LEADER 03754ctm a2200385Ia 4500001    209169
005    20240621212331.0
008    100331s2009    xx       b    000 0 eng d
035    (OCoLC)ocn692486523
035    209169
049    LHMA
040    LHM |beng |erda |cLHM
090    B2430.L964 |bW35 2009
100 1  Walton, Mélanie Victoria.
245 10 Expressing the inexpressible : |bbearing witness in Jean-Francois Lyotard and Pseduo-Dionysius / |cby Mélanie Victoria Walton.
264  0  |c2009.
300    ix, 314 pages
336    text |btxt |2rdacontent
337    unmediated |bn |2rdamedia
338    volume |bnc |2rdacarrier
502    Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2009.
504    Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-314).
520    What is an expression that can express that which cannot be expressed? Logic and grammar will declare it to be an impossibility and its expression, a mistaken use of language. Yet, humanity's archive persistently attests to both the legitimacy of the inexpressible expression and the multiplicity of ways to give it voice. While heterogeneous in time, place, and philosophical situation, the contemporary French father of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, and the late antique, presumably Syrian father of Neoplatonist Christian mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysius, both intimately consider the inexpressible expression. Both are provoked by the witness who is silenced by the binding limits of grammatical possibility, even while called to testify to an ineffable. Both define this inexpressible as precisely that which must be expressed in the face of logic deeming it absurd. To endeavor under the weight of impossibility reveals both Lyotard's postmodernism and Pseudo-Dionysius' philosophic-theology as pedagogic pursuits, as spiritual exercises in the originary sense of philosophy as the love of wisdom, rather than analytic treatises of self-subsistent theories.The plight of bearing witness to the ineffable is explored through the guiding example in Lyotard's The Differend, the differend created by historical revisionism's logical bind that forbids the Auschwitz survivor to testify to the existence of gas chambers (there cannot be a living survivor to a death camp). By taking the challenge seriously, Lyotard reveals that the force of this differend is not its circularity, but the mind's conceptual deficit before the Holocaust: the singular event overflows its possible comprehension. The witness' case is parallel to how reason can silence the faithful's testimony of God, He who exceeds all that we could know of Him. But faith demands the pursuit of this knowledge in the face of its absurdity. The radical conjunction of apophatic and cataphatic theologies in Pseudo-Dionysius' The Divine Names reveals a productive, stuttering method to name He who exceeds all names. Pseudo-Dionysius' most remarkable divine name is Eros. Its exceptionality in capturing an expression of the inexpressible prompts a demonstration of a Lyotardian rereading of the conjunction of eros and silence as a productive phrase to dissolve differends.
530    Electronic version(s) |bavailable internally at USHMM.
533    Photocopy. |bAnn Arbor, Mich. : |cUMI Dissertation Services. |e22 cm.
590    Dissertations and Theses
591    Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024
600 10 Lyotard, Jean-François, |d1924-1998.
600 00 Pseudo-Dionysius, |cthe Areopagite.
650  0 Negation (Logic) in literature.
650  0 Negative theology |xChristianity.
956 41  |uhttp://dc.ushmm.org/library/bib209169/3386657.pdf |zHosted by USHMM.
852 0   |bstacks |hB2430.L964 |iW35 2009
852     |bwww
852     |bebook