Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 06:58:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: "P. Johnston" <smirglehoffeth-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Questioning and Faith


Ariosto,

You are a shameless tease!  I leave it to you to
figure out how.


--- df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca wrote:
> Paul,
> 
> With regards to philosophy and literature note what
> Marion does as he
> gets to where he has been leading the reader to in
> _God withour Being_
> when he writes on  p.g.  110: "One therefore must
> attempt -- and it is
> indeed a question of an attempt  whose success is
> not prejudged -- to
> accede, from the  very point of view of our
> situation defined by
> finitude, to the crossing of Being. Hypothetically,
> this attempt would
> consist of investing an interspace, a  space
> undetermined because
> belonging to the domain neither of the idol nr at
> the same time of the
> icon. Indeed, more than of space,  one must speak
> hear of attitude (in
> the Husserlian sense of  the term)-- of  an attitude
> characterized
> neither by the idolatrous gaze nor by the  iconic 
> face. Let us
> specify. In this  attitude, it is a question of
> challenging what the
> screen of Being can affirm of idols (beings) by 
> lending them its own
> idolatry (as  screen), hence of distracting
> ontological difference. But
> this attitude could not, and even should not, for
> all that, reach the
> icon; for the icon begins to play, we have verified,
> only at  the
> moment when agape envisages our gaze; henceforth,
> our gaze  alone
> cannot pretend to the icon except by deceiving
> itself again [...] We
> are looking for an  attitude where the gaze no
> longer would freeze in a
> first (and last) visible, though not yet find itself
> envisaged by the
> invisible, whose initiative still scapes it; in a
> word, we are looking
> for an attitude where the gaze no longer would see
> any idol, though
> still not pretending to the impossible agape; a
> gaze, therefore, that
> would see nothing that it does not immediately
> transpierce, and that
> nothing would come to envisage; a gaze, in the end,
> that  would see
> nothing and that would not discover itself seen -- a
> gaze that sees
> nothing, but that nothing loves, with neither idol
> nor agape." 
> 
> 
> Instead of going for yet another philosophical or
> phenomenological 
> text while asking the question "can it [this direct
> and immediate
> seeing] be realized in fact?", he writes that "we
> could doubt this fact
>  if literary fiction had not described this type to
> us with more truth
> than factuality suggests" (p.111). From various
> possible examples he
> goes on to discuss M. Teste by Paul Valery, vanity
> and the "gaze of 
> boredom",  indifference (readers of French theology
> would be attuned to
> the fact that beyond Bousset he is quietly pointing
> to Fenelon), wisdom
> writings, etc. 
> 
> There is an abundance of literary examples that
> discuss fantasy and its
> relation to a distant object of desire. Yesterday I
> was reading
> Diderot's _Jacques le Fataliste_ and laughing at the
> way this
> distracted clown of the moment and the narrator
> himself was teasing
> with sexual innuendo the Master of Jacques who is
> always impatient for
> Jacques to tell him about his amorous exploits as
> well as the reader.
> The whole 'novel' is an interminable delay and
> postponement of a
> climax, with a brief exception (ironic) at the end
> of the novel the
> whole story is all foreplay. There is tons of this
> sort of literature
> from Cervantes, Through Ariosto (Italian writer), to
> _Celestina_, to
> Quevedo where there is an interesting and gradual
> renunciation of love
> in his love poetry. Much of this genre takes the
> form of the
> picaresque novel. 
> 
> Don't literature students want ever to say anything 
> on this list? Are
> you that intimidated by philosophers?
> 
> Ariosto
> 
> 
> -- 
>                                
>         
> 
> 
>      --- from list
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