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22 Ontotheological Turnings? beings come to be determined from out of their essence, and insofar as this essence still clings onto the ontic existence of beings and “thus in a certain way is something that is (on), the [essence], as such a being, demands in turn the determination of its being.”37 One can think here of the Platonic ideas or the ‘God’ of medieval theology, as the one who, supposedly unfounded or founded in and through Godself, grounds the essence of beings by just thinking them, or by creating these imperfect beings of which God is said to eternally have the perfect idea. If this is correct, one might say that the ‘end of metaphysics’ is the end of speaking of anything or anyone in general. I will show below that it is in this direction that Levinas, Marion, and to a certain extent Lacoste too will take Heidegger’s understanding of ontotheology. Ontotheology’s point of departure—beings—forbids that it encounters anything other at the end of the chain of beings, than a being. In this sense, it is close to the bad infinite. Ontotheology proclaims that a being is what it is only insofar as its contingent mode of being corresponds, and is thereby grounded, to the essence of this particular being. ‘God’ can thus only appear here in the light of a correspondence theory, as that being, albeit the highest, who assures a perfect fit between the essence or the ‘being’ of a being and the empirical being itself. Ontotheology’s obsession with objects decides in advance how God will enter the philosophical discourse. For, as such, the problem of ontotheology is not that it invokes God too easily, but it is rather that, through its preoccupations with beings, it will also think or use God in a particular manner, namely, as a function that outwits the endless referral of beings to other contingent beings. Ontotheology will think God in the very same manner as it thinks beings. “To think beings instead of being [. . .] is to think what is revealed, what comes to presence, rather than to think the mystery of the unconcealment, the coming to presence.”38 To come back to our example of the table: when the table is determined and defined as a ‘plateau with four legs,’ this essence is abstracted not only from what all tables have in common but also from that which is presented by every particular table we encounter. What the different tables have in common will be configured as that which is ‘most present’ or ‘most being-full’ in the table. This ‘ideal’ essence, which can be held in thought, is what is ‘actualized’ or ‘incarnated’ in every particular table. However, since this essence is considered to be ‘more real’ than any particular table, every particular appearance of a table will, accordingly, be considered only to be an inferior instantiation of the essence of a table, as when one compares a table missing one leg to the ‘idea’ of a table with four legs. In the same way, ‘God’ will be thought as that being that perfectly instantiates the imperfections of the material world. 23 Some Notes on a French Debate God will be thought of as either the creator who creates an inferior world, a conception which we have already seen Levinas lamenting, or as the one who lies ahead of us as the one whose perfection has already been realized.39 It is precisely the appearance of such a cleft “between the merely apparent being here below and the real being somewhere up there” that Heidegger will identify as metaphysics, and that, at least according to Heidegger, arose with Plato and is rehearsed by Christianity through “reinterpreting the Below as the created and the Above as the Creator.”40 Next to its shuddering before contingency and its craving for unity and univocity, metaphysics conceives of the being of beings always with an eye to its foundation or ground. It is here that one needs to understand that ontotheology is not primarily a theological question, or, as Mabille puts it, a bad theological response to a good philosophical question.41 Yet this is exactly how the problem of ontotheology is most often perceived. Westphal, for instance, distinguishes between theology and the language of prayer and praise in order to at least safeguard the latter from the accusation of ontotheology. Westphal notes that the critique of ontotheology concerns the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of our God...

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