A foreign God. Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics as philoxenia

The aim of this paper is to create a link between Heidegger’s deconstruction of the ontotheological frameworks of metaphysics and his conception of the Divine, especially represented in the figure of the “last God”. This extreme God is the completely other in regard to any traditional concept of the Absolute, since it is not unconditioned and founded on itself, but related to the Being as Event (Ereignis). The post-metaphysical God, compared with the God of metaphysics, could be nearer to the “divine God” of the religious experience; this is not only because of the emancipation of the God from the ontotheological structures, above all from the Hellenization of Christianity. The issue at stake in this paper is rather to show that the last God represents an original way of experiencing the Divine, experiencing the Difference in the sense of the deep duplicity of the familiar and the uncanny (heimlich and unheimlich), of closeness and absence, of revelation and mystery. The experience of the God is also a radical experience of ‘extraneousness’, in which man loses his consolidated certainties, included his monolithic identity. Both in the Greek classical tradition and in the Christian tradition, the dispossessing power of the God reveals itself in its relation with the foreign. For the Greeks philoxenia means the favor and the guarantee given to the foreign, who is protected by the gods and could even be a disguised God itself. In Gospels, for instance, Christ himself is foreign to this world and even after his resurrection he appears as a foreign to the disciples.