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PHOTOGRAPHS·BY·STEVEN·HOLMES
MFA·THESIS·EXHIBITION
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 ET LUX PERPETUA LUCEAT EIS
ALLOW YOUR LIGHT TO PERPETUALLY SHINE UPON THEM

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 Our existence in the world, with its
desires and everyday agitation, is not an
immense fraud, a fall into inauthenticity,
an evasion of our deepest destiny. It is
but the amplification of that resistance
against anonymous and fateful being by
which existence becomes consciousness,
that is, a relationship [that] being
maintains with existence, through light,
which both fills up· and maintains the
interval.I

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 ET LUX PERPETUA LUCEAT EIS

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'Allow Your light to perpetually shine upon them,' an
invocation of the Office of the Dead. It points not just
to light as the metaphor for and vehicle of divine life,
but suggests more subtly that this life is not to be taken
for granted - God will allow His Light to shine upon
some, and not others. This is the beginning of
difference, of differance,2 of linguistic, social and
soteriological differentiation, a differentiation of
impossibility, a difference deferred.3 It is a difference
traced to a will - God's. There is Being only by virtue
of a will that says yes and no, that the yes is necessarily
contingent on the no.
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 EXEGESIS4

The creation of the world was not a material act. The
People of the Book speak of a spoken creation,5 of a
performative.6

Logos does not signify presence.
Christian theology moved too quickly in its embrace
of Greek epistemology, embraced the logos before the
temporality of the historical eschatology was clear.
Before it dawned that the end time was not imminent
but immanent,7 the Fathers figured the Messiah as a
force of presence, a history renewed because of His
presence in the world.
The Fathers forget that the Paschal sacrifice coincides
with and echoes Passover - is the new delivery from
bondage. But the delivery was actually a departure.
The Israelites remember not an arrival at, but a
departure from.
Mitzraim is about leaving
constriction,B about moving into space. Passover is not
the remembrance of an arrival, but is the marking of

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an absention, of an evacuation, of a leaving empty. The
Red Sea is parted, a space is created within it, opened
up in order to pass through, not over or under.
Even here the presence is evaded - materially, the Sea
is not an obstruction tread upon. It is torn open, like
the veil of the temple as Christ is dying, as He leaves,
moves ahead of history. The shadowing, the echo is not
accidental.
Remember too the diaspora, Israel without a temple, a
culture of midrash, a theology of the intertextual, a
religion with no substantial9 center. A people of The
Book, whose words speak only ever of words, back to
the Word of The One Whose Name Cannot Be Said,10
whose words of creation were themselves read from a
text preceding perhaps even Him.11
Shadows, texts echoing texts, whose reference is only
ever other texts. The Passover remembering not a
conclusion, but rather the memory of a beginning, of
an event of space. Leaving Mitzraim, Passover is the
creation of space within history, a space of force, an
absence which pulls Israel forward into history.

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The logocentrism of Western metaphysics and
epistimologies, of a Christological edifice mistakenly
erected in the image of Greek narcissism, ignored the
central figure of the Christ event - an eschatology of
the trace. The death of God as a means to remember a
previous remembering,12 the memory of mitzraim. The
promise made, the faith in that promise is what lies at
the center of the Passover event. At the heart of the
Passover there is nothing but irreducible event - a
removal, a retreat, a tracing. At the center of the Christ
event, because it coincides with Passover, there is
nothing but pure event. A removal, a searing forward
through and past history in order to create the absence
before13 history that pulls history ahead. Yes, it is
absence that pulls history forward, like a black hole,
an assumption14 of voracious nothingness.
The crucifixion occurs at Passover, shadows and shades
Passover, since it is the second delivery, a delivery not
from bondage of the will, bondage of the body, but the
bondage of law - the bondage of grammar.15 This

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partially explains the error of linking Christ to logos.
The Messianic Passover delivers from the law, delivers
from the litigious grammar of the Law of the Book. And
in a movement similar to that of the Exodus, it is a
delivery of opening - it does not deliver to, it delivers
from. It is an opening up of, and does this through the
power of absence. The resurrected Christ leaves,16 puts
space between the spirit and the law, between the
linguistic and the real. This space is created, created
not to be filled, but to make entry possible, to make
meaning possible for meaning is a figure of space.
By creating absence, He creates potential, creates the
possibility of movement into a new evacuated realm
that exists between the sign and the signified,17between
the optic and the linguistic. The salvation of Christ is
not an invasion into, but His evacuation out of, his
liberation of the field of meanings, his cleansing of the
temple of language.
The error of "logocentrism" is the error of the Fathers
in equating the event with a new order based on a
presence in the linguistic. Not only is this equivalency

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inadequate, but it fails to recognize that in the
crucifixion logos is liberated too. If Christ is the logos,
He is the logos of an evacuated order,18 of an order of
absence, emptiness, silence.
The eschatology spoken of in Et Lux Perpetua Luceat Eis
is one of absence, of space. At the center of this event,
emptied space announces itself as source.
THE SUBLIME

To experience meaning in the presence of an absent or
incomplete grammar is to experience the sublime.
Anmnetic, one experiences impossibility, and at this
moment, truth. To represent the unrepresentable is to
become aware of the space within representation, the
space within language, to experience a floating over
or through language.19
The sublime is of the subject - and must be so as long
as it operates at a remove from or in spite of the trope.
The Romantic project obtains.
The sublime is of space. It is of space within language

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since its event moves between the rawness, the nudity
of opticality (the "real") and the subduction of the
linguistic (the "meaningful"). It is also of the subject
in space, the subject in relation.
The sublime erupts narrative. It completes extralinguistically20 a narrative which only ever opens,
which does not close or conclude. In other words, it is
impossible.

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The sublime is of experience, experience which
constitutes knowledge.21 Experience of the sublime is
an experience of space, either the inner space of
impossible grammars, or the exteriority of the subject
in relation, the subject in space.

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THE ROMANTIC

Of the subject, the Romantic is also of the sublime.
The Romantic subject experiences. The content or
nature of that experience is not the subject of this
experience, but rather the subject is.22

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 Experience of the sublime is not prelinguistic since
sublime experience is experience which completes a
ruptured or impossible grammar. An incomplete or
ruptured grammar may be created by situating the
conditions by which the sublime is possible. The
sublime is therefore incapable of figuration by systems
which attempt transparency. The sublime depends on
artifice - the Romantic sublime is one of gesture, one
of the unnecessary.

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 LIGHT

The Essence of the First Absolute Light,
God, gives constant illumination,
whereby it is manifested and it brings all
things into existence, giving life to them
by its rays. Everything in the world is
derived from the Light of His essence and
all beauty and perfection are the gift of
His bounty, and to attain fully to this
illumination is salvation.23
the shaykh al-israq Suhrawardi Matqul

Our existence in the world, with its
desires and everyday agitation, is not an
immense fraud, a fall into inauthenticity,
an evasion of our deepest destiny. It is
but the amplification of that resistance
against anonymous and fateful being by
which existence becomes consciousness,
that is, a relationship [that] being
maintains with existence, through light,
which both fills up and maintains the
interval.24
Emmanuel Levinas

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 NOTES

1 Levinas, Existence and Existents p. 51.
2 Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics in Wl:Hing_Ang

Difference.

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3 Derrida, La Differance, reprinted in Marges, Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1972.
Language is based on grammars whose oppositional
or binary foundations dissolve with the application of either
structuralist or poststructuralist semiologies. Derrida points
with this neologism differance to the way in which language
depends on oppositions (difference) that are never complete,
that are in fact impossible; that are always deferred. His term
differance moves between the play of difference and deferral.
4 Literary criticism of the biblical texts. From Greek,
meaning to pull apart.
5 The creation is a creation by speech, but through light, a
creation that is a series of divisions, of differentiations.
(Gen:1:1-10) The division of light and darkness occurs in
the third verse.
6 Holmes, The Word is Made Flesh, the Flesh is Made Word;
Michel Foucault and His Gaze.
7 "The Kingdom of God is at hand" meant not a chronological

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location, but a spatial one. The Kingdom of God is here, now,
one of immanence.
8 Mitzraim means "restriction", or "tight spot" and is a term
used by the Israelites to refer to Egypt as it is geographically
restricted between the Nile and the Red Sea. It has a second
meaning as the place of human restriction, the state of the
Yahwhistic peoples in slavery.
9 Of substance.
10 Yahweh, whose utterance of His own Name begins
creation, the first syllable of which is pure aspiration.
11 In the Haggadah, there are traditions which speak of the
words of Creation being read by Yahweh from text written
on fire.
12 "Do this in memory of me" at the Passover seder.
13 Ahead of, yet grammatically behind. Here operates too
differance.
14 Christ's assumption into heaven, His retreat, the
absention.
15 Christ delivers from the letter of the law, from the legalistic
word, from the text that rules, the litigation of grammar. See
Lyotard, The Di(ferend.
16 In the Gospel of Mark (which is the first redaction of the
Q Source, the Oral Tradition), the central theological element
occurs at exactly the midpoint of the his narrative, chap. 8

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vs. 31: Jesus "prefigures" his own death. The death of Jesus
is the central theme of this gospel, which is the closet
redaction to the Oral Source. It is also important to remember
that 16:9-20 is not written by Mark; ie. that Mark's narrative
ends with the empty tomb. There is no post~resurrection

narrative derived indisputably from the early redactions.
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17 Christ, who speaks Himself into existence (John 1:1:18),
in the Passover act conflates sign and signifier by Speaking
Himself. A sacrament is not a symbol, is not a sign. It is a
sign which is itself, Being.
18 Logos - word, but also order, opposite of chaos.
19 Kant.
20 By means of aesthetic judgement (Kant).
21 Kant, then Schleiermacher. Now, Levinas.
22 The subject of the Romantic experience is the subject,
subjectivity. Koerner.
23 Seyyed Nasr, Three Muslim~.
24 Levinas, Existence and Exjstents p. 51.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The SelfPortrait and Other Ruins, translated by
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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Writing and Difference, translated by Alan
Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978.
Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Frei.d.ri.ch: The
Subject of Landscape. London: Yale University
Press, 1989.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois.The Differend: Phras~J.n
Dispute, translated by Georges Van Der
Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988.

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The Postmodern Condition: A Report .o.o
Knowledge. translated by Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984

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Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence. translated by Alphonso Lingis. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.
Existence and Existents. translated by
Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1978.

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