| The dissertation, broadly speaking, engages the philosophical conundrum of radical alterity. Placing Barth in the thick of postmodern debate, the argument juxtaposes Barth's doctrine of God as wholly other with Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology and notion of otherness as constitutive of selfhood. Rather than viewing transcendence as precluding relationship, the alterity at work in both Barth and Ricoeur is shown to be the condition for the possibility of a divine-human relation. Levinas' phenomenology of the face and Derrida's philosophy of difference serve as an entree into the discussion, and Barth's method of unsynthesized dialectic discloses how both Levinas and Derrida remain unable to think beyond ethical relations among human others and stop short of radical alterity and the religious moment. Despite the fact that Barth and Ricoeur are unlikely conversation partners, joining Barth's claim of radical divine alterity with Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology of the self demonstrates alterity as the common denominator for the human and the divine. On these grounds, alterity is argued as the very basis for the possibility of relation with the other. |
