CLT 355 the Unnameable and the Sublime (Crosslisted with French, Team-Taught with Marc

CLT 355 The Unnameable and the Sublime (crosslisted with French, team-taught with Marc Froment-Meurice) (Spring 1998)

Traditional as well as new and radical currents of thinking about the limits of language and what may or may not lie beyond them. The course is built around literary and philosophical versions of and responses to classic expressions of negative theology in Western culture, that is, the attempt to devise and disqualify ways of talking about God as an ultimate reality beyond the reach of language. Theoretical negative theology, moreover, will be brought into relation with contemporary political questions about the "socially unspeakable," leading to reflections on the reduction to silence of certain groups or concerns and certain kinds of languages today. To this end stimulation will be sought from Claude Lanzmann’s film, "SHOAH." Readings from:

Plato, Sophist (SOFISTHS)

Plotinus, Enneids V

Longinus, On the Sublime (PERI UCOUS)

Dionysius, The Divine Names (De divinis nominibus)

Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate or Reden der Unterscheidung ("Modicum . . .", 70, in Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, vol. III, pp. 189-90).

Silesius Angelus, Wandering Cherub (Cherubinische Wandersmann)

Kant, Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)

Heidegger, On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache)

Shelley, "Mount Blanc"

Dickinson, Poems (Johnsons numbers): 581, 701, 1452, 1563, 1651,1668, 1700, also 985, and 1071)

Bataille, Inner Experience (L’experience intérieure)

Blanchot, The Step/Not Beyond (Le pas au-delà)

Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini)

Derrida, On the Name (Sauf le nom)

"How Not to Speak" ("Dénégations: Comment ne pas parler")

Celan, "Conversation in the Mountains" ("Gespräch im Gebirg")

Poems from Die Niemandsrose ("Was Geschah," "Tübingen, Jänner")

Jean-Luc Nancy, "Des Lieux Divins," in Qu’est-ce que Dieu? Hommage à l’abbé Daniel Coppieters de Gibson (1929-1983) (Bruxelles: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1985).

Additional Bibliography

Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths

Boileau, Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours

Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, trans. Paul W. Harkins in The Fathers of the Church vol. 72 (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982)

Cusanus, De docta ignorantia

De Libera, Le problème de l’être chez maître Eckhart: logique et métaphysique de l’analogie

Dragonetti, "L’Image et l’irreprésentable dans l’écriture de Saint Augustin," in Qu’est-ce que Dieu? Philosophie / Théologie. Homages à l’abbé Daniel Coppieters de Gibson.

Givone, Sergio, Storia del nulla(Bari: Laterza, 1995)

Grassi, La preminenza della parola metaforica. Heidegger, Eckhart, Novalis

Guillén, Jorge. "The Ineffable Language of Mysticism: San Juan de la Cruz." Language and Poetry. Harvard UP 1961.

Hamacher, Premises. Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Heidegger, "Die Sprache" ("Language")

Erläuterungen über Hölderlins Dichtung

Beiträge zur Philosophie

Heiser, John. "Saint Augustine and Negative Theology." In NewScholasticism. vol. LXIII, no. 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 66-80

Iser and Budick, eds., Languages of the Unsayable

Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur

Lévinas, Emmanuel, L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discoursTalmadiques (Paris: Minuit, 1982)

Lao Tzu, The Way of Life

Lossky, Théologie négative et connsaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, Paris, 1973

Marion, J.-L., "La vanité d’être et le nom de Dieu," in Analogie etDialectique: Essais de Théologie Fondamentale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1982).

Mortley, Raoul. From Word to Silence, I: The rise and fall of logos(Bonn: Hanstein, 1986)

______. From Word to Silence, II The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986).

Moses Maimonides, Moreh Nevukhim (Guide to the Perplexed), esp. "Lashon Benai Adam" ("The Language of Man") in Goodman, ed., Rambam

Plato, Parmenides

Schiller, "Vom Erhabenen" in Kleinere philosophische Schriftenin Werke XII, 1, , ed. R. Boxberger, or in Schillers’Werke 20 pt. 1, ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962)

Stevens, "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction"

Theunissen, Michael, The Other

______. Negative Theologie der Zeit

Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence

Whittaker, John. "Basilides on the Ineffability of God," in Studies in Platonism and Patristic Thought (London, 1984).

AAVV, Autour de SHOAH

Vahanian, Dieu anonyme

Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime

Arendt, The life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (esp. c. 13: Metaphor and the Ineffable)

Paintings by Turner or Caspar David Friedrich .

Rationale for course on The Unnamable and the Sublime:

This course proposes to bring some of the most enduringly significant attempts in different disciplines within Western culture to define the limits of language, and perhaps to exceed them, into comparison with one another. The tradition of negative theology will be compared with poetry of the ineffable and philosophical reflections on language that tend to define areas of inviolable silence. Since antiquity this problematic of the unsayable has been linked with that of the sublime, and this topic will serve to counterpoint the investigation of the central issues of negative theology. Such a pervasive problem as the language of the unsayable in Western tradition can best be treated at the intersection between disciplines, signally philosophy, theology, and poetry. It is not the property of any one national tradition nor is it peculiar to any historical period and demands the wide-ranging comparative treatment that this course proposes. Bringing together the different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds of the two instructors--both heavily invested in precisely this topic from widely diverse intellectual matrices--is part of a design to catalyze open dialogue on "what cannot be said" lurking as an ineluctable provocation perhaps in all discourses.