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  • The Place of Mimesis and the ApocalypticToward a Topology of the “Far and Near”1
  • Richard Schenk, OP (bio)

“In true love one must see oneself in the absolutely other. This must mean I would die in me to live in you. At the foundation of what I have named the self-consciousness of the absolute nothing, in which I am myself through the fact that in my foundations I see the absolutely other or, better, a Thou: here must lie the meaning of love. In my view the agape of Christianity has this meaning. Agape is not a yearning, but rather much more a sacrifice, the love of God and not the love of a human. This love comes down from God to humans rather than rising from humans up into God.... Just as Augustine puts it: I am myself through the love of God, i.e., through the love of God I am truly I.”2

I. “Complete Heidegger”: Gianni Vattimo and/or René Girard “Post-Schwager”?

The late Jesuit professor of systematic theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Raymund Schwager (1935–2004), in whose honor this essay was first presented as a lecture, adopted a great deal of the analysis and critique of sacrifice articulated by René Girard. Schwager provided Girard in [End Page 1] return a sense of the importance of letting stand a core of sacrificial imagery with which the crucifixion has been understood, arguably beginning with Jesus himself. Schwager’s friendly critique allowed Girard, already in 1995, in a corrective to his own earlier work to, as he said, “give credit to the decisive input from Schwager”3 by acknowledging as necessary a nuanced interpretation of the death of Jesus as a sacrifice.

Some four years later, Girard accepted an invitation to discuss mimetic theory with the well-known postmodern theorist, Gianni Vattimo, who identified Girard’s intentions constructively but somewhat too closely with his own programmatic and its reading of the later Heidegger. To articulate the difference between his own position and that of Vattimo, Girard once again stressed his debt to Schwager. Before discussing the greater discreteness that he (Girard, here in contrast to Vattimo) sees between text and interpretation, Girard first admitted that the basis for Vattimo’s confusion was the unnoticed shift that Girard had made in the wake of Schwager’s critique:

Between us—Vattimo and Girard—there is some misunderstanding—for several reasons. One of these reasons is obvious, and I am 100 percent responsible for it. In Things Hidden, I had decided not to use the word sacrifice in connection with the Cross. This decision probably colored Vattimo’s assessment of my work. Together with many others, Vattimo interprets my rejection of the word sacrifice as a rejection of (Christian) orthodoxy, which I never actually had intended...

In an essay for the Raymund Schwager Festschrift, I rejected my earlier rejection of the word sacrifice.

From a Christian point of view, the symbolic symmetry between archaic sacrifice and the Cross cannot be without significance. The attachment of orthodox theologians to traditional words like sacrifice is not meaningless, even if it all needs further explanation....4

One of the questions that first enticed Vattimo to look for an affinity between himself and Girard was the claim made by Girard himself that mimetic theory was necessary to “complete Heidegger” (Um Heidegger zu vollenden...).5 Vattimo gave this claim by Girard to complete Heidegger a sympathetic reading:

One should ponder the similarity between the apocalyptic vision of modernity, which Girard presents in Things Hidden, and the “Overcoming of Metaphysics,” which Heidegger describes in his later works. For Girard and Heidegger, what is [End Page 2] decisive and apocalyptical, i.e., revelatory, in our situation today is the explosion of violence on the basis of the fact that in our time the will to power—or mimetic rivalry—has become explicit and limitless.6

II. Completing the Logic of Place

The following reflections will explore the question of what it means not just generally “to complete Heidegger,” but specifically to complete Heidegger’s ontology of place, most particularly in his work before 1930. The focus on this seemingly restricted topic...

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