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Richard Kearney’s Enthusiasm J O H N D . C A P U T O Richard Kearney is a genuine ‘‘enthusiast,’’ in the genuine sense of the word. His writings are contagiously enthusiastic, charged and exciting , moving and inciting, full of prayers and tears. His beautiful and powerful prose is a perfect testimony to what his friend Seamus Heaney meant when Heaney said that the Irish are a people who took over their invader’s tongue and improved it for them. His thoughts dance; his erudition dazzles us. His imagination, his favorite theme, races ahead of the rest of us who are left in his dust. An insightful reader of Levinas, Kearney has a glorious and productive case of insomnia, which keeps him up at night reading everything and writing about it until the cock crows. But Kearney is an enthusiast in the ancient and literal sense of entheos , a man filled with God, driven by a passion for God, and that is the Kearney who interests me here. His passion is not simply one for the God who is, or for the God who is and was and will be—that would never be enough. His passion is for the God who may be, who may be more than we imagine, more than our imagination can contain ; the God who may be more than God, who is yet to be what God can be; the God who, as one might say in American English, hasn’t shown us anything yet. Such a God is a self-surpassing, self-transcending possibility whose posse exceeds his esse, who has passed right through and gone beyond being, who leaves being in the dust. If Thomas Aquinas said that God is the act of all acts, the actus om309 nium actuum, Kearney will go the Angelic Doctor one better and up the ante. In keeping with a line from Heidegger that he cites, that ‘‘possibility is higher than actuality’’1 (one of the many lines that Heidegger lifted from Kierkegaard without citation), Kearney has pursued this thought down to its most radical conclusion. For Kearney, God is the possibility of all possibilities, the possibility beyond all possibilities , and, as Kearney says in a recent writing that gives me great joy, in which he joins hands with the eminent quasi-Augustinian, quasi-Jewish, slightly atheistic quasi-theologian Jacques Derrida, God is even the possibility of the impossible.2 Kearney, who chiefly draws upon the resources of Levinas and Ricoeur, has been known to give Derrida a hard time in the past. Regarding this new alliance, I myself, off in the distance, try to observe this ring dance of Kearney, Derrida, Levinas, and Ricoeur through my clouded binoculars and can only say oui, oui, Amen, yes, yes, I said, yes, I will, yes. First, I would like to sketch the possibility of Kearney’s God of possibility, of God as the posse beyond esse. Then I will add a second word about Kearney’s enthusiasm, aimed not at tempering or moderating it, because enthusiasm properly understood is the love of God, and the only measure of love is love without measure. A moderate, temperate love is the love of a mediocre fellow. No, I will add a word aimed at complicating Kearney’s enthusiasm, bedeviling it, making it all the more ambiguous and aporetic. I have always stood for giving the devil his due, in particular the devil of undecidability. I have always thought we get the best results by facing up to all the difficulties that beset us in the wake of what I like to call a ‘‘devilish’’ hermeneutics . Aporias and undecidability are not all bad news for me, for such devilish aporetics only serve to intensify the passion of faith and to heighten the intensity and to raise the pitch of genuine enthusiasm— Kearney’s, mine, Derrida’s—the enthusiasm of all those who, like St. Augustine, keep disturbing their tranquillity with the question, quid ergo amo cum deum meum amo? The God Who May Be More Than God Richard Kearney’s philosophical theology turns on a distinction between what he calls the ‘‘eschatological’’ and the ‘‘ontotheological’’ concepts of possibility. In its most classical metaphysical terms, possibility is subordinated to actuality as the imperfect to the perfect, for possibility is taken to mean potency, latency, and unactualized or unrealized potential, every trace of which must be removed from an 310 John D. Caputo [3.145.130.31] Project MUSE (2024...

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