In this chapter I explain Jean-Luc Marion’s developing uses of the word “icon,” not primarily as a painted image, but precisely as the way God shows himself, breaking through the idolatry of the finite human perspective through the counter-gaze, or reversal of intentionality. Despite his language that appears to be iconoclastic, I argue that Marion’s discussion of the kenosis of the sacred image is deeply faithful to the patristic iconophile spirit, transposed to a phenomenological key. In this, Marion opens up a third way of understanding mediation, which I explain through the metaphor of the transparent window. Just as glass is not an obstacle to the rays of the sun, provided it is cleared of smudges or flaws, the finite limits of creatures are no obstacle for the infinite, as long as they are open to receive what is communicated.

The 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses makes questions of personal and national literary rivalry its topic. Stephen Dedalus’s wrestling with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in front of a skeptical audience in the National Library acts out the dramas of mimetic rivalry and anxiety of influence that are the chapter’s theme. Here, Joyce reflects on the nature of literary production and on national and international literary competition and consecration. The episode compresses a compendium of irreverent earlier Irish readings of Shakespeare into Stephen’s performance and transacts Joyce’s ongoing rivalry with his own Irish contemporaries, this articulated in a ghostly or doubled timeframe that counterpoints the 1904 Dublin of the novel’s setting to the 1922 Paris of Ulysses’ eventual triumphant publication. 'Scylla and Charybdis' satirizes the liberal humanist sentimentalism of the Goethean concept of weltliteratur. Weltliteratur, in Ulysses, consecrates the texts it elevates into a cosmopolitan supranational system that claims to be neutrally above the national field and its melancholy petty obsessions; nevertheless, national rivalries are essential to world literary systems and even when, maybe especially when, they are elevated to 'world classics' canonical texts are made to serve some political purpose.