Ab-negazione ontologica. Su una modalità post-moderna del pensare la Presenza

Ontological ab-negation. On a post-modern modality of thinking the Presence · The present contribution probes the vexata quaestio of thinking and saying the figure of God, and of the divine, in the specific language of philosophy. It asks if, and eventually, in what way, the abovementioned figure may make itself present or make itself Presence in the plot of the philosophical logos. The question is particularly examined in the special configuration that it assumes within the Star of Redemption [1921], the philosophical masterpiece of the Jewish-German thinker Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929). In the Rosenzweighian perspective, the God who makes himself present within the horizon of what is human – and thus both to the concrete existence and to the philosophical reflection of man – is the God who, due to a decision that is not logically deducible, decides to reveal himself, exiting from the fogs of his impenetrable mystery. In his work the thinker proposes a radical re-thinking, in a philosophical key, of the traditional biblical notion of revelation. Rosenzweig conceives revelation not as a pure and simple and neutral irradiation of the essence of God outside the horizon of the divine. According to the thinker, divine revelation is much more similar to a radical questioning of the divine essence that operates in God himself. Revelation is the highly-risky exposition of God’s essence to man, who can welcome it or turn it down. The revelation of God to man is a sort of self-denial of the very essence of God – an ontological ab-negation – that assumes the character of a an absolutely gratuitous gift of love. The privileged human place – a place phenomenologically, and thus philosophically accessi- ble – where the revelation of God to man happens is, according to the thinker, language, grasped in its grammatical value, even before its logical value. Thus does the word constitute, for Rosenzweig, the spousal gift [Morgengabe] of the Creator to the human creature, that which intimately, and wholly, constitutes man’s very humanity.