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159 NOTES Introduction 1. The etymology that derives the beautiful (to kalon) from the call (kaleo) and thus understands beauty not in terms of symmetry, proportion, or harmony but in terms of an attraction was suggested by Plato, in his Cratylus (416c); Dionysius the Aeropagite inherits it from Plotinus (Enneads, I, 6) and adopts it in his De Divinis Nominibus (IV, 7, 701c). 2. “The doctrine of the beholding and perceiving (Wahrnehmen) of the beautiful (‘aesthetics’ in the sense of the Critique of Pure Reason) and the doctrine of the enrapturing power of the beautiful are complementarily structured, since no one can really behold who has not also already been enraptured, and no one can be enraptured who has not already perceived” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols., trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), vol. I: Seeing the Form, 10; see also 125. (This work is divided into seven volumes.) 3. Heidegger, in Holzwege, trans. as Off the Beaten Track by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50. 4. “In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 3 vols., trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], vol. I, 10). 5. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 194. 6. Ibid., 169. 7. See the work of Kevin Hart, especially the Introduction in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, in press). 8. I am aware of the irony of this statement, since for Nietzsche Christianity—or at least a certain Christianity—was synonymous with Platonism, the “Platonism of the masses,” as he put it. 9. See Heidegger’s Nietzsche, 200–210. 10. This relationship is the first thing that a phenomenology of the image should discover as, indeed, it does: “the original ‘needs’ the image in order to become manifest ” (John Sallis, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics [Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1986], 69). 11. Heidegger, “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 287–288. 12. Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” in Pathmarks, 269–270. 160 1. The Metaphysical Chiasm 1. Perhaps we should rethink the “idea of infinity,” which for Descartes becomes sufficient evidence of the existence of God, as precisely that which comes from God— not “infinity” but the “idea” itself. Since any idea, insofar as it is given, is evidence of its giver, in this case (if not in every case), it is evidence of God. The etymology of the word seems to suggest as much: an ἰδέα (from ἰδεῖν, the aorist infinitive for the verb ὁράω, “to see”) is an appearance—what appears is not autochthonous to the mind, but its origin is elsewhere, a point outside of and beyond us. 2. Jean-Luc Marion recently posed the very same question in a paper entitled “The Saturated Phenomenon,” trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Philosophy Today 40 (spring 1996): 103–124; all subsequent page references are to this version of Marion’s text. Reprinted in Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak, Thomas A. Carlson, and Jeffrey L. Kosky (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), Part II: Phenomenology and Theology, 176–216. The theme of the saturated phenomenon was reworked by Marion and incorporated into sections 21 and 22 of his Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997); trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky as Being Given (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 199–221. In the wake of Marion’s publication a number of articles have appeared, all of them symptomatic of the perplexity that the thinking of the (im)possibility of the religious phenomenon was destined to cause. Some bore witness to the originality of Marion’s thought even when he engages in a close reading of Husserl and Kant; others questioned the accuracy of this reading, which was not, for their taste, faithful enough. And yet others did not see it as a way of thinking at all, but rather as a transvestite theology which poses, or so they tell us, as phenomenology, a theology—with an agenda—that dares “not speak its name,” that turns its readers into “catechumens.” (I am echoing here, in disagreement , Dominique Janicaud’s criticism as...