109; excess in, 23; recollection and, 152; in secret, 10, 12; subjectivity of, 135; touch and, 146, 147 Girard, René, 171n17 glory: call for, 155, 164; in cosmic poetics, 153–60 The Glow of the Secret (La Lueur du secret) (Chrétien), 2, 6–7, 13, 66, 69 God’s touch (toque de Dios), 125 good fight (agôn), 67–68, 69, 72–73, 76, 78 Gospel of John, 9 Gospel of Mark, 9–10; messianic secret in, 7, 8

Index

grace, 12, 25, 70; in cosmic poetics, 143; fragility and, 102 Gramont, Jérôme de, 2–3, 97n13 Gray, Thomas, 164 Gregory the Great, 123 Gschwandtner, Christina, 2 Hand to Hand (Chrétien), 26, 47–48, 53–54, 66, 70, 72, 74–75, 76, 109 hearing: in call, 146; in cosmic poetics, 165–66; passivity of, 146 heart, 84; conscience of, 149; in prayer, 123, 124; in Symbolique du corps, 84, 87–89 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 57, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 13–14, 32, 34–35, 39, 46, 56, 71, 97n13, 117, 119, 132, 134, 135, 144, 151; Being of, 139; on call, 28n24; Letter on Humanism by, 74; on phenomenology, 6, 23; on selfhood, 52, 58, 59; On the Way to Language by, 69 Henry, Michel, 65, 132, 133, 139, 151; on touch, 148 Heraclitus, 28n27, 72 Herbert, George, 103–4 Hermeias of Alexandria, 119 Hitchens, Ivon, 155 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 57–58 hope, fragility and, 102 hospitality, 43–44; fragility and, 104, 111; humility of, 108–12; listening in, 109–10; manifestation of, 110; prayer and, 125–26; responsibility and, 99–112; of silence, 110; for vulnerability, 101, 109, 111; for wounds, 109 Housset, Emmanuel, 2, 28n25 “How to Wrestle with the Irresistible” (Chrétien), 63–65 Hugo, Victor, 70–72, 138 humility: with authority, 5; with body, 47, 60; in cosmic poetics, 137; of hospitality, 108–12; in love, 11; with secret, 5, 11, 13

Index

Husserl, Edmund, 32, 45, 59, 119, 133, 148; on fatigue, 49; on phenomenology, 6, 56–57; on responsibility, 126; on selfhood, 52, 58 Huysmans, J.-K., 169 ignorance of place, body and, 52–53 illness: call with, 38–39; consciousness in, 134; from fatigue, 36–39 in-between (metaxu), 146, 155, 166 inner man. See soul inner voice, 58, 105, 106, 114nn19–20 L’inoubliable et l’inespéré (Chrétien), 13 L’intelligence du feu (Chrétien), 20, 123 interiority: Augustine and, 152; phenomenology of, 46–47; selfhood and, 58, 60; subjectivity and, 84; in Symbolique du corps, 1, 83–84 inter-sensibility, 148, 153, 162 irony, in secret, 10 irresistance, of Jacob, 72–75 Isaiah, 161 Jaccottet, Philippe, 132 Jackson, Kurt, 153 Jacob, 25–26, 30n62, 63–78, 64; fragility of, 75–78; good fight of, 67–68, 69, 72–73, 76, 78; irresistance of, 72–75; Valjean and, 70–72; wounds of, 76–77 J’aime la Bible (Essence of the Bible) (Claudel), 65 Jambet, Christian, 132, 139 Janet, Pierre, 33, 36–37 Jean Valjean (fictional character), 70–72 John of the Cross, Saint, 9, 120, 125, 132, 137; on touch, 147 La Joie spacieuse (Chrétien), 84 Jones, David, 162 Joubert, Joseph, 120, 140, 142, 150, 164 Journet, Charles Cardinal, 94 joy: in beauty, 24–25, 27n11, 157; in cosmic poetics, 141; dread and, 24;

177

fatigue and, 41–44; in loss, 22; in love, 42; phenomenology of, 29n46; in prayer, 123, 126 Juarroz, Roberto, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 100, 101, 106, 107, 114n16, 133, 143; on evil, 103; on fragility, 102, 103, 104; on responsibility, 126; on schema, 86, 91–92 Keats, John, 141 kenosis, 10; in cosmic poetics, 137 Kierkegaard, Søren, 13, 26, 49, 58, 70, 124, 142, 143, 150; Edifying Discourse by, 65; on prayer, 68; on selfhood, 52 Kristeva, Julia, 100, 112 Lacan, Jacques, 96n12, 148 Lacoste, Jean-Yves, 11, 23 Laforgue, Jules, 33 language, 2–3; anthropomorphosis and, 12; in art, 164; from common sensing, 145. See also Symbolique du corps Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 35, 36 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger), 74 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 8, 32, 52, 73, 92, 97n20, 112n1, 113n6, 114n16; on call, 99–100; cosmic poetics of, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 148, 150, 151–52, 159; phenomonology of, 21; on responsibility, 106–7; on selfhood, 52 Lewis, Stephen, 2 listening, 12; body and, 45, 47, 53, 54–55, 57; in hospitality, 109–10; miracles and, 8; in prayer, 120, 125; touch and, 146 Logos: in cosmic poetics, 141, 144; excess in, 160; fatigue and, 32; in prayer, 119 loss: excess and, 22; joy in, 22. See also fatigue; forgetting

178

Index

love: beauty and, 42–43; in blessed failing, 26; body and, 50–53; fatigue and, 41–42, 50–52; humility in, 11; joy in, 42; in secret, 11, 13 Lucretius, 32 La Lueur du secret (The Glow of the Secret) (Chrétien), 2, 6–7, 13, 66, 69 Luke 12:49, 20 Luther, Martin, 13, 159 Maldiney, Henri, 21, 23, 28n27, 71, 80n18 Malebranche, Nicolas, 32, 136, 137, 159, 161, 168 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 32 Manet, Édouard, 169 manifestation: of beauty, 25–26; of body, 48, 49, 56; of call, 19, 152; of fragility, 104; of hospitality, 110; of prayer, 124; of secret, 6–7, 9–10, 11; of selfhood, 110 Marcion, 8 Marion, Jean-Luc, 2, 45, 133, 137, 147, 151; saturated phenomenon of, 154 Maximus the Confessor, 111, 137, 139– 40, 157, 158 mercy, 35, 124, 143 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 45, 132, 133, 145, 148, 152, 166 Messiaen, Olivier, 145, 153–54 messianic secret, 7, 8 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 34–35, 162 metaxu (in-between), 146, 155, 166 methexis (participation), 136, 156–57 Michaux, Henri, 132, 134 miracle: fragility and, 19; listening and, 8; in secret, 7–9 Les Misérables (Hugo), 70–72 modernity, 84; atheism of, 149; transcendence and, 1; understanding of, 83 modesty, 48, 55, 60 Moses, 162 Munch, Edward, 153

Mystagogy (Maximus the Confessor), 140 mystery: in cosmic poetics, 136; as secret, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15; transcendence toward, 2 Mystici corporis Christi (Pius XII), 94 myth, of beauty, 23–24 nausea, 59 Neoplatonism, 132, 152, 158, 163, 169 Nicholas of Cusa, 161, 162, 163, 164 Nicole, Pierre, 102 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 33–34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32, 47, 51–52, 151; on responsibility, 126 nouvelle théolgie, 2 nudity, 56, 60; in “The Cat as instrument of nudity,” 169–70; vulnerability of, 102 obliquity: of body, 59, 60–61; in secret, 10, 14 oeuvre, 21, 22; in cosmic poetics, 131, 151–52 Offrandes Oubliées (Messiaen), 153–54 Olier, Jean-Jacques, 136 Olympia (Manet), 169 On the Way to Language (Heidegger), 69 ontology: of cosmic poetics, 143; of fatigue, 34, 35–36; of touch, 147 Origen, 88–89, 113n11, 123 parable, secret and, 9 paradox: of blessed failing, 23, 25; of cosmic poetics, 136; of secret, 9, 10, 12 La parole blessée (“The Wounded Word”) (Chrétien), 117, 121 parousia, 23 participation (methexis), 136, 156–57 Pascal, Blaise, 7, 13 The Passions of the Soul (Descartes), 42–43

Index

passivity: fatigue and, 35–36; of hearing, 146; phenomenology of, 100 Paul, Saint, 19, 86, 88 peace (eirênê), 67 “Peace and Proximity” (Lévinas), 112n1 Péguy, Charles, 103–4, 144 personal identity, 83 Pessoa, Fernando, 33 Peter, 8 Phaedrus (Plato), 23–24, 67 phenomenology, 69; of body, 45–61; of call, 19–20, 21, 23; of cosmic poetics, 131, 133, 155, 167; of fatigue, 33; of fragility, 101–2; of interiority, 46–47; of joy, 29n46; of passivity, 100; of Plato, 24; of prayer, 27n11, 117, 118, 121–22, 124–25; of promise, 26, 72–73; of responsibility, 105; of secret, 6, 10, 12, 13–14; in Symbolique du corps, 90–91; of touch, 147 Philo of Alexandria, 121, 131, 135, 137, 139; De Plantatione by, 138 Pickstock, Catherine, 2, 96n12, 97nn14–15 Pius XII, 94 Plato, 33, 54, 67, 119, 134, 145, 156–57, 167; Cratylus by, 18, 27n7; Neoplatonism and, 132, 152, 158, 163, 169; Phaedrus by, 23–24, 67; on recollection, 149; Symposium by, 27n4; unforgettable and, 150, 151 Plotinus, 13, 32, 157, 160; cosmic poetics and, 152–53; on creation, 162 poetics: of Symbolique du corps, 83–95. See also cosmic poetics poiesis, 160 polemos (war), 67 Pour reprendre et perdre haleine (Chrétien), 118 prayer: body and, 124–25; call in, 119, 121, 127; consciousness in, 119; to excess, 117, 119; heart in, 124; hospitality and, 125–26; joy in, 123, 126; Kierkegaard on,

179

68; listening in, 120, 125; Logos in, 119; manifestation of, 124; phenomenology of, 27n11, 117, 118, 121–22, 124–25; promise in, 119, 127; responsibility of, 126; silence in, 120; struggle of, 127; subjectivity in, 118; suffering and, 117, 124; transparency of, 118; in truth, 124; understanding of, 125, 126–27; for wounds, 1, 124 “Prayer According to Kierkegaard” (Chrétien), 69, 74 precarity, 99–102, 112n1 Prevot, Andrew, 2 Prime Mover, 33 Proclus, 13, 119, 140; cosmic poetics and, 152–53; recollection of, 164; on touch, 147 Promesses furtives (Chrétien), 23 Prometheus, 149 promise: call and, 134; in cosmic poetics, 142; fragility of, 22, 104; phenomenology of, 26, 72–73; in prayer, 119, 127 Proust, Marcel, 149 Psalm 118, 123 “Rain, Steam and Speed” (Turner), 153 recollection, 63, 119; gifts and, 152; Plato on, 149; of Proclus, 164 redemption, 31, 76, 102, 150, 154 Le regard de l’amour (Chrétien), 25, 26, 69, 74 Rembrandt, 46 response. See call responsibility: call for, 101, 104–8, 114n15; forgetting in, 106; fragility and, 99, 100, 101; hospitality and, 99–112; mutuality of, 110–11; phenomenology of, 105; of prayer, 126; selfhood and, 107; struggle for, 108; subjectivity in, 112; vulnerability and, 99, 100, 101 “Retrospection” (Chrétien), 21, 22–23, 28n27, 46–47

180

Index

revelation: in cosmic poetics, 149; from secret, 6, 10–11 Ricœur, Paul, 13–14, 20, 100 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 27n5, 32, 134 Rimbaud, Arthur, 18, 27n3 Rûmi, 121 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 32, 59, 97n13, 106–7, 114n16, 132, 133, 134 saturated phenomenon, 154, 155 Schelling, Friedrich, 149 schema, body as, 86, 91–92 Scotus, Duns, 163 The Scream (Munch), 153 secret, 5–15; absence of, 6, 11; anamorphosis in, 14; anthropomorphosis in, 12; of body, 55–56, 60; call in, 12–15; circle of, 66; in first word, 12; forgiveness in, 10; gift in, 10, 12; as hidden, 7, 15; humility with, 5, 11, 13; irony in, 10; love in, 11, 13; manifestation of, 6–7, 9–10, 11; messianic, 7, 8; miracle in, 7–9; mystery as, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15; obliquity in, 10, 14; parable and, 9; paradox of, 9, 10, 12; phenomenology of, 6, 10, 12, 13–14; prohibition to speak of, 8; revelation from, 6, 10–11; suffering in, 13; in Symbolique du corps, 85; as theocryptic, 8–9, 10, 11; theophany of, 8–9, 10; transcendence in, 12; truth in, 60; understanding of, 8, 9 selfhood: in body, 58–61; in cosmic poetics, 133; evil and, 102; interiority and, 58, 60; of Jacob, 70–72; manifestation of, 110; responsibility and, 107 Seneca, 102 Shelley, P. B., 138 silence, 54; in cosmic poetics, 140, 141; hospitality of, 110; in prayer, 120 Smith, Adam, 143 solipsism, 76, 125, 151 Song of Songs. See Symbolique du corps

soul, 19; Aristotle on, 141; body and, 47, 48, 50, 54–56, 86; Descartes on, 41; prayer and, 117 Spacious Joy (Chrétien), 123 Spinoza, Baruch, 36, 44 Stoicism, 102, 103, 111 struggle: fatigue from, 36; of Jacob, 25–26, 30n62, 63–78, 64; of prayer, 124, 127; for responsibility, 108 subjectivity, 28n29; body and, 45, 46, 58, 60; in cosmic poetics, 132, 149; fragility and, 103; of gifts, 135; interiority and, 84; in prayer, 118; in responsibility, 112; transcendence of, 118. See also selfhood suffering: in call, 21–22; from fatigue, 37–39; hospitality and, 43–44; prayer and, 117, 124; in secret, 13; truth in, 22, 24; vulnerability to, 100 Sulpicians, 136 Symbolique du corps (Chrétien), 2; heart in, 84, 87–89; phenomenology in, 90–91; poetics of, 83–95; understanding in, 86–87 Symposium (Plato), 27n4 synaesthesia, 145 Teresa of Avila, 123 theocryptic, secret as, 8–9, 10, 11 Theology of the Church (Journet), 94 theophany, of secret, 8–9, 10 Theta (Aristotle), 34–35 thirst, 56 Thomas, Saint, 133, 141, 155, 163, 164 titanism, 161 toque de Dios (God’s touch), 125 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 73, 112n1 touch: aesthetics in, 146; beauty and, 146; body and, 146; call and, 146; in cosmic poetics, 133–34, 145–48; God’s, 125; phenomenology of, 147 Traherne, Thomas, 158 transcendence: in cosmic poetics, 133; of fatigue, 50; meaning of, 1–2;

Index

modernity and, 1; redemption and, 150; in secret, 12; of subjectivity, 118; toward mystery, 2 transhumanism, 50 transparency: of body, 46; of consciousness, 22; of joy, 25; of prayer, 118; of secret, 7, 11 Trinitarian communion, 7 Trinity, 164; truth in, 158 truth: beauty and, 159; in cosmic poetics, 142; prayer in, 124; in secret, 60; in suffering, 22, 24; in Trinity, 158 Turner, J. M. W., 153 understanding: of call, 20; circle of, 66; of modernity, 83; of prayer, 125, 126–27; of secret, 8, 9; in Symbolique du corps, 86–87 unforgettable: in cosmic poetics, 149– 51; in prayer, 118, 127 The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (Chrétien), 21, 22–23, 25–26, 28n27, 46–47 Venard, Olivier-Thomas, 96n8

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veneration, 43 Verbum infans, 141 verbum mentis, 163–64 virtual power, fatigue and, 34–35 vision, 67, 133; in cosmic poetics, 165–66 Vita Nova (Dante), 17 La voix nue (Chrétien), 21–22, 72–73 vulnerability: in creation, 111; hospitality for, 101, 109, 111; of nudity, 102; responsibility and, 99, 100, 101; to suffering, 100 war (polemos), 67 weariness: of angel, 75–78; fatigue and, 39–41 Weil, Simone, 32–33, 57 William of Ockham, 163 Wolbero of Cologne, 84 Wordsworth, William, 138 “The Wounded Word” (La parole blessée) (Chrétien), 117, 121 wounds: hospitality for, 109; of Jacob, 76–77; prayer for, 1, 124; responsibility and, 101

About the Contributors

Rudolf Bernet is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and former director of the Husserl Archives. Among his recent publications: “Phenomenological Concepts of Untruth in Husserl and Heidegger,” in J.J. Drummond and O. Höffe, Husserl. German Perspectives; Force, Drive, Desire. A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis; “Das Komische und das Lachen,” in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie/Louvain Journal of Philosophy 84: pp. 163–84. Jeffrey Bloechl is Albert J. Fitzgibbons Chair and chair of the department of philosophy at Boston College and honorary research fellow at the Australian Catholic University. He is translator of Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. His work in contemporary European thought includes, most recently, Philosophy as Prophecy. On the Primacy of the Ethical according to Emmanuel Levinas. Emmanuel Falque is professor of philosophy and honorary dean of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris. His many major works in medieval thought, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion include Passeur de Gethsémani, Métamorphose de la finitude, Noces de l’agneau, Le Livre de l’expérience, d’Anselme de Cantorbéry à Bernard de Clairvaux, and Hors phénomène: essai aux confins de la phénoménalité. Jérôme de Gramont is professor of philosophy and honorary dean of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris. Recent publications include Le commencement à venir and Proust, Le présent perdu. Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches continental philosophy of religion at Fordham University. She is the author of Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion, Marion and Theology, Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy, and Reading Religious Ritual with Ricœur: Between Fragility and Hope.

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About the Contributors

Emmanuel Housset is professor of the history of philosophy and metaphysics at the University of Caen-Normandie. His research focuses on the philosophy of Husserl and the whole of phenomenology. He was awarded the French Academy’s 2021 Prize for the entirety of his work. He has recently published La différence personnelle: Essai sur l’identité dramatique de la personne humaine and Le don des mains. Phénoménologie de l’incorporation. Stephen E. Lewis is professor of English at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He has translated books by several contemporary French phenomenologists (Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion, Claude Romano) and published essays on Chrétien, Marion, and Jean-Yves Lacoste. Of particular recent note is his in-depth essay, “Seeking a ‘Phonetic and Semantic Community’ Between God and Human Beings: Biblical Poetics in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century French Literature,” in Stephen Prickett and Elisabeth Jay, general eds., The Bible and Literature, vol. V: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. Kevin J. Hart. Jean-Luc Marion is fellow of the Académie Française and emeritus professor at Sorbonne Université. He is the author of many landmark works in the history of philosophy, metaphysics, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion. Recent works include D’ailleurs la Révélation, and La métaphysique et après. Catherine Pickstock is Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, as well as tutor and fellow at Emmanuel College. Her major publications include After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Thomas d’Aquin et la quête eucharistique, Repetition and Identity. The Literary Agenda, and Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics. Andrew Prevot is Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies and professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism; Theology and Race: Black and Womanist Traditions in the United States; and Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crises of Modernity.