Hermeneutic understanding of the Incarnation and the Eucharist: Paul Celan’s Tenebrae and the interpretive nature of communion through body, blood and image

摘要

Carnal hermeneutics shows that pre-thematic bodily hermeneutics can complement cognitivehermeneutics. The thematization of sacramental imagination is an essential part of such anapproach. Carnal hermeneutics finds new ways of showing how imagination inhabits our bodiesand reflects on the emancipatory possibilities that are hidden in the process of maintaining andcrossing the various boundaries that constitute our identity. Carnal reading is both reception andcreation, i.e., it is not a reading into something but a reading from something. The act of interpretingPaul Celan’s Tenebrae is an exercise in a diacritical hermeneutics of communion and prayer,which contributes to the self-awakening of existence by elucidating the fundamental structures ofour understanding of being.