Kierkegaard & the Call of the Other

Dear Prof Kearney,
I am confused about your criticism of Kierkegaard. I understood you to be saying that because we must be able to recognise the stranger who comes to our door - even if this recognition is not a conscious deduction, but no more than a smell - our faith cannot be blind. We are required to interpret the call of the other? That that is part of the response? I'm not sure if this is what you're saying, but, if it is close at least, wouldn't Kierkegaard agree completely - isn't Kierkegaard's point that the ethical is about disclosure, about understanding, bringing to consciousness etc: the paradox is that, when this fails us and we are reduced to blindness (when we can only smell and intuit but not know? - when we cannot express the problem in the universal?) we still have to welcome the stranger (almost unethically, because ethics has failed us already?). So for Kierkegaard we do have to do the hermeneutic work, and the bizzare and contradictory thing about faith is that it somehow defies our duty? Frances


Professor Kearney's response:
Frances, your point is well made and I agree with most of what you say with regard to Kierkegaard.
My point about carnal hermeneutics is that it operates already in the very moment of the leap of faith - both after we have left the knowledge and understanding of the Universal behind and before we return to the universal after the leap. The carnal 'reading/flairing/smelling/sensing' of the stranger is already at work in the first facing of the stranger - that is, in the primal moment of faith as troth and trust. This can occur in the middle of the night, as with Jacob wrestling with angel - and while it may often be mistaken it is never 'blind'. A leap in the dark does not mean we cannot read. In fact, Derrida once said to me in the conversation in Villanova that 'we can only read in the dark'. Darkness is not blindness. Sense means both sensing and making sense, passive and active, receptive and interpretive. And the french 'sens' even has the third intriguing sense of 'direction'. Tu vas dans quel sens? Carnal sensing as orientation...going this way rather than that, like Mary or Abraham or Jacob recoiling or advancing, retreating or embracing...
That is the wager of hospitality.

Does that help a little?

Carnal Hermeneutics and Fallibility

Dear Professor Kearney,
[...] I completely understand how bodily hermeneutics can be temporally primary and prethematic. But it seems that the body can be just are erroneous as any cognitive hermeneutic. For example, one may be positively disposed towards a charming rapist or be repulsed by an angel. If I understand you correctly that the body may provide reliable discernments at times when cognitive hermeneutics cannot, I don't see how these moments of bodily discernments can themselves be discerned, given the body's ability to deceive (e.g. as charmed by a demon). [...]

Prof. Kearney's response:
A really interesting question. It is precisely because of the fallible/tentative/tacit/inchoate nature of our carnal discernments/readings (that is why I called it a hermeneutic 'flair' rather than 'judgment' ) that the primary hermeneutic of embodied imagination and sensation needs to be supplemented by a critical hermeneutics of reasonable discernment (Kant's aesthetic reflective judgment) and practical wisdom (Aristotle's phronesis). My point is that a primary leap of emotion, faith or flair is not 'blind' but already interpretative...In other words, hermeneutics goes all the way down...
hope that helps a little? We must come back to this in class as several other students asked me similar questions after seminar was over....