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Informationen zum Autor Melanie Victoria Walton joined the faculty at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee in 2011 as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy after earning her B.A. in philosophy, creative writing, and comparative religions from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Duquesne University in Pennsylvania. She currently teaches an array of classes in medieval philosophy, the philosophy of religion, the inexpressible, ethics, gender, aesthetics, and introductory classes exploring the dichotomies of the self and other, theory and practice, good and evil, and life and suffering. Her area of specialization is historically focused on questions linking contemporary Continental philosophy with the Neoplatonist mysticism of late antiquity and the early middle ages. Reflecting this diversity of interests, her recent scholarship includes chapters in edited volumes on phenomenology and guerilla gardening, racism and sexual stereotypes in contemporary films, and Lyotard on love, as well as essays on myth in Augustine and Heidegger and on construction and deconstruction in collage art. Klappentext The event happens. To it, you bear witness; to it, you are commanded to testify; and yet, by the command and by the event, you are unable to speak. Testimony demands the witness to demonstrate her knowledge-that knowledge that she must have by the fact of being a witness to something. And, yet, this something exceeds the possibility of its grasp by any manner that could yield its expression amenable to verification. One example is the Holocaust survivor silenced by the odious logic of the historical revisionist who forbids the living to evidence death camps. The horror of the example is not just the difficulty of actually undoing such a foul bind that masks hatred with sophistic flourish; it is the realization that the bind's power is fueled by the true inexpressibility of the Holocaust itself. A second example is the religious faithful called to testify to that superessentiality who supremely exceeds every capacity to know Him.While heterogeneous in time, place, and philosophical situation, the contemporary French father of postmodernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the late antique, presumably Syrian father of Neoplatonist Christian mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysius, both do justice to their witnesses by endeavoring under this weight of impossibility to express the inexpressible. Lyotard rigorously analyzes every aspect of the differend and explores a plethora of attempts to lift the silence, and finds each to fail. Pseudo-Dionysius founds a radical, stuttering method of speaking and unspeaking the names of God to give forth this inconceivable testimony. Expressing the Inexpressible undertakes a critical reading of each individually and then brings their distinct methods to bear on their shared problem of that which resists its articulation. Their conjunction finds its voice in a reading of silence and eros as forging a new idiom by which the witness may do the impossible: express the inexpressible. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Introduction: What is the Inexpressible Expression? Chapter One: Witness and Testimony Chapter Two: Contextualizing Jean-Francois Lyotard Chapter Three: Bearing Witness in The Differend Chapter Four: Contextualizing Pseudo-Dionysius Chapter Five: Bearing Witness in The Divine Names Chapter Six: Silence and Eros Conclusion: The Expression of the Inexpressible Bibliography Index About the Author ...
