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1. Toward a Phenomenology of the Persona
- Indiana University Press
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9 one Toward a Phenomenology of the Persona I begin by exploring the theme of transfiguration, first in terms of a phenomenology of the persona, and then in subsequent chapters with more speci fic reference to defining epiphanic moments such as the burning bush (Exodus 3:15), the transfiguration narratives of Christ on Mount Thabor (Mark 9, Matthew 17, Luke 9, John 12) and the story of divine-human love in the Song of Songs. In each instance, I will be seeking to address what I consider to be crucial contemporary debates on the notion of an eschatological God who transfigures and desires. What follows is not, let me make clear at the outset, a strictly theological or exegetical account—a task beyond my competence—but an attempt to chart a hermeneutic path of thinking along the tracks and traces of the Possible God who comes and goes. My approach here, as elsewhere in this volume, draws liberally from post-Heideggerian accounts of the self-other relation (Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva, Ricoeur, and Derrida), taking, in this instance, an additional cue from the Johannine promise: ‘‘A little while and you will no longer see me; and again a little while and you will see me’’ (John 16:16–20). The God Who May Be 10 Figure of the Other—Persona Each person embodies a persona. Persona is that eschatological aura of ‘‘possibility’’ which eludes but informs a person’s actual presence here and now. I use it here as another word for the otherness of the other; just as I use ‘‘person’’ to refer to my fellow in so far as he/she is the same or similar to me (empirically, biologically, psychologically, etc.). At a purely phenomenological level, persona is all that in others exceeds my searching gaze, safeguarding their inimitable and unique singularity. It is what escapes me toward another past that I cannot recover and another future I cannot predict. It resides, if it resides anywhere, beyond my intentional horizons of re-tention and pro-tention. The persona of the other outstrips both the presenting consciousness of my perception here and now and the presentifying consciousness of my imagination (with its attempts to see, in the mode of as-if, that which resists perceptual intuition). The persona of the other even defies the names and categories of signifying consciousness. It is beyond consciousness tout court. Though this ‘‘beyondness’’ is, curiously, what spurs language to speak figuratively about it, deploying imagination and interpretation to overreach their normal limits in efforts to grasp it—especially in the guise of metaphor and narrative. This persona is what Levinas names la trace d’autrui; and it is not unrelated to what Derrida calls the enigma of ‘‘alterity’’; nor ultimately to what, in many religions, goes simply but often quite misleadingly by the term ‘‘spirit’’ (pneuma/anima/âme/Geist). I will endeavor here to develop the notion of persona in terms of a radical phenomenology of transfiguration.∞ *** I never encounter others without at the same time configuring them in some way. To configure the other as a persona is to grasp him/her as present in absence, as both incarnate in flesh and transcendent in time. To accept this paradox of configuration is to allow the other to appear as his/her unique persona. To refuse this paradox, opting instead to regard someone as pure presence (thing), or pure absence (nothing), is to disfigure the other. To be sure, this is not an easy matter. The other always appears to us as if s/he were actually present. And it is all too tempting to ignore this as if proviso and presume to have others literally before us, to appropriate them to our scheme of things, reading them off against our familiar grids of understanding and identification. (Especially since the otherness of the other is not located somewhere else—for example, in some Platonic form or noumenal substance.) Accepting the other as a ‘‘stranger’’ in our midst is an uncanny and often threatening experience.≤ Far easier to take the other as given, to take him/her for granted, as no more than what we can grasp—following the logic: what you see is what you get. For if it is true to say that we do somehow ‘‘see’’ the persona [18.209.66.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:44 GMT) Toward a Phenomenology of the Persona 11 in the...