1.2 The Semiology of Incarnation
1.2.2 The Semiological Turn
30
is to embrace skepticism by displacing concepts with signs or icons. ‘Concepts’ only formally indicate their referent.
That said, when Smith goes on to claim that “God reduces himself to the sphere of immanence,” that is a different claim altogether.72 Smith insists that God must appear in a way finite being can receive God by validating finite being where and as it is, without obligation to deny one’s finite self. And even though God must appear this way, it is still God’s choice, Smith says, to condescend to appear “under finite conditions.”73 Presumably, God is happy to do it. But if this position yields the type of epistemological colonialism or imperialism that Levinas claims, then can Smith’s position differ significantly from the colonial British or Americans claiming that Africans are happy as slaves? Is Smith’s position more than a scandalously weak
justification for theological exploitation? Is kenotic self-giving the same as enforced reduction?
Imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation are the necessary outcomes of classical liberalism.
Choice is the justifying apparatus par excellence of modernity. Choice, linked fundamentally to the economic liberalism of rights and private property, which are the mechanisms of imperialistic violence.
31
immanence of human perception but also retains the transcendence of the Wholly Other. In short, it is a nonreductive manifestation.”74 Setting aside the textual contradiction, the context of this quotation is linguistic rather than metaphysical or epistemological as was the case above. The incarnation and the semiological logic that Smith builds around it becomes the model not just for God’s revelation but for comment ne pas parler – how (not) to speak – of what is beyond
language. We might note that Smith seems to conceptualize transcendence as a fusion of
presence and absence. Something is not present to the gaze or to the interpretation. Something is held in reserve, perhaps left up to the imagination. It seems almost teasingly erotic.75 The
dialectic of presence/absence is the logic of the sign, which arguably supports Smith’s logic of incarnation more than the incarnation itself does.
As Smith develops this position, he retreats from phenomenology to what he calls the proto-phenomenology of Augustine’s semiology, read through a Derridean lens. Through semiology he finally overcomes the incommensurability between finite and the infinite in the incarnation. In other words, he turns the phenomenon of Jesus of Nazareth into a sign pointing to the eternal, transcendent (noumenal?) Son. However, because a sign is incomplete without its
74 Ibid., 219. Emphasis added.
75While much has been made of the erotic or desire within the past generation of scholarship, perhaps culminating in Marion’s Erotic Phenomenon, we might have reasons to be wary of such moves. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, Stephen E. Lewis, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Looking back on the origins of modern philosophy and science, we find traces of a sexualized violence turned outward towards nature and the Other. We can recall Descartes’ ball of wax that has to be distinguished “from its outward forms – take the clothes off, as it were, and consider it naked.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, John Cottingham, trans. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986): 22.Likewise,
“[Francis] Bacon often analogized the relationship of the inquirer to nature as that of a man to woman and used metaphors of seduction, unveiling, and force to describe the process of inquiry” (Dusek, Philosophy of Technology, p. 42). Certainly, Smith never gives any such suggestion of sexualized domination in his writings, but if Derrida is correct that context is everything, then this Western genealogy should perhaps raise suspicions about erotic motifs.
Western thought, as a destruction of transcendence, has been a violent colonizing of what the Other keeps back or holds in reserve. The absence of the Other has proven no barrier against imperialistic violence. It is not clear how Smith imagines that would be different with God.
32
referent, Smith’s incarnation becomes ‘incomplete’ in this semiological sense, which is what allows it to function analogically. Smith states:
The Incarnation is precisely an immanent sign of transcendence – God appearing in the flesh. Thus it is a structure of both presence and absence: present in the flesh, and yet referring beyond, the Incarnation – as the signum exemplum – retains the structural incompleteness of the sign which is constitutive of language . . . Divinity, while it cannot be reduced to this body, is nevertheless infleshed [sic.] in it and thus signaling beyond itself. This is why the God-man is a mediator between divinity and humanity, finitude and the Infinite. This is also why, for Augustine, all signs function as mediators: they are precisely that which both appear and at the same time maintain what they refer to in their transcendence. By referring or pointing to what is other than themselves, signs make knowledge of transcendence possible.76
Presumably Smith would not want to say that the incarnation is theologically incomplete, in the sense that God is not fully present in the person of Jesus. Making that claim would put him at odds with Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Except, how can the incarnation be semiologically
incomplete without being theologically incomplete? And Smith did actually say in the quotation above that the incarnation is theologically incomplete: “present in the flesh, and yet referring beyond.” To what would the incarnation refer beyond itself? What is not present in the incarnation? In this context, Smith’s language of a mediator begins to ring of Arianism.
In his pursuit of revelation, Smith wants the logic of the incarnation to be the means of overcoming Husserl’s recognition that “one’s consciousness [is] essentially inaccessible to another.”77 Smith states:
But this is precisely where Augustine’s incarnational account of language indicates the possibility of overcoming this incommensurability without erasing it. For in my words, I am able to bridge this chasm and make ‘present’ (in a weaker sense) my thoughts to another in a way which makes connection possible, but at the same time preserves the difference. It seems to be precisely a ‘relation without relation’ of which Levinas speaks, for the word is able to be both present and absent, appearing within the sphere of the
76 Smith, Speech, 123. Emphasis added.
77 Ibid., 125.
33
same without being reduced to the sphere of the same, presented to perception but maintaining its otherness.78
The reason that the incarnation is central to Smith’s position is because of the divine presence in the finite human person Jesus. For Smith, then, language works in a manner analogous to the incarnation. The speaker remains present even while absent in speech. My consciousness
becomes given, through the logic of the incarnation, in language. Everything depends on whether the incarnation is a semiological event with metaphysical status – the sign must make present the referent.79 This incarnational logic then must be transferable to human language and
communication through the semiological structure. If all of this happens, then Smith has a strong position. If not, then his position deflates rather quickly.