Life as Strong as Death? Jean-Yves Lacoste s Être en danger

Transcription

1 Life as Strong as Death? Jean-Yves Lacoste s Être en danger The recent publication of Être en danger will be a surprise for not a few of Lacoste s readers: Lacoste not only, as he already did in Experience and the Absolute, again abandons quite consciously the tools of theology to advance his philosophical and phenomenological position, the book also introduces a new concept in Lacoste s philosophical panorama: life. Être en Danger a book of about 400 pages might be considered as the optimistic counterpart of Experience and the Absolute: Lacoste goes out of his way to dispel the unhappy consciousness cropping up so intensively in Experience and the Absolute and propagates the possibility for the subject of peace and quiet. In this way, Lacoste latest can be seen as the culmination of the shift one notice in Lacoste s recent work from the parousiacal moment in light of the horizon of the nonexperience to the non-experience surrounded by and embedded in multiple moments of affective presence and peace. If theology there be in this book, it comes unnoticed: this paper, ultimately, will not do anything other than marvel at the smoothness with which it is smuggled in. And, what is more, if theology enters philosophical discourse here, it does so in ways unproblematic, which means that the transition from philosophy to theology effected here might mean that a certain non-ontotheological transfer from philosophy to theology is possible after all. In this way, a non-ontotheological, or rather less ontotheological way of doing theology might be a possibility. 1. Toward a Fragile Phenomenology Le mot d ordre of Être en danger can still be summed up from out of a view on phenomenality that is plural and thus also partial, Plural, in the sense, that the same phenomenon can appear in multiple ways; Partial, both in the sense that my take on phenomenality and reality will always be just my take and in the sense that my take on reality remains a take on reality: although my experience of the world is fragmentary, it remains a valid experience of the world precisely. The modesty of such a phenomenology, next to its banality and triviality, should however not go unnoticed, for it can occupy a forceful position precisely because of its modesty. 1 Why so? Because it attains the bottom-line of experience: it finds that which no one can deny nor 1 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Être en danger, p. 221 [Page numbers refer to manuscript Lacoste sent me, August 2010) 1

2 deconstruct. Lacoste s quest, as Husserl s, is a quest for the common demeanour of human experience: that which all experiences share and in which they, perhaps, participate. In this way, Lacoste moves towards that which Merleau-Ponty has wonderfully phrased a familiarity of all human activity with all human activity. So this fragile phenomenology at the same time aims for a first phenomenology 2 in which the most ordinary is also the most fundamental. For this return to what is most ordinary or what lies at the beginning ( commencement ) of all experience, Lacoste announces more than once a return to Husserl or, rather, a turn through Heidegger back to Husserlian descriptions. Être en danger then is a book of decisions: first, it operates no longer in the margins of the established philosophy of Heidegger, it occupies central stage (even if its position is deliberately off-centre). So, for instance, La phénoménalité de Dieu was reluctant to take its distance from Heidegger going any further would be to take leave of Heidegger totally 3 the task set forth in Etre en danger, namely to think life from within the realm of possibility, is acknowledged to be taking leave of Heidegger. 4 This leave then will consist in the erection of a new fundamental fact of life over and against the primacy of anxiety, Dasein or existence in Heidegger. Second, Etre en danger quite clearly corrects Experience and the Absolute also privileges the joy of the presence and the presencing of beings over the absence confronted with in a nonexperience and will in fact acknowledge that even in the case of a divine presence more needs to be shown than a non-experience The Importance of Being Modest Être en danger s phenomenological modesty therefore begins by affirming that we only know of beings and that the question of being is and has to be postponed. This primacy of beings over being is therefore such that some sort of forgetting of being, in which Heidegger saw the origin of metaphysics, is inevitable and, all in all, not that grave. The primacy of beings is, for Lacoste, a way to return to the things themselves. Turning to the things themselves is at the same time to save the things or to save these beings. Saving beings is at the same time to preserve and to shelter them from the dangers of technology and its tendency to encounter everything it encounters to the contours of an object. 6 But to save the being from what 2 Ibid., p Lacoste, La phénoménalité de Dieu. Neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008), p Lacoste, Être en danger, p Ibid., p Ibid., p

3 exactly? From the mortification that is the reduction to the object issuing from the threat of technology. To save the being, then, amounts to showing the multiple ways and modes in which one sole being can appear rather than remain with the reiteration and the reproduction restricted to the object. one therefore must conclude that the world is in danger rather than that we put it in danger [ ] The reduction to objectness is not primarily a violence we inflict [upon the world] but a process that cannot not advene On this point, it is useless to interrogate what modernity has done or not. Our familiarity with the object is, in effect, of all times. 7 The particularity and newness of our postmodern situation is however that now, as if for the first time, the reduction to objectness of the totality of beings 8 is a genuine possibility. We have yet to understand just how the methodical forgetting of being gives way to the primacy of beings in ways not immediately complicated by metaphysical and ontotheological thinking. This is why the descriptions of the fragile phenomenology Lacoste is proposing revolve around three catch-words: plurality, partiality, and particularity: it is by paying attention to the appearance of this particular being here that, knowing all too well that this being here might just as well appear otherwise, that one gains sight, first, of the multiple and plural ways of appearing of this one being, and, second, of the fact that whatever sight one has thus gained this view on the being s appearance will always remains partial and fragmentary. No one will ever fully know what it is, for the human being, to be. The question only is if one wants to know what kind of being the human being is with which being one has to start, that is, which being might be the good sample of all other beings. Heidegger, however, most often privileges one or the other being as the passageway to the question of being, whether it be Dasein in Being and Time or the word in the later Heidegger. Husserl, on the other hand, does not know such a privilege and every being, equally, deserves the attention of the phenomenologist. In Husserlian phenomenology: neither a distinction between everydayness and an authentic heroics nor a being that renders all beings more being-ful is found. This is yet another reason why Lacoste in Etre en danger decides phenomenology in favour of Husserl. The plurality of modes of appearing gives way to [an overturning of] the primacy of the ontological over the ontic. 9 Lacoste s phenomenology of the ontic will turn into a 7 Ibid., p Ibid., p

4 phenomenology of the different ways of appearing of one single being. Although one can distinguish between three main modes (objectivity, Heidegger s Ding, and the sacraments), one will not succeed in delimiting and delineating strict lines of division between such diverse modes of appearing. In a critique of Heidegger s (all too) rural and provincial approach, Lacoste argues that on top of that the moment in effect will come, a moment on which Heidegger remains mute, in which the technical object is able to appear as beautiful, and where we will cease to have to deal only with objects. 10 So that which Heidegger repelled the most, the typewriters and illustrated magazines, that is, all form of technical objects will in post-heideggerian times appear as designer objects or as vintage nevertheless From this, then, Lacoste will be lead to propose a different ontology than the one Heidegger was advancing, for even though we can content ourselves with just signalling a simple distinction and rupture between thingness and beingness what Lacoste himself for a long time seems to have done to the point that one must simply state that where things appear, we have taken leave of the [horizon of] the world and vice versa. 11 By doing so, however, one can in fact guard [oneself] from giving a name to that region of experience where beings and things intertwine and simply proceed to underscore the ontology of rupture (between classes of beings) of Heidegger. 12 Of art, for instance, Heidegger writes It is due to art s poetic essence that, in the midst of beings, art breaks open an open place in which everything is other than usual [alles anders ist wie sonst]. 13 The rupture between thingness and beingness gives way, in Heidegger, to a mutual exclusion. In Lacoste, then, the interplay between thingness and beingness gives way to the doubling of the truth: one single being can appear as both a thing and a being ready-to-hand. The truth of beings no longer lies in being the one or the other, but rather in its plural appearance as this (thing) or that (being). For this truth to be described phenomenologically, then, one would need to describe a flux and a fluency of appearances, in short, a rhythm which, if one would no longer guard oneself of naming this region of experience, would have to be called: life. Saving the being comes to mean: one cannot a priori exclude any being or experience from the question of being, although no single being can tell us everything about being. 9 Ibid., p Ibid., pp Ibid., p Ibid., p Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, pp , p For the German, see Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), pp. 7-74, p

5 This is life, then: a fundamental rhythm 14 of experiences and of appearances in which constitutions of objectness, deconstitutions through the event and appearance of a thing, and reconstitution of objects succeed one another in the history and event of the self that always escapes me. Life, as Lacoste describes it, is perhaps the only thing that I, while leading it, never lead. Or, as Lacoste defines it: life as the primordial rhythm of affectivity is [the name] for the minimal and therefore fundamental presence of a self. 15 It is thus crucial to understand the event-like character of both self and world: there is no appearance or experience that would be at our disposal. One should not overestimate or romanticise (as is the case in some French phenomenology as well) the importance of the event, for the event is never the irruption of an absolute newness 16 : what distinguishes one event from another, its haeccitas in a certain way, does not forbid that it can be ranked among all other possible events. The conditions of possibility of experience [...] are well respected. The once and for all, the ephapax, is ultimately the condition of all appearances. 17 Just as I live my life only once, so too I encounter the objects and the events I perceive and experience just once. The event of the once and for all pertains to my self and to the phenomenon of the world. In this way, the different ontology which Lacoste is proposing, and the tertium datur it entails, through the movement between objectness and thingness, allows for an other ontology than the ontology of rupture Heidegger was advancing. One might therefore conclude that just as a modest and fragile phenomenology can be powerful, so too a phenomenology of the fragmentary might allow a far more rich description of what it is to live than the one singling out one or the other extraordinary experience. This different ontology, then, does not opt for one or the other figure of the human being. It knows of Marion s adonné, but recognizes just as well that at times nothing seems to be given to the human; it knows Romano s advenant but recognizes just the same that nothing extradordinary may happen to the human being and that the event is not all there is; it, of course, knows what Dasein is, but is already on the verge of describing phenomena that no longer pertain to such an existence, it knows that one does not speak of the mortals in the singular but knows, too, that the only experience I know of is the experience that I myself continuously undergo. 14 Lacoste, Être en danger, p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p

6 3. Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Theology: Otherwise than the Thing If it perhaps was impossible for Heidegger to distinguish between metaphysics and theology then the ontology of Lacoste, acknowledging the equal presence of objects, beings and things might give the existence of objectness (and thus of metaphysics) its due. Once again it is not a matter for Lacoste to deconstruct metaphysics, for it matters not to erase all differences between objectness and thingness which would result in seeing either objects or things everywhere and would therefore lose track of the fair sample. It matters rather to assign to those differences its proper (and real) place, which is to say that there are regions of experience which are metaphysical just as there are regions in which metaphysics plays only a regional role and in which therefore something other than ontotheology might be detected. The overcoming of metaphysics is to acknowledge that metaphysics might still be present in our present age and that such a presence therefore is not necessarily to be avoided or overcome even. For if one may equate objectness and the presence of metaphysics, it is good that an artwork can be an object too or that a human being is a body (instead of flesh): how else would be we repair the former and heal the latter? 18 The task rather is to give metaphysics and technology its proper place and realize that, alongside metaphysics, something like a theology might again show itself. The how of appearing of beings are, according to Lacoste, three: objects and beings readyto-hand appear only to perception, things appear to perception and affection and the third way of the sacrament appears to affection only. In and through these three modes, Lacoste queries for a phenomenology of the unapparent and it is on this question that theology, for Lacoste, has a bit more to say than philosophy, for it is with a logic of hiddenness then that one has to deal once one encounters the thing and the sacrament: what is most important about their appearance masks itself in the extravaganza with which it possibly appears. The res of the sacraments, too, loves to hide itself. Yet if it is the same being which is able to appear both as an object and as a thing, one can no longer maintain that a totally other horizon than the world substitutes itself for such a Heideggerian world, rather one will need to say that the world already differs from the world as described by Heidegger in If things appear, the philosopher s task is: To enlarge the horizon [of appearing] or to substitute the one for the other. It seems that a thing is not in the world [ ] There are things, and as soon as we perceive them as such, a displacement advenes: 18 Ibid., p Ibid., p

7 either we persist in seeing the world as the horizon of all phenomenality and we would need to manage a place somehow for strange phenomena such as the divinities. 20 In short, we would need to speak as Lacoste has done for a long time of the earth next to the world or of liturgical experience in the margins of the world. Or we would admit that those phenomena, those beings rather, do not really have a proper place in the world, and that, by making them appear, we are forced to interpret the world as not being the horizon of all appearing. 21 in which case, one can readily admit that the liturgical experience, for instance, is one of those possibilities offered to the region of experience called life. In this way, the phenomenality of human experience harbours more phenomena than a simple reduction of experience to the horizon of the world or to the earth for that matter allows. It is with the sacraments and the Eucharist, then, that Lacoste discovers the third way of relation of perception to affection. The sacraments instruct about a mode of appearing that appeals almost solely to affection. It is here then that one finds the startling statement that the encounter with God in and through the sacraments has to be more than a non-experience : instead of feeling nothing, in liturgical experience one should learn to feel. 22 Liturgical experience is an experience which is well aware of its peculiar status and in which absence, if absence there need be, is felt more vividly than ever. In this regard, the liturgical experience is one in which I sense that I do not sense. 23 This experience is twofold: on the one hand, I experience my non-experience through experiencing a certain lack, and on the other, I experience that which is lacking from this non-experience. In other words, I experience simultaneously that God does not come to experience and I experience that what I am experiencing is not God. It is the latter which makes for the somewhat awkward character of liturgical experience, for I might be seduced by that which I am nevertheless experiencing to the point of forgetting to feel that I am not feeling God. In short, that which occupies consciousness in non-experience might be such that its presence as a presence of absence, wrongly, takes precedence over God s presence. I might, for instance, take and interpret God s absence from experience so absolutely that I simply proclaim God to be absent or non-existent even. Or the other way around: I take what I nevertheless experience as God s absolute and final presence and would 20 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p

8 deem all other possible presences (in other religions, for example) to be of an inferior kind. In both cases, that which occupies consciousness (as at once too present (of absence) or too absent (of a presence) takes precedence over the object of this intentional aim and I no longer feel that I do not feel or I no longer, if you like, lack the lack. This logic of the lack, according to Lacoste, is universally valid but is felt all the more brutally 24 when it comes to the logic of the sacraments. How so? Because, in liturgy, that which gives itself to be seen and felt precisely gives itself not to be seen: the bread and the wine should diffract all attention that they would call to themselves. 25 How, then, should I endure sensing that I do not sense God instead of opting for not sensing at all atheism if you like or sensing too much a certain way of religious experience. This endurance is only possible by appropriately perceiving the passage-way from the liturgical things to the liturgical gift or to what exactly is being given in liturgy: bread and wine appear appropriately only if we no longer care for the bread and wine per se but only for the givenness of Christ through these mediations. The believer therefore needs to find a way to a phenomenology of the unapparent proper: not all visible thing refer to an/the invisible in the same way and in ways that would be appropriate. It is only by calling the least bit of attention to themselves, by distracting as much as possible from the visible glory, that the invisible might appear. Christ comes, if He comes, incognito. But, for this, it is necessary that the believer balances between feeling that he does not feel and no longer feeling that he does not feel: only in and through this balance the believer can know that and how the sacramentum refers to the res. 4. The Life of Dasein: First Phenomenology How to imagine situations and experiences in which that which determines the human as Dasein the Dasein in the human being Heidegger liked to say no longer solely constitutes our being. It are these experiences here labels as counter-existentials: experiences in which that which pertains to the structure of Dasein is reduced to the utter minimum. Counterexistentials, as Lacoste terms it, are those phenomena in which the human being deliberately attenuates the connection with world, namely sleeping and resting and being-atpeace. The mix between the intentionality and the ecstasy towards the world and the inward experience of self is even more visible in the experience of resting: even though this rest is not without world, the care for others and for the world is substituted for the simple concern for 24 Ibid., p Ibid., p

9 oneself as flesh. 26 Here the reduction to affectivity or to the affective encounter between my self and the world show themselves more primordial: the truth is in the mix rather than what is mixed. Or, in Lacoste s words: the being-flesh here attenuates being-in-the-world; being-inthe-world is reduced to being-flesh. 27 This reduction therefore names the simple joy of being alive and one in effect may retain the possibility to push back ek-stasis in favour of what we name here, for lack of a better word: life. The one resting is living more than he is existing. 28 Once again we see Lacoste privileging Husserl rather than Heidegger by being faithful to the view that not one experience deserves to be labelled as more fundamental than others, not, however, by arguing that all experiences are as valid for phenomenology as others but by arguing for the fact that it might be just these contradictory experiences which unfold properly what it is to be human. 29 This is ultimately what Goodman s idea of the fair sample does in ontological matters: the sample is fair and good if and only if actual and real experiences finitude for instance do not relegate other experiences to the realm of the non-existent peace and joy for example. If the fair sample, on the other hand, also prescribes that not all experiences are as important as others, than it is perhaps fair to state that what is most important shows itself in and to a plurality of experiences and not in this or that particular experience but rather in the transition of experiences. 30 This transition itself is what is important if one wants to decide over what it is be human. It is the givenness, the flux, in short the event of this transition that the phenomenologist should seek to describe. To describe this flux phenomenologically, it is necessary to combine, if one may say so, Husserl and Heidegger. One might add even that if Husserl focused on the how of each appearing and Heidegger s wager was ultimately on the appearing of appearing itself the phainomenon versus aletheia then a contemporary phenomenology seeking to retain the best of both should try to find a passage-way from out of appearances to the appearing of appearing or from what is given to givenness. Phenomena such as a sleep without dream and the phenomenon of peace somewhat contradicts the horizon of the Heideggerian world: not only there is the experience of a presence in my present which would not be vulgar, the experience of self that is the experience of peace is such that the world no longer disturbs this kind of experience. The 26 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Cf. Ibid., p Ibid., pp

10 extraterritoriality 31 of the experience of peace is pleasantly anarchic and causes a fruitful disorder 32 in the map of existence. 5. Towards an Otherwise than Existence : Desire and its Dialectics Something other than existence than Dasein is intimated in those passages that argue for a complete abandonment of the distinction between the existentiell and the existential. 33 Lacoste s conception of life totally disrupts the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Life has ontic and ontological characteristics: ontic, in the sense that it allows one to focus on other ontic experiences than Heidegger; and ontological because all these experiences would need to be integrated in the transcendentality of the human being s aptitude for experience. Both the ontic and the ontological therefore obtain a different signification than it has in Heideggerian thinking. This ontological strand of Lacoste s latest is most obvious in the interplay between rest and restlessness, peace and desire that Lacoste moves most decidedly beyond Heidegger. This dialectics between quietude and inquietude therefore can count as the crucial experience of all experiences in danger. 34 Restlessness here is, obviously, all that unsettles the experience of peace and that re-launches common experience and conveys to experience an ecstatic character. 35 In short, for all that throws us back into a world. The curiousness of this crucial experience and its dialectics between quietude and inquietude is that it allows for a theological as well as a secular reading. And if one of the shortest definitions of ontotheology would indeed be that the transition from the philosophical secular to the theological has become problematic if not impossible, the oddness of Lacoste s latest is that this transition occurs somehow à l insu: the transition from a secular reading of this dialectics to a theological interpretation can be made but it need not be the case. To start with the secular reading of the dialectics between inquietude or ecstacy and quietude and rest is to start with the curious fact that the being who is destined to die finds the time to rest at all. For a being advancing towards its death, it is quite awkward to find time for boredom and similar experiences. If life really is too short, one could have expected that boredom would be absent from the map of existence. Levinas once wrote that it is quite 31 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p. 149 and p Ibid., p. 283 and p. 207 respectively. 35 Ibid., p

11 comical to care for one s existence knowing all too well that one will not be able to save it from destruction. 36 A similar paradox, Lacoste argues, is quite well-known to theology where the desire for God and the concomitant restlessness turns all micro-eschatologies of peace and rest into a parody. 37 And yet nothing, perhaps, is more common to life our lives than such a back and forth between rest and restlessness. If then the knot between rest and restlessness sounds familiar, it is because this knot and this dialectics, according to Lacoste, makes for one of the most originary rhythms of life. 38 Originary, because the reconciliation between the emergence of desire and the obtainment of peace is nothing that we have to aim for, for the simple reason that, in one way or another, this conciliation has always and already taken place. 39 It is this conciliation that would need, for Lacoste, to be described phenomenologically. For, if one needs another account of facticity and existence than Heidegger has given us, one needs to say that while describing it, we discover nothing other than a fact. The referral of peace and inquietude and of inquietude and peace is a matter of fact [de fait] just as affectivity is. 40 It is, moreover, this knot and this dialectics that, basically, knows how to weave together contradictory experience without drama. Life, as we know it, knows all too well that some experiences are conflictual and that the longing for one experience can exclude others. But life knows, too, how to survive such conflicts not only without drama but also without frustration: nothing really demands that desire is an unfortunate event. 41 On the contrary, desire is what keeps life going, so to say, by perpetually launching experience towards its other. 42 And it is in this re-launching, in this flux, that a great many of even contradictory experiences can be contained: contrary to anxiety, stress, and boredom the simultaneity of rest and restlessness is not all that rare. 43 It is in our very lives that the simultaneity of lack unrest and pleasure is always and already familiar and reconciled: a happy present is possible even if one senses loss and lack Cf. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p Lacoste, Être en danger, p Ibid. p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p

12 6. Vita Philosophica Vita Teologica If the experience of life, then, combines the most banal and the most solemn of experiences, there seems to be nothing preventing us from inquiring whether a relations of sorts exists between what matters in life and what matters for God. The infinity and indeterminacy of desire and inquitude is, in effect, a desire coming from God knows where: one does not know the stakes of its never-ending character. Its whence and its whither, as Heidegger already argued for Dasein, remain in darkness. The impossibility to overcome ontotheology in one stroke thus amounts to a sort of theological agnosticism. Agnosticism, in the sense that one does not really know whether or not God is involved in the play between rest and restlessness although it cannot be excluded. Theological, though, because nothing forbids one to discern in the infinity of desire a stake of sorts for theology, if only because the desire for the Absolute shares the infinite proper to all play of desire, whatever the term of this desire may be. 45 The rupture with ontotheology consists in the fact that an ontotheological way of thinking necessarily would have find a way from this knot between rest and restlessness to a theological Aufhebung but that here the path towards theology remains absolutely free. This is the prohibition of any realized eschatology proclaimed and prescribed already by La phénoménalité de Dieu: even the place one would like to relate to all things theological need not be brought in relation to the divine. All that can be said of this theologically, Lacoste admits can surely be destructed, deconstructed or demolished. 46 But it might be clear just the same that an affirmation of life unsettles Heidegger s stress on finitude. If there is no philosophical reason why one should stick to just those experiences Heidegger had traced and if other experiences show us perhaps even better than Heidegger what it is for the human being to live, then, similarly, there is no reason not to suspect that the anarchic horizon of life and the disorder it brings to the existential analytic intimates a horizon other than finitude or the universe which perhaps at times can seem permeated with death. 47 The horizon of life might be other than the one in which our existence as Dasein plays and therefore indicate a beyond of the finite and the infinite 48, a beyond of rest and unrest by showing the way from the infinity of desire and ekstasis to the infinity of promise. 45 Ibid., p Ibid., p. 310n. 47 One may think here of those terrible deaths, Quentin Meillassoux mentions in his Spectral Dilemma, in Collapse 4(2010), , p premature deaths, odious deaths, the death of a child. 48 Lacoste, Être en danger, p

13 7. From Life to Spirit: Sacramental Intuitions It is to sacramentality that Lacoste points to indicate the instance in which one is allowed to experience more exactly and precisely the knot between quietude and inquietude, for it is in sacramental experience that the term of desire, God, constantly critiques both the one who thinks to have taken possession of the object of his desire privileging of quietude and the one who thinks that any such rest would be impossible privileging of inquietude. The dialectics of rest and unrest, in Christian theology, is in effect such that no one may lay claim on God no experience is to be equated with God but, simultaneously, no one can deny God to right to show up in experience if God should so choose no experience need be abandoned by God. In Lacoste s words, theology knows best how the relation between rest and unrest shows the unlimited character of a transcendence which does not forbid the o/one who is beyond to be also down here as the one whose presence offers itself to a peaceful enjoyment. 49 By definition, divine transcendence is that instance that denies all limits: God can be here and there, now and then, if, of course, God would so choose. It is in this sense that Lacoste proposes to study here but the sacrament s contribution to phenomenology 50 : the sacrament may propose itself as the experience of the ultimate, because of the Absolute s supposed presence and yet it is this presence that turns it into a lessthan-ultimate or pre-eschatological experience. In this sense, it can be for Lacoste, the example par excellence of a fragile phenomenology. The sacrament critiques all experiences of the Absolute in several ways: not only is it possible that I simply do not experience what I am supposed to experience there I can miss God s presence by being bored or distracted but even if I, quite piously, would remain ready for God s passing I still would not experience any theophany if God is indeed present there, then this mode of presence is not one of immediacy. In both cases, it must be said that givenness God s presence exceeds what is effectively given at best the sacrament, at worst distraction. Lacoste repeats that the experience of sacramentality need not be unhappy but will undoubtedly stir up restlessness by the excess of givenness. 51 Yet the givenness does not harm the integrity of what is given there. Sacramentality, then, is precisely this crossing of givenness and the given: it offers for thought an experience in which the ultimate 49 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p

14 simultaneously unsettles all present experience and allows all present experience to be an anticipation of the ultimate. Sacramental experience is an experience in which finitude touches infinitude and rest and restlessness meet. For the sake of completeness, one needs to add that even if there be such an intimation of immortality, this phenomenon itself is a fugitive 52 one and dissolves in the messiness of historicity. And yet at the moment one demythologizes the sacramental experience one comes close to the logic of its crossing again: even if the experience itself is to be understood as but one more event of historicity from without the event itself, from the inside if you like, teaches that one can reach the otherwise than history only from within history, or from the inside of history. 53 It is from within life and from within our dealings with beings that one may find, if any, that which is beyond life or beyond being. Even if one crosses the borders of phenomenology a bit here, the incarnational logic one encounters here quite close to the logic of the au-dela dans, the beyond down here, Derrida detected in Levinas oeuvre remains nevertheless a philosophical enigma. 54 It is, one might add, nothing less than an aporia: it will never be certain whether this incarnational logic led to the Incarnation or whether it is because of the Incarnation that one can find such an incarnational logic. But it is in this very space that a philosophy of finitude and a new kind of theology will meet. 52 Ibid., p Ibid., p. 310 and p Ibid., p