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Notes Introduction John Panteleimon Manoussakis 1. Most notably ‘‘How to Avoid Speaking’’ (1987), ‘‘Khôra’’ (1987), Circumfession (1990), The Gift of Death (1992), and ‘‘Faith and Reason’’ (1992). 2. Among these we might mention the following: the American Academy of Religion (Toronto), the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Chicago), the Inter-American Congress in Philosophy (Lima, Peru), the American Catholic Philosophical Association (Cincinnati), the Canadian Society of Hermeneutics (Halifax), the International Symposium of the American College of Greece (Athens), the European University Institute Intervarsity Seminar (Florence, Italy), the Erasmus Exchange Seminar of the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the European Society for the Study of Religion (Louvain). Several of the contributions to these international symposia are featured in this volume. 3. Recent bibliography also testifies to the timely and pressing character of the questions addressed in this volume. In the last few years we have seen a growing number of articles and monographs on the importance of Continental philosophy (phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction in particular) to questions of divine alterity, ultimacy, and transcendence. Three series in particular carry on their shoulders the weight of such a project in North America: John D. Caputo’s Perspectives in Continental Philosophy by Fordham University Press, Merold Westphal’s Series in the Philosophy of Religion by Indiana, and Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries’s Cultural Memory in the Present by Stanford University Press. I believe that this volume contributes in a significant way to this important debate. 389 Epiphanies of the Everyday Richard Kearney 1. Two of the most powerful literary evocations of ‘‘epiphany’’ (a term explicitly used by James Joyce) in modern literature are to be found in Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, both of which are invoked in the above paragraph. In his early work Stephen Hero, Joyce describes ‘‘epiphany’’ thus: ‘‘Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany’’ (chapter 23). See my essay ‘‘Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust,’’ in Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney’s Postmodern Challenge, edited by John Manoussakis and Peter Gratton (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006). One lesson to be learned from a poetics of epiphany would be that divinity is manifest in the most mundane of things, events, and persons, just as the sacred is revealed through embodied human figures in the great Wisdom traditions: Christ in Jesus, Visnu in Krishna, Buddha in Siddartha, Elohim in the widow–orphan–stranger, and so on. I consider the present essay to be a companion piece to ‘‘Traversing the Imaginary.’’ Both were written during the summer–fall of 2004, as two preliminary sketches of a micro-eschatology of epiphany. 2. G. M. Hopkins, ‘‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire. . . .’’ For an illuminating account of the influence of Duns Scotus on Hopkins, especially as it relates to the notions of ‘‘inscape,’’ ‘‘instress,’’ ‘‘incarnationalism,’’ and Creation as ensarkosis, see Philip Ballinger, The Poem as Sacrament: The Theological Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Louvain: Peters Press, 2000), 103– 50. See also the Appendix on ‘‘Scotus and Hopkins’’ in The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Christopher Devlin (Oxford University Press, 1959), 338–52 and the section ‘‘Scot et Hopkins —l’individuation’’ in Jean Duns-Scot ou la Révolution Subtile, edited by Christine Goémé (Paris: FAC, 1982). 3. See, in particular, Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and the contributions by Marion, Derrida, John Caputo, et al. in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, edited by John Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), in particular, ‘‘On the Gift: A Discussion Between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney,’’ 54–78. See also Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Marion was the first to speak of the first three phenomenological reductions: (1) to essence (Husserl); (2) to Being (Heidegger); and (3) to givenness (Marion himself). I am indebted to him for this helpful if somewhat schematic formula . No necessary, dialectical, or supercessionist claim is intended in our presentation. Hegelian synthesis and periodization is a temptation I hope 390 Notes [44.204.164.147] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:47 GMT) (like Ricoeur in Time...