the wounded word falls silent

Against a contemporary critique which would banish the religious, the transcendent, and the infinite from phenomenology, philosophy, and human life as a threat to the integrity of finitude, Chrétien shows that it is precisely our encounter with the excessive call of the infinite that invites, nay demands, us to embrace, “body and soul,” the finitude, fragility, and corporeality of human life, more conscious than ever of their limits. They are not rendered superfluous, but invested with irreplaceable significance. It is not as if “because no one can ever think, say or paint divine beauty in all its plenitude . . . we can avoid the task of praising it every way we can: quite the opposite is true—it is an essential aspect of its radiance that it demands our hands and voices.”[2] In speech, nothing less than the totality of our finitude is offered, wounds and all, “knowing at one and the same time that it cannot be enough and yet that nothing other than it can be enough.”[3]

Chrétien’s thought returns again and again to this moment, when finitude is stretched and broken open without ceasing to be finite—to the “wounded word.” This word is not defined by its adequate correspondence to its object or by its self-sufficiency. Instead, it is “wounded by this [divine] listening and this summons that have always already preceded it,” the immemorial and excessive to which it is impossible ever to fully correspond.[4] Just as blessing and wound were inseparable when Jacob wrestled “all night long in the dust . . . and thereafter [bore] the sign of a dislocated hip and a limp,” the weakness of speech is witness to its impossible strength. In this kenotic logic, “speech is all the more confident the less sure it can be of its own capabilities.”[5] This paradox reaches its culmination in the hymn, the speech in which “there is always this hint of tremulousness, suspended, as it were, on the edge of silence.”[6]


Here.