No Thing Forever: Death, Corporeality, Language and Representation

Daniel Watt (Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK)

Email: D.P.Watt@lboro.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT:

This paper proposes to explore the possibilities offered by the heresy of Patripassianism (also Sabellianism, Monarchianism, Modalism in its varied forms) to the consideration of language, the body and being. Taking as its departure the logical aporia of the oneness of the God proposed by the Patripassianist (meaning the ‘father suffers’) heresy this paper explores the concept of divided being, in a very human sense, through the impossibility of the experience of death and the inherent sense of absence in language, these issues especially in the context of Heidegger and the work of Agamben in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity.

The second part of the paper takes the ‘No Thing’ of Christ’s absconded body in the tomb and considers it in relation to the representation of his dead body in art, utilising Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’. Here the issue of testimony looms large as the attestation of the tomb visitors is essentially an attestation of absence. Re-invoking the Patripassianist impossibility I then turn to consider the Eucharistic identity as fundamentally absent, essentially a gap ingested into the human.

The final part, of the tripartite logos, of the paper seeks to elaborate the infinitely apocalyptic sensibility of ‘No Thing Forever’ as a human obligation by which an understanding of the redemptive capability of absence might be understood, principally through a Levinasian concept of desire, from ‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity’, as a lack with ‘is completely, and lacks nothing’. In such a context it is proposed that it is through ‘tongues flowering… laughing’ and finally disappearing, that we maintain our only encounter with the ‘deus abscondus’ from N.T. to the present.