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or cultures (other Western motives) will
adulterate its propagation. We must be
prepared to face the fact.
Mutations and tremors in the course of
our history never threw us off our course.
They just pro-duced several shoots heading
this way or that. It is not sufficient to say
that Medieval romance and Renaissance
painting, shoots from the Christian tree,
anticipate modern aestheticism; that the
Enlightenment was a foil to Christianity
in that the latter discards any religion
that implies a my-thology; that the TV
icon has to do with representation, or
even information made public; and that
literature is answerable to Scripture these
days when God is dead, and when meaning
died in the process. That would mean
transmission, inheritance or escheat in
the processes of rupture or reproducibility.
And what about secularity? Secular applies
to what belongs to God’s people, to the
members of the Church! Such a mistake
bears witness to the principle of filiation
and of its possible excesses. That is why
the difference between humanist cultures
or literatures and the cultural remains
uncertain and cannot shed any light on the
sustainability of their course.
Such dependence is forever. It makes the
debt heavier as shift follows swing. In
this light, Des-cartes thought of man as
possible master and owner of the earth.
The qualifier implies a divine warranty
of evidence and truth. And even if such
warranty has lost all credibility, we keep
refer-ring to it in whatever action existence
forces us into, in a belief in man that is
closely dependent on it. The models we
use as references can be easily found out,
although they are nurtured differ-ently.
Happiness as doctrine is but a pale copy
of Augustine’s beata vita, in a world ruled
by the cult of the self, lust and a dramatic
rush to personal freedom. Out of fear
of falling short, we are industrially and
busily creating the matter, artefacts and
potential needs for entertainment and
consumption products, certain as we are,
in so doing, of acquiring self-justification,
proof of our existence, and confirmation
that we belong here. It is difficult to
dissociate, to avoid bringing together the
places of interest invaded by tourists and
literature. People switch from one author
to the other, from one newspaper article
to another. Travelling the literary world
does not mean resting in the books that
can never be related to any list. But this
sophisticated universal vocation (some will
call it cosmopolitism), stemming from a
certain idea of religion, also uses the Greek
language when it promotes harmonization.
The aim is to fall in harmony with the
world and with oneself. But ‘to exist’, i.e.
‘to be/stand outside’ implies, above all,
incapacity to be oneself. Both inwardly and
outwardly, we are a prey to alterity, i.e; to
alteration, without any fulcrum, fair game
for whatever silent or humming polarities
are besetting us.
The act of writing ignores the religion of
literature. What we have to turn towards
is the impos-sibility of any coincidence,
of any layered unicity. It expresses far
more than finiteness. It is a rent that
cannot be mended. God, short of a better
word for naming the deity, means just
what it means: the outstanding ray in the
blinding homogeneity of light. As such it
stands as the inde-scribable shaft that
passes through every one of us in our
incomparable existence and the general
wilderness, without stopping. Such a
rupture gives man a chance at the same
time that it makes it impossible for my
being to be one. That is why I see myself
dying every second, and at the same time
am reborn to that experience as long as I
live. Death and Resurrection.
Such living death, rewritable as it is, is
cognate with writing as a phenomenon.
But its law re-mains something odd which
cannot merge into a generality especially if
it complies with a world order which sucks
the lifeblood of all works and reduces them
to consumer goods. A book is a book.
It seeks no recognition except by what it steals
from us. It comes to us but sneaks away.
In the process of kenosis, God reduced
himself to nothingness, emptied himself
of his own self. The word was coined by
Paul (Ph 2:6-7) to relate Christ’s deliberate
humbling in the process of incarnation.
The tendency to recognize a kenosis of the
divine principle itself in the Son made man
gather momentum among the moderns.
Which turns Christian monotheism into
another form of atheism, even if one
acknowledges the unfathomable generosity
of divine agape. In the Torah, God, or the
Nameless One is beyond identity: (I) shall
be / (I) shall be. Is it procrastination or the
coin of the impossible? Already in the Babel
story, the erection of a tower in order to
impose one language on the whole world is
repudiated; incidentally, Babel is the name
Yahweh uses to decree that languages
be confounded and translation made
impossible. Having man name the animals
amounts to anticipating an inevitable
linguistic dispersion among humankind.
For humankind to exist, the condition might
be said to be the impossibility of identifying
and coin-ciding with their words. They root
in their uprooting. One question remains
unanswered for them. Man is impossible
because God is impossible, unthinkable.
The dilemma of man comes from this
impossibility, this dual experience from
which he takes joy while remaining in grief.
The gap remains. All three monotheistic
religions, religions of the Book, may well
have been permanently coping with the
wound which, in Eastern philosophy, is
above all an opening. The trajectories
are different. In the West all moves are
governed by causality and finality.
Literature is part of such a positive
pursuit, contaminated by Christianity itself,
by the Roman heritage and its rationality.
For philosophers, it bears the mark of
the being which God could not do without,
in spite of his being supreme. Allowing
oneself to be caught up in the impossible
opens the way to a thought independent of
the being.
Nothing comes closer to the impossible
than death, unreal, if there is such a
thing and if it even-tually comes. Being
inexorable, there is no access to it. Caught
in the headlong rush of the self, man
destroys himself by endeavouring to
work out the field of the possible without
allowing for the impossible. Man does not
name what is mortal for his own sake for
that would make him capable of death as
such, but because he keeps dying in the
face of himself and of the others, in his
language, acts and institutions. Dying beats
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