While this notion of the abjectness (and preclusion) of God may very well be present in Derrida and postmodernist reveling in the bankruptcy of language as representation, Marion, I think, may be closer to our mystics in arguing not simply about this inadequacy but, despite it, urging us—as flawed human beings—to imagine nevertheless, to trust in a revelation and to be open to overwhelming promise of grace. (Even Derrida at one point allows in his 1993 Memoirs of the Blind, “I don’t know, one has to believe.”200) And indeed, St. John of the Cross, having experienced the grace of God, feels its loss that much more intensely. His is a suffering in love that is so much more than psychic anguish in the face of mere absence. A God real enough to be absent is real enough to be present.
Kearney’s critique, however, is helpful for our purposes in articulating what is going on in Bill Viola’s construction of just such an aesthetic—and theological—posture of openness and attentiveness. Kearney insists on a need for what he calls a “narrative heurmeneutics,” according to which “religious language”—and I count Viola’s efforts as such—“endeavor to say something . . . about the unsayable.”201 The art of Bill Viola, I have contended, opens our eyes to a new way for things one would not otherwise see, and a reaching for the uncontainable and for an inner life that resists the external necessities of existence—in other words, a theology (and technology) of revelation. It invites us to have the courage to welcome the unprecedented. Marion’s phenomenology of possibility offers, I think, just such an aesthetics of hope. Kearny calls it a “creative not knowing,” a “break with ingrained habits of thought and an open[ing] up [of] novel possibilities of meaning.” “Without the abandonment of accredited certainties,” he writes, “we remain inattentive to the advent of the strange; we ignore those moments of sacred enfleshment when the future erupts through the continuum of time.”202
The meaning that Viola’s art can portend may indeed be “present” as “absent.” Its dialectic—of disclosure and concealment, presence and absence, or meaning as the promise of presence through embodied absence, neither fully here and now nor entirely elsewhere and beyond—is what, I believe, makes his art replete with prophetic connotations of wonder, promise and futurity, as well as so engaging and so essential.
191. Derrida, Sauf le nom, in Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 453.
192. Boesel and Keller, Apophatic Bodies, 3.
193. Quoted in Costelloe, Sublime, 205.
194. Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion, 3.
195. Ibid.
196. Caputo, Review of The Erotic Phenomenon, 164.
197. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 434.
198. Quoted in Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion, 78.
199. Ibid., 98.
200. Quoted in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 195.
201. Ibid.
202. Kearney, Anatheism, 7.
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