After writing : on the liturgical consummation of philosophy / Catherine Pickstock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pickstock, Catherine.

Series:

Challenges in contemporary theology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plato. Phaedrus.

Plato.

Derrida, Jacques.

Language and languages--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Language and languages.

Writing.

Mass.

Lord's Supper (Liturgy).

Transubstantiation.

Postmodernism--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Postmodernism.

Physical Description:

xv, 292 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Summary:

After Writing provides a significant contribution to the growing genre of works which offer a challenge to the modern and postmodern accounts of Christianity. The author shows how Platonic philosophy did not assume a primacy of metaphysical presence, as had been previously thought, but a primacy of liturgical theory and practice.

Catherine Pickstock also provides a significant rethinking of Christian understandings of language, temporal and bodily life, and notions of the presence of God. Through a detailed reading of Phaedrus, the medieval Roman Rite, and a discussion of the theology of the Eucharist, the book indicates directions for the restoration of the liturgical order.

Contents:

Part I The Polity of Death 1

1 Socrates Goes Outside the City: Writing and Exteriority 3

2 The Plot of the Phaedrus 4

3 The Trade of the Sophists 6

4 Writing as Capital 7

5 The Contagion of the Good 11

6 Platonic versus Derridean Supplementation 20

7 Plato's return to Myth 23

8 Eros and Exteriority 27

9 The Socratic Gaze 32

10 The Mediations of Egypt 33

11 Intimations of Doxology 37

2 Spatialization: The Middle of Modernity 47

1 The New Sophistry 47

2 Peter Ramus 49

3 The Cartesian City 57

4 Reality Without Depth 61

5 The Written Subject 70

6 The City of Virtuosi 74

7 The Theatrical City 81

8 The Language of Modernity 88

Nouns: a hardness as of cut stone 89

Syntax: the contour against the void 95

The warp of language 98

3 Signs of Death 101

1 The Necrophilia of Modernity 103

2 The Abyssal Gesture 106

3 Indications of Nothing 108

4 Postmodern Parsimony 110

5 A Dismal Sign 114

Transition 119

'Can My Eating Slake Your Hunger?' On The Evacuation Of Liturgy 121

1 Duns Scotus and the Priority of the Possible 121

Univocity of Being 122

The formal distinction 123

The actual-possible 125

The thinkable 129

The eucharist and other possible miracles 131

The haunted middle 134

2 The Decline of Liturgical Order 135

Excursus on Scotist politics 135

Kinship 140

The economic realm 142

The civic realm 146

The juridical realm 149

The political 152

Eternal bonds 154

The rupture of power and love 157

3 The Theological Body 158

Part II The Sacred Polis 167

4 I Will Go Unto The Altar Of God: The Impossible Liturgy 169

2 Spatialization and the Liturgy 170

3 The Impossibility of Liturgy 176

A summary of the mediaeval Roman Rite 178

The journey's name 180

The problematic altar 183

The time of purification 186

The other offering 190

4 The Apostrophic Voice 192

5 The Permutability of Identity 198

Divine identifications 203

Borrowed names 208

6 Liturgical Satire 213

7 Liturgy as both Text and Voice 216

5 Seraphic Voices: The Space of Doxology 220

2 'Vesper in Ambiguo Est': The Time of Liturgy 220

3 Christic Asyndeton 223

4 Liturgical Space 228

5 'Dona Nobis Pacem': The Liturgical Chronotope 233

6 The Gift of Citizenship 238

The character of gift 240

Giving the impossible gift 241

The impossible return 246

The gift of being 248

6 The Resurrection Of The Sign 253

1 Transubstantiation: Beyond Presence and Absence 253

2 Eucharistic Scepticism 256

3 Transubstantiation in Aquinas: a Defence 259

4 Transubstantiation as the Condition of Possibility for all Meaning 261

5 The Eucharistic Logos 264.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

063120671X

0631206728

OCLC:

36648546