Á Propos, Lévinas by Appelbaum David

Author:Appelbaum, David. [Appelbaum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438443126
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Remark in a Kerygmatic Text

Identification is kerygmatical…. It is an obedience in the midst of the will (“I hear this or that said”), a kerygma at the bottom of a fiat.

—OB, 35, 36

The circle leads back to kerygma, the exercise of proclamation, because it institutes a magical equivalence, the performance that renders two unequals equal. In fecundity, Levinas imagines, proclamation gives rise to designation, by which act a word is made to take the place of a thing. It is invention of the noun, nominative, nomenclature, name—a whole language that possesses user-friendly logistics that guides meaning to the addressee. To treat language as a verb produces a device with no handle for reference, that semipermanent, relatively stable point to which meaning can attach, and one whose signification swarms without ever settling. A language whose vociferation conveys repeatedly a promise of meaning's coming to pass that is never granted fulfillment, but rather the eternal longing of a Tantalus. Meaning is staged as a ghastly apparition that gloats in the enigma of its proximity, that reiterates a lure that fascinates, fascination in fascination until the enigma is no different from fascination, and fascination, the enigma. That language with its antinomian voice had to be defeated by a violence that counters an originary violence; Derrida looks awry at the Medusa face of language. No agreement, synthesis, or dialectical resolution of the contestation is possible. This first impossibility then is driven to excess by kerygma. It mutters kerygmatically under its breath, and the image of a language and reality springs up, the Ursprung. “This as that,” a voice utters. It is so.

Two index fingers point. Wittgenstein reminds us of everyman who sees how language touches experience, while the philosopher rejects his psychologism. Two, not one, indices are needed linguistically to posit world and language in synch. Or so it would seem. In reality, phenomenology demonstrates, all the world is in immanence. Linguistical means do not extend to transcendence into meaningful speech; they are the transcendental conditions of any possible object for Kant and then the horizon for Husserl; it also lies at the crux of Levinas's “Kantianism.”75 The local product of magical equivalence performs under the name of kerygma and supplies the structure of predication. The predicative sentence says something of something else. The other to the subject is coordinated with the subject; coordination is reassertion of the idem, the same. To bind the two parts together—that thaumaturgical event of present note—the copula is conjured to join the two as one in “holy matrimony.” From “this as that” to “this is that.” Thus, the second and more dramatic act of performance, conjuration, conjunction, conjugal union.

What the fingers point at differs from (if one can say) what is overridden by the identity of the sentence. Predication synchronizes and puts world and language both in the same temporal frame and on the same page. “Temporalization is the verb form to be” (OB, 35). Discourse, which takes the form of a logic of predication, is a serviceable product of kerygmatic equivalence.

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