Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

HORIZONS
other term is not reduced to the sphere of the same, but is related to as Other. This
would not be thought or knowledge, but could only be indicated as “thought” or
“knowledge” in a different sense, a non-conceptual knowing by which the
transcendent appears, reveals itself, but is not reduced to concepts or the conditions
of the constituting ego. It would be “a thinking which does not bring all transcendence
back to immanence and does not compromise transcendence in understanding
it” (BPW 155): “An impossible demand!” (ibid.)
Levinas sees intimations of this in the history of philosophy, notably Kant’s notion
of the Categorical Imperative, and even more importantly in Descartes’s account of
the idea of the Infinite in the Third Meditation – an “idea” which exceeds thought, an
idea which cannot be contained by the finitude of the cogito. It is a thought which
cannot be reduced to immanence, cannot be grasped in a concept, and cannot be
submitted to correlational analysis. Here we have an “appearance” – a “revelation” –
in which the other who appears remains Wholly Other. Here Levinas uses the
important metaphor of surplus or excess to describe his project, casting it in terms of the
phenomenological theme of fulfillment and displacing the primacy of adequation in
Husserl’s account of transcendence (TI 22–3). For Husserl, the intention always
exceeds its fulfillment; there is always a surplus of “mean-ing” without intuition.
What Levinas is looking for is an intentional relation (albeit “an intentionality of a
wholly different type”) wherein there is a surplus of intuition, an excess of donation
which overwhelms the intentional gaze, which “dazzles” it. This surplus or excess
would be exterior to, lying outside of, the sphere of immanence or the same. It would
be an exteriority, a “beyond,” an “infinity” (TI 23), which is nevertheless “reflected
within” the totality.
Consistently, Levinas turns to Descartes’s “idea 55 [not ‘concept’] of the infinite
within us” as a site for this kind of intuition, a donation which undoes the
phenomenologically constituting ego (TI 25). Indeed, the infinite is precisely that
which the ego cannot constitute, but rather constitutes the ego. It is precisely a
thought which cannot be contained, cannot be thought, properly speaking, because it
“overflows” thought (BPW 156). Thus, “[t]he relation with infinity will have to be
stated in terms other than those of objective experience; but if experience precisely
means a relation with the absolutely other, that is, with what always overflows
thought, the relation with infinity accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the
word” (TI 25). So in the “idea of the infinite” we find a “revelation” of transcendence
within the sphere of the same: “the improbable feat whereby a separated being, fixed
in its identity, the same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither
contain nor receive solely by virtue of its own identity” (TI 27). The subject is
ruptured by an Other who invades its sphere of ownness, marking the revelation of a
genuine transcendence.
The “Saturated Phenomenon”: Marion’s critique of Husserl
As Husserl and Levinas both considered the other person or subjectivity as something
of a “limit case” for the question of knowing transcendence, Marion looks to
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