The [O]ther Analogia and the Trace of ‘God’

• Main Author: Calano, Mark Joesph T
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2019
• Subjects: Thomas Aquinas; Levinas; Derrida; analogia; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/philo-faculty-pubs/1; https://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_25/calano_december2019.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Quite broadly, analogia can be understood as a mode of presenting and (re)presenting the play between similarity and dissimilarity, being and other, and identity and difference. While Thomas Aquinas might have started the possibility of speaking of (and about) God analogically, this mode of (re)presenting can be better understood within a metaphysical system that gives primacy to being; in relation to this, recent emphasis in philosophy of the ethical relationship with the other seems to have put into question not only the metaphysical primacy of being but (by association) the analogical possibility of referring to God. Within this context and in this paper, I argue for the possibility of still (re)presenting God in an analogical way by understanding the play between being and difference that is constitutive of the movement of analogia. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part discusses analogia in relation to both the metaphysical privileging of ‘being’ and its possible applications to God. In the second part, we investigate the [other] possibility of understanding analogia in terms of an ethical relationship with an ‘other’ and its consequence of im/possibly naming God. The third part engages the dynamics between the two aforementioned emphases in analogia in its attempt to (re)present the metaphysical ‘being’ and the ethical ‘other.’ It further situates the trace of God within the need to reunderstand analogia within this possible overcoming of metaphysics