Rembrandt and Le Lorrain exhibits at the Louvre. The first painting at the entrance of the Rembrandt exhibit is most striking: The Emmaus disciples, a painting from 1628-9 (Rembrandt was 23), at the moment they recognize their traveling companion as the resurrected, stunningly backlit Jesus. What does recognition mean here? a remembrance of one’s own origins in the self-giving other, a transfiguration. Their eyes have suddenly opened at the breaking of bread, as he had opened the scriptures for them, that is, as he had broken the book open for them. Same verb “open” used in both cases in Luke 24. But what is the recognition about? The answer, I would like to believe, is in the background, far in the distance as indicated by the perspective, which draws our eyes to the weaker backlit shadow of a woman who is preparing food. Who recognizes her for herself, or her work? Rembrandt paints her as an echo of the blinding Jesus shadow, but I think she is the heart of the matter.

What would it mean to recognize her, and not just as a labor factor? I believe it is this: recognition of the transfigured work is a condition for true appropriation of the self, because re-cognition, as subsequent knowledge which meets the first type of cognition (that of the self-giver, of necessity ill-compensated by whatever social system was/is in existence), is the way to open a dynamics in which one may hope to escape self-justifications and limited economic rationales.

One of the two disciples has been so shocked by the recognition that he has jumped up, his chair has fallen to the side, and he has thrown himself at the feet of Jesus, in the obscurity projected by Jesus’ body. There seems to be fear in the eyes of the other fellow who is still sitting at the table.