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² See Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies 5.1.Google Scholar

³ See The Acts of John 88–89, in The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation Based on M. R. James, ed. Elliott, James K. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 316–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ See Qur'an 4:156–57.

⁵ See “Bones of Contention,” The Christian Century 124/6 (March 20, 2007): 5.

⁶ For general introductions to the historical period and Byzantine iconoclasm, see Besanon, Alain, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Todd, Jane Marie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 109–4Google Scholar; Grabar, André, L'Iconoclasm Byzantin: Le Dossier Archéologique (Paris: Flammarion, 1999)Google Scholar; and Barber, Charles, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

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¹¹ Quoted in Besançon, Forbidden Image, 125.Google Scholar

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¹⁴ Besançon, , Forbidden Image, 132.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Theodore the Studite Epistula ad Platonem; quoted in Mango, Cyril, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 173.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Theodore the Studite Epistula ad Platonem; in Mango, , Art of Byzantine Empire, 173–74.Google Scholar

¹⁷ See Mango, , Art of the Byzantine Empire, 175.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Nicephoros, , Discours contre les Iconoclastes [225D], trans. Mondzain-Baudinet, Marie-José (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1989), 73.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Schönborn, Christoph von, God's Human Face: The Christ-Icon, trans. Kraugh, Lothar (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 212.Google Scholar

²⁰ Nicephoros, , Discours contre les Iconoclastes [228A-B], 74.Google Scholar

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²³ Lévinas, Emmanuel, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Unforeseen History, trans. Poller, Nidra (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 80.Google Scholar For Lévinas' other major works relevant to his understanding of image and person, see Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003)Google Scholar and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

²⁴ Lévinas, , “Reality,” 89.Google Scholar Contrast this passivity with Lévinas' later commendation of passivity in Otherwise Than Being, 109–13. The difference between the two passive stances is that passivity before the image leads to apathy, while passivity before the “other” is a responsible willingness to love the “other” and undergo expiation on its behalf. Such interpersonal passivity is not founded on the order of things, but upon the encounter of two subjectivities.

²⁵ See Kant, , Critique of Judgment [29].Google Scholar

²⁶ Lévinas, , “Reality,” 82Google Scholar; see Rahner, Karl, “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4: More Recent Writings, trans. Smyth, Kevin (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 221–52.Google Scholar

²⁷ Lévinas, , “Philosophy and Transcendence,” in Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Smith, Michael B., European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 33.Google Scholar Readers of Heidegger know that Lévinas' ideas here have been shaped by Heidegger's interpretation of existence—Dasein. Witness the importance of Heidegger's aphorism, “Dasein is its disclosedness.” See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 171.Google Scholar Emphasis in original.

²⁸ Lévinas, , “Reality,” 84.Google Scholar

²⁹ Lévinas, , “Philosophy and Transcendence,” 25, 29Google Scholar; see also Lévinas, , Ethics and Infinity, trans. Cohen, Richard (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 83–92.Google Scholar

³⁰ See Marion, Jean-Luc, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Carlson, Thomas A. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. A recent book by Marion, , The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Lewis, Stephen E. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar, contrasts a vain Cartesian metaphysics of certainty, based upon objects, with a phenomenology rooted in the reception of infinite love, based upon embodied personal relations. For an interpretation of Marion's theology of the icon from a phenomenological perspective, see Horner, Robyn, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 160–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ See Schönborn, , God's Human Face, 182.Google Scholar

³² For response, Marion's to Heidegger, and Lévinas, on these points, see Idol and Distance, 198–253.Google Scholar

³³ Marion, Jean-Luc, God Without Being, trans. Carlson, Thomas A., Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20Google Scholar; see also 7–24 for Marion's exposition of the idolicon distinction.

³⁴ Marion, , Crossing of the Visible, trans. Smith, James K. A., Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 22.Google Scholar

³⁵ Evdokimov, Paul, L'Orthodoxie, Bibliothèque Théologique (Neuchâtel: Delachaux and Niestlé), 219.Google Scholar

³⁶ Marion, , “Le Prototype de L'Image,” in Nicée II, 470Google Scholar. In his recent work, Marion's descriptions have moved away from the mutuality between the icon and the viewer stressed in his earlier theological writing. By the late 1990s, demonstrating the influence of Jacques Derrida's ruminations on the concept of gift, Marion's philosophical works began to privilege the heuristic priority of the phenomenon over the beholder. The best representations of this shift are Marion's, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Kosky, Jeffrey, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Horner, Robyn and Berraud, Vincent (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 82–103Google Scholar. A new book by Marion interprets Augustine's theological anthropology as an explication of the idea that the human self is fundamentally a gift. See Au Lieu de Soi: L'Approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 89–148. These moves by Marion move his theological anthropology somewhat in the direction of the anthropological iconoclasm described in the next section of this present article, but there remains a significant difference between what Marion describes as the cataphatic counter-experience of the self given in phenomenal encounters and Blanchot's apophatic non-experience of selfhood through mortality.

³⁷ Hill, Leslie, “After Blanchot,” in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. Hill, Leslie, Nelson, Brian, Vardoulakis, Dimitris, Series, Monash Romance, ed. Nelson, Brian (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 1.Google Scholar

³⁸ See Blanchot, Maurice, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. Quasha, George, trans. Davis, Lydia, Auster, Paul, and Lamberton, Robert (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999), 493–95.Google Scholar For Blanchot's other major non-fiction works in English translation, see The Space of Literature, trans. Smock, Ann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 254–55Google Scholar; The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Smock, Ann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Hanson, Susan, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)Google Scholar; The Unavowable Community, trans. Joris, Pierre (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and The Blanchot Reader, ed. Holland, Michael (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).Google Scholar A series of essays by Lévinas on Blanchot can be found in Lévinas, Emmanuel, Proper Names, trans. Smith, Michael B. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 127–70.Google Scholar

³⁹ Blanchot, , Space of Literature, 254–55.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Blanchot, ibid., 255–56.

⁴¹ Blanchot, ibid., 258. Blanchot is here indebted to Heidegger's exposition of what Heidegger calls “being towards death [Sein zum Tode]. See Being and Time, [46–53] 279–311, along with Savage, Robert, “Between Hölderlin and Heidegger,” in After Blanchot, 149–67.Google Scholar

⁴² Blanchot, , Space of Literature, 260.Google Scholar

⁴³ For a literary example of how Blanchot describes this duplication of the self in death, see the description in Thomas the Obscure, in Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 109–10, in which the protagonist describes a corpse as follows: “Alas, all that prevented her from being distinguished from a real person was that which verified her annihilation. She was entirely within herself: in death, abounding in life. She seemed more weighty, more in con trol of herself.”

⁴⁴ Theodore, of Studios, Epistle 36, PG 99, 1220A.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd ed., s.v. “autopsy.”

⁴⁶ Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A. V. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), [590], 360.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, [452], 270–71.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Blanchot, , Space of Literature, 96.Google Scholar Emphasis in original. On the same theme, see Blanchot, , “Literature and the Right to Death,” in Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 391–99.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Blanchot, , Thomas the Obscure, in Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 73.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1, line 64.

⁵¹ Blanchot, Maurice and Derrida, Jacques, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Rottenberg, Elizabeth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1–11.Google Scholar

⁵² Blanchot, , Instant of My Death, 5.Google Scholar

⁵³ See Blanchot, , The Infinite Conversation, trans. Hanson, Susan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 210.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Among his publications relevant to this present article, see Hart, Kevin, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22–49, 105–32Google Scholar; Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming 2010); and “The Counter-Spiritual Life,” in Hart, Kevin and Hartman, Geoffrey H., eds., The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 156–77.Google Scholar Hart's theological transformation of Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism can be found in his earlier The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy, 2 ^nd ed., no. 13, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989).

⁵⁵ Hart, , “The Profound Reserve,” in After Blanchot, 35Google Scholar; also, see Hart, , “Encyclopedias and Other Things: Some Recent Theology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6/3 (Fall 2005): 55–57.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ See Hart, , “Counter-spiritual Life,” 160–66.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Hart, , Dark Gaze, 132Google Scholar; also, Hart, , “Le Troisième Rapport,” trans. Garet, Sandrine, in Blanchot dans Son Siècle, ed. Antelme, Monique et al. , (Lyon: Parangon, 2009), 25–40.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Hart, , “Profound Reserve,” 47.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ See Wahl, Jean, Existence Humaine et Transcendance, vol. 6, Être, et Penser, (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944), 37–40Google Scholar; Hart, , “Encyclopedias and Other Things,” 66–68.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ For a helpful delineation of three possible definitions of transcendence used in contemporary philosophies of religion, see Desmond, William, Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 2–4.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Hart, , “Profound Reserve,” 48.Google Scholar

⁶² See Ward, Graham, “The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, and Ward, Graham (New York: Routledge, 1999), 163–81.Google Scholar I thank Christopher McMahon for this reference.

⁶³ See Ward, , “Displaced Body of Jesus,” 163.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Ward, , “Displaced Body of Jesus,” 172–73.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Hart, , Dark Gaze, 161.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ I thank Kevin Hart and the members of the 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Religious Experience and English Poetry, 1633–1985,” held at the University of Notre Dame, for the conversation and fellowship that helped bring this article to fruition. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful suggestions.