At first glance grace appears to enter the text on the wings of the phenomenon-noumenon distinction. In this case the argument would be: though from moment to moment we seem to be steeped in sin, radically evil, this is only the way things appear from the phenomenal point of view. Grace provides a noumenal perspective, a view from above, of our complete and not merely incomplete, temporally hindered being. What throws this explanation off balance,however, is the fact that the “noumenal perspective,” the view from above, is that of our “inner accuser,” the superegoic point of view that grace does not represent but, on the contrary, disrupts. It is from the perspective of this inner accuser that we seem always already to have inverted the hierarchy between pathological motives and moral law, always already to have obeyed the law for selfish reasons. Grace, however, “descends” on us when we descend from this position to settle ourselves in the finite order of time. At this moment, grace opens up a space in the temporal order itself where things are not yet decided. The subjective experience of this space is the experience of jouissance, of an undeserved, unexpected, and indeed unwanted pleasure that unsettles us from ourselves or, to use Kant’s vocabulary, from the autonomous assumption of our disposition, our previous choices of maxims of action. The “spiritual” gift of grace, then, does not lift us out of our finite, bodily being, but “infinitizes” it, invades the body with a deregulating pleasure that awakens it from its corporeal torpor.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 07:12:41 +0000