La antifonía de la filosofía

Since its publication in 1989, L’antiphonaire de la nuit has never ceased to be the privileged gateway to the work of Jean-Louis Chrétien. This privilege no doubt stems less from the contents the book addresses than from the entirely original manner (or the “how”) in which its author approaches them. In this book, Chrétien weaves his responsory-antiphonary among philosophers, poets and novelists in order to show, starting from a motif that is “apparently monographic (night in poetry)”, how a meditation unfolds “on the faltering of our response, brought about by the excess of our encounter with things, with others, with the world and with God”. If, then, on the one hand the antiphonary is indeed an “antiphonary of the night”, on the other it is also the progressive unfolding and unveiling of the exposure of existence through and thanks to speech. For speech “is perhaps, for us, the minimal and at the same time the highest way of welcoming what, in our existence, is altered by what comes to meet it, by what arises and surprises”. Finally, an antiphonary is also the book that gathers the antiphons and other parts of the Office. In short, we might say that “antiphonary” is (1) the name of “something”, namely a collection; (2) a way of being; and (3) a way in which what in existence would otherwise be destined to remain forever unapparent comes to appear. Taken together, these three features are what we shall call the powers of the antiphonary. “Powers” because the antiphonary, like power as such, has the capacity to produce effects, inasmuch as it is able to manifest and to show; “powers”, again, because the antiphonary in fact makes manifest what would otherwise be destined to remain unmanifest: the exposure of existence to speech; “powers”, finally, because the antiphonary relaunches existence by opening it to all that exceeds it, to the excess of the night as well as to the excess to which every encounter exposes us. These pages will address these powers, conceiving the antiphonary as the very structure of manifestation, in order to show that the antiphonary is this structure because “it manifests”, which is what it is meant to do, just as did what the Greeks called symbolon.