GOD BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND ANONYMITY NOTES TOWARD A POSSIBLE PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEOAISTHETICS

Abstract

In this contribution, the author seeks to illuminate, from a phenomenological perspective, the ambivalence of the transcendent originality of the Christian phenomenon within the register of aísthēsis. Another name for this ambivalence is found in Aristotle’s use of the term diaphanes, sublimated through the well-known participle anōnymon (De An. II 6, 418a28–30). That something must pour forth from the anonymity of appearance through perceptio suggests a medial process of visibilization – that is, a diff erentiating process by which appearance itself becomes visible. Hence the thesis: God appears as a variation of the mediality of his own appearing. If God,
as medium, is diaphanes, then he is not merely the actively manifested eff ect of the medium, but also the perceptual variation of his own appearing. If, therefore, God is
the medium through which he appears (reveals and expresses Himself) to the world, then his appearance is a variation of Himself—as medium. In this way, a theology
of perception may acquire a non-privileged status (primarily Christian) as a medial theory – one that does not merely perceive, nor merely hermeneutically deconstruct, clarify, self-describe, conceptualize, or (re)formulate, but rather performatively and almost artistically traces the contours of the conditions of its own possibility. In doing so, it enables a continuous shifting of the boundaries of the possible with regard to the Beyond—as an unstoppable, forthcoming visibility in potentialis (Merleau-Ponty) – always retroactively projecting the contours of Otherness. It is precisely this
phenomenological theoaisthēsis that renders visible the impossibility of constraining Otherness within the framework of the classical theological concept (logos).