References
- Charles Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems, Ed. by George F. Butternick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 87. Guy Davenport's explanation of this line is as follows: ‘At the heart of Olson's poem is the “the E on the oldest stone” meaning the epsilon the omphalos stone at Delphi, which Plutarch puzzled over at the behest of Nero. We are still not certain whether it is part of the word, Gea, Earth, or part of a Greek citizen's name; Plutarch, always willing to be Pythagorean, gives many symbolic explanations, but for Olson the import of the that conical, ancient stone was precisely that it is so ancient that we have lost the meaning of the writing upon it. When we discover what it means, we will still be dissociated forever from the complex of ideas in which it occurs’ Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p. 19. What I shall call later in this essay the ‘atheism of the word’ describes such a forgetting.
- He writes, ‘the whole book suffered from the inevitable and assumed equivocation of its title: was it insinuating that the God “without being” is not, or does not exist? Let me repeat now the answer I gave then, no definitely not. God is, exists and is the least of things’ Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. by Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. xix.
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962), pp. 319–25.
- I wrote about this in my article ‘God and the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: A Nietzschean Response’, Literature and Theology, 14 (2000), 335–349.
- Again, as before, this does not mean that this tradition is not highly complex and differentiated in its own way. No one would be foolish to argue that there is no difference between the God of Descartes and Spinoza, for example (let alone the difference between their God and the God of Aquinas or Maimonides). Yet there is an absolute difference between the God of being and the idea of God as it is envisioned by Kant. What this difference is announced in the introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason, and is the shift of perspective from the infinite to the finite. It is also what Foucault describes as the ‘withdrawal of knowledge and thought outside the space of representation’ The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 263.
- Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘The Name of God According to a few Talmudic Texts’, in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. by Gary D. Mole (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 116–28. Hereafter NG.
- I am not the first to have made this connection. See Michael Fagenblat, ‘Levinas and Maimonides: From Metaphysics to Ethical Negative Theology’, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 16 (2008), 95–147, Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘The Promise of the Name. “Jewish Nominalism” as the Critique of Idealist Tradition’, Bamidbar, 2(2012), 11–35, and William W Young, The Politics of Praise: Naming God and Friendship in Aquinas and Derrida (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2007), pp. 24–31 & 139–48.
- Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: a View of World, Man, and God, trans. by Nahum N Glatzer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Hereafter USH.
- Even if Romeo had changed his name to Fred, Juliette would still remember him as the one who called himself Romeo, but to forget a name, and the individual who is named in it, is no longer to have a relation to them at all.
- See, Joseph Almog, ‘Naming Without Necessity’, The Journal of Philosophy, 83 (1986), 210–42.
- Our explanation follows the second lecture. See, Saul A Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 71–105. Hereafter NN.
- For Rosenzweig's own account of the divine name, see his essay ‘“The Eternal”: Mendelssohn and the Name of God’, in Scripture and Translation, trans. by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 99–113.
- This perhaps explains Lévinas's distancing from the Kabbalah as he writes in a footnote to this text: ‘The Kabbalah is a way of thinking whose traces and sources can admittedly be found in the Talmud, but the Talmud is quite distinct from it’ [NG 112].
- In the original French he writes: ‘Il est nom “collant” à ce qu'il nomme, tout autrement que le nom commun, lequel, éclairé par le système du langage, désigne une espèce mais ne colle pas à l'individu et l'englobe, si l'on peut dire, dans l'indifférence.’ L'au-delà du verset: lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1982), p. 150.
- The French text has an error and refers to the wrong verse 8:3.
- See, Shevu'oth 35b: ‘All the names mentioned in Scripture in connection with Abraham are sacred, except this which is secular: it is said; And he said, ‘My lord, if now I have found favour in your sight’. Hanina, the son of R. Joshua's brother, and R. Eleazar b. Azariah in the name of R. Eliezer of Modi, said this also is sacred. With whom will [the following] agree? Rab Judah said that Rab said: Greater is hospitality to wayfarers than receiving the Divine Presence. With whom [will this agree]? With this pair.’ Rashi interprets the passage as an interpretative choice. One either reads Adonai as referring to God or the strangers, but not both.
- Famously, Gareth Evans describes the mistaken attribution of the name ‘Madagascar’ to the island off West Africa when for the original speakers it meant part of the coast. Thus what the name originally referred to is no longer the same. This is similar to Kripke's example of the aardvark, though in the former case there was no conscious intention to change the reference, since it was an unintentional mistake. See, ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 47 (1973), 187–225.