The Ark of Speech

Jean-Louis Chrétien, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134473861
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Ark of Speech investigates the interplay of speech and silence in the dialogue between God and human beings, and human beings and the world. Ranging from the Old Testament and its depiction of God's creative word to the New Testament and its focus on the life and words of Jesus as the Word of the Father, the book shows how important it is for the believer to listen to God and to others in silence and devotion.

1

THE UNHEARD-OF

The first hospitality is nothing other than listening. It is the hospitality that we can grant to others, with our body and our soul, even out on the streets and on the roadside, when we would not be able to offer a roof, or warmth or food. And it is at any instant that this hospitality can be granted. Of all other forms of hospitality it is the precondition, for bitter is the bread that is eaten without speech having been exchanged, heavy and burdensome is the insomnia of the beds in which we sleep without our weariness having been welcomed and respected. And is not the ultimate hospitality, that of the Lord, the hospitality that falls, dizzyingly, into the luminous listening of the Word, listening to it so as to speak, speaking so as to listen to it? Listening is big with eternity.

The freshness and openness of this hospitality comes to it from its humility. It is the first hospitality, to be sure, but nobody has ever inaugurated it. No man has ever been the first to listen. We can offer it only because we have always already been received in it. It is consubstantial with the very transmission of speech. In order to speak, I have to be able to hear myself, but in order to hear myself, someone must already have heard me and spoken to me, in a way that forestalls me – that is, comes before me, in both spatial and temporal terms. We have been listened to even before we speak. Between our ears and our voice, other voices and other kinds of listening are already active. The hospitality of listening thus has a common quality, in the sense in which people used to talk of a common bakehouse. It is in a common space, or, more precisely, it is in what founds any possible community, that we welcome the other. When I really listen, I occupy the place of any other man, and it is equally true that, as everyone knows, there is no attention without a sort of effacement.

But how is it possible to think that, on the one hand, by listening I tend to be nothing but the place holder or surrogate of humanity, allowing the other to raise his voice into the light of the universal, and that, on the other hand, this place holding does not constitute an anonymity or interchangeability, since hospitality can only be truly given if it is given as our own – in our own words (‘from our own hands’, as we also say), in the form of a phrase such as, ‘Here I am, I’m listening’? These two dimensions do not form an alternative, and to think as much would mean missing out on an essential aspect of the phenomenon of listening. For to listen with my particularities, in other words with my habits and my prejudices, with my predilections and my resentments, with my memories and my dreams, means forcing the words of the other into the Procrustean bed of everything that is most contingent and most accidental about me, it means listening in a way that the Greeks would have called idiotic. And so it is not really listening, but rather reacting, as in those ‘reactions’ to this or that event that journalists require from curious bystanders – in other words those reactions that professionally curious bystanders require from merely occasional curious bystanders. Nothing of the other is received and taken in, for there is then no place in which he can be received, but merely a stand-offish reserve, and thus something that is as interchangeable as one can imagine – as in everything that depends on opinion.

On the other hand, when a man burns in the fire of attention the dead wood of his particularities, when he allows the words of the other to unfold in a silence that is rustling with meaning, what happens is that, by effacing himself, he becomes properly himself, and offers a kind of listening that nothing can replace by very virtue of the fact that it is universal. How are we to understand this paradox? The act of speech cannot be thought on the basis of the simple duality of you and me. As soon as you speak to me, we are already all there, even the dead, and those who will one day come also. The interlocutors do not address one another in the vacuum of a telepathic communication, they speak to each other in the world within which they exist along with everyone and in the language of a community. They are thus never only two people: even a face-to-face conversation is heavy with a distant rumour, and even intimacy has its own wide-open spaces.

Listening to the other does not simply mean listening to what he says, but to what it is, in the world or, in other words, to which his words are replying – what is calling his words, requesting them, menacing them or overwhelming them. To begin listening means having to break through the frightening closure of duality: indeed, it is not a question of the two interlocutors forming two halves that finally reunite and come together in a single sphere, as in the ancient myth. When I really listen with the other to what he himself, as he speaks, is listening to or has listened to, then it is really he to whom I am listening. And it is when I listen in this way that I really listen, for listening with the other is not the same as fusing with him, or coinciding with him: we hear twice over, from two distinct places, what has called our exchange into being. This alone gives to listening its solidity and its gravity.

These remarks are enough to dismiss the utopian idea of a perfect act of listening, of an adequate act of listening – in the sense in which philosophers speak of an adequate knowledge. To be sure, we speak in order to be heard, and who would not wish to be listened to as well as possible, with the most perfect attention? If we put to one side – as requiring to be thought through in different terms – the situations in which we speak so as not to be heard, two questions arise. Does being listened to constitute – and can it constitute – the ultimate and essential aim of my acts of speech? And, on the other hand, in what might the perfection of listening consist? A word that aims merely to be listened to is a word that inveigles: it enjoins, it orders, it seduces, it charms, it acts in many other fashions too, or at least it seeks to do so, but it excepts itself and withdraws from the dialogue of truth or in truth. I aim to be listened to only as a moment of the reply, as the precondition of another act of speech. To speak means first and foremost to say, to articulate a meaning on the basis of which we can exist together in the world, and even a word of revelation, with all its critical, decisive and imperious implications, can have this weightiness only because it says something about God and the world and the relation between them, and thus, in order to say this, it calls on a response from us, without which it would not be itself. A cry forces itself on to listening, it seizes us, as it were, in spite of ourselves, but it does not form the first moment of a dialogue. It shows something, it discloses the joy, suffering, horror, surprise to which, if I hear it, I must reply, but it says, properly speaking, nothing. Speech lives off the stifling of these cries, it forbids them so that it can speak itself – which does not mean, far from it, that it denies or fails to recognize their intensity as an essential possibility of the human voice. By making itself into the luminous monstrance of their meaning, by saying, tremulously, what in them is always unheard-of, it only makes them all the more piercing. For the voice brings into itself their piercing quality, which is the only way of not forgetting it. Only speech, by saying, and not by starting to howl in turn, really listens to the cries, for it alone can grant their desire, by bearing – and this is its very own responsibility – what is unbearable about them, and by bearing it as such, that is, without denying it. So listening cannot be separated from replying to and taking up what we listen to.

Where can we find the perfection of listening, supposing there is one? If perfect listening were a listening so full of insight and understanding that it to some degree enveloped my words with its lucid anticipation, understood my merest hint, without fail, in all I say and all I do not say – that it always knew in advance the movement of my phrases without ever being taken by surprise – then it would tend to suppress my speech and suppress itself as listening. And this, far from constituting a desirable aim, would merely lead to ruin and violence. There are senses in which perfect listening changes over into its opposite: complete violence and expropriation. We do not want to talk to those who know everything all too well, long in advance; we do not want to speak if others are going to finish our sentences for us; we do not start speaking to relinquish the ground of our being. Interpretation has its violence, too, and perhaps it is always a certain violence that founds and gives rise to interpretation. If listening understands too much (and we doubtless always understand too much), it tends to become vision, autopsy, a perspicacity that sees through me, instead of greeting me around the hearth of language. The gift that is attributed, in various traditions, to philosophers or visionaries of the spirit, enabling them to know at a glance with whom they are dealing and to see their innermost secrets without even needing to speak – is it really a gift? It takes away more than it gives, if it tears from the other his burden of language, that is, the unique and irreplaceable weight of his humanity.

As opposed to such a dire utopia, however dazzling it might make itself out to be, we have to imagine that the perfection of listening lies in its imperfection, to borrow a Taoist formula. Listening begins in a void, in dispossession – and not in bringing into action and setting to work a ‘know-how’ of listening that has already been acquired and possessed. The ‘know-how’ of listening has something obscene and pornographic about it, if the essence of pornography is the sterile and empty interchangeability of intimacy, its invasion by anonymous techniques and a gaze that wants to see everything. The only know-how or knowledge of which it can be a question in this domain is that there should be a question, that I should allow myself to be dispossessed of what I thought I knew by the words of the other, which are thus the occasion of a reciprocal openness. In other terms, what is at stake is what the Socratic tradition calls learned ignorance – the act of knowing what I do not know. Knowing that you do not know means knowing how to learn, knowing each time how to learn. And knowing each time how to learn means encountering the other and allowing the other to encounter you and speak to you. Each time – these words are important.

For, with this learned ignorance, we are not talking about a posture, a position, an attitude. It is learned only because it has been burned by the epiphany of the other. It is learned only by being born anew and starting over again. Its knowledge is not a kind of baggage, it means you lose whatever baggage you had. The hospitality of listening, like that of the Epiphany, is hospitality in a stable, that is, in a place normally unsuitable for receiving kings, a hospitality caught short, because it has nothing else to offer than a vacant and unadorned place. Its deficiency is its nakedness and thus its perfection.

What is there to hear and understand in this epiphany, and how is it to be understood? Every authentic word runs risks, ventures out, and listening can be faithful to it only if it measures up to this venture. Which venture? To start to speak, to take up the conversation, if we pay attention to the force of this expression, which has been concealed by habit, does not mean receiving it where it is held out to me, as when you ask questions round the table or at a conference, but to take it up from silence. No human speech comes before all other, as if it were indistinguishable from the origin and brought meaning into being, but every speech worthy of the name is a new dawn, and rises tremulously in the uncertain light of daybreak. It moves forward, to adopt the fine title of Henri Michaux’s work, ‘face à ce qui se dérobe’ – ‘in the face of what slips away’. What I say, I cannot say. The full measure of speech is that it speaks to the impossible.

This paradox reveals itself to be a self-evident truth. For if, in speaking, I need only draw on a stock of already available sentences, ready-made turns of phrase, pre-existing commonplaces, whether they are indeed commonplace or, on the contrary, precious, then my task is reduced to that of putting new wine in old wineskins and thus corrupting and wasting its newness. A man with the gift of the gab is a man who is always repeating things, even if the variety of his utterances conceals the fact. But if I have something new to say, even if it is merely this joy or this trial I am going through, it cannot be a question merely of actualizing a meaning that was already potentially there within me, and I have to say something I do not understand and cannot manage, something that has broken into me by coming upon me unawares. No rhetoric will do the job.

Speech takes risks because it is always the unheard-of that it wants to say, when it really wants to say something. The silence within events is what we want to bring into speech. In this way, the voice blazes for itself a trail that was not marked out in advance, a trail that it can in no way follow. It can be strong only in its weakness. Its sole authority lies in being venturesome, and so its trembling must always bear the hallmark of the silence from which it emerges: sometimes it is a toneless voice that alone can express the unheard-of. The distress inherent to airport novels and hit songs lies precisely in the fact that, by providing simple-hearted people with formulae of pure convention and worn-out, devalued expressions with which to express their joys and their pains, they deprive them of access to speech, they forbid its stammerings, and they thus deprive men of their own existence. There is something really vampiric about this. An arrogant vulgarity flourishes at the expense of all who listen to it. Then there is nothing left between the nakedness of the unsayable and the off-the-peg formulae that are all ready to wear, in which nobody speaks and nothing is said.

If speech is born from the unheard-of, listening, too, can live from it alone. And if we indeed speak only to the impossible, we also indeed listen only to and towards the impossible. How? It is towards what I myself do not understand and cannot master, towards what escapes me, that I must lend an ear. This is the only way to listen, for it is only in this way that I can let myself be shaken and transformed, rather than just instructed, by what occurs (even if this is only a new thought, which also constitutes an event). I listen where I do not know any more than the other about what he is saying to me, where I can share with him the surprise at what happens. To listen, we have, as a striking expression of Péguy puts it, ‘to be prepared to be caught off our guard’: only thus can we be reached by, and, as it were, united with, everything that is lofty, for the man who is on his guard, and sticks to the commands set out in his programme of possibilities, will never see anything happening but what he has already seen and will never hear anything but what has already been said.

Being with the other, attuned to the unheard-of, does not at all mean that I am, like a psychologist or an interpreter, lying in wait for the unsaid in the other’s speech, nor that I thereby adopt a position of superiority and mastery. Something quite different is at stake. Listening to the unheard-of in what the other is saying means following a patient, laborious path, sometimes getting lost and needing to start all over again, with all that is improvisational and, as it were, caressing in the act of attention, towards the singularity of the event that calls for his speech. It is only on this basis, on the basis of this perpetually inchoative fraternity in which what is to be said sets the tone, that the words of the other become audible, that is, respected. Their stammerings, their clumsiness, their inadequacy, their contradictions are no longer an obstacle, they are no longer privations or deficiencies from the point of view of some masterful speech: they mean something. But this meaningfulness has nothing in common with that of a symptom, which I decipher by myself in a supposedly expert fashion. It bears witness to the agonistic dimension of speech, it demonstrates that every act of speech is a hand-to-hand combat with silence, with what cannot be said and yet will be said.

All the same, this listening to the unheard-of has nothing in common with a mute contemplation. We are all ears only if we are all lips, just as we are all lips only if we are all ears. Heidegger has shown, with great profundity, that speaking means listening and that listening means speaking. To bear with the other the burden and responsibility of his words can only happen if we ourselves bring our offering, the fresh air of our whispered meanings. To allow myself to be questioned by what he has to say means also having, myself, to question and interrogate him. It is not certain that listening can always reply to what is said to it, for it does not have at its disposal a magical power that enables it to untie or to cut all the Gordian knots of existence, but it is certain that it must always be answerable to and for what is said to it. Its hospitality is active, and forms the perpetual noviciate of speech. Everyone has experienced how the attention with which we are listened to has a heuristic force and bears our speech beyond itself, fertilizes our thoughts and reinforces them quite unexpectedly. This is because this attention is not directed towards us but towards the unheard-of, from which our speech arises; thus it is on this unheard-of, and not on us, that it casts its light, which is our godsend. What we have here is an itinerant attention, which accompanies us, whereas in the quite different case of attention scrutinizing us with the aim of judging us, as in an examination or an audition, it includes much more of a dimension of constraint and inhibition. In one case, the silence of listening speaks, and, in the other, it is silent.

To these considerations, however, an objection can nonetheless be raised. If we listen towards the unheard-of, if we listen with what we do not know, and if listening with what we do not know constitutes the beginnings of deafness, do we not arrive at the idea of an attention that is, as it were, ecstatic? What distinguishes this surprise from a sort of stupor in the face of the unforeseeable? Is this not an entirely negative conception, which disables all understanding in its structures and its potentialities?

This would be to misunderstand and, quite literally, to remain deaf to this novitiate of speech. It is in following the movement of the other’s words, it is in following too the movement of my own questionings, that I am attentive to the unheard-of, as to the origin of our exchange. Learned ignorance does not consist of making ourselves amnesic and stupid so that we can listen better but of silencing within us the noise of what has already been said so that we can, in Heidegger’s apt words, let ourselves be said. This ignorance suspends my knowledge, it does not destroy it. It frees me from my blind adhesion to the belief that my knowledge is sufficient to hear and understand everything that will ever be said to me. It is a question of mobilizing my knowledge and my experience, and making them fluid and lively, so that they will serve the attention instead of replacing it.

The radical difference between the act of speech and the deciphering of a message or the reception of a piece of information is thereby made manifest. Listening is not the same as decoding, for words do not constitute a code. A machine can decode by bringing its programmes into play. But it will never be able to listen. Listening is a truly palpitating activity, it can happen only with this heart that beats, this air breathed in and breathed out, this patient activity of the entire body. It is with all one’s body that one listens, as the act of speech is never separable from an act of the body. The always unfinished truth of listening is a heartfelt truth.

2

WOUNDED SPEECH

A phenomenology of prayer

Prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, as it is the human act that alone opens up the religious dimension and never ceases to sustain, to bear, to suffer that opening. There are, of course, other specifically religious phenomena, but prayer constantly belongs among their conditions of possibility. If we could not address our words to God or the gods, no other act would be capable of aiming at the divine. Thus, sacrifice forms an act that is, at least at first sight, distinct from prayer, but it is impossible to imagine any sacrifice that prayer does not in one way or another accompany and constitute as such. With prayer, the religious phenomenon begins and ends.

This appearance can indeed, in certain cases, open only on to a virtual dimension, as when Supervielle, in his ‘Prayer to the Unknown’, speaks to a God whose existence he does not presuppose and whom he does not know whether he is listening to him:

And see, I surprise myself addressing my w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The unheard-of
• 2 Wounded speech
• 3 The hospitality of silence
• 4 Does beauty say adieu?
• 5 The offering of the world
• Notes
• Index