Using several examples, I discuss the features of Byzantine icons as a form of representational art. In addition to tensions which can occur within the image itself, I point out tensions between the expression of a glory which surpasses the limitations of the aesthetics alone (through the use of gold, perspective, and the mandorla) as well as an impoverishment which falls well beneath what images are capable of (the submission of the painting to prescribed word, in content, style, and name). This paradoxical inclusion of highs and lows, straining against the limits of representation on both sides, hints that the icon is aiming to express a meaning greater than the image alone.

In the Sophist, Plato asks how there can be false statements. A false statement (logos) says what is not. But a statement cannot say nothing – there must be something that it says. Plato tries to solve the puzzle by investigating the notion of not-being and the notion of a logos. To understand not-being, we must first understand being. That in turn requires understanding how something can be called by many different names. Plato’s solution to these problems rests on the distinction between what something is of itself and what it is because it is related to other things. It also rests on an understanding of the notion of difference. The class of not-beautiful things, for example, is a real group: they are different from the beautiful things. Similarly, not-beings are a real group. The upshot is this: “Theaetetus is flying” is false, in that flying is different from what is with reference to Theaetetus. Theaetetus has being. Flying has being. But “Theaetetus is flying” says with reference to him what is not.

This chapter explores cultural themes in Africa with “narrative politics” and its cultural values central to the discourse. In expounding “narrative,” the chapter brings to the fore its two most potent modes (literature and history), which reflect reality but are different in their modus operandi – through imagination (creativity) and verifiable facts. Written beautifully and with references, this chapter blurs the contrast between the two “narrative devices” and focuses instead on espousing their working togetherness. This is because a co-adoption of both in the narrative adds creativity to facts presentation, which thus makes it interesting to read and sustain readers’ interest just as their Yoruba derivative, Alo and Itan, is often a mixture of both.

The chapter also asserts the importance of autoethnography and how through personal experience and identity, the society’s “collective consciousness” is exhibited and manifested. Also, there are references made to the cultural relevance and implication of “time and season,” “taboos and superstitions,” “greetings and reverence,” as well as “namings and places” in Yorubaland.

Chapter 12 explores the question of how the Jewish people might understand the “after” in “after the Holocaust.” These concluding reflections entail an examination of several questions: What should be the Jewish response to the radical assault on the Judaism that makes the Jewish soul Jewish? How do Jews recover a name in the aftermath of the ubiquitous, systematic assault on their names, their souls, and the Name of the Holy One? The chapter takes up these questions through an examination of a tale from the Torah that fundamentally defines the Jews and Judaism: the account of Jacob at Peniel, when Jacob wrestled the name of Israel from the Angel of Death, from God Himself. After the Holocaust, the most stark and extreme manifestation of antisemitism, the Jews confront just such an angel - and God Himself - in an effort to recover a remembrance and a name, a yad vashem. The name that the Jews must once again wrestle from God is Yisrael, Israel, which means “one who struggles with God and humanity.”

As it goes with God, so it goes with the human being: The assault on God, then, entails a radical refashioning of the human being created in the image and likeness of God. Hence Chapter 11 examines what Emil Fackenheim calls the Nazis’ “most characteristic, most original product,” in order to see how and why the Muselmann embodies the essence of the Holocaust. The chapter opens by examining Primo Levi’s remark in Survival in Auschwitz that the Muselmänner have no story. Here I show that the human being who harbors a trace of the divine image is a human being with a story and a name. Having a story entails telling a story. The Muselmänner embody a stark, faceless silence, without a story, without a name, “the divine spark dead within them,” as Levi says. The chapter explains that the Muselmann is not the product of starvation, exhaustion, and brutality. No, the Muselmann is the Jew who has been forbidden to pray,the tohave children, to marry - the Jew who has been robbed of his name, his soul, and who has seen his children and his parents murdered before his eyes.

Tendencies inherent in language to amalgamation and to anatomization are placed in tension. The Name and the letter can become objects of vision and veneration in their own right in a quasi-cultic worship of writing. But Dante at the same time embraces a rational view of language in which meaning is produced mechanically by systematic differentiation. He lets these perspectives play suggestively with and against one another. He also stages the transition from oral to written culture and, correspondingly, the transfer of the mystique of the word from prophetic utterance or prolusion to artistic representation in visible form.