Abstract
In this paper, I work to situate the reading and writing that constitute a phenomenology of religion, especially with respect to the stories of the Resurrection of Jesus. First, I use the descriptions of lived embodiment by Husserl in Cartesian Meditations (1970) and by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible (1968) in order to inaugurate a phenomenological reading of the Resurrection of Jesus by the Gospel authors Luke and John. Then I use Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) and John Caputo’s “Bodies Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid” (2007) to account for the deeper phenomenological problem of how to distinguish the uniqueness of the Resurrection from that of the reappearance of a ghost. Finally, in light of the literary and conceptual analyses of the first two sections, I establish the method of a phenomenology of religion as a peculiar kind of epoché, an epoché of “obvious” political moves within a religious attitude, that allows us to practice a relation with the text not simply as literary or as conceptual but as the conscience of a community. Ultimately, the paper works to describe the Resurrection of Jesus as an event that pushes toward the very practice of textuality within the communities-to-come.
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Notes
- 1.
All references to biblical texts in this paper are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd edition (Coogan 2001).
- 2.
This article is dedicated to my aunt, Mary Costello, whose support for my writing and for my life commitments has been truly loving. My deep gratitude also goes to my friend and colleague Christopher Arroyo for reading an earlier version of this paper and for giving very helpful, constructive feedback.
- 3.
From the beginning of Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation: “What is especially peculiar to me as ego … with an exclusive ownness, includes every intentionality and therefore, in particular, the intentionality directed to what is other; but, for reasons of method, the synthetic effect of such intentionality (the actuality for me of what is other) shall at first remain excluded from the theme” (1970, 94).
- 4.
Donn Welton in “Soft, Smooth Hands,” explains that “thus there is a circuit running not only between the world and the lived body, but also between the lived body and itself. In this circuit there is a doubling of touch: the touching is touched and the touched is touching. There seems to be a blending of what is felt and what is perceived, such that I come to perceive the lived body as it is feeling” (1999, 46).
- 5.
Alia Al-Saji argues, in her analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology of touch, that “not only does the touching right hand feel itself to be sensing and living, but the touched left hand appears as Leib and feels itself to be such” (2010, 20; my emphasis).
- 6.
See John Russon’s Bearing Witness to Epiphany: “This is the character of the body as a whole: the body is a material specificity, but a specificity the very nature of which is to open up—open ourselves up—to what is beyond it. The body’s powers are powers of self-transcending, of opening, of learning” (2009, 31).
- 7.
Husserl further defines pairing as “a primal form of passive synthesis which we designate as ‘association’ in contrast to passive synthesis of ‘identification’” (1970, 112). What is paired does not come to identity, to the explicit recognition of the same thing. Rather, the pair remains associated and thus preserves the differences between the pair. Pairing as association also, Husserl says, occurs as “an intentional overreaching” (1970, 112) and “a living mutual awakening and an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other” (1970, 113). It is this “mutuality” that I highlight in Layers in Husserl’s Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity (2012): see especially Chaps. 2 and 3.
- 8.
Husserl claims that “the first-awakened manner of appearance of my body is not the only thing that enters into a pairing: my body itself does so likewise; as the synthetic unity pertaining to this mode, and the many other familiar modes of its appearance” (1970, 118; my emphasis).
- 9.
For a more extended comparison and contrast of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of touching and of the role of touch in Husserl’s phenomenology, see Derrida’s On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy (2005), particularly “Tangent III.”
- 10.
By following the excellent work of Kym Maclaren, who discusses the intimacy of touch as presented in the work of Merleau-Ponty in “Touching Matters” (2014), I could pursue the role of touch as intercorporeity in Merleau-Ponty and thus extend and clarify what is at stake in Husserl’s description of pairing. However, for the sake of this paper, I will leave that task attended to by Maclaren herself: “My proposal then is that in touching and being touched, because of the intercorporeity of touch, we are drawn into our bodies, and through a new organization of our bodies made newly incarnate while also being differentiated from the other” (2014, 101). Maclaren’s emphasis in that piece is on a genetic phenomenology. Since resurrection is an account of a new genesis, a new shape of bodily life, I believe Maclaren’s account would fit with the account of touch and of the Resurrection that I am giving.
- 11.
Jenny Slatman argues that this noncoincidence of my hands (I cannot touch the other hand’s touching) is one way of noticing that my being a lived body is always, as a whole, connected with my death: “a living being can only experience its being alive while encountering, touching its own being lifeless. And this should be taken literally, not dialectically” (2005, 305). The “eclipse” of the desire to touch my touched hand’s experiences, then, is the way in which finitude and death enters into my lived experience of lived experience.
- 12.
I will return to Luke’s Gospel after discussing Derrida and hauntology to deal with the stories that connect resurrection and a fear of ghosts. This will include the story of Jesus’s appearance to the disciples in Luke 24:36–50.
- 13.
This is in contrast with the story of how Jesus healed the centurion’s ill servant at a distance in Luke 7:1–10.
- 14.
Somewhat predictably, Caputo and Derrida have generated a negative response from some corners. A typical critical response comes from Jean-Pierre Fortin: “The human lack of control over both the experience of transcendence and the reception of supernatural empowerment does not repudiate the reality of the divine self-donation occurring in and as Jesus Christ” (2017, 76). It is not clear to me how Caputo could argue the contrary, if we understand by “transcendence” and “empowerment” the inspiration and evolution of religious and philosophical communities in their entering into the interpretation of resurrection, and of textuality, as such.
- 15.
As an argument that creates a continuity between a phenomenology of touch and Derridean theology, see Bob Plant’s “Christ’s Autonomous Hand” (2004).
- 16.
Derrida puts this point thus: “If we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic” (1994, 63).
- 17.
It is not clear what we are to make of the lived bodies that Jesus raised from the dead prior to his own resurrection. Are they also transitional in the same way? Are they the same as Jesus’s resurrected body?
- 18.
Derrida’s description of Marxism could also serve as a commentary on Judaism or Christianity or Islam in light of resurrection: “But this is perhaps what must now be thought and thought otherwise in order to ask oneself where Marxism is going, which is also to say, where Marxism is leading and where is it to be led: where to lead it by interpreting it, which cannot happen without transformation, and not where can it lead us such as it is or such as it will have been” (1994, 59).
- 19.
Derrida does in fact seem to privilege here a kind of spectrality over resurrection. The text continues: “always in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality” (1994, 65; my emphasis). But the “essential contamination of spirit by specter” (1994, 113) that Derrida identifies later in the text as an insight not only of Marx but of deconstruction itself may condition this statement. There is a place of spectrality. But in that place lies a living trace, something that is like the specter but surpasses it.
- 20.
In G. Morrison’s “The Triune Drama,” the disciples, when confronted with Jesus’s resurrection for the first time are, even though he bids them to be at peace, forced to encounter “both an absolute joy and a traumatic surprise. The trauma is especially being faced with glory” (2003, 87).
- 21.
See Emmanuel Falque’s very important work on resurrection in The Metamorphosis of Finitude. A relevant and supportive passage: “as for the resurrection of the body, … it is less its substance as such that concerns us than the modalities of its being or of its movements (Husserl), according to how they are turned towards others (following the spirit) or turned in on the self (following the flesh). Christ resurrected and appearing to his disciples is recognized by them less through his fleshly structure. … He is recognized through lived experience, or the manner of being of his body” (2012, 55–56).
- 22.
Jean Luc-Nancy, in Noli Me Tangere makes a lot of this address of Mary by Jesus: “‘Mary’ reveals Mary to herself, revealing to her both the parting of the voice that calls her as well as the dispatch to which her name commits her: that she in turn is to leave and announce the departure” (2008, 46).
- 23.
See Nancy: “It is not that Jesus refuses Mary Magdalene. The true movement of giving oneself is not to deliver up a thing to be taken hold of but to permit the touching of a presence and consequently the eclipse, the absence, and the departure according to which a presence must always give itself in order to present itself” (2008, 50).
- 24.
Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, also does not believe that Jesus’s injunction, “Do not hold onto me,” is Jesus’s way of rejecting Mary because she was a woman or because she could have stimulated carnal desire. Rather, Aquinas says, citing Augustine, “touch is the last stage of knowledge: when we see something, we know it to a certain extent, but when we touch it our knowledge is complete” (2517). Mary’s knowledge, as someone only recently a disciple, is imperfect, according to Aquinas, and thus she cannot be allowed to touch Jesus until her faith is at “the point of believing that he was equal to the Father” (2517).
- 25.
Aquinas agrees. In his Commentary, Aquinas argues that John’s hyperbole here is instructive and not simply false: “Now the words and deeds of Christ are also those of God. Thus, if one tried to write and tell of the nature of every one, he could not do so; indeed, the entire world could not do this. This is because even an infinite number of human words cannot equal one word of God. … Indeed, even if the world lasted a hundred thousand years, … his words and deeds could not be completely revealed” (2660).
- 26.
See John Russon’s Sites of Exposure: “in conscience we experience both the inner need of the finite situation to be a realization of the infinite and the need of the infinite to be realized in actuality” (2017, 125).
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Costello, P. (2019). Towards a Phenomenology of Resurrection and of Ghosts. In: Louchakova-Schwartz, O. (eds) The Problem of Religious Experience. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21575-0_10
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