LAUSR

This essay imagines the shape a phenomenology of betrayal would assume at the limits of phenomenology. With Caravaggio’s 1602 painting Cattura di Cristo for an aesthetic backdrop, I consider the paradoxical structure of betrayal with its interwoven strands of a surplus disclosure and a breach of trust. I go on to elaborate the relation of this complex term, at once positive and negative, to time, conceptuality, and truth. Ultimately, I am interested in how betrayal as a limit of phenomenology, where the coherence of intentionality and its correlations or of intuition and its fulfillments break down, underwrites the very possibility of phenomenological endeavor.