Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

HORIZONS
that which is “seen?” If the “object” of theoretical articulation is in some way
radically exterior to language (God, différance, pretheoretical experience), then every
unveiling of it within language will fail to produce the object: the phenomenon will
fail to appear, precisely because of the failure of the concept to grasp that which
necessarily exceeds its comprehension. Or rather, the object will be forced to appear
otherwise than itself, forced to play by the rule of the concept and thus suffering the
violence of conceptualization. We inherit this concern from Levinas’s suggestion
that “theory also designates comprehension [intelligence] – the logos of being – that is,
a way of approaching the known being such that its alterity with regard to the
knowing being vanishes” (TI 21). To this we must relate his understanding of
violence as “making them [others] play roles in which they no longer recognize
themselves” (ibid.). Thus the theoretical disciplines – philosophy and theology
included – are faced with the methodological question of how to speak, or how not to
speak. And in an important way, this methodological question is fundamentally a
question of justice: how do we do justice to that which is other (where “doing justice”
means respecting the other as other, rather than reducing it to a relation of
identity 15 ), particularly in our theoretical descriptions and articulations? It would
seem that either one treats all objects as present-at-hand (a positivist kataphatics),
thereby denying their alterity and unwittingly engaging in violence; or, one gives up
any possibility of non-violent description and thereby gives up theory (an apophatics
which ends in silence).
Unless, perhaps, there is a “third way” out of this aporia: what if, recognizing the
violence and failure of theoretical concepts which treat all phenomena as present-athand,
but at the same time appreciating the imperative of description, one were to
develop and work with a new kind of concept or different set of categories? Could
there be a kind of concept, and therefore a kind of theory, which does not treat
objects as present-at-hand, but rather both honors transcendence and answers the
call for reflection? That is, could the violence of the (traditional) theoretical concept
signal the development of a new kind of concept and set of conceptual categories,
precipitated by a fundamental redirection of philosophy to pretheoretical
experience? Could we, as Derrida suggests, think the concept of the concept
otherwise? The construction (or recovery) of just such a third way is precisely the
task of this book: to provide an alternative interpretation of concepts which do not
claim to grasp their object, but rather signal the phenomenon in such a way that
respects its transcendence or incommensurability rather than collapsing the
difference and denying otherness. Such a reinterpretation of concepts will open a
philosophical space for a reconsideration of theological method.
At stake here is the very possibility of both philosophy and theology – the ethical
possibility of philosophy and the possibility of an ethical philosophy. 16 This
philosophical consideration of concepts will then function as the foundation for a
theological employment of concepts which “do justice” to God. In particular, I will
attempt to develop the possibility of a “new” phenomenology which is attentive to
this methodological question of justice, since it has been precisely phenomenology
which has been the object of critique as a philosophical method which denies alterity
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