In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

219 Transcendence and Beyond A Concluding Roundtable Moderated by John D. Caputo John D. Caputo: Let me say at the start that I have learned a great deal this weekend, both from the gifted speakers we have heard, and from Hurricane Isabel, which roared up the northeastern coast on Thursday and nearly put an end to our program. I have learned something about the transcendence of nature. And I have learned to never again speak in praise of the unprogrammable disruption, the interruption, the incoming of the wholly other or the unforeseeable event. From here on in, I plan to advocate uninterrupted continuity and the absolutely programmable! Kierkegaard has Johannes Climacus say somewhere that the idea of contingency among the philosophers is such an abstract and empty term for them that the only thing that would make them understand it is an earthquake—to which I would add a hurricane. So I suppose we should all consider ourselves well instructed on this matter of contingency! We have posed the question of ‘‘transcendence and beyond’’ precisely in order to signify the way in which this concept can be rethought or redescribed in a postmodern and deeply pluralistic context. In the course of these three days we have seen this ‘‘beyond’’ take on many meanings, from Marion’s Transcendence and Beyond 220 powerful beginning on Thursday evening through the radical demythologizing approaches taken to this idea in the work of Vattimo and David Wood to the redescription of transcendence from feminist and ecological perspectives in Catherine Keller and Sallie McFague. We have heard a succession of distinctly important essays, each of which requires considerable study. In this final session, we will see if we can put some of it together by coming back to several questions that were raised in the course of the past few days. I begin by going back to the opening essay of Jean-Luc Marion (chap. 1), a tantalizing and complex argument for a radical or ultra-transcendence, beyond the classical metaphysical transcendence which is not transcendent enough for Marion . I know that David Wood has some questions about Marion’s essay, so I want to open the discussion by inviting David to share his concerns with us. David Wood: I am very excited to be here. This is the strongest brush with theology that I’ve had since high school, when I won the Hooke theology prize for an essay on the necessity of atheism. I have to say I feel like a poor man at a table groaning with delicious food. I’m hungry but this food is exceedingly rich and I can only pick at it a little bit at a time. I did make some critical remarks about Marion in my own essay (chap. 9) on the basis of what I had read of his work before I came here. I have not wholly digested the essay that he gave us, but it is fair to say that that essay represents almost everything that I find problematic about how he understands transcendence. I have three basic problems that I would like to share with you. As far as I have grasped the scaffolding of his thought in general—a God beyond being, a God of the impossible, a God of love—it rests on a serious and repeated misreading of Heidegger’s struggle with the question of Being. Of course, if you read Heidegger as a traditional ontologist he needs leaping over. But both Levinas and Marion really do not understand the way in which Being for Heidegger is a space of transformation for our being-in-the-world, both our self-relation and our relations with others and with the Other. This is both a technical issue about reading Heidegger and also addresses what we have to do to be able to think the sort of things that are worth thinking. It is just when we start considering how to reshape our being-in-the-world that something like love really comes in. Love, that is, in all its fragility, complexity and vulnerability . Marion’s understanding of God’s love seems to me removed from the very contingency that makes human love so precious. I suppose my question would be, can a God without a body—who is not mortal, who cannot fear or hate—can such a God love at all? I am not asking: Can his (or her) love be infinite, but does love make any sense without those...

Share