ABSTRACT
Jean-Louis Chretien is characteristically conscious of the history of thought that has already preceded his own attempt to do so. On Chretien's reading of Genesis, the biblical narrative makes "human speech into the first ark." Ultimately, Chretien will conceive the body as a vehicle of hope, for our present condition must be seen in light of the body's future redemption through the inheritance of the spiritual, resurrected body. Far from betraying the letter of Chretien's work, such an effort might serve to only underscore one of that work's principal motifs: any response necessarily falls short of what has called it. Beauty transgresses the traditional divisions between sight and hearing, the visible and the invisible, the seen and the heard. Chretien places this startling discovery in light of phenomenological attempts from the past to grapple with it.
