Consuming desire's deferral: A theological shadow in the culture of image

Parallax

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 39-55

  Carlson, Thomas A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009105956     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/135346499249830     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. Jean-Luc Marion, La Croisée du visible (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), p.86.
2. Marion, La Croisée du visible, p.85.
3. Baudrillard, of course, distinguishes the referential logic of representation, which refers the image to some original, from the logic of irreducible simulation, where the image refers to no reality beyond itself. On this, see, for example, Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981), p.17, where he summarizes the 'successive phases of the image': - it is the reflection of a profound reality - it masks and distorts a profound reality - it masks the absence of any profound reality - it is without relation to any reality whatsoever: - it is its own pure simulacrum.
4. Martin Heidegger, 'Memorial Address', in Discourse on Thinking, John M. Andersen and Hans Freund (trans.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p.48.
5. As I'll indicate in my conclusion, the logic that Marion discerns here in the relation between experience and televisual image might be found also to define, more broadly, the relation between individual subject and the global realities of capitalism in Fredric Jameson's analyses. That relation, as we'll see, is characterized by the 'growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience'. (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1991), p.410.)
6. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p.222.
7. Again, Heidegger's analyses of technology and calculative thinking are not far off here. See both Heidegger, 'Memorial Address' and his 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, David Farrel Krell (ed.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
8. On the idol and icon, see, in addition to La Croisée du visible, Marion's foundational theological treatment in God Without Being, Thomas A. Carlson (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
9. and the most recent phenomenological treatment in Etant donné: Essai d'une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).
10. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p.202.
11. Taylor, Hiding, p.202.
12. Ever Since Erring: A Post-modern A / theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Taylor has maintained that the death of God, thought deconstructively, does not simply replace the traditional Creator God with a creative human subject (as does, e.g., the atheistic humanism of a Feuerbach) but rather involves a more radical unsettling of the human subject itself.
13. Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.154-155.
14. Taylor, Disfiguring, p.319.
15. Origen, On First Principles, G. W. Butterworth (trans.) (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1973), II. 9.1.
16. For a brief but thorough introduction to Dionysius in English, see Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, vol I of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp.157-82.
17. For a fine introduction in French, see René Roques, 'Contemplation, extase et ténèbre mystique chez le Pseudo-Denys', in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, Marcel Viller et al. (eds) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-), 2: pp.1885-1911.
18. For a brief treatment of the interplay between divine darkness and human expectation in Gregory, see Jean Daniélou, 'Mystique de la ténèbre chez Grégoire de Nysse', in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, Marcel Viller, et al. (eds) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-), 2: pp.1872-1885.
19. For a brief treatment in English, which relates Gregory to Plotinus and Dionysius, see Kevin Corrigan, 'Ecstasy and Ectasy in Some Early Pagan and Christian Mystical Writings', in Greek and Medieval Studies in Honor of Leo Sweeney, S. J., William J. Carrol and John J. Furlong (eds) (New York: Lang, 1994.).
20. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (trans.) (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), II.162.
21. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, II.163.
22. On my approach to death in mysticism, and for further references, see Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
23. and 'The Poverty and Poetry of Indiscretion: Negative Theology and Negative Anthropology in Contemporary and Historical Perspective', in Christianity and Literature 47/ 2 (Winter 1998), pp.167-93.
24. Jameson, Postmodernism, p.411.
25. Pseudo-Dionysius, 'The Mystical Theology', in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Colm Luibheid (trans.) (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 1040D.
26. Pseudo-Dionysius, 'The Mystical Theology', 1048B.
27. For a more thorough explication of these modes of theological language, see Carlson, Indiscretion, Chapter 5.