Claudia Welz

Karl Verstrynge

Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas

Despite Oneself

René Rosfort

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort: Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics Stefano Micali: Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology René Rosfort: Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics Mads Peter Karlsen: The Past >Has Us Before We Have

Existential Ambiguities of Self-understanding

Hermeneutics and Negativism

How can we, in our times, understand the biblical concept that human beings have been created in the image of an invisible God? This is a perennial but increasingly pressing question that lies at the heart of theological anthropology. Humanity in God's Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration clarifies the meaning of this concept, traces different Jewish and Christian interpretations of being created in God's image, and reconsiders the significance of the imago Dei in a post-Holocaust context. As normative, counter-factual notions, human dignity and the imago Dei challenge us to see more. Claudia Welz offers an interdisciplinary exploration of theological and ethical "visions" of the invisible. By analyzing poetry and art, Welz exemplifies human self-understanding in the interface between the visual and the linguistic. The content of the imago Dei cannot be defined apart from the image carrier: an embodied creature. Compared to verbal, visual, and mental images, how does this creature as a "living image" refer to God--like a metaphor, a mimetic mirror, or an elusive trace? Combining hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives with philosophy of religion and philosophy of language, semiotics, art history, and literary studies, Welz regards the imago Dei as a complex sign that is at once iconic, indexical, and symbolical--pointing beyond itself.

An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Humanity in God's Image

Since the problem of theodicy concerns all dimensions of human existence and cannot be reduced to a logical problem of consistency, it cannot be resolved by means of a theodicy, a rational defense of God before the tribunal of human reason. But how can we deal with 'the wound of negativity?' Claudia Welz explores responses that do not end up in a theodicy. Instead of asking about the origin and sense (or non-sense) of evil and suffering, she considers God's (non)phenomenality, the dialectics of God's givenness and hiddenness. Neither God nor evil is given 'as such;' rather, God and evil are determined for someone as something within specific contexts of experience. How does God appear in human life, and how is his phenomenal presence or non-presence related to the ambiguities of our lives? In the center of the book, Kierkegaard's and Rosenzweig's answers, their reasons for having no reason to defend God and their ethics of love are discussed 'between' German idealism and French phenomenology. Both of them follow Kant's practical turn of the problem of theodicy, oppose Hegel's theodicy through history and anticipate Levinas' idea to look for the traces of God's transcendence in human movements of self-transcendence. Moreover, they have remarkable contributions to the current debates on 'metaphysics of presence' and 'onto-theology.' In dialogue with Levinas, the presence of God's love is in question, in dialogue with Derrida God's presence as a gift, and in dialogue with Marion the gift of God's presence as a so-called 'saturated' self-giving phenomenon . In conclusion to these discussions, theology is developed as semiotic phenomenology of the Invisible.

Claudia Welz

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