The Locus of the work of Francis D’sa SJ is cross-cultural dialogue. Cross cultural dialogue requires us to come to the border of our own culture. It is a border crossing without losing one’s cultural moorings. It an intercultural activity. It requires an inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. This means we require a pre-understanding that enables the hermeneutical circle to let us to arrive at an inter-religious and inter-cultural understanding. This is why Panikkar highlights the need of stepping into the mythos of the other culture.
To achieve this end, he proposes his diatopical hermeneutics where the hermeneutical circle operates across two topos. The distance that it sorts to overcome is not temporal or generational within the shared traditions. It is trying to seek understanding across unshared plural traditions. Its new understanding through the fusion of horizons results into fecundation of two or more traditions. Hence, we have the challenge to enter what Panikkar calls the myth of pluralism in order to arrive at a cross-cultural dialogue.
Such a dialogue/ polylogue gives life to the existing symbols which are ontomythical reality and even generate new symbols. When symbols lose their ontomythical power, they simply become signs and become removed from the lifeworld of the people. Hence, symbols have to be both bounded and open otherwise they die if they remain bound and closed without outside influence.
Symbols live within the mythos and the logos. If they are relegated into the logos alone than symbols they may become dry signs. Hence, Panikkar makes an apt distinction between faith and mythos. Faith is openness to mythos while belief is understanding of faith at the level of logos. Belief may have roots in the mythos but it is logos oriented. Faith is mediated by symbolic expressions and beliefs. Faith, therefore, cannot be reduced to beliefs.
Diatopical hermeneutics works the hermeneutical circles between the mythos and the logos. Indeed, it enables us to arrive at what Panikkar calls radical relativity that manifests the primordial interconnectedness of all traditions. It reveals that being is an inter-being and everything in interconnected and inter-related without absorbing its radical otherness into a monolithic sameness. It is in the encounter of this radical otherness, that one is moved to a dialogue ad intra that reveals new dimensions not just that of other but of oneself.
Diatopical hermeneutics creates a space of mutuality in which different traditions can mutually flourish. In the diatopical hermeneutics one is moved by an imperative of understanding and not by a comparative of intellectual colonialism that tries to assimilate otherness into sameness.
There are also attempts to move from diatopic hermeneutics to pluri-topical hermeneutics. One can locate these attempts in the work of Walter Mignolo. It is claimed that pluritopical hermeneutics enables us to arrive at a pluriversal understanding that has profound insight and indicates us that otherness is not a problem for the same but an enabling condition for our co-being with each other.
Hence, the challenge to move from monotopic hermeneutics to diatopical hermeneutics to a pluritopic hermeneutics might even lead to open deeper conditions of mutuality and reciprocity of co-existence for us in a hyper plural world otherwise we might be eaten up by ego consumo of the market. Hence , we need to enter the logic of Jouissance that follows the principle of loss. It does not follow the market principle of profit. It follows death. It dies to live and let live. Hence, loves asymmetry . The asymmetry is not aesthetic but the willingness to go beyond the established orders of being in the world.
The mutuality and reciprocity of co-being sort by Panikkar and Francis D’sa have all signs of Jouissance of co-being. This brings us to the Real of co-being and co-being of the Real. It only tells us that the co-being that we are seeking is Real-ed. It reveals that co-being that we wish to arrive is a continuous task as co-being is not static but is a dynamic state of becoming. Co-being that we are looking for is fragile and is , therefore , always in the coming and going. We have to work to let it stay in the coming.
