ABSTRACT

This chapter is about absence: The absence of the Face, to face up to the absence of the Face, where the Faith will have to begin. In the absence of the Face, we have to begin the Faith. What cannot be seen, the Face of the Unseen, is the defining moment of the Faith-ful, of the Faith. The Qur'an conceals what cannot be seen and in bright daylight calls it the Unseen, and yet calls that act of concealment Revelation. In Revelation, the return of the repressed is repressed. In a hermeneutics that is predicated on the assumption of a Revelation, Face, as the site of vision, and yet the Sight Unseen, is de-Faced. The story of the Qur'anic Revelation as Re-Citation, predicated on the Biblical that it assumes and resumes, is one elaborate account of a movement from the Semiotics of the evident sur-Face and toward the Hermeneutics of the promised Hidden, away from the Aesthetics of the Seen.