Doing Violence upon God: Nonviolent Alterities and Their Medieval Precedents
The Other resembles God.To welcome the Other absolutely is to preserve the Other as a state of irreducible uncertainty, to suspend the desire to ascertain exactly who or what the Other is, to suppress the wish to name, and to avoid assimilating or incorporating the Other into a reassuringly familiar...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1999
|
| In: |
Harvard theological review
Year: 1999, Volume: 92, Issue: 3, Pages: 325-347 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
|
| Summary: | The Other resembles God.To welcome the Other absolutely is to preserve the Other as a state of irreducible uncertainty, to suspend the desire to ascertain exactly who or what the Other is, to suppress the wish to name, and to avoid assimilating or incorporating the Other into a reassuringly familiar vocabulary. The object of this paper is a tentative comparison between Eckhartian gelâzenheit and Derridean openness. I will compare the Derridean response to the uncertainty of the infinitely Other with that of the German Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1329) in order to examine their respective terms of “emptiness” and “openness” and to try to understand how Eckhart's idea of description or conception as doing violence upon the Other is, in part, adopted and, in part, rejected by Jacques Derrida. As some of the most interesting aspects of Derrida's understanding of otherness can be discerned in his early work on Levinas, I will first examine Derrida's initial skepticism toward the idea of a nonviolent phenomenology, in contrast to his more recent reappraisal of his relation to Levinas and the “welcome of the Other.” |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000003424 |