A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus

On Being Attached to Philosophers and Prophets: A Response to Wyschogrod

On Being Attached to Philosophers and Prophets: A Response to Wyschogrod John D. Caputo The rejoinder I would make to Merold Westphal about Against Ethics is to a great extent made on my behalf by Edith Wyschogrod in the present study. Edith Wyschogrod is something of a soulmate of mine, a fellow traveler in a world that is, in Levinas’s poignant phrase, “attached to both the philosophers and the prophets.”1 She is someone who wants to station herself, as do I, in the distance between the philosophers and the prophets, which Derrida, citing James Joyce’s memorable phrase, described as “Jewgreek.”2 She too wants to be ignited by the sparks that each give off, in a project that is captured perfectly in her exquisite title “saints and postmodernism.”3 Her intuitions about my texts, and especially about Against Ethics and Prayers and Tears, run deep. She seems to get everything right, to take the words right out of my mouth, perhaps because I have learned so much of them from her in the first place. I have to spend a certain amount of time fending off the misunderstandings created by the impish spin I sometimes put on things, as my rejoinders to Ayres, Kearney, and Westphal make plain, but Edith always catches the spin, seizes the point, is never thrown off track by the tensions I mean to accentuate with my rhetoric. To comment on her lovely text is to say yes, yes, that is what I said and still more, what I did not know I said, for it has been magnified and generously enlarged by her insights and erudition. So it is no wonder that Edith has seized upon the “without why,” an expression used by Angelus Silesius—“The Rose is without why; it blossoms because it blossoms,”—that I have long cherished and held close to my heart, ever since my doctoral dissertation which led to my first book, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, on Heidegger and Eckhart. Silesius’s saying, first taken up by Heidegger in The Principle of Reason and made the epigraph of Irigaray’s interesting critique of Heidegger in The Forgetting of Air, goes all the way back to the German sermons of Meister Eckhart, where it was the highest way that Eckhart could name love. Some men love God, Eckhart quipped, the way they love their cow, for its milk (that is what Derrida would call an “economy”), whereas love, the Meister said, is without why, which is 311 what Derrida would call a gift and Eckhart himself called Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit has (at least) a double value. It is the name for a mode of meditative thinking, one that suspends concepts and propositions, that gives up the search for causes and reasons, in order to enter into a simpler experience of thinking; that was the side that Heidegger seized upon and that I still treasure. I might add, at this point, that it was with Heidegger and Eckhart in mind that I said that in mystical theology one renounces or detaches oneself from all propositions, affirmative and negative, both apophatic and kataphatic, a point that comes up in my discussion of Tom Carlson. But Edith Wyschogrod reminds us that Gelassenheit was also the name for love in Meister Eckhart, and that was a side of Eckhart that Heidegger simply ignored, with the effect that Gelassenheit and Denken finally has a strictly poetic sense utterly divested of its prophetic power and biblical resonance. That is what I criticized in Heidegger and what Edith Wyschogrod underlines by taking up the thematics of the body and flesh which she has so insightfully developed in her own work. What concerns us both is how utterly pain and afflicted flesh disappear from Heidegger’s view, be that in the absence of an analysis of Sorge as kardia, as heartfelt care, in Being and Time, or the absence of the concrete sufferings of historical human beings from the later “history of Being,” in which suffering and injustice simply play no part—except when pain is mystified as a metaphor for the ontological difference.4 Heidegger’s “call of Being” is I think an aestheticizing secularization of the Shema, which can never take the form of the call for justice that goes to the heart of the work of Levinas and Derrida upon which Edith and I so much depend. The question of justice is formulated by Wyschogrod in her contribution to this volume...