Brian Hamilton

The Foreclosed Event

I’m trying to get a grip on this crucial paragraph in Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being, in his chapter “Of the Eucharistic Site of Theology,” where he’s trying to explain why the event theology aims to unfold is “foreclosed”—why it’s concealed from view in a way that only celebrating the Eucharist can bring back into view (p. 144–149).

Where literature tends to destroy its subject (the character is not real, or conversely, the character is me or not me) and history tends to destroy its texts (presumably by doubting their historical veracity?) and poetry produces its own referent, theology alone “claims to tell the only living one.” The word needs to open up to its referent. But its referent, of course, is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: it is the fact of an undone fact (death), which inevitably hides itself away by virtue of its own paradox. Thus the event that the text reveals by its negative is on its own terms foreclosed and inaccessible. In a certain way this protects the event—but “Would we be deprived of the event by the very sign that refers to it? Would the theological discourse culminate int he repetition of the irrefutable?” Every text similarly forecloses the event it intends to reveal; theology alone cannot undo its foreclosure. Is theology, then, doomed to stammer ‘pious’ wishes—wishes which of course are not pious at all but more nearly blasphemous in their emptiness and sterility?

“We cannot lead the biblical text back as far as that at which it nevertheless aims, precisely because no hermeneutic could every bring to light anything other than a meaning, whereas we desire the referent in its very advent.” What we need is not another, closer reading of the text; what we need is a hermeneutic that transgresses the text, a hermeneutic from the point of view of event itself, outside of the possible reach of the text, which is the point of view of the Word itself.

22 February 2007 |
tags: Jean-Luc Marion, Lord's Supper