3.3 The Relation as a Condition of Revelation
3.3.3 Excess as Revelation in Relation, or Why Levinas Rejects Negative Theology
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interpretation. Is a hermeneutical lack different from a metaphysical lack, such that a hermeneutical Gnosticism would not bear the offense of an ontological Gnosticism?
It seems as if Smith’s project is provoked by the knowledge that “freedom is in peril.”103 The threat of Gnosticism, in Smith’s work, reflects a threat to liberty. There may be something that I cannot attain through my own economic labor, through the labor of my own body, on the basis of my own freedom. We must never lack freedom. The God who is invisible and beyond and Other cannot save us by making us radically free. Only the disclosed god is able to make humanity radically free. For the one who is free in this way, the Other will always be a competitor and a threat. The One I must murder.
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knowledge is power, a power that is as a zero-sum dynamic.105 Smith’s concept of revelation works within this dynamic because it renders the ‘concept’ analogical. Consequently, his concept of ‘concept’ leaves the human epistemological agent as the atomic structure in tension with the divine atomic structure of revelation. This dialectical tension is resolved in the analogical sublation of the divine precisely because revelation is disclosure for Smith.
Levinas pushes back against any concept of revelation that would render knowledge through the sublation of the Other. First, because of the separation maintained through atheism, there is no sublation.106 Second, at the point to which we now come, Levinas rejects all negative theology in favor of excess. Rather than negating thought, the infinite overflows thought. This Cartesian, or perhaps Anselmian, concept of infinity as an excess that exceeds our capacity to think allows Levinas to speak of transcendence nonviolently. There is no tension between infinity and its idea because thinking infinity is not a capacity that finite beings possess. Instead, it is an idea that comes from outside as a welcoming, a call, or a conversation.107 The result of this call or conversation is that dialectical structures are replaced with discursive structures.
105 Consider the modern dialectical epistemological structure that is the tension between knowledge and doubt. The other, that is doubt, is threatening but also productive when properly harnessed. In harnessing doubt, however, it is sublimated in such a manner that skepticism becomes structurally necessary to modern epistemology. When knowledge is power, as Bacon and Descartes taught us, then knowledge is competitive, which is to say, imperialistic.
106 Levinas says, “One can call atheism this separation so complete the at the separated being maintains itself in existence all by itself, without participating in the Being from which it is separated—eventually capable of adhering to it by belief . . . One lives outside of God, at home with oneself; one is an I, an egoism” (Totality, 58). The individuation of atheism bears structural similarities to the radical individualism sometimes found within modernity and liberalism.
Tactically, this connection with liberalism is important. To move beyond, it is strategically useful to step from within. Levinas’s concept of atheism may allow us, who largely stand within liberalism, to take the step with him towards a new typology beyond the liberal economic.
107 While Levinas credits Descartes’ Third Meditation with this concept of infinity, we must recognize how far beyond Descartes Levinas has taken the notion.
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There are important ramifications both for how we conceive of theological authority and how we might understand revelation. As we recall, one of Smith’s concerns was comment ne pas parler – How not to speak. He was concerned with the capacity of language to convey what is beyond language. For Smith, language is conceptualized as representing the divine through signs. We could consider it as a semiological deduction. In contrast, Levinas alters the relation of signs, referents, and signification by emphasizing le dire (the saying) over le dit (the said). With this emphasis, signification comes prior to the sign as speaking becomes a mode of welcoming the Other in such a way that the Other puts the Same into question.
Once more, there is something of a Kantian flavor to Levinas’s method. For Kant, if the empirical deduction is insufficient to account for causation or the self, perhaps we need to look beyond that method to a transcendental deduction. Cause-effect relations and the self are not objects in the world like any other object. If we think of causal relations the same way that we think of horses or oranges or carburetors, then of course we will fail to find empirical evidence for causal relations. Therefore, if most reasonable, well-intentioned people find the premise of causal relations to be compelling, then perhaps the problem is in our assumption that they are the same kind of object as other objects in the world. Perhaps we need to take a transcendental approach rather than an empirical one.
Now, in our case, if a semiological approach to language cannot account for speaking about that which exceeds the capacity of language, then perhaps an ethical or an eschatological approach would be more fruitful. Smith claims that the very possibility of theology is at stake here, and I agree with him. Of course, there is more at stake, such as the capacity to speak of the human Other. The altering of the relation between signs, referents, and significations bears some
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similarity to Kant’s altering of the position of the self and of causation, making them structurally requisite for experience and knowledge. Significance becomes structurally requisite for Levinas.
For Levinas, signification comes prior to the sign because speaking becomes a mode of welcoming the Other in such a way that the Other puts the Same into question. That ‘putting into question’ is the ethical component of language, which prioritizes ethical signification. Rather than receiving God on the basis of our understanding, the welcome of God puts us into
question.108 This welcoming of the Other in speaking is what Levinas calls ‘discourse.’ That is what I mean by the discursive structure of revelation. By opening the Same beyond itself, the Other calls the Same to goodness. This is the structure of discursive ethics that is the basis of Levinas’s concept of revelation.
In terms of speech and language, rather than speaking about God, in which case the standard relation of signs, referents, and significations would apply, we are now speaking with the God who addresses us. Therefore, what is at stake is not linguistic or semiological indication.
What is at stake is the ongoing opening of oneself to God or the human Other in welcome.
Language takes on the mode of prayer as welcoming desire for the Other. This relation of prayer, this discourse of prayer, reveals God through the transformation or sanctification of the Same.
God is not revealed by doctrine, but by justice.
108 In this sense, Levinas appears to be saying something similar to Barth in his Romerbrief. “In announcing the limitation of the known world by another than is unknown, the Gospel does not enter into competition with the many attempts to disclose within the known where some more or less unknown in the higher form of existence and to make it accessible to men. The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather it sets a question-mark against all truths.” Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Edwyn C. Hoskyns, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968): 35.
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