Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

HORIZONS
theology, in order to open up new a dialogue with phenomenology, particularly the
phenomenology of the young Heidegger as a lens for then returning to the protophenomenology
of Saint Augustine. However, my ultimate goal is to then return to
the theological challenge which first initiated the project. In other words, the
movement of the book is from (negative) theology, to phenomenology, and back
again. Unlike Derrida, the telos of my project is a philosophical reflection on the
possibility of theology – the possibility of speaking of God. In addition, my goal is to
make space for an experience of the transcendent within phenomenology itself – to
provide an account of how phenomenology can recognize religious experience and
the appearance of transcendence.
Method and the question of justice
First, a formalization of the problem: If the very topic of philosophy is experience, 8 and
if we appreciate that experience is pretheoretical, then how will it be possible to
theoretically describe this pretheoretical experience? Already, however, we have
been confronted by three different challenges, three different instances of
phenomena that are incommensurate with language: God, différance, and factical
experience. For each, that which exceeds conceptualization is different: in the first
instance, we are confronted by a radical transcendence which cannot be conceived,
an “Other” which exceeds conceptual determination. Here we would include the
face of the Other in Levinas, Marion’s Gxd, and the God of Augustine. In the second
case of différance, it is not so much a matter of transcendence in a Levinasian sense of
plenitude and excess, but rather a “quasi-transcendence,” a phenomenon which is
not quite a phenomenon, and thus cannot be named. Finally, in the case of factical
experience, we find a phenomenon which resists expression in language, not
because of its distance, but rather because of its proximity and interiority, a depth to
the self which cannot be expressed because it is a mode of being incommensurate
with cognitive conceptualization. “Case studies” of the final category would include
Augustine and Kierkegaard’s account of subjectivity, and Heidegger’s notion of
facticity.
However, despite their differences, when we formalize the problem we find that
all three confront a similar challenge – a methodological challenge: how will it be
possible to speak? Or as Derrida asks, Comment ne pas parler? How not to speak? How
to avoid speaking in a certain manner which in fact denies and conceals? How is it
possible to speak and yet not grasp (con-capere) in a concept, enframing and thereby
stilling that which is spoken of and reducing it to the order of predicative discourse?
How can one speak without betraying the object of speech, giving it up and
delivering it over to be manhandled by the interlocutor as something present-athand?
How can language, and more particularly theoretical concepts, communicate
without doing violence to the “object” which is exterior to language? Do not
concepts always already signal the violation of radical alterity?
This concern regarding the violence of concepts is a distinctly postmodern
matter, in the simple sense that it is only a “modern” concept which makes claims to
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