Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T03:18:46.857Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - The Parts of Speech: Mediation and Contingency

from Part I - The Literary Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2021

William Franke
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Get access

Summary

The immediate presence of the medium of writing, taken as object of Dante’s vision, becomes a metaphor for the immediacy of vision in the visio Dei. Writing is a medium or a means, but it is made here to function also as an immediate revelation, of God – or at least as a symbol for such immediacy. And yet, Dante’s vision of the divine Word as writing breaks it down into signifying by virtue of difference. The positive presence of the divine is rather signified by a negative play of difference generated by the signifiers of writing. Writing, consisting of signifiers of absent signifieds, indicates how all sense in language is generated by difference without positive terms. Dante’s presentation of the written text of Wisdom from Scripture makes this generation conspicuous in its binary differentiations between noun and verb, vowel and consonant, gold and silver, etc. By highlighting the nature of writing as signifying by difference Dante reveals language as profoundly and metaphysically a way of alluding to the unrepresentable. Writing is subject to fragmentation and breaking down in every visible manifestation. This disintegration becomes itself the token of a higher meaning and being beyond its grasp. All its expressions and transmissions fall victim to radical contingency. The breakdown of mediation is the realization of Dante’s vision as the immediacy which is God. Anguished lest contingency undermine belief in divine providence, Dante turns contingency into the marker of a higher, humanly incalculable, urepresentable yet necessary Being and meaning. Such Being and meaning alone can be believed to be divine.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso
The Metaphysics of Representation
, pp. 87 - 107
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×