Erotic Preaching

Christian preaching flirts with the impossible. As Barth puts it, “Our difficulty lies in the content of our task … As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.” ¹ But is mere recognition of preaching’s impossibility all we can say homiletically? Those who have heard God’s call to gospel proclamation need more than a holy shrug from homiletics. They deserve more. Preachers look to homiletics to articulate some method, some way to quell the uncertainty arising out of preaching’s impossibility. This methodological call prompts questions of how homileticians might conceptualize the task of preaching between society, self, Scripture, and sermon. This paper engages Barth’s impossibility–necessity homiletic, seeking a path around (or perhaps through) the aporia of preaching. ²

Homiletics has paid scant attention to epistemology, even less to such a yearning described by Anselm, one that seeks after God in love. ³ Love is often presupposed in homiletics. It is a given, something that should appear so obvious to the contemporary preacher that one may pass over it without comment. When love emerges as a topic in homiletical texts it is to name the posture of the preacher before her congregation—as a buffer of sorts for preaching the “hard word in love.” ⁴ I contend that the preacher who passes lightly over love does so at her own peril. Homiletics’ gravest ill is that we preachers have become so preoccupied with the noetic dimension of preaching that we have neglected alternative ways of knowing and speaking of God. Preaching’s communicative problems emerge from its epistemological problems. ⁵

This article retrieves an Augustinian/Anselmian/Pseudo-Dionysian notion of love: one in which love is regarded as neither a topic for homiletical reflection (i.e., sermons about love), nor as a bulwark for the prophetic word, but as a mode of theologico-phenomenological inquiry. It tethers preacher’s efforts to know about God to a yearning after God. ⁶ In other words, what drives this paper is a homiletical appropriation of an erotic phenomenology as a means of knowing and speaking about God in contemporary ecclesial contexts. As the Apostle Paul put it so simply and yet profoundly, “Knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:1–3). Or, as Jean-Luc Marion puts it, “Only love can claim to know Love.” ⁷

The Phenomenology of Eros: An Overview

Epistemologically speaking, love yearns to know beyond domination or totalization. Such yearning begins with wonder. ⁸ Wonder hearkens the would-be knower to the “face” of the other, which is simultaneously familiar and foreign; this “concrete emblem” of the other’s otherness is both visible and invisible in the face, as Merleau-Ponty once put it. ⁹ The loved one (l’aimée) must arrive within the horizon of perception before his phenomenality may give itself to the lover (l’amant). ¹⁰ In phenomenology, sight is the privileged mode of perception, wherein the phenomenon gives itself in as much as and to the degree that it shows itself. ¹¹ Thus, the phenomenology of eros transpires at the site where the “essentially hidden throws itself toward the light, without becoming signification.” ¹² Said differently, phenomena become visible to the would-be knower while simultaneously circumventing the a priori structures of knowability tethered to visibility. The phenomenal other approached in love by a “subject” presents himself (perhaps) in giving himself starting from himself without becoming an “object” of experience. ¹³

The “Object” that Gives Itself

Jean-Luc Marion offers an approach to knowledge that resists the Cartesian drive toward objectivization and totalization. According to Marion’s phenomenological schema, objects appear before consciousness to the degree that they give themselves to a perceiving subject. ¹⁴ Phenomena are given to the knower at the “fold” of givenness, which makes the knower’s knowability dependent upon the other to show her/him/itself. Similarly, Luce Irigaray notes that this is the site in which, “what is most interior and what is most exterior become mutually fecund.” ¹⁵ Givenness names a spatio-temporal event in which the alterity of the other that resists phenomenalization, and hence objectivity, nevertheless becomes visible. This first contact with the other, toward whom the gaze of love is projected, signals a kind of swelling, an expansive anticipation that frustrates the fulfillment of that anticipation in the intentional gaze of the would-be knower. In this instant of appearing, the one doing the seeing receives more than can be seen, much less known or discussed. The gaze constitutes more than sight; the gaze transcends sight. ¹⁶

Phenomenology outlines a path to knowledge by means of the “phenomenological reduction.” In brief, this initiates a process by which a would-be knower safeguards the objectivity of objects of experience through bracketing his judgment about the natural world. Such a suspension of judgement comes in the form of an epoché (from the Greek, ἐποχή, “suspension”). ¹⁷ The erotic reduction takes this procedure a step further. An erotic phenomenology charts the movement from that initial shock before the appearance of the “object” that gives itself beyond objectivity, a jolt that transcends the visible and is far beyond a mere passion of the soul. ¹⁸ The appearance of the “object,” the other, on the scene does two things: (1) a closeness-in-distance is inaugurated, de-centering and destabilizing the subject’s subjectivity; (2) the “object” resisting objectification quickens the perceiver to search, to forage for the alterity of the other that remains cloaked beyond all phenomenality. Even as the knower’s intentionality is sated via perception, the knower’s gaze constitutes an unremitting increase of hunger such that the closer the subject/knower draws to the “object” that gives itself, the more distant she feels. As Levinas describes it, “The desire that animates it [viz., the intentionality of the gaze] is reborn in its satisfaction, fed somehow by what is not yet.” ¹⁹ For every possible visibility, what is essential is “the beautiful appearing,” the giving of the invisible within the visible that the would-be knower must “seek, await, touch, but which is not comprehensible.” ²⁰

This is what an erotic epistemology does: the would-be knower’s gaze is drawn into a proximity that constantly withdraws from experience as such, rending the subject with its absence—as “a trace in the trace of an abandon, where the equivocation is never dissipated.” ²¹ Under the erotic reduction the subject’s sovereignty, her assumed capacity to know with certitude, is deconstructed by an otherness that presents itself as unpresentable and unknowable.

The De-centered Subject

The effect of the erotic gaze is to de-center and de-stabilize the lover while simultaneously giving to the beloved the intentionality operating behind the gaze itself. This gaze no longer takes. It gives. Such a gaze is antithetical to the prototypical “male gaze,” which objectifies in order to consume. The erotic gaze, by contrast, brackets the very possibility of objectification. ²² Before the erotic gaze both parties are transformed, but it is the subject/knower who experiences this most strikingly. The subject enters a state of flux in which the epistemological borders between self and other, inside and outside, subject and object, are blurred. As Levinas notes,

The ego stripped … of its scornful and imperialist subjectivity, is reduced to the “here I am,” in transparency without opaqueness, without heavy zones propitious for evasion. “Here I am” as a witness of the Infinite, but a witness that does not thematize what it bears witness of, and whose truth is not the truth of representation, is not evidence. ²³

Descartes’s notion of the ego, as that which guarantees the subject’s existence by making the subject transcendent to objects of knowledge, can only certify what it presupposes: objects. Certainty places the knowable upon the ego, such that, in the knowledge of the object it is the ego more than this object that is certified (EP, 12). The lover’s approach to the other before the erotic gaze eludes certainty because it resists objectification by bracketing the ego cogito. The other cannot be reduced to an object of experience, and therefore the self/subject cannot be certain of anything pertaining to the other. Thus, the subject’s very position as subject, as ego, is called into question. ²⁶ This de-centering of subjectivity before the other who escapes all certainty produces a recognition that the other before the erotic gaze is also an I who holds the would-be knower in her gaze. ²⁷ This phenomenological situation can help us describe a homiletical approach to the Word given for proclamation. The erotic reduction aims the intentionality of the preacher away from biblical objectification or appropriation. It does not render the preacher passive or submissive, as some commentators fear; rather, it bolsters a mode of agency seeking a manifestation of the Word in and yet beyond the words presented in Scripture.

Preaching’s Erogenous Zones

Having traced the phenomenology of eros from its origin in wonder to its saturated intuition in a moment of givenness, we are now in a position to consider this phenomenological movement homiletically. According to Barth, the Word remains other, transcendent. ²⁸ Accordingly, insofar as we may speak of preachers as receiving the Word, we must find a way to talk about that which is received beyond reduction. For Marion, the Word would constitute a “saturated phenomenon,” since whatever might be received overwhelms the intuitive capacities of the preacher. ²⁹ That which is given to the preacher as Word exceeds her capacities to know, much less speak. And yet, somehow, miraculously, the preacher is gifted with words in and by the Word. How is this impossibility possible? How may we describe this event of givenness phenomenologically to offer a method for sermon development? To do so requires fresh concepts and conceptualities.

An Advance beyond Seduction

In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion traces the formation of ipseity, a notion of subjecthood more radical than Descartes’s ego cogitans. Rather than beginning with a doubt that questions all phenomena save that of the doubting/thinking ego, Marion puts Cartesian certainty itself into doubt by showing the aporias created by the Cartesian quest to establish selfhood at the other’s expense. ³⁰ Marion thus offers an alternative path to knowledge via the erotic reduction.

Homiletically, the erotic reduction works like this. The preacher begins the sermon development process not by seeking to know God in some objective sense. He advances toward the Word erotically by supplanting the question “What can I know” with the question “Can I love first?” In this advance, the preacher realizes that he is always already too late to constitute a proper advance because God has already advanced on us. God can only be known as love, as the One with us and for us in the person of Jesus Christ. This means that preachers receive the Word from beyond their subjectivity, beyond their initiative and desire to know.

This theological a priori ought not obviate a homiletical advance, however. The preacher is active in her desire to know. But when love precedes knowledge, what is given to be known is of a different kind than that objective knowledge. “I love first, without any other reason than this one whom I risk loving, without awaiting her response, without presuming reciprocity, without even knowing her” (EP, 82–83). ³¹ The advance of the preacher before the Word needs to be radical, striving, as far as possible, to love first even while she bears the assurance of God’s originary love for her as well as God’s promise to manifest Godself to those who earnestly seek after God.

This advance toward the haecceitas of the Word—before this Word and no other—precludes seduction. ³² Seduction is a genuine threat to erotic preaching because it is self-serving. We cannot lure, coerce, or trap the Word. Indeed, we must not. The preacher is sent from her congregation to bring back a word. It is an ever-present temptation to seduce the Word out of the biblical text, to love the text just long enough for the Word to appear, only to seize it and trap it, forcing it into submission. When this happens, life falters. Only loving can foster an encounter.

The kind of advance I am suggesting here—one beyond seduction—occurs as a kind of kenotic act. ³³ The preacher humbles herself before God as if she could love first, as if the Word did not want to reveal Godself, as if God had not already promised to speak to and through the preacher (Lk 10:16). Such an advance draws close to Paul Ricoeur’s posture of dépouillement, or divestment, in which the interpreter (in this case the preacher) humbles himself to allow the magnanimous Word to become the subject, the addressor, who “appears of itself.” ³⁴ It achieves an act of conjecture—neither knowledge nor understanding—of which, by the conditions of its very possibility, strip down (dépouille) any hope of objectifying the experience.

I Love (to) You

An erotic advance beyond seduction requires the preacher to safeguard the alterity of the Word. In so doing, the preacher secures a certain distance between the words of Scripture and the Word given. Irigaray is most helpful here. She explains that the seemingly innocent declaration, “I love you,” threatens to reinscribe the other as an object of one’s experience and thus subject the other to the hegemony of the ego. Irigaray offers a more faithful path. She explains, “I love you risks reducing the other to the object of my love. This way of speaking should be used with caution. It would be better to say: I love to you, or in you I love that which both is and becomes, that which is foreign to me.” ³⁵ I love to you signals a mode of recognition beyond the Hegelian mode of recognition, which constitutes the basis for subjectivity in Hegel’s philosophy. Declaring, “I recognize you,” means that I cannot know you entirely. The “power of a negative prevails between us,” asserts Irigaray. “I recognize you goes hand in hand with: you are irreducible to me, just as I am to you.” ³⁶ A special kind of recognition that regards the alterity of the other is imperative for an erotic approach before (that is, in front of) the other. The preacher ought to love with a love to the Word, that respects the Word as subject and therefore submits in advance, laying down its intentionality as one lays down a sword.

Irigaray’s dative erotic approach does something else. Homiletics has tended to force preachers into an interpretive double-bind between a hermeneutic of generosity and a hermeneutic of suspicion; one reads with or against the text. It is beyond dispute that words of Scripture were written in contexts where human and nonhuman animals were subjected to marginalization and domination by others. Equally true and equally horrid is the fact that Scripture has been wielded by those in power to subjugate certain kinds of people to bolster racist, sexist, heterosexist, and capitalistic regimes of power/knowledge. By construing the erotic reduction datively, the preacher not only avoids constraining the Word’s becoming according to the words of Scripture, such a relation enables the preacher to engage Scripture beyond the false choice between generosity or suspicion. Another way to say this is that the loving dative approach generates a space for becoming that is impossible when the Word is reduced to being.

The Word in/as Flesh

When the preacher initiates an advance according to the erotic reduction she initiates the first move before the Word. By respecting the radical alterity of the Word via the dative relation, the preacher establishes the conditions for the possibility whereby they might receive the Word beyond totalization or objectification. The third component of the eroticization of preaching attends to the locus of encounter in one’s flesh. This is the site of the saturated phenomenon.

In phenomenology, flesh is a tricky concept. Flesh is irreducible to one’s body or one’s spirit. Maurice Merleau-Ponty employs this word to mark a site of encounter beyond matter, mind, or substance. “What we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy. As the formative medium of the object and the subject, it is not the atom of being.” We must not think the flesh “starting from substances, from body and spirit—for then it would be the union of contradictories—but we must think it, as we said, as an element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being.” ³⁷ Homiletically speaking, the preacher’s flesh does not exist in time or space, not even in the mind of the preacher. Rather, what the erotic approach initiates is a site of becoming in the preacher that redefines being and knowing.

Flesh is an important concept for Marion. “By entering into the flesh of the other, I exit the world and I become flesh in her flesh, flesh of her flesh” (EP, 119). By this Marion names a point of encounter between the would-be knower and the other, which bears the name “Word” in Reformed theology. Through a kind of homiletical divestment, the preacher-knower allows the Word to give a fleshly experience. Such an experience, as Marion frequently reminds us, is not about bodies and certainly not about sex. He struggles, however, to describe where this fleshly abode is to be found, which is unsurprising given what Merleau-Ponty says about it.

Irigaray provides some much-needed support here. She, too, speaks of the fleshly encounter, but in a way that is at once “horizontal and vertical, terrestrial and heavenly.” ³⁸ This has huge theological implications, for it calls into question the easy opposition between transcendence and immanence. On one hand, preachers are less encumbered by the problems of fleshly encounter as it grounds our theology. The becoming flesh of the Word constitutes the threshold of revealed theology alongside phenomenology. ³⁹ On the other hand, if the preacher’s flesh is not quite mental or spiritual or physical, but is given to her as a spatio-temporal locus of encounter in and through the erotic approach, this non-conceptual concept of the flesh puts serious pressure on “dialectical” theologies of the Word because whatever can be known of God in/as the flesh of the preacher cannot be thought according to spatio-temporal binaries.

The Jouissance of the Word

The final aspect of erotic preaching emerges (perhaps) in/as flesh, which does not exist in the preacher but can only be given by the other/Word. To name this experience that transcends dualities of activity–passivity and subject–object, French phenomenologists employ a word borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalytic philosophy and (Roland) Barthesian poststructural semiotics. The word is jouissance (from jouir, “to enjoy”). The French word is slippery, connoting more than the English translation, “enjoyment.” ⁴⁰ Marion employs the term to name the moment of fleshly climax wherein the other is enjoyed by the reconstituted subject beyond use or objectification. This moment of jouissance is always too much and never enough; it is the target of desire even as it remains beyond consumption or total consummation.

What does this jouissance, this playful encounter, look like in homiletical practice? The preacher, through prayer and meditation, reads the biblical text on behalf of her congregation. As she reads, she encounters a certain resistance. The text pushes back on the preacher, shocking her with its foreignness, its otherness, its dissonance—preventing an easy epistemic assimilation or thematic subsumption. She reads and rereads, praying and playing without ceasing, yearning for an encounter with the Word in love. In view of jouissance the preacher approaches, not knowing with certainty whether or not she will receive anything. In lieu of certainty, she receives faith. In loving she gives her flesh to God in hope that the Word might again become flesh in and through her. ⁴¹ It is here that textual resistance softens; she may perceive a kind of give in the text.

The always possible and never certifiable arrival of the Word is otherwise than a noetic encroachment by the preacher. It is otherwise than exegesis (ἐξήγησις); the preacher leads (ήγέοται) nothing out of (ἐξ) the text, for such a seduction abandons the erotic advance. Insofar as the preacher does not divest himself, does not humble himself, does not approach the Word tenderly in prayer, there can be no jouissance. If the preacher aims to seize the Word, to force it, to constrain it to yield a meaning otherwise than its “unpredictable landing” in the eroticization of flesh, nothing is given. In Marion’s words, “love does not pretend to comprehend, since it does not mean at all to take.” ⁴² Love only gives.

To transpose this into Barthian terminology, the veiling of the Word in the text is the unveiling. The always possible enfleshment of the Word opened to the preacher as a moment of jouissance through the erotic approach reveals a sort of thin space, where the veil of alterity becomes less opaque. Marion writes, “There where I feel that something puts up no resistance to me, and that, far from turning me back into myself and thus reducing me, this something withdraws, effaces itself and makes room for me, in short that this something opens itself.” ⁴³ The jouissance of the Word is the uncanny enjoyment always possibly available to the preacher through the erotic approach. Note well, that this openness and givenness does not permit the objectification or totalization of the Word. Just as the alterity of the other person remains forever beyond any “immediately visible spectacle,” so too does the Word retain its alterity in and beyond the text (EP, 105). Or, as Marion writes elsewhere, in a more theologically oriented discourse, “God crosses out our thought because [God] saturates it.” ⁴⁴ God’s superabundant love welcomes the preacher to experience the jouissance of this love as a site and moment of encounter with God’s Word in the Bible.

Here I am providing phenomenological vocabulary to capture with greater precision what other’s alternatively label the “Aha!” of the text, or “encounter” with the text, or an “experience of the assurance of grace.” ⁴⁵ Such terms designate that moment following prayerful, playful engagement with Scripture for sermon development when, all of a sudden, the Word discloses itself according to what Marion terms an “unpredictable landing.” This surprise inaugurates a climax in the preacher through the Word that overcomes time itself; it is an in-breaking of God into time (kairos) that enraptures and enthralls the preacher. In other words, this encounter endows the preacher with knowledge and pleasure. ⁴⁶

Jouissance increases as long as the preacher can bear it, until the point of spiritual-epistemological climax. There the jouissance of the Word reaches its end because it has accomplished itself in the flesh of the preacher: “the accomplishment lasts only as long as it remains unaccomplished; desire lasts for as long as it does not cease to increase” (EP, 132). ⁴⁷ Transposing this into homiletical parlance, the preacher basks in the afterglow of her jouissance, and accordingly, she is enabled and empowered to offer a Word from God for her congregation. The preacher’s task—always necessary, always impossible—is to render in words the radical immanence of her jouissance of the Word without encroaching on its alterity. ⁴⁸ This encounter with the Word’s transcendent immanence constitutes the homiletical erogenous zone par excellence and is thus the terminus ad quem of scriptural engagement for sermon development.

Conclusion

I have offered a theologico-phenomenological description of the preacher’s engagement with the Word in the act of sermon development. Beginning from a sense of wonder that gives itself (perhaps) and thereby de-centers the preacher’s position as an autonomous subject, the gaze of the Word saturates the preacher’s hermeneutical/homiletical intentionality. From a certain perspective, according to a certain advance toward the Word in love, the preacher resists the temptation to seduce God into giving up the Word, for such groping is antithetical to the erotic approach. The dative relation (I love to you) preserves the difference and distance between the preacher and the Word at the site of fleshly encounter. The preacher maintains this approach as long as he can bear it, in jouissance beyond consumption or consummation. Marion summarizes the erotic approach (to God) thusly:

Thus love gives itself only in abandoning itself, ceaselessly transgressing the limits of its own gift, so as to be transplanted outside of itself. The consequence is that this transference of love outside of itself, without end or limit, at once prohibits fixation on a response, a representation, an idol. It belongs to the essence of love—diffusium sui—to submerge, like a ground swell the wall of a jetty, every demarcation, representational or existential, of its flux: love excludes the idol or, better, includes it by subverting it. ⁴⁹

The erotic epistemology that I have sketched above presents preachers with a new signification that prompts a new oath, viz., Thy shall not kill (totalize, objectify) the other. Before the Word, erotic preachers also receive a new signification, one that does not merely reinscribe Descartes epistemology. The preacher’s existence is not contingent on his thinking or knowing (qua ego cogito); rather, he discovers himself in and through the Word, which signifies a reality that precedes and supersedes his intuition: “I love you first.” In God’s decision—in God’s radical freedom and alterity—to be with us and for us in Jesus Christ and in the preaching event, the preacher experiences a saturated signification. It is to such an experience, such an encounter, such jouissance, that the preacher bears witness; it is only on account of such an experience that the preacher is able to bear witness. It is this unpredictable and unplottable movement of God in and through the Word that is worthy of the name preaching.