Between Faith and Belief by Joeri Schrijvers

Author:Joeri Schrijvers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-06-01T04:30:00+00:00

A Sacred Anarchy, or the Authority of Authorities

It is on this issue of God that Caputo’s distinction between the metaphysics of omnipotence and his poetics of the impossible seems to founder and becomes untenable, as we have seen Hägglund also observe. For here the demarcation line between what is possible for us and what is impossible becomes highly questionable, and Caputo omits the weal and the woe of us natural ontotheologians. Let us first consider the “strong theologian” Marion on the question of what exactly is possible for the human being with regard to the question of the divine. Rather late in God without Being, Marion asks the following question: “if the crossing of being and the distraction of ontological difference could be conceived only from the point of view of God as agape, the analytic of man as Dasein would remain, for us, impassable, ontological difference, for us, unavoidable.”17 For Marion, just as for Caputo, faith necessarily turns to a certain ethics, because if “the being that it in each case is and has to be” and even that which this being could boast upon in being is of little concern to God, then this individual being rather has to imitate this divine indifference toward being and beings—by remaining indifferent for the play of being/s precisely and offering resistance whenever such indifference would no longer be the case. For Marion, this is accomplished, at the time of God without Being at least, foremost in boredom for which the play between being and beings obviously offers no solace. Boredom in Marion is in effect a precursor of the erotic reduction: when the play between being and beings disappears, it is the love of God that will appear. In more existential terms: if for the bored gaze, the meaning of being itself appears as something impossible—being does not make sense—then, at this very moment, the gaze is (still) envisaged by the gaze of God for whom nothing is impossible and so makes a true meaning possible. The possible “for us” and the impossible “for God” turn into logical and dialectical opposites: “the frontier between the possible and the impossible for us opens exactly this impossibility itself as the possible for God.”18 Even from this brief survey of Marion’s thinking of the (im)possible, it might be clear that this “God without being” borders on an omnipotent being, if only because it ridicules both what is possible and what is impossible for us natural ontotheologians.

Yet the point is that things are not considerably different in Caputo’s poetics of the impossible. Caputo’s poetics suddenly veer into a very transcendental direction again, “bracketing” all thoughts of a superbeing existing somewhere “out there,” bracketing in short everything we would know and be acquainted with from out of the text of the tradition to arrive at the “phenomenal field”19 of the kingdom, which ought to inspire our imagination concerning the possibility of the impossible. For this, Caputo proposes a reduction of the word and the name of

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