Collection Oramellon · Founding Corpus

Oramellism

Prolegomena to the paradigm of the interpellated being

The name, the axiom, the basso continuo, and the founding tripod

— basso continuo —

In memory of Father Gérard Eschbach, O.P. — † 13 May 2021

Opening

A paradigm does not impose itself: it proposes itself. It gives itself first a name, then an axiom, then a constant way of holding itself — a basso continuo that sustains without dominating. The pages that follow do not claim to summarise the work; they gather what, within it, serves as foundation: the name we have forged, the axiom that carries it, the triad that animates it, and the tripod of three volumes in which it takes shape. They are therefore to be read as prolegomena — in the strict sense: what must be said beforehand, so that the rest may be read.

The disagreement from which everything sets out has been stated elsewhere, in the foreword to our first volume: relation is not what happens to an already-formed subject; it is that within which and by which the subject comes to be. Oramellism is the name of the thought that draws, from this displacement, all its consequences.

I. The name: ὅραμα and τὸ μέλλον

The word oramellon knots together two Greek roots. The first, Ora-, comes from ὁράω (horáō, "to see"), and more precisely from ὅραμα (hórama, "that which is seen, the vision" — it is the -orama of panorama). The second, -mellon, is τὸ μέλλον (tò méllon, "the to-come"), the substantivised participle of μέλλω (méllō, "to be about to come about, to be destined to"). Hence our first definition: the vision of the future.

But we must at once specify what future means here, on pain of losing everything. τὸ μέλλον (the to-come) is not, in Greek, the future-point of a chronology — the mere "later" that will come to take its place after the present. It is the imminent: that which is on the point of being, which presses, which inclines the present toward itself. The future of the calendar waits; the to-come, for its part, solicits.

Now such is exactly the temporality of the interpellated one. The being of address is defined not by what it already is — a constituted subject that would then enter into relation — but by that toward which it is called. It stands in the imminence of a response to be given. To see from the to-come, rather than from the acquired: such is the inaugural gesture that the name encodes. Oramellon is therefore not an ornament laid upon the doctrine; it is its cipher. To name the paradigm is already to state its thesis.

II. The axiom: Respondeo ergo sum

A paradigm is known by the axiom it dares. Ours is stated: Respondeo ergo sum — I respond, therefore I am; and, in its second moment, Respondeo ergo fio — I respond, therefore I become.

The formula measures itself, as one hears, against the Cartesian cogito. The I think, therefore I am grounds the certainty of the subject on a solitary act: a consciousness that, withdrawing from the world and from others, grasps itself again in the evidence of its own thought. There the subject is first; relation, second and derived. It is this order that the axiom reverses. It is not because I already am that I can then respond; it is in responding that I come to be as the subject that I am. Response is not added to a constituted being: it constitutes it.

The second moment specifies the first. Respondeo ergo fio says that what comes to be in the response is not a stable substance, posited once and for all, but a becoming: the interpellated one is never finished, because the Call does not cease. Here again the name keeps watch: fio is a present turned toward the to-come, an I become that remains open. The subject of oramellism is not a fortress; it is a response underway.

III. The basso continuo: the A2R triad

Beneath the name and the axiom an engine is at work: the triad A2R — Call, Response, Resonance. We use it as a basso continuo: a line that sustains the whole polyphony without ever claiming the foreground, that structures without totalising. This is more than a musical image; it is a rule of method, and — as will be seen in the third volume — an ethical requirement.

The Call precedes: it does not emanate from the subject but solicits it. The Response comes to be: it is not a mechanical effect but an act, in which the interpellated one is at stake. The Resonance, finally, is not a mere echo: it is that which, of the response, propagates and holds together those whom one and the same Call has touched.

Sustained frequentation of the texts — and singularly the reading of the parable according to Matthew — has imposed four rectifications that fidelity obliges us to inscribe here, at the threshold, rather than to conceal them in the margins.

First rectification. The form of the Call is not gentle but oblique. The parable does not persuade head-on; it disconcerts, it takes things aslant, it leaves the hearer the task of moving. Obliquity is not a defect of clarity: it is the proper mode by which a Call respects the freedom it solicits.

Second rectification. To the three modalities of response — acceptance, refusal, deferral — a fourth term must be adjoined: attentional absence. One may not refuse the Call and yet not be there for it: distracted, saturated, elsewhere. This term, as we shall see, is no abstraction; it is the very diagnosis borne by our second volume.

Third rectification. The refusability of the Call and its eschatological term are not two separate traits: they are co-conditions. A Call that could not be refused would be not a call but a constraint; and it is because it opens onto an end that exceeds it that refusal, like acceptance, truly engages.

Fourth rectification. Resonance is not inner but collective. It does not fold back into the closed chamber of a consciousness; it circulates, it binds, it forms community. This is why oramellism, however personal in its axiom, necessarily opens onto a thought of the common.

IV. The founding tripod

Three volumes found the Collection. They do not follow one another at random: they compose a tripod, and one may, without yielding to it, hear in them the echo of the triad — provided one takes this echo for a basso continuo, which orients the reading without reducing each volume to a single term.

Oramellon I — Ontological Foundations

The human being as being of address

This volume holds the pole of the Call. Its task is ontological: to establish that the human is not first a substance that would then find itself addressed, but a being constitutively of address. The interpellated being is not an accident befalling the human; it is its manner of being. This volume disengages the thesis from its predecessors, sets out its proper structure, and shows what it allows one to understand that the other approaches could not perceive.

Oramellon II — Phenomenology of the Contemporary Human

The civilisation of saturation

This volume holds the pole of the Response — but grasped in its crisis. Our age does not first refuse the Call: it saturates it. Solicitations without number, attention crumbled, presence everywhere required and nowhere given. This volume describes the contemporary regime of attentional absence — that fourth term the triad had to admit. Saturation is not the opposite of listening; it is its modern pathology: one is too full to hear.

Oramellon III — Toward an Ethics of Non-Capturing Presence

Politics, work, and the formation of the interpellated being

This volume holds the pole of Resonance. Its central term — non-capturing presence — says what a presence must become in order to let the other resonate: a presence that does not grip, does not seize, does not totalise; that stands alongside without taking hold. Politics, work, and formation are here thought as places where this difference between capturing and making-resonate is at play. One measures here that the basso continuo was not only a rule of writing: it is the ethical thesis of the whole edifice. To refuse capture is the same gesture as to refuse totalisation.

V. Thresholds and sources

Oramellism does not spring from nothing. It converses with the great figures who have most advanced the question of relation — not to refute them, but to discern, in their contributions and their limits, what calls for the new proposal.

Descartes furnishes the point of reversal: the solitary cogito is precisely the order that the axiom inverts. To him we owe the rigour of the question — what is first? — and our disagreement over the answer.

Husserl takes up this gesture, to the point of titling his method's exposition Cartesian Meditations, and radicalises it: all consciousness is consciousness of something, strained by intentionality toward its object. Oramellism owes him its ground — phenomenology is the very method of our second volume — and turns its vector around: before being the consciousness that aims, the interpellated one is the one who is aimed at, the one toward whom the Call is directed. The first intentionality is not mine; I receive it. Where the fifth Meditation labours to constitute the other from the ego, oramellism reverses the charge: it is in being called by the other that the ego comes to be.

Hegel thought, better than anyone, that the subject does not stand alone: self-consciousness passes through the recognition of another consciousness. But the labour of the negative there remains ordered to a totality that, in the end, closes upon itself and knows itself. Oramellism retains the mediation of the other and refuses the closure: the Call is not a moment of Knowledge returning to itself.

Buber named, with the I–Thou, the anteriority of relation over the terms it relates. From him we inherit what is most just in it: the I does not exist before the relation. To it we add what it lacks: the dimension of the to-come — relation is not only reciprocal presence, it is a straining toward that to which it is called.

Levinas is, for ethics, the closest, and this is why the distinction must here be sharpest. The face of the other, prior to the Same, which resists all grasp and forbids totality, is kin to our non-capturing presence: there too, ethics is the refusal to seize. But oramellism parts ways on two points. The Call is not there only an ethical summons come from the other; it is constitutive — ontological before being moral. And Resonance, that third collective term, has no equivalent in Levinas, whose asymmetry of the face-to-face leaves the third party in a secondary position.

Ricœur, with oneself as another, narrative identity, and attestation, describes a self capable of responding, a self that receives itself from elsewhere. We follow him at length. We radicalise him on one point: the self is not first narrated and then made capable of responding; it is respondent first. Narrative comes to say, after the fact, a response that has already preceded it.

Marion, finally, carries the phenomenological line to its tipping point: givenness. The phenomenon does not first let itself be constituted by a sovereign I; it gives itself, and in giving itself it gives the I to itself. Hence the gifted (l'adonné) — that subject which is no longer constituting but receives its being from what comes to it. One measures the proximity: the gifted is almost the phenomenological name of the interpellated being. The saturated phenomenon renders, moreover, a decisive service to our second volume, by imposing a distinction without which everything blurs: the saturation of which Marion speaks is an overabundance that gives too much to see — an excess of intuition over concept — whereas the saturation we diagnose is its reverse, an encumbrance that prevents seeing. The first fills to overflowing; the second blinds. Where oramellism distinguishes itself from Marion: to givenness it adjoins the explicit structure of the response — the A2R triad — and the collective term of Resonance. Marion thinks what gives itself; oramellism articulates the response, and the resonance, that this gift calls for.

The anchor: Paul of Tarsus and the perichoretic gift

These philosophical thresholds are neither the only ones nor the first. At the heart and the base of the whole itinerary stands Paul of Tarsus, through two gestures that found the edifice. The first is a call: καλεῖν τὰ μὴ ὄντα (kaleîn tà mề ónta, "to call the things that are not") states a call that does not presuppose its addressee but brings it into being by calling it. This is the theological truth of which the axiom Respondeo ergo sum is the anthropological repetition: if I come to be in responding, it is because a Call preceded me into my very being.

The second gesture is a gift. Pauline χάρις (cháris, "grace," "gracious gift") is not a linear transfer from a giver toward a beneficiary — a model that would freeze positions and threaten capture. It is circulation: the gift received becomes gift given, and the members of one body give and receive themselves in one another. This circulation has its archetype in the Trinity, which theology names περιχώρησις (perichōrēsis, "mutual indwelling," perichoresis): the being-one-in-another of the divine Persons, without confusion or fusion. The etymology says it — peri-chōreô, "to make room around": the perichoretic gift makes room rather than seizing. Here surface, gathered together, the theological foundations of two of our theses. Resonance is collective because the gift is perichoretic; and non-capturing presence is possible because the gift, before being transfer, is a mutual "making-room."

The precedence of Christ is therefore not an add-on: it is the point where the triad finds its source. And this source is itself perichoretic — the originary Call circulates trinitarianly, from the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit. It is there that the to-come of the name receives its proper name.

VI. The programme: the to-come of oramellism

A paradigm faithful to its name does not close. τὸ μέλλον (the to-come) is not only the object of oramellism; it is its regime. This founding corpus therefore fixes no finished system: it opens a field.

The developments already undertaken — aesthetics, an ethics of responsibility, political philosophy, a phenomenology of religious experience, a thought of work, an anthropology of thresholds, a Marian cycle — are not pieces of a system that would close upon them. They are radiations: directions in which the basso continuo lets itself be heard in new matters, without ever erecting itself there into a totality. Each verifies the same requirement: to structure without dominating, to illumine without capturing.

What remains open is not a defect to be filled but the very form of fidelity. A finished oramellism would be an oramellism betrayed: it would have traded the to-come for the acquired, the response underway for the closed substance, resonance for capture. To keep the paradigm open is to keep it alive.

✳

It remains to name the debt. What these pages attempt to found, others first made thinkable — and among them, in the first rank, those who learn to listen before they learn to speak. To them belongs the last word, which is also the first: before I responded, I was called.