Program October 2

This paper speaks within the context of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2011)—where meaning ultimately involves the commodification of desire as it grasps at meaning that has no solid foundation—and builds on Chrétien’s statement (2004, 45) that ‘Our voice does not constitute itself by itself, does not give itself to itself since it always responds’. Through an analogy of mystical experience and musical experience, one grounded in the shared phenomenological moments of impact, absorption and ekstasis, the paper will enquire into the de-centring of the self that occurs in certain musical experiences. Here, the subject is called into a non-instrumental relation with that which is other. Suggesting that this de-centring is usefully considered in terms of an ‘apophatic anthropology’ (Turner 1995) whereby the self is constructed through its de-centring, and desire is dispossessed and thereby reconfigured, the paper will suggest that the mode of attention music is capable of eliciting can offer an interruption of the ‘liquid modern’ (Bauman 2011) mode of being.

Caricatured as “not-art-enough” by some and critiqued by others for its supposed “theatricality,” 1960’s North Atlantic minimalist art stands as a watershed moment in contemporary art history. While a great amount has been published connecting this sensibility with various ethical, historical, and sociological concerns, distinctly Christian theological engagement with this neo-avant-garde sensibility has been rather mute. Thus, this paper begins the process of listening to the theological resonances of 1960’s minimalist art by focusing on one leading coefficient: Sol LeWitt. This paper examines some of LeWitt’s art and “conceptualist” theory, which in part critiques the rationalization of the gaze—destabilizing a kind spectatorial sight’s longing for control and transparent access. I then turn to theological sources who possess a grammatical affinity with my reading of LeWitt as well as aim to similarly complicate and reform the tenuous relationship of vision and desire. This theological expansion via the work of Natalie Carnes and Maximos Constas focuses on the paradoxical nature of seeing and the faithful formation of a desirous seeing of art as well as the world.

In his work, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, Emmanuel Falque claims that Phenomenology has come to prioritize the lived experience of the subjective body, what he simply calls “flesh,” over the corporality of the objective body, what he calls “body.” This flesh/body dualism has replaced the soul/body dualism of the past. By attending to “body” he claims to be able to dimly perceive the passions and drives that precede signification. Our body feels the influence of these forces even though they cannot be signified, and thus brought into the realm of sense. They are non-sense, even though they are part of our drive for sense. To examine these forces Falque develops a concept call the “spread body.” The “spread body” has a passive and an active sense to it. In reference to passivity, the body is spread out in that it is open to the forces and drives that come from our animal engagement with the world. But in reference to activity, we are also spread out in that our body is extended and extending in the world through the force of life. In holding up both these aspects of Falque’s concept of the spread body, I nevertheless want to argue that, for Falque, there remains a priority of the active power of force over the passivity of reception. I will argue that this prioritizing of the active power of force could lead to a delimiting of the sphere of language to a separate realm that at times may seem merely superimposed. Additionally, for the same reason, Falque can appear to de-emphasize the social, even while respecting the difference of the other. With these two points in mind, I want to offer the work of George Rickey and Félix Ravaisson as a possible way for Falque to hold the active and passive, body and mind, in productive tension.

Internal to the lived realities of the human condition, new phenomenology offers resources for thinking about relational identity and an open future (especially in light of the uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation occurring due to the pandemic). In particular, the stress on phenomenological “excess” enables a consideration of how the human condition is defined by desire for what remains yet to come. In contrast to the attempt to satisfy desire in concrete “successful” ways, this orientation of continued expectation might rightly be termed “faithfulness.” In the attempt to offer a constructive proposal for how we can appropriate such resources for where we find ourselves, J. Aaron Simmons looks to trout fishing as a phenomenological case study. Combining the religious, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of existence, trout fishing is a lived practice of desire for an expected end, and yet it also trains us for living into a future in which those expectations remain unfulfilled. Using selected works of the Snite Museum of Art as signposts for this phenomenological investigation, Simmons will suggest that by bringing together new phenomenology, trout fishing, and a little bit of open theism, we can get a better picture of how desire facilitates faithful living in light of embodied vulnerability.

This essay attempts to marshal some of the resources of the so-called “new phenomenologists” (i.e., Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry) in service of a deeper phenomenological understanding of cinematic form, specifically the experience of cinematic temporality. Here, I put Deleuze in conversation with some central concepts from Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, with the hope that their harmonies and divergences will illuminate some central questions about the experience of cinematic temporality. In the end, I add some insights from cinematic multisensory analysis, as a means of giving a more wholistic picture regarding how Deleuze (an atheist, philosophical iconoclast) and Marion/Henry (theologically inflected phenomenology) might complement each other, giving us some reason to believe that the marvels of cinematic temporality can be understood as both human and divine, immanent and transcendent, standing (originary) and streaming (evanescent). Indeed, it is because all these dichotomies can be paradoxically true – within Henry’s conception of “Life” as the root and pure manifestation or phenomenality – that these instances gain their power.

This paper primarily engages the work of two contemporary thinkers, Jean-Luc Marion and M. Shawn Copeland, in order to advance an argument that builds on their attention to aesthetics, Christology, and their implications for subjectivity. The argument can be read initially through the example of China Christ, a 20th century artistic depiction that renders Christ’s flesh as other than white and refuses to render his face as visible. Drawing on Marion and Copeland, one can argue that diverse depictions of Christ saturate productively in two ways: first, through beauty, they communicate the intentionality of another (God) who makes a claim on the self. Second, they remind the viewer that the saturation of Christ’s flesh is accomplished by taking on human flesh in their diversity. Read through the lens of Marion’s thought, China Christ insists on the apophatic nature of theology and how that “decenters” the human subject. For Marion, Christ as a phenomenon saturates to a higher degree, rendering the subject no longer a subject but an addressee. But to open up space for retrieval and a stronger ethical application, note that China Christ literally saturates the flesh of Christ: saturation is defined in art color theory as the degree and intensity of a color’s difference from white. This can remind the viewer of another dimension of the apophatic. Perhaps Christ saturates the viewer’s gaze artistically precisely by becoming visible in thousands of paintings, devotional icons and in different flesh, so as to proclaim that Christ as phenomenon exceeds phenotypic whiteness and points to an ethic of love that concretely engages and affirms racial and ethnic difference.

In this paper I focus on the development of linear (or Renaissance) perspective to take up the task of an archeology of the subject, not primarily as a history but as a heuristic tool to explore the phenomenological nature of the aesthetic experience that marks the turn to our own modern age. A recent disagreement between Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque sheds light on the significance of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) and his On the Vision of God for this task, particularly the nature of the gaze at stake in Cusa’s development of “perspective.” Their conversation around this text is significant in that it sheds light on how through the rise of linear perspective the human desire for the unknown is transformed. Ultimately, I trace out what Cusa does with the notion of the “darkness of God”, especially as contrasted with earlier usage by Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), to show how human desire toward the infinite is transformed, through a focus on linear perspective, from a model of virtue formation to an ocular model that shows the contours of the nascent transcendental desiring subject. Tracing out how “darkness” is handled within modern subjectivity will reveal malformed networks of desire in the formation of the modern public space. In view of this, we can begin to ask the secular question of how we ethically orient a multiplicity of perspectives.

Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012) comprises parallel narratives: one arc follows a priest in a crisis of divine silence, the other the disintegration of a love affair. These respective Bernanos- and Bergman-esque types have robust literary and cinematic precedents; the film’s categoric uniqueness lies in the emergent onus to identify the Venn diagrammatic middle in two familiar tales. The most serious engagements to date have posited transcendence, love, or vocation as key to Wonder’s cipher. David Calhoun advances a transcendence from Plato via Kierkegaard; Julie Hamilton construes the film as a phenomenology of love; Roger Ebert, in the final review before his death, formulates the priest’s relationship to Christ as that of “a sort of former lover.”

While these currents are productive, I want to argue that the mnemonic character often implicated in studies of love and the divine in Malick itself constitutes the subject of Wonder. As much as The Tree of Life (2011) wields memory to promote a theology of grace, To the Wonder interrogates Platonic images of desire in service of a functionally Augustinian phenomenology of memory.

A study of the development of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological construct over the past several decades reveals some notable consistencies, especially with regard to the nature of “givenness” as put forth in Reduction and Givenness (1989), In Excess (2001), and Being Given (1997). This givenness is the foundation for his construct wherein the self apprehends and is affected by the other, and the roles of both the self and the other (“givee” and given) undergo considerable scrutiny as Marion works to articulate just how they ought to function in relation to each other within the context of his phenomenological framework.

Despite much clarification and progress throughout the course of his greater project, there persists a recurring tendency to sever the self from the other in order to preserve a clear understanding of the nature of each. This effectively places the self in a position of primacy and, I would argue, bypasses a real understanding of the nature of the given, insofar as it has the potential to lead one back to its source. It also prevents the self from arriving at the real object of its desire.

This paper will inquire into the exact nature of this blindness—a blindness best described as “one who thinks he can see”—and will offer a solution which itself is rooted in the context of liturgical space and practice. This solution will account for the self’s natural desire to “see,” the purity of givenness which stems from the Giver, and the effect which liturgy has as it provides an opportunity for the self’s response—and approach to—the given.

Possibility is central to the writings of Martin Heidegger as he considers human existence. Desire and possibility are formative to being, and one’s ultimate potential is being directed toward death. Despite an early engagement with theology, he does not set out a definitive place for God, nor the particularities of Christ. This contrasts with his contemporary, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his articulations of God’s possibility engaging with contingency. Through God’s availability to human beings, they may become directed toward Christ, who lives to be encountered within human existence, giving life beyond it. While Bonhoeffer is critical of Heidegger’s ontology for theology, he does align with the philosopher’s investment in continuity and contingency within temporal existence. Heidegger’s attention to human finitude, and his continual negotiation of possibility and limitation is similarly central to Bonhoeffer’s thinking. The philosopher and theologian’s conceptions of possibility are to be examined, as they bring the future onto human horizons, maneuvering between present reality and that which is to come. Here one can see Bonhoeffer addressing questions that Heidegger raises. Through Rembrandt’s The Hundred Guilder Print, Bonhoeffer demonstrates the social possibility of art as Heidegger does, yet reoriented toward Christ. The artwork enables Bonhoeffer to see and proclaim a vision of the church for his context. His orientation engages with possibility, toward a socially-encompassing church community, attuned to new creation in Christ. As such, Heidegger’s priorities thus redirected may inform being in Christ within the world.

In his efforts to bring to light the infinite call, Chrétien frequently recurs to the image of the wound. For Chrétien, the wound describes both the ruptured character of finite nature and the revelation of that character itself. Yet, what is the phenomenological status of the wound? In prizing this lexicon, does Chrétien speak of physical wounds? Of the rupture and suffering of flesh? What is the relation between wounded being and being wounded? This essay addresses these questions by bringing Chrétien into conversation with two depictions of desire in James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. Tracing the ways in which Chrétien’s accounts of the infinite call link its appearance to worldly phenomena, I argue that a phenomenology of divine revelation must consider the reality of wounded flesh. In this context, the second half of the essay draws upon Baldwin to argue that—though often conducted in poetic and abstruse language—the phenomena of touch, wounding, and desire, as always embodied, have unavoidably political dimensions. Thus, while an analysis of Chrétien’s thought reveals that the phenomena of woundedness and desire are manifest only in the world, in turning to Baldwin, we discover the complexities that attend this worldly appearing.

The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s greatest sculptural achievement, was received by his contemporaries as a compelling testimony to faith. Yet, in the centuries that followed, art historians and critics, from Burkhardt to Huxley to Lacan, have been confounded by the sculpture’s evocation of the erotic. In this presentation, I attribute commentators’ acute discomfort across the centuries to features of modernity that create seemingly impassable disjunctions between the erotic and the religious, as these are reflected in tensions between popular religiosity and the institutional concerns of the Catholic Reformation and among art historians. As I situate the Ecstasy of St. Teresa within its cultural context, I draw also on Mieke Bal, Giles Deleuze, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to sketch a less fraught encounter with the Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Although these figures are children of modernity, they offer robust resources for a fresh approach to the sculpture that supports the retrieval of the erotic within the religious and illuminates the holy desire that infused Bernini and drew the faithful to the Cornaro Chapel.

Jean-Louis Chrétien frequently uses the story of Jacob wrestling God to describe the anguish and wound of hearing the Call. Although Jacob is blessed in the end, Chrétien’s intent is to highlight the wound rather than the beauty Jacob received through the opening of the wound. Yet, what Chrétien has to say about beauty is necessary to complete our understanding of the Call and Response structure. The gift of beauty is a grace. Consequently, our response is sacramental in nature allowing us to “produce beautiful things.” To illustrate this reception of beauty and sacramental response, I turn to two interpretations of the story of the Road to Emmaus: the painting “Emmaus” by Filipino artist Emmanuel Garibay and the poem “Song on the Road to Emmaus” by Dorothee Soelle. The surprising imagined responses of the travelers in these two works highlight the transformation from wound to beauty and offer hope for a beautiful response from our own wounded world.