Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Notes

401 Notes Throughout the notes in this text, I often abbreviate titles. For example, John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, appears as Llewelyn, Genealogy. Where permission for reproduction has been given, the acknowledgement is given in the appropriate endnote. The full bibliographical citation is found in the bibliography. Preface 1. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 200. 2. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 72. 3. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 3–4. 4. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 61. 5. Ibid., 54. 6. St. Denys, The Divine Names, 2, PG 3, 1000b. 7. Marion, God Without Being, 73–83. 8. Derrida, Margins, 207–271. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Levinas, On Escape. 11. Bigger, Participation, 197–212. Acknowledgments 1. Ballard, Principles of Interpretation, 33–38, 74. Introduction 1. Levinas, Proper Names, 3–4. 2. In an unpublished lecture, the late Edward Ballard defined nihilism as a fundamental doubt concerning the possibility of a world, where world is an enduring structure of meaning and value. The death of a world leads, as 17_Notes_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:42 pm Page 401 Nietzsche said, “to a radical repudiation of meaning, value, and desirability,” a situation in which “the world as it is . . . ought not to be and . . . the world as it ought to be . . . does not exist” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 7; 318). It is a consequence of “the death of God,” which Heidegger interprets as the elimination of Plato’s supersensible (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 53–54; 61): “The supersensory ground . . . thought as the operative , working reality of everything real (Wirkliche), has become unreal” (Ibid., 99). 3. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, 403. 4. Analogy connects by generating middle terms, but if we look at the “middle,” or better, “the between” in a metaphorical context, the unity is disseminated. Were it not for Symposium’s Eros, a medial image for the middle ’s creativity, would we not fail to see that the creative between, the metaxu, is bounded by that “which always is and is never becoming” and “that which always is and never becomes” within which living creatures arise? Furthermore, analogy entails reading the copula “is” as close to an identity statement, and, while this is sometimes appropriate, it fails to capture metaphor’s reflexive and hermeneutical role. Doesn’t this failure limit the relevance of analogy? Given the metaphor with terms A and B and their hermeneutical operator, R (usually a form of the copula), then if ARB, B dwells in and interprets A; what identity or similitude with B is claimed for A? Sometimes it is seen and the metaphor works; at other times, the result is ambiguous. At times the discerned identity cannot be stated independently of metaphor or the identity may be functional and thus teleological . A site on the membrane of E. coli is a receptor, but the way this binds to its substrate and functions has nothing to do with the way my eyes or ears operate. If I see A as B, then B is a model-theoretic way of understanding A which allows. me to import and map certain features of B into and onto A and maybe even establish an equivalence class. Where intentionality reaches its limit, for example, with chora, metaphor is irreducible. Seeing the eidos is often like seeing the point of a joke—it controls the narrative or demonstrative phrases through which it is intended without ever being directly intuited. Metaphor is not always symmetric, for if A crosses B, B may not cross A. Philosophy is, however, mostly interested in catachresis ; otherwise the predicate will threaten to absorb the subject as in Hegel’s speculative proposition. Even in a catachresis it is not necessarily true that the counter-crossing is innocent of the trace of the first. In Plato’s metaphor, “the state is the individual writ large,” the state is socialized when crossed by the individual whose very form is communion. When he is in turn crossed by the state, i.e., the individual is the state, then it is a humanized state that lets us see him, not as a subject of tyranny, but as Aristotle’s political animal. There are situations in which irresolvable oppositions play back and forth, as in deconstruction, and nothing appears in the gap. 402 ■ Notes to Page 3 17_Notes_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:42 pm Page 402 5. Tsu, Tao Te Ching, 25. 6...