God Without Being (1982)

Dieu sans l'être (1982), as translated by Thomas A. Carlson (University of Chicago Press: 1991)

• Theological writing always transgresses itself, just as theological speech feeds on the silence in which, at last, it speaks correctly.
  • p. 1

• What if God did not have first to be, since he loved us first, when we were not? And what if, to envisage him, we did not have to wait for him within the horizon of Being, but rather transgress ourselves in risking to love love.
  • p. 3

• The icon and the idol determine two manners of being for beings, not two classes of beings.
  • p. 8

• The idol depends on the gaze that it satisfies, since if the gaze did not desire to satisfy itself in the idol, the idol would have no dignity for it.
  • p. 10

• The gaze strains itself to see the divine, to see it by taking it up into the field of the gazeable. The more powerfully the aim is deployed, the longer it sustains itself, the richer, more extensive and more sumptuous will appear the idol on which it will stop its gaze. ... In this stop, the gaze ceases to overshoot and transpierce itself, hence it ceases to transpierce visible things, in order to pause in the splendor of one of them.
  • p. 11

• Any access to something like "God," precisely because of the aim of Being as such, will have to determine him in advance as a being. The precomprehension of "God" as being is self-evident to the point of exhausting in advance "God" as a question.
  • p. 43