Surname: YANNARASFirst Name: CHRISTOS
CategoriesCategoriesCategories : Essay&Criticism
Date of Birth: 1935
Place of Birth: Athens, Greece
Career: Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Cultural Diplomacy.
Former Research Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Bonn, Germany.
PhD at the Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Sorbonne, Paris, France.
PhD at the Faculty of Theology, Aristotle University, Thessalonica, Greece.
Dr Honoris Causa, Faculty of Theology, University of Beograd.
Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Paris and at the Russian Institute of Theology in Paris, 1971-1973.
Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Theology, University of Geneva, 1977 - 1979.
Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Theology, University of Lausanne, 1978 - 1979.
Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Crete, 1979 - 1982.
Professor at the Faculty of International and European Studies, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, 1982 - 2002.
Feuilletons writer at the Athenian newspapers “TO VIMA” (1972 - 1989) and “H KATHIMERINI” (1994 - today).
E-mail Address: anpa@uom.gr
Works:
-Freedom from Necessity: The Relational Ontology, Ikaros 2004
-What can be said and what cannot be said: The Linguistic bïundaries of Realism in Metaphysics, Ikaros 1999
-The Inhuman Character of Human Rights, Domos 2000 (3rd edition)
-Postmodern Metaphysics, Domos 2004 (2nd edition) - Holy Cross Orth. Press, Brookline-Mass. 2004
-The Real and the Imaginary in the Political Economy, Domos 1996 (2nd edition)
-An Outline of Critical Ontology, Domos 1995 (3rd edition)
-Rationality and Social Praxis, Domos 1999 (3rd edition)
-Discontinuity in Philosophy-The Hellenic point of view, Domos 2002 (5th edition)
(Translated & published in French, Serbian & Ukrainian Languages)
-Person and Eros, Domos 2001 (6th edition) – Holy Cross Orth. Press 2007
(Translated & Published in German, Rumanian, Russian & Ukrainian Languages)
-On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, Domos 1998 (4th edition) - T.&T. Clark International 2005
(Translated & Published in French, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, Serbian & Slovenian Languages)
-Cultural Diplomacy-Outline of a Hellenic approach, Ikaros 2003 (2nd edition)
-An Examined Life, Ikaros 1996 (3rd edition)
-Variations on the Song of Songs, Domos 2003 (6th edition) – Holy Cross Orth. Press 2005
-Ideas as a Refuge, Ikaros 2001 (6th edition)
-Unreal Hellenism-Two Journeys in Concert, Domos 1999 (2nd edition)
-Red Square and Uncle Arthur: A first experience of communist Russia, Domos 1998 (5th edition)
-Hunger and Thirst-Essays, Gregory 1997 (5th edition)
(Translated & published in Finnish & Rumanian languages)
-The metaphysics of the Body: A Study on John Climacus, Dodoni 1971
-The Freedom of Morality, Ikaros 2002 (3rd edition) - SVS Press, New York 1984
(Translated & published in French, Italian & Rumanian Languages)
-Orthodoxy and the West – Hellenic Self-definition in the Modern Age, Domos 2005 (5th edition) – Holy Cross Orth. Press 2006
-Elements of Faith, Domos 2002 (13th edition) - T. & T. Clark 1991
(Translated & published in French, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, & Serbian Languages)
-Apologetics, Gregory 1975 (2nd edition)
-A Controversy about Eros, Domos 1989
-The Truth and Unity of the Church, Gregory 1997 (2nd edition)
(Translated & published in French, Italian & Russian Languages)
-Against Religion: The Religionization of the Ecclesial Event, Ikaros 2006
-Prophecy in Crisis, Domos 2006 (3rd edition)
-Desperation as a Privilege, Gregory 1983 (2nd edition)
-Capita Theologico-politica, Gregory 1983 (3rd edition)
-Neï-Çellenic Identity, Gregory 2001 (4th edition
-Critical Interventions, Domos 1993 (4th edition)
-The void in current politics, Kastaniotis 1992 (2nd edition)
-A penultimate Hellenism, Kastaniotis 1992
-A Country of Dirty Tricks, Kastaniotis 1994
-Unpremeditated suicides, Kastaniotis 1994
-Vicious Circle in Politics, Kastaniotis 1994
-The Dehellenisation of Hellenism: Accompaniments, Kaktos 2005 (2nd edition)
-The Hellenic Way of Politics, Ikaros 1996
-Resistance to Alienation, Ikaros 1997
-Culture as the central problem in politics, Kaktos 2005 (2nd edition)
-The Pursuit of meaning in politics, Livanis 1998
-Decline as a Challenge, Livanis 1999
-European Unification and Hellenic Readiness, Livanis 2000
-The Left as Right, the Right as pantomime, Patakis 2001 (2nd edition)
-The Dictatorial Power of the Party System, Patakis 2004 (3rd edition)
-“In smaller measure generous”: Instructions for use, Patakis 2003
-Reason begins with Eros, Ikaros 2004
-Sociocentral Politics: Criteria, Estia 2005
-Struggling with Despair, Estia 2007
Variations on the Song of Songs
READ AN EXCERPT: Variations on the Song of Songs
CANTUS FIRMUS
Behold you are beautiful, my love,
Behold you are beautiful.
Your eyes are doves.
Reciprocity is indicated in the glance. The first tremor is always the involuntary meeting of two glances. That is to say, love is born in light. Glance, smile, voice, gesture, movement —the boundary point between the bodily and the bodiless— the space of the signifiers of reciprocity.
The light of a glance of a person in love passes to the mouth. The smile is not a parting of the lips, it is a radiance. Glance and smile are inseparable, the same light. A reflection of uniqueness, inseparable companions of desire.
The third non-material level is the voice. Warmth of the voice, tremolo of desire, tenderness which cannot remain hidden, however much it tries. The quavering of the voice in the surprise of love, the sound of our name heard for the first time on the lips of the Other. And for as long as love lasts, in every word, the voice is a physical presence, a sensory immediacy. An expression of the word embodied in the music of a unique call.
The music is transcribed into the “grace” of movement, of gesture. Grace means the rhythm of beauty which evokes tenderness —a tangible call like the music of the voice. Love transforms the gestures, transforms the gait, the movement of the head, shoulders; it gives another rhythm to the body —akin to a shy desire to dance, an imperceptible wave of hidden joy.
A non-material harmony in an infinite gradation of tones. From egocentric desire to the intensity of self-offering. From the impersonal need of possession and ownership to perfect self-renunciation, loving self-emptying. From death to life.
We read love in the glance, in the smile, in the grace of movement. The body speaks the soul’s language. The soul expresses life’s yearning. With the light of unbounded expressiveness.
Even in the most egocentric thirst for pleasure, the body of the Other is something much more than an object of desire. It is the signifier of the desire. What is signified, even if unconsciously, is only life. The longed-for body articulates the desire as a promise, but the principle of desire goes beyond the body of the Other. And that is why “the pleasure of women” — the pleasure promised by female beauty — is a pleasure “that has no limit”.
The signifier of desire arises in the “space” of beauty. The language of bodily beauty, in a first phase, and the language of dress. When the reciprocity of desire transcends the relativity of language, the nakedness is self-evident, the shedding of clothing. Then the whole body is a glance and a smile, and a rhythm of grace, an immediacy of desire, for the fullness of relation, the fullness of life.
Nakedness is never totally completed, the absence of clothing is not enough to achieve nakedness, or to live it. Nakedness is a progressive pursuit of the always indeterminate transformation of the signifiers, a transformation of the languages in which the principle of desire clothes itself. A ceaseless interweaving of the language of vision and the language of touch, from the intoxication of the call to the ecstasy of participation.
The bodily demand for pleasure — a blind desire, deprived of the vision of its real goal — is signified in clothing or in nakedness, just as it is signified in glance, smile, voice, gesture, movement. The semantics of light and grace become autonomous, ceasing to “pass over to the prototype” of love. The principle of desire dresses itself in the aggressive language of egocentric demand. It violates the relation, turning it into a thirst for pleasure.
There is an erotic nakedness, and there is an aggressive nakedness. The latter violates the relationship, destroying it by placing it on the level of “exchange”. It is the nakedness that is offered as an impersonal object of pleasure, outside the bounds of relation, of mutual self-offering. To satisfy a fleeting need, or the self-regarding reassurance of the ego as a desired object. It is the commercialized nakedness of pornography, the cold exploitation of sex. “It is light rebelling as lightning” (cf. Luke 10:18).
Erotic nakedness is only self-offering. It is not contrived, it is spontaneous. Like the light in the beloved glance and smile. To reveal the renunciation of the last resistance of self-defense, which is shame. Shame is the natural defense against the egocentric demand of the Other. I defend myself with dress, I wear clothing to preserve my subjectivity: that I should not be exposed to gaze like an impersonal object of pleasure.
When love approaches the wonder of mutual self-renunciation and self-offering, there is no shame, because there is no defense or fear. Then the whole body speaks the language of the glance, of the smile, of the rhythm of grace. The whole human being becomes “wholly light and wholly face and wholly eye — a good given and a perfect gift received”. It is offered without resistance or reserve. And the final disarming of self-giving attires itself in the language of revelatory nakedness.
“Love knows no shame, and therefore does not know how to give a disciplined form to its parts. Love naturally has the property of not feeling shame, of forgetting its measure”.
That which in aggressive nakedness is challenging and repellent — such as immodesty, indecency, and excess — in real love might “naturally” only be an expression of love’s amazement. When you really renounce yourself and give yourself, when all that concerns you is the joy and truth of the Other, that the Other should blossom in the fullness of the relation, then there are no barriers or rules, no conventional forms of behavior or measurements of shame.
Erotic nakedness is never totally completed, because it is the language of self-emptying. The casting aside of clothes is not enough to accomplish nakedness. Nakedness must clothe itself in the language of self-giving and self-offering. In the boundless eloquence of the ceaseless surprises of the relation.
Erotic nakedness is the language of self-emptying. Jesus as a naked infant in the manger, “stripp0ing himself naked in the river and accepting baptism as a servant, hanging naked on the cross as a robber, and through all these things he showed his love for us”.
When Christian tradition speaks of the incarnation of God, it does not exhaust the semantics of the revelation in the historical nature of the event. The historical person of Jesus is revealed in God’s mode of existence: an unbounded dynamic of erotic self-offering, the self-emptying of God out of his intense love for humanity. “Self-emptying” means that the formless takes on a form, the ineffable becomes language. Form and language are the flesh of the finite and transitory, the flesh of the mortal, which nevertheless can mean the uncircumscribed and timeless, the personal presence of authentic life.
Every signifier of incarnation belongs to the given facts of form and language: conception by a virgin mother, a conception free from the natural urge for the creative self-perpetuation of the mortal. God (the Other of our vital desire) is revealed as Father: The life-giving first principle of personal existence. The virgin becomes mother — the erotic power of nature gives flesh to authentic life without the mediation of transitory desire. Language signifies the mode of life, without that which is signified being subordinated to the intellectual content of the signifier. That which is signified remains beyond the signifier, just as the participant in sexual intimacy, in the dynamic indeterminacy of the subjective “Other,” remains beyond every erotic union.
The God of historical revelation and the Other of erotic union is truth. Here “truth” (a-letheia) signifies “non-oblivion” (me-lethe), disclosure as personal. Truth is only the manifestation, only the nakedness of self-emptying, the signifier of desire. What is signified by desire is always beyond, inaccessible to language, accessible only to the erotic relation of love.
E-mail Address: anpa@uom.gr
Works:
-Freedom from Necessity: The Relational Ontology, Ikaros 2004
-What can be said and what cannot be said: The Linguistic bïundaries of Realism in Metaphysics, Ikaros 1999
-The Inhuman Character of Human Rights, Domos 2000 (3rd edition)
-Postmodern Metaphysics, Domos 2004 (2nd edition) - Holy Cross Orth. Press, Brookline-Mass. 2004
-The Real and the Imaginary in the Political Economy, Domos 1996 (2nd edition)
-An Outline of Critical Ontology, Domos 1995 (3rd edition)
-Rationality and Social Praxis, Domos 1999 (3rd edition)
-Discontinuity in Philosophy-The Hellenic point of view, Domos 2002 (5th edition)
(Translated & published in French, Serbian & Ukrainian Languages)
-Person and Eros, Domos 2001 (6th edition) – Holy Cross Orth. Press 2007
(Translated & Published in German, Rumanian, Russian & Ukrainian Languages)
-On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, Domos 1998 (4th edition) - T.&T. Clark International 2005
(Translated & Published in French, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, Serbian & Slovenian Languages)
-Cultural Diplomacy-Outline of a Hellenic approach, Ikaros 2003 (2nd edition)
* * *
-An Examined Life, Ikaros 1996 (3rd edition)
-Variations on the Song of Songs, Domos 2003 (6th edition) – Holy Cross Orth. Press 2005
-Ideas as a Refuge, Ikaros 2001 (6th edition)
-Unreal Hellenism-Two Journeys in Concert, Domos 1999 (2nd edition)
-Red Square and Uncle Arthur: A first experience of communist Russia, Domos 1998 (5th edition)
-Hunger and Thirst-Essays, Gregory 1997 (5th edition)
(Translated & published in Finnish & Rumanian languages)
* * *
-The metaphysics of the Body: A Study on John Climacus, Dodoni 1971
-The Freedom of Morality, Ikaros 2002 (3rd edition) - SVS Press, New York 1984
(Translated & published in French, Italian & Rumanian Languages)
-Orthodoxy and the West – Hellenic Self-definition in the Modern Age, Domos 2005 (5th edition) – Holy Cross Orth. Press 2006
-Elements of Faith, Domos 2002 (13th edition) - T. & T. Clark 1991
(Translated & published in French, Italian, Rumanian, Russian, & Serbian Languages)
-Apologetics, Gregory 1975 (2nd edition)
-A Controversy about Eros, Domos 1989
-The Truth and Unity of the Church, Gregory 1997 (2nd edition)
(Translated & published in French, Italian & Russian Languages)
-Against Religion: The Religionization of the Ecclesial Event, Ikaros 2006
* * *
-Prophecy in Crisis, Domos 2006 (3rd edition)
-Desperation as a Privilege, Gregory 1983 (2nd edition)
-Capita Theologico-politica, Gregory 1983 (3rd edition)
-Neï-Çellenic Identity, Gregory 2001 (4th edition
-Critical Interventions, Domos 1993 (4th edition)
-The void in current politics, Kastaniotis 1992 (2nd edition)
-A penultimate Hellenism, Kastaniotis 1992
-A Country of Dirty Tricks, Kastaniotis 1994
-Unpremeditated suicides, Kastaniotis 1994
-Vicious Circle in Politics, Kastaniotis 1994
-The Dehellenisation of Hellenism: Accompaniments, Kaktos 2005 (2nd edition)
-The Hellenic Way of Politics, Ikaros 1996
-Resistance to Alienation, Ikaros 1997
-Culture as the central problem in politics, Kaktos 2005 (2nd edition)
-The Pursuit of meaning in politics, Livanis 1998
-Decline as a Challenge, Livanis 1999
-European Unification and Hellenic Readiness, Livanis 2000
-The Left as Right, the Right as pantomime, Patakis 2001 (2nd edition)
-The Dictatorial Power of the Party System, Patakis 2004 (3rd edition)
-“In smaller measure generous”: Instructions for use, Patakis 2003
-Reason begins with Eros, Ikaros 2004
-Sociocentral Politics: Criteria, Estia 2005
-Struggling with Despair, Estia 2007
Variations on the Song of Songs
READ AN EXCERPT: Variations on the Song of Songs
CANTUS FIRMUS
Behold you are beautiful, my love,
Behold you are beautiful.
Your eyes are doves.
Reciprocity is indicated in the glance. The first tremor is always the involuntary meeting of two glances. That is to say, love is born in light. Glance, smile, voice, gesture, movement —the boundary point between the bodily and the bodiless— the space of the signifiers of reciprocity.
The light of a glance of a person in love passes to the mouth. The smile is not a parting of the lips, it is a radiance. Glance and smile are inseparable, the same light. A reflection of uniqueness, inseparable companions of desire.
The third non-material level is the voice. Warmth of the voice, tremolo of desire, tenderness which cannot remain hidden, however much it tries. The quavering of the voice in the surprise of love, the sound of our name heard for the first time on the lips of the Other. And for as long as love lasts, in every word, the voice is a physical presence, a sensory immediacy. An expression of the word embodied in the music of a unique call.
The music is transcribed into the “grace” of movement, of gesture. Grace means the rhythm of beauty which evokes tenderness —a tangible call like the music of the voice. Love transforms the gestures, transforms the gait, the movement of the head, shoulders; it gives another rhythm to the body —akin to a shy desire to dance, an imperceptible wave of hidden joy.
A non-material harmony in an infinite gradation of tones. From egocentric desire to the intensity of self-offering. From the impersonal need of possession and ownership to perfect self-renunciation, loving self-emptying. From death to life.
We read love in the glance, in the smile, in the grace of movement. The body speaks the soul’s language. The soul expresses life’s yearning. With the light of unbounded expressiveness.
Even in the most egocentric thirst for pleasure, the body of the Other is something much more than an object of desire. It is the signifier of the desire. What is signified, even if unconsciously, is only life. The longed-for body articulates the desire as a promise, but the principle of desire goes beyond the body of the Other. And that is why “the pleasure of women” — the pleasure promised by female beauty — is a pleasure “that has no limit”.
The signifier of desire arises in the “space” of beauty. The language of bodily beauty, in a first phase, and the language of dress. When the reciprocity of desire transcends the relativity of language, the nakedness is self-evident, the shedding of clothing. Then the whole body is a glance and a smile, and a rhythm of grace, an immediacy of desire, for the fullness of relation, the fullness of life.
Nakedness is never totally completed, the absence of clothing is not enough to achieve nakedness, or to live it. Nakedness is a progressive pursuit of the always indeterminate transformation of the signifiers, a transformation of the languages in which the principle of desire clothes itself. A ceaseless interweaving of the language of vision and the language of touch, from the intoxication of the call to the ecstasy of participation.
The bodily demand for pleasure — a blind desire, deprived of the vision of its real goal — is signified in clothing or in nakedness, just as it is signified in glance, smile, voice, gesture, movement. The semantics of light and grace become autonomous, ceasing to “pass over to the prototype” of love. The principle of desire dresses itself in the aggressive language of egocentric demand. It violates the relation, turning it into a thirst for pleasure.
There is an erotic nakedness, and there is an aggressive nakedness. The latter violates the relationship, destroying it by placing it on the level of “exchange”. It is the nakedness that is offered as an impersonal object of pleasure, outside the bounds of relation, of mutual self-offering. To satisfy a fleeting need, or the self-regarding reassurance of the ego as a desired object. It is the commercialized nakedness of pornography, the cold exploitation of sex. “It is light rebelling as lightning” (cf. Luke 10:18).
Erotic nakedness is only self-offering. It is not contrived, it is spontaneous. Like the light in the beloved glance and smile. To reveal the renunciation of the last resistance of self-defense, which is shame. Shame is the natural defense against the egocentric demand of the Other. I defend myself with dress, I wear clothing to preserve my subjectivity: that I should not be exposed to gaze like an impersonal object of pleasure.
When love approaches the wonder of mutual self-renunciation and self-offering, there is no shame, because there is no defense or fear. Then the whole body speaks the language of the glance, of the smile, of the rhythm of grace. The whole human being becomes “wholly light and wholly face and wholly eye — a good given and a perfect gift received”. It is offered without resistance or reserve. And the final disarming of self-giving attires itself in the language of revelatory nakedness.
“Love knows no shame, and therefore does not know how to give a disciplined form to its parts. Love naturally has the property of not feeling shame, of forgetting its measure”.
That which in aggressive nakedness is challenging and repellent — such as immodesty, indecency, and excess — in real love might “naturally” only be an expression of love’s amazement. When you really renounce yourself and give yourself, when all that concerns you is the joy and truth of the Other, that the Other should blossom in the fullness of the relation, then there are no barriers or rules, no conventional forms of behavior or measurements of shame.
Erotic nakedness is never totally completed, because it is the language of self-emptying. The casting aside of clothes is not enough to accomplish nakedness. Nakedness must clothe itself in the language of self-giving and self-offering. In the boundless eloquence of the ceaseless surprises of the relation.
Erotic nakedness is the language of self-emptying. Jesus as a naked infant in the manger, “stripp0ing himself naked in the river and accepting baptism as a servant, hanging naked on the cross as a robber, and through all these things he showed his love for us”.
When Christian tradition speaks of the incarnation of God, it does not exhaust the semantics of the revelation in the historical nature of the event. The historical person of Jesus is revealed in God’s mode of existence: an unbounded dynamic of erotic self-offering, the self-emptying of God out of his intense love for humanity. “Self-emptying” means that the formless takes on a form, the ineffable becomes language. Form and language are the flesh of the finite and transitory, the flesh of the mortal, which nevertheless can mean the uncircumscribed and timeless, the personal presence of authentic life.
Every signifier of incarnation belongs to the given facts of form and language: conception by a virgin mother, a conception free from the natural urge for the creative self-perpetuation of the mortal. God (the Other of our vital desire) is revealed as Father: The life-giving first principle of personal existence. The virgin becomes mother — the erotic power of nature gives flesh to authentic life without the mediation of transitory desire. Language signifies the mode of life, without that which is signified being subordinated to the intellectual content of the signifier. That which is signified remains beyond the signifier, just as the participant in sexual intimacy, in the dynamic indeterminacy of the subjective “Other,” remains beyond every erotic union.
The God of historical revelation and the Other of erotic union is truth. Here “truth” (a-letheia) signifies “non-oblivion” (me-lethe), disclosure as personal. Truth is only the manifestation, only the nakedness of self-emptying, the signifier of desire. What is signified by desire is always beyond, inaccessible to language, accessible only to the erotic relation of love.