Bearing Witness in Jean-François Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius Mélanie V
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Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2009 Expressing the Inexpressible: Bearing Witness in Jean-François Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius Mélanie V. Walton Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Walton, M. (2009). Expressing the Inexpressible: Bearing Witness in Jean-François Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1332 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE: BEARING WITNESS IN JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD AND PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Mélanie Victoria Walton December 2009 Copyright by Mélanie Victoria Walton 2009 EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE: BEARING WITNESS IN JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD AND PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS By Mélanie Victoria Walton Approved July 24, 2009 ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Lanei Rodemeyer, Ph.D. Dr. Thérèse Bonin, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy Associate Professor of Philosophy (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ Dr. Bettina Bergo, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ Dean Christopher M. Duncan, Ph.D. Dr. James Swindal, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty Graduate School of Chair, Department of Philosophy Liberal Arts Associate Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE: BEARING WITNESS IN JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD AND PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS By Mélanie Victoria Walton December 2009 Dissertation supervised by Dr. Lanei Rodemeyer, Ph.D. What is an expression that can express that which cannot be expressed? Logic and grammar will declare it to be an impossibility and its expression, a mistaken use of language. Yet, humanity’s archive persistently attests to both the legitimacy of the inexpressible expression and the multiplicity of ways to give it voice. While heterogeneous in time, place, and philosophical situation, the contemporary French father of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, and the late antique, presumably Syrian father of Neoplatonist Christian mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysius, both intimately consider the inexpressible expression. Both are provoked by the witness who is silenced by the binding limits of grammatical possibility, even while called to testify to an ineffable. Both define this inexpressible as precisely that which must be expressed in the face of logic deeming it absurd. To endeavor under the weight of impossibility reveals both iv Lyotard’s postmodernism and Pseudo-Dionysius’ philosophic-theology as pedagogic pursuits, as spiritual exercises in the originary sense of philosophy as the love of wisdom, rather than analytic treatises of self-subsistent theories. The plight of bearing witness to the ineffable is explored through the guiding example in Lyotard’s The Differend, the differend created by historical revisionism’s logical bind that forbids the Auschwitz survivor to testify to the existence of gas chambers (there cannot be a living survivor to a death camp). By taking the challenge seriously, Lyotard reveals that the force of this differend is not its circularity, but the mind’s conceptual deficit before the Holocaust: the singular event overflows its possible comprehension. The witness’ case is parallel to how reason can silence the faithful’s testimony of God, He who exceeds all that we could know of Him. But faith demands the pursuit of this knowledge in the face of its absurdity. The radical conjunction of apophatic and cataphatic theologies in Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names reveals a productive, stuttering method to name He who exceeds all names. Pseudo-Dionysius’ most remarkable divine name is Eros. Its exceptionality in capturing an expression of the inexpressible prompts a demonstration of a Lyotardian rereading of the conjunction of eros and silence as a productive phrase to dissolve differends. v DEDICATION This project may find one site of origin in my own inexpressibility as a child and another in the inexpressibility that was my first, captivated response to philosophy. To honor these ambiguous origins, I dedicate this work to my family and those friends and professors who struggled to understand me through the years and permitted the possibility of this expression: Ba, Dad, Ben, Cliff, Clancy, Bettina, Nancy Baker and Bob Zimmerman of Sarah Lawrence College (without whom I’d still be trying to be a poet), and, most of all, to the utter comprehension by and unconditional love of Nikki, Kali, and Tal and their endless hours of attention and rejuvenating moments of distraction. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank, most sincerely, Lanei Rodemeyer, Thérèse Bonin, and Bettina Bergo for their rigorous guidance and kindness through years of tutelage prior and those years dedicated to the germination and creation of this project. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract.............................................................................................................................. iv Dedication............................................................................................................................v Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................. vi Introduction: What is the Inexpressible Expression? ................................................... 1 1. Witness and Testimony.............................................................................................. 17 1.1. Prologue to the Problem: The Inexpressible..................................................17 1.2. The Witness and Testimony in Lyotard.........................................................20 1.3. Heidegger’s Silence: The Synthesis of Language and Being ........................33 1.4. Lyotard on Testimonial Narrative..................................................................40 1.5. The Witness and Testimony in Pseudo-Dionysius ........................................54 1.6. Concluding Remarks......................................................................................71 2. Con-Textualizations: Jean-François Lyotard ......................................................... 75 2.1. The Difficulty of Characterization.................................................................75 2.2. What is Postmodernism?................................................................................88 2.3. Lyotard’s The Differend...............................................................................101 a. And as Linkage in Gertrude Stein .......................................................114 b. Therapeutic Language Games in Ludwig Wittgenstein......................122 c. Parataxis in Theodor Adorno ..............................................................134 d. Authorization of the Addressee in the Cashinahua.............................140 e. Concluding Remarks...........................................................................146 viii 3. Con-Textualizations: Pseudo-Dionysius ................................................................ 148 3.1. The Difficulty of Characterization...............................................................148 a. Neoplatonism ......................................................................................152 b. Mysticism............................................................................................168 3.2. Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names.........................................................178 a. Naming Names....................................................................................182 b. Good and Light ...................................................................................190 c. Beauty and Eros ..................................................................................193 d. Evil and Proportionate Privation.........................................................200 e. Mystical Language and Spiritual Exercise..........................................207 4. Silence and Eros ....................................................................................................... 215 4.1. Introduction to a Last/Further Solution........................................................215 4.2. The Symbiosis of Silence and Eros .............................................................221 4.3. Lyotard on the Possibility of a Just Silence.................................................243 4.4. Reading Lyotard on Eros to Read Pseudo-Dionysius on Eros....................264 Conclusion: The Expression of the Inexpressible ...................................................... 286 References....................................................................................................................... 298 ix Introduction What is the Inexpressible Expression? “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value.1 “What if the book were only infinite