Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, 4)

Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Volume 4

Series Editor Eugene Thomas Long

For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6034

Morny Joy Editor

Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion

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Editor Morny Joy Department of Religious Studies University of Calgary University Drive T2N 1N4 Calgary Canada [email protected]

ISSN 1568-1556 ISBN 978-94-007-0058-1 e-ISBN 978-94-007-0059-8 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010938784 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Acknowledgments

This volume, as with many such edited collections, has been a number of years in the making. For instigating the project, I would like to express my gratitude to Eugene Long, Series Editor, for inviting me to undertake this labor of love. I would also like to thank sincerely both Springer Publications, and the members of the editorial staff who shepherded this book through the various stages of production, for their support. To the six contributors, I want to extend my profound appreciation for their patient endurance during the many requests and queries of the editorial process. I am indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the award of a fellowship that has sustained my own research. In addition, I am also particularly grateful to the Killam Trust for granting me a one year Fellowship with teaching release at a crucial time that enabled me to pull the project together. Finally, my utmost thanks to John King for his continuing guidance and expertise in all things editorial.

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Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morny Joy

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Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics, Philosophy and Religion . . . . . . . . . . Morny Joy

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Thinking Otherwise: Derrida’s Contribution to Philosophy of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ellen T. Armour

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Levinas’s Project: An Interpretative Phenomenology of Sensibility and Intersubjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bettina G. Bergo

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The Challenge of Love: Kristeva and Irigaray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morny Joy

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Thinking Differently: Foucault and the Philosophy of Religion . . . . . Jeremy Carrette

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Deleuze and Philosophy of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philip Goodchild

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Jean-Luc Marion: Phenomenology of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christina M. Gschwandtner

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Critical Theory, Negative Theology, and Transcendence . . . . . . . . . James Swindal

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Encountering Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morny Joy

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Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contributors

Ellen T. Armour Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, USA, [email protected] Bettina G. Bergo Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, [email protected] Jeremy Carrette Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, [email protected] Philip Goodchild Department of Theology and Religions, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, [email protected] Christina M. Gschwandtner Department of Philosophy, Scranton University, Scranton PA, USA, [email protected] Morny Joy Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, University Drive, T2N 1N4 Calgary, Canada, [email protected] James Swindal Philosophy Department, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh PA, USA, [email protected]

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Introduction Morny Joy

This book will survey the work of twentieth-century Continental philosophy and its potential impact on philosophy of religion as it is practised predominantly in English-speaking countries. The term “Continental philosophy,” insofar as it refers to religion, can be ascribed to a tradition of thought that dates from the time of Kant, resulting from the demise of natural theology, where it had been assumed that human beings could have knowledge of God. Other philosophers connected with this tradition who have specific association with the subject of religion, if not necessarily an affinity for it, are Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. In the first half of the twentieth century, the major philosophers identified with this philosophy are Husserl and Heidegger, and then, more recently, from the 1970s onwards, French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are included, as well as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The Frankfurt school of critical theory, exemplified at the present time by the work of Jürgen Habermas, has also not been without some influence. In the English-speaking domain, philosophy of religion is principally identified with analytic philosophy, where the universal presumptions of an abstract reason, especially with reference to matters of belief and its justification, have dominated. As a result, philosophy of religion, as a sub-discipline of Anglo-American philosophy, covers a vast range of topics, from the perennial question of the existence of (a good) God, to other concerns that derive from this pre-eminent divine existence, e.g., the problem of evil, life after death, miracles, as well as morality and ethics. In this tradition, truth pertains to an objective frame of reference, which is based both on logical arguments and processes of verification. As a result, theists and atheists have debated long and often, according to tenets of propositional argumentation, with occasional forays into symbolic logic, on the particular merits of their positions on the above issues. Continental philosophy does not demarcate a specific area or subject matter that is designated as belonging to philosophy of religion. The boundaries between M. Joy (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, University Drive, T2N 1N4 Calgary, Canada e-mail: [email protected] M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_1,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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disciplines and their ideas are much more fluid and, especially in the twentieth century, the divide between philosophy and literature is not nearly as emphatic as in English. In contrast, then, questions regarding religion can be located with reference to specific themes within a worldview that allows for a wide range of influences. While not all of the philosophers that are presented in this volume subscribe to the same principles or positions, they share a very similar worldview that puts into question the discipline of philosophy of religion as it has traditionally been undertaken in analytic philosophy. Some of the principal factors that influence their positions, though not all of them address each of these specific issues named, are: 1. The “death of God,” specifically the God of modernity as it was postulated by reason. This move was initiated irrevocably by Friedrich Nietzsche. Gilles Deleuze’s work can be identified as a contemporary reworking of Nietzsche’s radical project. 2. The secular theories of Marx and Freud, which put into question both the proclaimed autonomy of the subject and the related reliability of consciousness. The work of Paul Ricoeur, especially his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” continues this task, though Ricoeur will attempt to reclaim a more modest approach to subjectivity. 3. The phenomenological approach, as it was introduced in the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. This approach placed an emphasis on understanding a human being’s lived experience and the nature of existence, rather than maintaining a reliance on definitions dependent on abstract reasoning. It also calls into question what Heidegger calls “onto-theology.” 4. The breakdown of confidence in the certainties of modern rationality and of Western Christian values, which were unable to prevent the two world wars. It is Emmanuel Levinas who interrogates this failure, specifically the aftermath of the Holocaust, and proposes an alternative approach which promotes the primordiality of ethics. 5. The depiction of intrinsic ideological bias masquerading as truth, that has been exposed by members of the Frankfurt school, or the disclosure of vested interests in power and control revealed by the genealogical investigations of Michel Foucault. Both the Frankfurt school and its different members, such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as the work of the poststructuralist Michel Foucault, who was influenced by Nietzsche, respectively address different issues that result from forms of political and institutional domination and the abuse of power. Such influences have resulted in forms of philosophy that do not necessarily take for granted the existence of a God – beneficent or otherwise. This philosophy also puts into question the efficacy of traditional logic and argument as ways of either ascertaining or asserting the existence of this God by means of philosophy. There is a greater appreciation of historical and cultural influences on the formation of philosophy’s structures and procedures. At the same time, there is a move to greater self-reflexivity and a growing awareness of the need to formulate a distinct ethics of

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intersubjectivity that seeks justice. This move in the direction of self-interrogation and responsibility does not necessarily accept rational concepts as providing selfevident knowledge in response to questions regarding the meaning and purpose of existence. In addition, language is no longer regarded as transparent. If there is any acknowledgment of theology, it is often that of a negative or apophatic variety. No absolutes are taken for granted – any universal statement is subjected to interrogation. As a Catholic, Jean-Luc Marion may not necessarily agree with all of the characteristics described above, but he would not reject the idea of the “end of metaphysics” as it relates to a rejection of onto-theology. His own project, while phenomenogically based, seeks ways to reintroduce discussion of a god located beyond such former metaphysical constraints, i.e., where God is not identified with Being. Most of the above presuppositions would appear to indicate that philosophy of religion, as it has functioned within a normative and solely rational perspective, is no longer appropriate or even viable. This does not mean, however, that questions of a religious nature are no longer being posed, nor that traditional questions have become irrelevant. The Continental approach is neither nihilistic nor anti-human, though it does worry about self-proclaimed absolutes of either a humanist or religious nature. The terms of reference have indubitably been changed. Fascinating developments are today occurring as contemporary Continental philosophers explore new possibilities for formulating and responding to traditional problems from this more critical perspective. In determining the specific intention and the contents of this volume, a number of choices were made. Firstly, there was a conscious decision to select thinkers whose work has been adopted by contemporary scholars of religion. The aim is neither to defend religion nor to dismiss out of hand conventional philosophy as it has been pursued. Instead, the book is an exploration, written by scholars in religion and philosophy who have an in-depth knowledge of their subjects. The hope is that by undertaking such explorations of a select number of Continental thinkers, they will stimulate interest in alternate or innovative developments that could enrich the study of philosophy of religion. At the very least, there is the intention of providing thorough background information of the work of specific Continental thinkers and their attitudes and evaluations of religion. This is because these thinkers often do not address religious issues in a systematic or developed way and at times it can be difficult to extract the ideas that are specifically engaging with religion from their larger corpus. In this volume, there will be eight chapters that explore pertinent areas of these potential new directions in philosophy of religion. 1. 2. 3. 4.

The hermeneutic approach Paul Ricoeur (1906–2005) The deconstructive approach of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) The ethical prioritization of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) The psychoanalytically based gender analyses of Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) and Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) 5. The post-structuralism of Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

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6. The radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) 7. The renegotiated phenomenological project of the “saturated phenomenon” of Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1964) 8. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School: Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), and Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) Another decision made with regard to the contents of the volume, principally in the interests of length, was not to include coverage of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The reason for this is that there is a plethora of recent work available on their influence, particularly on Husserl (Bello 2009; Harnell 2000; Hart 1994) and on Heidegger (Vedder 2007; Crowe 2006; Schalow 2001). Gadamer himself was notably reticent to engage on the topic of contemporary religion as his interests in a religious direction were principally concerned with that of ancient Greek culture.1 Nor did there seem to be a pressing need to include a detailed development of the history of philosophy of religion. This is because of the number of excellent books already written on this topic. These range from the now classic work of James Collins, The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion (1967), to Eugene Long’s recent volume, Twentieth-Century Western Philosophy of Religion 1900–2000 (2000). It seemed more appropriate to focus on exploring the innovative developments of the Continental thinkers and their implications rather than to try and reconcile them with the tradition. This is because many contemporary scholars in philosophy of religion have observed that there is need for a change, but few have ventured to develop these ideas in a detailed study. In the General Introduction to his own volume, Long notes the criticisms that are being made today of philosophy of religion: Some philosophers argue that the philosophy of religion is too embedded in the eighteenthcentury problematic of western theism at a time when persons are becoming more global in outlook and the boundaries of our histories are being expanded. Other philosophers argue that the traditional approach to philosophy suffers from unacknowledged ideologies which limit its scope and prevent it from taking into account the rich diversity of human experiences, purposes, and social contexts. In some cases this results in calls to expand the scope of western philosophy of religion. In other cases philosophers call for the reconstruction of the philosophy of religion. At the root of many of these challenges are deep questions involving the nature of philosophy itself. (Long 2000: 2)

The need for change was also expressed from a different perspective by Walter Capps in “The Future of Religious Studies,” the concluding chapter of his book, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (1995). He observes: When speculating about the future of religious studies, one encounters considerations whose long term influence is difficult to calculate. . .. Charles Long’s views about the ways in which

1 One of Gadamer’s more interesting statements in connection with religion concerns the unfortunate way it has used philosophy dogmatically. As a response, he states: “Yet, when modern philosophy begins to entrust itself to the ancient path of thought, perhaps thinkers will learn once again to discern the ancient content of the concept of God” (1999: 17).

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a prevailing colonial, social, political, and cultural structure bestows privileges on selected religious perspectives, and positions is. . . [a] significant example in point. Similarly, if taken seriously, Luce Irigaray’s analyses of differences between men’s and women’s discourse, together with her suggestions about seemingly impartial rules of gender and grammar being deeply rooted in phallocratic assumptions about the world, carry a thoroughly reformative (although still underrecognized and articulated) conceptual capacity. And the same powers lie inherent in Renato Rosaldo’s plea that astute reflection on culture cannot be properly achieved by detached, “objective” observers who mistakenly believe it virtuous to avoid dealing with subjectivity. . .It goes without saying that, at this writing, the field is only partially cognizant of the authority of some of these intellectual events, but will be influenced accordingly as they become better known. (Capps 1995: 338–339)

The late Grace Jantzen was someone who did not mince her words when she describes what she believed to be the shortcomings of the current state of philosophy of religion: The way in which the philosophy of religion as conventionally practised acts as a technology of powers stands out clearly in relation to the disciplinary boundaries that are drawn around it, the ways in which the topics which comprise it are disciplined. The same topics come up with predictable regularity: as Brian Davies says, philosophy of religion is about what philosophers of religion usually do! There is no indication in his work . . . that the discipline has a history, that it is a social construction which has not always been constructed in the way that it is at present, and that what counts as philosophy of religion (and indeed as religion itself) is closely related to who is doing the counting. (Jantzen 1999: 23)

Finally, David Tracy has also pronounced on the fact that things must change: “[T]he entire narrative of philosophy of religion in the modern West needs rethinking and retelling if both the ‘roots’ and ‘fruits’ of that curious modern invention, philosophy of religion, is one day to play a properly interdisciplinary and intercultural role” (1990: 29). In a recent article, I drew attention to what I considered to be some of the more obvious failings of philosophy of religion. One is the obvious fact that until extremely recently, “it has been a distinctly male enterprise. Any check of the table of the authorship in philosophy of religion texts vividly illustrates that most of the contributors to this enterprise have been male” (Joy 2004: 193). I also indicate the work of feminist philosophers of religion, Pamela Anderson (1998), Nancy Frankenberry (1998) and Grace Jantzen (1999), who have challenged this male monopoly and proposed constructive alternatives to counterbalance the traditional concentration on rationality and its reifications. One of their principal objections is that much energy has been misdirected in focussing primarily on faith and on the rational means needed to justify its claims, rather than investigating other ways of understanding how thought can reflect and examine human experience. Frankenberry queries the unacknowledged prerogatives of traditional epistemological categories. What has the status of knowledge? What gets valorized as worth knowing? What are the criteria evoked? Who has the authority to establish meaning? Who is presumed the subject of belief? . . . What do we learn by examining the relations between power, on the one hand, and what happens as evidence, foundations, modes of discourse, and forms of apprehension and transmission, on the other hand? (1998: 192)

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In addition, Frankenberry observes that philosophy of religion has been largely “Eurocentric and Anglo–American in orientation” (193), so that there has been little consideration given to the fact that philosophy of religion could concern itself with other religions of the world. She states: “The next crucial stage of philosophy of religion will require engagement with and inquiry into a plurality of religions. Methodologically, this will mean taking as much account of history of religious and cultural anthropology as previous practitioners have of speculative metaphysics and practical theology” (194). As I note, Frankenberry also brings to the reader’s attention: [T]he obvious absence of discussions of race, class and culture, as well as of gender, that has kept most of philosophy of religion confined to white, Western, and Christian parameters.. . . Again, for Frankenberry, it is the unexamined notions of a predominantly Christian and Eurocentric orientation that prevail, though claims to neutrality and objectivity are still asserted. (Joy 2004: 196)

Given all these qualifications, I believe that such a volume as this one is definitely warranted because, in effect, while it does not address all of these major problems, it endeavors to open up a space and to make suggestions that potentially will encourage philosophy of religion to recognize its shortcomings. Such issues are in dire need of further study and expansive treatment. Another type of difficulty arose in the development of the volume. Initially the basic idea had been that each of the contributing scholars would be given a list of what are considered to be the crucial questions that appear in most philosophy of religion textbooks, and they would describe how each thinker spoke to these issues. Such an approach proved not to be feasible, however, on a number of counts. Firstly, many of the authors are not especially concerned with such issues, or, if they are, it is only peripheral to their main purpose. Secondly, the aim of the volume is to introduce ideas that may even challenge the need for continuing with such traditional categories. As a result, while these topics are not entirely absent from most essays, they are not all represented, nor are they treated in the traditional methodical way. The book has thus unfolded in ways that may not resemble the accustomed coverage of this genre. But then again, the vital impetus for this book is to be stimulating, even provocative, in order to test present boundaries and open up the sort of debate that may lead to a rethinking of the discipline. One such challenge became obvious once all of the contributed essays were assembled. In a majority of the thinkers presented in the volume, there has been a decisive move from epistemology to ethics. This has introduced searching questions as to an obvious past lacuna in much philosophy of religion regarding the treatment of others – be it people of different races, classes, gender or religions other than Christianity. This was indeed remarked upon above by Capps and Frankenberry. While “the other” has indeed been a subject matter intrinsic to phenomenology since its beginnings, as capably presented by Michael Theunissen in his book, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber (1986), the

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treatment of the topic tended to remain on the level of abstract discussion, removed from any reference to practical involvement. Yet the plight of human suffering – be it in Levinas’s indictment of the ethical failure that did not prevent the Holocaust, or Ricoeur’s distress at humanity’s almost endemic propensity to resort to violence, which he considers as a form of evil – engages the emotions in ways that demand ethical or practical response. This inevitably demands greater attention be paid to context. As a result, there is a need for a deeper awareness of the present day problems that beset humanity that calls for a responsibility and discussion of issues that are not simply abstract test-cases. Epistemology has been found wanting in its avoidance of the interrelatedness of mind and body, of reason and emotion, of abstract and concrete. An ethical orientation, informed by, yet moving beyond the confines of phenomenology, attempts to address the inherent interelationship of these aspects. It appeals instead to an integrated mode of knowing and acting especially concerned with the condition of others. It would seem that philosophy of religion needs to give very careful consideration to such a dramatic change in human understanding and conduct towards intersubjectivity. This is because it is in this way that attention to another person becomes humanized, embodied, quickened in its ethical response. That such attention, in turn, will lead to a greater appreciation of diversity is a hope implied in a number of essays. Such diversity can today be found in the peoples from many religions and backgrounds who inhabit the urban centers of what is still described as the “Western world.” The further hope is that Christianity, with its Eurocentric heritage, will no longer consider itself as the sole arbitrator of what counts as absolute knowledge, and that questions of pluralism and/or heterogeneity will become an integral part of any deliberations that constitute what is understood as philosophy of religion. There is a vast sea-change taking place in the world. One influence is the great pattern of immigration of peoples that defy former easy divisions into East and West. At the same time refugees, of both economic and political provenance, are also influencing the changing demographics of many “western” countries. Religious differences are an inherent part of this diversification in ways that secularism neither anticipated nor is willing to acknowledge. At the same time, the enormous pressures exerted on the world’s resources, especially in the present economic decline, demand responses that cannot be met simply by the “bigger and better” rationale that governed the unchecked expansion of global capitalism. While there are certain groups of people who, in the face of these momentous transformations, appear to be resorting to regressive and defensive religious stances as a form of protection, the thinkers that are presented in this volume are, in various ways, facing these problems. While they admit that they do not have definitive answers, they have all, in extremely diverse and creative ways, and sometimes with unsparing honesty, endeavoured to address the issues that are arising. They are thus helping to prepare the citizens of the world to deal constructively, both theoretically and practically, with the profound problems that are facing them on a global basis in this century. If it is similarly responsive to these issues, philosophy of religion could

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well provide significant insights, of both a critical and constructive nature, on some of the most important and controversial issues facing humankind in the twenty-first century.

Overview of Contributions While there is no detailed treatment of the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in this volume, a few words of introduction regarding their influence on phenomenology and the subsequent turn to hermeneutics are in order. This is because virtually all the thinkers discussed in this volume, with the possible exception of Julia Kristeva and the Frankfurt school, are deeply indebted to them, and engage with their ideas, whether or not they are in complete agreement with them. While neither Husserl nor Heidegger specifically addressed the question of philosophy of religion, the challenges that they issued to both western metaphysics and rationalism continue to have a major impact on most of the thinkers that are treated in this book. Edmund Husserl was deeply concerned about what he perceived as the crisis in European thought. Phenomenology was his attempt to respond to what he considered the excesses of enlightenment rationalism, specifically naturalism. His model of the phenomenological method proposed that in order to understand a particular phenomenon, there should be a return of focus to phenomena themselves rather than the automatic application of abstract categories. All previous suppositions of an explanatory nature, especially causal ones, needed to be suspended. This involved a movement of epoche, or “bracketing off” of preconceptions. Such a reduction permitted the resultant postulate of a “transcendental ego” to intuit the essence (eidos) of any object in an act of pure consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenological method also encouraged an awareness of the presuppositions of consciousness as manifested in the forms of intentionality that were involved in acts of knowing. This aspect was more evident in his later work that concentrated on the lived experience of subjectivity in what he termed the “life-world” (Lebenswelt). His work was influential on early scholars of religion who adopted this phenomenological method to different ends. Geradus van der Leeuw (1890– 1950), today identified as a phenomenologist of religion, was particularly interested in applying Husserl’s notion of intuition, which he connected with “understanding,” to appreciate the ultimate ground or essence of phenomena which he then identified as basically religious or sacred. While Rudolf Otto’s (1869–1937) The Idea of the Holy (1924 [1917]), cannot be said to be directly influenced by Husserl, or that he be called a phenomenologist in the strict sense of the word, his approach of attempting to understand the ultimate non-rational dimensions of religious experience by what he termed, “the numinous,” has certain resonances with phenomenology. Today, it is fascinating that the work of Jean-Luc Marion and his phenomenological studies of the “saturated phenomenon” do, after a fashion, involve these two approaches in an attempt to reintroduce theological topics to phenomenology. Even quite early in the reception of Husserl’s work, however, there were those, such as Eugene Fink,

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who detected a distinct theological strain in his writings.2 This type of expansion in a religious direction has continued in more recent work, as evident in Hart (1986); Laycock (1988) and Bello (2009). One other aspect of Husserl’s work that also continues to be debated is the relation to other people and the idea of empathy. Martin Theunissen’s intriguing book, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Buber (1986), identified the issue of otherness and intersubjectivity as one of the main topics in Husserl’s later work (69–81) and as central to the sense of one’s subjectivity. Nevertheless, one of the charges against Husserl’s work by later thinkers initially associated with phenomenology, such as Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, is the neglect of any developed relationship to the other person or difference which involves an explicit intersubjective ethical programme. They will both develop this missing aspect with quite different resonances as a major focus of their own work. Husserl’s pupil, Martin Heidegger, was even more radical in his attempt to rethink the fundamental categories of western thought, not simply those of the dominant rationalism. Heidegger rejected not only Husserl’s transcendental idealism but the whole metaphysical enterprise since the time of Plato and Aristotle. As a result, there is a shift in Heidegger’s work not just from Husserl’s methodology but also from the development of what Heidegger terms “onto-theology.” This latter construct came about, in Heidegger’s view, principally because of the mistaken identification of the Christian God with the foundational Greek concept of Being. Heidegger denounces the resultant analysis of the “Being of God” which has since pervaded both philosophy and theology and thus displaced any further investigation of the primordial dimension of Being itself. His demanding interrogation (Destruktion) of the development of onto-theology, which also incorporated Husserl’s earlier refutation of the excesses of rationalism, puts into question the preconceptions of how philosophy of religion had previously defined its task – particularly as it evaluated the topics of God, truth, belief, revelation, language and the human condition. Heidegger endeavoured to introduce a new mode of philosophizing or revised ontology, that sought to understand Being (Sein), and that would act as a corrective to the errors made in the name of onto-theology. As far as Heidegger was concerned, the being of human existence (Dasein) could only be appreciated by understanding its specific location as both situated in an historical context and temporally ordered. This marked the introduction of hermeneutics into phenomenology, casting doubt as to whether any essence of a phenomenon could ever be surmised. Instead Heidegger proposed certain conditions of finitude or “facticity.” Under such temporal conditions it became requisite for human beings to enquire into their manner of being or existing in the world and to discern the way to live authentically. This would avoid the former grandiose claims of onto-theology and any pretensions to absolute knowledge. Instead, Heidegger’s philosophy allows that all human

2 I have written elsewhere on some of the problems that I have discerned in the early adaptations of phenomenology to more theological purposes, and the problems this created in Religious Studies (Joy 2004).

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understanding is hermeneutical, or subject to interpretation, as it is always mediated by the historical and temporal conditions of existence. Heidegger does not dismiss the possibility that a god may exist, in fact his final interview with the newspaper Der Spiegel was enigmatically entitled: “Only a God Can save Us” (1976). Such a god, nevertheless, would not be of the same order as has previously existed, particularly the Christian God as depicted by onto-theology. In the chapter on Paul Ricoeur that I have written myself, I first describe his philosophical pedigree. Perhaps the most formative influences in his early philosophical career were the works of both Husserl and Heidegger. During his internment as a prisoner of war in the Second World War, he deepened his studies of them, even translating Husserl’s Ideen 1 into French. In time, however, Ricoeur moved away from Husserl and followed the early Heidegger in his rejection of Husserl’s transcendental approach in favour of a more contextualized hermeneutical phenomenology. He also paid particular attention to “understanding” as a key process in any interpretative act. Understanding is thus appreciated as disclosing a form of truth as insight that both defies definition in conventional terms of proofs or argument and also eschews essences. Another preoccupation of Ricoeur was a concern with otherness. In his early book on Husserl, Ricoeur observed: “All aspects of phenomenology converge upon the problem of the Other” (1967: 195). The personal other and the problem of intersubjectivity became a major ethical focus in Ricoeur’s later work, but even in his earlier hermeneutical studies of texts, Ricoeur regarded the act of interpretation as an encounter with the other – in this context with ideas that engaged and expanded our understanding. Though he was a Christian, and this was indeed the inspiration of much of his life and thought, in his philosophical writings Ricoeur adopted a methodological agnosticism with regard to questions of religious belief and the source of conscience. Ultimately, his latest book on recognition was a plea for justice for all, but it also resonates with a concern for the personal other in a relationship of radical reciprocity. Though this can be realized in a secular society, it also bespeaks an orientation of openness and love that has definite Christian resonances. In the early work of Jacques Derrida there was an intense engagement with the work of Husserl and a prolonged investigation as to whether his work involved not only metaphysical, but also theological presumptions. Derrida characterized this by the phrase: “a metaphysics of presence.” In his own deconstructive strategy that was influenced by Heidegger’s notion of destruktion, Derrida was also concerned with the problem of otherness. Derrida’s neologism of différance was indicative of his interest in the exclusions and suppressions of the other that was an inevitable part of any conceptual closure – something which he felt Husserl had ignored. Much of his later work explores topics such as the gift, friendship, hospitality, and their heterogeneity that precludes attempts, such as Husserl’s, to posit any stable definition, let alone an essence. In her essay on Derrida, Ellen Armour relates how Derrida was first introduced to scholars of religion through the volume edited by Raschke, Deconstruction and Theology (1982). Since then his work has been taken up by scholars with a number of different interests in religion. Her paper focuses primarily on the avenues opened up for philosophy of religion by Derrida’s work that are

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distinct from its traditional preoccupations. In Armour’s view, for the most part these distinctions are not absolute divergences, and there are topical and thematic linkages between the two approaches. For example, both areas of deconstruction and theology have taken up the question of mysticism in recent years; both are concerned with theism and its limits. The treatments of these topics in Derrida’s work, as well as in the work of certain philosophers of religion influenced by him are, however, not uniform. Armour concentrates on what she sees as three particularly distinctive features in such work in regard to religion. In contrast to philosophy of religion’s traditional (virtually exclusive) focus on Christianity, Derrida’s work engages and has been engaged by diverse religious traditions. Where philosophy of religion seeks to establish the rationality of the contents of religious belief, Derrida seems drawn to religion because it pushes beyond the limits of rationality (narrowly conceived). Armour then concludes by observing that while traditional philosophy of religion seems to understand religious belief as somehow hermetically sealed away from cultural and historical change, Derrida sees religion and culture as very much intertwined. That is, for Derrida, religiosity “infects” (as it were) what purport to be very secular arenas and religion is itself part and parcel of a larger cultural landscape. In the third essay, I will concentrate on two contemporary thinkers who, though not of French origin, live and work in France, and who have been identified with a postmodern orientation. They are Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Although both of them are reluctant to identify themselves with the label “feminist,” they have each posed fundamental questions about the lives and status of women. Their investigations have been profoundly and diversely influenced by the theory of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – whose work is a controversial mixture of the selective ideas from Freud, Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, and the linguist, de Saussure. They are also keenly aware of the impact of the Nietzschean proclamation of the “death of God.” Yet their work is suffused with images, of a spiritual nature, as they search for ways to express new understandings of the “divine” (Irigaray) and the sacred (Kristeva), as well as an ethics of love, devoid of illusions and projections. While they do not write in a traditional philosophical style, they do not hesitate to refer to the work of philosophers considered as having an impact on philosophy of religion, such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. Their modified phenomenological approach, understood within a broad mandate as an investigation of the meaning of lived experience, is qualified by a form of a suspicious engagement that questions the unconscious dimensions of thought and behaviour. Their interrogations of the gender of God, specifically as conceived in solely masculine and transcendent terms, to the exclusion of women and of “feminine” attributes, if taken seriously, would result in the transformation of philosophy of religion as it has been traditionally practiced. Emmanuel Levinas was encouraged by his professor at the University of Strasbourg, Maurice Pradines, to go and study with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg University. Levinas did this, and actually wrote his doctoral thesis on the concept of intuition in Husserl. During his years there, from approximately 1928–1935, however, he became more interested in the existential phenomenology of Heidegger. Gradually, he also broke away from Heidegger’s influence to concentrate on the

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nature of the ethical relationship to others, and not so much on the more subjective preoccupations of Dasein. As Bettina Bergo observes in introducing Levinas in her study of his work, much ink has flowed on the topic of Levinas and whether his philosophy is “religious,” “confessional,” a “Jewish” philosophy, or a mode of hermeneutical ethics adapted largely from a critical response to Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontology. Even more interesting, however, is the attention that is accorded to human intersubjective interdependency – set forth in the way Levinas configures the infinite responsibility of the face-to-face relationship. This “event” of human beings, in a face-to-face encounter, argues that Being or existence is inflected primarily through human relationships. This interruption or modification of Being is thus inaugurated by a purely intersubjective sentiment sometimes called “sincerity.” Because sincerity arises from no act of will, no moral sentiment, and no faculty, one is constrained to call it an intersubjective affect, without giving it an ideal or positive status. It is accorded neither a psychological nor a metaphysical status. It also stands unverifiable, because it is pre-representational and therefore largely unattainable through epistemic techniques of suspension, like Husserl’s phenomenological and transcendental reductions. Its most remarkable implication, however, lies in its claim to be a “first philosophy”. On this account, as Bergo argues, if the dual, dynamic structure of what is called human “intersubjectivity” is prior to Being, and inflects or interrupts it, then first philosophy must be revisited, and the primordiality of ethics needs to be taken into consideration. A notable facet of Michel Foucault’s work is that his first two publications were in the area of phenomenology. One of these was an introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s volume Dream and Existence, that was later published separately (1954 [1993]). The second was Maladie mentale et personalité (1962 [1976]). Initially Foucault was interested in undertaking a historical analysis of phenomenology and existential psychology. He was particularly curious about the relation of imagination to human existence, but he understood it as having a much more fluid, if not enigmatic role than Husserl’s employment of it as the agency by which one arrives at the essence of a phenomenon. In time, however, he preferred to concentrate on history, but with a particular emphasis on its construction and the specific manoeuvres by which certain categories are determined and imposed. Jeremy Carrette observes that Foucault’s work has been positioned between the disciplines of history, literature and philosophy, but his weaving of ideas from the French intellectual tradition allows him to reconfigure the status of knowledge itself. He saw the task of philosophy as a mode of “thinking differently” rather than “legitimating what was already known.” The sense of “thinking differently” recognises, in a post-phenomenological position, that the “conditions of thought” are shaped and determined by the play of “power” within institutions and society. This contextualisation of thought made Foucault useful methodologically for social theory, but also unsettled philosophy in its understanding of “truth,” “power,” “discourse,” and the “body. A post-Nietzschean and post-Heideggerian reading of Foucault thus presents a key set of interpretative frames for examining Foucault’s implications for philosophy of religion. One key frame involves a “repositioning” of religion in order to demonstrate that the political force of religious discourse, in both its power

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to silence and to its power to demand an utterance, attempts to govern human life. In addition, Foucault problematizes certain foundational aspects of Christianity, e.g., its marginalization of the body within a dualist ontology. From Foucault’s critical perspective, philosophy of religion would need to consider more than rational arguments in its defence of beliefs and institutionalized practices. The underlying aim of Carrette’s chapter is to show how the “refusal” of the philosophy of religion to read its own history is a refusal to see the problem of knowledge in terms of disciplinary power and the historical conditions that have influenced it. Gilles Deleuze could in no way be considered a phenomenologist. He made a very strong distinction between his own work and the historicism that he discerned in the work of Husserl and Heidegger. Deleuze’s work is more concerned with a philosophy of becoming where terms such as “event”, “intensities”, “virtuality,” witness to a stance that refuses stasis and confinement to concepts and categories. This philosophy, according to Philip Goodchild, has little explicit to say on his own account in relation to the problems typically addressed in philosophy of religion. Thus, while questions of the existence and nature of God, and the nature of good and evil, are referred to in Deleuze’s works on Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Kant and Spinoza, the sceptical implications of the philosophy of immanence he draws from these thinkers would suggest that discussions on these matters are now closed, since they derive from false problems. Nevertheless, it is truly striking that Deleuze describes Spinoza as the “Christ of the philosophers,” thus positioning himself as one of his followers, and that, like Spinoza, he continues to construct a metaphysical system. In contrast to Spinoza’s emphasis on eternity, Deleuze’s metaphysics is entirely concerned with temporal existence. At the same time, according to Goodchild, Deleuze’s metaphysics, similarly to Spinoza’s, is inseparable from ethics: ethics are no longer objectified into eternal laws or values, but inform the temporal conduct of the thinker. The question that Goodchild then poses is whether the same could be said of a religious dimension, which remains very pertinent in Spinoza in the form of a “third kind of knowledge.” Goodchild’s chapter will explore the way in which conceptions of an excess significance of meaning and value are incorporated immanently throughout Deleuze’s work, focusing on the way in which he deploys concepts of intensive difference, repetition, and life. Goodchild proposes that there is a spirit at work in Deleuze’s philosophy which turns the entirety of his work into an immanent philosophy of religion. Another philosopher concerned with excess, but in quite a different way, is JeanLuc Marion. His appeal to phenomenology is of a quite different order from that employed by the other thinkers in this volume. As Christina Gschwandtner relates, Jean-Luc Marion is one of the most significant living French philosophers who has contributed much to the emerging field of Continental Philosophy of Religion. Marion proposes that we can think rigorously about religion and give coherence to faith and religious experience even after the “death of God” (and taking that “death” seriously). He rejects metaphysical ways of thinking about the divine, seeking instead for a phenomenological account of religious experience. His probably most significant idea is that of the “saturated phenomenon.” He contends that we can

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talk about experience of God or religious experience by examining its phenomenality. Such a “divine” phenomenon or a phenomenon of revelation is particularly rich or excessive, in that it “saturates” our experience and overwhelms us. It is from this perspective that Marion contends it is possible to identify and to describe religious experiences. Gschwandtner further relates how Marion rejects much that is part of a traditional approach to philosophy of religion, such as proofs for God’s existence or arguments about the coherence of divine omnipotence and goodness in light of the reality of evil. Instead, he operates out of a position that introduces a phenomenological approach to the possibility of expressing experiences associated with faith. From this position, Marion analyzes the phenomena of love, the sacraments, language about the divine, prayer, and various other aspects of religious experience. He maintains that the “rationality” of love (or the heart) is more appropriate to any experience of, or talk about the divine, rather than the rationality of Cartesian or Husserlian certainty. A number of other philosophers, such as Dominique Janicaud (2006), contend that Marion’s work is more theology than phenomenology. Such a charge arises because ultimately, in Marion’s work, it is necessary to dismantle idolatrous ways of talking about God that place limits on the divine, and instead to allow oneself to be addressed in an experience of saturated phenomena that witness to a “God beyond Being”. The next chapter of the book addresses questions of religion from a totally different philosophical orientation than phenomenology. It is, however, still of marked interest for the philosophical study of religion. This is because, as James Swindal explains, the early members of the “Frankfurt School” – Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno – while standing within the Marxist tradition, repudiated its reductionist tendencies when dealing with cultural phenomena. Inasmuch as the Marxist polemic against culture began as a critique of theology, which was then extended to all ideology as “priestly” deception, so the Frankfurt School’s rehabilitation of the cultural could be seen, from a certain perspective, as a return to a reformed idea of the theological. Swindal detects a common thread which runs through each of the above thinkers. This is that each one has a complex and somewhat strained relationship to his own socio-cultural heritage. Most of the members of the original Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt were Jewish by birth. At times, in fact, Jewishness and critical theory were all but interchangeable terms. This resulted in a kind of prophetic Jewish messianism – minus a messiah – that envisaged a just future that could not be expressed by positive theology or in graven images. As a result, they shared an attraction to highly nuanced forms of negative theology which served as a corrective to extreme forms of religious utopianism. Jürgen Habermas, a second generation critical theorist, though of Protestant descent, has also taken a keen interest in Jewish intellectual issues. Both he and the critical theorists also share a disdain for the exclusivity of instrumental reason in modern culture. Each theorist, in different ways, has confronted the role that religion played in socio-cultural life. This is because Marx, their inspiration and guide, understood religion to be a cipher of cultural life that encoded the ideology of capitalism. For the critical theorists, however, it is now the secularizing of religion that bears the mantle of historical inevitability that provides the hermeneutic key to any cogent

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analysis of religion. Swindal’s chapter will survey the writings of each thinker in roughly chronological order. What emerges is a constellation of various religious thematics: God and transcendence; messianism; language; suffering; morality and ethics, to name but a few of the most important topics. The final chapter will survey the topic of the “o/Other” as it has featured in many guises in the chapters of this book, particularly in those philosophers of French background. It will summarize a number of the arguments and also assess the repercussions that could result for philosophy of religion if their allegations and insights were encountered with an open mind and generosity toward this way of thinking otherwise.

Bibliography Anderson, Pamela. 1997. A feminist philosophy of religion: The rationality and myths of religious belief. Oxford: Blackwell. Bello, Angela Alles, 2009. The divine in Husserl and other explorations, Vol. 98, Analecta Husserliana, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Capps, Walter H. 1995. Religious studies: The making of a discipline. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Collins, James D. 1967. The emergence of philosophy of religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Crowe, Benjamin D. 2006. Heidegger’s religious origins: Destruction and authenticity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Foucault, Michel, and Ludwig Binswanger. 1993 [1954]. Dream and existence. In Studies in existential psychology and psychiatry, ed. Keith Hoeller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Foucault, Michel. 1976 [1962]. Mental illness and psychology. (Based on Maladie mentale et psychologie) (trans: Sheridan, Alan). New York, NY: Harper and Row. Frankenberry, Nancy. 1998. Philosophy of religion in different voices. In Philosophy in a feminist voice: Critiques and reconstructions, ed. J.A. Kourany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1999. Hermeneutics, religion & ethics (trans: Weinsheimer, Joel). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hart, James G. 1986. A precis of an Husserlian philosophical theology. In Essays In phenomenological theology, ed. S. Laycock and J.G. Hart. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Only a god can save us: Der Spiegel’s interview with Martin Heidegger. Philosophy Today 20: 267–284. Janicaud, Dominique. 2006. Phenomenology “wide open”: After the French debate (trans: Cabral, Charles C.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Jantzen, Grace. 1999. Becoming divine: Towards a feminist philosophy of religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Joy, Morny. 2000. Beyond a god’s-eye view: Alternative perspectives in the study of religion. In Perspectives on method and theory in the study of religion, ed. A. W. Geertz and R. McCutcheon, 110–140. Leiden: Brill. Joy, Morny. 2004. Philosophy and religion. In New approaches to the study of religion. Vol. 1. Regional, critical and historical approaches, ed. P. Antes, A. Geertz, and R.A. Warne, 185–217. Berlin: de Gruyter. Laycock, Stephen. 1988. Foundations for a theological phenomenology. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

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Long, Eugene T. 2000. Twentieth century western philosophy of religion 1900–2000. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Otto, Rudolf. 1957. The idea of the holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raschke, Carl. 1982. The deconstruction of god. In Deconstruction and theology, ed. Thomas J.J. Altizer, Max A. Myers, Carl A. Raschke, Robert P. Scharlemann, Mark C.Taylor, and Charles E. Winquist. New York, NY: Crossroads. Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schalow, Frank. 2001. Heidegger and the quest for the sacred: From thought to the sanctuary of faith. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Theunissen, Michael. 1986. The other: Studies in the social ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Buber (trans: Macann, C.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tracy, David. 1990. On the origin of the philosophy of religion: The need for a new narrative for its founding. In Myth and philosophy, ed. F. Reynolds and D. Tracy, 11–36. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Van der Leeuw, Geradus. 1963. Religion in essence and manifestation. 2 Vols. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Vedder, Ben. 2007. Heidegger’s philosophy of religion: From god to gods. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics, Philosophy and Religion Morny Joy

Paul Ricoeur was born on 27 February 1913 in Valence, near Lyons, but grew up in Rennes, Brittany. He was of Huguenot Protestant background. In the years before WWII, Paul Ricoeur was part of the rich philosophical scene in France where a number of new currents of thought were emerging, though they were not yet necessarily converging. Among the most prominent thinkers from this time who had a lasting influence on Ricoeur’s philosophy, even if in time he challenged or moved beyond their ideas, were the Catholic personalist philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), and two existentialists of rather different persuasions, Gabriel Marcel (1899–1973) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).1 It was from his interactions with them that Ricoeur acquired in large measure his commitment to an engaged philosophy. He never ceased to be concerned with the plight of humanity – especially with issues of undeserved or inflicted suffering and the consequent responsibility for human beings to alleviate it. He was not a political activist, but in his writing he attempted to chart a path of concern for, and accountability towards others – especially those of different religious, ethnic or minority backgrounds. This initial concern for others was no doubt intensified by the experience of World War II. Ricoeur was imprisoned for 5 years (1940–1945), in various camps in the area of Germany known at that time as Pomerania. Though he certainly suffered much privation, and even life itself could never be taken for granted, he was accorded certain privileges as an officer – among them reading. This was a somewhat unexpected boon. Thus, in the course of this period, Ricoeur deepened his appreciation of certain German philosophers – in particular Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers, with whose work he had become familiar before the war. Apart from this access to philosophical texts, Ricoeur and his fellow prisoners organized a mini-educational system with lectures and courses. Ricoeur later reflected

M. Joy (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, University Drive, T2N 1N4 Calgary, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 1 See

especially Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay (1998: 22–25).

M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_2,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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in an interview about this time, especially about the circumstances of such an extraordinary undertaking: Together with Michel Dufrenne, I read the work of Karl Jaspers. I am indebted to Karl Jaspers for having placed my admiration for German thinking outside the reach of all the negative aspects of our surroundings and of the “terror of history.” I note in passing that we knew nothing of the horror of the concentration camps until our liberation in the spring of 1945.. . . The meticulous study of Karl Jasper’s work was to lead us to write a work together and publish it under both our names under the title: Karl Jaspers and the Philosophy of Existence (1947). (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 9–10)

In the same interview, Ricoeur also observes that during this time he undertook the translation of Husserl’s Ideen I.2 He also sketched the outline of a projected major publication – the three volumes on the philosophy of the will. The actual composition of this magnum opus did not conform exactly to this anticipated plan, which was modeled on Karl Jasper’s trilogy, The Philosophy of Knowledge.3 There were a number of diversions that occurred for Ricoeur in the course of writing these volumes. These resulted in a revised programme which had far-reaching consequences for Ricoeur’s future philosophical orientation. It changed from a basic Husserlian phenomenology to a more hermeneutically engaged approach in the mode of the early Heidegger. The first published volume of this undertaking, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1966 [1950]), was conceived in accordance with Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology, i.e., it attempted to determine the essence (eidos), or the basic structures of the human will. Yet, even at this stage, Ricoeur differed from Husserl in that he did not confine himself solely to an analysis of acts of consciousness. Instead, he wanted to appreciate the interaction of the mind (the voluntary) and the body (involuntary), which would also acknowledge an emotional dimension. The body was thus accorded a dynamic role, give the fact that Ricoeur respected: “the meaning of the body as a source of motives, as a cluster of capacities, even as necessary nature” (Ricoeur 1966: 9). In undertaking this exploration, Ricoeur became aware of certain vicissitudes that occurred in the passage from an act of willing to practical implementation. His studies from this time demonstrate the radical finitude of the human condition – the free yet bound nature of the will, struggling to act in resolute ways, in conformity with rational decisions, but always susceptible to the vagaries of the body with its physical and emotional disruptions, as well as to unconscious impulses. Ricoeur discovered “a sort of residue, inaccessible to analysis and to the phenomenological method: infantile, archaic, pathological culpability” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay 1998: 29). He did not conclude as a result of these findings, however, that such human fallibility automatically led to 2 This

work was published in English as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982 [1913]). 3 Jaspers’s trilogy was published in German under the title of Philosophie (1932). It appeared in English also in three volumes, entitled, Philosophy in 1969 and 1970, published by the University of Chicago Press. Its basic plan was a movement from surveying conditions of everyday existence to those of transcendence.

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any grievous fault of the type he would call “bad will,” or even an evil act. Instead he proposed that: “The phenomenon of the voluntary and the involuntary appeared to me to be capable of accounting only for the weaknesses of being exposed to evil and capable of doing wrong, but not of actually doing evil” (Ricoeur in Hahn: 15). These unconscious contingencies nonetheless did pose problems for Ricoeur’s initial ideas concerning the nature of the will and it putative freedom. This is because other issues, such as those conveyed by the religious terminology of guilt and sin, also emerged. Ricoeur admitted he was especially predisposed towards such issues because of his “early formative training in Calvinist predestination” (29). This insight motivated Ricoeur to write two related volumes, instead of the second slated volume of the trilogy that he had previously designated as an empirics of the will. These appeared under the headings of Finitude and Guilt, Fallible Man (1965 [1960]) and the Symbolism of Evil (1969 [1960]). A number of changes in Ricoeur’s approach became evident in these two distinct works. Perhaps the most important was that Ricoeur was no longer content to accept that human consciousness was always immediately present to itself. As Ricoeur’s awareness continued to develop on this topic, he began to appreciate that human consciousness only arrived at knowledge by way of interpretation rather than by direct intuition. There is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms. In passing from one to the other, hermeneutics gradually frees itself from the idealism with which Husserl had tried to identify phenomenology. (Ricoeur 1991 [1986]: 15)

This move in the direction of hermeneutics was henceforth to provide assistance to Ricoeur in delineating not just the dynamics of the human will, but all human experience. Ricoeur expressed his realization of this awareness: “A hermeneutic philosophy [is one which accepts the mediated nature of subjectivity and] gives up the dream of a total mediation” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 194). These changes in Ricoeur’s thinking led to the abandonment of his third planned volume on a “poetics of the will.” Ricoeur himself observed in his own intellectual biography: “As for the poetics of transcendence, this was never written, if by this title one expects something like a philosophy of religion; for lack of a theological philosophy” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 13). He further explains: As for the third part, here I was to deal with the relation of human willing to Transcendence – obviously a Jasperian term, which modestly designated the god of the philosophers.. . . It is difficult for me to express today to what extent I was fascinated, in the 1950’s, by Jaspers’ great trilogy, most specifically the final chapter of the third volume devoted to the “ciphers” of transcendence: was not the “deciphering” of these ciphers the perfect model of a philosophy of transcendence that would be at the same time a poetics? (13)

Abandoning this ambition, Ricoeur continued by describing his new philosophical focus: “My primary concern, which has never wavered, not to mix games together has instead drawn me closer to the notion of a philosophy without any

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absolute” (13). Nevertheless, as a result of attempting this aborted project, inspired by the work of Jaspers, Ricoeur became sensitized to the conundrum of the human condition with its infinite aspirations and its finite capacities – Pascal’s “ontology of disproportion” (15). The problem of human fallibility and its propensity to evil had graphically presented itself to Ricoeur and would continue to preoccupy him during his career. Towards the end of his life he became specifically concerned with humanity’s cruelty in its treatment of fellow human beings. He regarded this as a manifestation of evil. Ricoeur then focused on seeking human solutions such as justice and due recognition as ways of mitigating the situation.4 Ricoeur’s most immediate task when he wrote The Symbolism of Evil, however, became one of discerning what he understood to be both the opaqueness and multivalency that characterized symbols. He employed the catch-phrase: “The symbol gives rise to thought” (le symbole donne à penser [Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 17]).5 Ricoeur understood this task as more indirect than direct in that it indicated: “The passage from an analysis of the essence of the will to a symbolism of the myths expressing the figures and genealogies of evil” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay 1998: 29). These indirect meanings were expressed in the world’s literary heritage, rather than in philosophy. Ricoeur observed: “The Symbolism of Evil had set in motion this conception of indirect reflection by basing the avowal of bad will upon a set of symbols and myths deciphered in the public texts of great cultures” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 19). In keeping with a modified notion of poetics, conceived as an appreciation of the dynamics of creative expression, Ricoeur then turned his attention to the way in which the western tradition had attempted to account for this element of human weakness. His studies of biblical texts and the (neo-)Platonic tradition in The Symbolism of Evil (1967 [1960]), explored the various symbols and myths expressing insights into the source of the free yet bound human will. Instinctively, Ricoeur himself was not receptive to the Augustinian explanation of original sin as inherited, calling it a pseudo-concept (Ricoeur 1995: 254), and his investigations recount many other symbolic descriptions that endeavored to represent the source this phenomenon. At the very end of The Symbolism of Evil, he recapitulates his task, as he now understands it. The task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to break out of the enchanted enclosure of consciousness of oneself, to end the prerogative of self-reflection [the Cogito].. . . All the symbols of guilt – deviation, wandering, captivity – all the myths – chaos, blinding, mixture, fall – speak of the situation of man in the being of the world. The task, then, is, starting from the symbols, to elaborate existential concepts – that is to say, not

4 This

aspect of Ricoeur’s work will be treated later in the paper. expands on this statement: “What the symbol gives rise to is thinking.. . . The aphorism suggests at the same time that everything has already been said enigmatically and yet that it is always necessary to begin it again as in the dimension of thinking. It is this articulation of thought given to itself in the realm of symbols and thought positing and thinking that constitutes the critical point of our whole enterprise” (1967: 349). 5 Ricoeur

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only structures of reflection but structures of existence, insofar as existence is the being of man. (Ricoeur 1967: 356–357)6

Ricoeur describes this task of symbolic interpretation, in an age when formalism and technical jargon had tended to constrict the resources of figurative language, as one of reviving the richness and subtleties of meaning that words can convey. This shift to philosophical hermeneutics, with its movement from “the statics to the dynamics” of symbols, facilitated a move to incorporate both the retrospective and anticipatory elements that Ricoeur posits as inherent in all symbolic expressions. In coming to terms with symbols, one cannot remain a purely detached observer. The world of symbols is not a tranquil and reconciled world; every symbol is iconoclastic in comparison with some other symbol, just as every symbol, left to itself, tends to thicken, to become solidified in idolatry. It is necessary, then, to participate in the struggle, in the dynamics, in which the symbolism itself becomes a prey to the spontaneous hermeneutics that seeks to transcend it. It is only by participating in this dynamics that comprehension can reach the strictly critical dimension of exegesis and become a hermeneutic but then one must abandon the position – or rather, the exile – of the remote and disinterested spectator, in order to appropriate in each case a particular symbolism. (Ricoeur 1967: 354)

For Ricoeur, this active participation involves not just a mind or word game but a shift in existential priorities that can have distinct consequences for human behavior. His move to hermeneutic phenomenology also marked a change in his appreciation of the need for a new mode of self-reflexivity. Ricoeur himself clarifies what is involved in this change from phenomenology to a Heideggerian form of phenomenological hermeneutics: Hermeneutics remains fundamentally an understanding of the self. Thus, it remains reflective. But, on the other hand, the means of understanding are no longer those of a transcendental or eidetic reflection but require understanding, interpretation and thus a mode of intelligibility other than that of the immediate and intuitive grasping of the essence of mental phenomena. (Ricoeur in Reagan 1996: 124)

At the same time, Ricoeur’s investigation into such figurative depictions of evil also led to a fascination with the work of Sigmund Freud. His subsequent intense study resulted in a volume: Freud: An Interpretation (1970 [1965]).7 In addition, 6 Ricoeur expands on this understanding as a means of illuminating the human condition: “By recounting our origins, where we come from, myths describe in a symbolic way what we are: the paradox of the good demon and that of the evil god are not merely playful fantasies but the privileged means of unraveling the tangled skein of passions belonging to the human heart. When the myth tells, for example, how the gods corrupted the demons, something is said about the hidden perversity of the ‘higher’ part of ourselves. When the myth recounts the birth of death, it touches the secret thread of our fright in the face of death, a fright that in fact closely links together evil and death and confronts death as a personified demon” (1996: 205). 7 This approach was also influenced by his high school studies with Ronald Dalbiez who Ricoeur notes was one of the first thinkers to attempt a philosophical reading of Freud. As Ricoeur observes, in noting the impact this would have on his future work: “His Freud was the ‘biological’ Freud: he stressed the realist conception of the unconscious which he used to refute the ‘Cartesian illusion’ of self-consciousness, and the alleged reduction of the world to my representation” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay 1998: 7).

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Ricoeur was also becoming aware that the opacity of symbols was not just a phenomenon related to representations of evil alone, but to “the entire intentional life of the subject.” Such a conclusion brought into question “a presupposition common to Husserl and Descartes, namely the immediateness, the transparence, the apodicity of the Cogito” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay 1998: 16). Ricoeur noted that such an awareness demanded an approach that moved beyond the confines of phenomenology of conscious activity to a mode of hermeneutic phenomenology that attempts to unravel, insofar as possible, the workings of the unconscious. For this task, Freud was indispensable. Ricoeur also credits Freud with helping him to leave behind his preoccupation with culpability and guilt. “The work did indeed help me to go beyond the somewhat obsessive and archaic side of the problem of culpability [and its relation to guilt], which has been replaced in my work by the question of suffering, of excessive suffering that overwhelms the world” (29). Yet Ricoeur remained intrigued by the purported origins of evil – and the fact of its contingency. “If the reason for evil does not lie in finiteness, then it just comes about, it happens, in the manner of an event that one recounts” (17). In order to help to find a way to express this conviction from a philosophical perspective, Ricoeur turned to the work of Kant, whom he was teaching at that time (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 15). From this period onwards, Kant, to whom Ricoeur refers as “my preferred author for the philosophy of religion” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay 1998: 148), becomes the most dominant influence on Ricoeur’s philosophical reflections about religion. This influence is apparent not just on the subject of evil and human frailty, but on the relationship of philosophy to religion, especially concerning Kant’s notion of the limit. Ricoeur has often expressed his admiration for Kant’s rejection of metaphysics and, in particular, for Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which he describes as “a philosophical hermeneutics of religion” (Ricoeur 1995: 75). As he relates, “like Kant, I assume the question of determining whether a religion within the limits of reason is possible, which at the same time would recognize the external character of religious symbolism before taking on the task of providing a philosophical interpretation of it within the limits of reason alone” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 495–96).8 Ricoeur worries that all too often philosophy, in its presumptions, has taken upon itself a globalizing notion of responsibility for pronouncing upon matters of religion (472). Preferring instead, in a manner similar to Kant, to retain a distinction between non-philosophical (Denken) thinking and rational knowing (Erkennen),

8 Ricoeur completes this quotation in a way that henceforth situates his own approach: “Like Hegel, I assume the question of determining whether speculative philosophy can transmute figurative thinking into its own essence, while leaving it just as it is. In both cases, my response is, regretfully, somewhat negative. To this extent, I assume an irreducible dichotomy between what has been considered. . .as religious discourse and all other discourses falling under the jurisdiction of reason alone. This dichotomy does not exclude the fact that religious discourse allows itself to be instructed by philosophical reason precisely as a critique of anthropomorphism” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 496).

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Ricoeur maintains that philosophy needs to observe certain limits regarding matters which it cannot claim to control according to the dictates of reason. But this does not prevent a person from entertaining ideas that stretch beyond the bounds of reason. Ricoeur describes the difference accordingly: “Denken [functions] as the thought of the unconditional, Erkennen as the work of the understanding, as knowledge through objects. This disjunctive act, which Kant calls the limit, is the answer to the first of the three questions: What can I know?” (Ricoeur 1995: 212). Ricoeur then clarifies his position: My evolution has involved a clearer split, between what has to do with the responsibility of philosophical thinking and what belongs to non-philosophical sources of philosophy. What makes this enigmatic from an epistemological point of view is that it arises at the point of articulation of philosophy and non-philosophy. Kant’s approach in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone seems to me exemplary in this regard: here we see the philosopher thinking at the limit, proposing an autonomous rational interpretation of figurative contents that reason does not draw out of itself. (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 472)

He then carefully elaborates a notion of the work of philosophy: “Philosophy has attempted in various ways to colonize this outside entirely for its own benefit and to make it its own. Renouncing this hubris seems to me the first stage in a philosophy that is at once responsible for its arguments and prepared to recognize its Other and to be instructed by it” (472). I have included this quotation in full because I believe it to be an apt and succinct summary of Ricoeur’s later philosophical orientation. In his own work, the identity of this posited “Other” is the means by which one’s selfunderstanding is tested and expanded.9 It is intriguing that Ricoeur is reluctant to use the term “Other” to portray God within a philosophical frame of reference. This is not to say, however, that Ricoeur dismisses “God-talk” from his work, especially his explorations of various biblical genres, such as his essay, “Naming God” (Ricoeur 1995: 217–235). Such explorations, however, are never regarded by Ricoeur as philosophical but as exercises by “an amateur of enlightened exegesis” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 448).10 As such, these exercises could rather be described as biblical hermeneutics of a theological nature, rather than philosophical hermeneutics – a position that he clarifies in the essay, “Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics” (1975/1976: 14–33). Ricoeur states that “biblical faith cannot be separated from the movement of interpretation which elevates it into language” (32). It is in this context that Ricoeur provides his own understanding of what such a faith constitutes: “For my part I should link the concept of faith to that of self-understanding in the

9 Otherness will take on various designations at different periods in Ricoeur’s work. See especially Ricoeur (1992: 317–55). The most relevant usage for this essay is discussed later in the chapter. 10 In such exercises of exegesis, Ricoeur posits that, instead of resorting to the abstract arguments of philosophy, he prefers, using hermeneutical philosophy, to “try to get as close as possible to the most originary expressions of a community of faith, to those expressions through which the members of this community have interpreted their experience for the sake of themselves or others” (1995: 37). On his account, these forms are polyphonous: narration, laws, hymns, prophecy, wisdom, laments, supplications, praise. As such, from Ricoeur’s religious perspective, there is no one specific form that can be identified as the authentic or correct mode of revelation.

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face of the text. Faith is an attitude of one who accepts being interpreted at the same time he interprets the world of the text. Such is the hermeneutical constitution of the biblical faith” (Ricoeur 1995: 46). At the same time, any theological interpretation of biblical texts must adhere to certain requirements that Ricoeur advises for all forms of hermeneutics. Thus, though a theological hermeneutics will speak about God in ways that attest to one’s commitment and acceptance of its words as carrying a mode of revelatory importance, it must nonetheless be subject to critical analysis. Ricoeur describes what such a critical exercise involves: It is here that that I see an essential connection between the criticism of religion practiced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and the self-understanding of faith. This critique of religion is, of course, constituted entirely outside of hermeneutics, as a critique of ideology, as a critique of otherworldliness, as a critique of illusions. But for a text-centered hermeneutical understanding this critique can simultaneously remain the recognition of an external adversary, whom one does not attempt to retrieve and baptize by force, and also become the instrument of an internal critique, which appropriately belongs to the labour of distanciation which all self-understanding before the text requires. Today a “hermeneutics of suspicion” is an integral part of all appropriation of meaning. (Ricoeur 1975/1976: 32)

Ricoeur will nonetheless allow that such religious language has a particular affinity to poetics. With certain qualifications, he understands the Bible as a poem, albeit one that is “unique” and eccentric (Ricoeur 1995: 221). As a result, insofar as biblical language in its polyphonic genres speaks figuratively about God, it shares certain attributes with poetry. Ricoeur describes his understanding of their common characteristics: Poetic discourse is . . . about the world, but not about the manipulable objects of our everyday environment. It refers to our many ways of belonging to the world before we oppose ourselves to things understood as “objects” that stand before a “subject.” . . . In so doing, it calls into question the reduction of the referential function to descriptive discourse [defined by adequation to real objects] and opens the world to a nondescriptive reference to the world. (Ricoeur 1995: 222)

The unique “nondescriptive” reference, in the context of scripture, is that of God. It is in this context that Ricoeur explains why, as a philosopher, he is reluctant to introduce or discuss the concept of “God,” or arguments for God’s existence, etc., into his philosophical work. The word “God” cannot be understood as a philosophical concept, not even “being” in the sense that of medieval philosophy or in Heidegger’s sense. The word “God” says more than the word “being,” because it presupposes the entire context of narratives, prophecies, laws, wisdom writings, psalms, and so on. The referent “God” is thus intended by the convergence of all of these partial discourses. (227–228)11

11 This

statement is indicative of Ricoeur’s own self-described location within the western tradition and its inheritance from both Judaism and Christianity. In an interview Ricoeur discusses his own attitude that reflects the polyphony of the biblical texts that have been especially influential in his own life and work. He places himself in a close relationship to an intertextual inheritance: “There is certainly a very specific relation between Judaism and Christianity. I strongly resist the tendency in Christianity that consists in saying that Judaism is a thing of the past because it has

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Ricoeur often refers to his particular obsession about maintaining a distinction between his commentaries on scripture with their exploration of poetic language, and his strictly philosophical work.12 In fact, in one interview, he describes himself as being virtually “schizophrenic” (Ricoeur in Reagan: 134) in his adherence to this distinction between philosophy and theology of any variety. I am very committed to the autonomy of philosophy and I think that in none of my works do I use any arguments borrowed from the domain of Jewish or Christian biblical writings. And, if one does use these writings, it is not an argument from authority. I mean that, for example, I put on the same plane Greek tragedy or the histories of Israel, neo-Platonic metaphysical speculations or the patristic interpretations of biblical writing. As a consequence, there is no privileged place for religion in general, or for the Judeo-Christian tradition, in philosophical argumentation. (Ricoeur in Reagan: 125).

It is this position that David Tracy, his former colleague at the University of Chicago, describes in a remarkably respectful tribute: Like Kant, Ricoeur always keeps the genres clear in order not only to allow figurative and conceptual forms their distinct but dialectically related roles, but also to keep properly distinct religion, philosophy and theology.. . . Unlike some of his admirers Ricoeur himself never allows philosophy or theology to be confused or conflated. (Tracy 1996: 202)

He then continues: “He possesses all the virtues of the classical Reformation tradition.. . . rigorous in philosophical method; generous, but straightforward in criticism; aware and honest about distinctions and the need for limits. In a word beautiful in the Reformed sense [sic]. (203) It is in an article, “Hope and Structure of Philosophical Systems” (Ricoeur 1995: 203–216), that Ricoeur sets forth the basis of his philosophical agenda in relation to religion. Invoking the notion of intellectus spei, rather than the traditional intellectus fidei, Ricoeur appreciates a philosophy informed by hope as one that is not in search of absolute knowledge.13 Ricoeur states that the first step of a philosophy of hope: “consists in an act of renunciation by which pure speculative reason gives up its claim to fulfill the thought of the unconditioned along the line of empirical objects” (212–213). been replaced by Christianity. Christianity is grafted onto a minor branch of Judaism, the eschatological branch, it leads back, therefore, to what was already a dialectical relation within Judaism between the Rabbinical movement of the second Temple tied to restoration. . .and another variant of Judaism. Christianity, in this way, is placed within the continuation of a certain pluralism internal to Judaism” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay 1998: 165). 12 Ricoeur relates his philosophical reasons for this stance in an interview: “I have always been mistrustful with respect to speculation termed ontotheological, and I had a critical reaction to any attempt to fuse the Greek verb to be and God, in spite of Exodus 3,14” (1998: 150). 13 Ricoeur is at once subtle and precise in appealing to Kant for instruction on this position. “Can one, Kant asks, philosophize within the limits of reason about a structure of experience that lies to begin within the language of symbols and myths? Yes, he replies, to the extent that religion falls under the broader question of determining what I am permitted to hope for. This question emerges at the intersection of philosophy and religion, inasmuch as hope concerns the capacity of regenerating a moral will, whose structures are entirely the province of practical philosophy” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 446).

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The wager of an alternative mode of intelligibility fostered by hope is placed by Ricoeur within a horizon of promise; of an as yet unfulfilled claim that can never be known with certainty. This is definitely a philosophy that acknowledges human finitude, both theoretically and practically, but it is also one that prevents a premature closure that could promote, in Ricoeur’s view, idolatry or ideology. As a result, such a philosophy can thus open vistas of dynamic possibility within a teleological perspective that Ricoeur will continue to explore. In contrast to Hegel’s dialectic, which culminates in the triumph of reason as Geist, Ricoeur prefers an open-ended version of Kantian Denken that allows for imaginative investigation of prospective itineraries of meaning. In this context, the notion of the Kantian limit takes on resonances of approximation and probability rather than statements of certainty which he believes prematurely puts a halt to thinking. This approach is clearly visible in a number of Ricoeur’s initial forays into religious language. Though Ricoeur is appreciative of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and admits that there are certain shared interests between linguistic analysis and phenomenological hermeneutics, particularly in the areas of semantics and pragmatics, he is at pains to enumerate their differences. He acknowledges that he is indebted to this analytic mode of philosophizing, having discovered in it “a level of argumentation and a sense of philosophical discussion sorely lacking in French philosophy” (Ricoeur 1978: 11). Still, although he sees a similar interest in linguistic articulation on the part of both phenomenology – particularly with regard to Husserl’s method – and philosophical analysis, he prefers the hermeneutic phenomenological approach, because he anticipates it will allow him to address human activity from an existential dimension – a move that will ultimately lead him to ethics. “The subordination of linguistical-phenomenological method to a hermeneutical-reflective philosophy, in its turn, prevents this theory from being restricted to what is termed ‘action’ at the level of ordinary language, but instead extends the philosophy of action into the regions of human praxis explored by Hegel and Marx” (Ricoeur 1978: 12). This differentiation between the two ways of philosophizing is also stressed by Ricoeur in relation another aspect of language. In “Philosophy and Religious Language,” he states that it is the expressive dimension of language that sets it apart from being merely a mode of rational clarification: “Whatever ultimately may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language, it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression” (Ricoeur, 1995: 35). While conceding this necessity of conveying the meaning of any experience in linguistic expression, Ricoeur prefers not to reduce the dimension of faith to propositions. As a result, he is extremely reluctant to begin any treatment of religious discourse with theological claims to the effect that “God exists” or that “God is immutable” etc. (37). Another clarification Ricoeur undertakes on behalf of his approach entails rejecting two negative assumptions about religion promoted by the Vienna Circle.14 The

14 The

Vienna Circle was a name given to a group of philosophers who began to meet in the 1920s whose main intention was to purge philosophy of metaphysics. Their approach was highly empirical and supported by logic based on mathematical principles.

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first of these is that religious language was viewed as a category mistake because it deals only with metaphysical statements. On this account, religious language is thereby eliminated from serious philosophical consideration, according to the tenets of symbolic logic. Ricoeur’s contention is that though religious language maybe extravagant and metaphorical at times, it should not necessarily to be regarded as solely metaphysical. The second assumption, which is related to the first, concerns the procedures of verification/ falsification. This form of assessment also used by the Vienna Circle holds that any statement that is non-falsifiable cannot meet the criterion of verification. In that religious language has always been regarded as not able to be falsified, it is therefore considered meaningless (Ricoeur 1981: 93). Ricoeur worries such a narrow conception of logical truth, according to the idea of adequation, cannot accept the meaningfulness of many forms of discourse. In his estimation, these other modes of discourse that are not metaphysical could nevertheless be evaluated according to their own criteria that differ from that of adequation. (To support such a claim, Ricoeur often refers to Wittgenstein’s notion of innumerable language games, with their variant standards.) He states: “The reduction of all truth-claims to the only category of scientific discourse which can be verified and falsified by empirical means can be and has been – rightly to my mind – challenged by the unbiased observers of the variety of ways language is used for the variety of purposes of these uses. Nobody, in this regard, has gone further than Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations” (Ricoeur: 1981: 94).15 Ricoeur’s move towards a more a more expansive appreciation of language can be undertaken only because of two hermeneutical presuppositions that Ricoeur advances that themselves depend on the multivalency of language. The first is that a text, as a form of linguistic expression, can interrogate a reader, because it puts into question already assumed ideas and ideals. Another presupposition is the acceptance that sentences or even extended descriptions have a dual referential capability, a theory that he adapted from R. Jakobson.16 Ricoeur describes his adaptation of Jakobson: I spoke, following R. Jakobson, of the “divided,” “broken” reference; according to this hypothesis metaphorical expressions were not confined to the creation of meaning, based on a new semantic relevance, but they contributed to a redescription of the real and, more generally, of our being-in-the-world, by reason of the correspondence between a seeingas on the plane of language and a being-as on the ontological plane. (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 46)

15 Ricoeur will then proceed to quote Paragraph 23 from the Investigations. In one of his interviews

with Charles Reagan, Ricoeur also declares: “I am completely on the side of Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, where language games have an unlimited world and philosophy has, among others, the responsibility to preserve the autonomy, the rights, of these language games” (Ricoeur in Reagan 1996: 134). 16 Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) was one of the two founders of the Prague School of linguistic theory. Ricoeur was specifically interested in his theory of split reference, as it applied to literary texts. He appreciated this dynamic idea of poetic and literary description in that it allowed him to move beyond the unilateral meaning ascribed to texts by the then predominant theoretical approach of structuralism.

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In this model, there is, at one level, the sense in terms of literal meaning of the statement. At the same time, from Ricoeur’s perspective, a sentence or text can have a reference which he posits as applicable to a person’s way of being-in-the-world. This mode of dual referentiality in the interpretation of a sentence (or text) can also introduce, in Ricoeur’s view, a productive clash of meanings in that it can challenge a person’s present worldview. This can stimulate a mode of self-reflection which can result in an existential change in belief, attitude or behavior. Given such a pluri-vocal view of language and its application in his hermeneutic orientation, it is of no surprise that Ricoeur’s approach to the topic of evil is similarly multifaceted. For Ricoeur, “The problem of evil does not simply constitute a speculative problem. It calls for the convergence of thought, action and feeling” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 474–475). For this reason, Ricoeur finds that traditional theodicies and their rational efforts to reconcile evil with an all-powerful and beneficent God are inadequate. Ricoeur also does not believe, any more than Kant, that it is possible to locate the origin of evil in the sense of providing a decisive answer on an intellectual level to this quandary. As I described earlier, Ricoeur thinks that philosophy, when instructed by the west’s symbolic heritage, can help provide a deeper awareness of the basic aporia at the heart of the problem of evil: “How can the will be bound and free at the same time?” Ricoeur’s own resolution is to appeal to hermeneutics, with its mediatory and wide-ranging interpretative investigations of the symbolic representations of evil. “The challenge has to be taken up as a provocation to think more and to think anew.. . . Action and feeling are summoned to give this aporetic situation not a solution but a response destined to make the aporia productive, that is, to continue the work of thinking in the domain of action and feeling” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 475). Yet Ricoeur remains aware that even the insights thus gained, though they may provide some consolation, will also never provide a completely satisfactory solution. As a way of further enriching his reflections on this dilemma, Ricoeur will turn to his favored collaborator in religion and philosophy, Kant. This is because in Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone Ricoeur finds ideas that are in accord with his own project of “thinking more” on the topic of evil. Yet it is not only how Kant thinks but what he is thinking that resonates with Ricoeur – particularly his appeal to hope. How can a will exist freely? How can it become capable of exercising freedom? This is the existential question at the center of Kant’s philosophy of religion.. . . For what is evil if not the incapacity of the will? To restore to concrete freedom its fundamental power, what Kant calls regeneration, is the object par excellence of religion. And that this restoration should actually be possible is what it is reasonable to hope. Concrete effective freedom thus becomes an object of hope. But does this belong to the power of reason itself? With this question, two paths diverge, the one Kant follows and the one that recognizes a transcendent source of this power. (Ricoeur 1995: 296).

Ricoeur prefers to follow Kant’s option rather than adopt a transcendent view – though he adds his own more recent inflections to Kant’s position. “One of the major motifs of Kant’s philosophical hermeneutics of religion is to give an account, within

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the limits of reason alone, of this interweaving of the confession of radical evil and the assumption of the means of regeneration. And consequently, to the extent that this interweaving is constitutive of the motif of hope, we can say that hope is the specific object of this philosophical hermeneutics of religion” (Ricoeur 1995: 77). Ricoeur understands that this means of regeneration, proposed by Kant in the key of hope, refers to the potentiality for new positive operations of a human will that has become demoralized to be restored. Thus revitalized, a person can then act according to maxims derived from an innate predisposition (Anlage) to the good which will counteract the degenerate effects acquired by reacting impulsively to the dictates of a similarly inborn propensity (Hang) to evil. As Ricoeur observes: “In this sense, evil remains contingent, albeit always already there. This paradox could be called the “paradox of the quasi-nature of evil” (Ricoeur 1995: 80). Yet the principal question still to be asked is: How can this happen, that the will be regenerated? The problematic aspect of Kant’s additional postulates includes his apparent admission that such a radical renewal can only occur thanks to the intervention of some non-human agency, i.e., an act of grace. But Ricoeur will not necessarily admit to such an intervention,17 preferring a more philosophically nuanced resolution, though he is as ready as Kant to celebrate the seemingly inevitable subjugation of evil. “In philosophical terms: evil requires a nonethical and nonpolitical transformation of our will, what Kant calls regeneration; it is the task of religion within the limits of reason alone to elaborate the conditions of possibility of this regeneration, without alienating freedom either to magical conception of grace and salvation, or to an authoritarian organization of religious community” (Ricoeur 1995: 80). Ricoeur himself will attribute this regeneration to the stirrings of conscience. “However radical it may be, evil cannot bring it about that we cease being open to the appeal of conscience” (80).18 Yet, for Ricoeur, from a philosophical perspective, this “gift,” or “unfathomable aide” (86), defies any rational explication of its possible wellspring. To support his summoning of conscience Ricoeur turns to Heidegger’s invocation of conscience, a topic that he has treated in some detail (Ricoeur 1992: 341–355). Conscience, for Ricoeur, can encompass a number of references that indicate an inscrutable provenance, e.g., the immeasurable depths of Dasein, as evoked by Heidegger (342), etc. Ultimately, however, Ricoeur, in his philosophical guise, is unwilling to name God as its source. He concludes his reflections on conscience with line similar to the following meditation: “I cannot say as a philosopher where the voice of conscience comes from – that ultimate expression of otherness that haunts selfhood. Does it come from a person who is other whom 17 Ricoeur

is all too aware of the various dilemmas, if not aporia, that Kant is trying to resolve on this issue. For further discussion of the problematics involved see, in particular, (1992: 820–888). 18 Similarly to Kant, Ricoeur will nonetheless allow that this regeneration, as well as the call of conscience, can occur because of the deeply rooted or inherent goodness of human beings. “In other words, the fact [is] that the original goodness in man is more profound than the radicality of evil, a radicality that affects and infects a penchant, again to speak like Kant, without being able to equal the fundamental disposition to the good” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay: 148).

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I can still envisage, from my ancestors, from a dead or a living God, but one absent from life as the past is from reconstructed history, or even from some empty place?” (Ricoeur in Hahn 1995: 53). It was in the last 20 years of his life, Ricoeur moved from simply theoretical discussions of philosophical problematics – though he had always been concerned with existential matters pertaining to everyday life, i.e., the “life-world,” or Lebenswelt of Husserl – to struggle with more pronounced ethical and political issues. In large part, this shift was prompted by Ricoeur’s growing dismay at the undiminishing amount of violence that continued to plague the world. To Ricoeur, this was a manifestation of evil in the form of unjustified infliction of harm on innocent people. As he observed to Charles Reagan: “I must say that in my previous work there is very little about ethics and politics” (Ricoeur in Reagan: 114). He then continued, as if justifying the change that he would now make in his focus. It is this speculative problem of action and passion, but also the problem of victimization – the whole story of this cruel century, the twentieth century – and all of the suffering imposed on the Third World by the rich, affluent countries, by colonialism. There is a history of victims that keeps accompanying or reduplicating the history of the victors. But the history I try to revive has a strong ethical debt to the victims. (114)

As part of this response Ricoeur will move in two directions – one that is public, that is practical and ethical; the other of a more personal nature. At the heart of his practical, ethical claim for justice is an appeal to wisdom, seemingly inspired by Job, but also directed to constructive ethical change. “Wisdom, which is no longer to develop arguments or even to accuse God but to transform, practically, emotionally, the nature of desire that is at the base of the request for explanation. To transform desire practically means to leave behind the question of origins, toward which myth carries speculative thought, and to substitute for it the question of the future and the end of evil” (1987: 207). In his contribution to help counter the manifestations and effects of violence that witness to humanity’s on-going inhumanity, Ricoeur accepts initially the necessity of mourning that inevitably accompanies the acknowledgement of such unjust suffering. His own philosophical preference, to move to ethics, is no doubt informed by his religious convictions. It also results from his conclusions on the inability of abstract philosophical reasoning, or even of speculative explorations, to provide conclusive answers to the problem of evil. While he concedes that the different religions can provide sustenance for suffering of this nature (Ricoeur in Hahn: 475), Ricoeur’s intention is to attempt to address the root cause of evil as it lies within the behavior of human beings themselves. In so doing, he relates that such a project involved a return to his early mentors. “By taking into account the primordial suffering which appears to be inseparable from human action, I returned to the lessons from my first masters on limit-situations (Jaspers) and embodiment (Marcel), as well as my former investigation on the absolute involuntary” (Ricoeur in Hahn: 49) In one sense, both of these influences address the way in which a form of “otherness” can have an unpredictable impact, basically in that it defies any definite

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explanation. But Ricoeur has moved beyond his earlier and less applied investigations inspired by Jaspers and Marcel into demonstrations of human fallibility, although he now recognizes that even in his earlier work there was an impetus to liberation involved, however unthematized at the time. It is at this point that the distinction to which I am most attracted – that between, on the one hand fragility, vulnerability, fallibility – in short, finitude – and on the other, the historical effectiveness of evil already present – constitutes the primary resistance that I oppose to the temptation of mastery that thought claims to achieve, before considering any project of liberation, and this is so as early as the work of delimiting and identifying the problem of evil. (Ricoeur in Hahn: 473)

Ricoeur has since become vitally engaged with the question of the fragility of all things human, and how to protect them in a way that does not resort to the often hollow solutions supplied by ratiocination. “The question becomes: What shall we do with this fragile being, what shall we do for him or her? We are directed towards the future of a being in need of help to survive and to grow” (1996a: 16). It is in Oneself as Another (1992 [1990]), that Ricoeur begins his explorations into interpersonal “otherness,” as a way of grounding his ethics. This is most strongly developed in the chapter: “What Ontology in View?” (1992: 297–356). From a phenomenological perspective, Ricoeur admits that there is an inherent difficulty in its capability to constitute another person: “There appears to be a difficulty that phenomenology encounters in trying to get beyond this original asymmetry between self and others, and in forming an idea of reciprocity that is just as essential to the idea of truth as that of justice” (2005: 260). Yet Ricoeur wagers that, in this context, human responsibility for other human beings is the core issue, in that it is in the midst of others “we become effectively responsible” (1992: 17). Ricoeur looks to Hegel for inspiration to help develop formulations of this responsibility and undertakes an adaptation of his concept of recognition (296). Ricoeur, however, will surpass the Hegelian model of recognition as it is expressed in the dialectic. He does this by insisting on the integrity and irreducibility of the other person. This is expressed in a relationship of reciprocity that, on Ricoeur’s definition, surpasses mutuality. Ricoeur describes the movement that occurs: The passage from recognition-identification where the thinking subject claims to master meaning, to mutual recognition, where the subject places him- or herself under the tutelage of a relationship of reciprocity, passes through a variety of capacities that modulate one’s capacity to act, one’s agency. (2005: 248, translation amended)

In such a relationship, Ricoeur describes another person who has close ties as worthy of being bestowed with the same solicitude that one would lavish on oneself. “Ultimately the question at stake concerns mutual recognition – a recognition through which the other ceases to be alien and is treated as my peer according to a fundamental human fellowship” (1996a: 17) Then, on the impersonal level, in the public realm, where justice supplants reciprocity, the other is deemed as equally deserving of all the rights and benefits to which one believes one is entitled. Here:

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“As for the corollary of reciprocity, namely equality, it places friendship on the path of justice, where the life together shared by a few people gives way to the distribution of shares in a plurality on the scale of a historical, political community” (1992: 188). In proposing such an inclusive ethical gesture, Ricoeur is making a particularly positive supposition. This is that human beings are by nature predisposed to act in a supportive way towards their fellow beings. Unfortunately, however, as became evident in the earlier discussion of evil humanity’s innate propensity to evil as well as their predisposition towards the good, i.e., humans can deviate from goodness. Ricoeur can only propose – or is it hope? – that, in the end, the human predisposition to goodness and its accompanying solicitude will ultimately prevail. “Solicitude assumes that, counter to all cultural pessimism, I pay credit to the sources of goodwill – what the Anglo-Saxon philosophers of the eighteenth century always tried to affirm in opposition to Hobbes, i.e., that man is not simply a wolf to man, and that pity exists. It is true that these are very fragile feelings and that it is one functions of religion to take charge them and recodify them in a way” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay, 1998: 159). Within his chosen philosophical orientation, however, Ricoeur is nevertheless still unwilling to defer to religion to provide an endorsement of his position – though he acknowledges that religion dominates most deliberations on the subject of solicitude towards others. It would appear, however, that it is Ricoeur’s intention to make philosophy similarly responsive to and responsible for others. It could be said that what Ricoeur is striving to express is a phenomenological ethics of intersubjectivity. To this end, Ricoeur wants to make certain important distinctions in his work from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas as well as from Heidegger. The philosophy of Levinas has had a remarkable effect on Ricoeur – and Ricoeur has been at pains to stress his consensus with Levinas on the necessity of an ethical response to the summons of responsibility coming from another person. But ultimately, he will disagree with Levinas’s insistence on the primordiality of ethics as implying the absolute priority of the other person, at the expense of personal integrity. In relation to Heidegger, Ricoeur will find fault with his emphasis on Dasein as being principally preoccupied with realizing one’s “own most possibilities.” In Ricoeur’s view, although Heidegger allows that there is care, even a form of solicitude for others, he does not establish sufficient grounds for an ethics of intersubjectivity, where there is a distinct mode of reciprocal relations. Despite his disagreements with these thinkers, Ricoeur admits that he has not yet articulated a satisfactory ontological worldview of his own with which to support to his criticisms. “Not that I have ever found my ontological feet in any final or absolute sense. It is no accident that the title of the last chapter of Oneself as Another is in the form of an interrogation rather than an assertion – ‘Towards which Ontology?’ [sic]. Here I try to explore possibilities of an ethical ontology beyond the Heideggerian model of ontology without ethics and the Levinasian model of ethics without ontology” (Ricoeur in Kearney 2004: 167). In his turn to the practical as part of his attempt to delineate an interpersonal ethics that has an ontological grounding, Ricoeur will also acknowledge the need for

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close attention to particular circumstances. In his exploration of matters concerned with personal morality and public justice, there is a marked attention to phronesis, or practical wisdom, that is characterized by a starkly realistic observation of the discrepancies that beset the human condition and interfere with any definitive regulations. “Practical wisdom (or the art of moral judgment in situation) appeared to me to be required by the singular nature of cases, by conflicts among duties, by the complexity of life in society where choice is most often between grey and grey than between black and white, and finally by those situations that I call situations of distress, in which choice is not between good and bad, but bad and worse” (Ricoeur in Hahn: 52). The stress on practical wisdom or phronesis is part and parcel of Ricoeur’s expanded version of Aristotelian teleological ethics, described by Ricoeur as “the wish to live well with and for others in just institutions” (51).19 It is this invocation that allows him to incorporate the exacting demands of recognition, as enacted in both personal solicitude and public justice, as being integral to any vision of a good society. It is in this ethical move that Ricoeur places his hopes to provide a means of ameliorating the human situation, and, even more specifically, to counteract the continuing malign effects of evil in the world. The related more personal, though intimately connected commitment of Ricoeur is that of cultivating a profound sense of affirmation for life in this world, as opposed to a preoccupation with the question of life after death. It could be said that, in effect, this is the way that Ricoeur deals with the philosophical question of life after death. Ricoeur remarked in a late interview on the topic of immorality: “My own experience of the end of life is nourished by this deepest wish to make the act of dying an act of life. This wish I extend to mortality itself has to be thought sub specie vitae and not sub specie mortis. This explains that I by no means like nor do I use the Heideggerian vocabulary of being-toward-death, instead I would say being unto death” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay: 156). He also depicts in poignant language the hope which infuses his own disposition so that, at the moment of death, “the veils that conceal the essential buried under the historical revelation” will be removed (156). Rather than endorsing the actual possibility of life after death, let alone providing arguments in its defence, Ricoeur claims: “I therefore project not an after-death but a death that would be an ultimate affirmation of life” (156). He seems troubled that such extraordinary efforts are expended by people during this life in imagining various types of eternal existence. Instead of such fantasizing, Ricoeur describes his admiration for Hannah Arendt’s

19 This

teleological ethics is also tempered by a reworking of Kant’s understanding of the moral law to modify its abstract universalism. Ricoeur does this in order to make it more compatible with notions of aiming at the good and just life that needs an application of phronesis to address specific situations. In a footnote in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur indicates the basis for this adaptation: “It is striking, too, that in focusing on the nature of the bond between virtue and happiness, whether or not they are ‘absolutely identical,’ Kant had no reason to cross Aristotle on his path.. . . The formalism of morality prevented him from posing the problem of the sovereign good in terms of dynamism and aim, despite . . . in appearance [being] so close to Aristotle (1992: 212, footnote 1).

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notion of “natality” as confirming his own appreciation of life in this world. He refers to natality in a number of his works, remarking on the surprise he felt when he encountered it for the first time, thus recognizing a kindred spirit in Arendt. “I came across, with a certain amazement, the exclamation of Hannah Arendt, as someone who was Jewish, quoting the Gospels, which themselves quote Isaiah 9:6: “A child has been born unto us.” For her, too, birth signifies more than death. This is what wishing to remain living until death means” (Ricoeur in Azouvi and de Launay: 157) For Ricoeur, the ability to live in this way implies a certain detachment that he associates with a similar sentiment of “letting go” (Gelassenheit) in the work of the medieval mystic, Meister Eckhardt (156). In addition, Ricoeur aligns this detachment with Freud’s prescription for the necessary task of mourning involved in forfeiting any easy consolation of an eternal life after death. It is from such a position of non-attachment that Ricoeur can contemplate human mortality realistically with its attendant joys and sorrows in a way that could be read as a rebuke of Heidegger’s austere notion that authenticity can only be attained by facing the fact of the utter randomness of life and of mortality. Ricoeur’s vision is not quite as bleak. “I have to include within this work of mourning the assurance that joy is still possible when everything has been given up – and it is in this that suffering is the price to pay; not that it is to be sought out for itself, but it must be accepted that there is a price to be paid” (157). In his final years, however, Ricoeur had a surprising up his sleeve. Near the conclusion of what must be one of his last interviews in 2003 with Richard Kearney, he discusses his newfound interest in an exercise of comparison between the languages of biblical exegesis and philosophy. He had forecast this shift in a previous interview that took place in 1991, when Charles Reagan had asked him about future projects. At that time he replied that he was fascinated by the overlapping of different forms of discourse, particularly an example such as that of the language of love or agape which is common to religion and philosophy. He also said that: “I am very interested in a comparison between the Psalms and Greek tragedy, on the level of the complaint and lamentation” (Ricoeur in Reagan: 135). He then continued: “I am interested in exploring the areas of intersection between the religious, the poetic, the ethical, and the historical. I think that I have paid sufficiently for their distinction and I have a right to say something about their conjunction” (135). He did undertake one such an exploration in an essay on “Love and Justice” where he brought his ethical reflections on solicitude and justice into dialogue with the notion of agape. One of his conclusions was: I would like to build a bridge between the poetics of love and . . . the prose of justice, between the hymn and the formal rule. . . . [I]n our reflections on the hymn we saw, this relation to praxis was not considered. As we saw, love was simply praised for itself, for its elevation and its moral beauty. And in the rule of justice, no explicit reference was made to love, this latter if anything being left to the realm of possible motives. Yet both love and justice are addressed to action, each in its own fashion, for each makes a claim on action. Our dialectic must therefore move beyond our separate examination of love and justice to consider their interaction. (1996b: 32)

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Then, finally, in the 2003 interview with Richard Kearney, he seemed to have reached a further insight, as he observed: “I am not sure about the irreconcilability between the God of the Bible and the God of Being” (Ricoeur in Kearney 2004: 169). He then observes: “The tendency of modern French thought to eclipse the Middle Ages has prevented us from acknowledging certain very rich attempts to think God and being in terms of each other. I no longer consider such conceptual asceticism tenable” (2004: 169). It would certainly have been fascinating if Ricoeur had had the opportunity to develop these reflections further. While this would not imply a complete rejection of his former philosophical enquiries, I do believe there is a definite tempering of the strict delineation of the boundaries that he had formerly drawn between philosophy and religion. Yet it would not appear that Ricoeur was now ready to allow God to be associated with Being as it has been pronounced in traditional ontotheology – particularly with reference to Christian apologetics. Nor was there any indication that he would sanction proofs and truths. What intrigued Ricoeur was the possibility of finding in the work of philosophers such as Leibniz, Spinoza and Bergson – and who did not adhere to traditional metaphysical formulations – different modes of speaking about God that could be compatible with the plurivocal forms and expressions that he had always honoured in the biblical pronouncements. He gives some signal of the direction of his thinking with reference to the ethical ontology he had been working on. “This recent turn to religious thinking is intimately connected with my growing interest in the whole field of action and praxis which increasingly drew me away from the abstract universalism of Kant towards a more Aristotlian ethics of the ‘good life’ (bien vivre)” ( 2004: 167). Ultimately, however, this was all to be reconceived in a manner that also incorporated his phenomenological explorations of human capability (homo capax) within the context of the vicissitudes and tragedies of human existence and the crucial ethical response. He further opined: “And here it might be useful to rethink the Aristotelian notion of dunamis and Spinoza’s notion of conatus in rapport with Leibnitz’s notion of appetites – possibility as a dynamic tendency or inclination.. . . But my own interest in these questions is ultimately inseparable from the moral question – how do we relate a phenomenology of “being able” to the ethical events of ‘imputability’ and ‘attestation’?” (169) Unfortunately, Ricoeur did not live long enough to break this new ground in a major work. In concluding this essay and proposing the possible influences Ricoeur could have on philosophy of religion, one thing that comes immediately to mind is Ricoeur’s insistence on the plurivocity and richness of language which can result in creative interventions in thought and action. This viewpoint is at the heart of his own appreciation that “‘God’ can be said in many ways.” That is why Ricoeur is averse to restricting “god-talk” to narrowly defined linguistic arguments concerning his existence or attributes. Another contribution comes from his lifelong engagement with the problem of evil and violence. His position was not a theodicy of defending the ways of an inscrutable god, but rather of seeking to provide always deeper insights and tenable remedies for suffering fellow creatures. His search led Ricoeur to seek to express both an ontology and an ethics – building on a phenomenological ethics of capacity and intersubjectivity – that would support the flourishing of human life

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in just societies. Such an ethics need not necessarily be religious, but the manner in which Ricoeur frames his vision of a world where love and justice are coextensive is one inspired by the wisdom of Jewish and Christian scriptures. For the greater part of his life it appears that Ricoeur preferred to withhold his confessional allegiance from his strictly philosophical deliberations, anticipating that he could have a broader appeal if he followed a form of methodological agnosticism – especially in his evocations of a good and just existence. He seemed to have some doubts about the efficacy of such a method in the end, but he did not regret the path he had followed. Ricoeur’s remarkable philosophical odyssey in religion and philosophy certainly spurs any reader to think more – according to the Kantian directive that he was wont to encourage. His commitment to the vibrancy of life, the vitality of words, and the vulnerability of the human condition cannot but prove instructive, if not inspiring, to those who understand philosophy and its relation to religion as not simply word games or dogmatic fiats. There is both a love and a honest wisdom that shine through in the monumental tasks Ricoeur set himself, even if he did not always succeed in making the dialectical encounters that he constructed as productive as he intended.

Bibliography Azouvi, François, and Marc de Launay. 1998. Critique and conviction: Paul Ricoeur (trans: Blamey, K.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hahn, Lewis Edwin. 1995. The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Peru, IL: Open Court. Raynova, Yvanka. 2003. All that gives us to think: Conversations with Paul Ricoeur. In Between suspicion and sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s unstable equilibrium, ed. A. Wiercinski, 670–696. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press. Reagan, Charles. 1996. Paul Ricoeur: His life and work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. Fallible man (trans: Kelbley, C.A.). Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and nature: The voluntary and the involuntary (trans: Kohák, E.V.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. The symbolism of evil (trans: Buchanan, E.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation (trans: Savage, D.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1975/6. Philosophical hermeneutics and theological hermeneutics. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 5/1:14–33. Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. My relation to the history of philosophy. The Iliff Review 35/3: 5–12. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. The bibical worldview and philosophy. NICM Journal 6/3: 91–112. Ricoeur, Paul. 1982. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (trans: Kersten, F.). The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Action, story and history: On re-reading the human condition. Salmagundi 60: 60–72. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Life: A story in search of a narrator. In Facts and values. Philosophical reflections from western and non-western perspectives. ed. M.C. Doeser and J.N. Kraaj, 121–132. Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Ricoeur, Paul. 1987. “Evil,” The encyclopedia of religion, Vol. 5. Mircea Eliade (Editor-in-Chief), 199–208. New York, NY: Macmillan. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative, Vol. 3. (trans: Blamey, K., and Pellauer, D.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From text to action, Essays in hermeneutics II (trans: Blamey, K. and Thompson, J. B.). London: The Athlone Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as another (trans: Blamey, K.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the sacred: Religion, narrative and imagination, ed. D. Pellauer (trans: Wallace, M.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1996a. Fragility and responsibility. In Paul Ricoeur: The hermeneutics of action, ed. R. Kearney, 15–22. London: Sage. Ricoeur, Paul. 1996b. Love and justice. In Paul Ricoeur: The hermeneutics of action, ed. R. Kearney, 23–39. London: Sage. Ricoeur, Paul. 1997. A response by Paul Ricoeur. In Paul Ricoeur and narrative: Context and contestation, ed. M. Joy. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. Critique and conviction, ed. F. Azouvi and M. de Launay (trans: Blamey K.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1999. Memory and forgetting. In Questioning ethics: Contemporary debates in philosophy, ed. R. Kearney and M. Dooley. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004a. History, memory, forgetting (trans: Blamey, K., and Pellauer, D.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004b. On life Stories (2003). In On Paul Ricoeur: The owl of minerva, ed. R. Kearney, 157–169. London: Ashgate. Ricoeur, Paul. 2005. The course of recognition, (trans: Pellauer, D.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thinking Otherwise: Derrida’s Contribution to Philosophy of Religion Ellen T. Armour

The effects of the division between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, a prominent feature of the U.S. philosophical landscape, have significantly affected philosophy of religion. For many decades, the analytic approach dominated the field. Continental philosophy impacted Christian thought (and religious thought more generally) through the work of such figures as theologian Paul Tillich, ethicists Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, and theorist of religion Rudolph Otto, to name a few, but none of these figures claimed to be doing philosophy of religion. Engagement with continental philosophy led these scholars to new questions, new challenges, and in Tillich’s case, especially, new conversation partners (psychoanalysis, depth psychology, etc.). It also gave a distinctive shape to the new field of comparative religion. Meanwhile, those who laid claim to the realm of philosophy of religion, on the other hand, used analytic philosophy’s finely honed tools of logical argumentation to look more deeply into traditional Christian claims and questions. These scholars submitted the contents of traditional Christian faith to the scrutiny of reason in order to establish those contents on firmer ground. The resurgence of interest in contemporary continental philosophy that characterized the American academic scene in general in the latter decades of the past century has allowed continental philosophy of religion to emerge as a legitimate counterpart to its analytic cousin. Predominant among those philosophers that have attracted academics’ interest in recent decades is Jacques Derrida (1930–2008), known in American circles as the founder of deconstruction. A Sephardic Jew by birth, Derrida was born and raised in Algeria. His experience of living as a Jew in a predominately Arab French colony was, at times, difficult and clearly formative.1 He moved to Paris in 1949 where he pursued advanced degrees in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieur. He made his mark as a philosopher of note with the publication in 1967 of three of his major works: De la grammatologie, La voix et les

E.T. Armour (B) Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] 1 See,

e.g., his quasi-autobiographical text, “Circumfession” (Derrida 1993).

M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_3,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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phénomène, and L’écriture et la différence.2 All three books in various ways brought to the fore themes and conversation partners that remained central to Derrida’s work and to its reception. The titles indicate what became understood at first as the signal and most controversial aspect of Derrida’s work: a reconfiguration of language’s significance to philosophy, a concern that linked him with certain of his philosophical forebears (notably Martin Heidegger and Freidrich Nietzsche). More elliptically, the titles allude to another central preoccupation of Derrida’s with what is “other” to philosophy, a concern of many of his contemporaries in France, most notably Emmanuel Levinas.3 In different ways and degrees, each of these early texts seeks what lies at the limits of philosophy, of language and its ability to say – a preoccupation that remains central to Derrida’s oeuvre and, as we shall see, to its connection to religion. Perhaps because of these foci and a decidedly unconventional writing style (by the standards of analytic philosophy, especially), Derrida came to the attention of U.S. scholars not through American philosophers, but through literary critics, including most notably Paul de Man of Yale University.4 Deconstruction, a term that was for Derrida merely a descriptor of a certain technique, if you will, of inquiring after limits and what lay outside them, became in the American academy of the 1980s and 1990s a program – and a controversial one, at that. What some perceived as a fresh approach to scholarly inquiry seemed to others at best esoteric nonsense and at worst dangerously nihilistic. With time and more widespread exposure to Derrida’s texts, however, the more hysterical reactions died down somewhat even as interest in his work spread to other fields in the humanities and social science – including philosophy, particularly philosophers trained in continental thought and interested in religious issues, as I will note below.5 A similar trajectory from the somewhat hysterical overreaction to wider and more productive engagement can be discerned in religious studies. Scholars of religion were first introduced to Derrida through the 1982 volume, Deconstruction and Theology, which presented deconstruction as “in the final analysis the death of God put into writing” Raschke (1982: 3; author’s emphasis). Derrida’s work has 2 Subsequent references to these texts will be to their English translations. For more on Derrida, including a complete bibliography, see Lawlor (2008). 3 Indeed, one of the most important essays in Writing and Difference is Derrida’s critical but sympathetic engagement with Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Derrida (1978: 212; 79–153). 4 A controversy erupted posthumously around Paul de Man in the late 1980s when writings surfaced from his previous career as a journalist in his native Belgium during World War II. Some of those writings seemed to indicate a collaborationist stance toward Naziism. The veritable firestorm of controversy that erupted caught deconstruction – and thus Derrida – up in its wake. See de Man (1988) and Hamacher (1989), which contains an essay by Derrida. For more from Derrida on de Man, see Derrida (1986). 5 Pre-eminent among Anglo-American philosophers who engaged Derrida’s work productively was Richard Rorty, whose particular blend of continental and Anglo-American philosophy was widely read in the 1990s. See, e.g., Rorty (1989). A prominent polemical exchange occurred between Derrida and John Searle. See Derrida (1988a).

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subsequently been taken up by scholars with a number of different interests in religion. The diversity of appropriations reflects the variety of ways that religion figures in Derrida’s work. This makes the task of writing an essay about Derrida’s impact on philosophy of religion rather daunting. I will not attempt an exhaustive catalogue of the uses made of, insights gained from, and questions raised about Derrida’s work on religion. I will focus primarily on the avenues opened up for philosophy of religion by Derrida that are distinct from those traditional to philosophy of religion. These distinctions are not absolute divergences, for the most part; there are topical and thematic linkages between the two fields including, for example, topics I discuss below (religious language, mysticism, theism and its limits). However, I would identify at least three distinctive hallmarks of Derrida’s approaches to religion. In contrast to philosophy of religion’s traditional (virtually exclusive) focus on Christianity, Derrida’s work engaged and has been engaged by diverse religious traditions (Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, as well as Christianity).6 Where philosophy of religion seeks to establish the rationality of the contents of (Christian) religious belief, Derrida seemed drawn to religion because it pushes beyond the limits of rationality (narrowly conceived). The parameters established by those limits and what lies outside them also yields a kind of religious philosophizing that places greater emphasis on ethical matters and implications than is usually the case in traditional philosophy of religion. Finally, Anglo-American philosophy of religion assumes and reinforces a boundary between the religious and the secular, a project Derrida’s work calls into question. While all of these elements of Derrida’s work with religion have influenced continental philosophers of religion, by far the greatest attention has been paid to the second – thereby drawing in only a limited way, I will argue, on the resources Derrida’s work offers to philosophy of religion. Thus, my aim in this essay is both to honor the impact that Derrida’s work has had and to expand its reach.

Derrida and Religion: Two Generations If the editors of Deconstruction and Theology were the vanguard of the initial influx of Derrida’s work into religious thought, then John Caputo, Kevin Hart, Merold Westphal, and Richard Kearney constitute the most prominent names in a second wave of philosophers who have become identified with philosophy of religion in a Derridean vein (see, e.g., Caputo 1997; Hart 2000; Westphal 2001; Kearney 2001). On the surface, one can hardly imagine two more opposite perspectives. If the first wave allied deconstruction with the death of God (and thus presumably the end of religion-as-we-know-it), the second enlists deconstruction as a chastening fire through which Christianity must go for its own sake. Yet both appropriations claim roots in Derrida’s exposure of and attempt to move beyond onto-theology, a term

6 For Buddhist and Hindu engagements with Derridean thought, see essays in Coward and Foshay (1992). For Derrida on Judaism, Islam, as well as Christianity, see Derrida (2002).

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first coined by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger identified onto-theologic as a primary symptom of philosophy gone astray from its original aim and originary source, thinking the meaning of Being. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, philosophy came to treat Being in terms of beings. It identified Being with transcendence thought through certain categories: as the ground that gives rise to beings (onto-logic) and as the highest being, the self-caused source of beings (theo-logic). (See Heidegger 2002: 67–75). This has consequences for theology as well as philosophy. Insofar as theology has adopted the God of the philosophers, it has lost its way for, as Heidegger is famous for saying, “man [sic] can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (2002: 74). Derrida takes up the question of the onto-theo-logical foundation of philosophy in his early work – most notably, in Of Grammatology and Dissemination – going arguably farther than Heidegger in establishing onto-theo-logic’s reach as extending into what he calls “the text of western metaphysics” outside of which “there is nothing.” The editors of (and many of the contributors to) Deconstruction and Theology, like many of Derrida’s early readers in the United States, read this as a claim about the linguistic nature of reality. If there is “nothing” outside “the text,” then any claims that language can successfully refer to anything – much less God – are clearly illusory. Thus, not only God, but truth, goodness, and reality itself also are endangered by deconstruction, which led to another charge against Derrida: that of political and ethical nihilism. Scholarly consensus since, however, has established this as a reductive version of Derrida’s claim. The “text” is the context within which we in the West speak, know, and do. Derrida calls it a “text” in part to alert us to its linguistic character. We speak in common parlance of what is “lost in translation” between languages. What is easily thinkable within one language (middle voice constructions in German, for example) is all but impossible in another (English has no middle voice). Similarly, the “text” of metaphysics sets the limits of what can and cannot be thought, of how we approach our world and all that resides in it. Like all languages, the text of metaphysics has a basic “logic” (onto-theo-logic) that takes on flesh via a “grammar” that determines what can and cannot be thought, done, and seen. Central to this text is the notion of absolute presence, unadulterated unity and pure being – i.e., God. This God, as the source of all that is (the theos that grounds ontos), serves as the guarantor of truth because his Word (logos) is reality. This understanding of the text of western metaphysics and its political and ethical import has clear implications for philosophy of religion, according to this second generation of Derrida’s interpreters. Christian thought is as affected – or better, infected – by the text of metaphysics’s onto-theo-logic as any other aspect of western culture. Understood as a therapeutic exposé of and intervention in ontotheology, Derridean deconstruction chastens Christianity by urging it to abandon the false security that “Athens” (philosophy and its concept of god) offers. They invite Christianity to return to “Jerusalem”; to its roots in the uncertain ground of faith in a god who, while hardly unloveable, remains ultimately un-knowable and forever out of reach of those who would enlist “him” in support of their own agendas. Such accounts of Derrida’s value for philosophy of religion have much to commend them both as readings of Derrida and as philosophies of religion in their own

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right. In refusing to cede this particular high priest of high theory to banal secularity, they call attention to the troubling of clean borders that is a key feature of Derrida’s thought. As philosophies of religion, they provide an alternative approach to the questions of theism and its limits – one that refuses from the outset the stark choice between theism and atheism in favor of figures of transcendence that elude substantialist metaphysics. Much in their work explicitly resists fundamentalisms of all stripes, particularly those that too closely align Christianity with American right wing politics, thus challenging those who see in deconstruction only political or ethical nihilism. Yet one would miss the full impact of Derrida’s work with religious motifs if one took their work to be exhaustive of it. My reference to the God of onto-theology as “he” is not coincidental, and it speaks to a dimension of Derrida’s work with religion that I will argue deserves more prominence in accounts of its significance. Among the thinkers whose proximity Derrida courts is the French psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan, often described as performing a linguistic turn upon Freudian theory.7 For Freud, becoming a fully functional and productive social subject centered on one’s status as a sexed and gendered being. “Anatomy is destiny,” he claimed; that is, taking up one’s place in society as a man or a woman involved coming to terms with one’s embodiment as male or female – specifically, with whether one had a penis or not. The central drama was played out in childhood within the confines of the patriarchal family and, if successful, resulted in the assumption of the social roles and responsibilities granted to the two genders within a patriarchal system.8 Influenced in part by structuralism, Lacan argued that the primary site of the primal drama was not first and foremost the individual psyche but larger social systems and the language in which they are embedded. The penis takes on such psychosexual freight because we are immersed in a culturo-linguistic system whose central value is the phallus. Although the penis is made of flesh and blood, the phallus is only a phantasmatic object, according to Lacan. It does not exist anywhere or in any form other than as the (absent) center of the culturo-linguistic system that it anchors. But, like the astronomical phenomenon called a dark star, it exercises an unmistakable and irresistible gravitational pull on that system. Derrida saw an inextricable link between Lacanian psycho-social-linguistics and the “text” of western metaphysics. The latter, Derrida claimed, is not just ontotheological and logocentric, but also phallo(go)centric. That is, its standard of value is the phallus around which economies of truth and desire revolve. Like ontotheology, the relationship to language is central. One’s ability to “speak the truth” is determined by one’s status vis-à-vis the phallus. To “have” the phallus (a masculine position) enables one to pose as a speaking subject; to lack the phallus (a feminine position) renders one incapable of speaking one’s mind and approximating truth. That the text’s grammar extends beyond “mere language,” though, is reflected in our

7 For

an introduction to Lacan, see Lacan (1982). of Freud’s essays that trace the changes in his thinking on these matters over time have been collected in Freud (1997). 8 Several

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sexual economy, for example, which rests on a heteronormative binary sex/gender system in which the desiring subject is masculine and the object of desire feminine. Derrida’s critical alliance of phallogocentrism with ontotheology is, I will demonstrate, a central aspect of his work with religion. Indeed, it is central to many of those dimensions of his work that have received the most attention and, I will argue, to his usefulness for philosophy of religion. Familiarity with these two generations of scholarship on Derrida and religion might also lead one to conclude that his work is primarily of interest to and import for Christianity. This, too, would be a misinterpretation. As early as 1992, a volume of essays entitled Derrida and Negative Theology was published. It featured essays by scholars of Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Christianity who inquired after the connections to and import of Derrida’s proximity to negative theology for scholarship in those traditions. In more recent years, the triad of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism emerged as an important theme of Derrida’s analyses. Attending to these dimensions of Derrida’s work will also allow me to reframe Derrida’s association with postmodernity. Although often either hailed or vilified as a harbinger of the postmodern zeitgeist (generally identified in these cases with radical relativisms of various sorts), Derrida explicitly resisted such assignation.9 His work on and with religion is particularly entangled with the question of his relationship to modernity and whatever might follow it. Hence, I will take that question as my point of departure.

Ontotheology and Beyond: The Death of God, The Death of Man? Derrida’s initial reputation as an enemy of religion rests on his association with a certain version of postmodernity that identifies the death of God, of reason, and of the subject as key markers of this epochal shift. Yet Derrida has explicitly resisted being associated with either postmodernity in general or these specific markers.10 The reasons for his reluctance are borne out in his work. Derrida neither advances nor announces the demise – timely or untimely – of any of these central tropes of western thought. He does, however, explore the extent of their reach and expose their boundaries. Their reach extends beyond discrete religious or philosophical domains and their boundaries turn out to be marked by both racial and sexual difference. As noted above, the text of western metaphysics (outside of which “there is nothing”) is not only ontotheological, but also phallogocentric and includes in its scope not only philosophy and religion, but language itself. Derrida’s reading of Plato in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (the first essay in Dissemination), for example, uncovers the centrality of God the Father to the text of metaphysics and signs that his reign is troubled from 9 On Derrida’s position on postmodernism, see, e.g., his “Response to David Tracy,” in Caputo and Scanlon (1999: 181–84). 10 “I try to keep myself at the limit of philosophical discourse. I say limit and not death, for I do not at all believe in what today is so easily called the death of philosophy (nor, moreover, in the simple death of whatever – the book, man, or god, especially since as we all know, what is dead wields a very specific power)” Derrida (1981: 6).

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the outset (Derrida 1981: 61–172). Derrida follows out the network that inscribes speech’s privileged status in relation to writing and finds at the heart of this network the presumed presence of a father god whose Word is Being and who thus guarantees that speech arrives at its destination. However, this god is himself afflicted by difference and deferral as are his “children” speech and writing. So also are those who use speech and writing as communicative tools. The linguistic economy is sustained by an economy of desire that circulates around the phallus, the standard of truth in our culture. Our ability to mean what we say (to approximate truth) depends on our proximity to the phallus. Those who (believe they) have the phallus, a position marked as masculine, are better able to approximate truth. Those who (believe they) are the phallus, a position marked as feminine, are assigned to the realm of the inchoate and incoherent. This economy is religious in two senses. At its heart lies the all-too-familiar religious figure of the God of ontotheology. The effects of God-the-Father reach to the level of basic presuppositions of western thinking, the distinction between writing and speaking. Note, as well, the role that belief plays in sustaining ontotheology. Insofar as we continue to believe that speech differs from writing in that our presence in speaking ensures we can mean what we says and say what we mean, then, contrary to the first generation of readers of Derrida, God-the-Father remains in some sense alive. Belief also sustains the phal(logo)centric economy that defines the standard of truth in ontotheologic. According to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (on which Derrida depends), the phallus is a phantasmatic object, thus no one can really have – or be – the phallus. Indeed, the existence of the phallus is, like God’s existence, a matter of faith. Thus, the subject positions available to us within this economy have no ultimate ontological ground, but are sustained by our belief in them. This does not mean they are illusory; quite the contrary. A substantial infrastructure has grown up around them and continues to support them. My use of “economy” here is both literal and metaphorical. I speak of a sexual, racial, and linguistic “economy” because this system is a dynamic one that trades in certain “currencies” (truth, language, desire) and involves the circulation and accumulation of cultural and financial “capital.” That is, to acquiescence to the gendered/sexed/raced roles assigned to us in this system is to accrue a certain amount of cultural capital – the goods that come with having an identity at all, for example, and limited, of course, by the status accorded to that identity. One’s place in the system will likely effect and reflect one’s economic status. In this sense, the phallogocentric economy is analogous to the contemporary global economy, itself based no longer on the gold standard (an ostensibly solid material foundation) but on a floating – dare we say “fictional” – standard, the U.S. dollar, whose status is sustained both by belief and by the considerable infrastructure that has grown up around it.11 Derrida’s work also delineates the racial dimensions of the text of western metaphysics as they coalesce around both God and “man.” In “The Ends of Man,” originally delivered as a talk at an international conference on philosophy and

11 On

the fiduciary, see Derrida (1998a: 26–29). I will have more to say about this essay and this topic in particular below.

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anthropology held in 1968, Derrida notes “man’s” troubled status (Derrida 1982: 109–136). Posited as a purportedly universal ground for occasions such as an international philosophy colloquium, the very event of such a colloquium is of a piece with other symptoms of a “mute trembling” at “man’s” edges. There are, after all, places in the world where it would make no more sense to prohibit such a colloquium than to hold one. Lest we think this is merely a philosophical problem, we should note that Derrida connects man’s trembling with the events of the spring of 1968: the Paris student uprisings, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the war in Vietnam. Central to Derrida’s inquiry into “man’s” boundaries here and elsewhere is, once again, the work of Martin Heidegger, known for his attempts to break metaphysical humanism’s hold on western philosophy and notorious for allying himself all too closely with Nazism. Here, too, Derrida sees a conjunction between politics and philosophy. For all of his attempts to transcend metaphysical humanism, Derrida demonstrates again and again that “man” will not be disposed of so easily. Moreover, “his” reappearances often occur on stages replete with racist overtones. Metaphysical humanism is the flip side of ontotheology, he notes. This account of the target of Derridean deconstruction also allows us to add additional dimensions to what it means to say there is “nothing” outside the text. As noted above, to the degree that the text is co-extensive with western discourse and culture, then what lies outside the text is rendered largely invisible, illegible, and unintelligible – non-existent in any meaningful way, it would seem. That we can trace the boundaries of the text, however, suggests that what lies “outside” is something other than empty space, an absolute nothingness. Indeed, it is critical to note that Derrida’s primary interest lies not in simply exposing the text’s boundaries, but in evoking and invoking what lies outside it: to what is “othered” by it and thus “other” to it.12 Given religion’s role as a kind of placeholder for transcendent alterity or absolute otherness, it is perhaps not surprising that the pursuit of the text’s “others” carries Derrida down pathways with religious resonances. (See Levinas 1996: 8). Exceeding the boundaries of ontotheology intersects with an impulse or aim that always attended much religious thinking, namely, pointing toward what lies beyond our ability to say. Scholars in religion noted quite early a proximity between Derridean différance, his neologism for the differing/deferring that (un)grounds meaning, and the strategies of so-called negative or apophatic theology.13 As I noted above, in Coward and Foshay (1992), scholars not only of Christianity but of Hinduism and Buddhism, traditions also known for ways of unsaying and unknowing divine transcendence, explore connections between these traditions 12 For

a more substantial version of the aspects of Derrida’s work discussed to this point, see Armour (1999). 13 Derrida (1982, 1–28). On the connection to negative theology, see Hart (2000) and Carlson (1999). See also the exchanges between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in “On the Gift,” in Caputo and Scanlon (1999: 54–78). Caputo attempts to parse out the significance of the differences between these two thinkers in “Apostles of the Impossible” in the same volume (Caputo and Scanlon 1999: 185–222).

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and Derrida’s work. Derrida, however, expressed ambivalence about this religious embrace – particularly its Christian version. In “How to avoid speaking” (Coward and Foshay 1992: 73–142), for example, Derrida at times seems like the recalcitrant partner dragged onto the floor against his will and struggling to break free before he gets entangled in something that makes him uneasy. This text is full of resistances to the usual construals of a proximity between “deconstruction” and “negative theology.” Derrida takes pains to distinguish what he is attempting to think with différance from the use of negation in the service of a hyperessential god (God as Being Itself, e.g.). On the other hand, Derrida reads the texts of apophatic Christian theologians with considerable care and insight and his usual attention to detail. Moreover, some of Derrida’s movements of resistance are made on behalf of both “deconstruction” and apophatic theology. Because both attempt to open access to alterities that both lie beyond and motivate human endeavor, he resists equating either with mere language games. Because the alterities toward which each reaches are not the same, in his view, Derrida resists being drawn too deeply into negative theology’s orbit even as he finds avoiding it altogether ultimately impossible. Negative theology, as Derrida reads it, finds itself caught in the same (double) bind of being compelled/impelled simultaneously toward speech and silence, attraction and avoidance. It is as though one haunts the other perpetually; the need for silence haunts the need for speech, the need to confront haunts the desire to avoid, negative theology haunts deconstruction, deconstruction haunts negative theology. My analysis to this point might suggest that engagement with Derrida’s work on religion will result in, at best, a quiet mysticism – one that may indeed resonate with a certain strand of Christian theology and practice, but that ultimately has little to say to a world confronting daily conflicts between, to put it in a reductive shorthand, religion and democracy. However, further reading in Derrida’s corpus belies such a resolution and allows me to make my case for an expanded reading of the significance of that work for a philosophy of religion that aims for relevance to these contemporary issues.

Giving Place, Saving Names: or, What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? In “Sauf le nom,” an expanded version of “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices,” the final essay in Derrida and Negative Theology, Derrida takes up once again the topic of negative theology.14 Though it opens within a discursive setting immediately recognizable as religious, it does not stay there – a fact with important ramifications for understanding the significance of Derrida’s work with religion for philosophy of religion. To what does “negative theology” refer, Derrida asks? 14 “Sauf

le nom,” in Derrida (1995b: 35–88). The title is left untranslated to preserve its multiple meanings: the name must be saved (“save the name”), the name is safe (“safe, the name”), the name is exceptional (“save, the name”). See Dutoit’s introduction, “Translating the Name?” in Derrida (1995b: xii–xiii).

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Certainly, first to a certain approach to theo-logy (talk of God) – one that originates in Platonic and Christian traditions – that aims beyond the usual appellations of the divine as a being possessed of certain attributes toward some(no)thing that, while it provokes those appellations, transcends and exceeds them. In that sense, then, one might define (or confine) negative theology to a (mere) linguistic strategy of interest only to devotees. Derrida notes, for example, that it is a performative discourse with a double address: as instruction to the disciple, on the one hand, and as prayer to God on the other. Its performance is a fiduciary act in two senses, one might say. First, it aims to be faithful to the name: to “save the name” in the sense of preserve it, hold it in reserve for that to which it most truly refers. Second, it aims to draw another into its circle of fidelity. Thus, saving the name also involves a kind of disbursement and dispersal from one to another in the name of the totally other (tout autre). Yet to what and for what is this name saved? To what does it refer, this name that “names nothing that might hold, not even a divinity (Gottheit), nothing whose withdrawal does not carry away every phrase that tries to ensure itself against him?” Derrida continues, “‘God’ ‘is’ the name of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification” (“Sauf le nom,” in Derrida 1995b: 56–57). This abyssal double movement of preservation and dispersal, it will turn out, is, on Derrida’s reading here and elsewhere not easily or simply confined to some sphere that we can delineate as religious (v. secular) or sacred (v. profane), but to a transcendental condition – or an unconditioned transcendence – that goes by other names, as well: democracy, justice, the gift, for example. Derrida is not claiming that all of these names are equivalent – to God or to one another. Rather, inherent in all of these names is the same abyssal structure of call and response, if you will; the same demand for a(n impossible) fidelity to a universality yet-to-come that is simultaneously announced and betrayed in any particular instance of its becoming. This openness is both temporal and spatial; that is, while the call announces itself in a particular time and place, it arises out of abyssal structures that give time and place. Derrida proposes terminology with religious or philosophical resonances to indicate these abyssal structures. As a figure for temporal openness, he turns to the messianic while the ancient Greek term khora, from Plato’s Timaeus, figures what gives space or place. By the messianic, he means a posture that anticipates an advent often in the name of a justice yet-to-come. The term is drawn from Jewish and Christian traditions, of course, but the temporal structure Derrida evokes with that term does not originate with them. Furthermore, its appearances or evocations are not limited to religion. Messianisms show up in secular, even anti-religious settings, as well – Marxism, for example, which anticipates a future of economic and social justice brought about by a revolution, not a slow, steady march of progress. The messianic transcends these particular messianisms in another way, as well. Given the histories of each of these messianisms, one can argue that each has betrayed the call of justice in responding to it. Thus, Derrida proposes a messianicity without messianism, or without a messiah.15

15 On

the messianic, see Derrida (1994).

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Khora, the figure indicating that which gives space or place, though its pedigree is philosophical, not religious, bears a structural similarity to the messianic. Moreover, the linguistic strategies used to evoke or invoke it echo those of negative theology – a feature highlighted by the publication in English of Derrida’s essay, “Khora,” in the same volume with “Sauf le nom.” In this essay, Derrida inquires after Plato’s use of that term in the Timaeus. Translatable variously as “space, place, location, region, country,” according to Derrida (1995b: 93), khora figures in the Timaeus as the name for the (non)place that serves as receptacle for and gives birth to the stuff of the cosmos (which is given creative intelligible order by the demiurge, readers of the dialogue will recall). I call it a (non)place because of its peculiar status; khora eludes fixation in any (one) place or as any (one) thing as it changes with its content. Indeed, its status vis-à-vis being is not altogether clear. “There is khora . . . but what there is, there, is not.. . . This there is . . . gives nothing in giving place or in giving to think” (Derrida 1995b: 96). Referring to it as a third genus to the intelligible and sensible, Plato deploys a series of metaphors aimed at invoking and evoking traces of khora’s presence, allowing readers to glimpse its outlines. Derrida notes that these metaphors (nurse, mother, imprint bearer) follow a gendered trajectory coincident with khora’s womblike function in the Timaeus’ cosmogony. It may seem like we are some distance from the explicitly theological landscape of “Sauf le nom,” but religious resonances abound. Fundamental to Derrida’s inquiry is the question of khora’s place vis-à-vis the topological grid formed by mythos and logos on which philosophy’s status as a purely rational discourse stands. As in his reading of Plato in Dissemination (described earlier), Derrida’s reading of Plato here demonstrates that the line between mythos and logos is not altogether clear. Plato’s recourse to khora as a necessary third term belies the Timaeus’s positing of the cosmos as nothing more or less than the outworking of an intelligent order. Beyond and before this rational creative principle lies khora, necessary to the principle’s realization, yet other (a/rational, not necessarily ir/rational) to it. And, like the God of apophatic theology, khora is not directly available to either sense experience or intellection; as a third genus, it is definable only in terms of what it is not. Thus, Plato’s turn to metaphors as indirect routes to khora’s evocation registers now as a kindred gesture to the via negativa. Most of the Timaeus’s interpreters “gamble on the resources of rhetoric without ever wondering about them” (Derrida 1995b: 92). They “speak tranquilly about metaphors, images and similes” (ibid.) without once noticing that that to which these rhetorical flourishes refer undoes the very logic of sensible and intelligible that constitutes the economy of the rhetorical flourish. As was the case with apophatic theology, khora’s metaphorology is no mere language game; rather, the medium is the message. “Deprived of a real referent, . . . [khora] has as its property. . .that it has nothing as its own and that it remains unformed, formless. This very singular impropriety, which precisely is nothing, is just what khora must, if you like, keep; it is just what must be kept for it, what we must keep for it” (Derrida 1995b: 97). As that which eludes naming (save, the name), khora is a name to be saved (save the name) for that which transcends not only ontologic, but theologic. “There is khora; . . . But what there is, there, is not. . .. This there is . . . gives nothing in giving place or in giving to think, . . . whereby it will be risky to

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see in it the equivalent of an es gibt, of the es gibt which remains without a doubt implicated in every negative theology, unless it is the es gibt which always summons negative theology in its Christian history” (96).16 What significance for philosophy of religion per se lies in considering these two texts together? After all, they originate from rather different sites – one (ostensibly) theological, one (ostensibly) philosophical, one Christian, the other Greek. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? In some second generation accounts of Derrida’s work with religion, “Athens” has come to stand for an excessive rationalism borne of Christianity’s incorporation of Greek philosophy. John Caputo, for example, calls Christianity back to its roots in “Jerusalem,” that is, in faith as the name of the limit of knowledge – a limit to be acknowledged and embraced.17 I want to suggest another way of reading “Athens” and “Jerusalem” and of construing the relationship between them. First, it is noteworthy that the lineage of negative theology’s Platonic roots runs through the Timaeus (via first Jewish and then Christian Neoplatonism). Its attribution of cosmological order to a rational cause funded its appropriation into a Christian frame – with all the torques and torsions to Plato’s demiurge that such absorption entailed. Thus, these texts together invoke the historical origins of philosophy of religion itself. But they also evoke and invoke its more originary – and abyssal – origin in an attempted fidelity not to a Father God whose word is being, but to that which exceeds word and being. Reading the two essays together allows us to figure that transcendence in spatial terms via a dual trajectory of desertification (stripping away of place) on the one hand and of giving place on the other. Recall that the via negativa is a taking away of all names in order to reach what the mystic Angelus Silesius called “the unknowable God.”18 “‘God’ ‘is’ the name of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification of language,” Derrida writes (Derrida 1995b: 55–56), pure (non)place. “God,” then, opens onto khora, in a sense (indeed, Derrida goes on to invoke khora as evoked by desertification). Emplaced at this point of origin but ultimately displaced are not only onto-theologic, but phal-logo-centrism. Recall that the network of metaphors that (un)speak khora are predominately feminine. Recall as well that the process of desertification that constitutes the via negativa begins with a double address: to God and to the disciple, both of whom are male in Silesius’ text.19 Thus, the two genders to which the phallogocentric system gives place are ultimately displaced here.

16 Some

readers will recognize the allusion to Heidegger here. The theme of the gift, yet another abyssal figure of (im)possibility, has received a great deal of attention from scholars in religion who take up Derrida’s work. For a way into that literature, see Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. 17 See, e.g., his introduction to Caputo and Scanlon (1999: 10). This typology guides much of his work on Derrida in Caputo (1997). 18 Angelus Silesius was the pseudonym for a 17th century German mystic, Johannes Sceffler. His extant writings are collected in Silesius (1984). For more on Derrida’s usage of this text, see Derrida (1995b: 145, n. 3). 19 In response to an interlocutor, Derrida acknowledges that the disciple is indeed male, but warns against concluding “that the scene is unfolding between men, and above all that the one who speaks is a man” (Derrida 1995b: 35). He does not elaborate on this point, but I take it as an allusion to the way the process of desertification undoes secure gendered positions for both the disciple and God.

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Yet another trajectory opens up out of “Save the name” that needs to be pursued. Recall that this text originated as the postscript to the volume, Derrida and Negative Theology, which included essays by scholars of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Christianity. Derrida asks after what enables the translatability of “negative theology” from its Latinate-Christian-Platonic (i.e., European) origins into other religious traditions and sites. It is questionable whether any Buddhist, Muslim, or Jewish discourse has been written under its aegis. What, then, authorizes negative theology’s migration to other traditions? This is not a question of family resemblances or analogous phenomena, but rather of the demands inherent in the internal logic of the very discourse of apophasis itself. Derrida claims that “what assigns [negative theology] a proper place [within a specific historical site] is what expropriates it and engages it thus in a movement of universalizing translation.” (Derrida 1995b: 63) He goes on to describe “the principle of negative theology” as “a movement of internal rebellion” that “radically contests the tradition from which it seems to come” (67). And fidelity to that principle prompts negative theology’s opening into and onto a process of universalization along “the horizon of translatability.” This then allows for the extension of this European idiom into other languages, traditions, and contexts. In that process, its European origin is effectively decentered in favor of fidelity to a more original origin. Once again, the line between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, fails to hold. What seemed at first glance to be a purely religious concern turns out to have geographic and thus political overtones. Indeed, Derrida explicitly links negative theology’s translatability to other structures bearing (and betraying) the ideal of openness to alterity, namely friendship and the notion of a universal community, for example, topics given their own treatment elsewhere.20

Religion and (Post)modernity: The Return of the Religious In 1994, Derrida participated in yet another colloquium on religion, this one held on the Isle of Capri and hosted by the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo. Derrida’s contribution to the volume of essays that emerged from the conference is entitled “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” (Derrida 1998a). Derrida (1998a: 41) tells us that the title references two classic modern philosophical texts on religion, Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone (1998) and Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and of Religion (1935). Central to this essay is the association of postmodernity with the return of religion. Such an association presumes that modernity at least contained or confined religion to a particular sphere even if, in the end, it failed to eliminate it altogether. The wall banishing religion to modernity’s outside was erected using an epistemic grid that assigned the two sources of religion, faith and (the experience of) the sacred, to the irrational or a-rational. 20 “It is just this singular exemplarism that at once roots and uproots the idiom.. . . There, in this testimony offered not to oneself but to the other, is produced the horizon of translatability – then of friendship, of universal community.” (Derrida 1998a: 77). See also Derrida (1997b: 2000; 2001: 1998b), for example.

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Symptoms of religion’s return are usually associated with anti-modernism. Chief among them are the various forms of “fundamentalisms” with their anti-democratic and anti-intellectual aims.21 Once again, Derrida’s query begins with a question of language and naming but pursuit of the question takes us beyond both as “mere” cultural artifacts. In this instance, the query begins with the definition of “religion” itself. On the one hand, the very occurrence of such a colloquium presumes that the meaning of “religion” is self-evident, at least to all gathered around this table. It further assumes that religion per se is not confined to any particular historical or cultural form of itself (of which there are many). Thus, the colloquium takes for granted the term’s universality. And yet such an assumption – or belief – belies the specific historical, cultural, linguistic origins of the term. Like negative theology, its origins, too, lie within a Greco-Latinate-Christian idiom – one shared by the participants in the colloquium (men, all, who hail from Europe, itself the creation of and heir to this idiom). Thus, the success of religion’s ability to name what it claims to name (to save the name) rests on its ability to transcend its original idiom – a promise the fulfillment of which Derrida’s query calls into question Indeed, the colloquium itself betrays such a promise insofar as its (all male, recall) participants are of Jewish or Christian background. No representative from Islam (much less other religious traditions) is present, nor are there any women. Derrida singles out for particular attention – quite appropriately, given its centrality to modern accounts of religiosity – Kant’s account of religion. As is well known, Kant locates religion in the sphere of practical reason cordoning it off from speculative or “pure” reason (that associated with the pursuit of, e.g., scientific knowledge). Derrida notes that Kant recognizes two forms of religion: cultic religion, directed toward achieving divine favor, and moral religion, directed toward living rightly in communion with others. Both have their source in faith, but, where cultic religion’s faith is dogmatic and mistakes divine revelation for genuine knowledge, moral religion’s faith is (self) reflective and issues in action. Reflective faith allows the human being to exercise its capacity for freedom governed by reason, a capacity that distinguishes the human species from all other types of living creatures. Thus, in Kant’s scheme, true religion is universal, rational, and moral. While, at least theoretically, one may find true religion practiced by adherents of any particular revealed religion, divine revelation is not necessary to the exercise of true religion – that is, the cultivation of the ethical life. Anyone may access religion’s truth via the exercise of the human facility for practical reason.

21 I put “fundamentalisms” in quotation marks because, as I understand it, the term originated with

the 20th century American Christian movement that was quite explicitly a reaction to conflicts between traditional Christian doctrine and modern science and religion. Its leaders identified a set of “fundamentals” that they deemed essential to Christian faith (including, e.g., biblical literacy and the virgin birth of Christ) and thus became known as “fundamentalists.” The term is applied by analogy to forms of other religious traditions (Islam, for example) that are deemed “conservative.” How appropriately is certainly a question. In any case, that naming practice is, I would suggest, emblematic of some of the dynamics I will describe below.

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This does not mean that all religions are equal; quite the contrary. In Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone, Kant establishes self-reflective faith as the truth of religion not only through his account of the moral life, but through demonstrating its essential kinship to Christianity. Under Kant’s analytic gaze, the Christian faith reveals itself as the mirror image of rational religion, thus confirming rational religion’s claim on religiosity and ipso facto establishing Christianity as the only true religion. At first glance, then, it would seem that Kant has successfully contained religion within the boundaries of reason alone. Faith in God or in Christ, or religious experiences connected to that faith serve only as supplements to religion’s truth. “‘It is not essential and hence not necessary for everyone to know what God does or has done for his [sic] salvation, [writes Kant], but it is essential to know what man himself must do in order to become worthy of this assistance’” (Derrida 1998a: 10). Ironically, then, for all practical purposes, true religion requires the death of God, Derrida writes. That is, to be truly moral, one must act as if God did not exist – as if the increase of good and the decrease of evil in the world were entirely in one’s own hands. But how universal is this account of the truth of religion? Has this determinate, revealed religion really been dismissed from the scene or has it just gone underground disguised as the universal? Are we ready to measure without flinching the implications and consequences of the Kantian thesis? The latter seems strong, simple and dizzying: the Christian religion would be the only truly ‘moral’ religion; a mission would thus be reserved exclusively for it and for it alone: that of liberating a ‘reflecting faith’. It necessarily follows therefore that pure morality and Christianity are indissociable in their essence and in their concept. (Derrida 1998a: 10)

This indissociable association reflects and is reflected in what Derrida calls mondialatinization (translated as “globalatinization”). In many ways coincident with globalization, mondialatinisation renders explicit the cultural and linguistic (as well as economic) forces that have rather literally (re)made the world as a network. Naming the process of world-making “latinization” calls attention not only to current western dominance but to that dominance as a reflection of the legacy of Roman imperialism, a prior occasion of world (re)making to which the west (and Christianity, the last religion of the Roman empire) is heir and by which it remains haunted. Insofar as that heritage helped inspire and sustain previous western imperialisms – also world (re)making enterprises – mondialatinization links globalization with the centuries long western legacy of exploration, expansion, and colonization. Fundamentalisms’ rejection of modernity register differently against the backdrop of mondialatinization, Derrida argues, when he turns to consider “what is said and done, what is happening at this very moment, in the world, in history, in [religion’s] name” (Derrida 1998a: 23). The italics alert us to all that is at stake in the saying, doing, and happening: the very unity of world, the concept of history and time as these are deployed in the west. Indeed, ours is a time, we say, of renewed religious warfare, he notes (some 10 years before 9/11).

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E.T. Armour Like others before, the new ‘wars of religion’ are unleashed over the human earth (which is not the world) and struggle even today to control the sky with finger and eye,” he writes, but they do so through new technological means – “digital culture, jet and TV without which there could be no religious manifestation today.. . . No voyage or discourse of the Pope, no organized emanation (rayonnement) of Jewish, Christian or Muslim cults, whether ‘fundamentalist’ or not. Given this, the cyberspatialized or cyberspaced wars of religion have no stakes other than this determination of the ‘world’, of ‘history,’ of the ‘day’ and of the ‘present’.. . . All of history, the earth, the humanity of man, the rights of man, the rights of man and of woman, the political and cultural organization of society, the difference between man, god, and animal, the phenomality of the day, the value or ‘indemnity’ of life, the right to life, the treatment of death, etc. (Derrida 1998a: 24)22

But lest we identify religious wars only with “them” – whether Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Christian right – Derrida also asks whether the “military ‘interventions,’ led by the Judaeo-Christian West in the name of the best causes (of international law, democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, of nations or of states, even of humanitarian imperatives) are they not also, from a certain side, wars of religion?” (Derrida 1998a: 25)23 To answer in the negative would require the ability to isolate “the religious” from “the political, the economic, the juridical” – a project that a consideration of the role in politics, economics, and law of one source of religion, faith, renders problematic. Fiduciary trust (as, for example, in the move away from the gold standard described earlier) has literally made the world go around since the advent of capitalism and continues to do so in mondialatinisation. The signature, guarantor of the signatory’s now absent presence that not only makes checks legal tender, but makes bills into laws (in a democratic system) and turns pronouncements into edicts (in more tyrannical systems), rests ultimately on faith as well.24 The juridical system, likewise, rests on a foundation of faith. Testimony is given under oath. Witnesses have traditionally sworn an oath to God as a sign of their truthfulness, but even without that explicit address, religiosity appears. The witness promises to respond truthfully; the oath sets apart (renders “holy”) the speech acts that will constitute this testimony. And insofar as the juridical system rests on a notion of justice as unconditioned and absolute, outside the order of calculation, it too rests on faith. To

22 The

reference to the rights of women is not simply a throwaway line. Elsewhere in the essay, Derrida notes a phallic dimension to certain evocations of the sacred especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms and suggests this may be why, “in the most lethal explosions of a violence that is inevitably ethnico-religious – . . . on all sides, women in particular are singled out as victims not ‘only’ of murders, but also of the rapes and mutilations that precede and accompany them” (1998a: 49). One thinks, of course, of Bosnia, as well as the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 23 Apropos of the previous footnote, note the role defending the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban played in the justification of that war. On this, see Saba Mahmood’s closing comments in Mahmood (2006: 207–208). 24 For more on the signature (as part of his exchange with John Searle on speech act theory), see “Signature Event Context,” in Derrida (1988a: 1–23).

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be just is to do justice; that is, justice is instantiated in its performance – and its performance is a response to a “call to faith” in its (ideal, at least) unconditionedness.25 One could then, speak of the performance of justice as launched by a leap of faith. The allusion to Kierkegaard, here, is deliberate on my part. Insofar as the foundations of justice, democracy, testimony, etc., give rise to justice, democracy, testimony, etc., they are not themselves just, democratic, truthful, etc. They exceed those orders of naming and being – indeed, of nameability and the ability to be per se. But, while the moment of singularity is critical here, such leaps do not (only or simply) wrest one out of the company of others and the values and practices that sustain you (as with Kierkegaard’s solitary knight of faith). Rather, they ground as well as unground all that life-in-community requires and aspires to be.26 Without this performative experience of this elementary act of faith, there would neither be ‘social bond’ nor address of the other, nor any performativity in general: neither convention, nor institution, nor constitution, nor sovereign state, nor law, nor above all, here, that structural performativity of the productive performance that binds from its very inception the knowledge of the scientific community to doing, and science to technics.. . . We speak of trust and of credit or of trustworthiness in order to underscore that this elementary act of faith also underlies the essentially economic and capitalistic rationality of the tele-technoscientific. No calculation, no assurance will ever be able to reduce its ultimate necessity, that of the testimonial signature.. . . To take note of this is to give oneself the means of understanding why, in principle, today, there is no incompatibility, in the said ‘return of the religious’ between the ‘fundamentalisms,’ . . . or their politics, and on the other hand, rationality, which is to say the tele-techno-capitalistico-scientific fiduciarity, in all of its mediatic and globalizing dimensions. (Derrida 1998a: 44–45)

Given the fundamental status of faith, the project of fencing off the secular from the religious – of containing religion within a limited sphere – seems misguided, if not doomed from the start. Moreover, Derrida notes that such a project is itself religious; that is, it proceeds in the name of the other source of religion, the pure, the set-apart, the holy. That religions refuse to cooperate – and that they “return” in the form of fundamentalisms that turn violent and, in turn, provoke violence – registers, he suggests, as an autoimmune response. Modernity generates antimodernisms (including but not limited to so-called fundamentalist forms of religion), but both Islamists and Christian televangelists, for example, use all the technological means at their disposal to proliferate and grow, thus they infect themselves with

25 See “Force of Law,” in Derrida (2002: 241). Readers will doubtless hear in the present discussion

echoes of khora and the messianic as described above. Indeed, Derrida names these as origins of religion’s two sources. See Derrida (1998a: 17–20). 26 For Derrida’s own discussion of these matters in relationship to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, see Derrida (1995a).

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modernity.27 What sense, then, does it make to speak of the return of religion – as such, much less as a symptom of the passage of modernity?

Taking Stock: Philosophy of Religion in a Derridean Key Having laid out a programmatic sketch of Derrida’s work with religion, it’s time now to assess its significance for philosophy of religion. Insofar as this field is equated with the corpus of traditional Anglo American scholarship bearing that name, Derrida’s work with religion offers a critical perspective on dominant trends in the field. I noted at the outset that philosophy of religion is de facto Christian philosophical theology, for the most part. Scholarship in this field is dominated by the aim of shoring up Christian theism by setting it on an ever more solid rational footing – or destroying that claim to rationality once and for all. Hence, professional philosophers of religion pursue such perennially fascinating topics as the warrants for theistic belief and the challenges posed to it (by, for example, the problem of evil). Other religious traditions enter into its discursive field of vision as the challenge of religious pluralism; only rarely do philosophical inquiries in the service of other religious traditions – whether inherent in them (as in Daoism, for example) or in conversation with them (as in Coward and Foshay 1992) – appear under the aegis of Anglo American philosophy of religion.28 A Derridean philosophy of religion would clearly be a matter of thinking otherwise, I would argue. Derrida’s work opens up a wider playing field for philosophical engagements with religion. His work calls our attention to the “religiosity” that lies at the foundation of much of what the West holds dear. This is a much more ambivalent claim, however, than that made by those on the religious right who argue that the U.S. is (or at least should be) a Christian nation, for example. Certainly Derrida’s analysis acknowledges Christianity’s formative influence and ongoing, if unrecognized, dominance of western culture, but he considers it a legacy to contend with rather than the solution to what ails us. Furthermore, to expose religious foundations to western civilization is not to endorse some version of theocracy over democracy; quite the contrary, in Derrida’s case. The (abyssal) religious structures that (un)ground western culture neither originate within specific religious traditions or appear only there. Recall that justice and democracy – features we associate with secularity – share the same abyssal structure of radical openness. That openness

27 The

planes used in the 9/11 attacks are a rather literal case in point. The planes used “were in origin WWII bombers adapted in the 1960’s for mass tourism and business travel, refunctioned by [Mohammed] Atta and his crew as weapons of mass destruction” (Retort 2004: 98–99). 28 The scope of the work done by Anglo-American philosophers of religion is, of course, quite wide. But the canonical topics in the field remain relatively narrow. See the table of contents in textbooks for philosophy of religion, for example, Mann (2004). Quinn (2005) includes chapters on philosophy in other religious traditions, religious pluralism, etc., in addition to chapters on standard topics like arguments for God’s existence, the problem of evil, the question of religious experience, etc. Whether the former have any influence on the latter, though, is another question.

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is both spatial (in its directedness toward the other) and temporal (in its openness toward what is yet to come); i.e., khora-like and messianic.29 The radicality of that openness further distinguishes what John Caputo has called Derrida’s “religion without religion” from those visions articulated by conservative Christians in the U.S. To be open to the other is to be open to any other – the nature, features, or intent of that other cannot be predicted in advance. To be open to the future is to be open to any future, as by definition, the future cannot be predicted in advance. While these abyssal foundations bespeak utopian aspirations, they offer them no firm footing. Thus, rather than providing a solid foundation upon which to erect a shining city on a hill, these abyssal structures call forth a certain responsability under conditions of inescapable vulnerability. I say “respons-ability” to echo Derrida’s highlighting of the performative dimension of acting upon (or, perhaps better, enacting) any of these foundations by evoking the call to respond embedded in each of these foundational structures and the sense of being responsible that responding to that call bears.30 Of course, as Derrida reminds us here (and elsewhere), to respond in any particular instance is also to betray the unoriginary origin of the call.31 What, then, would a respons-able philosophy of religion look like? Rather than seeking ever firmer logical ground for belief, questions of justice, of ethics and politics, would take priority, though not in their usual form. Philosophical respons-ability to religion in this sense would involve attempting to be faithful to the unoriginary origins of the abyssal foundations to which justice, democracy, ethics, and religion ultimately refer and invoke. Fidelity to them would require, on the one hand, taking responsibility for religion’s imbrication in a mondialatinized world – attending to and attempting to address, then, its role in the systems of sexism/heterosexism, colonialism, racism, ethnocentrism that continue to structure the circulation of cultural and economic capital throughout the globe. So, for example, such a philosophy of religion would need to attend to the role that religious identities – themselves a creation of western culture around religio, as scholars like Tomoko Masuzawa have argued – play in the circulation of capital.32 Fidelity to religion’s unoriginary origins would also require seeking out and supporting 29 On

those spatial and temporal dimensions of democracy-yet-to-come, see especially Derrida (2000) and his address to UNESCO (Derrida 1997a). 30 I also echo Derrida’s discussion of religion with responsibility in The Gift of Death. Alert readers will also hear an echo of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of infinite responsibility in response to the call of absolute alterity, though I do not intend to equate Levinas’s position with Derrida’s. Fully unpacking the complex relationship between these two philosophical figures is beyond the scope of this essay, but, for Derrida’s perspective, see, e.g., his “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Derrida (1978: 79–195) and Derrida (1999). 31 In The Gift of Death, for example, Derrida notes that to respond ethically to any particular other is necessarily to shirk one’s responsibility for some other particular other. And yet one must respond, one must decide. This is the impossible demand structured into unconditioned ethical obligation (Derrida 1995a: 68). 32 The body of literature on the metadiscourse of religious studies is quite substantial. For two monographs particularly relevant to the perspective in this essay, see Masuzawa (1993; 2005).

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responses – whether within specific instances of the practice of a “revealed religion” or elsewhere – to these abyssal foundations that further movement toward democratization or a true univeralism, for example. In short, rather than the turn inward in search of greater security (as much of what goes under the banner of philosophy of religion seems to do), a respons-able philosophy of religion would turn outward in a posture of spatial and temporal openness. This would be, then, a philosophy at risk. Openness to the possibility of infinite justice brings with it openness to the possibility of injustice, as well. Indeed, in “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida notes that Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone is also a book on radical evil. And Bergson’s Two Sources, was written in 1932, “between the two world wars and on the eve of events of which one knows that one does not yet know how to think them, and to which no religion, no religious institution in the world remained foreign or survived unscathed, immune, safe, and sound.” Is, then, this or any other “‘return of the religious’ not without relation to the return – modern or postmodern, for once – of certain phenomena at least of radical evil?” (Derrida 1998a: 41) These are sobering words indeed for those of us living through the current religious wars, manifest in the events now known as “9/11” and their kin and in the global war on terror unleashed by the U.S. in 9/11’s wake. To take on or take up the task of a respons-able philosophy of religion in a time and place where life-giving and death-dealing deserts are more than metaphorical, where terrifying visions of the yet-to-come are all too easy to conjure up, is daunting, to say the least, but all the more important for that context.

Bibliography Armour, Ellen T. 1999. Deconstruction, feminist theology, and the problem of difference: Subverting the race/gender divide. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bergson, Henri. 1935. The two sources of morality and religion (trans: Audra, Ashley, and Brereton, Cloudsley). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co. Caputo, John. 1997. The prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Caputo, John D., and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. 1999. God, the gift and postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Carlson, Thomas A. 1999. Indiscretion: Finitude and the naming of God. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Coward, Harold, and Toby Foshay, eds. 1992. Derrida and negative theology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. de Man, Paul. 1988. Wartime journalism 1939–1943, eds. Werner Hamacher et al. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination (trans: Johnson, Barbara). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as La dissemination [Paris: Seuil, 1972]. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and phenomena (trans: Allison, David B.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as La voix et les phénomène [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967]. Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of grammatology (trans: Spivak, Gayatri). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published as De la grammatologie [Paris: Minuit, 1967]. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and difference (trans. Bass, Alan). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as L’écriture et la différence [Paris: Seuil, 1967].

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Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse. In Positions (trans: Bass, Alan). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of philosophy (trans: Bass, Alan). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Mémoires: For Paul de Man (trans: Lindsay, Cecile, Culler, Jonathan, and Cadava, Eduardo), ed. Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988b. Signature event context. In Limited, inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Circumfession. In Jacques Derrida, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (trans: Bennington, Geoffrey). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international (trans: Kamuf, Peggy). New York, NY: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1998b. Monolinguism of the other; or, the prosthesis of origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (trans: Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Naas, Michael). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. New York, NY: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Acts of religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York, NY: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1997. Sexuality and the psychology of love, ed. Philip Rieff. 1963. Reprint. New York, NY: Touchstone. Hamacher, Werner, et al., eds. 1989. Responses: On Paul de Man’s wartime journalism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hart, Kevin. 2000. The trespass of the sign: Deconstruction, theology, and philosophy, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics. In The religious, ed. John D. Caputo, 67–75. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Religion within the boundaries of mere reason and other writings (trans: and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, Richard. 2001. The god who may be: A hermeneutics of religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1982. Feminine sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (trans: Rose, Jacqueline). ed. and introduced by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan. Lawlor, Leonard. 2008. Jacques Derrida. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 2006. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2006/entries/derrida/. Accessed 20 May. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1996. Is ontology fundamental? In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings, ed. Adriaan Theodor Peperszak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2006. Agency, performativity, and the feminist subject. In Bodily citations: Religion and Judith Butler, ed. Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Mann, William E., ed. 2004. The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of religion. New York, NY: Blackwell. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 1993. In search of dreamtime: The quest for the origin of religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The invention of world religions: Or, how european universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Quinn, Phillip L., and Charles Taliaferro, eds. 2005. A companion to philosophy of religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Raschke, Carl. 1982. The deconstruction of god. In Deconstruction and theology, ed. Thomas J.J. Altizer, Max A. Myers, Carl A. Raschke, Robert P. Scharlemann, Mark C. Taylor, and Charles E. Winquist. New York, NY: Crossroads. Retort [Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts]. 2004. Afflicted powers: Capital and spectacle in a new age of war. New York, NY: Verso. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Silesius, Angelus. 1984. Cherubinischer Wandersmann, ed. Louise Gnadinger. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam. Westphal, Merold. 2001. Towards a postmodern Christian faith: Overcoming ontotheology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Levinas’s Project: An Interpretative Phenomenology of Sensibility and Intersubjectivity Bettina G. Bergo

Our relation with the Metaphysical is an ethical behavior and not theology Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78.

Introductory Remarks: Biography Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, near Vilna where a rationalist strain of Jewish thought had been flourishing for many generations.1 He was the eldest of three brothers in a family that had reached a degree of prosperity sufficient to cultivate a Russian and Hebrew education, and take brief vacations in the Lithuanian countryside. Lithuania was not a seedbed for political anti-Semitism. The diasporic experience there entailed, rather, epithets and insults in the street. (See Malka 2002: 31) Fearing a change in the political climate, the family emigrated to the Ukraine for 6 years, during which time the young Levinas witnessed the revolutionary period in greater Russia. When the family returned to Lithuania in 1920, the country had already obtained its independence. Nevertheless, it was quite natural that Levinas travel to Strasbourg to study in 1923. French culture was second to none in prestige, and the Jewish community was settled for hundreds of years in that Alsatian city. During that period, the Third Republic, mightily shaken by the Dreyfus Affair (see note 2, below), there were three fundamental philosophical movements: Neo-Kantianism, Bergson’s vitalism, and the epistemologies of the emergent social sciences (Malka 2002: 40–41). In Strasbourg Levinas studied philosophy with Maurice Pradines, who urged him to work with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg, where he also encountered Martin Heidegger, in 1928. The dual influences of phenomenology and hermeneutics persist throughout his life. B.G. Bergo (B) Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 1 Heartfelt

thanks to Gabriel Malenfant (Université de Montréal) for his help and collaboration.

M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_4,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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In 1935, Levinas published his first original philosophical exercise, On Escape. In that work, he proposed a meditation on existence very different from Heidegger’s influential ontology. Later, about a year before the French mobilization in 1939, he was naturalized a French citizen and enlisted in the officer corps. Within 4 months of mobilization, however, Levinas was captured and imprisoned in an officers’ labor camp. His entire Lithuanian family was killed, though his wife and daughter found protection with a Catholic religious order in Orléans. During his 5 years of imprisonment, he managed to work out the lectures that later became Existence and Existents (Levinas 1978 [1948]) and Time and the Other (Levinas 1988b [1947]). Levinas’s first major, original work appeared, late, when he was fifty-five. This was Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Levinas 1969). The book earned him a teaching position at the University of Poitiers, and then at the University of Paris, Nanterre. Between 1961 and 1974, he published numerous essays on Judaism, Talmudic interpretation, and phenomenological questions concerning sensibility, meaning, and transcendence. (See, for example, Levinas 1993). In 1974, he published Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas 1974), which significantly reworked themes from his earlier Totality and Infinity.

A Different Sort of Ethics Levinas has come to be known as the philosopher of responsibility and a new ethics. Yet his “responsibility” is not a prescription; it is not normative. One can certainly “be otherwise,” he says in 1974, but what Levinas is pursuing is something he calls “otherwise than being.” This “otherwise” simply happens outside of everyday time. Stated differently, it occurs outside of time, when we understand time as the dynamic flow of waking consciousness. Responsibility happens in what one could call intensive modes. These include modes of sensibility and modes of strong emotion. If these occur outside of flowing time, this is because we bathe in moods; the time sequences we can represent are already conditioned by affectivity. Moreover, one is subject to a host of petites perceptions or changing micro sensations of which one is unconscious until she or he turns her or his attention to them. Levinas’s responsibility thus takes place subliminally, before a person has the “time” to reflect on it, much less to construct a clear representation of a just-lived moment. This amounts to a certain revision of his earlier definition of responsibility as engendered by the face-to-face encounter with another person. The importance of the other person never disappears from his thought. However, by 1974, responsibility is studied in light of the layers of passive emotions and affects “in” me, in a subject. Levinas’s philosophy of emotion and responsibility is difficult because it reworks a vocabulary borrowed from Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl. The sheer magnitude of his critical enterprise has made his philosophy challenging to pick up and simply read. That said, it is important to keep in mind that Levinas was working out his particular interpretation of the relationship of sensibility, affect and sense starting from the early 1930s. At that time, although he was influenced by Husserl’s phenomenological studies of passive synthesis, Levinas avoided

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extensive discussion of Husserl’s approach to embodiment. He did not extensively rethink bodies, affectivity, and drives, in part because vitalism and neo-romantic philosophies often approached these themes with racial and political metaphors. Lived embodiment does return explicitly in his work between the 1940s and the 1970s. Levinas’s concern with understanding bodies and skin as sensitive fields, open to the impact of other people, led him to a philosophy superficially close to the anti-mechanistic sense of force in the later Nietzsche. To explore this resemblance surpasses the space available in this essay, however. Suffice it to say that Levinas owes a debt to interpretive philosophies of sensation and emotion, notably in Husserl, Maine de Biran, and more distantly, in Nietzsche.

The Early Philosophy In the 1920s, Levinas’s thought had unfolded a profound interest in the genetic phenomenology Husserl was developing, and in the kind of anti-psychoanalytic psychology taught at the University of Strasbourg by Maurice Blondel and Maurice Pradines. Given his hostility to psychoanalysis, it is easily overlooked that psychological interests stay with Levinas like an undercurrent to his phenomenology. His teacher, Maurice Pradines had explored pre-conscious sensations, with a view to rethinking ethics, outside of Utilitarian approaches to pleasure and pain. Pradines’s work rejected psychoanalytic versions of the unconscious and its emergence through repression. His critical study of human sensation (Pradines 1928) showed that it was impossible to establish a simple continuity between pleasure and pain. Types of pain were qualitatively different from pleasure, he argued, and that meant that utilitarian interpretations of the Good, as maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain, could never yield a single measure. Indeed, if pleasure was not the antithesis of pain, then augmenting pleasure or happiness requires something other than simply diminishing its contrary. For Levinas, this something other opened into a phenomenological account of sensations and emotions. Maurice Pradines was thus a significant influence on Levinas for this and other reasons as well. He was one of the few in Strasbourg to speak out in defense of Captain Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer framed for espionage under the Third Republic.2 On the other hand, while Pradines urged Levinas to study phenomenology with Husserl in Freiburg, he

2 Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) who was Jewish, and an elite officer in the French army, was arrested in 1894, charged with passing military arms secrets to the German embassy and courtmartialed, though evidence was weak. Ultimately, he was pardoned by the Président, though it was not until 1906 that the high court recognized his complete innocence and exonerated him. The drama divided France. While the Dreyfus Affair led to legislation separating church and state in 1905, the trauma persisted in France well into the 1920s. Maurice Pradines (1874–1958), pointed to the Dreyfus Affair as a case where, ultimately, ethics rose above political machinations. Levinas attended Pradines’s lectures, in which questions of politics were discussed. They also contained a firm opposition to mechanism, using Bergson who insisted, like Husserl, that sensation and affect were not irrational or deprived of cognition. See Marie-Anne Lescourret (1994: 60–63) and Malka (2002: 41 ff.).

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did not anticipate the importance Heidegger’s existence philosophy would have in Levinas’s development. It is important to begin this early in Levinas’s career, because there is a striking circle in his thought. It runs from an interest in sensibility and affectivity through a struggle with existence understood as both mine and the external other’s, back to a concern with pre-cognitive interiority. In the aftermath of his studies with Husserl (1928–1929), Levinas proved deeply influenced by Heidegger’s existentialism. In particular, he engaged with Heidegger’s analysis of existing in-the-world as Dasein (the human site that is open to the call of Being). He was also drawn to Heidegger’s concern with mortality, and his pursuit of the question of Being, which Heidegger argued had been forgotten by the philosophical tradition.3 In fact, Levinas praises Heidegger at the end of his doctoral thesis devoted to the concept of intuition in Husserl (Levinas 1973, first published in 1930). It is Heidegger, he there argues, who best understood the concrete problems of human existence. By 1933, Levinas was grappling with the terrible tension between Nietzsche’s philosophy of values – which likewise starts from lived, bodily existence – and the German rediscovery of his Wille zur Macht [will to power]. One of Nietzsche’s philosophical perspectives proposed a reinterpretation of life or existence, as conscious and unconscious forces in bodies. Sensation and emotions were, for him, responses to the working of these forces, therefore one could understand them as signs of modifications that we cannot actively control. Levinas viewed this intuition as dangerous, much the way he was skeptical about vitalist philosophies like Bergson’s. Nevertheless, Levinas chose to work against Heidegger’s existentialism by exploring, in the place of the latter’s Dasein, an embodied subject affected by its environment, but above all by other people. By 1935, Levinas had returned to France from Freiburg.4 In his first year back, he published a short experimental essay entitled On Escape. In that work, he broke completely with Heidegger arguing, among other things, that the Heideggerian Dasein was a formalistic presentation of human beings. Almost as a pure abstraction, Dasein had no body. Dasein was never hungry, Levinas ironized, because its everyday existence was given over to utilitarian tasks and to a futurally projected time consciousness. By contrast, On Escape was constructed upon Pradines’s themes like pleasure and its promise of transformation, sensuality, and other modes of existence into which humans plunge, as if, through enjoyment or ecstasy, they could transcend their own mortal existence. (See Levinas 1982a; English translation: Levinas 2003) In the place of Heidegger’s preoccupation with mortality or

3 In

Being and Time, Martin Heidegger presented an interpretive phenomenology intended to approach the fundamental question of philosophy which the tradition had consistently covered over, that of the Being of beings. Evacuating notions of God, other worldly transcendence and historic teleology, Being and Time deployed a new “transcendental level,” which one could conceive through non-cognitive states of mind such as anxiety. Addressing the question of Being was also entailed posing that of life, generally, albeit outside vitalism and biology. See Heidegger (1927). 4 In the interest of space, I will not examine the infamous “Davos disputation” between his erstwhile hero, Heidegger, and Ernst Cassirer.

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“being toward death,” which must be confronted stoically, Levinas gathered examples of our attempts to “get out” of existence, but in no way to die. Transcendence is sought in enjoyment, which means that life may feel constricting but there is also a love of life. On the other hand, shame and nausea also figure in this essay. Described and interpreted ontologically, nausea is the experience of being trapped in one’s body. The raw phenomenological presentation of nausea is that of being engulfed by one’s own existence, above all by a body that is “me,” and that has deprived the ego of control. From the immersion and suffocation experienced in nausea, there is a struggle to get free even before it is possible to distinguish cognitively between an objective world and a thinking, feeling subject. The immediate experience of nausea is one of submersion – in self, in world; in short, in existence. That means that nausea is one possible mode of directly experiencing what Heidegger called Being. This mode, however, was nothing like Heidegger’s lighted clearing.5 It also cannot be compared to the silent call of Being that Heidegger discusses in Being and Time. Nausea is the experience of existence simplified and neutralized into pure, suffocating presence (Levinas 2003, Part VI). Yet, unlike Heidegger’s Angst (anxiety), which volatilizes our concern with things in the world and opens us to the question “why is there Being instead of simply nothing?,” Levinas’s nausea shows that the question of nothing is a mere abstraction, to be asked without taking any account of the ways we experience our bodies. Like his analyses of pleasure, pursued for the promise it holds out of escaping our daily existence, nausea gives the lie to Heidegger’s resolute self-projection toward his personal mortality. According to Levinas, it is not more authentic or proper to us to pursue or confront the fact of death, and everyday experience shows this clearly. Tacitly grasping their condition as mortal and limited beings, human beings seek escapes. They seek the prolongation of moments of blissful absence. That is the lived promise of authentic transcendence, and it is experienced and cherished before (or even, after) any confrontation with the transcendence of Heidegger’s “possibility of impossibility” (one’s death). In fine, Levinas’s 1935 work inaugurated a life-long struggle against Heidegger’s existential ontology. Against Heidegger’s discussion of the necessity of confronting death, which is the only event that no one can live through “for me,” the only event for which there is no “substitution,” Levinas developed a worldly conception of transcendence. But the meaning of an event for which there is no “substitution” would preoccupy him throughout his life. Already in On Escape, Levinas set in the place of Heidegger’s being-toward-death a related, if less rigorist, notion: finitude. He asked, “Would an infinite being seek to escape?” (Levinas 2003: 56). To be finite for Levinas means to open sensuous vistas toward “elsewheres” that lead

5 Heidegger approached Being as an understanding fundamentally different from that of metaphysics or science. Meditating on the Presocratics, notably Heraclitus, Heidegger presented Greek thaumazein or wonder, as opening or thinking out into a lighted clearing (Lichtung) in which Being gathers and illuminates beings. See for example, “Aletheia” in “Aletheia” in Heidegger (1984).

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nowhere: pleasure, need, eros. These feature as so many promises of an outerside to one’s finite life and ennui. The abundant literature of escapism suggests that Heidegger’s ideal of resoluteness before the possibility of one’s death, or “authenticity,” is a rare behavior. Can I really believe, Levinas wondered, that a being who seeks to escape – often, to escape more than its daily routines – has failed to grasp its “own-most possibility,” mortality? What transcendence, and what escape, are opened in Heidegger’s version of the sublime, which confronts its imminent nothingness? If Heidegger captured the meaning of our concrete existence, in its immediacy and without illusions, then surely there are other dimensions to concrete life than confronting mortality.6 Levinas’s descriptions of multifaceted escapism points to another such dimension. Yet, some phenomena of group escapism evince the transformation of the evasion of mortality, turning into a forward race toward death, and Levinas was always deeply suspicious of these modes of social, religious or esthetic “participation.” Thus, his descriptions of intersubjectivity allot little room to spectacles and cults in which transcendence is aimed at through selfdissolution.

The War Years and Their Aftermath In 1940, Levinas, as reserve officer, was called into military service. His platoon was captured in May of that year. This was 4 months after the publication of the major interpretive essay in which he returned to Husserl’s phenomenology, “The Work of Edmund Husserl.”7 For 5 years, he was held in the Fallingsbostel camp – where he learned of the extermination of European Jews. He did not know whether his wife and daughter were still alive in France. It is unclear when precisely he learned of the murder of his Lithuanian family. What is nevertheless clear, from essays like Yves Béon’s Planet Dora,8 is that even the officers’ camps were not places where inmates were meant to survive. This is important, and yet one could read his two 1947 collections, Existence and Existents (Levinas 1978) and Time and the Other (Levinas 1988b) without thinking twice about it. Nevertheless, the context of the Endlösung (Final Solution) set the tone for his struggle with philosophers of transformative labor and the body, conceived in formal terms as a force that humanizes nature or forges culture. Descriptions that contrast the harshness of fatigue, the torment of exhaustion with the light in which the world shimmers by day, only to sink into oppressive darkness by night, are motivated by Levinas’s years in Fallingsbostel.

6 Heidegger discusses facticity in Being and Time in light of the experience of everyday life, the experience of Being “thrown” into existence, and the escapism of idle talk and curiosity. See Heidegger (1927: 203–223). 7 First published in the January–February 1940 issue of the Revue philosophique, Paris. Reprinted in Levinas (1982b: 7–52); for English, see Levinas (1998). 8 Béon (1985); in English: Béon (1997). Dora-Mittelbau was a concentration camp, next to Buchenwald, in which missiles were constructed. While not engineered to be a death camp, many among the 60,000 perished under its conditions.

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But his wartime notebooks have yet to be published. These diaries and his confessional writings are the only places where Levinas explicitly speaks of Jews and Jewishness. His philosophy, which flowered as an interpretive phenomenology, with elements of non-Freudian psychology in it, was meant to concern all persons. Most notably, by 1974, it addressed all those who had some experience of the antisemitism he called, simply, “the hatred of the other man” (Levinas 1974; in English: Levinas 1981: 1; Levinas, 2009). The work of the war years above all secures Levinas’s intuitions about existence, labor, embodiment, desire, finitude, and the idea of infinity. Between 1930 and the war’s end, Levinas is very clearly a hermeneutic phenomenologist. He describes impartially, but always with an eye to the modes in which humans receive and confer meaning on their experience. He presents what he called in 1961 a “dramatique des phénomènes” (Franck 2001) (a phenomenological “staging” of lived events), in which those subjective-objective distinctions I make after living through an experience are bracketed with a view to recapturing their dynamic immediacy. Levinas borrows Husserl’s method of e¯ poch¯e (bracketing or reduction of experience to its lived immediacy) to study passivity and the affects that are on the verge of becoming intentional consciousness. He uses Husserl’s insights into passivity against Heidegger’s interpretations of will and being-toward-death. But he also turns Heidegger’s interpretive interest in our situation in-the-world against Husserl’s epistemological formalism. The result is an original philosophy that proceeds from my being affected by an other, whose arrival cuts through my concerns about the world and my own mortality. Of course, this is Levinas, a Gallicized Lithuanian Jew, who had traveled from Vilna to the Ukraine and back, then to Strasbourg and Freiburg. This is Levinas, whose contact with Judaism was with the anti-pietist, anti-mystical motifs of rationalist, Mittnagdist Judaism as taught by the Gaon of Vilna (1749–1821).9 Mittnagdism focused more on Torah study than on the difficult hermeneutics of the Talmud, and this will be extremely important when he encounters a different path that permits the rapprochement between the ethical intuitions of Talmudic Judaism and the prophets, and the phenomenology of my encounter with the other person, who faces me. One thing seems clear, concerning the impact of the Shoah on Levinas’s philosophy. Existence, which Heidegger called “Being,” is not revelation and concealment. Levinas’s “existence” contains two dimensions: one that is especially marked in human interactions with nature; the other that comes to the fore when existence is described as brute being. In the first case, existence understood as our world is frequently a matter of light, desire, and enjoyment. However, when understood as the sum of entities in act, and persevering in existence, Being expresses the myriad conflicts of wills, both mechanistic-biological and conscious. Not unlike Nietzsche’s forces and Freud’s drives, Being neither glimmers nor beckons, nor is it an event, as in Heidegger. Existence or Being has all the qualities of Hobbes’s mechanism, and Darwinist competitions for scarce resources. In this

9 One

work available in French is Levinas (1986). Also see Lamm (1989).

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respect, it is a complete rethinking of Heidegger’s ontology, down to the moiling presence that besets the insomniac, unable to fully awaken and debarred from the sleep by which it could escape. In a framework such as this, while Levinas may have taken a step back behind Heidegger’s ontology – a step some argue is regressive10 – the strategy he adopts toward ontology allows him to characterize nature and history as fields of force, rather than as Heidegger’s revelation before all religious revelations. Theodicy, or the challenge of explaining how goodness or divinity could permit so much suffering among its creatures, thus finds an answer in Levinas. It is the way in which existence simply carries on: forces, whether cultural, political, or natural, proceed toward their logical conclusion. In this course toward dominance or discharge, they create or encounter destructive conflicts. No god is to be held accountable for – much less vindicated by – such a state of affairs. A fundamental dualism, light and dark, characterizes the world as living. No ultimate sublimation, in Hegel’s sense, can reduce this dualism.

Post-war Developments A curious event occurred in 1947, after Levinas was reunited in Paris with his wife and daughter. A polymath rabbi named Shushani – mathematician, physicist, and Talmudist – was introduced to Levinas by a colleague. At the time, Levinas was directing the École normale israélite orientale. Avid to learn Shushani’s Talmudic dialectic, even to distill its philosophical implications for phenomenology and hermeneutics, Levinas invited Shushani into his home in the 16th arrondissement. For 2 years, Shushani taught Levinas a profoundly humanist, pluralist approach to Talmud before disappearing in 1949. (During that time, he also taught Elie Wiesel, who was then a young journalist. Shushani ended his days in Montevideo, Uruguay.) His impact on Levinas clearly rivaled that of Husserl himself. What Levinas learned from Shushani was a way to weave together Judaism and phenomenology. The ethical reading of the prophets and subsequent commentaries are as old as the prophetic message itself, especially in Judaism where the question of an actual messiah is utopian and secondary. The ethical reading had been brought to the foreground by thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and Hermann Cohen (1843–1918) – and, on the religious side, by the founder of Reform Judaism, Leo Baeck (1873–1956).11 What is remarkable about Levinas’s expansion of the ethical intuition, however, is that it requires neither the postulation of a god, a soul, nor the

10 Regressive, in an ontological sense, insofar as Levinas restores a conception of being or existence

in which conflict and mechanistic causality are its primary dimensions. Being as “conatus essendi” is clearly a characterization of existence that Heidegger sought to surpass. 11 The author of the Das Wesen des Judentums (Baeck 1987), Baeck was, among other things, a founder of the reform movement sometimes called Progressive Judaism. He was Chief Rabbi in Berlin until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

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conviction that divinity exists or acts in history. Levinas’s adoption of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to meaning, which Husserl defined in terms of intentional (conscious) “aiming” (at any object or idea) and modes by which an entity, idea or even mood “gives itself” to consciousness, made it possible to approach what has been called experiences of transcendence in terms of affectivity. Thus, Levinas approaches transcendence as immediate experience, in a face-to-face encounter with the other. This is given or lived as an excess of sensuous and affective meaning. In reflecting on such experiences of affective excess, certain traditions qualify them as “transcendent” or attach the name “god” to them. For Levinas, what can be elucidated are the conditions of possibility – conditions attaching to embodied, concrete existence – of these experiences. However, because one does not “get out” of existence itself – save, in dying – any interruption of the consciousness and temporal flow of existence occurs in the immediacy of intersubjective encounters. These interruptions are “transcendent” only in the simple sense that I am as if overtaken by the other’s face and respond to him or her, before I represent the experience to myself and constitute it conceptually. Intersubjectivity is the only “site” of transcendence, then. And it is “ethical” in the elementary sense that the roots of what is called “responsibility” are located in the peculiar way the gaze of another person affects me. This ethics-in-incipience is not normative any traditional sense; there is nothing particular “to do.” However, in the space of an instant the gaze pulls me out of my grounding in my thematizing consciousness. I answer. And the only thing I ever really answer is another person. When I speak to animals or pets of whatever sort, Levinas argues, I do so by analogy with the responsive circuit I first experienced before and through the other human being. This domain of phenomenology involves an interpretive step. This occurs especially insofar as Levinas is interested in what constitutes the discreteness of an “event” that cuts through the continuous flow of our consciousness.12 This concern with the meaning of an event that “interrupts” largely comes from Heidegger’s extension of phenomenology into hermeneutic ontology. For Heidegger, however, it is Being that glimmers and beckons, as the only bona fide event that pulls me out of my concern with particular entities or beings. In response to Heidegger’s existential-personal time distilled from the New Testament conception of the kairos, or awaited eschatological time, Levinas developed an interpretive phenomenology of the moment of intersubjective “responsibility” out of a conception of the present that he drew from the now moment of prophetic writing – as opposed to Heidegger’s interest in the Pauline letters.13

12 In

his lectures of 1905, Husserl characterized the passive and all-unifying flow of internal time as the minimal structure of “transcendental consciousness.” He would always preserve this formal, ground level of flowing consciousness as the foundation of all higher level consciousness that explores objects visually or works out logical categories. Both Levinas and Heidegger were influenced by Husserl’s conception of internal time consciousness, and both philosophers perceived flaws in its disembodied, mentalist character. 13 Heidegger introduced a significantly modified conception of the Pauline kairos in an attempt to move past the purely formal time discussed by the Neo-Kantianism of his day. The experienced

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Whatever one makes of their respective quests for deformalized conceptions of lived time, two things should be emphasized. First, working past abstract conceptions of time and space opens to interpretations drawn from literary and religious writings. Consistent with the goals of phenomenological investigations, it seeks the lived conditions of possibility underlying these writings and, in principle, attempts to pass behind the representations they have developed. Second, if Heidegger and Levinas’s thought is compared, then two distinct biblical heritages informing their existential interpretations of time and space can be detected. This remark should be explored in greater detail. For the present,14 I emphasize simply that there is no substantive tension between Levinas’s reading of Judaism and his philosophy. The methodological differences cross-fertilize each other, although the philosophy works toward a lived, non-confessional level at which his themes of responsibility, transcendence, even his mentions of “God,” take on meaning through an approach to embodied intersubjectivity that comes, for Levinas, before any constitution of a monadic subjectivity. In the 1950s, Levinas was part of the group of intellectuals that Jean Wahl had assembled informally into the Parisian Collège de Philosophie. These included Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), and a host of others who were also attending Alexandre Kojève’s dramatic lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Kojève 1980a). These lectures had as their thematic pivot the dialectic based on the figure of the master and slave. Levinas was aware of Jean Wahl’s earlier reading of the Phenomenology (Wahl 1929), which had foregrounded the unhappy consciousness – a very different figure in Hegel, for which the separate spheres of world, finite mind and divinity could not be reconciled through the movement of “Spirit.” There is every reason to believe that, while he rejected a dialectical vision of history as totalizing, Levinas found Wahl’s “unhappy consciousness” closer to the dualism of the world as totality and ethical in-finity, i.e., incompleteness and divisions,15 that he would develop. It is likely, too, that Levinas attended MerleauPonty’s lectures on passivity at the Collège de France (1954–1955), because his own work increasingly explored the ethical meaning of passivity. As a result, Levinas

“messianic” time of awaiting, found in several of Saint Paul’s letters opened to an existential and hermeneutical temporality in which the “pl¯er¯oma t¯on kair¯on” or fullness of time promises a recapitulation of lived time that constitutes an entirely new structure of the “now.” In so doing, it opens an eschatological promise in Saint Paul (see Galatians 4: 4; Romans 13: 9–10). Heidegger’s temporal structure of Dasein as out ahead of itself toward its ownmost possibility (of death) functions similarly to allow Dasein to get itself into view as a whole, and this – existentially rather than simply formally or speculatively. For a discussion of messianic time in Paul, see Agamben (2005), “Fourth Day: Apostolos.” 14 Notably the rationalist vein in Mittnagdism, opposed to mysticism of all stripes, but also the humanism of Levinas’s Talmud teacher, Shushani. 15 “In-finity” here underscores the difficulty of limiting, conceptually and at the level of passive syntheses of affectivity and vulnerability, the face-to-face encounter with the other person. Infinity thus does not denote divinity, much less an ontological ground that reveals and conceals itself.

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would always read Hegel against the French Nietzschean grain inaugurated by Kojève. Thus, for Levinas, it will be the primacy of the face-to-face encounter with another person that interrupts me affectively and passively, before it opens onto Hegel’s reciprocal struggle for the recognition of my own and the other’s desire. This is because the passivity Levinas and Merleau-Ponty were exploring entails a speculative reconstruction of affective life prior to the work of cognitive consciousness. Indeed, by 1974, the theme of my passivity before the other person who approaches will be unfolded into a layered sensuous undergoing, qualified as the un-positable, un-deducible “ground” through which an “other” inhabits the self as a pre-conscious mood and as a kind of bodily memory. This radical passivity is not directly recognizable to consciousness. Only repeating experiences of affective interruption and anguish, and the accompanying intensification of my concern or remorse suggest that the subject carries in its affective structure something it has difficulty “identifying” conceptually, which works within it. The passivity thematic opened a different vista on intersubjective existence. In the 1950s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also studying passive synthesis, combining experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, and Husserl’s unpublished notes on passivity, phantasy, and distant memory.16 The extent of his influence on Levinas is difficult to determine, although Levinas adopted his concept of “fundamental historicity,” which is personal, embodied and sedimented time. Against the grain of then fashionable neo-Nietzschean voluntarism and Kojève’s master-slave dialectic, the phenomenologies of passivity argued that alterity might affect a sensuous subject prior to acts of will and distinct from instincts or drives to selfpreservation or mastery. What Levinas learned from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the personal experience of time he adapted from Heidegger, and the hermeneutic understanding of language originating from a silent call – all these will not only be transplanted into his own “humanism of the Other, ” but will also prove compatible with an ethical reading of the Talmud and the Bible. The compatibility entails largely a precision of focus, not a reduction. Ethics, before it is any rule, calculus, or ethos, is the human relation, intersubjectivity, or religio in the preChristian sense of a disposition of conscience and actions to which human beings are bound. 16 For Merleau-Ponty, the elucidation of fundamental psychic acts of “institution” or creative posit-

ings required that we venture beyond Husserl’s phenomenology and set forth the different ways in which we are passively “acted on” or “acted by” our (social) imaginations, the various modalities of desire, deliria and our dream consciousness that does not begin and end with sleep. The other in the same, for Merleau-Ponty, denoted all these things. They were invariably related to sensations and memories of other persons. In his lecture notes for the Collège de France course of 1954–55, he wrote elliptically: “A dream is begun by that which in us receives events and classifies them in relation to our acquired, intersubjective dimensions. An onirism in filigree [that runs] throughout all [our] awakened life” in Merleau-Ponty (2003: 208), my translation. Also see Husserl (2001: 2006). Husserl did not publish these notes in his lifetime. They are a significant part of Husserl’s great reworking of his thought in the 1910s and 1920s, with a view to describing the embodied genesis of conscious life.

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Being, Intersubjectivity, and Totality and Infinity Let me risk what may seem to be a tangent, and recall that in the 1950s and 1960s, the poet Paul Celan, who had survived a Rumanian labor camp, was also teaching in Paris, at the École normale supérieure. Levinas was aware of Celan though he rarely quoted his poetry.17 Two years after the appearance of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961), Celan’s brief collection of poems Die Niemandsrose (“The Noone’s-rose”) appeared. A little poem in that collection expresses the aftermath of central European Jews just after the Shoah. It was called Zürich, zum Storchen (At the Little Stork), a restaurant. Celan dedicated the poem to a survivor and fellow poet, Nelly Sachs, interned in Sweden and continually tormented by fears of Gestapo searches and bombings. Tellingly, the poem ends with the lines: Our talk was of your God, I spoke against him, I let the heart I had hope: for his highest death-rattled, his wrangling word – Your eye looked at me, looked away, your mouth spoke toward the eye, I heard: We really don’t know, you know we really don’t know what counts.18

This painful agnosticism oscillated between utter betrayal and abjection and a different way to conceive hope – a kind of weak messianism. In what was none other than a fierce scruple about the Jewish, and the human, condition, Celan pursued the deconstruction of aesthetics into strangely resonating fragments, and silence. Eschewing ideologies and faith, Levinas for his part pursued a philosophy that variously accommodated faith, agnosticism, and atheism. The dissolution of meaning haunted him from all sides – the surd being the threat of Being, experienced by the insomniac,19 as the ever possible threat of meaninglessness. Yet the pursuit of 17 See Levinas (1997) for Levinas’s essay on Celan. The essay concerns above all Celan’s “Büchner

prize essay,” Der Meridian (1961). deinem Gott war die Rede, ich sprach/ gegen ihm, ich/ liess das Herz, das ich hatte, / hoffen:/ auf/ sein höchstes, umröcheltes, sein/ haderndes Wort – // Dein Aug sah mir zu, sah hinweg,/ dein Mund/ sprach sich dem Aug zu, ich hörte: // Wir/ wissen ja nicht, weisst du,/ wir/ wissen ja nicht,/ was/ gilt.” 19 The theme of insomnia first arises in Levinas’s Existence and Existents (1947), where it is not Heidegger’s mood, or attunement of acute anxiety that alone reveals Being in its “purest” form. Instead, it is insomnia, where no thing comes to meet us or threaten us, yet we are anguished and 18 “Von

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fragments of a this-worldly revelation through the interstices of language in dissolution would become for Levinas a quest for the intersubjective, affective origins of speaking-to-another. Moreover, though forces in nature and politics may reign anarchically, it remains specific to human sociality that a different kind of time, one of interruption and response, occasionally puts those forces on hold. The project of ethicizing, more importantly of secularizing, Talmudic Judaism thus brought Levinas to a different affirmation of living. Alternatively, perhaps it simply slowed the nihilistic current characteristic of the thought of some of those who lived through the catastrophe of the Final Solution. Levinas knew of Celan, at least by the late 1960s.20 But when he wrote on Paul Celan, he chose Celan’s essays, not his poems, most notably the “Conversation in the Mountains”21 and Celan’s well-known Georg Büchner Prize address “Der Meridian” (October 1960). In commenting these, Levinas sought to show the resonance of responsibility, or sincerity – what he calls the “Saying” – in Celan’s deconstructive poetics. “For Celan, the poem is situated precisely at that presyntactic and pre-logical level,” he writes. “But also [at that of the] pre-revelatory [pré-dévoilant]: at the moment of pure touching, pure contact . . . a language of proximity for the proximity that is older than the truth of Being.”22 Nevertheless, Levinas will not follow Celan in his experiments with silence. Celan’s enigmatic experiments with natural metaphors hold his interest less than do Celan’s remarks that a poem “should not offer much difference with a handshake,” which underscores a poetic power of address and ethical interpellation. Thus Levinas’s adaptation of Celan weaves his own affirmation of the face-to-face encounter with another human being into the abjection of homelessness with which the essay, “Conversation” ends. Yet this is not made explicit, at least not until 1974, when suddenly Celan’s words, “I am you, if I am I” (ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin)23 introduce the central chapter of Levinas’s work, Otherwise than Being, “Substitution” (1974). If substitution points in this context to a subliminal and pre-reflective inhabitation of the other as a kind of emotional force in what I call “me,” it is crucial to keep in mind that substitution is also the essence of the activity of signification. Whether one adopts Saussure’s theory of the sign, which insists that a word disturbed by the sheer presence of obscure, indeterminate existence. See Levinas (1988a: 61 ff.) for a discussion of this positive presence, which Levinas calls the il y a. 20 Levinas’s own essay on Celan “De l’être à l’autre” appeared in the collection Noms propres (Levinas 1976). In 1974, however, he quotes a line from one of Celan’s poems. 21 Celan, “Gespräch ins Gebirge,” 1969. Published in English, among other places, in Celan (2005). Also see Celan (1990). 22 Levinas (1976: 50). Hereby, he lifts the intersubjective connection out of Heideggerian ontology, in which Being reveals itself and conceals itself, but also outside of any other thinking of revelation, including religious philosophy. 23 This can also be translated “I am you when I am I” – the temporal and the conditional modalities are carried by wenn, here it is not clear which is primordial. With Otherwise than Being, published four years after Celan’s suicide in 1970, the latter has been enlisted to illuminate Levinas’s final philosophical project – the description and interpretation of a broken subjectivity, where sensibility and sensuality are inhabited by something that is not simply subjective.

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points toward a concept, or whether one argues, with Derrida, that words themselves form complex networks pointing from one word to another word, or one signifier to another – which destroys the argument of an autonomous idea lying behind our words – substitution remains the central rule. One substitutes sound and meaning for the thing or idea to be denoted. All one has with which to do this is words. Whether one speaks of persons or concepts, “substitution” expresses the dynamic of meaningful relations. So the particular chiasmus that Levinas discovers in Otherwise than Being is the substitutive movement in which I am affected by something I cannot identify post facto as “me.” This hetero-affectivity may have a minimal structure. It is analogous to that substitution by which one signifier, or term, stands in the place of another, transforming it by opening up its initial system of references without diminishing its capacity to point beyond itself. This is what Celan himself understood as poetry’s role. Levinas thus joins Celan in revisiting substitution as the an-archic – lacking definite ground – source of ethical responsibility. This source of responsibility is none other than the impact of another, whether that other is described as the face that confronts me, as a persistent, ambiguous memory, or as a restless affect. Totality and Infinity was an exercise that laid out the lived meaning of “exteriority” in its interpenetrating layers: the exteriority of the world, that of the other person, finally the exteriority of the history one experiences in the family. There, the father whom Levinas describes sees history backward and forward. For him, the child both is and is not like the father. More importantly, the child can do what the parents could not – reconsider the past and pardon members of his or her generation. Totality and Infinity was, as Derrida said, a treatise on hospitality. It was a phenomenology of the human possibility of welcome and pardon. Totality and Infinity shows three large influences: that of Franz Rosenzweig24 and Shushani; that of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and that of the Shoah. Let me take a moment to understand its logic before approaching its elaborate aftermath that is Otherwise than Being. This 1961 work represents a decidedly exceptional moment in Levinas. Perhaps it is his most involved struggle with Heidegger. Here, Being shows itself as “war,” not as the “event” that must be made one’s own – the Ereignis25 – according to Heidegger. Along with Being, understood as conflict, politics becomes the art of foreseeing and managing ontological conflicts. In this respect, Levinas sounds in 1961 disconcertingly like the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt had argued in the 1920s that the essence of the political concerned life and death. It was the political decision that distinguished the friend-state from the enemy-state, just as the 24 In the “Preface” to Totality and Infinity, Levinas pays tribute to Franz Rosenzweig’s antiHegelian Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig 2005) as “a work too often present in this book to be cited” (28). The Star was the work in which Rosenzweig severed his thinking from Hegelian speculative systematics, turning to the meaning of Jewish and Christian existence and temporality. 25 This is the language of Heidegger in the 1930s, in which Being comes to be expressed as the “Event” or Ereignis, while in the wake of the event, we are called to make that event our “own,” to sich er-eignen (ap-propriate for ourselves) the event.

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authentically political act has to seize the occasion for a struggle to the death with that enemy state.26 For both men, utterly different in other respects, to exist in the sphere called “political” means understanding when war is about to break out, or when the threat of death means one confronts a enemy worthy of the name – to speak like Schmitt. Now, whether Being is, in itself, a closed “sphere” or not – a claim that is not clear in Heidegger – it remains that Being, understood as our existence, is totalizing. It is all that there is. Therefore, Levinas can only counter Schmitt and Heidegger by thinking existence in terms of transcendence. In this context, transcendence is understood as interruptions of Being or existence. Here, the latter is experienced as human time and the flow of consciousness, which phenomenology showed as the passive ground underlying humans’ cognitive or “intentional” acts. Such a conception of transcendence implies simply that the other person, but never a god, intervenes to interrupt the everyday experience of time. There is no need for any recourse to a monotheistic God, or to proofs of God’s existence. That question belongs to a different discourse. While the other person who interrupts me is powerless to change (my) existence enduringly, my encounter with him or her opens a path to transcendence – beyond my egocentric needs, pleasures, or willing. In 1961, this difficult, erstwhile theological concept called “transcendence” is rethought by Levinas. It emerges, both temporally and spatially, as a sensuous, affective vector toward another person. This force occurs through that person’s expression and by virtue of the nudity of his or her face.27 Levinas calls this a “trans-ascendance” to hold traditional religious or theological resonances at bay. Ethics – or humans’ concern with the good – thus originates for Levinas in an affective transcendence, which moves as if in the direction of the other, “toward the other. ” It is occasioned by face-to-face encounters. Since the face looks, speaks, changes its expressions, the other person is uniquely unpredictable. It appears that no object, and probably no animal, is as utterly unpredictable as the other. From this perspective, Levinas characterizes the face as not-limited, or in-finite. This infinity, however, is also phenomenal and embodied. Part of its unpredictability lies in that it can actively touch me. Here too lies eros, which he approaches quite late in the book. Totality and Infinity, subtitled An Essay on Exteriority, thus turns around the two poles: one, of unpredictable, dangerous (political) existence (Being), and two, 26 While

he opposed the National Socialists prior to the election of 1933, Schmitt promptly turned around and joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) three months later, on May 1, 1933. He was thereupon made president of Union of National Socialist Jurists and was able to keep his post at the University of Berlin. The anti-Semitism of his 1936 urgings that German law be “cleansed” of Jewish elements is patent and well known. Accused of opportunism, he would later qualify his Nazi engagement as mere pretence. 27 By 1961, the notion of the nudity of the face denotes above all its self-presentation as unprotected skin, eyes that look at me but remain directly vulnerable. Nudity will also be referred to with terms like “dénuement,” being laid or stripped bare, which only a creature of flesh and blood can be. This, too, is the being I can want to murder, because the face that looks at me is a gaze that has a frankness that disturbs me.

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of its brief yet repetitive interruptions by an embodied infinite – that is, the Other whose approach elicits an affective response that bespeaks spontaneous responsibility. Levinas calls this dualist schema, “religion” in 1961. It seems that he means this in two senses: the well-known re-ligare, denoting ties between persons, but also that of religio, those acts one performs by which the sanctity of the other is translated into words and deeds.28 It is nevertheless striking that Levinas’s “religion” and “trans-ascendence” interrupt an existence conceived as verb-like and conative, like the meta-physical ground of the struggle for resources, or an unbalanced Heraclitean flux. In this vision, “religion” is obviously no one established religion, and “transascendence” is not spatial transcending. Trans-ascendence goes to no place, it goes no where. It is an uncalculated response to another person; a mode of bearing witness to my presence, my disponibility: “Here I am,” or “after you, Sir.”29 This statement is not confessional. But neither is it deontological, nor some foundational philosophical principle from which to derive the common good. Levinas is simply describing – under the phenomenological suspension of our cultural and philosophical assumptions – the repeating event out of which grow our desire and concern for other persons.30 Now, these moments of respons-ability most often come to pass unnoticed. One invariably feels skeptical about this claim for heteronomy as transcendence, just as one might doubt the in-finite meaning of passing face-to-face encounters. After all, like all immediate experience that I later reflect on, I am obliged to return to the event, however brief, and reconstruct it linguistically, conceptually and temporally. To live reflectively means to live backwards. Or again, one lives forward and reflects backwards. Grammarians have understood this backwards-forwards as a mode sui generis of temporality. This indicates the time that it takes to put one or several lived events into a conceptually and syntactically coherent form. This time lapse, that permits “operativity” or meaningful, objectifiable experience, “introduces a gap and a delay in the ‘pure presence’ of utterances [lived experience].. . . [It] cannot be represented in its turn, in the representation that nevertheless implies it in a certain fashion.”31

28 In

his “Preface” to Totality and Infinity (23), Levinas writes of this ground level of religion, “Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak.. . . The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context [in which a person simply responds to another].” 29 Levinas (1981: 117). Or again, “as simple as ‘hello,’” (143). 30 The phenomenological suspension, or epoché, denotes a technique Husserl revived from the Ancient skeptics. It entails describing lived events, while refraining from any judgement about the existence or inexistence, the objectivity or subjectivity of what is given in consciousness. See Husserl (1982: §32, 60–62): “What we demand [is that] the whole pre-discovered world posited in the natural attitude, actually found in experience . . . as it clearly shows itself in the concatenation of experience, is now without validity for us.” 31 Remarks by grammarian, Gustave Guillaume, cited by Agamben (2000: 111; my translation).

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Grammarians recognize this, as did theoretical psychology and psychoanalysis. Living forwards and reflecting backwards, skepticism is invariably reborn as one considers the upsurge of an uncanny sentiment or an affective interruption of our intentional projects. “What was that?” one wonders. “Oh, nothing; that was nothing,” one concludes. Heidegger also knew about this nothing. For him, the onset of anxiety dissolves our concern with the things of the world.32 One thereupon confronts oneself without accoutrements – one has become a kind of question for oneself. Then the anxious moment passes. When I consider it, I dismiss it out of a mixture of skepticism and conceptual confusion. “Oh, it was nothing.” Skepticism is a natural, pre-philosophical reflex. All this, Heidegger had discussed in 1927 and 1929.33 For Levinas, the locus of this “nothing” was crystallized in the moment of the face-to-face encounter. That is where our rational projects evaporate for him. Like all such moments, however, the encounter itself subsequently sinks into the flow of intentional consciousness. From this fluid place, it can be partly recovered as part of a conceptualizable process. The unity of the temporal flow, of course, lays the eccentricity of such an encounter – as a sensuous and emotional upwelling or surcharge – open to doubt. Like Heidegger’s anxiety, the encounter also evaporates or leaves one with a forgettable moment of perplexity, as when one wonders: “What happened to me?” When Levinas says that it is a “third party,” meaning those additional others or community of others – products of cognitive identification which follows upon every face-to-face encounter – who “look at me through the eyes of the other person” (Levinas 1969: 213), he is pointing to the process by which the face-to-face encounter metaphorically melts back into a representable series of events. This movement between interruption and representation is the product of intentional34 and linguistic construction. In other words, by the time I wonder who 32 “That in the face of which one has anxiety . . . is Being-in-the-world as such. What is the difference phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is anxious and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially incapable of having an involvement. This threatening does not have the character of a definite detrimentality which reaches what is threatened, . . . that in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. Not only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.” See Heidegger (1927: 40; 230–231; Niemeyer edition (186). The nothing, in the “face” of which we are anxious is a nothing that is nevertheless “something” nonobjective; it is, in a word, the ever present possibility of our ending, our demise. It is important to note that of the most significant states-of-mind adumbrated by Heidegger (anxiety, joy, boredom), what confers on them their significance is precisely that, being “incapable of having an involvement,” they function to take us out of world and intersubjectivity – a function that transcendence also has in Levinas. In the latter’s philosophy, however, being taking out of the world of our concerns lies precisely at the root of inter-human relationality. 33 Heidegger (1927); also see “What is Metaphysics?” (1929), in which anxiety delivers a nothingness that is more fundamental than logical negation. See Heidegger (1992: 89–109). 34 “Intentional” in Husserl’s sense of consciousness as invariably conscious-of something, whether the object concerns self, world, or others. Intentionality in Husserl’s phenomenology is the effort

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the other is or about the color of her or his eyes, intentional consciousness, always a cognitive consciousness-of something, has reunified its flow erasing the metaphoric gap produced by the interruption of the face-to-face. In the blink of an eye, the flow of consciousness reclaims its right. This means that the intensity of my affective “investitures” by the other who approaches is exceptional but embedded in everyday consciousness. Moreover, the face-to-face encounter opens repeatedly onto a larger social existence, where there is the other and other others. In the larger context, reflection and conceptuality allow me to ask a question regarding the role of the other, and what he is to me. I also ask: What is this other to all those others around him? (Levinas 1969: 212–213; 1981: 117). This also implies that the self-restoration of intentional consciousness35 transforms ethical responsibility into a question or a doubt. But such questions ground the analysis and evaluations required by justice. Justice thus belongs to two worlds for Levinas. It belongs to the world of ethical responsibility, which leaves its trace in intentional consciousness – as a trace of trans-ascendence. It also belongs to the world of everyday violence and political thought, understood as calculations of power – which for Levinas constitutes “Being.” In the first instance, justice carries a corrective imperative that involves an expanded responsibility toward community at large. In the second instance, justice distributes allotments between friends and enemies, i.e., life understood as political. In this second case, “justice” becomes the justice of the stronger. It can thus serve oppressive or violent ends. As distinct from that of Heidegger, Levinas’s Being, or “essence,” is thus the site for conflicting impetuses: responsibility and power. This hybridity involves a kind of Spinozist worldview – appealing to the conatus or will to persevere in one’s existence. In this worldview, “what-is” expresses itself: now as an infinity of wills; now as their “ethical” interruption. For this reason, as I observed, theodicy is not a question in Levinas’s philosophy because, in the absence of a substantive divinity, and because it is possible to derive our concept of holiness from the face-to-face,36

or energy, intrinsic to consciousness, to reach out and encompass, equal or “adequate-to” all its objects. This consciousness, borrowed from Brentano’s dynamic psychology, is always “full” – of something. Affects and sensations are if not wholly intentional and conscious, then on the verge of becoming conscious, lest we simply know nothing about them. 35 Throughout, when I use “intentional consciousness,” I use it in Husserl’s sense of a movement that aims at objects, whether these are internal or external; this movement contains a subjective and an objective dimension. It is the sheer spectacle of world and consciousness that we all have, before we separate out what is “mine” and what is “an object.” For a summary of intentional consciousness, see Husserl (1988: §8). 36 Cf. Levinas (1969: 291). “The truth of being is not the image of being, the idea of its nature; it is the being situated in a subjective field which deforms vision, but precisely thus allows exteriority to state itself, entirely command and authority.. . . This curvature of the intersubjective space inflects distance into elevation; it does not falsify being, but makes its truth first possible.. . . This ‘curvature of space’ expresses the relation between human beings. That the Other is placed higher than me would be a pure and simple error if the welcome I make him consisted in ‘perceiving’ a nature.. . . Man as Other comes to us from the outside, a separated – or holy – face.” This theme of holiness as

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Levinas’s understanding of the Good neither vindicates historical violence nor suggests that there might be an invisible direction to history – as in some Idealistic theodicies. In Levinas, the Good does not even arise as the counter-weight to his Spinozistic conatus or will to live and thus expand one’s power. If justice is described as belonging to two worlds, then it is also possible to say that the face of the other carries aspects of these two worlds. That is, provided I recognize clearly that the face as expression and regard interrupts me affectively, even if within a short space of time I also recognize or identify the face cognitively. Almost instantaneously, I integrate the face into my worldly consciousness, which itself is the consciousness that negotiates Being. This ambiguity means that no conception of meaning, whether phenomenological or hermeneutic, can dissolve the dualism at the existential level. The passive resistance of the face lies in its nakedness and its defenselessness. If the interruption it effects belongs to the order of quality, not quantity; i.e., to the dimension of experienced intensities, then the everyday experience of time as a moving series of instants is not consciously halted so much as it is briefly interrupted. Levinas means that to approach experience in its lived immediacy, two fundamentally distinct levels must be discerned even though they cross each other: sensuous-affective immediacy and intentional or cognitive consciousness. Since the former interrupts, Levinas will argue that the desire and willing that one is able to represent to oneself is never halted per se. In fact, the nudity of the face can provoke as well, even if unintentionally. I can rip up a letter, or devour a steak. Although I cannot destroy the face in the same way, I can attempt to annihilate it. This is because I may interpret its passive resistance as effrontery. After almost two hundred pages of discussion of the ethical summons made by the face, Levinas observes that it is the only thing an “I” can really want to murder (Levinas 1969: 47; above all: 198).37 All other murders are murder by analogy with the face. Any other face, the face of the dog, as I indicated, is a face by analogy with the human face. Levinas could probably have devoted pages to a phenomenology of murder.38

exteriority and separateness, not assimilable once and for all by thematizing reflection, continues in Otherwise than Being, where it is also called illeity, because “thou” erases the distance of this separation, cf. Levinas (1981: 168 ff.). 37 “To kill is not to dominate but to annihilate; it is to renounce comprehension absolutely. Murder exercises a power over what escapes power. It is still a power, for the face expresses itself in the sensible, but already impotency, because the face rends the sensible.. . . I can wish to kill only an existent absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers infinitely.. . . There is here a relation not with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance.. . . The epiphany of the face brings forth the possibility of gauging the infinity of the temptation to murder . . . also as the purely ethical impossibility of this temptation. . .If the resistance to murder were not ethical but real, we would have a perception of it. . .would remain within the idealism of a consciousness of struggle, and not in relationship with the Other” (Levinas 1969: 198–199). 38 Works of survivors like Jean Améry (At the Mind’s Limit) and Charlotte Delbo (Auschwitz and After) illustrate uniquely that, within the concentration- and deathcamp universes where unprecedented violence was sanctioned, the impetus to murder a naked face took on a spontaneity virtually

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It is not absurd to argue that Levinas’s insistence that the idea of fraternity – as lived, un-mediated responsibility (Levinas 1969: 214) – stands less as a fact than as an ideal, unprovable yet recognizable.39 That the other, as not-me, is affectively rooted in me, represents something like an “experience,” or emotive state, that is “more ancient” than the notion of brotherhood as defined by civil society. Certainly, this is cognitively undemonstrable. But Levinas never sought to work simply in the order of evidence or warrant. This is not an epistemology or cognitive theory of affect. The sensuous-affective primacy of responsibility, that primacy of the face-to-face, is shown by description. It simply happens, and I am free to be skeptical about it as a ground of moral heteronomy. Now, phenomenology provides descriptions of lived experience. These descriptions are not fictions. But like literature, they may refashion the way we perceive the human condition. Thus presented and recounted, Levinas’s responsibility entails a minimal aesthetic orientation40 comparable in its force to Marxian utopias of a culture after class struggle. The difference, however, is that for Levinas, “history” is now, in the blink of an eye, not later.

Otherwise than Being and the Transposition of Messianic Time into Sensibility Totality and Infinity (1961) was the only attempt Levinas made to approach the ethical encounter as an encounter with an exteriority that he deemed transcendent. He was amply criticized for this construction, notably with regard to the status of the other whom I encounter. If I encounter the other person and experience her or him as radically outside the sphere of my world and time, then where is the other? Derrida wondered whether it was not necessary to assume some kind of space, or lighted clearing in which the encounter could take place. If so, then Heidegger’s Being, as this clearing, would again be as or more fundamental than Levinas’s ethical face-toface relation.

alien to what one considers the more calculated strategies of “sadism.” Of course, this spontaneity does not exclude the latter. 39 I have already discussed the doubt that skepticism utters about these Levinasian interruptions. If we recognize in our everyday lives what he intends as the meaning of the face-to-face, then that is all to the good. Skepticism concerning affective events that are largely pre-conscious cannot be eliminated without insisting that everything an embodied creature lives is directly – and positivistically – available to conceptualization. Lived in immediacy, however, it can be described in all its complexity. But often this requires literature rather than deduction. Literature and poetics provide us with some of the richest phenomenologies we have. In that respect, Levinas’s descriptions, often bordering on lyricism, suggest a thinking-in-images that may well be the most surprising “aesthetic” in philosophy in our time. 40 As an image, the face is animated in Levinas like “expression,” it is not fixed. In his “Preface” to Totality and Infinity, he compares the self-revelation of the other person to “conjunctures in Being for which perhaps the term ‘drama’ would be most suitable, in the sense that Nietzsche would have liked to use it” (28).

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This criticism impelled Levinas to shift his attention away from exteriority and transcendence as such, to focus on what he could describe without using spatial coordinates like “interior” and “exterior.” This also protected his claim that the ethical encounter interrupted the process that is Being or essence. Without denying the “exteriority” of the other person, his 1974 magnum opus, Otherwise than Being, pursues the encounter as a passive and passionate experience happening to a self, before that self resumes its cognitive shape as a reflective subject. Thus the change is not radical. It is more like a shift in perspective. I will come in a moment to the strange adverb “otherwise.” Initially, it is enough to say that “otherwise” does not denote an alternative way to exist. Levinas’s “Otherwise” takes issue not with existence itself, but with all those modes in which one lives, without becoming directly conscious of them. These include aspects of sensibility or sensuous life and some part of human emotions. Since Kant inaugurated a philosophy of reflection, in which sensibility and intuitions were schematized with concepts to produce judgements about experience, the status of sensibility has posed problems.41 While sensibility is clearly conscious, and while sensibility is so often intertwined with emotion or affectivity that one experiences a bodily sensation simultaneously as a mood, or again, as a passion, it is another question entirely to know how sensibility and affectivity draw our conscious attention to them. For example, the moment I describe this process of becoming conscious of a feeling, I have situated it in time and quality. But it had to reach a threshold of intensity before I did become conscious of it. For that reason, Otherwise than Being involves a difficult undertaking. It explores the sensuous vulnerability of our skin understood as living flesh. Through its phenomenological descriptions, it attempts to show that this flesh is not simply an outside that feels when it is touched. Moreover, living flesh is not a simple outside that has an in-side that we never think of. The flesh is more like what Merleau-Ponty sketched. That is, it is a chiasmatic site in which exteriority and interiority interpenetrate. It is the site of their original interpenetration, before one separates them into representations. When approached at the level of affectivity, the metaphoric in-side of the flesh is sometimes experienced as if it were folded out and raw, exposed to the outside or thrust into the body like an affective “cavity. ” Approached at the level of time as the flow of consciousness, my sensuous vulnerability stands both in time and out of it. It consists of degrees of intensities, sometimes discrete, sometimes enduring. These have to be reconstructed if I want to reflect on them. When I do reflect on them, these intensities may have the strange, foreign feel of those affective moments in which I am “not quite myself,” albeit for reasons difficult to explain after the fact. Unlike Totality and Infinity, with its discussion of the other as outside me, the intensities that accompany the semi-conscious memories of our encounters with others will not be extended into discussions of hospitality and welcome. In 41 See

Kant (2002: 38; 54). It posed problems notably with regard to the extent to which one could think a pure form of intuition, like time, and to what degree the categories of the understanding were operative in everyday cognition, as contrasted with their role in the production of universalizing judgments.

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Otherwise than Being, Levinas unfolds the suffering whose expression takes lyrical, “prophetic,” or performative forms that stand largely outside his earlier descriptions of teaching and conversation. In the place of these one finds the powerful chapter entitled “Substitution.” The descriptions of pre- or semi-conscious sensibility in “Substitution” – in which what was an external other has been reconceived as the affect of remorse (Levinas 1981: 114) – depict what one can only call “a memory of the flesh.”42 For Levinas, this is not a memory of a cognitively transparent event. It is a repeating mood and modality of awareness. It involves a “primitive” form of substitution from which the possibility of empathy flows. It thus motivates my offering the world to the other through the words I express to her. If the general idea of substitution denotes a host of things, from physical maneuvers to the way metaphors are made – or again, the way that any word or affect can take the place of another – then Levinas is working, once again, at an interpretive level in which grounds, and distinctions such as inside versus outside, are understood as theoretical constructions that are proposed after the fact.43 For Levinas, substitution does not mean that I have become the other. It is unthinkable to “become” the other. It means that the experience of self as a concentrated localization, a “here,” is possible only through a “force” that limits, localizes, and singularizes that self. In psychological terminology, no ego could emerge except as the precipitate of encounters with what is not it, most notably that of other beings.

42 In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argued for an enlarged conception of embodied perception. With an expanded sense of perception, including a vast array of sensations Merleau-Ponty included a kind of memory that could be hermeneutically described as attaching to the flesh. This memory of the flesh is rarely conscious. What makes it decisive is, instead, that it animates our behavior as well as many of our attitudes toward our body, those of other people, and experienced environments. From the enduring sensations of the “phantom limb” to the ways in which our bodies recognize familiar, desirable, or fearsome environments on the basis of what could only be memory traces and minimal indication, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas with him, expands the meaning of memory beyond positivistic identifications of discreet entities or events. Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1962, Part I, Chapter IV, “The Synthesis of One’s own Body”; Part II, Chapter 1, “Sense Experience.”) 43 See, for example, Levinas’s remarks in Levinas (1969: 205–209). For him, signification precedes signs as an intersubjective or heteronomous passion, in which signs concentrate and objectify the signifying intention that runs deeper than the intentional aiming at an object or the intention to do a particular thing. “Merleau-Ponty . . . showed that disincarnate thought thinking speech before speaking it, thought constituting the world of speech. . .in an always transcendental operation, was a myth. Already thought consists in foraging in the system of signs, in the particular tongue of a people . . . and receiving signification from this very operation. Hence. . .thought operates in the ‘I can’ of the body. It operates in it before representing this body to itself.. . . Signification surprises the very thought that thought it” – and this, because signification is relationality, there other wells up, where “I” was in my solitude; our relation is indicated by the spontaneity of my signifying (words, even myself – I make myself a sign and offer it, unintentionally, like an apology or an account). So it is the relation, which, as prior to objectification, occasions expression and the objectification that occurs through concepts and signifiers. “It is not the mediation of the sign that forms signification, but signification [later on, ‘substitution’]. . .that makes the sign function possible” (Levinas 1969: 206). That said, signification is not thought, it is above all affectivity and relationality.

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These beings cannot be reduced to the personal self. However, they can inhabit it, mnemonically and affectively, as desire and the structuring power of an internalized voice. In substitution, the ego is not displaced by the other person. The impact of the other, nevertheless, gives the ego its form as desiring and as possessed of a “moral” conscience. The irony is that Freud’s famous expression of healing: There where It was, shall I be, becomes for Levinas: “There where I am, he/she also is.” To this sensible fact I owe my hetero-genic singularity as a person bound to other persons. Whatever else it may be and whatever other behaviors it engenders, such as violence, this foreign dimension of sensibility constitutes its capacity to change the course of my attention and my intentions. It is insistent in me as a strange memory that probably holds me open to my surroundings, and certainly to the intersubjective ties that instigate my speaking as response. For the origins of speech are dialogical. Within the parameters of cognitive psychology, emotions have been interpreted as inchoate judgments rather like a subliminal rationality that results in conceptual judgements. Against this, psychoanalysts have argued that it is reductive to interpret affectivity merely as weak rationality. The sensibility-affectivity complex should be acknowledged as a non-judgment-forming intelligibility. It is only partly tied in to rationality. At times, it can be positively endangered by the “after-thought” that reinterprets it, looking for reasons and justifications of an emotion. Psychoanalytic listening discovered, early on, the repressive potentiality of rationalization. This debate between cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis is itself a simplification. In order to make sense of and communicate my sensations and affects, I must translate them into language. This is what Levinas calls the “Saying” (or sincerity) which carries into the “said” (words uttered) (Levinas 1981: 134). Because language is divided between those states and movements we call nouns and verbs, predication – which is always a rudimentary form of judgment – appears to be the basic function of language. The investigations of linguistic performativity, pioneered by J. L. Austin (2005) and N. Ruwet (1982) – not to mention the uniqueness of poetic language as described by Julia Kristeva – uncover a gestural, behavioral dimension of language whose starting point could only be intersubjective ties. These ties are pre-theoretic and perhaps inborn. However that may be, they indicate the dimension that Levinas is attempting to describe. It is not absurd to think of his late work as the description of what the eighteenth century called “moral sentiments.” However, Levinas’s emphasis is on the heteronomous origin of these sentiments. Such a rethinking of the origin of moral sentiments is confirmed by psychological studies of infantile development and by structural linguistics (Roman Jakobson).44 Thus, in the place of innate ideas or capacities, Levinas sets up a repetitive, sedimentary complex of memory, sensibility, and encounters. The temporality implicit in these is extremely complex because, while the encounter may last but an instant, the force of such a memory – as half-thematized and half-suffered – undoes the domination of traditional conceptions of time as a serial succession of abstract units. Levinas calls this mode of temporality “diachrony.” It represents a significant

44 See

Jakobson (1995); see an illustration of the dialogical ground of language on p. 94.

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change in the phenomenology he wrote in 1961. Here, the “dia-” denotes the eventlike quality that cuts across more or less linear, thematized, everyday time. In my view, however, diachrony is only the beginning of the story. The structure of repetition that Levinas identified in responsibility, which increases as it is assumed, suggests that the ethical interruption belongs simultaneously to moments of intensity and to some sort of developmental sedimentation, which points backward to ever earlier incidents. Could these be similar to Freud’s discovery that anxiety precedes the formation of the conscious ego itself?45 There would seem to be marked similarities in these depictions of interruptive affects and their genesis. I will, however leave the delineation of the origins of this hetero-affectivity to psychology. Suffice it to say that Levinas’s interest in this sensuous and affective immanence was already present, indirectly, in Totality and Infinity. There, the other was called in-finite because unpredictable (Levinas 1969: 199). But time itself also contained an infinite “historic” dimension tied to the family (Levinas 1969: 274– 286). This is the forward-looking history I discussed earlier in this essay. Thus, after describing intersubjectivity in the forms it takes in the family, Levinas envisioned an open, or in-finite, future where a utopian promise appears. This was not something to be pursued like a political program, of course. Secular, moral, and aesthetic like a world-picture, infinite time in Levinas reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianism.” This messianism entailed the remembrance of past generations, which are still present where we are now – as possible or imaginative memories. Weak messianism was, said Benjamin, our secret appointment [geheime Verabredung] with those generations. Those who, before us, breathed the air we now breathe (Benjamin 1980: 693–704; in English, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin 1969: 253–263). Levinas writes in the final pages of Totality and Infinity: But infinite time is also the putting back into question of the truth it promises. The dream of a happy eternity, which subsists in man along with his happiness, is not a simple aberration. The truth requires both an infinite time and a time it will be able to seal – a completed time. The completion of time is not death, but messianic time, where the perpetual is converted into the eternal. The messianic triumph is the pure triumph; it is secured against the revenge of evil, whose return infinite time does not prohibit. Is this eternity a new structure of time, or an extreme vigilance of messianic consciousness? The problem exceeds the bounds the framework of this book. (Levinas 1969: 284–285)

The temporality that, along with substitution, forms the leitmotif of Otherwise than Being was thus already set forth as a question in Totality and Infinity. Such messianism was, for Levinas, the extension of the good of responsibility, which leaves a trace in Being. It is not the God of negative theology – not unless that means a negative theology like Maimonides’s, where language had to open to an unlimited number of possible predicates for the God that is beyond human knowledge. On the 45 Freud (1977). In this mature work, Freud reversed his early arguments that anxiety just pointed to a repressed idea or feeling. He noted that in many cases where anxiety was reported, no repression could be found. Moreover, patients were unable to determine the first onset of anxiety. Its physical component suggested that anxiety may have originated around birth, before the Ego had fully developed through contact with its environment.

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other hand, Levinas’s messianism bears comparison with Theodor Adorno’s invitation to view history “as if from the perspective of redemption, ” although Levinas sets this into a less abstract framework consisting of literal generations.46 What is interesting is that, here, messianism has nothing of Heidegger’s expectant awaiting of an event of overpowering meaningfulness, i.e., waiting for a god or the event of Being. Yet it tries to move beyond the vision of ruins piling upon ruins, which was how Walter Benjamin described the dystopic vision of Paul Klee’s angel of history as it was sucked backwards into the future. Recall that, instead of seeing redemption at the end of history, Klee’s angel was pulled backwards, by the force of a “storm in paradise,” into the future. All it could see was what had already happened or was presently occurring. Now, messianism, for Levinas, first arose with the theme of the promise of future generations. By 1974, it had shifted to become a witnessing borne to the sensuous and passionate origins of intersubjective responsibility. His writing gradually transformed itself into a poetics of the haunting memory he will call the “other-in-the-same.” Between the publication of his two books in 1961 and 1974, the theme of messianism moved from the forward-backward looking history of the family, opposed to the History of history texts, to the enactment of his own text as witnessing here and now. In Otherwise than Being, the messianic hope that Levinas had called “a new structure of time” in 1961 was taken up by a discussion of sensuous substitution. Still, the diachronic time described by substitution is secular. He always realized that messianic conceptions of “truth” and a “sealed time” were impossible in the everyday world. Yet responsibility, like the bite of conscience, is a reality that is not simply the result of learned norms – lest the norms themselves have no reason for being other than preserving peace. But is peace mere utility? Focusing on diachrony, and enacting responsibility in his own text, Levinas intended Otherwise than Being to be the supplement to Totality and Infinity. It was the last stone in his construction of secularized Jewish philosophy, which he began building seriously after his post-war encounter with Shushani. The pale hope indicated in Otherwise than Being may be the one remaining way around the generous, if tragic, dissolution of meaning staged in Paul Celan’s poetry, which urges: “we really don’t know what counts.” If so, then Levinas’s oeuvre is an experiment in messianic thinking not wholly unlike Nietzsche’s attempt to create a new prophet, Zarathustra, out of both Dionysian and Hebrew wisdom, in order to affirm life in suffering. Such messianic wagers are not new. In the twentieth century, the most sophisticated materialists – Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem (Scholem 1995) – turned this concept over and over, lacking as it were a “site” where a messianic overture might prove meaningful – or even in some way phenomenal. For them, it was certainly not meaningful in history. Nor was it meaningful in established religion. In addition, in the medical or scientific literature of that time, messianic passions rang akin to psychosis. Levinas’s last work provides a different site with its unique 46 See

Adorno (1983). Adorno’s “as-if” perspective is an imaginative exercise attempted in the midst of the despair that recognizes that there is no redemption in or out of history. In this sense, redemption must not be conceived in Christian terms, but as a displacement of perspective having nothing to do with positivistic history.

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return to the flesh. This time, however, the flesh is opened to interpretation and to skepticism. As Levinas puts it, his phenomenological descriptions and fragile messianic poetics must be “unsaid” or put into question. Each time skepticism comes to mind, it is useful to revisit his own critique of predicative language and judgements. Thus, when he describes the strange “movement” of substitution, he also warns us that, upon expressing this moment using nouns and verbs, his readers have good reason to doubt it. This is why he continually deconstructs predication, consciousness, and causality, much the way he deformalized abstract time. This way, messianism circulates in his text as a question to which humans return in times of crisis. In order to get at messianism as the ideal that promises justice for the weakest members of a society, Levinas uncovers the intersubjective conditions of possibility of the formation of social ideals (see Levinas 1981: 101). The question that Levinas’s idea of ethical responsibility poses expresses a very different sense of messianic hope, set apart from questions of the meaning and existence of God. If “God” is a name, a signifier that one pronounces in the midst of the experience of the ethical claim by the other person, or in the wake of the memory of substitution, then “God” refers neither to a being, nor to a cause. “God” becomes a figure that expresses the surplus of meaning, even of suffering, that arises intersubjectively and is generally overlooked by accounts from those sciences that treat consciousness as largely solipsistic. In this respect, it would seem that traditional religion also finds its meaning in ethical responsibility. “God”, as signifier, points toward those curious affective moments that may explain why, at times, I am concerned to be “my brother’s keeper.” Though a genealogy of monotheism was never Levinas’s concern, the impetus toward others’ good and the demand for justice found in the prophets animate his phenomenology. If one stays faithful to his own disciplined thought and does not reify the Other or responsibility, then the ground of philosophy of religion is shifted toward intersubjectivity and the groundlessness of ethical practice. In fine, Levinas has moved philosophy of religion beyond its contemporary scope and epistemic moorings – toward what may be a very ancient question.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 1983. Negative dialectics (trans: Ashton, E.B.). New York, NY: Continuum, 1983, Reprint ed., first translated edition, 1973. Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Le temps qui reste. Paris: Éditions Payot. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The time that remains: A commentary on the letter to the Romans. (trans: Dailey, Patricia). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Améry, Jean. 1980. At the mind’s limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities (trans: Rosenfeld, Sidney and Rosenfeld, Stella P.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Austin, J.L. 2005. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baeck, Leo. 1987. Essence of Judaism. New York, NY: Schocken. First published: 1905. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York, NY: Schocken. Benjamin, Walter. 1980. Über den Begriff der Geschichte, II. In Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1–2. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

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Béon, Yves. 1985. La planète dora. Paris: Seuil. Béon, Yves. 1997. Planet dora: A memoire of the Holocaust and the birth of the space age (trans: Béon, Yves and Fague, Richard L.). ed. Michael J. Neufeld. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Celan, Paul. 1990. Paul Celan, collected prose (trans: Waldrop, Rosemarie). Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press. Celan, Paul. 2005. Paul Celan selections, ed. and trans: Pierre Joris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and after (trans: Lamont, Rosette C.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Franck, Didier. 2001. Dramatique des phénomènes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Freud, Sigmund. 1977. Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety (trans: Institute of Psycho-Analysis and Angela Richards). New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Being and time, 1st ed. (trans: Macquarrie, John, and Robinson, Edward). New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Early Greek thinking (trans: Farrell Krell, David, and Capuzzi, Frank A.). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Martin Heidegger basic writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1977, expanded edition. Husserl, Edmund. 1982. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Book I (trans: Kersten, F.). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund. 1988. Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (trans: Cairns, Dorion). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Analyses concerning passive and active synthesis: Lectures on transcendental logic (trans: Steinbock, Anthony). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund. 2006. Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory (1898–1925) (trans. Brough, J.B.). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Jakobson Roman. 1995. On language, ed. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a science. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kiefer, Ferenc, and Nicolas Ruwet, eds. 2004. Generative grammar in Europe. Dordrecht: Springer. Kojève, Alexandre. 1980a. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’esprit réunies par Raymond Queneau), 2nd ed. Paris: NRF-Gallimard, 1947; Gallimard, TEL. Kojève, Alexandre. 1980b. Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenology of spirit (trans: Nichols, James H., Jr.). New York, NY: Cornell University Press. Lamm, Norman. 1989. Torah Lishmah: Study of Torah for Torah’s sake in the work of Rabbi Hayyim. Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing. Lescourret, Marie-Anne. 1994. Emmanuel levinas. Paris: Flammarion. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (trans: Lingis, Alphonso). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press; reissued 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1973. Theory of intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology (trans: Orianne, André). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 1995, first published, Paris: F. Alcan, 1930. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1974. Autrement qu’être; ou, au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1976. Noms propres. Montpellier: Fata Morgana; reissued by Livres de Poche, 1997. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. De l’existence à l’existent, 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin; first published in 1948. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise than being; or, beyond essence (trans: Lingis, Alphonso). Boston, MA and Dordrecht: Kluwer; thereafter Duquesne University Press, 1998.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1982a. De l’évasion, ed. Jacques Rolland. Montpellier: Fata Morgana; first published in Émile Bréhier’s journal Recherches philosophiques 5 (Paris: 1935–1936): 373–392. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1982b. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1986. Preface. LaGrasse: Éditions Verdier. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the other, and additional essays (trans: Cohen, Richard A.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988a. Existence and existents (trans: Lingis, Alphonso). Dordrecht: Kluwer; Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988b. Le temps et l’autre. Paris: Presses universitaires de France; first published in, ed. J. Wahl, Le Choix, le monde, l’existence (Grenoble: Arthaud, 1947). Levinas, Emmanuel. 1993. Collected philosophical papers (trans: Lingis, Alphonso). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1997. Proper names (trans: Smith, Michael B.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Discovering existence with Husserl (trans: Cohen, Richard A., and Smith, Michael B.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2003. On Escape/De l’évasion (trans: Bergo, Bettina). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2009. Œuvres I: Carnets de captivité, suivi de Écrits sur la captivité et Notes philosophiques diverses, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. Paris: Bernard Grasset/IMEC. Malka, Salomon. 2002. Emmanuel Lévinas: La vie et la trace. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of perception (trans: Smith, Colin). New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible (trans: Lingis, Alphonso). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; first published in French in 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. L’Institution; La Passivité: Notes de Cours au Collège de France (1954–1955). Paris: Éditions Belin. Pradines, Maurice. 1928. Philosophie de la sensation. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Rosenzweig, Franz. 2005. The star of redemption (trans: Galli, Barbara E.). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Ruwet, Nicolas. 1982. Grammaire des insultes et autres études. Paris: Le Seuil. Scholem, Gershom. 1995. The messianic idea in Judaism, and other essays on Jewish spirituality. New York, NY: Schocken, reprint ed. Volozhiner, Hayyim ben Isaac. 1986. L’âme de la vie: Nefesh ha-Hayyim (trans: Gross, Benjamin). Wahl, Jean. 1929. Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: Rieder, 1929, 2nd ed., 1951.

The Challenge of Love: Kristeva and Irigaray Morny Joy

Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are two contemporary women thinkers who have made their homes in France and who have had a profound impact on contemporary feminist thought. For various reasons, however, they are both reluctant to be identified with the feminist movement. Querying notions of God, specifically as conceived in solely masculine and transcendent mode, to the exclusion of women and “feminine” attributes, is at the heart of their projects. At the same time, rationality, with its binary structures, and its dispassionate stance towards questions of belief as the mainstay of religion is held to be inadequate. Instead, what is of primary importance for both of them is an ethos of an existence where unreflective needs and desires are transformed by conscious exercises of self-discipline. As part of this process, they propose an orientation that emphasizes a loving affirmation both of one’s finite and inherently divided self, and of other human beings, who suffer from the same predicament. Such an ethics of love is not simply a result of conscious selfreflection, but is based on a rigorous self-analysis of a psycho-dynamic nature. Its concrete demands of respect for the other person find their realization in practices that displace dependence on a transcendent male figure, i.e., a Father God, or rigid rules of a categorical or universal nature. Their respective solutions, however, differ in a way that highlights one of the central debates of contemporary feminism – this is the concern as to whether there are specific qualities that need to be cultivated by women, and/or whether these qualities are innate or culturally imposed. This exploration of the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, after a brief survey of further commonalities, will be divided into three sections for each thinker. The first will investigate their early work where both examine the consequences they perceive resulting from the repression of the mother – and hence the exclusion of women from the symbolic order which, in the Lacanian framework of cultural institutions and their conventions, would include philosophy and theology. This will also involve a reconsideration of the traditional designations of god, and the way that his existence is confirmed. In the second section, their alternative proposals for M. Joy (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, University Drive, T2N 1N4 Calgary, Canada e-mail: [email protected] M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_5,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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more inclusive procedures of both self-understanding and self-affirmation, particularly with reference to a therapeutics of desire, transmuted into love, is described. In addition, in the case of Irigaray, the attainment of a “divine” status, will be considered. Finally, their advocacy of an ethics of intersubjectivity that recognizes the inherent integrity of others in a way that fosters non-narcissistic or non-paranoid relationships will be evaluated. It is necessary to approach their thought with utmost care and perspicacity. Basically, this is because their reception is one that has polarized opinions even amongst women philosophers who have otherwise been receptive to Continental philosophy. Though their positions on many issues are quite distinct, they are often identified by their opponents. Both Irigaray and Kristeva have been described as gender essentialists, or purveyors of maternal values in ways that simply reinforce existing patriarchal or paternalistic attitudes and structures. In one sense, then, before I even begin to negotiate the possible productive effects that their thinking could have on philosophy of religion, I have to admit that I am entering something of a minefield. This is because Irigaray and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic assessments, as well as their possible contributions to philosophy and religion, are both often reduced by their opponents to catch-phrases or stereotypes that simultaneously simplify and distort the issues. Yet, even behind such caricatures, there remains evidence of the fact that philosophy and religion, as they have operated within the western tradition, and in analytic philosophy, in particular, have not been especially flattering or welcoming to women. It is sufficient to read extracts from Plato, Aristotle, certain of the early Christian Church fathers, as well as Kant and Hegel, to name some of the more notorious examples, and find women ranged on the side of excess emotion, frailty of will, and deficiency of intellect, in contrast to the more able-bodied and stable-minded male of the species. Religion has even taken these characteristics as evidence of women’s inherently sinful nature and deemed them as especially prone to sexual deviations. Various women philosophers, whether they accept the term “feminist” or not, have attempted in recent years to address the major issues involved in such descriptions. Simply stated, the question has been how can both philosophy and religion clean up their respective acts so that women are not regarded as congenitally inferior – be it in mind, body, or soul – as the likes of Aristotle and Aquinas have argued – when they are compared to the professed ideals or norms that have been designated as “masculine.” Both Irigaray and Kristeva have tried in ways that, at times overlap, and at others diverge markedly, to provide solutions to this problem.

Towards a Therapeutics of Women and the “Feminine” Though neither Irigaray nor Kristeva can be understood as religious, or even believers, in the accepted sense of these terms – in fact Kristeva even declares her atheism – they are vitally concerned with religion and its dynamics. Constructs of a “feminine” imaginary, which often have an ambiguous relation to the actual physical and emotional characteristics associated with women, are at the heart of their

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project of revision. The body is rehabilitated as a fleshly and sexual/sensuous participant in all activities of knowing and relating. The fact that the body also resonates with emotional expressions for them is no longer grounds for its dismissal as an object or a potential source of error and transgression. For both thinkers, it is love that becomes paramount – the driving force of our existence. The vicissitudes of love, thwarted, misdirected, passionately and exhaustively pursued, is the very stuff that determines whether we flourish or languish. For Kristeva, specifically, both religion and psychoanalysis involve “tales of love.”1 Irigaray and Kristeva each turn to Hegel and his notion of the other, revising his idea of negativity within the dialectic. They adapt this in diverse ways and, in the process, vividly portray an arduous process of redirecting our primal energies or desires. Indeed Irigaray will name this process a “labour of love” and, as a result, she posits that both men and women can “become divine.” An intrinsic part of such cultivation is the development of an ethical relationship to another human being.2 Where they differ is that Irigaray will opt for an “ethics of sexual difference,” while Kristeva will initially portray her ethics of otherness, or difference, as l’héréthique – a felicitous combination of “heretic” and “her ethic” – which evokes the fierce love of a mother for her child that Kristeva introduced in Tales of Love (Kristeva 1987a).3 Ethics begins at home for both Irigaray and Kristeva, and frustrated love seems to be at the root of all its problems. Self-acceptance and awareness, through a psychoanalytic therapeutics, as variously described by both Irigaray and Kristeva, will displace unreflective submission to the dictates of the good old authoritarian father God or his surrogates. In all of this reorganization however, questions inevitably arise as to the effect of such changes on philosophy as well as on religion. If the omnipotent, salvific God has been deprived of his former sovereignty, what becomes of the proofs and truths that were the bulwark of such a self-perpetuating system? 1 Kristeva observes: “Psychoanalysis is an experience of sexuality and thought, and a experience of love.. . . Transfer/ counter-transfer is nothing else than a loving relation between patient and analyst. It’s a love story . . .” (2002a: 77). 2 “Otherness” or alterity has become a shorthand term for intersubjectivity or for what was formerly termed “love of one’s neighbour.” As Emmanuel Levinas has observed, traditional codified ethics, with its summary directives, appears to have been singularly ineffective in preventing the disastrous European wars, and the Holocaust during the last century. These occurred in countries that were regarded as predominantly Christian and “Enlightened.” While neither Irigaray nor Kristeva will unreservedly accept Levinas’s proposed remedy of an ethical orientation where one places one’s responsibility for neighbour, or the other, in a place of primacy, thus supplanting one’s own interests – and where ethics thus replaces ontology as first philosophy – they acknowledge ethical relationships need to be drastically “re-envisioned.” In Levinas’s case, the other person is the means by which the absent Other/God – who cannot be named or known directly, is witnessed to. 3 Yet, a caution needs to be added that such a “herethics” (as it has been translated into English) does not necessarily involve an unqualified endorsement of a type of maternal or “feminine” love as a prototypical ethics, but rather seeks to discern a disposition that is sensitive to the exclusions and rejections of women as the negative version of “the other.” In particular, this negative other indicates for Kristeva those unacknowledged dimensions, not simply other human beings, that constitute our psychic make-up, and that have been repressed in order to become, as Freud termed it, “civilized.”

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Do we then automatically arrive at a kinder, gentler communicative world of harmonious interactions and attachments? Do we find more accessible and less doctrinaire means of conveying appropriate ways to implement preferred ideals, beliefs and ways of living peaceably in a just community? One glance at our current world situation provides a graphic reminder that this is unrealistic, though an often and simplistically invoked ideal. As an alternative, what insights can thinkers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva supply that can help to understand how humanity got itself into this mess? For surely it is the task of philosophy, most especially philosophy of religion, not just to concern itself with dogmatic categories as defence mechanisms, but to contribute in a meaningful and productive mode to an in-depth analysis of how humanity, despite eons of religious interventions, has successfully managed to distort, even thwart, its deepest yearnings, its highest aspirations.

Julia Kristeva and Religion Kristeva’s work is redolent with religion. This, in part, harks back to her childhood in Communist Bulgaria, where her own family background was Orthodox, although she was educated by French Dominican nuns. Her present interest in religion, however, would seem to be mainly professional. As Kathy O’Grady has commented: “Kristeva’s fascination with theology [and religion] rather than taking the form of a personal embrace or system of belief, stems from the wish as a psychoanalyst, to uncover the efficacy of those imaginary constructs that enable a kind of subjective stabilization in an individual” (O’Grady 2003: 88). For Kristeva this approach takes the particular form of examination of “religious texts and practices that enable both a corporeal and psychic transparence to a loving other” (88). Yet this interest was not apparent when Kristeva first came to study in Paris in 1965. At that period, her intention was to further her studies in linguistics, but she soon became part of a circle of theorists exploring the intersection of Marxism, psychoanalysis, avant-garde art and literature. In time, she discarded the Marxism, experimented in blending structuralism and psychoanalytic theory, then underwent analysis herself and trained as a psychoanalyst. It is the works that reflect this last stage of her own process that are most relevant for a discussion of philosophy of religion. Kristeva amends the theories of both Freud and Lacan on the structure of the unconscious so as to reveal the “lost territory of the mother” that is, the unacknowledged element in their depictions of the acquisition of consciousness. In their view, to attain mature differentiation, the symbiotic union with the mother must be renounced. While Kristeva does allow that such a step is still necessary, she does not subscribe to the view that the primal mother, or her influence, is thereby totally eliminated. She describes the persistent effects of the separation from this maternal relationship: This split has left within us traces of the pre- or translinguistic semiotic processes that are our only access to the species memory or the bioenergetic neuronal maps. These semiotic processes (archaic traces of the links between our erogenous zones and those of the other [mother], stored as sonorous, visual, tactile, olfactory, or rhythmic traces), diachronically constitute a presubject (the infans [infant]). (Kristeva 1987a: 8)

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For Kristeva, the “semiotic” is a term which she derives from the Greek, semion, meaning: “trace, mark or distinctive feature” (Kristeva 1987b: 5). This is her qualification of Lacan’s description of the unconscious “imaginary” phrase, that precedes the Oedipal process and the acquisition of language that is named by Lacan the “symbolic.” Entry into the Symbolic/symbolic basically marks the admittance into the human cultural domain with its linguistic apparatus and formalized institutions. For Kristeva, the Law or rule of the father, thus established by an act repression, or what she terms “abjection” of the mother,4 does not necessarily reign supreme. This is because the symbolic can be disrupted by intrusions of perverse and recalcitrant bodily symptoms and vocal expressions that witness to an unconscious, semiotic domain of undomesticated urges. Such is the legacy of the break with the maternal symbiotic bond. Yet Kristeva’s early efforts to reclaim the influence of the mother and her archaic territory did not meet with unanimous approval. In her experimental essay, “Stabat Mater” (Kristeva 1987a), she divided the text into two separate columns on each page. These two columns represent the semiotic and symbolic domains respectively, although they are not completely discrete entities, with certain overlaps occurring. One side of the page presented an historical overview of the cult of the Virgin Mary, while the other conveyed an impressionistic evocation of Kristeva’s own experience in giving birth to her son. As such, it was an attempt to graphically illustrate the inherent interactive nature of the symbolic and the semiotic elements simultaneously in one text. Kristeva was criticized for this work on two counts. One objection was that she still seemed to be identifying herself as a Father’s daughter, in that she still endorsed the repression of the Freudian identified phallic or primal mother (Jantzen 2002: 152–153). The other criticism was its diametrical opposite, arguing that Kristeva was glorifying in the mother’s role, even identifying it as a woman’s main function, so that females were only valued for their reproductive abilities (Stanton 1989). The problem is that Kristeva’s own writings are dense and somewhat ambiguous on these issues. She has refined and clarified her ideas over the years, especially in interviews. Sara Beardsworth, an appreciative yet critical reader of Kristeva, provides a contemporary sympathetic evaluation of Kristeva’s intentions: The objective of “Stabat Mater” as a whole, and other of Kristeva’s writings, is to bring out the maternal feminine in conditions that work to conceal recognition of the feminine at all, that is to say, in late modern societies. There may be a bias of interest on Kristeva’s part when she repeatedly stresses the significance and fate of the maternal. At the same time,

4 “Abjection”

is a term used by which Kristeva indicates the act of separation from the mother. It is acted out specifically in relation to the mother’s body – which is abjected or “ab-jetted,” as it is sometimes translated. The maternal body both attracts and repels, and such necessary abjection in orthodox psychoanalysis is prescribed as the only way in which the (male) child achieves autonomy. She has elsewhere defined it accordingly: “Abjection is something that disgusts you, for example, you see something rotting and you want to vomit – it is an extremely strong feeling that is at once somatic and symbolic, which is above all a revolt against an external menace from which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the impression that it may menace us from the inside” (Kristeva 1996: 118).

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M. Joy this bias of interest has unearthed what worries about the reduction of the feminine to the maternal pass over too quickly: that the maternal is not to be set off from the feminine, that it is an aspect of all subjectivity, which both men and women must negotiate, and that it is the theory of the unconscious (encompassing the semiotic and symbolic) that reveals this. (Beardsworth 2004: 265)

This interesting observation that “the feminine” is a neglected dimension that needs to be acknowledged by both men and women will resurface later. For the moment however, and for its relevance to philosophy of religion, I would like to return to Kristeva’s treatment of the Virgin Mary in “Stabat Mater.” Beardsworth, discussing this article, states: “Kristeva addresses the cult of Mary in part because it achieves a certain refeminization of the mother, and so a certain recovery of the maternal feminine” (265) which is neglected by both Freud and Lacan. Dawne McCance, however, reminds the reader of another function of the Mary cult which, as a disembodied idealization of the lost (maternal) object, simply facilitates one’s access into the symbolic. Along with the Trinity, Christianity’s Virgin Mother, without a natural body and without knowing sex or death, demands incorporation, the sacrifice of a body, as the price of identification, ego-formation and placement in the Symbolic. For Kristeva, it is the genius of the Christian construct that it facilitates perfectly, the structural requirements of signification: it makes love an experience an identification with an ideal Other, an identification that requires repression, sacrifice or killing of the body, the “erotic” body, that is especially the body of women. (McCance 2003: 139)

These two reactions also exemplify the qualified response to Kristeva’s work that can be found in some feminist quarters. While she does definitely reclaim the mother from her outcast or derelict status, by insisting on the intrusion of semiotic elements in the symbolic, she still insists that the mother and her realm of plenitude must nevertheless be rejected, and her body abjected, so as to permit a child access to the realist and conscious conduct that is characteristic of the paternal rule of law in social structures. From a feminist perspective, Grace Jantzen voices another of the principal concerns regarding this position. As she states: Kristeva closely follows Freud in his social appreciation of the Oedipus complex, in which a boy must separate from his mother and overcome his hatred and jealousy for his father.. . . It has frequently been pointed out, starting out with Freud himself, that the pattern of struggle as Freud explained it was an account of male psychosexual development, and patriarchal society. Kristeva takes this over without comment about its gendered nature. She thus represents the splitting and separation from the mother in terms of a masculine subject, without acknowledging that she is doing so. (Jantzen 2002: 152)

Kristeva’s model of an interactive dynamic between the semiotic and symbolic, when regarded from a theoretical perspective, however, certainly does emphasize a marked change, with its inclusion of the corporal, with its visceral feelings and

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expressive articulations.5 In some respects, Kristeva’s insertion of the active involvement of women, even if only as semiotic interruptions in the symbolic patriarchal world of western psychoanalysis and religions, does highlight their absence from any meaningful discussions concerned with the male symbolic figure of authority – God as totally Other – who has presided over philosophical and theological proceedings for a major part of the history of the Western tradition. If one reads traditional philosophy of religion – apart from a number of recent feminist developments6 – this is a trend that continues alarmingly in most philosophy of religion. What, then, are the contributions that Kristeva could offer to change this dominant trend? One of them has to do with insight into the psychodynamics involved in the emergence of this God-figure – which need not necessarily be identified with a male, though invariably it is interpreted as such. This takes place because the repression of mother is not something that happens automatically, but is stimulated by the intervention of a third element – in classical psychoanalysis that of a paternal authority. It is here again that Kristeva adds a fascinating variant, positing instead this third element as a complex figure that represents a melding of the best of both parents. She will initially designate this composite figure as “the imaginary father” who instigates the process of transference. “In short primary identification appears to be a transference to (from) the imaginary father, correlative to the establishment of the mother as “abjetted” (Kristeva 1987a: 41–22). Kristeva has adapted this “imaginary father” from a reference in Freud’s work to a similar construct: “At the dawn of psychic experience Freud saw a primary identification, a ‘direct and immediate transfer’ of a nascent ego to the ‘father of individual prehistory’ who, according to Freud, possessed the sexual characteristics and functions of both parents” (Kristeva 1987b: 25). But need such a figure necessarily be male? Kelly Oliver describes what Kristeva envisages in such a development: This father is not really a father, or not only a father. Rather, the “father in individual prehistory,” Kristeva’s “imaginary father,” is a combination of the mother and the father. It has no sexual difference.. . . It has the characteristics of both masculine and feminine. Kristeva calls it the “father-mother conglomerate” [1983, 40]. The identification with this conglomerate is the vortex of primary identification within what Kristeva calls the “narcissistic structure.” This identification is what sets up all subsequent identifications, including the ego’s identification with itself [33]. (Oliver 1993: 77)7

5 This indicates a distinct problem in both Freud’s somewhat mechanistic description of the functioning of libido, as well as Lacan’s neglect of this vital aspect of the drives. Insofar as Kristeva’s depiction also aligns the semiotic with creative facets of the female – particularly maternity – it does draw attention to the somewhat typecast role of women as symbols of both lack and necessary loss in Freud and Lacan’s work. 6 See Jantzen (1999); Frankenberry (1998); Anderson (1997). 7 Oliver finds something of a problem with the logic involved here: “This identification with the imaginary father is a transference between the semiotic body and an ideal other who lacks nothing. It is called father in spite of the fact that it is also a mother, because, following Lacan, Kristeva identifies the Symbolic with the Father. She explains this curiosity by arguing that even though the child’s first affections are directed at the mother, these archaic ‘object’ relations are already ‘symbolic’ and therefore associated with this father. This is to say that the logic of the symbolic is

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As Oliver explains: “The mother-father conglomerate, then, is the combination of the mother and [the object of] her desire. It is a father within the mother, a ‘maternal father’” (79). Kelly then continues to explain the somewhat convoluted dynamics involved in this transaction: “This identification with the imaginary father allows the child to ‘ab-jet’ [sic] its mother’s body and thereby separate from her. But the separation is not tragic because it is supported by the imaginary father which is the mother’s love” (79). The machinations at work here, however, still presume the classical Freudian scenario, whereby a woman’s desire is always primarily for the male, and that in a sense the child identifies with the mother’s desire for the father. There are certain critics of Kristeva who are not happy with this manoeuvre, viewing it as simply a revamped version of the male oedipal conflict and its resolution. Indeed, as Kristeva expands on her theory, she would seem to corroborate such a charge. This is revealed in her discussion of religion. One of the most intriguing dimensions of this imaginary father is its vital connection with religion. In depicting a child’s pre-oedipal identification with this phantasm of a loving mother-father, Kristeva aligns it with the beginnings of the religious impulse. Kristeva, in fact, depicts Christianity as having admirably mirrored, and thus provided the necessary substitutes for, this archaic fantasy with its longings for an all-encompassing love. This is because remnants from unsatisfactory resolutions of such early psychic attachments may remain a disruptive influence throughout one’s life. In describing this, Kristeva states: More than any other religion, Christianity has unravelled the symbolic and physical importance of the paternal function in human life. Identification with this third party separates the child from its jubilant but destructive physical relationship with its mother and subjects it to another dimension, that of symbolization, where, beyond frustrations and absence, language unfolds. Because of its insistence on the paternal function, Christianity shapes the preconscious formulation of the basic fantasies characteristic of male desire. (Kristeva 1987b: 40)

What Kristeva is describing here seems to be a God who, as an intervening third figure, is distinguished by love instead of authority as in Freud’s characteristic paternal model. “This is perhaps what Christianity celebrates in divine love. God was the first to love, God is love: these apothegms reassure the believer of God’s permanent generosity and grace” (25). It is worth noting, however, that as Kristeva develops her ideas in this connection she paradoxically discloses her own orientation as being patriarchal. This is because the maternal loving dimension that she had originally included in the mother/father composite is slowly displaced by the paternal aspect that, in turn, becomes more dominant. This paternal aspect then becomes supplanted by the need Kristeva discerns for a strong direction.8 As a result, the women’s voice and presence that Kristeva wanted to reintroduce would appear to be abandoned. already within the maternal body” (Oliver 1993:78). This anomaly will be discussed further later in this chapter. 8 In both her own texts and in interviews, Kristeva unquestioningly relates the basic elements of Freud’s scenario of Totem and Taboo where the primal horde murders the alpha male who alone has had access to the women as the basis of the need for such authority. The resultant internalized

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This is because maternal love now seems to be engulfed by a required new modality of paternal omnipotence, though it now incorporates an aspect of love. At the same time, Kristeva will propose another symbolic mediation inherent in the Christian tradition that provides a form of consolation/affirmation for its adherents. This is that Christ in the crucifixion suffers the desolation of apparent abandonment by his father. In this way, Kristeva proposes that Christ participates in the suffering inherent in the human condition with the depression and mourning that occur in life during moments of loss of love, when the originary abandonment/loss of the mother is again psychically reawakened. “By quirks of biology and family life we are all of us melancholy mourners, witnesses to the death that marks our psychic inception” (41). Yet such consolation is no longer effective for many. This is because in present times, according to Kristeva’s telling, a dark shadow has fallen on the therapeutic religious tales of love that once flourished. The prognosis is suitably grim. The once consolatory and guiding God is dead. Kristeva, though an atheist herself, seems alarmed at the results of the widespread disenchantment so evident in secular societies, where the paternal regulative element seems lacking. Today, the state of the world poses a crucial question: Are we still living in a civilization structured by authority and symbolic laws, or – like the patients suffering from new “maladies of the soul” – have we lost our capacity to represent, to maintain a superego and paternal function? And if so, are we not threatened with regression into barbarism, into tyranny? (Kristeva 2002a: 129)

In her work “New Maladies of the Soul,” Kristeva depicts what she understands as the contemporary crisis in subjectivity when such a paternal function is absent: We are all normal, that is to say neurotic, and we discover ourselves to be increasingly gripped by psychotic anxieties – paranoia, schizophrenia – which are precisely the anxieties that confront us at the border at the limit of our identities. Our identities are in crisis. They could go bad, decompose or explode. (Kristeva 2004: 155)9

This tragic situation has largely occurred, in Kristeva’s view, not simply because of the loss of God and regulatory commands, but more precisely because of the loss

guilt resurfaces in the need to propitiate this sacrifice both in ritual observances of totem-figure reenactments, and regulatory laws that prohibit a repetition of this act and other untoward antisocial activity. Kristeva acknowledges the need for such a communal mode of authority and regulatory procedures. As she states: “This [Totem and Taboo] is the origin of the social contract, a set of symbolic laws that represent authority. Where there was murder and there will now be a set of rules: rules governing the exchange of women, alimentary or moral prohibitions, and so on. Tyranny and execution are transformed into a set of symbolic nouns that constitute the basic of morality, religion, and ultimately, civilization” (Kristeva 2002b: 12). 9 Kristeva provides graphic descriptions of these maladies – which she also describes as stemming from narcissistic disorders. “When psychic representation is in default, it takes the form of psychosomatic illnesses, drug abuse, or acting out – from botched actions to perverse violence, like paedophilia and social vandalism. What can’t be represented is abreacted in a violent act or else goes deep down inside where eventually everything self-destructs – organs, self-awareness and life itself” (Kristeva 2002b: 32).

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of the requisite compensations that religious mediations supplied for love’s traumas. Kristeva’s diagnosis is that this contemporary “crisis of love” has come about because there is no effective secular equivalent for the “imaginary father,” and thus a successful transference, either with the first or later loves, is not achieved. From her own experiences in psychoanalytic practice, Kristeva relates how she has come to appreciate psychoanalysis as a substitute remedy for the former sustenance supplied by religion: “It is want of love that sends the subject into analysis, which proceeds by first restoring confidence in the capacity for love through the transference, and then enabling the subject to distance him or herself from the analyst” (Kristeva 1987b: 3). She then continues: “The analytic situation is the only place explicitly provided for in the social contract in which we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered and to search for possible new identities and new ways of talking about ourselves” (3). In this way Kristeva portrays the analytic relationship of transference as encouraging a negotiation similar to that involved in the original transference to the “imaginary father,” who as the intervening figure, embodies as it were, the fusion of love, protection and guidance. Now the transferential and healing medium that was formerly provided by religion has become, in Kristeva’s view, the province of psychoanalysis. Kristeva has declared that: “It’s [love is] the only thing that can save us” (Kristeva 1996: 121). As such, it is the analyst who now represents the imaginary father, and also stands in for the now absent Other, God (1987b: 30). Kristeva describes how she understands the work of an analyst in this therapeutic role: “He’s the pole of primary identification that consolidates our capacities for representation; he’s the storekeeper of our imagination. There are other facets too: the father’s femininity, his passion, his desire”. (Kristeva 2002a: 24) She reiterates this designation elsewhere: “I want to stress the fact that the function of the psychoanalyst is to reawaken the imagination and to permit illusions to exist” (Kristeva 1987b: 18). Thus, for Kristeva, psychoanalysis works not to eliminate fantasies completely, but to help an analysand perceive their illusory nature and the hopelessness of expecting any complete fulfillment of their exorbitant demands for love. Yet Kristeva also allows fantasy to have a constructive role: “Fantasy returns to our psychic life, but no longer as cause for complaint or source of dogma. Now it provides the energy for a kind of artifice, for the art of living” (9). In a sense then, Kristeva allows that certain illusions are indeed necessary and can have a constructive role. “What today’s analyst must do, I think, is restore to illusion its full therapeutic and epistemological value” (21). Does this mean that Kristeva will then allow that religion has a place to continue to fulfill human needs in contemporary society? No, she will not go that far. She declares what she understands to be the difference in a psychoanalytic approach: I believe that the link offered by psychoanalysis subsumes the illusion of religion. I wrote an essay. . . that examines the interaction between psychoanalysis and religious discourse. It is often said that psychoanalysis can replace religion: first people confess and then you give them hope. That may be right, but it really isn’t, for this hope is concomitant with the dissolution of the analytic contract. Believers belong to the name of the father, the community, the church and an identifiable morality (Kristeva 1996: 11).

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Kristeva continues by clarifying what she believes to be the task of psychoanalysis today, which is to set people free from their illusory or compulsive desires so that they may form and enact conscious goals. Connections and illusions – of course they exist. We live in a society, and we will continue to live with illusions. Still, I am not fooled by them. I am going to analyze them. Why? Because I want to create new connections, not to isolate myself but to explore with other people. This requires another relationship to social bonds, another morality, that is different from religious morality. (11)

In support of a new morality, Kristeva will encourage analysands to sever their morbid dependent needs and to build connections with others according to a way of enlightened love. This undertaking is never entirely free of illusions, but its practitioners are all too aware of their delusionary expectations as expressed in inflated desires and projections. In fact, Kristeva will articulate what could be described as the ideal outcome of such a process. This is an ethics of intersubjectivity – in the form of a realistic love that neither expects nor demands excessively. Such an ethics can only be practiced, however, once all such exorbitant fantasies, or other thwarted expressions of displaced desire have been reclaimed through the work of psychoanalysis. One of the central prerequisites that must be in place before such an ethics of love can be achieved is an understanding of the dynamics of a displaced negative “othering.” Kristeva will also use terms such as “stranger,” “foreigner,” “alterity,” to depict this tendency to blame and to be intolerant of other people. She posits that this tendency arises because the necessary work has not been undertaken that would reconcile the human psyche to its own intrinsic state of separation/alienation. Kristeva again acknowledges that was formerly the task of Christian caritas or love: “The alienation of the foreigner ceases with the universality of the love for the other” (Kristeva 1991: 84). According to Kristeva, such an appeal, however, lost its effectiveness once empires and nation states came into clash with one another and divided loyalties arose between rival religious communities: Nonetheless, the absolute aspect of the religious bond soon collided with human needs as well as with the demands of States and soon afterwards those of nations. The fate of the foreigner in the Middle Ages – and in many respects today – depended on a subtle, sometimes brutal, play between caritas and the political jurisdiction (85).

Kristeva does not hold out much hope for a complete resolution of these difficulties and exclusions – and the inevitable hatred and violence that results –whether manifest in either the present political or religious domain. Instead she recommends looking within for insight concerning the modes of externalized projection involved. “Freud noted that the archaic, narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien double, uncanny and demonical” (183). Such a defence mechanism needs to be examined with the same rigorous honesty as other self-generated illusions. “The other is my (‘own and proper’) unconscious” (183). The result is that the foreigner within needs to be faced and not foisted on innocent others.

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Psychoanalysis is then experienced as a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself, towards an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable. How could one tolerate a foreigner if one did not know one was a stranger to oneself? And to think that it has taken such a long time for that small truth, which traverses or even runs against religious uniformist tendencies, to enlighten the people of our time! (182)

It is only with the realization of such a truth, after a requisite long journey of self-examination of a psychoanalytic persuasion, that an ethics of love for the other can come into being. As a result, for Kristeva, love and compassion can then be expressed in accordance with more measured and tolerant anticipations. There are many other aspects of Kristeva’s thought that could still be pursued, especially in relation to the potential efficacy of her ethics, but the intention of this chapter has been to emphasize those elements of her work that have relevance for the philosophy of religion. The major concern in this connection is, however, whether a mature religion and its consequent philosophic examination and response can ever be adequately expressed. This is because the personal psychoanalytic therapy that Kristeva advises is beyond the reach of the majority of human beings, both practically and financially. As a result, by way of conclusion, the question arises as to what other insights can be gleaned from Kristeva’s work that may be appropriate to apply as criticism to the way that such things are presently conducted in philosophy of religion.

Summary Observations Before proceeding, however, one thing that needs to be observed is that, for all her brilliant insights, there is an extraordinarily strange ambivalence that lurks at the heart of Kristeva’s work. While she declares that she is intent on reintroducing the maternal and feminine element – in the guise of the semiotic – back into psychoanalytic theory, she remains reluctant to promote the cause of women. At times it seems that, like a faithful Freudian, she mainly associates most feminism with its most radical expression as an attempt at castration, and she is reluctant to admit any legitimate challenges to excesses of paternal law. Kristeva observes that women appear at risk of psychosis because their excessive demands for equality or more rights threaten the social order. There is also a seeming conflict between the loving and authoritarian aspects of her theory that never seem to coalesce into a unified position. Then again, they may indeed coalesce, but this is only possible in a society that that would be under the control of the law of the Father. Given such qualifications, it is difficult to appreciate the reason why psychoanalysts could now claim the mantle of God, or his former earthly substitutes, as providential providers of consummate loving counsel. In what way does a contemporary imaginary fathermother substitute guide a new course of civilization in the absence of a god. Even if psychoanalysts are skilled in encouraging the dissolution of harmful fantasies, there is a risk, similar to Freud’s indulgences, of imposing their own fantasies on their patients, however beneficent they may believe them to be. These remain troubling and unanswered elements of Kristeva’s work. There is, however, an interesting development in Kristeva’s later work where she is somewhat more flexible in her experiments with the semiotic. She depicts

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it as related to all creative efforts that question the status quo. In fact, she wants to reclaim the term “revolt’ as a type of synonym for the creative resistance that it embodies. In Revolt, She Said, Kristeva describes her understanding of this term so that it does not necessarily indicate political protest. Instead she views revolt from a psychoanalytic perspective, invoking Freud. “Freud’s insight means an invitation to revolt (anamnesis, desire, love, hatred) all the better to reveal oneself (to create and re-create the self). Understood in these ways, revolt takes on forms that are themselves more complex, less immediately transgressive” (2002b: 85). It is here that Kristeva’s own “less immediately transgressive” ideas on revolt as a mode of cultural transformation, not revolutionary activist protest, become clear. In such a revolt, however, there would be a place for women to participate constructively. She continues: An open mind, a mind set on revolt as I understand it, could become a permanent voice on a level of esthetics, literary creation, discussions, art and communication.. . . This implies that a new cultural space will open up that will not become a space for religious dogma, but one that understands the spiritual anxiety driving religious dogma. In this scenario it is via education, culture and creativity that this need for revolt could be expressed, without strangling itself in dogmatism and fundamentalism”. (106)

It is from this position that Kristeva’s musings on the traditional exclusion of women cannot but raise questions about what is involved or, more appropriately, what has been excluded in philosophical reasoning about God. This is because it would seem that philosophy of religion, in its haste to prove the existence of God, as well as clarify his attributes and the kind of world he created, has lost touch with the vital creative energies that have informed the need for such assurances. Whether one accepts or rejects the foundational psychoanalytic narrative with its incestuous longings and repetitious compulsions, Kristeva still raises relevant questions that may, however, lead to different answers from those that she herself suggests. Her insights into the banishment of passionate emotional energies from the austere rational enterprises that are characteristic of traditional philosophy of religion bring to attention questions hitherto unasked. Are these constructions simply defence mechanisms that strive to keep at bay, or under control, those semiotic-like impulses of revolt that Kristeva had initially depicted in the mode of the maternal/feminine? Such interruptions could problematize the Law of the Father with its absolutist tendencies that tend to obscure whatever love may have been involved both in the creation of humanity and its further amorous impulses. Maybe today it is the task of women philosophers to try and conceive of alternate models of God. They could also discuss the intertwining passions of the head and heart in ways that resonate more sympathetically with the human condition so that there is no longer any need to divide and separate them.

Luce Irigaray Luce Irigaray, who is Belgian born, moved to Paris in 1960 to undertake advanced studies. Her work spans a number of disciplines – literature, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, and she has doctoral degrees in both linguistics and philosophy. She trained to become a psychoanalyst in the Lacanian school, but was

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famously expelled from Lacan’s Ecole Freudienne after the publication of her thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a), which was highly critical of the Freudian psychoanalytic movement, especially in its treatment, both theoretical and practical, of women. Irigaray has complained that many commentators do not pay sufficient attention to the philosophical elements in her work. A number of women scholars, however, e.g., Dorothea Olkowski (2000) and Sara Heinämaa (2006) have investigated this aspect of her writing, especially the phenomenological engagements that concern both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in particular. It would appear that it is her work on Heidegger that has most resonance for philosophy and religion, especially as she contests his depiction of the nature of Being and the precise way in which it has been forgotten. It is the dimension of the divine, both its nature and its relation to women, that is carefully scrutinized by Irigaray throughout her many works. In her early period, in Speculum (1985a) and This Sex which is Not One (1985b), Irigaray challenged the model of God and/or the divine that has been prominent in western religious traditions. During the period of Sexes and Genealogies (1993a), Irigaray began a more creative project of delineating the features of a “feminine divine” that was specific to women. Then, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993b), she began to explore a new mode of human relationship. In I Love to You (1996), she further developed the notion of the divine and the way it could find expression in heterosexual relationships. Her next move, already foreshadowed by references in the earlier work, involved a turn to the East, particularly to yoga and Tantrism. In a later work, Between East and West (2002a), Irigaray refined her ideas on love and the divine and their implications for a revision of western thought in both philosophy and religion.10 Finally, in The Way of Love (2002b), Irigaray engaged with Heidegger in a way that gave a remarkable twist to his notions of Being and its relationship to the gods. Irigaray employs diverse tactics in the different phases of her project of elucidating the process of “becoming divine.” In the first phase, in both Speculum and This Sex which is Not One, she attempts to subvert, using deconstructive tactics, the ideal of a transcendent male God and the accompanying divinely sanctioned law of the Father, which has dominated western religious traditions. In a related strategy, Irigaray then explores the forbidden territory of female mysticism, intimating that a clandestine alliance exists between women and God in this realm of excess that resists reduction to rational formulations. In “La Mystérique” an essay in Speculum, Irigaray, in a parodic mimetic mode, intentionally assumes the guise of a female mystic/hysteric in order to counter Lacan’s declaration that female mystics are inarticulate when it comes to expressing the erotic delights (jouissance) of their divine encounters. Irigaray appreciates the female mystic as neither repressed nor incoherent. Instead she views the mystic as manifesting, by means of their bodies, an eloquent protest against the strictures that have forbidden them access to education

10 There

is not the space to explore the Eastern explorations in the work of Irigaray in this paper, but I have dealt with it elsewhere. See Chapter 6, Joy (2006).

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and autonomy. From a religious perspective, the exclusion of women is most obvious when contrasted to the privileges of men who have claimed over the centuries, as a prerogative, to be the sole official representatives of God in directing religious institutions, performing rituals and promulgating dogmatic decrees. In her eulogy of women’s mystical expertise, Irigaray introduces the motif of the two lips of women’s sexuality to celebrate women’s heterodoxy. She also associates them with a mode of multiplicity and even infinity. This allows women to challenge dichotomies, such as those of soul and body, of sacred and profane, that she views as having served to prevent women from having achieved a similar symbolic status to that of men.11 This motif of the lips also suggests a space of fluidity that designates for Irigaray the infinite variety of women’s previously untapped creative resources. Irigaray situates this unlimited potential within a process of becoming that contests the ontotheological concept of a timeless Being/God that has been so characteristic of western metaphysics and theology. In time, however, after further explorations in this realm of female possibility, Irigaray became dissatisfied with the strategy of mimicry of mysticism, since she understood that its manifestations remained confined to the unconscious dimension that Lacan named the Imaginary.12 She began to appreciate that women’s representations, as well as their identities, cannot remain confined to private mystical trysts if they are to redress the pervasive imbalances that Irigaray views as having, until now, deformed human and divine relationships in the wider culture. In particular, Irigaray appreciates the situation of woman as having been particularly circumscribed and that it is only by envisioning a god of their own that they can attain true autonomy. We women have become weak, formless, insecure, aggressive, devoted to the [male] other because unaware of ourselves, submissive to the other because we were unable to establish our own order. . .. If we are to escape slavery it is not enough to destroy the master. Only the divine offers us freedom – enjoins it upon us. Only a God constitutes a rallying point for us that can set us free – nothing else. . .. So far it requires no faith other than the faith in the possibility of our autonomy, our salvation, of a love that would not just redeem but glorify us in full self-awareness. (Irigaray 1993a: 68)

As a woman operating in such a repressive culture, yet intent on challenging its impositions by an appeal to an innovative mode of divine intervention, Irigaray adopts a two-step movement. One facet that she continues is the deconstruction of the basic concepts and institutions of the culture which has alienated her, while the 11 I

use the term “symbolic staus” both with reference to Lacan’s postulate of the symbolic and, with more precision, to the realm of religion where women have been denied a specific form of symbolic status. This is because they have until recently, women have not been accorded the right to preside at rituals or holy ceremonies, to learn the sacred scriptures in their original language and comment on them, or to be respected as able to attain what is regarded as the highest state of spiritual perfection. 12 The Imaginary, from a Lacanian perspective, refers to false projections, impelled by desire, by which one attempts to fulfil one’s own illusory fantasies of plenitude, such as experienced in the symbiotic relationship with the mother, especially her loving gaze, which confirms the child’s narcissism.

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other is “to discover and at the same time preserve the singularity of my nature and allow me to elaborate its culture” (148), particularly in relation to a new appreciation of the divine. Irigaray’s first step in this creative direction is undertaken in a thematized manner in an essay, “Divine Women,” in Sexes and Genealogies (Irigaray 1993a: 57–72). Here she undertakes a project of portraying the distinct otherness/difference of women and their specific relation to the divine. This could have reverberations that are revolutionary in their psychic, emotional, social, ethical, philosophical, and theological effects. Irigaray’s complex interweaving of these new ideas indicates the notion of a divine mode that is to be rescued from an immobile transcendent ideal or from any predetermined telos. She poses the rhetorical question: “Why do we assume that God must always remain inaccessible transcendence rather than a realization – here and now – in and through the body?” (Irigaray 1993b: 148). In contrast to accepted abstract metaphysical concepts, a god, in Irigaray’s scheme of things, needs to participate in human existence. As such, God is no longer an abstract “Being” but indicates a process of becoming divine. In these explorations Irigaray starts to promote positive forms of female identity that women can adopt and actualize for themselves. As a result, a god represents: “An other that we have yet to make actual, as a region of life, strength, imagination, creation which exists for us both within and beyond, as our possibility of a present and a future” (Irigaray 1993a: 72). This is indeed a change from women’s former exclusions. In Speculum Irigaray had also portrayed the situation of women as “the still undifferentiated opaqueness of sensible matter, the store (of) substance for the sublation of self” (Irigaray 1985a: 224). Again, in Je, Tu, Nous, Irigaray further describes them as “the natural substratum in this social construction [of patriarchy]” (Irigaray 1993c: 45). From a psychoanalytic perspective, Irigaray assesses that western culture was constructed on the repression of the mother/woman. “The entire male economy demonstrates a forgetting of life, a lack of recognition of debt to the mother, of maternal ancestry, of women who do the work of producing and maintaining life” (Irigaray 1994: 7). Similarly to Kristeva, Irigaray now works towards a cultural transformation so as to replace this neglect of matter, and the consequent oblivion of the maternal. The key to this move will be the fact that: “The female body is not to remain the object of men’s discourse or their various arts but . . . [it should] become the object of a female subjectivity experiencing and identifying itself” (Irigaray 1993c: 59). To assist in this task, Irigaray will explore several possible modalities of depicting this divine other for women. Such experimentation is the work of a consciously deployed creative imagination which displaces former unconscious Imaginary projections (1993a: 160–169). Irigaray wonders: “This God, are we capable of imagining it as a woman?” (63). That this divine otherness will no longer conform to the intransigence of a transcendent God as a male Other is indicated by Irigaray when she describes women’s divine as: “Their Other without capital letters” [i.e. in lower case] (Irigaray 1993b: 115).Yet she vacillates about the actual form of “her” or “his” identity: “How is our God to be imagined? Or is it a god?”(Irigaray 1993a: 67). In her first foray into divine territory, Irigaray seems to favor a divine identity that is

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not only incarnate but participates in the cosmic processes of the natural world: “We climb toward God and remain in Him, without killing the mother earth where our roots lie, without denying the sky either. Rooted in the earth, fed by rain and spring waters, we grow and flourish in the air, thanks to the light from the sky, the warmth of the sun” (69). Irigaray then links the cultivation of such natural affiliations with the needed reclamation of the repressed maternal body. But the problem then becomes, however, the manner in which a woman today can realize her own connection with such a depiction of the divine. Basically, Irigaray will recommend two tasks to assist in this process. One is the cultivation of certain values, even virtues, associated with female figures from the past – be they mythic or proto-historic. The second is the practice of a personal discipline with definite spiritual repercussions whereby instinctual desires are transformed so that they foster a state of equanimity and integrity. This, in turn, allows for the emergence of a love that is neither obsessive nor controlling. To aid women to undertake the first task, Irigaray harkens back to values from former times. She has come to accept the historical existence of gynocracies – which she believes existed before patriarchy – a hypothesis that is hotly disputed today by scholars.13 She clarifies her understanding of this position: “Gynocratic traditions . . . should not be restricted to matriarchy but should include eras when women reigned as women – [that] predate patriarchy” (Irigaray 1993c: 24). Irigaray postulates that in these times there were goddesses, whose qualities and relationships, as well as women themselves, were valorized. “At one time mother and daughter formed a natural and social model. The mother-daughter couple was the guardian of fertility of nature in general, and of relationship with the divine” (Irigaray 1994: 12–13). As a further support, Irigaray invokes ideals that she attributes to certain fabled female types. Among these are Antigone and the goddess, Aphrodite. Antigone respects the natural and social order by genuinely (not metaphorically) respecting the earth and the sun, respecting maternal ancestry as a daughter.. . . She reminds us that the earthly order is not a pure social power, that it must be founded on the economy of the cosmic order, upon respect for the procreation of living beings, on attention to maternal ancestry, to its gods, its rights, its organization. (70)

In the same vein, Irigaray proposes that: “Aphrodite . . . holds a very special place between nature, gods and human manifestation. She represents the embodiment of love, already sexualized in its forms – man and woman – but still close to the cosmos.. . . Aphrodite – in her time – was the embodiment of love becoming human freedom and desire” (95). Both of these female figures endorse specific values that Irigaray regards a necessary corrective, but also constitute an integral part of her vision of women becoming divine. On this score, Irigaray is quite clear that she is not recommending a return to actual goddess worship, merely an adaptation of specific esteemed values and ideals. 13 See

Conkey and Tringham (1993) for one example of such criticism.

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The second and related task that gradually becomes apparent in Irigaray’s own life and work is a path of deepening self-awareness and a spiritual discipline. She describes this variously at progressive stages in her writings. From the beginning, Irigaray has mourned women’s unrealized potential and their diverted desires – that were channelled, as Irigaray implies, to fit within a male-designed economy of exchange and gratification. It is now time for women to find genuine modes of expression of their desire as love. Yet the solution that Irigaray envisages is not an unfettered and unfocused outpouring of instinct and emotion. Instead, Irigaray advocates another deliberately conscious process, tempered by yoga and meditiative practices, for which she herself is the test case. Intrinsic to this practice is an appreciation that a woman has a specific identity that she has to develop. This is sustained by a particular belief on Irigaray’s part that: “I was born a woman but I must become the spirit or soul of the body I am. I must open out my female body, give it forms, words, knowledge of itself, a cosmic and social equilibrium, in relation to the environment, to the different means of exchange with others, and not only by artificial means that are inappropriate to it” (Irigaray 1993c: 116). In a later work, I Love to You (1996), Irigaray describes the self-reflective project that she undertook: In my case it was more a question of inverting myself.. . . I carried out an inversion of the femininity imposed on me in order to try and define the female corresponding to my gender.. . . I wanted to begin to define what a woman is, thus myself as a woman – and not only a woman but a freely belonging to the female gender or generic – by carrying out a particular process of limitation or negation relative to my natural immediacy.. . . Hence I attempted to sketch a spirituality in the feminine, and in so doing, of course, I curbed my own needs and desires, my natural immediacy . . . [and I called] into question the spirituality imposed on me in the culture appropriate to the male. (64)

Ultimately, this quest lead Irigaray in the direction of eastern religions, which she regards as revering body and spirit and holding them in a mode of balance that western religions have lost.14 She specifically turns to yoga with its focus on the breath as a spiritual orientation that inculcates methods of physical and mental control. She relates: “Through practicing breathing, through educating my perceptions, through concerning myself continually with cultivating the life of my body, through reading current and ancient texts of the yoga tradition and Tantric texts, I learned what I knew: the body is the site of the incarnation of the divine and I have to treat it as such” (Irigaray 2002a: 62). Such a spiritual discipline also encourages the education of desire so that the instinctual needs become transmuted into a state of non-attachment that she likens to Buddhist practice. What becomes evident in this personal search is a growing acknowledgment by Irigaray of a spiritual dimension that is not connected in any way with western orthodox religious dogmas or theological beliefs. There are also no aspirations to immorality. In contrast, Irigaray’s spiritual and divine references entail basically an ethical mode of living with a reverence for what she terms, “what is,” or for a

14 For

Irigaray’s exposition of this dimension of Eastern religions see her work Between East and West (Irigaray 2002a).

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somewhat unproblematized notion of the “natural” world.15 She defines her understanding of this approach: “Male religion . . . represents a social universe organized by men, but this organization is based on a sacrifice: the sacrifice of nature and the sexual body, particularly that of woman. It imposes a spirituality cut off from its natural roots and environment and therefore cannot fulfill humanity. Spiritualization, socialization and cultivation must start with what is” (Irigaray 1994: 12). An unexpected feature of Irigaray’s work as she moves from a solely critical stance to proposing alternative divine vistas for women, with their corporal, emotional, psychological, sexual, ethical, and spiritual aspects – or what, as a composite, she terms women’s “morphology” – is that Irigaray has become a proponent of sexual difference. For Irigaray, male and female exist as utterly distinct entities from a biological as well as a morphological point of view.16 In time, Irigaray will crystallize this distinction by the term “sexuate.” This term is closely aligned with her previous understanding of gender, as distinct from “sexual” which has only physical and instinctive connotations for Irigaray. Gender [is an] index and mark of the subjectivity and the ethical responsibility of the speaker. In fact gender is not just a question of biology and physiology, a matter of private life, of animal habits or animal fertility. It constitutes the irreducible differentiation that occurs on the inside of the ‘human race’” (Irigaray 1993a: 170). Each woman, then, is regarded as a member of a universal category, and thus locates her task of becoming woman, or becoming divine, within certain parameters. Irigaray describes this positioning self-referentially: “I belong to the universal in recognizing that I am a woman. This woman’s singularity is in having a particular genealogy and history. But belonging to a gender represents a universal that exists prior to me. I have to accomplish it in relation to my particular destiny” (Irigaray 1996: 39). This reconciliation of the subjective and the objective has a definite Hegelian flavor for Irigaray insofar as she understands that it is now also appropriate for women to aspire to the task of also attaining the universal in the public realm – a task that Hegel had denied them. Irigaray’s redefinition of the universal allows that women can love another human being on their own terms. This is in contrast to Hegel’s relegation of woman to the domestic realm – including procreation – where she was deprived of any recognition of her singularity, let alone the possibility of attainment of the universal. For Irigaray, love was impossible in such a state of servitude. She describes their previous plight. “For woman, therefore, the universal comes down to practical labor

15 Irigaray

makes a distinction between two different understandings of nature. “Patriarchal cultures, especially of late, often interpret the meaning of nature in accordance with a human nature that they have themselves defined. Yet in the first instance nature means earth, water, fire, wind, plants, living bodies, which precede any definition or fabrication that tear them away from roots and origins that exist independently of man’s transforming activity” (Irigaray 1993a: 129). 16 Irigaray explains her position in I Love to You: “Without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal. Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing else” (Irigaray 1996: 47).

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within the horizon of the universal delimited by man. Deprived of a relationship to the singularity of love, woman is also deprived of a universal for herself. Love, for her, amounts to a duty – not a right – establishing her role within humankind where she appears as man’s servant” (22). In contrast, a woman can now express her desire, which she has transformed through her spiritual exercises into a non-possessive love. (Irigaray will also refer to this process as the labor of love.) At the same time, this love no longer implies that a woman must sacrifice her identity to the needs of the other. “Women must construct a world in all its and their dimensions. A universe, not merely for the other . . . A world for women. Something that at the same time has never existed and which is already present, although repressed, latent, potential” (Irigaray 1993b: 109). This new world is thus one where contemporary women can dare to love. And it is by doing so, in heterosexual relationships, that Irigaray will also claim women will also become divine. But, in this instance, they will not do it alone. What Irigaray is claiming is indeed something quite revolutionary, that the act of human love is divine. As she states: “We are perhaps confronted with the unveiling of another relation with the divine than the one that we already know, a divine not only living with humans but in them, and to be greeted and listened to between us” (Irigaray 2002b: 50). In another declaration, she is even more explicit: “Love, even carnal love, is therefore cultivated and made divine. The act of love becomes the transubstantiation of the self and his or her lover into a spiritual body. It is a feast, celebration, and a renaissance, not a decline, a fall to be redeemed by procreation. Love is redemption of the flesh through the transfiguration of desire for the other (as an object?) into desire with the other” (Irigaray 1996: 139). One can thus appreciate Irigaray’s approbation of the tantric symbol of male and female figures in an embrace of disciplined sexual ecstasy as an appropriate symbol of divine love that has been so obviously missing in the western religious traditions. Within both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions such a symbolic union also represents an overcoming of the dualities that beset mundane existence. Yet there is a marked distinction in Irigaray’s interpretation of this symbol. In eastern traditions it indicates the attainment of a rarefied, disembodied state of ultimate consciousness, where the body itself is left behind. In contrast, Irigaray intends that both the spiritual and carnal elements must be honoured. The flesh must not be disregarded and treated simply as a means to achieve the absolute.17 It is in The Way of Love (2002b) that Irigaray attempts to ground these various dimensions by placing them within a rereading of Heidegger’s On the Way to Language. Irigaray frames her work as a poetics that is a form of homage to Heidegger. But it is also conceived also as “a philosophy in the feminine”, with a certain distinct interpersonal emphasis that she finds lacking in Heidegger. “The book outlines another philosophy, in a way a philosophy in the feminine, where 17 In

this Tantric discipline of spiritual transformation, Irigaray also acknowledges that the breath/air/spirit connection as the most primal of elements is of utmost importance. The role of breath, as associated with the life source and the mother, has featured in Irigaray’s previous work, especially in connection with the work of Heidegger.

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the values of intersubjectivity, of dialogue in difference, of attention to the present life, in its concrete and sensible aspects, will be organized and raised to the level of wisdom” (vii). Previously, in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray expressed her dismay that Heidegger, in developing a new ontology of Dasein in Being and Time, had overlooked the status of the mother, as the primordial matter or physis of life, and thus of archaic Being. For Irigaray, it is the mother, not Being, that has been forgotten. Irigaray observes, with critical reference to Heidegger, that: “To forget Being is to forget the air, this first fluid given us gratis and free of interest in the mother’s blood” (Irigaray 1993a: 127). She describes the rupture she perceives: “But he remains within its architectonics: the logos. Seeking the cause of the loss in the forgetting of this architectonics, though it is the architectonics itself that accounts for the loss.. . . [T]he loss and the oblivion proceed from an architechne: from the meta-physical logos” [sic] (Irigaray 1999: 87). Irigaray nonetheless remained sufficiently sympathetic to Heidegger’s project of the need to rethink Being, although her suggestions for its composition take her in quite a different direction. Irigaray is also mindful of Heidegger’s suggestion that we are in need of a new god – a viewpoint with which she concurs. She observes: “We still have to await the god, remain ready and open to prepare a way for his coming. And, with him, for ourselves, to prepare, not an implacable decline, but a new birth, a new era of history” (Irigaray 1993a: 129). It is in The Way of Love that Irigaray provides an indication of what form she thinks that this god could assume when she describes her purpose in writing the book: “Faithful to the teaching of Heidegger in a way but shifting the emphasis into a frame or a space in which Heidegger did not venture, those of a meeting with an other, another who is different while being nearest to ourselves: the clearing for the advent of a dialogue or conservation between the two parts of humanity in the respect of their otherness to one another [sic] (Irigaray 2002: xii). In The Way of Love it might seem that we are no longer waiting for a god to be revealed. Irigaray appears to have responded to the provocation of Heidegger uttered in his final article’s title: “Only a God Can Save Us.” This is because Irigaray intimates that a god has arrived, and it is love, specifically incarnated in the love relationship between two human beings. This is because: “[M]an and woman breathe together, engender together, carnally and spiritually. Their alliance is flesh becoming word – the announcement, the question, the dialogue, the thanks, the poetry of the encounter” (Irigaray 1996: 124). Such is Irigaray’s encomium to the new god. For Irigaray, it is not simply recasting Being, but the fullness of humanity, expressed in both flesh and spirit, that is ultimately disclosed. Yet Irigaray has not been particularly forthcoming when questioned about further elaborations. She has been particularly reticent in response to any inquiries posed as to whether she believes a god exists. Nonetheless, she gives strong evidence of what she understands as involved with the appeal to god(s) and their represenational worth for human beings. “If God is the keystone of our tradition, I think the most decisive act

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of sovereignty is to become aware of all the energy, all the representations invested in him. This is the most difficult act to carry out” (Irigaray 2000: 173). She also has no difficulty in dispensing with traditional forms of God. “God must not be a Godobject outside of me, foreign to the becoming of my subjectivity. Rather, God must be the one who contributes to the becoming of this subjectivity, having already been established by me, or in me, as the blind font of my consciousness, of my project, of my becoming, of my horizon” (Irigaray 2001: 86). It would be a rather challenging undertaking to consider in detail what the changes would be for philosophy of religion if all of Irigaray’s ideas were taken seriously. This is because, whether her ideas of a new god are accepted or not, she has clearly demonstrated fundamental problems about the way that the discipline has been conducted. She has posed many specific questions to philosophers other than Heidegger and Hegel, including Nietzsche and Levinas, particularly concerning the implications of their thought for women. In the majority of her investigative analyses it is the neglect in philosophy and religion of a feminine specificity or difference that preoccupies her. “Why is our rationality historically based on abstract logical categories rather than on a culture of experience, including sensual experience?” (Irigaray 2000: 73). In addition, she has a rather daunting question for male philosophers: “I would ask [philosophers] furthermore: why should objectivity be a construction – beginning from a God, from a transcendental object – and not respect for what exists? And also: why do they define and impose as objectivity what is a product of their auto-reflection, a necessity of their consciousness, and place it before the knowledge of existing reality?” (Irigaray 2001: 91). Finally, with reference to religion itself, she worries about the continuing effects that the ideal of a male God and his attributes will continue to exert on women. “Above all, I would ask these philosophers if their need both for God and for the transcendental object to achieve their freedom is not derived from the erasure of other as other” (92). While one may disagree with the various solutions regarding the nature of the divine that Irigaray recommends – as do many feminists in religion and philosophy, e.g. Jantzen (1999), Armour (1997, 1999), Joy (2006),18 it has to be admitted that her criticisms of the Christian tradition and the impact it has had on women’s integrity is particularly salutary. She has inspired many of these same feminist scholars to construct other productive responses. There have also been recent anthologies that explore new directions, such as Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack’s Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (2003) and Anderson’s New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion (2010). It is to be hoped that these works will instigate a much needed renewal in the way that questions and problems in philosophy of religion are both framed and pursued, particularly with reference to women.

18 Certain

of these disagreements include: (1) An insistence on a virtual normative heterosexuality; (2) Prescriptions of idealized “feminine” characteristics; (3) An uncritical and selective appropriation of eastern religions; (4) A romanticized depiction of nature.

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Bibliography Anderson, Pamela Sue. 1997. A feminist philosophy of religion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Anderson, Pamela Sue. 2010. New topics in feminist philosophy of religion. Dordrecht: The Netherlands Springer. Anderson, Pamela Sue, and Beverley Clack, eds. 2004. Feminist philosophy of religion: Critical readings. London: Routledge. Armour, Ellen. 1997. Writing/reading selves, writing/reading race. Philosophy Today 41: 110–117. Armour, Ellen. 1999. Deconstruction, feminist theology, and the problem of difference: Subverting the race, gender divide. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Beardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Conkey, Margaret W., and Ruth E. Tringham. 1995. Archaeology and the goddess: Exploring the contours of feminist archaeology. In Feminisms in the academy, eds. D. Stanton and A.J. Stewart, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Frankenberry, Nancy. 1998. Philosophy of religion in different voices. In Philosophy in a feminist voice: Criticism and reconstruction, ed. J. Kourany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heinämaa, Sara. 2006. On Luce Irigaray’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity between the feminine body and its other. In Returning to Irigaray, eds. E. Miller and M. Cimitile, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. [1974]. Speculum of the other woman (trans: Gill, G.C.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985b. [1977]. This sex which is not one (trans: Porter, C. with Burke, C.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993a. [1987]. Sexes and genealogies (trans: Gill, G.C.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993b. [1984]. An ethics of sexual difference (trans: Burke, C., and Gill, G.C.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993c. [1990]. Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a culture of difference (trans: Martin, A.). New York, NY: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1994. [1989]. Thinking the difference (trans: Montin, K.). New York, NY: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1996. [1992]. I love to you (trans: Martin, A.). New York, NY: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1999. [1983]. The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger (trans: Mader, Mary Beth). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Irigaray, Luce. 2000. Why different?: A culture of two subjects (trans: Collins, C.). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Irigaray, Luce. 2001. [1997]. To be two (trans: Rhodes, M.M., and Cocito-Monoc, M.F.). New York, NY: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 2002a [1999]. Between east and west: From singularity to community. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 2002b. The way of love (trans: Bostic, Heidi, and Pluhá˘cek, Stephen). London: Continuum. Jantzen, Grace. 1999. Becoming/Divine: Towards a feminist philosophy of religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jantzen, Grace. 2002. Birth and powers of horror: Julia Kristeva on gender, religion and death. In Rethinking philosophy of religion: Approaches from continental philosophy, ed. Philip Goodchild. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Joy, Morny. 2006. Divine love: Luce Irigaray, women, gender and religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1987a. Tales of love (trans: Roudiez, Leon S.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Kristeva, Julia. 1987b. In the beginning was love: Psychoanalysis and faith (trans: Goldhammer, Arthur). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to ourselves (trans: Roudiez, Leon S.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1996. Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. Ross M. Guberman. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2002a. Intimate revolt (trans: Herman, J.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2002b. Revolt, she said: An interview with P. Petit. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Kristeva, Julia. 2004. Interview: Sharing singularity. In Julia Kristeva: Live theory, ed. J. Lechte and M. Margaroni. New York, NY: Continuum. McCance, Dawne. 2003. Kristeva’s melancholy: Not knowing how to lose. In Religion in French feminist thought: Critical perspectives, ed. M. Joy, K. O’Grady, and J. Poxon. London: Routledge. O’Grady, Kathy. 2003. The tower and the chalice: Julia Kristeva and the story of Santa Barbara. In Religion in French feminist thought: Critical perspectives, ed. M. Joy, K. O’Grady, and J. Poxon. London: Routledge. Oliver, Kelly. 1993. Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the double bind. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Olkowski, Dorothea. 2007. The end of phenomenology: Bergson’s interval in Irigaray. In Returning to Irigaray: Feminist philosophy, politics, and the question of unity, ed. Elaine Miller and Maria C. Cimitile. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Thinking Differently: Foucault and the Philosophy of Religion Jeremy Carrette

[A]t every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is.. . . The key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos. (Foucault 1983a, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” 374)

In Michel Foucault’s 1982 Collège de France lecture course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a distinction is made between philosophy and spirituality, where the latter depends on the effective presence of “transformation.” Foucault argued that the link between philosophy and spirituality was ruptured in modern philosophy when Descartes requalified “know thyself” (gnothi seauton) as the self-evidence of consciousness and discredited “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou) as found in Greek, Hellenistic, Roman and early Christian discourse (Foucault 1981–1982: 14). Although aspects of “a transformation in the subject’s being” (or “spirituality”) still persisted in modern philosophy, as in certain nineteenth-century philosophical works (such as Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), Foucault was attempting to show that the subject’s relation to truth was different in later philosophical thought. Foucault recognized a greater inseparability between philosophy and spirituality in ancient forms of thought as the “activity of knowing, and the conditions and effects of this activity,” which were linked to a “transformation” (28). Modern philosophy, in contrast, isolated a concern with the “access to the truth” and the “conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth” (15). In short, Foucault was trying to establish that at certain points in history the relation of the subject to truth was determined by a question of “change” and “transformation” – something which demanded a “shift” in an individual’s existence.1 J. Carrette (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] 1 McGushin (2006) has explored the idea of Foucault as offering a philosophy of transformation in an examination of his Collège de France lectures from 1981 to 1984.

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The “wedge,” according to Foucault, between the ancient world’s uniting of philosophy and spirituality appears in history not through science but through theology – and the theology of Aquinas and the scholastics in the particular. Here faith becomes part of rational reflection rather than a question of the “knowing subject” and specific spiritual practices that constitute “care of the self.” The key part of Foucault’s work on “care of the self” was that “there cannot be knowledge without a profound modification in the subject’s being” (27) and that modern philosophy had forgotten this link. It had forgotten the link to the social and personal transformation of the world and had even dislocated its logic from such a rational correlation. These experimental reflections made during Foucault’s 1982 lecture course captured – towards the end of his life – the central problematic of his entire work, and its importance for understanding the significance of his writing for the philosophy of religion. Foucault’s late work is a re-uniting of philosophy and spirituality in so far that he constantly attempted to link thought with personal, social and political transformation. Foucault thus challenged the philosophy of religion to re-establish a link between the ancient notions of philosophy and spirituality, an appeal to the historical processes of transformative thinking, rather than an appeal to the disembodied abstractions of philosophy, which silently justify the status quo or leave one unchanged. There is in Foucault a link between theory and practice, ideas and social change through the recognition that knowledge is always grounded in human institutions that shape bodies and lives. Foucault brought philosophy to the political body through historical analysis and a contemporary interpretation of historical texts. In this sense, he can also be appreciated as, consciously or not, questioning the contemporary ethics of much philosophy of religion.

Life and Thought of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Building on his later integration of thought and life in a 1982 interview, Foucault recognized that all his work was part of his “own biography.” He argued in relation to his different works that he “had the occasion to feel and live those things.” (Foucault 1982a: 11). His mature reflections found a ground for such thinking in ancient philosophical texts, which are captured in his studies of Greco-Roman thinkers, such as Socrates, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca; but shades of the same kind of approach are scattered throughout his work. For example, the awareness of linking thought and practice was made in more radical terms in the middle period of his writing when he explained in a 1977 interview that his books were about experiences and transformations that sought to bring about political change (Foucault 1978a: 27). As he argued, his historical investigations made “use of ‘true’ documents, but in such a way as to furnish not just the evidence of truth but also an experience that might permit an alteration, a transformation, of the relationship we have with ourselves and our cultural universe: in a word, with our knowledge (savoir)” (37). Foucault’s attempt to change the way we think was an important part of his historical perspective, because history revealed the provisional nature of thought itself and showed the conditions from which certain ideas emerged as problems. Foucault

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famously argued that the task of philosophy should not be about “legitimating what is already known” but rather “to think differently” (Foucault 1984b: 8–9), which is why his thinking has caused such unease with the philosophical systems that seek to reinforce a dominant paradigm of thought. Foucault’s thinking was a practice of historical critique that drew attention to the contemporary conditions of thought and practice. One of the strategies of such thinking is to refuse or resist the existing categories and concepts. This, in turn, meant that Foucault used a whole series of techniques to displace thought, but always, as the later Foucault insists, within the rational terms of the Enlightenment critical apparatus (Foucault 1984a: 32ff). Foucault, echoing Kant, took thought to its limits in order to expose how it functions in history and how it shaped human institutions and the very fabric of the body. This approach means that Foucault’s work is never easy to locate. He crosses many traditional academic boundaries, consciously plays with language and pushes the structures of knowledge in order to reveal what is hidden in the discourse or the way we organize thought. It is precisely this radical movement of thought that allowed Foucault not just to use a qualified understanding of “spirituality,” but to directly engage with the theology and religion in the history of ideas (even as Foucault’s work has enabled the term “religion” to be critically suspended in a wider cultural and historical analysis). While Foucault also touched the edges of some traditional themes in Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy of religion, his work both exists outside such a discipline and reconfigures the very foundations of such thinking. In this introductory essay, I want to introduce Foucault’s work through the idea of thinking as a practice of transformation in order to show how he offers a new set of concepts and concerns for those working within the intellectual domain of the philosophy of religion. In so doing, I will draw attention to how his thought demands both a personal and political engagement and, ultimately, a critical reconfiguration of the categories of philosophy and religion.

Michel Foucault’s Philosophical Location I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. (Foucault 1982a: 9)

While Foucault’s “philosophy-as-life” established a strong connection between biography and philosophy, the correlation between these two areas is never simplistic. Foucault, at times, sought as much to conceal as to reveal – in a playful and enigmatic style – in part to test the assumptions behind the positioning of his thought. Foucault, in this sense, saw every representation as bound up with a certain history and politics of knowledge. Even the notion of the author is brought under scrutiny. In 1969, towards the end of what is known as his literary period, he wrote an essay questioning the modern “author-function,” in which he explored how the notion of the author stabilizes the text and how it supports legal and institutional systems (Foucault 1969a: 130). Foucault was here showing how the way we construct knowledge, or what he called a “discourse” (the institutional system of language), provides the sub-structure of truth and social practice. Discourses serve social interests and concerns, related to the existence and maintenance of specific communities.

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The very act of categorising the world becomes part of the social order – ideas and the social world have an organic development shaped by emerging interests. Such an intellectual concern with categories and the restrictions of certain categories on thought and practice, meant that Foucault constantly tried to find ways to avoid the labels often attributed to him, even those that are often used to position him today, such as structuralist, post-structuralist or postmodernist (Foucault 1983b: 116ff, 34, 1984c: 383). The nature of Foucault’s philosophical location can perhaps be seen from his response to a 1984 interview question about being read diversely as an idealist, nihilist, new philosopher, anti-Marixst and new conservative. In the interview, he stated: “I think I have been situated in most squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously.. . . None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean” (Foucault 1984c: 383–384). Foucault’s resistance was not simply the practice of being enigmatic although, as in his 1963 study of the “surrealist” writer Raymond Roussel (Foucault 1963c) would suggest, he delighted in the ambiguous). Rather, as I have suggested, it was an attempt to question the assumed categories that positioned his thinking. Biographers have rightly sought to locate Foucault in the political events of his life and his engaged activism and struggles for social justice (Macey 1993; Eribon 1992). Some biographers have also tried to make more imaginative interpretations from his Nietzschean spirit and his gay life in San Francisco. Yet, while there are correlations between his work and his sexual life, such limiting and simplistic frames of interpretation perhaps reveal why he preferred the ambiguous and enigmatic as a strategy (Seigel 1990; Miller 1993; Halperin 1995). The tension between strategic anonymity, as in Foucault’s position as the “masked philosopher” for an interview in Le Monde in 1980 (Foucault 1980a: 323–324), exists in some tension with the intellectual quest for historical location. Foucault’s particular life history saw him move from a privileged upbringing in the French provincial town of Poitiers to the most elite academic institutions in Paris and eventually, in 1970, to the Chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. The research culture of the latter institution meant he was obliged to present publicly his work for only 26 hours a year in lectures and seminars (which he did from 1971 to 1984, with the exception of his sabbatical year in 1977). These recently published lectures show the framework of his thinking behind his published studies and reveal the style of his “experimental” thought. We can also see how the chosen title of his chair at the Collège de France demonstrates the nature of his approach as, to follow Clare O’Farrell’s study, a “philosopher–historian” (O’Farrell 1989). The experimental nature of Foucault’s thinking meant that at various points in his career he felt uncomfortable operating within one of these domains, but at various times – often in response to external criticism – he also resisted being seen as either an historian or a philosopher. As O’Farrell recognized, Foucault established his own approaches that utilized both these practices to the unease of those located more firmly in the respective disciplinary regimes. To understand Foucault’s work we must see it as located in the spaces between literature, history, politics and philosophy; although it ventures across a wide range of

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other disciplines, including the social sciences, psychology, religion and medicine. This interaction of thought is made possible in large part through the post-1945 French intellectual context. In Foucault’s formation in the history of science, and in the cultural context of French intellectual thought, philosophy permeates more easily than it does across Anglo-Saxon disciplinary structures. The intersections of Foucault’s thought and his utilisation of evocative, literary images have contributed to the unease of those in the analytical tradition of philosophy and resulted in a greater appreciation of his work within social and cultural theory. While Foucault championed anti-humanist thinking, it is by no means a feature of all his work and, as Prado identifies, his employment of at least five different usages of truth indicates he is no simple relativist (Prado 1995: 119ff). As Prado suggests, there are not only relativist and constructivist notions of truth in Foucault, but also Nietzschean perspectivist notions, experiential and semi-objectivist ideas. The more objectivist notions emerge in his extension of critique, his late work on the ethical subject and in his fight for social and political justice. Many in the English-speaking world have often seen his style of thought, particularly in the 1960s, as a rejection of rationality and positioned him – wrongly – in the quagmire of a “postmodern” approach. The disciplinary anxiety is that Foucault displaces essential philosophical concepts through history and thus shows the fragile fluctuations of thought. Despite these misunderstandings, the complex developments of Foucault’s thought reveal how he remained loyal to the Enlightenment philosophical traditions, and how he saw his work as extending critical practice from Kant (Foucault 1984a: 42). “I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” (42). While Foucault can easily be criticized, as, for example, by Habermas, for undermining the value of modernity and the Enlightenment, his later reflections are more measured than his earlier avant-garde reactions (Habermas 1987a, b; 1989). To position Foucault’s thought in the Enlightenment system is to recognize the importance of critique within that tradition, which is exactly how Foucault understood his own style of thinking. Foucault’s method is one of “critical” practice. Developing such an Enlightenment paradigm, he wrote in 1978: “[C]ritique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth . . . in a word, the politics of truth” (Foucault 1978d: 32).

The Intellectual Roots of the Philosopher–Historian The nature of Foucault’s critical approach can be seen from the various strands of his intellectual formation. We can identify four broad clusters of formation, which at various points of his career he openly acknowledged: Heidegger and phenomenology; the history of science and Kant; Nietzsche and the avant-garde, and, structuralism and the history of religions.

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Foucault was influenced early in his work by aspects of European phenomenological thinking, not least through his exposure to Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne, but principally through the work of Heidegger. Foucault acknowledged in a late interview that Heidegger had “always been the essential philosopher” and that his “entire philosophical development was determined by [his] reading of Heidegger”; although not as significant as Nietzsche who he discovered through Heidegger (Foucault 1984d: 250, 1982a: 12–13). Despite these revelations, and acknowledging his reading of Heidegger in the early 1950s, the specific influence is unclear (Milchman and Rosenberg 2003). It is generally agreed – and confirmed by Foucault himself – that Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow were correct in their 1982 study of Foucault in recognising that Foucault goes “beyond” Heidegger in developing his own historiographical method (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982; Zoungrana 1998), but there are patterns of influence. Foucault’s first publication was an extensive commentary on Binswanger’s Dream and Existence essay, and his other early works on psychiatry carried forward a concern with the historical “conditions of possibility” (Foucault 1954: 31–32). Foucault’s historical critical analysis held many echoes of Heidegger’s critical project – as seen in Stuart Elden’s (2003: 197) correlation between connaissance [formal rules of knowledge] and savoir [conditions of knowledge] both in Foucault and in ontic and ontological knowledge in Heidegger. Foucault’s Nietzschean embodiment of knowledge and his commitment to the problematic of the “historical present,” however, took him “beyond” Heidegger and the desire for some point of return (Milchman and Rosenberg 2003: 16). The movement away from phenomenology can be seen in the second major aspect of Foucault’s formation. This can be seen in his early work in the history and philosophy of science, especially under the influence of his doctorate supervisor Georges Canguilhem, and his predecessor at the Sorbonne, Gaston Bachlehard (see Gutting 1989). Canguilhem’s work linking epistemology and the history of science allowed Foucault to question the construction of rationality in the history of madness and the foundations of the (psychological) subject. As Foucault argued: “[T]he history of rationality (either you accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible, or as though a rational history of all the ramifications and all the bifurcations, a contingent history of reason were impossible” (Foucault 1983b: 27). Canguilhem’s “philosophy of the concept” allowed Foucault to move away from grounding knowledge in the subject. Alongside Foucault’s early doctoral work on madness, Historie de folie à l’âge classique (Foucault 1961a),2 Foucault also wrote a thesis on Kant, Introduction à l’anthropologie de Kant (Foucault 1961b) and, as Fimiani (1998) has argued, this work contains many of the conceptual directions of Foucault’s thinking, particularly his later work on the ethical subject. Kant is the hidden source behind much of Foucault’s critical project, but direct evidence of this only appears at the very beginning and end of his work. Perhaps, the final acknowledgments of Kant

2 Originally

part translated as Madness and Civilization (London: Tavistock, 1967), followed by the completed translation History of Madness (London: Routledge, 2005).

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and the Enlightenment reveals that however much Foucault’s experimental projects challenged philosophical thought he never left the prestigious intellectual institutions that produced such discourses. Foucault was more concerned to establish an intellectual space that allowed thought to come back to life by engaging it with those areas it refused to explore outside “philosophy” and which flourished, hidden, beneath its surfaces. He was attempting to bring philosophy back to its critical and ethical limits; and in his exploration of the social-political texts of ancient Greece and Rome, the philosophy of Kant is never far from the ethical framework. I have already noted how the influence of Nietzsche superseded that of Heidegger, and it was Nietzsche’s thinking that also took him beyond phenomenology and his study of psychiatry and the asylum. Nietzsche was Foucault’s self-confessed intellectual “revelation” (Foucault 1982a: 13). Although Foucault became more explicitly Nietzschean with the utilisation of the term “genealogy” from around 1971 and the development of his thinking about “power” (particularly in mid-1970s), Nietzsche had been present in his thought since his first reading in the early 1950s. It was also through Nietzsche that the physical body takes on a stronger theoretical force in Foucault’s thinking. For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, history and thought are rooted in the body as the primary mark of truth. The impact of Nietzsche is also dovetailed with Foucault’s interest in the writings of Georges Bataille.3 Through Bataille Foucault explored the theme of transgression, the death of God and sexuality, drawing out the significance of the Marquis de Sade in understanding the relation of language, desire and belief.4 Foucault’s fascination with such ideas is also reflected in his encounter with the French literary avant-garde, his work for the literary journal Tel Quel, and his exploration of themes in surrealism.5 During this period Foucault was deeply influenced by the enigmatic writing of Maurice Blanchot and the play of language, which had an important influence on his understanding of the limits of language, as detailed in his 1966 work The Order of Things. In his exploration of language and the limits of expression, Foucault also engaged with the avant-garde notions of the “death of God,” echoing the ideas of both Nietzsche and Bataille. While this period of the 1960s was an explicitly experimental time in Foucault’s thought, it was one that redirected him from the fashionable approaches of existentialism and phenomenology to his own methods. The period of the 1960s was also one shaped by the intellectual movement of structuralism, not least exemplified in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the wider currents of this movement had a strong impact on Foucault’s work. Foucault nevertheless went to great lengths to separate his thinking from structuralism, stating strongly: “I have never been a structuralist” (Foucault 1983b: 22). He insisted that

3 Foucault wrote an important essay on Bataille for a special edition of the journal Critique (no. 195–196), Hommage à Georges Bataille, in 1963, entitled “A Preface to Transgression” (Foucault 1963a). 4 For a discussion of these themes see Carrette (2000: 63–84). 5 Foucault wrote a short essay, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, on the work of Magritte in 1968, see Foucault (1968).

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he had “used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis” (Foucault 1966: xiv). However, his work in the 1960s, particularly The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969b) contained many characteristics of structuralism, even though he is never confined himself to such a position and its strict rules. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) provide a detailed scrutiny of this question in a discussion with Foucault himself, and they perhaps capture the clearest sense that Foucault’s method of archaeology6 “resembles structuralism” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 53, 57).7 The resemblance can be seen in the rejection of subjectivity and interiority in the construction of meaning, but, despite the echoes, he never formally adhered to the details of a strict structuralist position. We can also see, for example, that in Foucault’s archaeological method his “rules of formation” are never permanent structures (as held in structuralist theory). They are instead a “set of relations,” such that meaning is created by ever-changing formations rather than determined by a set of fixed rules as such. “Archaeology describes discourse,” it marks out historical patterns, rather than identifies hidden structures and rules (Foucault 1969b: 131). Foucault’s very elaborate, some would say paradoxical, outline of archaeology did not help in clarifying the issue. There is no doubt that Foucault is drawn into the “structuralist atmosphere” in the 1960s, particularly with his notion of “episteme,” which he defined as the “total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems” (Foucault 1969b: 191; see Ray 1987: 45). It is perhaps best to capture Foucault’s work, however, under the rubric of “post-structuralist” in so far as he extends, or goes “beyond” (to recall Dreyfus and Rabinow) structuralism by developing a theory of “discourse” (a group of signs given a mode of existence; Foucault 1969b: 107), where statements (units of this discourse) are determined by their historical conditions. Despite his resistance to being seen as a structuralist, Foucault indirectly acknowledged its impact in a 1967 interview where, alongside the importance of Bataille and Blanchot, he notes the influence of structural and functional analysis in the work of Georges Dumézil and Claude Lévi-Strauss (Foucault 1967: 98). Both scholars were strikingly concerned with the theme of religion. In Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault also pointed out that it was from Dumézil that he learnt “the internal economy of discourse” and “the system of functional correlations from one discourse to another by means of comparison” (Foucault 1970: 235). Dumézil’s work on the history of religions provided a way of examining not only the content but the relations of meaning, in a similar

6 Foucault took the idea of archaeology from Kant. The archaeological method sought to find the underlying structures of historical ideas by examining the rules and formation of a discourse. It sought to establish how an idea, such as “madness,” “sexuality” or the “self,” was created and deployed through history, rather than assuming it was a fixed object of knowledge through all time. 7 Clare O’Farrell (2005: 28) also points out, in one of the best introductory studies, that much of the confusion about Foucault’s relationship to structuralism is related to the fact that “his extended and positive treatments of the movement have not as yet been translated.”

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way to Foucault’s archaeological method. There is also a correlation in Dumézil between these relations of meaning and ideology,8 which arguably also shaped Foucault’s genealogical model. From the 1930s, Dumézil had developed a comparative study of Indo-European mythology in which he identified a “tripartite ideology” of sovereignty, physical power and fecundity, which functioned in social the world, for example, according to priest, warrior and artisan (see Dumézil [1966]1996). This correlation between classificatory structures and social function shaped the parameters of Foucault’s thinking about discourse and practice in the same way as Dumézil models the gods of the ancient world, but where Dumézil gave priority to ancient gods Foucault gave priority to the modern disciplines of social institutions. Dumézil’s influence, fittingly, re-appeared in Foucault’s final lecture course at the Collège de France in February 1984, in discussion of Socratic parrhêsia (truthtelling) and the last words of Socrates. As Davidson (1994: 79–80) shows, Foucault followed Dumézil in rejecting the interpretation of Socrates’s final words as a concern with death. They showed instead a Socrates concerned with a philosophical way of life.9 However, Foucault’s final works were more directly influenced by the Greco-Roman scholarship of Pierre Hadot (like Dumézil a scholar from the religious section the École Pratique des Hautes Études) from whom the late Foucault developed his understanding of “care of the self” and established the link between philosophy and spirituality, particularly the idea of philosophy as a way or style of life (Hadot 1995). These diverse sets of influences are testimony to the many philosophical and historical ideas that affected Foucault’s philosophical practices.

The “Experimental Attitude” My role – and that is too emphatic a word – is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people – that’s the role of an intellectual. (Foucault 1982a: 10)

As is evident from the above discussions, Foucault’s work evolved and changed through the “experimental” nature of his thinking. He shifted the framework of his analysis and the theme of his study to specific problems in the history of ideas, but always within a philosophical-historical framework. He thus constantly adjusted his conceptual terminology and method throughout his life in, what Gros calls, “a hermeneutical spiral” (Gros 2005: 515). We can see these evolving interpretative frames as he moves from “archaeology” in 1961 (the historical examination of discourse), to “genealogy” in 1971 (the historical analysis of institutional power,

8 As O’Farrell (2005: 140) indicates, Foucault “did not find the notion of ideology to be a particularly useful one.” He resists and questions the Marxist idea of ideology and, at times, uses the word in a more under-theorized way to imply a relation of power (O’Farrell 2005: 96–98). 9 The feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen (2004) uses Foucault’s wider method to criticise and challenge the preoccupation of western philosophy with ideas of death rather than life.

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discourse and the body) and, eventually, to problematiques in 1983 (how and why issues become constituted at certain historical moments). Each conceptual shift reflects successive refinements – and thus they are not mutually exclusive to each other – of his central concern with the “conditions of emergence” for ideas and their function in particular historical contexts. Foucault later regarded the idea of problematization (or problematiques) as applicable to all his work, but admits, as with his later introduction of the idea of power in the 1970s, that he “never isolated this notion sufficiently” in his first works (Foucault 1983c: 343, 1984e: 257). Foucault’s writing therefore conceptually developed and sought to establish a “transformation” in his own thinking at the end of each book (Foucault 1978a: 41). As he pointed out: “I write precisely because I don’t know yet what to think about a subject that attracts my interest. In so doing, the book transforms me, changes what I think. As a consequence, each new work profoundly changes the terms of thinking which I had reached with the previous work” (Foucault 1978a: 27). However, each of his studies were always concerned with, what he called in 1975, the “history of the present” (Foucault 1975a: 31). This term indicates an account of history in terms of contemporary questions and problems. Foucault’s central aim in all these works was to put ideas into history and into the structure of power relations within society. Ideas are never neutral but inspired according to institutional investments of power. In continuing to follow Foucault’s own later reflections in order to illuminate his entire work, it is striking to note that, in an autocritique of his work in 1980, he used Jürgen Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests ([1968] 1987) to frame his own thinking (Foucault 1980b: 161). Following Habermas’s framework of techniques of production, signification and domination, he saw his early work as concerned with “techniques of domination,” but added that his later work was concerned with, what he calls, “techniques of self” (162). While his early studies on the history of madness, medicine and the prison had focused on processes of domination, he now recognized that there is another side to this process – an important corrective. This is the process that he terms “technologies of the self.” This shift addressed a key critical concern for many feminist writers who saw Foucault’s early and middle work as preventing any form of resistance (see McNay 1992; Taylor and Vintges 2004). The later Foucault appeared to recognize self-formation as a stronger moral force in society. Foucault conceded in the same essay in 1980 that the broad notion of “government” captured a central theme of all his thought. Such was the result of this insight that in his 1979–1980 Collège de France course he positioned the scope of his thinking as different aspects of governmentality. As he explained in the summary outline of his course: “This year’s course drew upon analyses made in preceding years bearing on the notion of ‘government’: this notion being understood in the wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men. Government of children, government of souls or consciences, government of a household, of the State or of oneself” (Foucault 1980c: 154). Governmentality thus captured both the techniques of domination and the techniques or technology of the self and returned Foucault’s thinking to questions of

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philosophy and spirituality in the Greco-Roman period, particularly in terms of how human beings conduct and transform themselves in the world. Foucault was concerned with the “knowledge of the subject” as it is governed through institutions of power (the asylum and the prison), disciplinary forms of knowledge (human sciences) and socio-political regimes of organisation (sexuality). By developing the idea of governmentality as a framework to locate Foucault’s thinking, it is possible to briefly summarize Foucault’s work according to four periods: (1) 1954–1969, the exploration of institutional governance and techniques of domination in madness, medicine and the human sciences through an analysis of historical discourses; (2) 1970–1975, the exploration of state and institutional governance of the body through disciplinary regimes of power; (3) 1976–1980, the exploration of state and individual governance of the sexual body through bio-power; and, (4) 1981–1984, the exploration of the government of the self as an ethico-political structure. In each period of work, Foucault was seeking to bring about a change within his own thinking, with its transformative implications, and thus provide a liberating space for social and political change. He even believed that his books failed if as a result of his analysis there was no corresponding change in social practice, such as in the asylum, the prison or the politics of knowledge. His works were in a sense “public gestures” or engagements of a “specific intellectual” in the political problems of his time (Foucault 1977: 40, 1976b: 130–131).

Foucault, Philosophy and the Question of Religion The reception of the various themes of Foucault’s work has been diverse and mixed in the Anglo-Saxon world. There are three successive waves of Foucault scholarship, each reflecting phases of interpretation, led by successive publication of material from the Foucault archive in French and then – in most cases – translation into English. The first phase of initial reception was interpreting his key concepts in the late 1970s and early 1980s as his work spread beyond France. This engagement took place, not surprisingly, at the border of French studies, philosophy and history. It also had an impact in sociology and political theory, where Foucault was read in terms of post-Marxism and the social construction of ideas (Sheridan 1980; Lemert and Gillan 1982; Major-Poetzl 1983; Rajchman 1985; Smart 1985; Hoy 1986). There were other readings of Foucault in the history of medicine and psychiatry and critical appraisals of his historical method (White 1973; Hacking 1981; Midelfort 1980). The second wave of examination emerged 10 years after his death, with the publication of the four volume collection of Foucault’s extraneous articles, papers and interviews, Dits et ècrits, in 1994. Here the focus was primarily in appreciating the “scope and importance of his work” (Davidson 1997: 1), with an emphasis on the extraneous documents and the critical reception of his work in a wide range of disciplinary spaces. This wave of writing saw an explosion of books on Foucault, particularly with the growth of cultural studies and queer theory (Halperin 1995). There was also an inter-disciplinary engagement with Foucault across the Humanities and Social Sciences (Ball 1991; During 1992; Smart 1994;

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Simons 1995). This was coupled with a strong appreciation – albeit at times an ambivalent one – of Foucault within feminist theory from late 1980s (Diamond and Quinby 1988; Fraser 1989; McNay 1992). The third phase, still in process, is the reading and reception of his Collège de France lectures. This was linked with a growing recognition of the work from the “late Foucault” (Moss 1998). The Collège de France lectures allow for an appreciation of the complex development of Foucault’s thinking (O’Farrell 2005). At the same time, they provide a sense of his passionate engagement with the themes of his work and his detailed reading of specific texts. We also gain a sense of the dynamic of Foucault’s thinking outside his published work. Le Blanc and Terrel (2003) capture Foucault in the Collège de France lectures: “Foucault, en réalité, entrevoit la parole au Collège comme la possibilité d’échapper aux contraintes du livre. Concrètement, voilà une pratique philosophique qui n’est plus indexée sur celle du livre” (Le Blanc and Terrel 2003: 8).10 While most of the lectures do not offer new theoretical contributions outside of his principal works, they do provide fascinating clarifications on details. The late lectures, in particular, add much to understanding the unfinished directions of Foucault’s thinking on the ethical subject (Davidson 1994). The specific engagements within the field of religion and the philosophy of religion follow the same waves of thinking outlined above.11 Foucault provided a critical apparatus for examining hidden assumptions of knowledge and the initial explorations of his work sought to map out how his thinking could theoretically reshape the method and study of religion, including examination of the category of “religion” and examining the physical body as central register of religious truth (Chidester 1986; Clark 1988; Turner 1991). Some of the most creative engagements utilized Foucault’s genealogical method for reading the history of religious ideas, such as critically rethinking the historical concept of mysticism and the nature of power and gender in the philosophy of religion (King 1999; Jantzen 1995, 1998, 2004). Others carried out more detailed textual and archival work to show how Foucault used religious, theological and philosophical concepts within his historical studies and, in turn, identified more precisely his Catholic context in France (Bernauer 1990; Carrette 1999, 2000; Bernauer and Carrette 2004). Here we see the creative tension between studies that applied his thinking and those that explored the internal questions and themes of religion and theology in Foucault’s own writings.

10 “Foucault, in reality, perceives speaking at the College as the possibility to escape the constraints

of the book. More precisely, this is a philosophical practice which is no longer dependant on the one of the book.” 11 John McSweeney (2005) has also usefully summarised the theological engagements according to three principal trajectories; first, the particular utilisation of specific Foucauldian concepts to the concerns of religion; second, a series of broader critical debates that locate Foucault within the wider stream of “postmodern” religious thinking, along with Derrida and writers like Jean-Luc Marion; and, third, those writings that explore Foucault’s own ethical project and the intersections of his work with religion.

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While Foucault’s work inevitably touches upon important historical questions of religion, such as the nature of Christian monasticism, particularly in the material for his unpublished fourth volume on the History of Sexuality (Les aveux de la chair [Confessions of the Flesh]), the main contribution he makes to the philosophy of religion is providing a critical apparatus for knowledge. His historical location of concepts and his understanding of the deployment of ideas within different orders of institutional power reveal the specific investments in forms of knowledge. Foucault’s critical analysis offers invaluable insights through his key notions of discourse, subject, power, body and the self. These concepts, as I have noted, have significantly shaped contemporary cultural, feminist and queer theory through their radical repositioning of knowledge within an embodied political realm. Knowledge, in this sense, always serves interests within the realm of governance, both public and private. Foucault (1982b: 212) played with the idea of the “subject” to show the inter-related aspects of his thinking. He saw his work as showing how the subject (disciplinary knowledge) creates a subjectivity (self-identity) through the process of subjectification (power). The structures of our knowledge create us as subjects and thus identifying how knowledge operates through different systems of power becomes central to our own liberation. In order to understand this critical framework of analysis I will explore how each of his ideas transforms philosophical knowledge. Philosophy of religion after Foucault becomes, therefore, the strategic practice of identifying operations of power inside historical processes – that is to identify how we are subject to different forms of knowledge. Traditional analytic philosophy of religion thus seeks to retain stable objects of knowledge, such as the mind, truth and God, as entities uncontaminated by lived, embodied and impermanent institutional discourses. It wants to limit rationality and critical thought to an area of knowledge that supports hierarchical power and controls “subjects,” rather than open thought to a wider critical context found in historical, relational and dynamic forms of knowledge (Jantzen 1998; Carrette 2007).

Discourse and Archaeological Knowledge Foucault’s archaeological method critically transformed disciplinary knowledge – the so-called “rational” discourse – through historical scrutiny. Philosophical and religious knowledges are not given but constructed through an infinite series of historical networks. As Foucault remarked in 1983: “I do not believe in a kind of founding act whereby reason, in its essence, was discovered or established and from which it was subsequently diverted by such and such an event. I think, in fact, that reason is self-created, which is why I have tried to analyse forms of rationality: different foundations, different creations, different modifications in which rationalities engender one another, oppose and pursue one another” (Foucault 1983b: 28–29). Refusing to be held by what he called the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment, that you are either for or against the tradition of rationalism in the Enlightenment, Foucault sought to show how knowledge is “historically determined” and that rationality can face its own internal critique (Foucault 1984a: 43). In this way Foucault

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tested the categories of western thought and sought to extend the rational platform by showing how thought was related to discursive and social structures. In Foucault’s archaeological works, History of Madness (1961a); The Birth of the Clinic (1963b); The Order of Things (1966); and, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969b), he attempted to find a “positive unconscious of knowledge” (Foucault 1966: xi) outside the phenomenological or normative objects of study. The aim was therefore to question the assumed unities of knowledge and the “ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination” (Foucault 1969a: 22). He did this by suspending “continuities” and exploring the “discursive field,” by which he meant the network of statements – not simply linguistics but any medium of utterance – and how they relate in history. The aim was to explore what governs the statements and how discourses are formed as a “practice” rather than a given unit of knowledge (Foucault 1969b: 46). Foucault showed how discourses “function” in a particular “enunciative field” (99). Discourses, therefore, exist in time and space and constantly transform themselves and our lives. The result is that knowledge loses it transcendent capacity and becomes understood as an historical formation. “It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make” (131). In this connection, Foucault argued that at certain times in history discourses constellate to form a specific “episteme” – “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period” (191). This determines what it is possible to say and think at a certain time, and establishes the historical conditions of possibility for knowledge that exist outside the subject. In his work Foucault demonstrated that knowledge is configured through a complex network of open-ended discourses, which mutate through history, not so much by design as through random forces interacting in the social space. Each of Foucault’s early works operated by taking specific discourses and showing how an object of knowledge is formed. His study of madness was an archaeology of the way the mad were silenced12 and institutionalized. The study of medicine was an archaeology of medical perception, while his 1966 work, The Order of Things, was an archaeology of the human sciences. He respectively shows how psychiatry silenced the voice of the mad through the confining of patients to the mental asylum; how the medical gaze is constructed through the “stable” objects of death and the corpse; and how the human sciences are constituted through the figure of “man” in modern thought. It is the figure of “man” that makes the discourses of economics (notions of labour), biology (notions of the organic structure of life) and philology (notions of language) possible, creating a shift from earlier constellations of thought in the “Classical period” (sixteenth and seventeenth century), which was developed

12 Derrida

([1967] 1978: 35), responding to his previous teacher, famously questioned whether a history of silence and unreason was possible, but this largely failed to understand how Foucault was using the idea within institutional contexts (Carrette 2000: 28–29).

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through the system of taxinomia, such as wealth analysis, natural history and general grammar. With the end of metaphysics, the notion of “man” emerges as a new philosophical problem, but, in Foucault’s view, it was one that may not last long, because it was another temporary historical construction. As Foucault explained: “Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist – anymore than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language. He is quite a recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than 200 years ago” (Foucault 1966: 308). At the end of The Order of Things, Foucault heralded, in a Nietzschean fashion, the “end of man” and thus the end of disciplinary knowledges dependant on such thinking. Having shown that “man” was a “recent invention” (Foucault 1966: 387), he claimed that there was a tension within the idea of “man” as a “positivity” (something posited as real), because it exists in the paradoxical space between empiricism and transcendence. Foucault returned in this discussion, like Nietzsche, to the death of God, and saw the death of God and the last man as “engaged in a contest with more than one round” (385). In a mode that is typical of Foucault’s poetic imagery, he concluded that “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the end edge of the sea” (387). For Foucault, “truth” could not be located in the notion of “man,” or the psychological subject emerging from such an idea. The object of “man,” for Foucault, was “neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge” (386). It is the very attempt to stabilize the subject/object of “man” which prevents philosophy from recognising the importance of language, history and the unknown – the Other – outside of thought. When philosophy extends its rationality to recognize the limits of its own interiority, there is the possibility of recognising the “archaeology” of thought itself. Foucault’s thinking becomes useful at this point to identify how the gendered, racial and political-economic structures determine thought, despite its assumed neutrality. The implication of such an archaeology for the philosophy of religion is that it could be transformed by recognising the Others within its own constructions; something unsettling to an “essentialist” rationality. The philosophy of religion would no longer be seeking to establish an external objective “truth,” or a positivity of knowledge, but would rather be seeking to establish the historical reasons and specific interests behind a set of philosophical ideas (Jantzen 1998). It would seek to examine not so much beliefs, but the discursive practices and the hidden rules behind any set of statements. In such new forms of philosophical practice, the philosophy of religion would be taken out of the “eternal realm” of ideas and put into the political realm of discourse.

Power and Genealogy In Foucault’s archaeological works the idea of “discourse” appeared somewhat abstract and it was not clear how discourses operated, or how “statements” functioned, in the social world. His attempt to explain the ideas of “archaeology” and “discourse” in The Archaeology of Knowledge did not help sufficiently, but there

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were signs that Foucault was recognising a more specific realm of operation in the movement of different discourses. In The Archaeology of Knowledge he referred to the “pre-conceptual,” the “non-discursive” and “non-discursive systems” as shaping discourse (Foucault 1969b: 63, 68, 162), but never made these references explicit. In a later refinement of his archaeological thought, he recognized that discourse is always located within social institutions and that these institutions set up various “force relations,” or compelling influences, related to interests and values. This allowed Foucault, embracing a Nietzschean genealogy, to shift to a concern with “the relations of power, not relations of meaning” (Foucault 1976b: 114). In the post-1968 atmosphere of French thought, Foucault extended his sense of discourse as practice to more specific operations in society and he began to talk about how specific discourses are “governed” (Foucault 1970: 219, 1976b: 112). As he stated in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France: “I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality” (Foucault 1970: 216). Foucault went on to show that “disciplines” (groups of objects, methods and propositions of truth) control discourses and determine what can and what cannot be said. These “rules of exclusion” establish who can speak with authority as well as the “principles of classification, ordering and distribution” (Foucault 1970: 216, 220, 222). Religious, judicial and political discourses, for example, function according to specific rituals and roles, they determine what is valid and invalid, heretical and unorthodox. Philosophy is not excluded from this list of disciplines. “I wonder,” Foucault stated, “whether a certain number of philosophical themes have not come to conform to this activity of limitation and exclusion and perhaps even to reinforce it” (Foucault 1970: 227). If philosophy and religion are part of such distinct disciplinary regimes, it becomes necessary to understand how they operate and what kind of exclusions take place in the discourse. It soon became apparent to Foucault, following Nietzsche, that these – and other discourses – are determined by the operations of power and always related to questions about the physical body. Although Foucault never provided the same lengthy explanation of genealogy as for archaeology, it becomes clear from his 1971 essay on Nietzsche that these notions of power and the physical body, as an historical site of knowledge and truth, are the central elaborations to his earlier method (Foucault 1971: 148). “Genealogy, as analysis of descent,” Foucault argued, “is thus situated within the articulations of the body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (148). Through his genealogical method, Foucault sought to develop what he called a “counter-memory.” He did this not only by showing how discourses operate at the edges of thought, but also by reading history through its exclusions, not least of the body. Genealogy is also about forms of domination and power and it is this which brought the relation of discourse and social institutions into sharper focus for Foucault. Discourses are always sustained and developed by institutions, they do not appear from nowhere, but are rather the result of very specific forms of

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engaged power relationships. It is precisely in this context that philosophical knowledge can be seen as a form of disciplinary practice, because rather than assuming some neutral system of knowledge, both philosophy and religion are caught in the games of institutional control – not least in excluding or disregarding non-western forms of philosophy and religion (see King 1999). Philosophy itself is thus always involved in the system of power relations. Knowledge (savoir) is power (pouvoir). As Foucault succinctly expressed it during his 1975 discussion of the prison: “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault 1975a: 27). The question of power was central to Foucault. Despite the fact that it can easily be seen as a reductive and total explanation, or a simple rejection of Marxist notions of ideology,13 the notion holds a series of complex features (O’Farrell 2005: 97–108, 149–150). Indeed, Foucault was clear to state that he “never held that a mechanism of power is sufficient to characterize society” or “that ‘power’ was something that could explain everything” (Foucault 1978a: 148, 170). He also did not deny the force of political ideology. The theme of power emerged most prominently in his mid1970s books, Discipline and Punish (1975a) and The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (1976a) – the latter best captured with its French title La Volonté de savoir.14 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault examined the transition from punishment by torture to incarceration and discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Here Foucault showed the modes of subjection and control of the body not only in the prison, but in monasteries, army barracks and schools. Power controls the body not only in a negative way, but in positively forming subjectivity and thus – as some critics have been keen to point out – we are not merely subject to regimes of power but also subjects of resistance. As Judith Butler appreciates, there is “ambivalence” in “the subject both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency” (Butler 1997: 15). The notion of power also shaped Foucault’s first – somewhat sketchy – study of

13 The question of Foucault’s relation to Marx’s thinking is complex, partly because of the problem-

atic personal associations he had with Marxism in France (Foucault 1978a: 106, 136; see Macey 1993). Foucault never explicitly upheld Marxist concepts and was criticised, not least by Sartre, for locating Marx, with Ricardo, in a nineteenth-century episteme (Foucault 1966: 253–263, 1978a: 104). While Foucault recognised some “very interesting things about the body in Marx’s writing,” he was concerned with the way Marxist ideas about ideology deny the reality of the body (Foucault 1975b, 57–58). However, as Le Blanc (2004) has indicated, there are lines of connection between Foucault and Marx through the influence of Althusser and the notion of assujettissement (subjecification). Paolucci (2003) has also identified more subtle uses of Marx in Foucault’s work and it is possible to establish some link between the operations of power and ideological knowledge. In his uncritical and controversial readings of the Iranian revolution, in 1978, Foucault does appear to suggest that Marx was more accurate in seeing religion, not as an opium of the people, but as “the spirit of spiritless times” (Foucault 1978a:137, 1979: 218; see Afray and Anerson 2005). Nonetheless, Foucault is still at this point resisting notions of Marxist ideology and seeking to shift away from such readings of history towards a position of multiple power relations. 14 The title was an acknowledgement of Nietzsche’s work.

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sexuality, where he made clear that power is not to be understood according to a hierarchical and judicial model, but “the multiplicity of force relations” (Foucault 1976a: 92). “Power,” for Foucault, “is everywhere” and “exercized from innumerable points” (93, 94). In this sense, the State “consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations which render its function possible” (Foucault 1976b: 122). This becomes clearer in Foucault’s discussion of what he calls “bio-power”; the regulation and control of the population through the body (Foucault 1976a: 139). The construction of “sexuality” (not sex as such) as a discourse was part of such a bio-power apparatus. It was a way of ordering and controlling the population. Foucault’s genealogical approach followed Nietzsche in focussing on the immediate reality of the physical body, rather than on speculative and abstract notions, such as the soul.15 Foucault thus read history through the body (Foucault 1971; Nietzsche 1968: 358). Having developed this idea in Discipline and Punish to understand the prison system, in the first volume of his – unfinished – multi-volumed work on the history of sexuality, Foucault sought to show how knowledge and power operate through the “deployment,” or “apparatus” (dispositif), of a “subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures and powers” (Foucault 1976a: 71). Sex, according to Foucault, was not repressed in western society, but systematically proliferated as a mechanism of control. In a tradition from Christian monastic confessional practices to psychoanalysis, Foucault illustrated how sex was put into speech: “The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech” (21). Sex is put into discourse in order to socially control the body. Thus, life could be politically organized and controlled through a technical knowledge of sexual life, such as the scientia sexualis of the modern world. Foucault’s aim was to show the strategies of power operate within the discourse of “sexuality.” The body is only seen through the dominant discourse rather than being a thing-in-itself; and in this sense sexuality is not given but produced. As Foucault made clear in his study of sexuality: “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct” (Foucault 1976a: 105). This rethinking of sexuality has radically transformed the understanding of the subject and offered feminist and queer theorists a way to resist dominant ideologies of the body. In addition, it has also provided a new “paradigm” to shift discussions of sexuality away from sexology and psychoanalysis (Bristow 1997: 169). The recognition of how discourses function in society demonstrates how knowledge and the deployment of such knowledge determine our embodied existence, rather than assuming that physical reality exists prior to its representation. Foucault’s thought brings philosophy back to the body and provides critical resources for those philosophical systems that ignore and forcefully suppress embodied life. 15 As Nietzsche ([1883–1885] 1969: 61) states in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I am body entirely, and

nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body.” See Carrette (2000: 109–128) for a discussion of body and soul in Foucault and Nietzsche.

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Self, Philosophy and Spirituality Foucault’s first volume of his history of sexuality was fragmented and held many experimental ideas and unexplored avenues. The original proposal of six volumes went through extensive reordering and thematic change between 1976 and 1983, not least because the problem of “sexuality” was reconfigured according to different historical concerns. Foucault’s Collège de France lectures from 1980 reveal how much material could have been brought into the final volumes, as he moved from questions of the body to questions of the “care of the self” and the question of “subject and truth.” What emerges from the late Collège de France lectures is a shift from the government of the body to the government of the ethical self, from technologies of domination to technologies of self. Having started by writing on Christian practices of the self in confession,16 Foucault realized it was necessary to explore the GrecoRoman period. This became the subject of the next two volumes of his work, The Use of Pleasure (1984b) and The Care of the Self (1984f). This shift was not merely a change of historical period, but, as Goss (2005: 509) has shown, it was “a change in problematic.” In his later work, influenced by Pierre Hadot, Foucault was not only showing the conditions under which sex and the body were problematized in the ancient world and how these related to the emergence of Christian sexual ethics, but reconfiguring his work around the problem of truth in relation to the self. He first explored, in The Uses of Pleasure, the ethics of pleasure in Greek writings, examining the codes of austerity towards the body (dietetics), marriage (economics) and love of boys (erotics). He then, in a variety of different texts, including such writers as Epicurus, Seneca, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius, explored the understanding of pleasure in the arts of self formation, a study which formed his final published volume The Care of the Self. Here Foucault showed that new techniques of the self intensified towards the Christian period. What emerges from these late works is the notion of sexual ethics as it relates to the cultivation of “arts of existence,” or, in a Nietzschean sense, life as an aesthetic project. As Foucault explained: “Sexual ethics requires, still and always, that the individual conform to a certain art of living which defines the aesthetic and ethical criteria of existence.. . . The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth – the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing – central to the formation of the ethical subject” (Foucault 1984f: 67–68). Foucault argued that Christian sexual ethics “borrowed extensively” from the Greco-Roman world and that there was not so much a greater austerity in sexual ethics as a shift in the mode of self-relation through notions of purification and confession, which in turn altered the relationship to pleasure. However, despite mapping these aspects of sexual practice in the Greco-Roman world, it was the ethical subject that was now dominating Foucault’s philosophical agenda. Reflecting

16 Material for the unpublished 4th volume of his History of sexuality, Les aveux de la chair, see Carrette (1999).

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on his late work, he makes a distinction between four elements in the ethical process: (1) the ethical substance (substance éthique), which is the focus of the ethical task, such as pleasure, desire or the flesh; (2) the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement), which is the way individuals are driven towards the moral obligation; (3) the self-forming activity (pratique de soi) or asceticism; and, finally, (4) the telos (téléologie), which is the final outcomes of the moral practice, such as purity, immortality or mastery of the self. In each period of his study of late antiquity these are transformed or re-constellated (Foucault 1983c: 352–355). Foucault’s reading of ethics, inspired by Pierre Hadot amongst others, provided a new basis of understanding morality through an “aesthetic of existence” or an “art of living.” He was concerned in his later work, as McGushin (2006) maps out in detail, with a philosophical askesis, i.e., “an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought,” that brings about transformation (Foucault 1984b: 9). It was this conceptualisation that allowed him to approach early Christianity not from its doctrinal propositions but from the perspective of pastoral formation. In this vein, the discussions of Cassian and Augustine, and how they reconfigured the ethical subject in Christianity, would have formed the material of the fourth volume of his history of sexuality. This was never published, but some fragments of this material can be found in various remaining pieces (Carrette 1999: 154–197). These show the importance of confessional practices in monasticism as a means to control thought and Augustinian concerns with the control of flesh, shifting the “art of living” to an ethics of self-renunciation – where paradoxically the self is found in the renunciation of the self. This created a new kind of ethical relation to the body and sexuality. As Foucault made clear: “The thesis I propose is that early Christians introduced important changes, if not in the sexual code itself, at least in the relationship everyone has to his own sexual activity. Christianity proposed a new type of experience of oneself as a sexual being” (Foucault 1980d: 184). Foucault’s premature death from AIDS in 1984 meant that much of the late work on ethics can only be discerned through the remaining recorded lectures, interviews and papers. While these provide astonishing reflections on a range of ancient texts, exploring the subject and truth and parrhêsia (truth-telling), they are still works in process and in need of theoretical clarification and consolidation (see, for example, Foucault 1983d). Foucault’s later ethical reflections are, as Rajchman (1991: 143) indicates, “the least resolved” and “the most open” of his work. Not surprisingly, therefore, these works have been sharply critiqued both for the selectivity of material from the ancient world and a lack of critical analysis of the texts (see Goldhill 1995; Larmour et al. 1998). As Amy Richlin indicates, after establishing a certain blindness to women in Foucault’s history of sexuality: “Not that women are the only glaring absence in Foucault’s history. Foucault has reproduced for his readers an antiquity without Jews (as Daniel Boyarin has pointed out), without Africans, Egyptians, Semites, northern Europeans; without children, babies, poor people, slaves” (Richlin 1998: 139). Despite these omissions, Foucault’s late work did enough to inspire scholars to develop his thinking about around an ethico-political subject, particularly as a way of bringing agency back into his work (Moss 1998; Taylor and Vintges 2004). The

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focus on Christianity in the late works and the philosophical concerns with spiritual practices also opened useful avenues for a new mode of ethico-politico spirituality17 (Bernauer and Mahon 1995; Connolly 1998; Bernauer and Carrette 2004). This, as McSweeney (2005: 143) observes, is one of the vital areas for understanding how Foucault’s work can be related to contemporary theological concerns, linking theological subjectivity with social and political engagement. It also brings the philosophy of religion into engagement with not only the question of how knowledge transforms the self, but also how philosophy can have the courage to speak honestly and account for its own political interests in the practices of life. As Gros (2002: 166) reflects on the later Foucault’s work on parrhêsia: “Ce n’est pas une morale de philosophe, c’est une ethique de l’intellectual engagé.”18 In this sense, philosophy is not about abstract questions, but about the way ideas inform the practices of life. Thought is always, whether conscious or not, a statement about one’s relationship to the world.

Conclusion: Philosophy and Religion After Foucault It is true, European thought finds itself at a turning point. This turning point, on an historical scale, is nothing other than the end of imperialism. The crisis of Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism.. . . There is no philosopher who marks out this period. For it is the end of the era of Western philosophy. Thus, if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe (Foucault 1978b: 113).

In each successive stage of Foucault’s thinking, knowledge is taken out of its essential metaphysical certainty and located in the historical-political realm – the realm of political engagement. The categories of knowledge are shown to operate according to discursive strategies inside specific institutional practices. Thus knowledge is no longer an innocent tapestry of ideas from the past, but a set of “force relations” in the public world, constantly re-written in the present. Once knowledge has lost its sovereign authority, Foucault posited that western philosophy can only turn the rational enterprise on itself in order to build a critique that examines its own techniques of power and recognizes its own limits. It is precisely this strategy that has allowed scholars within the philosophy of religion to question the function of its own categories, including an assessment of the cultural bias and hidden assumptions in the classification of non-western traditions (King 1999; Fitzgerald 2000). As Foucault revealed in his inaugural lecture in 1970, both philosophy and religion have a history and a disciplinary apparatus. It was not surprising therefore that Foucault sought to find the points of contact outside the west and to recognize how western thought was inescapably locked in a relationship to notions excluded from

17 As

Afray and Anderson (2005: 287) note, Foucault had first referred to the idea of a “political spirituality” in 1978 and he made use of the term in his controversial journalistic reports on Iran and in his lectures at this time (see Foucault 1978c, 1979). 18 “It is not a philosopher’s morality, it is an ethics of the engaged intellectual.”

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its dominant regime of thought – cultures of difference and otherness. A number of writers have picked up an Oriental sub-text in Foucault’s work – some assuming Foucault’s Orient included the Greco-Roman material – through which Foucault attempted to find alternatives to the technologies of modern society (Schaub 1989; Afray and Anderson 2005: 17–21). Foucault, however, did not seek a Heideggerian “return” to a more pastoral existence, due to his concern with the “present.” Instead, there is search for an alternative “art of living.” If Foucault’s challenge was to transform ourselves and the world through a new philosophical ethos, it is perhaps in engagement with non-western thought that it will be possible to “think differently” about our (western) selves. This is not to reject or undervalue western thinking in totality, but to recognize it is not the entire story and that it holds its own (hidden) unconscious of knowledge. Philosophy of religion after Foucault has a responsibility to link thought with practice and to develop a self-critical apparatus in order to widen rationality and the critical enterprise. The problem, of course, is that rationality itself is a contested site of knowledge, bound with great interests of imperial power and gendered politics. Foucault unsettled such knowledge by showing how and why certain issues have become problems and how our philosophical choices reflect investments in specific relations of power. The challenge to “think differently” that is instigated by Foucault comes about through the courage to transform ourselves – to transform philosophy – and to make thought a new ethico-political spiritual practice.

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Deleuze and Philosophy of Religion Philip Goodchild

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) did not write a philosophy of religion as such. His works fall into three main categories: a series of aesthetic commentaries on writers, artists, and the cinema; a series of philosophical commentaries, on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Foucault; and a series of philosophical works written in his own name, notably Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). He also co-authored Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What is Philosophy? (1990) with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. While Deleuze’s own major works do not contain any extended discussions of issues in philosophy of religion, his historical studies were all on philosophers with strong interests in religion. What is remarkable, however, is that Deleuze’s commentary on them passes without opinion or judgment: the conceptual framework for Spinoza’s ontological proof for the existence of God is analysed without any accompanying assessment of whether or not it works, as is the conceptual framework for Nietzsche’s antagonism to Christianity. One can therefore read long discussions of immortality and eternity within Spinoza’s system, for example, without learning Deleuze’s own views on the subject – indeed, such opinions are regarded as irrelevant. Given such circumstances, to evaluate the significance of Deleuze’s work for philosophy of religion calls for a certain amount of critical construction. I propose to argue that there is an implicit philosophy of religion within Deleuze’s work, one that can be analysed into three moments. First of all, and most prominent, is a moment of indifference: “the question of God is what has become impossible, a matter of indifference” (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 108). As we will see, Deleuze gives philosophy a different task from that of justifying beliefs. Secondly, however, this indifference is complicated by the construction of an atheist metaphysics in tension with theism: “atheism has never been external to religion: atheism is the artistic power at work on religion. With God, everything is permitted” (Deleuze 1980). This atheist metaphysics makes a unique contribution to the philosophy of religion in taking thought without transcendence to its furthest limit. As entirely P. Goodchild (B) Department of Theology and Religions, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_7,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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immanent, Deleuze’s metaphysics, like Spinoza’s, are inseparable from ethics – they concern the temporal conduct of the thinker. Beyond metaphysics, however, there is also a third moment of beatitude: “A life is the life of immanence: it is sheer power, utter beatitude” (Deleuze 1997: 4). If Deleuze’s thought expresses an immanent ethos such that it no longer has to concern itself with a transcendent morality, may it not also express an immanent religiosity? The aim of philosophy, for Deleuze, is to liberate life wherever it is trapped, so as to express pure joy or beatitude. These moments of indifference, of atheist metaphysics, and of beatitude need to be understood in their conceptual rigour within Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole.

Indifference Contemporary philosophy of religion is largely dominated by a series of debates on such well-known topics as the nature and existence of God, the problem of evil, religious language, religious experience, the possibility of providence and miracles, the credibility of an after-life, the relation of religion and morality and the significance of religious diversity. In general, such interminable debates take place to advance the positions of classical theism and atheism, although process theism and occasional representatives of Eastern religions may also find a voice. Such debates had little significance in the secular culture of twentieth century France beyond the residual reach of the Catholic Church. For most French intellectuals, the combined critiques of religion arising from the German thought of Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were sufficient to decide the issue, rendering such matters as of purely historical interest, however tenuous such a judgment may now seem. The attitude of indifference expresses a quiescent atheism in which the question of God is no longer regarded as a live problem; it expresses a cultural judgment, the milieu in which Deleuze worked, rather than a properly philosophical judgment. These debates had no significance for him. There is, however, a more significant reason for Deleuze’s indifference – it concerns what it means to think. For many, thinking is having a debate (Deleuze 1995: 148). The aim is to construct justified beliefs, or, failing that, to present the weight of the balance of probabilities. Philosophy becomes a democratic discussion. Anyone can participate, however uncultivated or ill-informed, so long as one has an opinion and can invent some reasons. Religious beliefs are presented from a point of view external to the discussion, deriving from the commitments of historical religious traditions, and subjected to critical scrutiny in order to ascertain whether they are justified, warranted, credible, or even rational. Such debates prove interminable because, however far one tries to separate out the problems under discussion, the process of reasoning is always guided by presuppositions, judgments, and opinions concerning other problems. As Deleuze dismissively remarks, many arguments do not advance beyond debates over the merits of different kinds of cheese. In addition to such presuppositions, however, reasoning is also guided by an image of thought. Deleuze asks, “Do we, for instance, have the same image of thought that Plato, or

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even Descartes or Kant, had? Doesn’t the image change in response to overriding constraints that express, of course, extrinsic determinants, but above all express a becoming of thought? Can we, flailing around in confusion, still claim to be seeking truth?” (Deleuze 1995: 148). For Deleuze, philosophy is “knowledge through pure concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 7). And concepts are “what stops thought being a mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip” (Deleuze 1995: 136). Concepts are no longer regarded as representations of things or their properties. Instead, they impose divisions, forge connections, or judge identities. They always refer to other concepts. Since for Deleuze concepts are not related to objects by existential judgments, the truth of propositions is of much less significance than the sense of the concepts with which they are expressed. Such concepts are created in order to frame problems, and should be evaluated in relation to problems. If this is the task for philosophy, then it has nothing to do with discussing things. (Deleuze 1995: 139). Philosophy makes thought possible; it is not simply true or false, right or wrong, as is opinion. This evolution of the image of thought is the combined effect of the work of Deleuze’s precursors, upon whom he wrote his major studies. Philosophy, of course, has been struggling against mere opinion since the time of Plato. If the solution of Platonic idealism is to turn philosophy into the knowledge of ideas rather than objects, the solution of Kantian transcendentalism is to turn philosophy into the knowledge of concepts through a priori judgments. For Deleuze, philosophy will be a transcendental exercise, concerned with conditions of understanding rather than judgments deriving from experience. Deleuze ventures no opinion about the existence of God – or of things in general – because of the rigour of Kant’s proof of the impossibility of proving the existence of God.

Deleuze on David Hume Deleuze often describes his philosophy, against the grain of the history of philosophy, as a “transcendental empiricism.” In spite of Hume’s famous contribution to the model of debate in philosophy of religion, Deleuze’s early study of Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1953) explains Deleuze’s disdain for opinion. For Deleuze, empiricism is not simply the epistemological doctrine that all ideas derive from and represent a corresponding impression. This doctrine merely gives the mind a simple origin and frees ideas from the obligation of having to represent things. (Deleuze 1991a: 31). Deleuze reads Hume’s philosophy as a sharp critique of this theory of representation. He contrasts empiricism with rationalism, which expects ideas such as “always,” “universal,” “necessary,” and “true,” as well as general ideas, or the existence of the object as such, to “stand for something which cannot be constituted within experience or be given in an idea without contradiction” (Deleuze 1991a: 30). For Hume, impressions are atomic, and may be joined by fancy in a whimsical or delirious way. If delirium is the original condition of the mind, then Deleuze argues that the truly philosophical problem is not how one represents things in the form of knowledge, but how one moves beyond mere impressions of

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the senses and memory to a constant and uniform association of ideas. For Deleuze, “empiricism does not raise the problem of the origin of the mind but rather the problem of the constitution of the subject” (31). In this respect, the key doctrine of empiricism is “relations are external to their terms.” The relations established between ideas do not belong within the ideas as such, but are imposed upon them, according to the principles of causality, contiguity, and resemblance, in the service of human passions. The human subject is formed by associating impressions according to principles and motives that are external to them. As Hume famously remarked, the understanding is and should only ever be in the service of the passions. Its determination is entirely practical. Beliefs are established by the understanding for the sake of practical action. Hume’s scepticism regarding rationalist metaphysics challenges arguments for the existence of God by showing how ideas could be associated differently. It removes necessity from the order of things. Far from being an atheist intervention in rationalist debates concerning God and miracles, therefore, Hume effects a conversion of the problems and tasks of philosophy: “Philosophy must constitute itself as a theory of what we are doing, not what there is” (133). For Hume, religion itself replaces God as an object of philosophical inquiry. For Deleuze, therefore, empiricism is a doctrine of moral philosophy rather than epistemology. Hume is above all a moralist, a political thinker, and an historian. (Deleuze 1991a: 33); Hume noted that “morality is a subject that interests us above all others . . .” (Hume 1978: 455). For the domain of reason is itself limited, and it can only be brought to bear within an existing world, in the service of the passions, with their own ethics and order of ends. Deleuze pointedly remarks: “The important and principal sentence of the Treatise is this: “’Tis not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” (33). For where reason is nothing but the “comparing of ideas, and the discovery of their relations,” then passions, volitions and actions are original facts and realities, complete in themselves, which cannot be true or false. They are not subject to reason or conscience (Hume 1978: 457–458). Hume establishes, above all, the limits of reason rather than the limits of religion. On this account, philosophy would appear to be indifferent to religion because reason has no bearing on religion. Reason only attempts to establish its power over religion by extending its role beyond the association of ideas to the relations between objects themselves – but this extension is an illusion requiring perpetual correction, since objects cannot be given in experience. Nevertheless, one of the sources of religion is precisely such a misuse of reason. Philosophy does, after all, have a vital role in the critique of superstition. While all beliefs derive from the passions, there are also illegitimate beliefs that do not derive from experience. The names of the gods, for example, can produce belief simply by substituting a spoken repetition for repetition in experience. (Deleuze 1991a: 70, 73). Where the gods of polytheism are the echo, extension and reflection of the passions, theism is also an illegitimate belief because it misuses the principle of causality. (Deleuze 1991a: 74–75). Causality cannot be constituted in experience because, in a sense, it constitutes experience. As the principle of habit, causality constitutes expectations or tendencies through repetition. (67–69). It is the principle

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of association upon which all belief in the external world is based. Nothing, therefore, can be known about causes in nature. In this respect, “religion, by itself and in its other aspects, is only the fanciful usage of the principles of association, resemblance and causality” (Deleuze 1991a: 76). As is widely recognized, Hume is the precursor for the genetic explanations of the origin of religion in human nature, as found in Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. As is also widely recognized, these accounts do not have a demonstrative force. There remains scope for a theism rooted in faith rather than reason. In spite of the general presumption of Hume’s atheism, Deleuze finds the critical force of Hume’s philosophy insufficient to account for the apparently theistic conclusions of his essays on miracles and the immortality of the soul, and, more significantly, for the properly philosophical content of the Dialogues on Natural Religion. It is insufficient to invoke Hume’s irony and necessary precautions here. In fact, religion is justified, but only in its very special situation, outside culture and outside true knowledge. We have seen that philosophy has nothing to say on what causes the principles and on the origin of their power. There, it is the place of God. We cannot make use of the principles of association in order to know the world as an effect of divine activity, and even less to know God as the cause of the world; but we can always think of God negatively, as the cause of the principles. It is in this sense that theism is valid, and it is in this sense that purpose is reintroduced. Purpose will be thought, albeit not known, as the original agreement between the principles of human nature and nature itself. “There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the association of our ideas.” (Deleuze 1991a: 77; citing Hume 1975: 54)

According to Deleuze, Hume’s philosophy reaches its ultimate point in the concept of purposiveness, i.e., human nature conforms to nature. While causality cannot be deduced by reason, it is actually felt (Deleuze 1991a: 26). While the relations which the understanding forms do not depend on the given, but rather on the principles of human nature, these functional principles do in fact “agree with the hidden powers on which the given depends, although we do not know these powers” (133). Purposiveness, this agreement between intentional finality and nature, is the nature we discover within ourselves. As a source of reason, instinct, generation and vegetation alike, Deleuze remarks that it is more like an élan vital (a reference to Bergson, who is discussed below) than the project or design of an infinite intelligence that reduces all purposiveness to intention (77). In this way, Deleuze indicates the direction in which he will seek a return to metaphysics beyond representation, empiricism and humanism.

Atheistic Metaphysics The critique of philosophical theism finds its most rigorous formulation in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Deleuze attributes particular importance to the passage on the construction of the idea of God as the transcendental ideal of pure reason (Kant 1929: 487–495). Kant’s argument begins with the logical law of non-contradiction:

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for every pair of contradictorily opposed predicates, only one can belong to a concept. When it comes to determining the content of a thing, however, rather than its mere logical form, it becomes necessary to presuppose the transcendental ideal of the sum total of all possibilities. A thing is only completely determined when one of each pair of contradictory opposites belongs to it. Then the assumption that “everything that exists is completely determined” requires that one posit this idea of the sum-total of all possibility as the transcendental presupposition of the material for all possibility. Now, whereas logical negation concerns merely the relation of one concept to another in a judgment, transcendental negation determines content. Thus, possibilities must be either affirmed or negated, and transcendental negation signifies not-being itself. Moreover, affirmed realities contain the content, whereas negations are merely derivative. The transcendental ideal of the sum total of all possibilities therefore contains only positive realities. It is omnitudo realitatis, the whole of possible reality. Since what possesses all reality is a completely determined thing in itself, it is an individual being, the ens realissimum or most real being. Then “all manifoldness of things is only a correspondingly varied mode of limiting the concept of the highest reality that forms their common substratum, just as all figures are only possible as so many modes of limiting infinite space” (Kant 1929: 492). As the origin of all beings, with nothing above it, it is the primordial being and highest being, and as everything that is conditioned is subject to it, it is the ens entium or being of all beings. Indeed, since the primordial being cannot consist in a number of derivative beings, it is therefore simple. It conditions the possibility of beings as their ground, not as their sum. As soon as this being is hypostatized as an object, it must be treated as one, simple, eternal, self-sufficient, etc., in other words, as the concept of God in classical theism. Kant goes on to argue that although reason is the desire to move from the conditioned to the unconditioned, or from the contingent to the necessary, it transgresses the limits of possible experience by treating this ideal of pure reason as an object. In discussing this passage, Deleuze notes that God is treated as the master or principle of the disjunctive syllogism. The disjunctive syllogism proceeds: either p or q, but not q, therefore p. Deleuze notes the irony here: “God is here, at least provisionally, deprived of his traditional claims – to have created subjects or made a world – and now has what is apparently a humble task, namely, to enact disjunctions, or at least to found them” (Deleuze 1991b: 295). In spite of this, Kant has shown how this very simple idea fulfils all the roles of the philosophical Christian God. Deleuze points out that such a God determines all beings by negation, exclusion and limitation. If God is the whole of possible reality, then each being is a determinate being in virtue of being not-God in a completely determinate set of ways. In logic, however, alongside exclusive disjunctions there are also inclusive disjunctions, where either p or q may be satisfied by p, q, or both p and q. Deleuze therefore conceives the possibility of a diabolical anti-God who, as principle of the inclusive disjunction, determines the passage of each thing through all of its possible predicates. There is no longer any originary reality, nor complete determination of the identity of things. (296). This leads Deleuze (co-authoring with Guattari) to make the following humorous statement:

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To anyone who asks: “Do you believe in God?” we should reply in strictly Kantian or Schreberian terms: “Of course, but only as the master of the disjunctive syllogism, or as its a priori principle (God defined as the Omnitudo realitatis, from which all secondary realities are derived by a process of division).” Hence the sole thing that is divine is the nature of an energy of disjunctions. (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 13)

The vertiginous prospect of an atheist metaphysics at work upon religion from within similarly leads Deleuze to make the following paradoxical statement in regard to the work of his contemporary Pierre Klossowski, in whose work on Nietzsche as well as literary writings Deleuze finds such a diabolical theology at work: In another respect, it is our epoch which has discovered theology. One no longer needs to believe in God. We seek rather the “structure,” that is, the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called “theological.” Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities – divine or anti-divine, Christ or Antichrist – animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions. Nietzsche’s prediction about the link between God and grammar has been realized; but this time it is a recognized link, willed, acted out.. . . (Deleuze 1991b: 281)1

The significance of such speculation is that rather than determination operating through exclusion, or the negation of a set of pre-existing possibilities, determination may be conceived as an affirmation of divergence or a differentiation that creates new possibilities. As in Hume, the idea of God is no longer regarded as an object of belief but as a transcendental principle for the constitution of belief as such. What is most significant here, is that rather than conceiving of reality as an atemporal delimitation of a predetermined possibility, reality may be fully affirmed in differentiation and creation. The conceptual background for such a shift is laid in Deleuze’s studies of Bergson (Deleuze 1988a [1966]) and Spinoza (Deleuze 1990 [1969]).

Bergsonism Henri Bergson’s metaphysical method is a method of “intuition.” As in empiricism, Bergson begins with perception – ideas derive from impressions. The common complaint against Bergson’s method of intuition is that it will be necessarily subjective. His conclusions are believed to have no logical or metaphysical force. The normal remedy against such subjectivism is to turn philosophical analysis away from the impressions of the senses to an analysis of the usage of language. The danger here, explored in Bergson’s critique of linguistic philosophy, is that purely cultural prejudices enshrined in language become the sole object of philosophy. On both sides, there is a danger of philosophy becoming reduced to a mere excavation of 1 The Nietzschean “prediction” referred to is: “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (Nietzsche 1990: 48).

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opinion. Deleuze, defining philosophy as “the creation of concepts,” will walk a line between subjectivism and linguistic prejudice. The entire thrust of his reading of Bergson is to liberate Bergsonism from mere psychologism: “We might say, strangely enough, that duration would remain purely intuitive, in the ordinary sense of the word, if intuition – in the properly Bergsonian sense – were not there as method” (Deleuze 1988a: 14). In other words, to have an impression is not sufficient for philosophy. Intuition occurs when such impressions are subjected to a rigorous analysis. Deleuze, following what Bergson does more closely than what he says (for this is the empiricist route to take), isolates three aspects of the Bergsonian method of intuition. The first rule is that of distinguishing between true and false problems. People are accustomed to thinking of the true and false in relation to representation. A solution to a problem, or an answer to a question is true if there is an object or fact to which it refers. Bergson, by contrast, makes truth into an intrinsic quality of thought itself. What is at stake, here, is a contrast between a model of thought based on the image of a celestial schoolteacher, omnitudo realitatis, who knows all the possible answers in advance, and a model of thought that allows genuine invention and freedom. There is a “semi-divine” power in the freedom to constitute problems themselves, without which certain thoughts would never have happened. Humanity makes its own history in the problems it poses for itself (Deleuze 1988a: 15–16). How, then, may one distinguish between the genuine problems which are invented and false problems? In the first place, one might say that problems have to be actually posed within thought itself. So, for example, many of the problems discussed within philosophy of religion come from outside philosophy, since they are posed by the need to evaluate the truth-claims of religious traditions and revelations. This kind of criterion is imprecise. In contrast, Bergson operates by exploring ideas in the mind in their own positivity as ideas, rather than in terms of their referents. Bergson’s first rule for identifying false problems is that they are problems whose very terms consist in a confusion of the “more” and the “less.” Under this heading one can include the problem of a cosmological argument, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, the problem of a teleological argument, “Why is there order rather than disorder?”, and the problem of theodicy, “Why is the world like this when it is possible that it could have been otherwise?” Bergson shows that there is more, not less, in the idea of nonbeing than in that of being, in disorder than in order, and in the possible than in the real. To form the idea of non-being, one would have to think of the idea of being, plus a logical operation of negation, as well as the psychological motive or other reason for that negation. Similarly, “the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind that throws its image back into the past once it has been enacted,” and an addition of the motive for this act (Deleuze 1988a: 17). Each problem derives from the same error: We mistake the more for the less, we behave as though non-being existed before being, disorder before order and the possible before existence. As though being came to fill a void, order to organize a preceding disorder, the real to realize a primary possibility. Being, order and existence are truth itself; but in the false problem there is a fundamental illusion, a

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“retrograde movement of the true,” according to which being, order and the existent are supposed to precede themselves, or to precede the creative act that constitutes them, by projecting an image of themselves back into a possibility, a disorder, a non-being which are supposed to be primordial. (Deleuze 1988a: 18)

One thus gains a richer sense of Deleuze’s indifference to most debates in philosophy of religion. In his view, they derive from false problems, from illusions internal to reason as such or from speculative mirages. As an example, the Kantian idea of God as the sum and condition of all possibility is an abstraction that removes all determinate content from the real. To imagine the priority of the possible involves an existential (as opposed to a merely logical) contradiction. As Bergson explains: For we feel that a divinely created will or thought is too full of itself, in the immensity of its reality, to have the slightest idea of a lack of order or a lack of being. To imagine the possibility of absolute disorder, all the more the possibility of nothingness, would be for it to say to itself that it might not have existed at all, and that would be a weakness incompatible with its nature, which is force. (Bergson, cited in Deleuze 1988a: 19)

In short, the fundamental opposition which Deleuze poses is that between a reality determined by negation, and thus stripped of positive content, and a reality determined by affirmation through differentiation and divergence. This opposition underlies Bergson’s second rule which tells us the conditions for forming an adequate metaphysical idea. It comes in two parts: to rediscover true differences in kind or the articulations of the real, and to follow these tendencies beyond the limits of experience until they meet again in a virtual image, like rays of light in a mirror. Like Plato’s dialectic, Bergson’s method of intuition is a method of division. Unlike empiricism, which assumes atomism and thus concerns the association of ideas in the imagination under certain principles, Bergson’s method takes impressions as composites and attempts to dissociate them into the real articulations that underlie them. It is a distinct method of philosophical analysis. For while associations of impressions may be purely subjective, divisions may express the metaphysical articulations of the real. Of course, one cannot initially know that one’s divisions may correspond to an underlying reality. Indeed, to select tendencies from reality may be a self-confirming hypothesis, since one only selects from reality those impressions that correspond to the principle of selection. All tendencies are therefore fictions, taken beyond the limits of experience. This is why the second part of this method is vital. Since in experience we do indeed encounter composites, it concludes that the tendencies must meet in a virtual focus that forms the condition of real experience in order to explain such composites. To clarify this, I would like to explore how Bergson’s method could be applied to the ontological argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument rests on a virtual identity of thought and existence, whereas the standard objections keep thought and existence separate. Kant points out that reason has a tendency to move from the conditioned to the unconditioned, for reason consists in seeking conditions (Kant 1929: 495). The ens realissimum, which provides a “therefore for every wherefore,” best fulfils the role of the unconditioned (Kant 1929: 497). The question, however, is whether one is thinking of anything, when positing a perfect being

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with the property of existing, or nothing at all. Do we deal with a badly analysed composite when we consider the existence of the idea of existence? Kant identifies a difference in kind: the unconditioned necessity of judgments is not the same as the absolute necessity of things. Thoughts represented in the mind are entirely distinct from the existence of things. The idea of a hundred dollars makes no difference to one’s financial position. “There is already a contradiction in introducing the concept of existence – no matter under what title it may be disguised – into the concept of a thing which we profess to be thinking solely in reference to its possibility” (Kant 1929: 503). Kant therefore concludes, “as every reasonable person must, that all existential propositions are synthetic” (Kant 1929: 504). This last admission, an appeal to “every reasonable person,” is a giveaway. It is always invoked by philosophers when they cannot think of a reason, because if they could think of a reason they would no doubt explain it in order to enhance understanding. It is often a sign that no reason is possible. The question arises as to whether Kant’s distinction between logical and existential judgments corresponds to an articulation of the real, a truly metaphysical distinction? Is it a necessary transcendental distinction? If one admits that all existential propositions are synthetic, then one can never find the conditions of real experience, since in real experience thoughts are inevitably joined to existence in order to be actually thought at all. For Kant, being “is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves” (Kant 1929: 504). This view already differs from Thomist metaphysics, for which being involves existing in God. At least in Thomism there is a ground for existential synthetic judgments. In Kantianism, by contrast, there is apparently no ground for existential judgments. Thought and reality never converge at a virtual point. It was left to Heidegger to identify the role of time in the schematism of the categories as the true ground for a Kantian metaphysics (see Heidegger 1962). By contrast, in Anselm’s formulation of the ontological argument, beginning with the conception of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” the tendency to compare ideas in terms of increasing “greatness” is extended as a fiction beyond experience until it reaches a virtual point where it rejoins the line of existing beings. Does Anselm’s formulation reach God as a virtual point that founds metaphysics? Instead of exploring the issue further here, we will return to the ontological argument in its formulation by Spinoza. Bergson’s third rule for intuition gives the ground for the preceding rules. It is to state problems and solve them in terms of time rather than in terms of space. Bergson’s method of intuition is concerned with the actual existence of ideas within time, rather than their content represented in a space of possible experience. For Bergson, the true metaphysical distinction is between qualitative difference as encountered in the experience of duration, and quantitative differences as represented in space. The Kantian distinction between thought and existence would then be a distinction between things represented as possible, in thought, and things represented as real, in existence. Yet even those things represented as real are still only possible things, represented as possibly being real. There is no true difference in kind here as both sets of ideas belong to thought. Yet ideas exist in time as well as objects. The fundamental distinction is not that between existing in space and existing in thought, or a represented space, but between actually existing in duration and existing as an atemporal representation. The whole of reality is on one side of the

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division, existence in duration; in representation one only ever encounters abstractions. By dividing reality in this way, Bergson effectively gives himself the means of choosing the reality in each case, because it belongs to the temporal side. Intuition of duration, therefore, exceeds a simply psychological experience because it enables us to identify existence as such (Deleuze 1988a: 32–33). The problem that remains to be explained, which Deleuze explores at considerable length (although it need not concern us here), is how the movement of the real leads to a positing of things in space, and eventually to the false problems of identifying things in terms of space rather than time. The philosophy of religion of Bergsonism, as detailed by Deleuze, gives three moments, corresponding to the three stages of his method. Firstly, a moment of indifference, consisting in a rejection of false problems, since such problems do not actively make a difference to the way in which problems are posed. Secondly, a moment of metaphysical insight, based on a method of division separating mere differences of degree from true differences in kind. Thirdly, a moment of intuition, where the reality of duration is experienced as real. This third moment, while it is the ground of metaphysical distinctions, gestures towards a stage beyond philosophy. For intuition, the direct experience of time as it happens, is pushed forwards by the creative force of time itself which, according to Bergson’s ontological monism, is nothing but the movement of life in us, the ground of matter, instinct, intelligence and intuition. What matters here is not monism as such, but that the whole of reality lies on this side of the division. As Deleuze explains: “Duration, Life, is in principle (en droit) memory, in principle consciousness, in principle freedom. ‘In principle’ means virtually. The whole question (quid facti?) is knowing under what conditions duration becomes in fact consciousness of self, how life actually accedes to a memory and freedom of fact” (Deleuze 1988a: 106). Bergson divides the manifestation of life within consciousness into three tendencies: instinct, intelligence, and intuition. When instinct is reflected within consciousness, it is through habit or custom. Such habit is expressed in imagination as the “story-telling function,” the creation of gods, religions and fictitious representations which succeed in thwarting intellectual work. It is also the condition for social life, yet it acts against the individualistic inventions of intelligence. Intelligence, by contrast, addresses actual problems and obstacles in life, and consists in a “tool-making function” which is concerned with understanding the external world, the true articulations of the real. Always provoking changes in society, intelligence is at odds with the grounding of society in custom. In the interval that arises from the conflict between the two, the experience of duration as creative emotion appears as a qualitative essence or immanent quality that spreads itself over various objects, animals, plants, and the whole of nature: “Imagine a piece of music which expresses love. It is not love for a particular person.. . . The quality of love will depend upon its essence and not upon its object.” Although personal, it is not individual; transcendent, it is like the God in us. “When music cries, it is humanity, it is the whole of nature which cries with it. Truly speaking, it does not introduce these feelings in us; it introduces us rather into them, like the passers-by that might be nudged into a dance.” In short, emotion is creative (first, because it expresses the whole of creation, then because it creates the work in which it is expressed; and finally, because it communicates a little of this creativity to spectators or hearers.) (Deleuze 1988a: 110–111).

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Here we approach Deleuze’s conception of an immanent life. It is immanent, not because it is included within our minds, but because it expresses an essence that infuses the whole of reality. It is immanent as an immanent cause that in some sense, entirely different from a material, causal, efficient or final cause, creates the music, the work of art, or the idea in which it expresses itself as a force of inspiration. It is immanent because, although it is not produced by us, it communicates a little of this inspiration to us. Now, this creative emotion is rarely expressed sufficiently within the concepts of philosophy. Bergson therefore points beyond philosophy to the work of artists and mystics. As Deleuze explains: At the limit, it is the mystic who plays with the whole of creation, who invents an expression of it whose adequacy increases with its dynamism. Servant of an open and finite God (such are the characteristics of the Élan Vital), the mystical soul actively plays the whole of the universe, and reproduces the opening of a Whole in which there is nothing to see or contemplate. Already motivated by emotion, the philosopher extracted the lines that divided up the composites given in experience. He prolonged the outline to beyond the “turn”; he showed in the distance the virtual point at which they all met. Everything happens as if that which remained indeterminate in philosophical intuition gained a new kind of determination in mystical intuition – as though the properly philosophical “probability” extended itself into mystical certainty. Undoubtedly philosophy can only consider the mystical soul from the outside and from the point of view of the lines of probability. But it is precisely the existence of mysticism that gives a higher probability to this final transmutation into certainty, and also gives, as it were, an envelope or a limit to all the aspects of method. (Deleuze 1988a: 112)

The mystic, here, expresses the virtual point of the real to which the philosopher aspires. Although philosophy cannot move by itself beyond probability, it finds its probability raised and intensified by the existence of the mystic. The problem is not whether the mystic has a true experience of God, or whether the mystic can infer any knowledge about God from experience. Such extrinsic problems remain false problems for the postulation of an external reality adds nothing to the content of the experience. The truly philosophical problem is to learn how to express the immanent experience of life itself by means of concepts adequate to express its nature. It is a problem of attaining a higher kind of knowledge beyond metaphysical probability. It is also a problem of expressing the mystic’s beatitude or creative emotion itself within reason. For Deleuze, one philosopher above all others has been able to do so – Spinoza. It will be necessary to run through the moments of indifference and anti-theological metaphysics in Spinoza’s thought before we can turn to the higher knowledge that is beatitude.

Spinozism Baruch Spinoza’s aim is to convert philosophy into an expression of God. This constitutes an extraordinary revisioning of the philosophy of religion. Indeed, Deleuze’s main work on Spinoza (Deleuze 1990 [1968]) can in some ways be regarded as a work of theology. The entire first half of the book is concerned with the concept of

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God. In this work, Spinoza’s method resonates with Bergson’s, in spite of the obvious differences between logical deduction from geometric axioms and the intuition of duration. Under what conditions can language become an expression of God? Spinoza’s fundamental distinction is between revelation, composed of signs which stand for a given meaning, and expression, which discloses meaning as such (Deleuze 1990: 57). The relation between a sign and what is signified is equivocal – these are distinct terms, partes extra partes, like objects distributed in space. The link between sign and signified can only be learned and obeyed. It cannot be understood because it has no intrinsic meaning. For Spinoza, scripture consists entirely in revelation, that is, in signs that are expected to be obeyed. It is a mistake to turn to scripture for an understanding of the nature of God, for this is not the nature and purpose of scripture, which is to achieve obedience rather than an understanding of metaphysics (Deleuze 1990: 56). The requirement for understanding, by contrast, is commonality. What is expressed has something in common with its expression. Although it may be distinct in essence, when that essence is attributed to an expression, the attribute is univocal in respect of what is expressed and the expression. Univocity, having a common meaning, is a precondition for philosophical understanding. Under what attributes might God express himself? For Spinoza, it is possible to distinguish between three kinds of divine names which may be derived from revelation. The first kind are images of God, or how people imagine God to be, often based on their experience of goodness, such as the summum bonum, compassionate, just and charitable. For Spinoza, these names will be entirely equivocal, since there is no reason why the nature of God should be good in the way in which we imagine the good. A second kind of name derives from a theology of creation, and relates to God as the cause of all things. These include names relating to creation, providence and predestination. It is often thought that such names apply to God analogically, since they are attributed to God on the basis of his effects, but differ in meaning when applied to God as a cause differs from its effects. Since they are not univocal, they do not fully express the nature of God. A third kind of name is an adjective indicating the modality of the divine essence, including the classical philosophical descriptors of infinite, perfect, immutable, eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent. The question to be determined here is whether they express the nature of God. Now, according to Deleuze’s Spinoza, “God would not be God without them, but is not God through them” (Deleuze 1990: 49). If God is defined in these terms, then we have an extrinsic definition. For since these terms imply a perfection beyond human thought, they are not univocal in relation to God and creatures. The concept of God is not generated through them. As in Parmenides and Bergson, the only way for Spinoza to advance understanding is through affirmation of those of our ideas that are adequate, rather than through any negation or limitation: “Immanence is opposed to any eminence of the cause, any negative theology, any method of analogy, any hierarchical conception of the world. With immanence all is affirmation” (Deleuze 1990: 173). Signs are rejected as equivocal; they do not give us any understanding of the relation between sign

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and signified. Analogies are rejected as involving a mixture of affirmation and negation: the eminence of the cause over the effect does not give us any definite idea of how the cause exceeds the effect. Properties are rejected as involving a “misty eminence.” Properties such as “infinite perfection” tell us nothing of the nature of the being to which they belong. To be told that God is perfect tells us nothing concrete of what it means for God to be God. Then, as Deleuze says, “It is one of Spinoza’s principal theses that the nature of God has never been defined, because it has always been confused with his ‘propria’ [properties]” (55). How, then, does Spinoza proceed to form the idea of God? “An adequate idea is just an idea that expresses its cause” (Deleuze 1990: 133). Spinoza’s “logic” is one of genesis rather than analysis. It is necessary to find a genetic definition of the idea of God, one from which all divine properties will follow. Again Deleuze reads a transcendental turn in Spinoza. The first part of the method consists in gaining knowledge of our power of understanding (129). One has to gain a reflexive knowledge – not an idea of some object, but an idea of an idea. An idea of an idea is distinct from that idea itself. Moreover, “Just to have a true idea is enough for it to be reflected, and to reflect its power of knowing; it is enough to know, to know that one knows” (131). This striking claim is conceivable if an idea expresses its cause. Instead of proceeding from properties of an effect to properties of a cause, one determines the cause as the sufficient reason of the effect. The second part of the method is thus genetic. Yet it is still necessary to start with an idea one knows to be true, and then, from suppositions about its properties, derive a genetic definition. In order to exorcise the fiction of the initial supposition, one must arrive at the idea of God, from which all other ideas flow, as quickly as possible. Only from this foundation does one find a unity between reflexive and expressive ideas, between an idea of an idea, and that idea itself. This general method is applied to the case of God. Spinoza’s requirement, according to Deleuze, is as follows: God expresses himself in his attributes, and attributes express themselves in dependent modes: this is how the order of Nature manifests God. The only names expressive of God, the only divine expressions, are then the attributes: common forms predicable of substance and modes. (Deleuze 1990: 59).

The two attributes predicable in the same sense of both God and creatures are thought and extension: these are unlimited qualities, in that they can be extended to infinity. They are also the forms common to God, whose essence they constitute, and to creatures which imply them essentially. Deleuze’s Spinoza is no pantheist – he does not identify the essence of God and creatures, since the attributes are the essence of substance but not that of modes. Modes simply imply them. “The univocity of attributes does not mean that substance and modes have the same being or the same perfection: substance is in itself, and modes are in substance as in something else” (Deleuze 1990: 165). Indeed, Deleuze claims that only through community of form can one effectively distinguish God and creatures. If one attempts to distinguish God and creatures through analogy, then one ends up making the very mistake

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of anthropomorphism that analogy denounces, since the essence of creatures is used as a basis for thinking the essence of God (46–48). The next stage is to pass from the infinite to the absolute by proving that every substance must be unlimited. If a substance were limited by itself, it would have to change its whole essence; if a substance were limited by another, there would then be two substances with the same attribute; nor can a substance be limited by God, since this would mean that God is faced with something that requires limitation before being created. All attributes must therefore belong to God as absolutely infinite being (Deleuze 1990: 70). The nature of God consists in absolute infinity, that is, an infinity of attributes. Now, to prove the existence of God, Spinoza cannot simply follow proofs from infinite perfection or necessary existence, as Descartes does, since if one identifies infinite perfection with the nature of God, one does not prove that such a nature is possible or involves no contradiction. Instead, Spinoza will show that the infinitely perfect has as its reason or principle the absolutely infinite. Spinoza arrives at the existence of God in Proposition 11 of Book One of the Ethics. Although Spinoza does not refer to them in the proof, Deleuze takes the preceding Propositions 9 and 10 as crucial. The real or genetic definition of God is as an absolutely infinite being, that is, a substance consisting in an infinity of attributes. The more reality a thing has, the more attributes that belong to it or the more that the intellect perceives concerning its essence. Moreover, since each attribute of one substance is conceived through itself, then a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes necessarily exists, since a substance cannot be conceived to exist through something else (such as the intellect that conceives it). Spinoza’s God, like Kant’s, is the whole of reality. Modes, however, are no longer limitations of an infinite substance but finite expressions of it. This is actual, not possible reality. Spinoza’s method, therefore, is first to distinguish between thought and extension, which is a true metaphysical distinction since each cannot be conceived through the other, and then to reunite these attributes into the unity of a virtual image – the substance that expresses itself in the attributes. One can maintain an essential distinction between substance, or what is expressed in the attributes, and the mind that thinks the idea of substance, which is a modification of the attribute of thought. Commonality is possible on the basis of univocity, that is, that an attribute is univocal in respect of the substance it expresses and the modes in which it is expressed. While Deleuze (not entirely persuasively) argues that Spinoza draws heavily on Duns Scotus’ concepts, he emphasizes how Spinoza understands the notion of univocity in an altogether different way from Duns Scotus (Deleuze 1990: 49). For Scotus called an “attribute” the mere properties of God, such as justice, goodness and wisdom, defining God by intrinsic perfections. As a theologian, required to guard against pantheism by means of a “creationist” perspective, Scotus made univocal Being a neutralized, indifferent concept, concerned with purely formal distinctions, and indifferent to distinctions between finite and infinite (Deleuze 1990: 66–67). For Spinoza, by contrast, the same attribute constitutes the essence of God and contains the essences of modes. Univocity is the expression of the God in the modes – God and modes are thought together in disjunction, not compared in their essence.

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Thus it is the idea of immanent cause that takes over, in Spinoza, from univocity, freeing it from the indifference and neutrality to which it had been confined by the theory of a divine creation. And it is in immanence that univocity finds its distinctly Spinozist formulation: God is said to be the cause of all things in the very sense (eo sensu) that he is said to be cause of himself. (Deleuze 1990: 67)

For Deleuze, immanence is the new figure that the theory of univocity takes on in Spinoza. As an immanent cause, God is the condition of possibility of real experience, no broader than what is conditioned. Since God does not limit himself, there are no unrealized possibilities left over in God. God expresses himself fully in the modes, and only in the modes. One may now determine the relation between Deleuze’s metaphysics and theology. Deleuze explains that metaphysics begins with the Platonic problem of participation (Deleuze 1990: 169). He shows how the concept of an immanent cause (as the reason expressed in real experience) was developed out of Neoplatonism under the hypostasis of intelligence (referring in particular to Nicholas of Cusa; Deleuze 1990: 174). He also shows how the concept of an immanent cause begins to develop in creationist theology in the form of the exemplary Ideas in the Word that express the multiplicity of creatable things (referring in particular to Bonaventure; Deleuze 1990: 179). Nevertheless, immanence must take leave of emanative and exemplary causation to take on its truly philosophical role: “Born of the traditions of emanation and creation it makes of these two enemies, questioning the transcendence of a One above Being along with the transcendence of a Being above his Creation” (322). It is vitally important to distinguish immanence from Neoplatonic emanation, Scotist univocity, and Augustinian creationism. In each case, the charge is not that these metaphysical traditions are false, since we are not concerned with the designation of objects. Instead, theology is regarded as an enemy since it draws on transcendence to constrain the power of the understanding from going to the limit of what it can do. The objection is a practical and philosophical one: “Any organization that comes from above and refers to a transcendence can be called a theological plan: a design in the mind of a god, but also an evolution in the depths of nature, or a society’s organization of power” (Deleuze 1988b: 128). Whether we are concerned with religion, ontology, or politics, the enemy is always theological. Deleuze replaces a conception of transcendence based on unity, eminence, analogy and hierarchy with the distinction between an expression and what is expressed. It is a distinction that will have considerable implications for a philosophy of religion.

Beatitude One may now assess the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy of religion as a whole. Can one say, then, that Deleuze believes in Spinoza’s God as opposed to a “moral, transcendent, creator God”? (Deleuze 1988b: 17). Does Spinoza’s ontological proof work? Or can one claim, to the contrary, that it is Spinoza’s strategy of reasoning – his “plane of immanence” – that functions as the transcendental ideal of pure reason

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for Deleuze’s work, taking on its own transcendent form, and falling back into emanation, indifference, or eminence? Can one still take extension as an attribute of the absolute, given the centrality of temporality in post-Kantian metaphysics in general, and Bergson’s critique of spatialization in the name of a monism of duration? Such questions are undercut by the radical conversion of thinking that Deleuze applies to Spinozist metaphysics, a conversion that Deleuze finds immanent in Spinoza’s work itself. In his metaphysics, Spinoza has indicated “a second kind of religion: no longer a religion of imagination, but one of understanding. The expression of Nature replaces signs, love replaces obedience . . .” (Deleuze 1990: 291). Spinoza’s theory of a third kind of knowledge, a knowledge termed “beatitude,” also indicates the possibility of a third kind of religion. If Spinoza describes Christ’s knowledge as directly of the third kind, knowing God’s existence through itself (301), and if Deleuze describes Spinoza as the “Christ of the philosophers” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 60), this must be because Deleuze attributes to Spinoza a knowledge of a higher kind. There is an extraordinary ambivalence in Spinoza’s method between its reflexive and genetic stages. On the one hand, Spinoza proceeds by an order of definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs, and corollaries, where ideas reflect ideas alone. On the other hand, however, Spinoza argues that the mind only has knowledge of itself insofar as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body (Spinoza 1989: II, Proposition 23, p. 59). One begins in ignorance and learns through encounters and experimentation what a body can do. How may such a duality be resolved? Deleuze resolves it through the concepts of expression and affirmation: “When an external state involves an increase of our power of acting, it is joined by another state that depends on this very power” (Deleuze 1988b: 40). Thus, on the one hand, a mode is composed of encounters between bodies that take place in duration, and enter into relations of composition. Here, there are only relations of speed and slowness, movement and rest between an infinite number of bodies. Such relations, however, are doubled in temporal existence by an eternal essence that constitutes a body’s characteristic relation. On the other hand, a mode experiences an affect arising from an encounter. Here again, when an encounter composes a relation, the resulting joyful passion is doubled by an active joy that expresses itself in the encounter. Deleuze shows how the attributes of thought and extension become reconceived in terms of affects and relations of composition, respectively. The essence of a mode, or what it expresses of substance, is now considered as an affect and a characteristic relation. More significantly, for Deleuze the mind functions as a “spiritual automaton,” an expression. One only needs a true idea in order to know that it is true; one only needs a joyful encounter in order to express an active joy. In short, affirmation becomes the touchstone of truth in philosophy for Deleuze. The production of ideas is practical and experimental. Metaphysics become ethics – there is no real distinction here. If existence is a test, rather like a physical or chemical test, it is one in which all negation must be eliminated as abstraction and fiction, so that the essence of a mode can express itself in an active joy. In temporal life, ethics takes on a de facto priority in relation to metaphysics. One selects adequate ideas by the active joys through which they are expressed. One generates true ideas

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when one comprehends them through their cause, or when an idea is reflected in the idea of an idea in a movement to infinity. At the same time, the infinite movement of ideas is the immanent cause that generates the true idea in a moment of expression or self-survey. Adequate ideas express and affirm themselves in the mind. They are understood as God understands them in a moment of beatitude.

The Plane of Immanence The crux of Deleuze’s philosophy of religion lies in the nature of this moment of transfiguration or transmutation that produces a third kind of religion. A “divine energy” is invoked to describe the work of an immanent cause (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 13). It is an energy that under certain conditions can appear to manifest itself as a force of exclusive disjunction, negation, or limitation, as though a transcendent plan of organization were in operation. Under such conditions, it appears to operate a system of judgment, the judgment of God. Nevertheless, when fully affirmed as a power of expression or inclusive disjunction, as the difference between actual modes of existence and their virtual images or ideas, this divine energy loses the unity of a transcendent ideal and becomes the life that expresses itself in actual individuals. Deleuze is quite explicit in his final essay, “Immanence: A Life . . .,” (Deleuze 1997; also published in Deleuze 2001), which may be taken in some ways as a last will and testament, about the transformation of philosophy required. Beginning with a purely transcendental problem concerned with the order of ideas, “What is a transcendental field?,” he quickly moves to define a transcendental field by a plane of immanence, and the plane of immanence by a life (Deleuze 1997: 4). There is a dual transformation at work here. Deleuze’s argument begins as follows: What is a transcendental field? It is distinct from experience in that it neither refers to an object nor belongs to a subject (empirical representation). It therefore appears as a pure asubjective current of consciousness, an impersonal pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self. (Deleuze 1997: 3)

Deleuze begins with the immediate data of experience in order to extract the virtual ideas that express themselves in actual experience. Ideas belong not to sensations themselves but to the passage from one to another in a pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor self. The first transformation is as follows. It is not that the transcendental field belongs within consciousness, as though it were itself a concept that could be considered by the mind. This is because a relation or passage between ideas exists eternally, even if there is no mind in which it can be revealed. “Eternal,” here, means crossing “the transcendental field at an infinite speed which is everywhere diffuse” (Deleuze 1997: 3). In contrast, the transcendental field is defined by absolute immanence. It is not internal to us, but we are internal to it. It subsists, whether or not there is an individual consciousness that expresses it. Ideas are no longer representations in our minds. Our minds live and move in a transcendental field which is a mental landscape. Instead of ideas being subjective and arbitrary associations, or representing objective realities, they have their own

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dynamism, life, and self-positing power. They are modes of thought on a plane of immanence. The second transformation is to understand immanence as a life. The indefinite article here is the index of the transcendental. The concern is not with concrete individuals, but with the conditions of experience, a transcendental determinability. It would seem that Deleuze is only concerned with a virtual plane of singular ideas, the conceptual coordinates for dividing up experience. Yet Deleuze writes: “Pure immanence is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanence which is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is sheer power, utter beatitude” (Deleuze 1997: 4). The plane of immanence is now in a field of life and force. Since, in Spinozism, there is a univocity of causation, then the actualization of virtual ideas takes precedence over our presumed sense of physical causation in the encounter between bodies. As with Hume, causation is a principle for the constitution of experience as such; it is not a physical principle encountered within experience. This is no simple materialism, for all events are mediated by an immanent causality: “What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality, but something that enters into a process of actualization by following the plane that gives it its own reality. The immanent event actualizes itself in a state of things and in a lived state which bring the event about” (5). How, then, is such a dual transformation of philosophy into immanence and life to be achieved? In some ways, it is merely a matter of following the empiricist conversion from epistemology or metaphysics into an ethics or practical philosophy. Deleuze contrasts a systematic reading of Spinoza with an affective reading, “without an idea of the whole, where one is carried along or set down, put in motion or at rest, shaken or calmed according to the velocity of this or that part” (Deleuze 1988b: 129). To attain a plane of immanence, one has to be like the passer-by swept up into a street dance, blown along by the movements of thought as though by a great wind. Life is not merely an idea or a matter of theory: it is a way of being (13). As Deleuze explains, “Actually, there is only one term, Life, that encompasses thought, but conversely this term is encompassed only by thought. Not that life is in thinking, but only the thinker has a potent life, free of guilt and hatred; and only life explains the thinker” (14). For if thought surpasses the reflective knowledge it produces in consciousness, and if there is an unconscious of thought that is not normally fully expressed in consciousness, then consciousness may register the effect of the causes that act upon it in an affective form. The distinction between inadequate and adequate ideas, or between true and false problems, is displaced by a distinction between joyful and sad passions. For joyful passions may be accompanied by active joys that express themselves in the latter. As self-movements of the plane of immanence, these active joys express singular ideas as infinite movements of thought. They are at once events that occur and senses that can be expressed as creative emotions. This practical conversion places thought within immanence. It is no longer a question of speculating about whether there is a single substance or a univocal Being. It is a matter of a way of life. Nevertheless, Deleuze is not concerned simply

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with moral philosophy or pragmatism. It is not as though any old practical philosophy will do to achieve immanence. Instead, Deleuze is concerned with an ethics of thinking as such. One no longer starts with what is positive in some idea, but one starts with what is positive in a joyful passion (Deleuze 1990: 288). Deleuze explains three elements of Spinoza’s philosophy where it is entirely consonant with Nietzsche’s. The first aspect is that consciousness is devalued in favour of thought, since thought itself surpasses the consciousness we have of it (Deleuze 1988b: 18). For while thought expresses the idea as an immanent cause, consciousness only registers the effects of what happens in our body through sensation and what happens in our mind through thinking. Consciousness has a tendency to satisfy its ignorance and mask its anxiety over inadequate ideas by mistaking effects for causes. It takes itself as a first cause, as though it had a power over the body, whereas it is in itself an effect. It takes its contents for final causes, as though there were an order of reasons. When it reaches its limits, it invokes a God endowed with understanding and volition, operating by means of free decrees or final causes. Indeed, Deleuze emphasizes that consciousness is only a dream with one’s eyes open. It is constituted by the illusion of freedom, the illusion of finality, and the theological illusion (20). The outcome of this first aspect of the practical conversion is the moment of indifference. For Deleuze, this is a refusal to take the contents of consciousness as true metaphysical or ethical categories. The second aspect of the practical conversion applies the same insight to moral values. If consciousness is only composed of effects, then our sense of good or bad expresses the effects which our encounters have upon them. Such effects should not be universalized as absolute moral judgments of right or wrong since they do not derive from the final causes of moral values. In the same way that signs of divine names are equivocal, moral values do not express the good life. Yet far from being a refusal of ethics as such, and a licence for each to pursue the gratification of their passions or their immediate self-interests, this conversion is merely a precondition of an ethical life. For moral values function only as signs or commands, producing no understanding of the good life. Thus it is a vain effort to hope to dispel such passions through attempts at reasoning from moral values. Spinoza’s ethical path proceeds through ordering rather than through judgment. One should attempt to order one’s life so that sad passions are no longer produced, and joyful passions are substituted instead. As a result, if the task of life is to produce a maximum of active joys, this cannot be achieved in a life dominated by sad passions. The outcome of this second aspect of the practical conversion is to draw a distinction between emotions and moral values, and then to encounter the whole of reality on the side of emotion, for it is here one encounters actual causes and ideas. It is not the case that all passions are good for Deleuze. All passions are real, and they are effects and signs of true causes. This outcome leads straight into the third aspect which is the basis for the other two – a devaluation of all sad passions in favour of joy. For a philosophy of immanence, ethics is purely selective. It is a matter of allowing the actualization of the virtual. Instead of selecting between extrinsic goals or values, however, true freedom lies in affirmation. For one can only respond to an external value through obedience or transgression, through passion or resentment.

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Such a reaction allows no true affirmation. Indeed, the person with sad passions, the slave, is necessary for the existence of the person who exploits them, the tyrant, and the person who is saddened by the human condition in general, the priest (Deleuze 1988b: 25). The anti-theological force of a philosophy of immanence is expressed in its principle of selection of active ideas, the principle of affirmation. Deleuze’s philosophy of religion is also heavily influenced by Nietzsche. The ethics of philosophy as amor fati is not a refusal to discriminate but a principle of discrimination itself. It is a question of liberating the power that will in turn liberate life from all sad passions and liberate thought from all inadequate ideas. In order to eliminate all that is negative in thought, “it suffices to reintegrate each thing into the type of infinite that corresponds to it” (Deleuze 1988b: 96). Deleuze is no longer simply concerned with a practical conversion. Deleuze is concerned with liberating a divine power within thought itself. If Parmenides, Bergson, and Spinoza make affirmation into the road to truth, they do not, for all that, provide us with a principle or method for affirmation. Deleuze finds such a principle in that other philosopher of eternal beatitude, Nietzsche. Indeed, Deleuze explains that the idea of God will itself change in content, taking on another content in the third kind of knowledge which Spinoza calls beatitude (Deleuze 1990: 299). Deleuze draws on Nietzsche for a general transformation of Spinozism: Nevertheless, there still remains a difference between substance and the modes: Spinoza’s substance appears independent of the modes, while the modes are dependent on substance, but as though on something other than themselves. Substance must itself be said of the modes and only of the modes. Such a condition can be satisfied only at the price of a more general categorical reversal according to which being is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple, etc. (Deleuze 1994: 40–41)

For Deleuze, the power of understanding in Spinoza’s second kind of knowledge (adequate ideas) lacks a particular qualitative difference “characterized by the degree of power or intensity of our own essence itself” (Deleuze 1990: 305). To achieve the identity of speculative and practical affirmation, Deleuze invokes Nietzsche’s doctrine of an eternal return. Philosophy thus becomes a means of thinking beatitude – the joy that follows from ideas of the third kind (308). Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return is esoteric. Since he claims that Nietzsche never fully explained the doctrine, one may perhaps consider it as Deleuze’s concept of repetition rather than Nietzsche’s own doctrine. Nevertheless, Deleuze attributes a unique role to the consideration of repetition in both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression. In relation to them we speak readily of an overcoming of philosophy. Furthermore, in all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement – in other words, the abstract logical movement of “mediation.” They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. (Deleuze 1994: 8)

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One escapes representation through repetition, for each repetition makes a difference, and actualizes the force that drives it more and more fully. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre, the idea of a director before his time. In this sense, something completely new begins with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. (Deleuze 1994: 8)

This is a practical conversion of thought that turns metaphysics into the selfmovement of ideas. It is no longer a question of simply thinking difference, or thinking differently, but of making a difference. For this one needs a device or machine, rather than a speculative principle. Repetition is thus invoked not as a speculative hypothesis but as the highest principle of affirmation. Deleuze compares it to Kant’s categorical imperative: “What is Kant’s ‘highest test’ if not a criterion which should decide what can in principle be reproduced – in other words, what can be repeated without contradiction in the form of a moral law?” (Deleuze 1994: 4). Kant’s criterion of universalizability, however, remains within the sphere of generality, expressing a point of view according to which one term may be exchanged or substituted for another. Repetition, by contrast, can only be truly affirmed in relation to that which cannot be replaced, something entirely singular. Unlike law, which always has a generality of application, repetition can only be applied to a singular case: “If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law: against the similar form and equivalent content of the law” (2). An ontology of repetition, based on an immanent causality, will lie at the farthest extreme from a physical determinism based on law. Repetition is only of singularities. It even exceeds identity, since identity is only possible on the basis of repetition. Repetition is the higher form of the transcendental field. It is the condition under which identities and essences become thinkable. Deleuze argues that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche aim to make something new of repetition itself so that it is: “a matter of acting, of making repetition as such a novelty” (Deleuze 1994: 6). Both oppose repetition to the laws of nature as they are concerned with affirmation as the most interior element of the will, and thus with authenticity rather than accuracy. Both oppose repetition to the moral law, since this can only subordinate particular cases to a general form. Both even oppose repetition to Socratic recollection, dissolving the forms of particularity. In repetition, thought is raised to the power of the infinite. What, then, is to be repeated? For Kierkegaard, it is a return of the beloved, the restoration of Isaac to Abraham or of the fortunes of Job (Kierkegaard 1983). Yet such a return seems impossible: Kierkegaard contrasts the “knight of infinite resignation,” who desires repetition yet renounces all things, with the “knight of faith” who makes the leap over an infinite abyss in virtue of the absurd. Deleuze’s objection to Kierkegaard is not that he leaps over an abyss without reason, leaving thought without a ground, nor that he invokes the grace of a transcendent God to achieve repetition. On the contrary, what the knight of faith desires is an immanence restored, and the transcendent movements simply recharge immanence. Like

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Pascal, Kierkegaard is concerned “no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 74). Deleuze’s objection is rather that Kierkegaard invokes the repetition of the same, the “betrothal of a self rediscovered and a god recovered” (Deleuze 1994: 95). Yet repetition, if it is to be the source of identity, must be of something prior to identity. Hence in a repetition that occurs solely on the basis of faith, the self restored by God, is a double or simulacrum. As a result, Kierkegaard can only portray himself as a poet of faith, a humourist, rather than a knight. When repetition is treated as the rediscovery, once and for all, of God and the self in a common resurrection, then it does not in Deleuze’s view attain to true authenticity. It can only trace the movements but it cannot enact them. Faith remains tied to the sphere of the possible, instead of attaining a true affirmation and repetition. The problem changes for Deleuze, however, when believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 75). It is still a matter of faith, of affirmation as the highest principle, but this life may now be affirmed as a set of self-actualising singular events. It is faith in immanence, and immanence as a dimension of faith. Deleuze thus treats the eternal return as an immanent principle of ethical selection that is beyond the transcendent values of good and evil: “whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return” (Deleuze 1983: 68). Such a test eliminates all the little pleasures granted only once, everything that is half-willed, everything that will be given up tomorrow. Instead, repetition becomes for Deleuze a categorical principle that selects only those thoughts that fully affirm themselves, and that go to the limit of what they can do in expressing themselves. Moreover, the concept of repetition is not a speculative test applied by a thinking subject. If taken in this way, one remains in the predicament of Kierkegaard: “He can thus invite us to go beyond all aesthetic repetition, beyond irony and even beyond humour, all the while painfully aware that he offers us only the aesthetic, ironic and humoristic image of such a going-beyond” (Deleuze 1994: 11). Instead, repetition is only affirmed of something beyond identity and consciousness. It could variously be called an aliquid, what-not, thingummy, mana (the sacred energy of the Polynesians discussed by Lévi-Strauss), ça (the French for the Id in psychoanalysis), truc or machin – the French word machin possessing this sense as well as that of a “machine” (Deleuze 1991b: 49–50). The unique feature of such a “what-not” is that it expresses what it denotes and denotes what it expresses, circulating between thought and being, producing sense as a surface effect of the series it conjoins, but never being tied to a particular identity. For Deleuze, repetition can only be affirmed of an idea that acts as a pure dynamism creating a corresponding space. Such a dynamic space “must be defined from the point of view of an observer tied to that space, not from an external position” (Deleuze 1994: 26). Repetition can only be said of difference – a pure difference that differs in kind from the form under which it is actualized or expressed. In truth, it is not the person who affirms, but an idea that actualizes itself in creating the autonomy of a work of art. The idea affirms itself.

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This is still a logic of expression, but one where Spinoza’s God has been replaced by a plane of immanence, consisting only of singular ideas. Such ideas manifest themselves at once in sense and in events, but they can only participate in thought and extension to the extent that they are pure differences, transcendental ideas, existing as a multiplicity of differences and repetitions. Unity, identity, negation, and totality do not exist at this level. They are surface effects or products of such a system, rather than originary terms. If Deleuze continues to use the language of “univocity,” then, and if he writes of Being as the “unique event in which all events communicate with one another” (Deleuze 1991b: 180), or of an “equal and common Being” (Deleuze 1994: 41), this is because the only mode of existence is repetition. This is how all “what-nots” exist. If there is a “single clamour of Being for all beings” raising a cry, “Everything is equal!” or “Everything returns!” (Deleuze 1994: 304), this is a cry that raises being from thought, through affirmation, to realization. It is not the whole of existence that returns. Only the idea returns, in its moment of actualization. All else is mere surface effect. Being itself is selection, affirmation, repetition. If it has one sense, this is a sense expressed of a multiplicity. Repetition is an infinite circuit between thought and being, lived in singular and different moments of creation. Such events remain transcendental. They do exclude, however, any transcendental ideas of self, world, and God because repetition, as the highest form of affirmation, can only be affirmed of difference. For Deleuze, therefore, there is a “knowledge of the third kind,” but it is unconscious. It operates through the subject in acts of creation, leaving an affect of joy, but it exceeds the powers of the subject. Such knowledge is an unconscious of thought, a paradoxical element that can only be expressed directly as nonsense. Yet, when repeated in an act of creation, it ensures the genesis of sense as expressed in a work of art, or in the creation of concepts, or in the invention of a scientific function. As in the Bergsonian method, a series of terms are followed until they meet in a virtual image. In contrast to Bergsonism, however, the two series converge only on a paradoxical element that remains displaced and disguised, yet coordinates the two – a transcendental idea that differs in kind from a sense that can be expressed. For Deleuze, this is always a “what-not,” a machine, an unconscious desire. In place of a Spinozist substance, there is a multiplicity of singularities or events that express themselves with a vital power of affirmation as so many problems that motivate thought.

Conclusion What, then, should one conclude? Is Deleuze’s philosophy of religion one of indifference, atheism, and materialism? There is much in his work to make a reader believe so. In reality, however, for one who attempts to think through his philosophy, rather than merely reading it, nothing could be farther from the truth. For while Deleuze might have been indifferent to conventional problems in philosophy of religion, at the heart of his interests lies what it means to be a thinker. This includes concepts and problems, presuppositions about what it means to think, the

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movements made by conceptual personae, and the relation to the wider territory in which one thinks. While Deleuze may have discounted a moral, transcendent, creator God, he makes divinity into a power of affirmation and creativity immanent to life itself. The whole of existence comes to seem inspired. While Deleuze may seem wedded to materialist presuppositions in some of his conceptual rhetoric, such as when appealing to a “plane of immanence,” his entire philosophy displaces physical causation in favour of a multiplicity of ideal, immanent causes which form also a vitalism, a philosophy of life. Life is force, power, affirmation, repetition, differentiation, and beatitude. It is hardly surprising that Deleuze should follow the anti-clericalism of Spinoza, Kant, and Nietzsche by defining philosophy in opposition to theology. Moreover, since the topics of God and transcendence recur so often throughout Deleuze’s work, it is also hardly surprising that he be no less concerned with a religious thought than they are. Deleuze does not remove the question of the divine from thinking any more than he removes the question of ethics. On the contrary, just as he converts the whole of metaphysics into ethics, making ethics into the immanent qualification of a thinker, he imbues the entirety of thought with a religious pathos, a spirit of affirmation, a praise of creativity. In this respect, perhaps no one has gone further in constructing an immanent philosophy of religion. There remain a range of critical questions. Do certain materialist assumptions continue to rule Deleuze’s logic of multiplicities? Can God only be thought in terms of the Kantian idea of classical theism? Might affirmation not be grounded on a more profound ambivalence? Is it sufficient to follow the practical turn, transmuting thought into immanence and life, in order to construct a thinking that encompasses the whole of life? Should such a thought include, for example, the awareness that characterizes consciousness, the “now” that characterizes time, or the faith that orients itself to the future? Is it not possible for the spirit of an idea to come directly into consciousness itself, under certain rare conditions, and, in doing so, transform the image of thought as a plane of immanence into something entirely different? Nevertheless, however Deleuze’s philosophy fares in the subsequent history of thought, it sets a standard for expressing an immanent philosophy of religion as an affirmation of life that few may ever exceed. The purpose of philosophy of religion has changed. It is no longer an analysis of given statements of belief. It is a quest to elevate thought to a level that is divine.

Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles. 1980. Seminar on Spinoza, 25 November. Available at http://www.webdeleuze. com/php/sommaire.html. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and philosophy (trans: Tomlinson, Hugh). London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988a. Bergsonism (trans: Tomlinson, Hugh, and Habberjam, Barbara). New York, NY: Zone. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988b. Spinoza: Practical philosophy (trans: Hurley, Robert). San Francisco, CA: City Lights.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza (trans: Joughin, Martin). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991a. Empiricism and subjectivity (trans: Boundas, Constantin V.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991b. The logic of sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and repetition (trans: Patton, Paul). London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations (trans: Joughin, Martin). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Immanence: A life . . .. Theory, Culture and Society 14(2): 4. Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Pure immanence: Essays on a life (trans: Boyman, Anne). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1984. Anti-Oedipus (trans: Hurley, Robert, Seem, Mark, and Lane, Helen R.). London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is philosophy? (trans: Tomlinson, Hugh, and Burchill, Graham). London: Verso. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Kant and the problem of metaphysics (trans: Churchill, James S.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hume, David. 1975. Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals, ed. L.A. Selby Bigge and P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon. Hume, David. 1978. A treatise of human nature, ed. L.A. Selby Bigge and P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon. Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of pure reason (trans: Kemp Smith, Norman). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. Fear and trembling. and repetition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. Twilight of the idols (trans: Hollingdale, R.J.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spinoza, Benedict de. 1989. Ethics (trans: Parkinson, G.H.R.). London: J.M. Dent.

Jean-Luc Marion: Phenomenology of Religion Christina M. Gschwandtner

What might a thinker who celebrates the “death of God” and advocates the demise of metaphysics have to say to contemporary philosophy of religion? Much philosophy of religion is concerned with proving God’s existence or reconciling various concepts of “revelation,” such as miracles, with “reason,” often understood as the truths of science. French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion not only does not do this, but actually does not think that “proofs for God’s existence” are either feasible or conducive to Christian faith. And yet Marion has much to say to contemporary philosophy of religion, even if he does so in a language and a manner very different from traditional approaches to the discipline. Marion’s philosophy and theology have elicited much interest in recent years. The English-speaking world was first introduced to his work with the 1991 translation of God without Being, which for a long time remained the only work available in English. But with interest in Marion’s work increasing significantly almost all of his works are now translated into English. Marion’s work as a whole is clearly written on the boundary line between philosophy and theology. Not only is it guided by both philosophical and theological concerns, such as the topics of God and the human self that are central within all of it, but it employs language from both disciplines, often using examples from the Scriptures or from the liturgical tradition of the church. It is also significantly informed by both theological and philosophical thinkers (such as theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar, Louis Bouyer and Henri de Lubac, as well as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Emmanuel Levinas). Marion’s contributions may be regarded as both “destructive” and “constructive.” On the one hand, Marion makes clear why it is not solely a cause for despair that much of contemporary culture rejects thought about God or at least finds it irrelevant (as is particularly true of European culture). His thought about what has been called the “death of God” and his rejection of metaphysical language for the divine not only take the criticism of this tradition seriously but envision ways to move beyond them. On the other hand, Marion also contributes much to questions that have always been central to philosophy of religion, even if his way C.M. Gschwandtner (B) Department of Philosophy, Scranton University, Scranton PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_8,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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of approaching these questions might often seem unfamiliar. One might say that his core concerns are to find a coherent way to talk about the divine philosophically and to explore the possibility of depicting religious experience in rigorously philosophical fashion. These concerns, then, are not totally unlike the traditional approaches of talking about God’s existence and divine revelation in the world, even if the terminology and the philosophical approach employed are rather different. In this chapter I will try to elucidate Marion’s particular contribution to these central concerns of philosophy of religion. I will begin by explaining the context for Marion’s work and the sources which inform it. Becoming familiar with this context goes a long way toward understanding what Marion is about. I will go on to explore Marion’s most significant contributions to the questions of God and religious experience. These include in particular his idea of a God “without Being,” his proposal of the “saturated phenomenon,” and his emphasis on love. I will close with a brief consideration of the most important criticism leveled against Marion’s work. Firstly, however, some background information. Marion currently teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Chicago. His appointment was made primarily because of his work in Descartes. He is also head of the Descartes Center at the Sorbonne and editor of the Épiméthée Series. The theological and phenomenological considerations are actually a relatively new development in Marion’s writings. One can divide his work roughly into three “periods” or emphases: All of his early (and even some of his more recent) works are on Descartes (Ontologie grise [1975], Théologie blanche [1981], The Metaphysical Prism of Descartes [1986, English 1999], Cartesian Questions [1991, English 1999], On the Ego and on God [1996, English 2007]). These are followed by several books that are more theological in emphasis (Idol and Distance [1977, English 2001], God without Being [1982, English 1991], Prolegomena to Charity [1986, English 2002], The Crossing of the Visible [1991, English 2004]), while all of his most recent publications are in the area of phenomenology (Reduction and Givenness [1989, English 1998], Being Given [1997, English 2002], In Excess [2001, English 2002], The Erotic Phenomenon [2003, English 2007]). He has just published Certitudes négatives (2010) and Le croire pour le voir (2010). Yet these “areas” or “emphases” are not as distinct as they might seem. Marion’s early writings on Descartes already clearly exhibit his later theological and phenomenological concerns. As a whole, Marion’s work is characterized by a desire to carry further Heidegger’s (and contemporary philosophy’s) “destruction” of metaphysics with the aim of liberating talk about the divine and the human subject. Marion’s specific desire is to open philosophical thought to a phenomenological reflection on love. His work on Descartes provides an outline of Descartes’ metaphysical system, an analysis of Descartes’ thought about the divine, and an examination of Descartes’ philosophy of the ego. His more theological works similarly show the way that metaphysics has limited God and reduced the divine to an idol and the implications of this for the human subject. In his phenomenology, Marion attempts to develop a phenomenology of “pure givenness” that breaks out of metaphysical restrictions and therefore is able to think about a “phenomenon of revelation” and to speak of self and other “after the subject.”

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Descartes Marion began his philosophical work with Descartes. All of his early writings are on Descartes and on the late medieval and early modern context of Descartes’ work. His emphasis is not on Descartes as mathematician or early scientist, but on Descartes as metaphysician and especially on the implications of Descartes’ work for theology. These two concerns (metaphysics and theology) are at the core of all of Marion’s philosophical writings in some way or other. Marion begins by exploring the metaphysical nature of Descartes’ work and shows how metaphysics takes on a new meaning for Descartes that influences all later conceptions of metaphysics. First, for Descartes metaphysics develops an epistemological content, instead of being explicitly ontological. Concretely this means that “being” for Descartes becomes grounded in the thinking of the ego. The ego that thinks itself and grounds its own existence in thinking (“I think therefore I am”) also conceives of the being of all other things as grounded in thinking. (E.g., the ego examines its own thoughts and discovers there various ideas, some of which it thinks correspond to real beings “out there” and whose “real existence” it proves by careful thinking and reflective proof.) According to Marion this is still metaphysics, but it is a metaphysics that hides its ontological nature in an epistemology.1 Second, Marion seeks to show that for Descartes metaphysics has a dual nature, which implicates both an ontology (thinking about the “being” of various types of beings) and a theology (thinking about a “supreme being” such as God).2 He therefore confirms what Martin Heidegger has called the “onto-theo-logical constitution” of metaphysics, by showing that Descartes’ metaphysics does indeed display this double structure.3 Concretely this means that, on the one hand, the thinking ego functions as a supreme being in whose thoughts all other beings are grounded and implicated. On the other hand, in the Third Meditation, the ego becomes grounded on an even higher being, God, whose existence it proves by the need for God to serve as the foundation for its own existence as its Creator and Sustainer. In Marion’s view, Descartes therefore displays clearly the structure of most metaphysical systems, in that they feature a mutual implication of a highest being and the being of all other beings who are grounded in this supreme being in some fashion. But Marion is not only interested in Descartes’ reflections on metaphysics. He has much to say about Descartes’ contribution to theology.4 He emphasizes several

1 Marion

outlines this argument in the most detail in Ontologie grise (Marion 1975). argument is explicated in detail in Marion (1999b). A good summary in English is found in Marion (1986). 3 Heidegger explains this notion the most clearly in his essay “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics” (Heidegger 1969). Marion presumes familiarity with Heidegger’s work throughout his writings. Yet he also sees his work on Descartes as a kind of validation of Heidegger’s claims about the history of metaphysics. 4 Most of Marion’s thought on this matter is originally formulated in Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Marion 1991b). He carries aspects of this argument further in On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions (Marion 2007b). 2 This

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times that Descartes as philosopher refuses to engage in theology and yet his philosophical stances have profound implications for theological thought. Two examples of this are particularly important for Marion’s own thought. First, Marion outlines the move toward univocity in late medieval and early modern thinking. Increasingly thinkers at Descartes’ time, for example Vasquez and Suarez, began to employ the same kind of language to talk about divine and human beings. Thus, God and humans both “exist” or “are” in a similar fashion. The term “being” has more or less the same meaning when applied to God as it does when applied to human beings. Marion claims that Descartes resists this move by refusing such univocal language between human and divine. Marion also argues that medieval thinkers had circumvented such a move to univocity by employing doctrines of analogy to talk about the divine. Thus, although humans and God are similar in some respects, they are quite different in others. Analogy permits us to admit a certain similarity and yet enables to make a distinction. For example, although God is “good” in some sense and human “goodness” is “good” precisely when it is like or participates in some way in God’s “goodness,” God’s “goodness” is also far superior to human “goodness” (in fact, it serves as its source) and thus in many ways “unlike” human “goodness.” One could call it a sort of “super-goodness” (or maybe speak of human “goodness” as a frail or imperfect one). Marion argues that this method of analogy had fallen into disuse in late medieval thinking and that Descartes is no longer able to employ this language. A second issue is closely related to this one. Marion shows that late medieval and early modern thinking increasingly emphasizes the independence from and superiority to God of so-called “eternal truths,” namely truths of mathematics and logic. Hence, mathematics is said to be superior to God in some sense, because God must have used the principles of math and logic to create this world and could not possibly have employed others. This type of thought is particularly evident in the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Marin de Mersenne. All three thinkers posit mathematical truths as equal to or superior to God. For Kepler this means that we can “think God’s thoughts after him” and therefore become priests of nature as we “read” the divine creation. From this perspective, God creates according to clear geometrical laws which we can discover and operate in a similar fashion. Galileo also values mathematics highly and thinks of it as the paradigm for all rationality and certainty. God used geometrical laws in the creation of the world. Mersenne similarly interprets mathematics as the language of the divine and endows it with quasi-divine dignity for that reason. All three thinkers, then, propose that God is subject to our thinking or at least to certain immutable mathematical and logical truths. These truths are eternal and could not have been otherwise. God must obey them just like we do and merely “applies” them in the creation of the world. Marion understands Descartes as adamantly opposed to this move. For his part, Descartes insists that mathematical truths, albeit eternal, were created by God and are entirely dependent upon God (in fact, God could have chosen to create the world with a different mathematical system). This is because God is not subject to human

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logic or to the fate/chance of which the poets speak. The primary text for Marion is a quote from a letter Descartes wrote to Mersenne in order to express concerns regarding the recent publication of a work on theology to which Descartes objects strongly. He says: “The eternal truths that you [Mersenne and others like him] call eternal were established by God and depend entirely upon Him. To say that these truths are independent of God is in effect to speak of Him as a Jupiter or a Saturn, and to subjugate Him to Styx and the Fates.”5 This quote expresses Descartes’ disdain for any philosophy that would make God subject to math or any other human knowledge. For Descartes, God remains superior and infinite. No examination of the world, even a perfectly mathematical one, could discover God or understand nature perfectly. Instead it can always only discover the code or method God did in fact use for the creation of this particular world.6 Descartes therefore recognizes that the divine knowledge is much higher than ours and that God could have chosen to act differently. In his later work, Marion will be as concerned as he interprets Descartes to be, with keeping the divine free from contamination with human logic and understanding. Marion insists that Descartes finds the claims of Kepler, Galileo and Mersenne absolutely outrageous and consistently insists on the creation of eternal truths. God created math and logic. They are dependent upon God and God could have created them otherwise. That does not mean that this world is capricious and illogical. Once God has created and is committed to a particular set of truths and logic, these are consistently employed and become unchanging. But God always remains superior to them and is their Creator. These points are very important to Marion and inform his later thinking in a significant fashion. Throughout his own claims about who God is and how we might experience anything like revelation, Marion always strongly emphasizes God’s absolute transcendence and the utter inadequacy of all human language to reach the divine. Similarly to his treatment of Descartes, Marion tries very hard to preserve God’s ineffability and yet to say something coherent of God that is philosophically rigorous and can be communicated. He certainly does not lapse into a personal incommunicable mysticism, but wants to open philosophical paths of speaking about God without at the same time reducing the divine merely to such ways of speaking. One thinker that he often employs in this context is Descartes’ contemporary, Blaise Pascal.7 In many ways Pascal stands for Marion as a theological response to Descartes’ philosophy. Pascal provides a critique of the Cartesian metaphysical system and especially of Descartes’ thoughts about God. Pascal firmly rejects proofs 5 Letter

to Mersenne, April 15, 1630, in René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Descartes 1991: 3; 22–23). 6 The code refers to the ordering of the world which we might be able to discover but which is entirely dependent upon the divine will and could have been otherwise. Marion examines the notion of the code in Descartes’ work in great detail in Ontologie grise and Théologie blanche. 7 Blaise Pascal was profoundly influenced by Descartes’ philosophy but also quite critical of him. Marion often posits Pascal as a more theologically astute adversary to Descartes. He treats Pascal in several articles and in the final section of On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism.

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for God’s existence. All such proofs are “useless and uncertain.” He judges even Descartes’ notion of God as infinite to be thoroughly inadequate. Pascal engages in a distinction between three orders or manners of approaching and understanding reality. These are the ways of the eyes, of the mind, and of the heart. He regards Descartes as stuck in the second order, that of the mind, which is primarily concerned with certainty. True thought about God, according to Marion’s reading of Pascal, is found only in the third order, the order of the heart or of charity. This order is not concerned with certainty but rather with faith or assurance. In his own work, Marion will consistently use Pascal’s distinction of the orders in order to talk about charity and about appropriate language for God. As a proposal of a more successful way of speaking of the divine, Marion also repeatedly mentions the discussion of the divine names in Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. fifth century). He suggests that Dionysius’ three-fold path is a much more successful way of approaching the divine than any attempt to prove God. He sees Dionysius beginning with positive/affirmative (or kataphatic) language about God which makes claims about who or what God is (such as “good,” “wise,” “loving,” etc.). Dionysius continues with a negative (or apophatic) move which denies these more positive statements as inappropriate language about God, i.e., God is not “good,” “wise” or “loving” in the way humans are. Marion finds this progression culminating in a higher way of “eminence.” This transcends any attempt at description of God in favor of a language of prayer, praise or awe directed toward God. Ironically, Marion finds all three Dionysian ways of speaking amalgamated in Descartes’ proofs for God’s existence. He interprets Descartes as employing three proofs for God’s existence. One describes God as infinite and incomprehensible and as a thought that the ego cannot grasp (Third Meditation). Marion sees this proof as similar to the path of “eminence” in Dionysius. Another Cartesian proof describes God in terms of omnipotence and omniscience and posits the divine as creator and guarantor for the continued existence of the ego (Fifth Meditation). Marion likens this to the kataphatic or affirmative way in Dionysius. Finally, the third proof introduces the idea of God as causa sui, as self-caused cause (Replies/Objections) and in Marion’s view is not unlike the apopathic or negative way. Marion thinks that these proofs recover the three-fold Dionysian path, but that they do so insufficiently and ambiguously. In fact, by juxtaposing them to each other in this fashion, Descartes only highlights the incompatibility of the three notions and the incoherence of their amalgamation. For Marion, God cannot be both incomprehensible and the highest being. God cannot both escape all causality and be its very ground. Marion suggests that Descartes’ deliberate confusion of the three ways makes it very difficult for subsequent thinking to speak more appropriately about God. Much of Marion’s own work will try to recover aspects of this Dionysian language about God.8

8 Marion initially outlines this argument in the Metaphysical Prism, but continues it throughout much of his work. The entire third part of Idol and Distance constitutes an analysis of Dionysius and the three ways are also mentioned again in Marion’s most recent writings.

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Phenomenology Marion’s work is also informed by important contemporary sources. First of all, he takes Nietzsche’s notion of the “death of God” very seriously, particularly in the sense in which this announcement is interpreted by Heidegger. He relies on the wellknown passage from Nietzsche’s Gay Science. In this parable a madman runs into the marketplace announcing that belief in God has died and that moral values are now no longer grounded in a well-organized universe but must instead be articulated anew by the human beings who have murdered this God.9 Marion reads this as an announcement of the death of a very particular God, namely the notion of the moral grounding of values that one finds in parts of the Christian tradition (especially as influenced by Platonism) and more recently in Kant. This concept of God as the moral foundation of values does indeed die in Nietzsche. But Marion points out that it is precisely that: a concept of God and not “God as such.” (Of course, as he points out, a God who can die from the very beginning does not deserve the name God.) The fact that this “concept” of “God” dies is actually a cause for celebration for two reasons. This is the case, first, because any “God” limited by a particular concept is not really God, but only a concept of God. And if God can be confined to a particular idea or image, this concept or image is idolatrous because it limits all of the divine to this particular narrow vision. The death of such an idolatrous concept frees the God imprisoned within its narrow confines. Therefore, second, this death opens the way to speak of God in a less idolatrous, less blasphemous fashion. New images and languages about God now become possible that were previously forbidden or ignored. The death of an idol, for Marion, is always a moment of freedom and new beginnings.10 Marion’s own attempts at finding a new language for God, and possibly even new images of the divine, are informed profoundly by the method of phenomenology, as found in Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and mediated by Marion’s teacher and friend, Emmanuel Levinas. Phenomenology as a method of philosophical exploration was formulated most clearly by Husserl. Husserl was on a quest for a philosophically rigorous language that could meet the new science and give it philosophical justification and coherence. He rejected philosophy’s modern preoccupation with relating the “thing out there” (or the “thing as such”) with anything corresponding to it as an image in my mind. Instead he attempted to provide careful descriptions of what appears to human consciousness. Husserl sought to overcome the traditional split between subject and object by showing that consciousness is always intentional, and always directed toward that of which it is conscious. It is false to make a dichotomy between what happens in the secrets of one’s own mind and the reality of the outside world. Rather, any access to the world in which I live is

9 The

parable is originally found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science (Nietzsche 1975: 126–27). of this argument is developed in Marion’s most well-known work God without Being. I will return to this text below. 10 Much

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provided through my consciousness of this world as the one where I live and experience (and not as something separate from me, whose existence must be proven).11 Husserl proposed that one should set aside all such concerns with proving anything about the existence of objects or some outside world. He proposed instead that one should examine carefully what does actually present itself to consciousness and the ways in which human beings are conscious – whether that is in perceiving, in feeling, in judging, in remembering, etc. This method of setting aside or “bracketing” is usually called the “phenomenological reduction.”12 Husserl is primarily interested in examining carefully everyday experiences and feelings of objects in the lived world. He seeks to give a careful account of how experience presents itself to consciousness. This account depends, on the one hand, on what the phenomenon gives to consciousness (intuition) and, on the other hand, on what consciousness directs toward the phenomenon (intention). For Husserl, both processes are closely related. The activity of reduction and the relationship or balance between intuition and intention will both be appropriated by Marion in different ways. Husserl’s most famous student, Heidegger, took phenomenology in a different direction. This was to focus primarily on the particular being of Dasein, or human being, by examining the ways in which Dasein is conscious of its own moods, its rootedness in the world, and its experience of time. Marion also takes seriously Heidegger’s evaluation of the history of metaphysics as blind to its own meaning and as in need of “deconstruction” in order to recover not only the true meaning of Being, but that of human being in all its dimensions. Yet although Marion embraces much of Heidegger’s approach to and evaluation of the history of metaphysics, he also criticizes him in important ways (as I will outline further below). Much of Marion’s readings and criticisms of both Husserl and Heidegger are profoundly informed by Emmanuel Levinas, the thinker who, as an early student of both Husserl and Heidegger, introduced phenomenology to France. Although Levinas’ thinking is phenomenological to the core, he begins to challenge and change the meaning and scope of phenomenology. His fundamental criticism of Husserl and Heidegger’s thinking is that it lacks any openness to true alterity or difference, to what Levinas calls “the other.”13 This is a profoundly ethical question for Levinas. He claims that philosophy in general, including phenomenology, tends to reduce all alterity to sameness. Any strangeness or “otherness” becomes familiarized to some version of myself, something that I can “grasp,” something tame and familiar over which I have control and mastery. True difference is too strange and threatening. Philosophy from its inception is hence marked by a kind of violence. 11 One

of the reasons Marion rejects proofs for God’s existence as useless, is precisely this fundamental insight of Husserl. 12 Husserl’s own versions of this process are far more complicated than I can summarize here, but especially the notion of the reduction will be emphasized strongly by Marion. 13 This criticism extends throughout Levinas’ oeuvre. His major works are Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, but countless articles also explicate his criticism of the metaphysical and phenomenological tradition.

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Yet Levinas does not only criticize Western philosophy’s need to reduce the other to the same, he also attempts to investigate in what way alterity could be explored, experienced and described phenomenologically without immediately reducing and mastering it. Can phenomenology remain open to difference and otherness without succumbing immediately to the need for clarity and familiarity? Is there a way to describe phenomenologically the impact of the strange alterity of the other? That is Levinas’ most fundamental concern, and Marion shares it in many ways. Yet while for Levinas’ alterity (and even the language of “infinity” which he often employs) is primarily about the human other, Marion also attempts to employ this language for our experience of the divine (or for any experience of excess/revelation/utter alterity). Marion thinks that while Levinas has opened phenomenology in an important fashion beyond its obsession with objects (in Husserl) or the dimensions of Being (in Heidegger) to focus on otherness, Levinas does not go far enough because this alterity is for Levinas always ethical and always about the human other. Marion thinks that phenomenology should explore any notion of alterity, including that of divine ineffability.14 Phenomenology can therefore be extended to reach to what is invisible, ineffable, intangible, utterly other. How can it do this? Levinas’ work gives important indications for Marion, although he does not always make explicit how Levinas informs his thought on this point. For Levinas, one does not have a mutual or symmetrical “relation” with the other, but one is interrupted by the other. One feels the impact of the other’s arrival, although he or she has always already passed and speaks from an immemorial past. In this way, the self is interrupted, shattered, commanded by the other; a response of responsibility is demanded that always falls woefully short of the need expressed. In Levinas’ view, I find myself always already accused and guilty, and under obligation to others whom I have so far neglected. Such others impose impossible demands upon me. Yet I truly become a self and achieve uniqueness and individuation precisely in this responsibility that proceeds from the call of the other upon me. Therefore, for Levinas, I am not first a subject who then reaches out to objects or other humans from a position of superiority and strong self-foundation. Rather, I only become a self because the other interrupts me and calls me to unique responsibility. This call is felt and heard more than it is seen. Although it derives from what Levinas calls the “face”, I do not actually see any face or identify a particular image or “person.” Rather, I hear the call of the other and respond to it. Levinas therefore explores phenomenologically how I might experience such a call that cannot be reduced to a clear image or impression. It is consciousness that feels the impact of the other’s interruption, yet it cannot grasp or embrace this alterity. Levinas sometimes speaks of it as a trace. Thus, although this is a genuine experience that is indeed felt by consciousness, it is very much unlike the experiences Husserl described. The intentionality or directedness of consciousness that

14 He

makes this criticism the clearest in his work Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Marion 2002a).

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is wrapped up with a world which it shapes, and to which it gives meaning, is interrupted and turned upside down by the call of the other. Marion will later speak of this as a kind of “counter-intentionality” where one could say that intentionality is not imposed by my consciousness on the objects of which I am conscious, but rather proceeds from the things themselves (or the human other) toward me. Intentionality is displaced from consciousness to the phenomenon experienced by consciousness. And this displacement of intentionality, makes it possible for Marion to speak of something like an experience of God or revelation. Marion’s concern to speak anew of God in philosophy permeates all of his writings. I will focus on two particularly important ideas that are central to his work and arise clearly out of the contexts I have just examined. These are his insistence on “God without Being” and his notion of the saturated phenomenon. One is associated more clearly with Marion’s earlier work (for a long time God without Being was his only book translated into English), and one more with his most recent work in phenomenology.

A God Without Being First, I will deal with the notion of “God without Being.”15 As outlined above, Marion embraces and even celebrates Nietzsche’s notion of the death of God as having freed humanity from a very limited concept of the divine. This now allows new talk about God who is not confined to this particular concept. He suggests furthermore that this critique applies not only to the concept of the moral God discarded by Nietzsche’s madman. Rather, Marion seeks to dispense with any idolatrous concept of God, or any concept that places limits on the divine and seeks to confine God to one particular manner of appearing or explanation. Marion sees the traditional language of ontology or being as particularly detrimental in this respect. On the one hand, he intends by this to criticize the late medieval desire to apply a univocal concept of being both to God and to human – or even other types of – beings, where God and such beings are identical. On the other hand, Marion also proposes a critique of Heidegger’s own philosophy, which he argues similarly confines God to Being, even if in Heidegger this means something very different than it does for the medieval and early modern thinkers. Beyond both of these limitations, Marion seeks to think of a God who is “not contaminated by Being.”16 From his examination of the Cartesian context, Marion has learned that any univocal language about the divine is idolatrous, i.e., anything that applies the same concepts to God and to humans necessarily limits the divine and turns it into an idol. Thus to speak in the same fashion of God’s being and of human beings is false and gives us a wrong understanding of God. Proofs for God’s existence, for example, are utterly inappropriate and even blasphemous, precisely because they assume that certain concepts 15 Most of the arguments in this section are first formulated in God without Being, although they are previewed to some extent in Idol and Distance. 16 This phrase is adopted from Levinas who also criticizes Heidegger on this account

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could be applied to God and “prove” the correspondence of these notions to what is beyond all concepts. This applies especially to the idea of existence or being. Proofs for God’s existence limit the divine to mere existence – and to a rather human existence. This link between God and ontology is linked closely to the history of metaphysics. Marion’s desire to overcome metaphysics is therefore fueled by a two-fold concern. On the one hand, metaphysics is idolatrous, because it defines God in one specific fashion and limits the divine to an assigned place in the metaphysical system. The fact that God is assigned a specific location within the system is idolatrous because it makes the system superior to God. In addition, the divine becomes subject to human appropriation. Marion’s condemnation of metaphysical ways of talking about God extends beyond the particular thinkers whom he criticizes. Any metaphysical concept of the divine is judged as inadequate and false. He describes such notions as so many idols in which there has been a glimpse of the divine but the philosopher was so dazzled by this limited glance that the idol merely provides an invisible mirror to the gaze. As such it circumscribes perfectly what the gaze has been able to see or grasp – which is not much. Any attempt at proofs for God’s existence definitely fall under this condemnation in Marion’s view. On the other hand, metaphysics also limits other phenomena. Its strong notion of the human subject is particularly important here. Metaphysics, as for example in Descartes, is dependent upon a rational capacity that holds all beings in its powerful gaze and determines their being by its own thoughts. Marion assesses that metaphysics is so concerned with examining beings as they are when they are present before us, that it neglects how phenomena give themselves and how they might escape this presence. Although Marion explores both of these implications of metaphysics thoroughly in his work, it is the implications of metaphysics for thought about the divine that is his primary concern in God without Being. Since Heidegger already criticizes the history of metaphysics in similar fashion, in what way does Marion see Heidegger himself as limiting the divine to Being?17 Marion thinks Heidegger does so because he speaks of theology as a regional ontic science (as opposed to the ontological and more fundamental science of Being as such). Theology is thus the exercise of exploring the faith or “Christianness” of an individual human Dasein, thus confining God to merely a term in the personal faith convictions of individual people. For Marion, this is not only a particular and personal experience, in which not everyone participates, but always one posterior to and dependent upon Dasein’s more primordial being which all humans share. Thus, although Heidegger claimed that any theology he might ever write would not contain the term “Being,” he does seem to see “Being” as decidedly superior to God.

17 Marion’s

criticism of Heidegger is the clearest in Chapter 2, “Double Idolatry,” of God without Being, although he also criticizes Heidegger in other respects in Reduction and Givenness and Being Given.

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This is particularly true in his late writings, where the gods are included among the fourfold that orients human experience of the world.18 Marion argues that Heidegger confines theology to a sub-discipline of philosophy and that God becomes a very particular and narrow being dependent upon a human Dasein’s individual decision of faith. In Marion’s view, this “God” is not worth very much. Marion, conversely, wants to speak of God non-idolatrously and therefore without the language of Being. He seeks to overcome the limitations of the “ontological difference” Heidegger outlines as characterizing the entire history of metaphysics. From Heidegger’s perspective, metaphysics disregards the difference between beings – or entities – and Being as such. It also does not speak of the differences between the Being of Dasein and that of other beings and various other ontological differences. Its history is therefore marked by a forgetting of ontological difference. Marion wants to show that the distance between divine and human is, in fact, much greater than that of ontological difference and displaces it by rendering it irrelevant. Instead of speaking about God in terms of “being,” Marion believes that one should employ the language of love or of the gift. He deepens this argument in Prolegomena to Charity and takes it up in a more strictly phenomenological fashion in his more recent work on The Erotic Phenomenon (2007). He suggests that the most appropriate name for God is that of love or charity in both Idol and Distance and God without Being. In Idol and Distance, Marion shows how distance is most appropriately traversed and delineated by charity. Distance can thus open a new dimension beyond ontological difference, namely the dimension of love. Charity both makes relation possible and preserves distance because it does not attempt to define or reduce the other. Similarly, God without Being insists that charity is able to play beyond ontological difference because it undoes the preoccupation with Being altogether and provides a new horizon. Marion asserts that charity reverses all the figures of vanity or boredom that convince one that nothing is worth caring for and that no being matters. It introduces a new dimension where love becomes more important than being. Love views the world in an entirely different fashion. Marion consistently maintains that love is the most appropriate name for God. Not only did he already speak of God as love in his earliest works, but he also concludes his more recent work on the erotic phenomenon with the claim that God is the supreme lover and that all love is best understood as a reflection of the divine and grounded in God. While any other names for God ultimately become idolatrous, love in its self-giving character cannot be limiting. It gives all of itself consistently and always empties itself of its own identity for the sake of the other. Love therefore qualifies as the name for an ineffable God because it does not describe, depict, circumscribe or limit anything. God gives Godself in abundant self-giving. While Being confines God and limits the divine, the language of love

18 Heidegger employs the notion of the Fourfold especially in his late work. Marion assumes many

of these ideas and concepts in his critique. They are explicated and criticized the most clearly in God without Being.

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enables an outpouring of abundance and excess. Since love cannot be limited or confined (e.g., by reducing it to moral categories) but always gives itself as selfless and generous gift, its language is much more appropriate to divine ineffability than the metaphysical language of ontology. For Marion, this is not to revert to theology, however. Marion is quite emphatic that love or charity can be treated with considerable philosophical rigor, quite separate from its more common theological connotations. In order to develop this alternative way of talking about God, Marion contrasts the notion of the idol with that of the icon. Initially, he speaks of concrete visual images, paintings, or statues – i.e. the sculpture of a Greek divinity, an Eastern Orthodox icon of the face of Christ – but quickly moves beyond the purely visual. Idol and icon do not refer merely to different ways of representing God, but in fact to different manners of seeing or approaching the divine. Idols can therefore be conceptual; for example, the “moral God” who dies in the “death of God” would be one such conceptual idol. The idol, according to Marion, is something that arrests a glimpse of the divine and presents it in an image or concept. It is thus not so much “false” as it is insufficient. What makes it “idolatrous” is that it serves as a stopping point for the visual or intellectual gaze and fills the gaze completely, as if this concept or image could exhaust the divine and grasp it completely. In contrast, the icon speaks of a vision of God that does not describe or even “see” the divine, but instead opens itself to God’s generous self-giving. Marion analyzes the visual religious icon as a pathway to think a more conceptual icon that might be able to respond to and get beyond Heidegger’s “idolatry.” The icon is not exposed to the gaze and cannot be controlled by human vision. Rather the gaze is meant to travel through the icon toward the invisible. In fact, the gaze is returned not as an invisible “mirror,” as is the case for the idol, but as a “being envisaged” by the divine. The icon therefore provides for an encounter with God that does not reduce the divine to a mere concept or an image of oneself. As pointed out above, for Marion this encounter is encapsulated in a generous and abundant love that pours itself out without insisting on response or reciprocity. Marion does not think, however, that by advocating a language of love, he has given up on philosophical thought and submitted to a fideistic stance devoid of reason. He insists that love has its own rationality, a rationality of the heart or the will that differs from a “scientific” or abstract and theoretical conception of reason or truth. He sees Pascal, Kierkegaard, and to some extent Levinas employing this kind of language and he wants to revive it and make it prominent.19 The rationality of love is an alternative account of reason which is grounded in a movement of the will or the heart. Its “truth” is that of assurance and affirmation, not of certainty or verification.20 Even in his most recent work Marion insists that this is a language superior to that of “being” or ontology.

19 His

most recent work on the erotic phenomenon attempts to do this without venturing into theology but staying entirely within the realms of a phenomenology of eros. 20 I will examine this in more detail below.

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The Saturated Phenomenon Marion’s probably most important contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion is his notion of the saturated phenomenon. His phenomenology depends largely on Levinas’ interpretation of phenomenology, as outlined above. Although he assumes Husserl’s conception of the relation of consciousness to phenomena and embraces Heidegger’s summary of phenomenology as a return to “the things themselves,” he follows Levinas in giving primary place to an incoming phenomenon. Instead of depicting the process in which consciousness constitutes phenomena, Marion instead focuses on how consciousness experiences the impact of phenomena upon it. In the range of impacts phenomena might have, he is particularly interested in the strangest, the most excessive, the most radical phenomena. He wants to explore what particular impact the arrival of these phenomena might have. In order to describe all this, Marion develops a phenomenology of donation or givenness.21 He argues that this is justified by Husserl’s insistence that phenomena are selbstgegeben (give themselves) and must be examined as they give themselves to consciousness and by setting aside all preconceptions that might limit this careful examination. (Husserl’s notion of the epoche or phenomenological reduction “sets aside” or “brackets” all assumptions and questions about the “existence” of the object or the world as “outside” of consciousness.) Marion goes further than Husserl by claiming that Husserl’s notion of the constituting ego of consciousness or even his claim of the particular horizon(s) within which the phenomenon appears must be set aside in order to allow the phenomenon full freedom of appearance. In Husserl, by contrast, intentionality is generally directed toward the phenomenon. The intuition of the particular phenomenon often falls short of the intention of consciousness which must then supply much of the context and horizon within which the phenomenon is properly explicated. Marion claims that this basic description fits only for certain phenomena and that many phenomena present themselves otherwise. He suggests that one should envision a scenario in which the phenomenon would not give too little (as seems to be the case in Husserl) but too much. Thus the intuition of the phenomenon could become so overwhelming that any intention of consciousness would fall short in attempting to constitute it. Such phenomena would defy any attempt at constitution or inclusion within a certain horizon and instead would overwhelm consciousness and its capacity to grasp the experience. Marion calls such phenomena “saturated phenomena” because they are “saturated” with givenness and “saturate” the experience of consciousness.22

21 Marion’s most mature formulation of this is laid out in Being Given and culminates in his work In Excess. 22 Marion first articulated this idea in his essay “The Saturated Phenomenon,” first translated in Janicaud et al. (2000). He revised the notion slightly and explicated it in much more detail in Being Given and In Excess (each of the chapters of In Excess deals with one type of saturated phenomenon). His most recent text on this topic “The Banality of Saturation” responds to some of the criticisms made of his proposal. Both texts (“The Saturated Phenomenon” and “The Banality of Saturation”) are included in his newest collection The Visible and the Revealed (Marion 2008).

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He therefore outlines a range of phenomena with increasing complexity. Basic phenomena – what he calls “common-law phenomena” or “poor phenomena” – such as mathematical equations or even simple objects – present fairly little to intuition, and intentionality must then be at work quite heavily. Phenomena with higher complexity present more to intuition and are not as easily grasped by concepts, but overall intuition and intention are balanced in such phenomena. Saturated phenomena, finally, present excessive amounts of intuition and cannot be grasped adequately by intentionality. They are excessive, extraordinary, and bedazzling, to the point where they sometimes strike us blind with the intensity of their light. While we cannot grasp them conceptually or direct our intentionality toward them, consciousness does receive and retain an impact from the incoming of such phenomena. Thus although they cannot be “intended” in the traditional phenomenological way, their impact and experience can be described phenomenologically. Marion insists that phenomena can be saturated in a variety of ways. Thus, an experience of a historical event is saturated in the excess of its complexity that defies any easy historical explanation or constitution of what “really” happened. It must always be described anew and continually reinterpreted. Similarly, the experience of a piece of art overwhelms the ability to constitute, to explain or to comprehend it fully. In the same way as Levinas’ “other,” these phenomena break in, interrupt our complacency, unsettle us, and make their mark upon us without our being able to grasp hold of them or understand them fully. Marion outlines four “types” of saturation or excess, namely in terms of quantity (the historical or cultural event): of quality (the piece of art), of relation (the immediacy of my flesh), and of modality (the human other, whether ethical or erotic or otherwise). He goes on to claim that one could envision an instance of saturation in which consciousness is overwhelmed not only in one respect (e.g., in terms of quality) but in all four respects simultaneously. Such a phenomenon would be surprising and incomprehensible, not just by pushing the boundaries of our horizons but by transgressing them altogether. And yet such a phenomenon could still be “experienced” (and thus described phenomenologically) in the impact it has upon consciousness. It would simply be more radical, more excessive, more abundantly given, than any of the previous instances. This phenomenon is the phenomenon of revelation. And although all of Marion’s examples for such a religious phenomenon are emphatically Christian, in theory the phenomenological structure could apply to any religious phenomenon. This phenomenology of saturation or excess, then, makes is possible to speak of and describe religious phenomena. It enables a philosophically rigorous description of what happens when a person meets the divine, participates in liturgical actions such as the Eucharist, prays, reads the Scriptures, acts from abundant and self-sacrificing love, etc. It enables a renewed interaction between philosophy and theology by applying philosophical tools to religious experience, examining such experience carefully and giving it renewed coherence by relating it to the description of other human experiences. While the phenomenon of revelation, as Marion outlines it, certainly is saturated, radical and extreme, he examines it as a phenomenon

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and insists that he is describing the possibility of experiencing such a phenomenon. He also insists that he is not prescribing that such a phenomenon must appear to everyone, or even proving that there are historical instances of such phenomena having appeared or having been experienced by anyone. To show this, Marion occasionally engages in phenomenological readings of certain Scriptural passages (e.g., Jesus’ transfiguration or resurrection appearance at Emmaus) or phenomenological analyses of liturgical acts (e.g., participation in prayer or the Eucharist). He does not claim anything about the “historicity” of the passage or the “authenticity” of the experience, but instead shows how we can describe the experience phenomenologically as one of overwhelming intuition that cannot be grasped by any adequate concept. At the same time, it is a real experience whose impact is felt in its invisible intensity. Marion is very clear that while theology can indeed speak of the actuality or effectivity or historicity of a phenomenon of Revelation, philosophy can only explore its possibility. Philosophy can never reach God directly, but is totally inadequate for such a task.23 At times Marion also reflects on the kind of language appropriate to depict such an experience. He again takes recourse to Dionysius’ three-fold structure to do so. He insists that any “description” of the divine (whether positive or negative) always necessarily falls short because we have no phenomenological access to the divine as such. Descriptions or proofs always limit and reduce. Instead, he suggests, we require a kind of performative speech that would not describe but makes something happen and requires a response.24 This is a language of praise or prayer, an erotic language that calls forth a response of love. As the most appropriate (and least idolatrous) “concept” for God is love (precisely because it is not a concept but a selfless gift), so the most appropriate language to speak of the divine is an erotic response of prayer and abandon. Marion also develops the notion of love further in his recent phenomenological work. In The Erotic Phenomenon, he develops a phenomenology of eros that would provide a close phenomenological reading of the phenomenon of love. He proposes this as an alternative to metaphysical thinking about philosophy in general and love in particular. In this work he considers the lover, the beloved, the movement of love, the language of love, the child, friendship, and very briefly in the final paragraphs, even the divine. He claims that philosophy has never developed its thinking about love rigorously and he seeks to provide such structured

23 Marion

sometimes makes a visual distinction by capitalizing the phenomenon of Revelation which belongs to the domain of theology and writing about the philosophical phenomenon of revelation in the lower-case. 24 In a recent article “The Apophasis of Love,” which is also included in The Visible and the Revealed, Marion examines this language in detail by comparing erotic speech with language employed for the divine. He moves here to what he calls “perlocutionary” speech which is speech which does not describe states of affairs or disseminate information and also does not act as a performance. Rather it is a kind of action which elicits a particular response. He examines in detail Clélia’s announcement to Fabrice that she loves him in the famous French writer Stendahl’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma.

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and conceptual thought about love in his work. Most of the book is posited as a rethinking of Descartes’ Meditations; yet a desire for affirmation replaces the Cartesian search for certainty. Marion describes the lover’s struggle to receive unconditional love and affirmation to dispel the meaninglessness of life. It also involves the subsequent decision to become lover even without prior or expected response from the beloved. He examines the various “moves” of the lover and considers the possible continuation of love as manifest in the promise of faithfulness, the child, and vows of friendship and fidelity. Marion is clear throughout his work that he sees his own phenomenology as one of givenness and love. In this particular work on eros, he again develops the notion of love as displaying an alternative logic or rationality, not subject to metaphysics and ontology in the traditional sense. The “saturated phenomenon” of love is thus also “beyond being.”

Criticism of Marion’s Work Marion’s project has been criticized in many different ways. In outlining some of this criticism I will focus on the two most prominent aspects of the project outlined above, namely the rejection of the language of being for God and the proposal of the saturated phenomenon. On the one hand, many thinkers disagree that metaphysics in general and the language of being in particular are inappropriate for God or should be discarded entirely. Even thinkers who are also influenced by Levinas and agree with Marion to a large extent, such as Paul Ricoeur or Richard Kearney, at times chastise him for going too far in the rejection of ontological language (Kearney 2001). In their view, Marion’s emphasis on ineffability becomes so extreme that it is literally open to almost anything. Since Marion refuses to define God, he is also unable to designate this ineffable divine as good or loving instead of evil or hateful. Kearney and others suggest that Marion’s God is so transcendent that almost anything can take its place.25 The concept becomes a mere placeholder for anything to fill, because Marion judges all guidelines one might provide for guarding God’s name as too confining and ultimately idolatrous. Similarly, many Thomist thinkers disapprove of Marion’s elevation of the “good” or of love over “being” and are especially uncomfortable with Marion’s initial accusation of St. Thomas as idolatrous because of his application of ontological language to God.26 Others fully agree with Marion’s rejection of metaphysics and ontological language, but think that his proposal for better language of God is not sufficient. John Milbank, for example, thinks that Marion is still far too beholden to Heidegger’s philosophy and that his critique does not go far enough. According 25 Benson

(2002) also makes this claim.

26 Marion later qualified this position by showing that even in St. Thomas this ontological language

is unsettled by an essential indeterminacy. His article on St. Thomas is included in the most recent French edition of God without Being.

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to Milbank, only theology can overcome metaphysics and Marion does not pay sufficient attention to the theological tradition and its most important thinkers in his critique of metaphysics.27 There are even some thinkers who suggest that Marion’s language of love or givenness for God (especially in his earlier works) again limits the divine and becomes a new idol for God.28 Unlike the thinkers mentioned above who think that Marion’s notion of God is too radical and too ineffable, others suggest that it is far too limited and especially too Roman Catholic in nature. Marion is seen as dangerous and even totalitarian in his submission to traditional and very conservative Catholic doctrines – such as the real presence in the Eucharist or a submission to Church hierarchy. John Caputo has made this criticism particularly strongly (Caputo 1992, 1998, 2002). In a less forceful manner, several of Marion’s translators have argued in a similar vein, such as Thomas Carlson and Robyn Horner. All three suggest that Marion’s notion of God is pre-determined as a positive, excessive, abundant, and Christian one and that a darker or more threatening version of the divine is thereby excluded (see Carlson 1999; Horner 2001). Similar comments are often made about the saturated phenomenon. While some think it too extreme and excessive, others interpret it as far too determined by its particular Christian content. Many of these thinkers feel that Marion’s God is too Christian, too Roman Catholic, or even too explicitly linked to the rites and particular theological vision of the Roman Catholic church. A phenomenon of revelation, they suggest, should be able to depict the experience of any religious phenomenon, not a specifically Christian one. In fact, many of the philosophers who bewail the theological nature of Marion’s discourse are found in this camp. They suggest that it is precisely the close link between Marion’s philosophy and his theology that jeopardizes his account of the saturated phenomenon or any other philosophical talk about the divine. John Caputo, for example, insists that a religious phenomenon should resemble Derrida’s call for différance. Any determinations of a phenomenon of revelation as positive, life-giving, or even loving, are unacceptable and too limiting. Caputo wants to deny any references to a Christian God (especially to Christ) in order to “make room for faith” in a more general sense. Although Marion always insists that his proposal only describes the possibility of such a religious phenomenon, many think that he has predetermined this possibility as specifically Christian and that it quickly collapses into a very real and particular historical actuality.29 Marion is accused of reading the Scriptures too literally, describing religious experience too narrowly, and of lacking any functional notion 27 John

Milbank has made this criticism in many places. The first clear formulation of this critique is found in the chapter “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” in Milbank (1997). 28 Jean-Yves Lacoste, for example, suggested as much in his early review of Marion’s God without Being (Lacoste 1987). 29 Thomas Carlson points out, for example, how extremely similar Marion’s theological and his philosophical accounts are. He suggests that the two inform each other more thoroughly than Marion wants to admit. See especially Carlson’s introduction to his translation of Idol and Distance.

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of hermeneutics.30 His readings of Husserl and Heidegger are also at times condemned as phenomenologically confused and the proposal of saturation criticized as untenable.31 Similarly, his reconception of the subject as primarily receptive and given over to the incoming phenomenon is seen as too passive and as no longer about phenomenology (primarily because of the reduced role of intentionality).32 At times it is suggested that Marion personifies the phenomenon by attributing so much initiative to it. There is a sense in which most criticism of Marion amounts to a critique of transgression of boundaries. Marion is considered as either too theological or too philosophical, in each case assuming that the boundary between the two disciplines must be drawn differently. In many cases, this issue is addressed explicitly. Dominique Janicaud was one of the first to accuse Marion among other thinkers of a “theological highjacking” of phenomenology.33 He claims that Marion’s philosophy is deeply metaphysical because it attempts to turn phenomenology into an absolute philosophy and because it focuses on topics that are outside the realm of phenomenology altogether (i.e., the divine). Marion’s philosophy, so he suggests, is merely a veiled support system for his theological agenda. Other thinkers concur with Janicaud’s evaluation. They see Marion’s phenomenology of givenness as a veiled theology of grace, where the phenomenological gift is really a way of talking about God or God’s gracious givenness. They suggest that Marion determines the “giver” of the saturated phenomenon by assuming that the source of this givenness is God. Theologians, on the other hand, often judge Marion to be a theological thinker far too influenced by philosophical paradigms and theories. They find Marion useful for theological projects but too beholden to phenomenology in general, or Heidegger’s thought in particular, for it to be a successful account of the divine.34 John Milbank, for example, wants to eliminate most of Marion’s philosophical references in favor of a purely theological answer. Yet most recently, David Tracy and Emmanuel Falque have suggested that Marion keeps the two disciplines separated too much and that in fact he ought to cross the boundaries between them much more explicitly and more frequently.35 Marion’s philosophy and especially his delineation of the boundary between philosophy and theology, have thus provoked lively debate, on

30 Jean Grondin and Jean Greisch criticize Marion especially for his lack of hermeneutics (Grondin

1999; Greisch 1991). 31 Béatrice Han and Natalie Depraz have made this criticism repeatedly for Heidegger and Husserl,

respectively (Han 2003; Depraz 1997). others, see Marlène Zarader for a critique of this (Zarader 2003). 33 He first articulated his criticism in the famous “The Theological Turn in Contemporary French Phenomenology,” included in Janicaud et al. (2000) and carried it further in Phenomenology “Wide Open” (Janicaud 2005). 34 Wayne Hankey, for example, has made this criticism repeatedly, as do many early reviews of God without Being. See, for example, Hankey (1999) and Hankey (2001). 35 See their respective chapters in Hart (2007). 32 Among

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the part of both philosophers and theologians. Such an issue will continue to stimulate heated exchanges from both sides as to where the boundary between philosophy and theology can finally – if ever – be drawn.

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Janicaud, Dominique, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur. 2000. Phenomenology and the “theological turn”: The French debate. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Kearney, Richard. 2001. The god who may be. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. 1987. Penser à Dieu en l’aimant: Philosophie et theologie de J.-L. Marion. Archives de Philosophie 50: 245–270. Leask, Ian, and Eoin Cassidy, eds. 2005. Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than being or beyond essence. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and infinity. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1975. Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Paris: Vrin (2nd ed. 1981; 3rd ed. 1993; 4th ed. 2000). Marion, Jean-Luc. 1986. On Descartes’ constitution of metaphysics. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11: 21–33. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991a. God without being (trans: Carlson, Thomas A.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991b. Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes. Paris: PUF. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1994. The end of the end of metaphysics. Epoche 2(2): 1–22. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1999b. On Descartes’ metaphysical prism: The constitution and the limits of onto-theo-logy in Cartesian thought (trans: Kosky, Jeffrey L.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2001. The idol and distance: Five studies (trans: and introduced by Carlson, Thomas A.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002d. They recognized him; and he became invisible to them. Modern Theology 18(2): 145–152. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2003. Saint Thomas Aquinas and onto-theo-logy (trans: Gendreau, B., Rethy, R., and Sweeney, M.). In Mystic: Presence and aporia, ed. M. Kessler and C. Sheppard. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2004. The crossing of the visible (trans: Smith, James K.A.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2006. The erotic phenomenon (trans: Lewis, Stephen). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2007b. On the ego and on god: Further cartesian questions (trans: Gschwandtner, Christina M.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2008. The visible and the revealed. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2010. Certitudes négatives. Paris: Grasset. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2010. Le croire pour le voir. Paris: Broché. Milbank, John. 1995. Can a gift be given?: Prolegomena to a future trinitarian metaphysic. Modern Theology 11(1): 119–158. Milbank, John. 1997. Only theology overcomes metaphysics. In The word made strange: Theology, language, culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1975. Gay science (English trans: Kaufmann, Walter), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 126–127. New York, NY: Penguin. Smith, James K. A. 1999. Liberating religion from theology: Marion and Heidegger on the possibility of a phenomenology of religion. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46(1): 17–33. Smith, James K.A. 2004. The call as gift: The subject’s donation in Marion and Levinas. In The hermeneutics of charity: Interpretation, selfhood, and postmodern faith, ed. James K.A. Smith and Henry Venema. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Ward, Graham. 1998. The theological project of Jean-Luc Marion. In Post-secular philosophy: Between philosophy and theology, ed. Phillip Blond. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Welten, Ruud. 2004. Saturation and disappointment: Marion According to Husserl. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie en Theologie/International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 65(1): 79–96. Welten, Ruud. 2005. The paradox of God’s appearance: On Jean-Luc Marion. In God in France: Eight contemporary French thinkers on God, ed. Peter Jonkers and Ruud Welten. Leuven: Peeters. Zarader, Marlene. 2003. Phenomenality and transcendence. In Transcendence in philosophy and religion, ed. James Falconer. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Critical Theory, Negative Theology, and Transcendence James Swindal

Critical theory is a loosely associated group of philosophers, sociologists, and theologians who wrote incisive critiques of Western culture and mores. These thinkers initially worked with the various projects sponsored by the Institute of Social Research founded at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s. Since many of them were Jewish, the Institute was dissolved during the War, forcing most of them into exile. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Max Horkheimer (1895– 1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Erich Fromm (1900–1980), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) all fled Germany, with all but Benjamin ending up in the United States where they continued to do their work.1 The Institute was formally reassembled in Frankfurt in the early 1950s, and continues to this day. Jürgen Habermas (1929–) is the currently the most representative and influential member. Critical theorists are most interested in doing a social and cultural critique set broadly with the parameters established by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), and then modified later by Engels, Georg Lukacs (1885– 1971), Karl Korsch (1886–1961), Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), and others. They are interested in the study of sociology, particularly in the works of Max Weber (1864–1920) and Helmut Plessner (1892–1985). Their guiding social principle is that immanent critique of the status quo can lead to social and individual liberation. Immanent critique is a method whereby one analyses a text or social practice on the basis of a theory understood not as enduring for all times and places but as itself contextually indexed. For example, while Hegel criticized the political practices of his day on the basis of his theory of absolute knowing shaped by the pre-industrial era in which he lived, early critical theorists a century later critiqued political practices by means of a critique of instrumental reason shaped by the capitalist world J. Swindal (B) Philosophy Department, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] 1 Walter

Benjamin died, apparently by his own hand, as he was fleeing into exile in Spain. I have left Erich Fromm and Paul Tillich off of this list. Fromm left the Institute in 1939 in disagreement first with Adorno and then with Horkheimer over the status of psychoanalysis. After that point, he made very few references to anyone involved with the Institute. Tillich worked closely with both Horkheimer and Adorno and taught courses with them. M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_9,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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that had developed in the twentieth century. This methodology of immanent critique has continued to color all of their analyzes, whether of the family, the media, aesthetic practices, economics, or religion. It assumes that truth is not the correspondence between mind and reality, such that the mind is understood to conform itself to a fixed reality, but rather is found in the illumination of a current social practice through the lens of a contextualized critique. From this perspective, no analysis can establish conclusions that will apply in all social-political situations: present, past, or future. The post-World War I German culture into which critical theory was born was rife for a revolution of thought. Not only had the German political order and economy collapsed, but the spiritual and intellectual dynamism of the prior decades had suffered accordingly. In such difficult times, the need for new paths of thinking was no longer a luxury but a necessity. It is within this thicket of cultural gloom that critical theory, an intellectual movement unique in Western history, evolved. Yet it is not only nearly impossible, but in fact unnecessary to unravel the various historical threads that led to this unique point in intellectual history. Equally difficult would be the reconstruction of the histories of the various critical theorists themselves. However, one common thread runs through each of these thinkers: each had a complex and somewhat strained relationship to his own socio-cultural heritage. These autobiographical factors will play a significant role in shaping the response of each to the horrors of the two World Wars and their aftermaths. Most of the members of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt were Jewish. At various times, in fact, Jewishness and critical theory were all but interchangeable terms (see Jäger 2004: 44). Though Marx himself had a Jewish heritage, he had taken a surprisingly dim view toward his background. He did not fit Judaism into the historical stages of religious development in the West. Though it played an irreplaceable role in forging the capitalist dynamics of profit and exchange, on his view it formed no integral part in maintaining the capitalist system. As a form of ideology, all religion would vanish in the communistic future he envisioned.2 Unlike Marx, critical theorists have respected religion as an important cultural phenomenon, even in otherwise highly secular societies. Their immanent critique of religious thought and practice, though, derives less from an analysis of religion’s relationship to economic structures of oppression than from psychological and historiographical analyses. The psychological analysis of religion employed by the early critical theorists was heavily Freudian. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) generally had understood religion as a mere projection by neurotic persons of a father figure. Critical theorists’ historiographic analysis, on the other hand, was Messianic in orientation, derived from an idiosyncratic view according to which the utter unrealizability of the utopia toward which all history is directed is itself the basis of 2 “Ideology” is, in its broadest definition, any kind of political ideal that guides political decisions. Often, however, ideologies are philosophical or religious notions masking as political. For example, religious notions of transcendence, which affirm the existence of an afterlife or of a realm above the material world, can be used as political ideologies which can justify a political order to dispense with aid to the lower classes of societies (since their reward will be in the next life).

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human redemption. Thus they critiqued religion not from the point of view of its claims to truth – such as its claims to salvation or to the divinity of Jesus – but from the degree to which it authentically mirrors this Messianic condition. Such a Messianism is unable to be articulated by any religious imagery or positive theology, yet it remains as an inexpressible reality immanent in all history as an unachievable ideal. It is, thus, technically an open question as to whether or not critical theorists can be considered atheists. Ostensibly, Adorno, the early Horkheimer, and even the early Habermas all were philosophical atheists. Philosophical atheists are agonistic about whether reason is able to determine anything about God’s existence or nature. But critical theorists’ general approach to religion is meant neither to undermine the truth of its claims nor even the social efficacy of its practices. Instead, the intention is to understand its role in the larger picture of human life understood, as they stress, materially. Their material point of view is ever inspired by Marx’s principle that all social and individual meanings are grounded in that which is necessary for the reproduction, maintenance, and well being of individuals living in a particular social context. All transcendence is dismissed as ideological. Marx had understood religion to be a cipher of cultural life. It encoded the basic ideology that guided capitalist culture. Marx had been influenced, of course, by Hegel’s stunning critique of religion by philosophy. The dominant religion targeted by Marx’s subsequent critique was Protestant Christianity. As inevitably intertwined with a moribund bourgeois society, however, not only Protestantism but all religion was understood to be short-lived. Despite their embrace of Marxian materialism and its critique of religion, critical theorists do not abandon transcendence altogether. Their notion of transcendence, however, differs from that of most theists. The primary analog of transcendence for theists generally is some kind of efficient causal relation between God and the world. (See, for example, Deck 1969: 237.) In this kind of causal relation, the agent transcends itself precisely by changing another thing in a way that communicates something of itself to the thing. As a causal relation, it assumes that the cause and effect are logically distinct, though the cause is nonetheless related to effect by means of the property it brings to it. Critical theorists abjure causation as a model of transcendence, adhering instead to a principle of strict modal incompatibility between any two objects. According to such a critique of causation, an arc of separation stands between any singular objects and has to be preserved nominalistically in order to save each object’s uniqueness. In the history of philosophy, the explication of causal relations has usually led in the direction of the conceptualization of a first cause or primary act: a cause that can differentiate itself into actualities that become external to itself while it remains causally related to them. Aristotle’s unmoved mover is an example. It, in turn, inspired the cosmological argument for God’s existence by Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) among others – an argument famously criticized by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant attempted to resolve the problem of the grounds for agent causation without an appeal to God. He did this in the Critique of Pure Reason by splitting his account of the origin of causal action into two types: empirical causality

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and the rational being’s “causality of reason.” But the account of the shift between these two sources in one subject has remained perplexing. Habermas, for one, wants studiously to avoid this kind of dualism of causes in his account of free action. In contrast, he clings to a non-causal theory of action that views all action within a lifeworld nexus of multiple interactions. Though objecting to the notion of human participation in a divine causal transcendence, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas all claim that humans have an altogether unique power of transcendence. This power is the human capacity to destabilize the otherwise stable processes by which the material reproduction of life takes place. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who strongly influenced the development of critical theory, found in the phenomenon of will to power a transcendent power of radical emancipation and creativity. Though rejecting Nietzsche’s specific understanding of will to power as a cosmic force of disruption in all creatures, critical theorists nonetheless do find a radical capacity for emancipation within human thought and action. They aim to reveal this pathway to emancipation. In what follows, I shall reconstruct the religious analyses of some representative critical theorists. What will emerge is a constellation of their various views on religious thematics, such as transcendence, Messianism, suffering, anamnesis, atheism, and evil. I shall conclude with some critical remarks – particularly about critical theorists’ shared attraction to highly nuanced forms of negative theology – and suggest how their insights serve as a corrective both to extreme forms of religious utopianism, on the one hand, and to religious indifferentism, on the other. One preliminary remark is in order. It need not be assumed that since the critical theorists understood themselves as products of history, they completely refrained from a systematization of thought that could effectively extend their thought beyond the times in which they lived. Nonetheless, reading them can be difficult, not only because the fractured times in which they wrote have already passed, but also because they were, perhaps, keen to avoid being subjected to facile interpretation by future readers.

Walter Benjamin My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is soaked with it. If one merely read the blotter, though, nothing of what has been written would remain. (Benjamin 1983: 18)

Walter Benjamin can be considered in many ways to be the paradigmatic critical theorist. Though only tangentially involved in the actual affairs of the Institute, he was considered by Adorno for a period of time to be the intellectual guiding force of it. Benjamin was unique in developing an idiosyncratic but penetrating and influential critical perspective on aesthetics and culture. This was something that, for example, Marx was unwilling to do. To a large extent, Benjamin set the tone for how critical theorists were to analyze religion. He was unabashedly Messianic in his overall perspective, though his

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preoccupation with aesthetics often blunted the force of it. His religious thinking was completely detached from systematic concerns. He presented neither apologetics, proofs for the existence of God, nor a theological ethics. His primary conviction was that a true religion must forgo its reliance on a linear notion of time that proceeds inexorably up to an omega point of a kingdom of heaven. He proffered instead a dialectical – as opposed to a simple linear – notion of time and history. As dialectical, this notion of time contained a unity of opposites: it contained both the continuity of an enduring present but also an equally continual irruption of the present by both the past and future. Benjamin lived at a time in the early twentieth century when Jews in Germany were becoming increasingly assimilated in its Christian culture. In this context, a unique type of Jewish-inspired Messianism was born. Benjamin himself claims that the Messiah himself consummates all history, since he alone creates, completes, and redeems it (see Benjamin 1978: 312–313). But since the Messianic kingdom cannot be set up as the finality or goal of history, it necessarily bears on only a religious hermeneutics of the present. Benjamin proclaims that “nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal” (312). The Messianic opposes, for him, the happiness that is the goal of the secular world. Yet the secular serves as a counterforce that assists the Kingdom’s emergence. Indeed, anything merely natural is Messianic precisely by reason of its passing away (Benjamin 1968: 254; Siebert 1985: 124). This establishes a dialectics of history. While all that is earthly seeks its downfall, the Messianic emerges precisely through this downfall. For Benjamin, Messianic history is the history of the now (Jetztzeit).3 How is the past, then, to be understood? In the Arcades Project, he claims, in a radically inverted logic, “in order for a part of the past to be touched by the present instant, there must be no continuity between them” (Benjamin 1999: 470). This radicality, in fact, seems to have been missed – or perhaps simply rejected – later by Horkheimer and Adorno. They argued that “only the conscious horror of destruction creates the correct relationship with the dead . . . we, like them, are victims of the same condition and the same disappointed hope” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 215). Yet on Benjamin’s view, the past and present are not the same condition, but two conditions that are equally irreducible. For Benjamin one remembers by hearing, in the gift of anamnesis, the voices of those in past generations who have no possessions and no hope.4 Anamnesis

3 As Hannah Arendt notes, this, is not unlike Meister Eckhart’s mystical nunc stans. See Arendt (1968: 261). For a good account of Jewish Messianism in critical theory, see Mendieta, “Introduction,” in Habermas (2002: 4–7). 4 With these views on the importance of the inclusion of the mores and insights of past persons, it is thus not too surprising that Benjamin entertained a positive estimation of G.K. Chesterton. He once described Chesterton’s work to Adorno as having “the irresistible music of healthy common sense.” See Adorno and Benjamin (1999: 178). For a good description of Benjamin’s understanding of the way tradition is transmitted, see Arendt (1968: 1ff).

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as remembrance is a liberating force for those in the past who have cried out for justice. Conversely, then, only for the sake of the hopeless have peoples in the present been given hope. Benjamin wants to break through the ideological veil of anonymity and obscurity that conceals the truth that the victims of history are also the makers of history (Hewitt 1995: 151). In remembering, we seek to gain a restoration, or “rescuing,” by way of apocalyptic re-enactment.5 This is ostensibly quite a utopian gesture, though it implies neither a progressive development to perfection nor a means to salvation by a trans-historical agent. Such Messianism is neither personalizable nor able to be determined conceptually. It is a sensitivity to the Messianic elements that rupture the continuum of history at any point. In Habermas’s formulation, Benjamin’s Messianism grasps the repetitious mythic quality present in capitalist progress, “the always the same in the new,” yet ascertains in it utopic images of that which does not progress – “the new in the always the same” (Habermas 1985: 140). Though his Messianism expresses our lack of control over our own historical destinies, Benjamin’s theory of language bestows on human beings a remarkable power over creatures. He suggests that the very nature of meaning can be grasped only within a biblical understanding of naming.6 Benjamin analyzes the two creation accounts at the beginning of the book of Genesis to investigate the origin and nature of language. In the first account, God is the agent. He utters the words “let there be” at the beginning of each day of creation. This indicates the creative power of language and the fact that all created things thus partake in language. But in the second creation account, humans are invested with the gift of language and are thereby elevated above nature. “God set language, which had served him as medium of creation, free. God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man” (Benjamin 1978: 323). The non-human world of nature, on the other hand, remains speechless and mourns. Yet Benjamin sees something positive in this mourning, since “that which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable” (330). Even though humans now have the power to name, particularly their own offspring, “no name ought (in its etymological meaning) to correspond to any person, for the proper name is the word of God in human sounds” (324). According to Benjamin, our naming, in a way, determines our fate. Through words, humanity is bound to the language of things. Thought mimetically translates the language of the lower nameless strata of creation to the higher. This is analogous also to what is done in the translation of texts: “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (Arendt 1968: 80). As such, however, Benjamin’s mimetic view of language rejects the bourgeois model that maintains that words have only an accidental, or conventional, relation to their objects. He thinks that language is never merely symbolic or sign based. On

5 For

a good discussion of Benjamin’s understanding of this, see Habermas (1985: 138–141). will claim that Benjamin in this process “rediscovered allegory as the key to knowledge” (Habermas 1985: 33). 6 Habermas

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the other hand, he also rejects the belief that a name expresses the mystical essence of the thing. For Benjamin, things in themselves, as created by God, have no words. They are named by the human word alone. Mimesis is that by which humans discover even non-sensuous (i.e., non-onomatopoetic) similarities. Yet both the gift of producing the similarities, and the gift of recognizing them, change through the course of history. The Fall, in fact, occurs precisely when names no longer live intact, but have moved beyond name language into practices of “over-naming” (Benjamin 1978: 330). Moderns now want the word to communicate something, specifically something other than itself. Now the word expresses, for example, not just the thing but the good or evil of the thing. It would seem that Benjamin’s theory of language leaves our understanding of the past unaccounted for. In opposition to Ernst Cassirer’s (1874–1945) humanist claim that all could be reduced to the symbolic, Benjamin maintained that history is cut off from complete formal symbolization.7 Only allegorical representation succeeds in portraying world history properly as a history of suffering. In his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, Benjamin describes the Paul Klee painting, Angelus Novus, in this perspective. In the painting, an angel is gazing into the past, ready but unable to turn and return heavenward. It looks backward in shock. This angel of history has, unlike humans, the ability grasp the pattern of crisis in the past that keeps ever growing and expanding. Humans see only a series of events, while the angel sees the storm that we call progress (Arendt 1968: 257). Such is the predicament of humanity, who is unable to grasp even the fracture and disharmony of history. The theology that Benjamin draws from these Messianic and linguistic insights is dialectical.8 Its aim is to reveal the constellations of the irruptions of history. At one point in the Arcades Project he claims that commentary on reality, as opposed to commentary on a text, requires the “scientific mainstay” of theology (Benjamin 1999: 858). For Benjamin, theology allows the historical materialist to grasp the truth of past ages in dialectical images that seize history at a standstill, thus releasing objects and events from the sterile and illusory continuity of history. This allows them to be comprehended as they will appear in the light of Messianic fulfillment (See Hewitt 1995: 152). Theological truth, as grasped in this way, is latent in all historical analysis, even that of historical materialism. Benjamin famously has us imagine a puppet playing chess, moved by a dwarf under the table. He states that the puppet “will indeed always win if it is moved by theology. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the service of historical materialism, which today is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”9 For Benjamin, the Messianic will usher in an 7 For

Habermas’s remarks on this, see Habermas (1985: 33). is idiosyncratic, but redolent of much that is valuable. Recently, even Catholic theologians are becoming interested in Benjamin’s work. But theological appropriation is difficult until much of his vocabulary has been clarified. See Wunder (1997: 12). 9 Arendt (1968: 253). According to Martin Jay, Adorno and Horkheimer were not pleased with the overall theological trajectory of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In correspondence with him, Adorno tried to dissuade him of these tendencies. See Jay (1973: 201). 8 It

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age of a secularized classless society, though one that is not constituted as a stable order but emergent within its sheer moments of illumination.

Max Horkheimer I have spoken of the problematic freedom of the individual, the freedom without which Christianity is inconceivable. (Horkheimer 1974a: 158)

Horkheimer’s intellectual trajectory differs significantly from Benjamin’s. While Benjamin represented the Messianism of a rescuing future, Horkheimer was a man very much of the present world – at least of the academic and cultural world of his time. He was the director of the Institute of Social Research starting in the early 1930s until his retirement in 1958 and remained to a large extent the member most responsible for everyday operations of it. Horkheimer often took up religious matters, even the matter of his own Judaism. (See Horkheimer 1974a: 150.) He asked, “In what does Jewish culture consist? To what extent is it superior to European and American civilization, which is now in the process of disintegration? Modern Jews have given up something higher in order to accept something lower. That is in the nature of assimilation” (Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14: 332). Yet he was also an ardent student of Christianity. Despite the critical views he presents of modern religion, he never discarded his abiding respect for the role of religion in human life. Though he wrote about the conflicts between religion and secular society, in many of his writings he also spoke, as a critical historian of religion, of the positive aspects of their relationship. In the historiography of the twenties and thirties, it was not uncommon to find a categorization of the history of religion into three phases – a prehistory of pagan religions, the era of Christianity, and then the bourgeois secular order.10 In his “Thoughts on Religion,” Horkheimer offered a neo-Marxist interpretation of this general structure of the history of religion. In pre-Christian times, the strongest motive for endorsing religious beliefs had been dissatisfaction with human existence. But then Christianity professed that God was intimately tied to the earthly order, though later it lost its function of “expressing the ideal” and became the bedfellow of the state (Horkheimer 1972: 129). With Christianity, the image of perfect earthly justice is, however, an illusion and thus is impossible to achieve within human history. For Horkheimer Christianity provides “no compensation for the wretchedness of past ages and no end to the distress in nature” (130). He argues that the Christian ideal arose out of primitive exchange – the principle that each is entitled to a share of happiness. Yet in the early phase of the Enlightenment, reason was understood as a conciliatory attitude standing in marked contrast to the squabbles over religion that marked the late medieval Church. “This concept of reason 10 For Horkheimer and Adorno, however, the Jews uniquely stand outside of this schema of history.

See Seymour (2004: 148). This “idea” of the Jews as standing outside of history contributed to the anti-Semitism that some fascist writers adopted.

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was doubtless more humane but at the same time weaker than the religious concept of truth, more pliable to prevailing interests, more adaptable to reality as it is, and therewith from the very beginning in danger of surrendering to the ‘irrational’” (Horkheimer 1974b: 13). The Church opposed these new philosophies that arrogated to themselves responsibility for determining moral and religious matters. During the Enlightenment, however, religion was reduced to one cultural good among others. Yet subjective reason, in trying to extinguish religion, ended up neutralizing metaphysics and even objective reason itself. Ironically, religion could thus again thrive in the Enlightenment, insulated from any threat of metaphysical attack – but the new bourgeois idea of tolerance eroded its true spirit of providing enduring principles of conduct for humankind. Self-interest became the new guide. What Horkheimer calls subjective reason “reveals truth as habit and thereby strips it of its spiritual authority” (30). It replaces reason with mass culture. Horkheimer argues that in bourgeois society, the secularized “progressive” citizens still believe in the ideals of equality and justice, but see them as more limited than the non-progressive do. But there is no going back to the pre-secular order. It is a vain hope that contemporary debates in the church would make religion once again the vital reality it was in the beginning. Good will, solidarity with wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now discarded their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the afterlife but the happiness of men who come after them and for whom they know how to die. (Horkheimer 1972: 130)

The loss of religion, however, leaves its mark behind. In a claim that Adorno will later echo, Horkheimer affirms that the hitherto religious concept of infinity is preserved in the secular awareness of the contingency of human life and of the inalterable solitude of all. This discourages society from indulging in thoughtless optimism or forming new religions.11 In “Materialism and Morality,” also written in the early thirties, Horkheimer makes the general claim that morality also has developed historically, primarily in the wake of the breakdown of externally imposed religious authority. He finds a touchstone for the pre-bourgeois state of affairs in Augustine’s ego vero evangelio non crederem nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas (I would not believe in the true gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church were not moving me so). Centuries later, Kantian morality was constructed in order to endow individuals with a moral center in the wake of the breakdown of such religious authority. Horkheimer calls Kant’s categorical imperative a “moral sentiment,” and considers it a positive contribution. He nonetheless thinks that Kant could not find the social coordination by which this subjective ahistorical concept could operate. Materialism developed in the nineteenth century precisely in order to grasp such morality not in terms of obligation, but rather “in terms of the conditions for its emergence and passing away, not for the sake of truth in itself, but in connection with determinate

11 The

widespread growth of new Churches and religious movements in the United States would seem to be an exception to what Horkheimer is proposing here.

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historical forces” (Horkheimer 1991: 188). In Horkheimer’s perspective, materialism dialectically critiques the very conditions of society and culture. It continues the insights of moral sentiment by encouraging both a sensitivity to the actual suffering of others and a political impulse to improve the lot of humanity through economic equality and justice. Horkheimer concludes that given the decline of religious authority in the West, the dominant Protestant culture created its own myth of the authority of the subject. In Luther’s reformation there was little reference to God’s will. The Protestant Hegel then saw the conflict between the individual and the state as the unfolding of God’s absolute spirit. Hegel thought that an individual’s highest love is shown not through death for love of enemies, as Christianity would affirm, but through death for the secular state. Horkheimer felt that with the decline of religion came the strengthening of the authority of fathers in bourgeois families. In the early forties Horkheimer also addressed the “Jewish Question,” which had been an ongoing topic for many European political and theological writers. It dealt with the complexities of Jews living in a Christian culture. Horkheimer authored, with Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was intended to be a critique of anti-Semitism. The text passes the whole of history through the mill of anti-universalist theory and finds only the Jewish religion to be adequate: “Jewish religion allows no word that would alleviate the despair of all that is mortal. It associates hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite, lies as truth” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 23). For them, Judaism is a religion “without transfiguration . . . with no semblance of ideology or myth but at the same time without the self-deceptions of the Enlightenment” (Jäger 2004: 123). They held that while Judaism aims to deny myth, Christianity creates mythic kinds of doctrines that legitimize power. For example, Christianity makes women bear the stigma of weakness, even as, paradoxically, it venerates women (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 110). It ennobles self-preservation by sanctifying marriage and replaces law by mercy. It fosters an idolatry of identity thinking (90–92). Horkheimer and Adorno condemn all idolatrous presumptions of the unity of the divine and human, even in the form it takes in Hegel, and all the human institutions that attempt to mirror it. After his return to Germany in the late forties, Horkheimer grew increasingly pessimistic about the capacity of the bourgeois-Protestant political order to guarantee freedom. In “Threats to Freedom,” he argues that much in contemporary Christianity is reliant upon an “empirical” notion of freedom that holds to a compatibilism between freedom of choice and the necessities of nature and society. At the same time, however, Christianity is supposed to offer resistance to the secular order – only God’s will is to reign (Horkheimer 1974a: 149). Nonetheless, secular societies, increasingly unimpeded by Christian restraints, hamper freedom in other ways. For example, persons in such societies now increasingly feel the threat that

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family and intimacy pose to their careers. Professionals have less interaction with their individual clients. Personal isolation increases. At this point, Horkheimer changes course. He then indulges in speculation about how freedom can be garnered from non-political sources, specifically from religion. He examines how religions can engender love. “In the eyes of the Jewish mother shone the realization that long after her death her son might experience the Messiah’s coming or even himself be the Messiah. The love of the Christian mother was – in all humility and less assurance – sustained by the belief that her child belonged to the elect and had an immortal soul” (Horkheimer 1974a: 150). As Siebert interprets this, the Jewish prohibition of images of God expresses the historical meaning of Judaism as expectation and unfulfilled longing as contrasted with Christian view in which salvation is already attained (Siebert 1985: 131). Yet for Horkheimer the person raised in any religious environment retains a capacity to form bonds of love. He bemoans how Western culture, in losing religion, is losing the spontaneous childlike part of love. In Horkheimer’s view, moreover, love is threatened by symbolization. In this way, Judaism’s prohibition of images gives it, perhaps, the upper hand over Christianity. The move of Christianity to symbolization, Horkheimer suggests, has its roots in the logos of the Fourth Gospel. He sides with Benjamin in disagreeing with Paul Tillich (1886–1965) and other liberal theologians about the value of religious symbolization. Liberals retreat into symbolism and, correlatively, into collectivities and confessional groupings. Some appeal to love as the meaning of life. But Horkheimer declares such appeals to love remain as obscure as the God they are supposed to replace (Horkheimer 1974a: 48). He claims that a symbolic content can become a sign of everything and therefore of nothing. “Symbolic interpretation is an escape route which the despairing take without admitting their despair to themselves” (155). If the ego becomes a mere symbol, how can it be understood, as it is by Christians, as eternal? He even claims that Catholicism, because of its stress on good works over mere faith, stands nearer to Judaism than Protestantism does (Horkheimer 1970b: 59). Horkheimer then also took aim at contemporary Christian theology, specifically that of the Catholic neo-Thomists. He admits that religious thinkers generally resist “dullness” – the tendency to reduce everything to formulas and principles (Horkheimer, “Zu Theodor Haecker,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1983), as quoted in Hewitt (1995: 142). He sees in neo-Thomists, however, an attempt to transform the remnants of mythological thought into workable devices for mass culture. They “compromise with existing evil” (Horkheimer 1974b: 65). Faith is made a matter of expediency: it streamlines old ideologies for modern purposes and works to undermine the value of suffering and individuality. Horkheimer claims that many Christians find the legitimation of such expediency in the Psalmist’s claim that humans are to be the masters of creation. He thinks that positivists and neo-Thomists alike both use this authoritarianism in a way that augments rigid rational control. Yet he admits that St. Thomas himself worked to put the dominating impulse of science

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in its proper place.12 Moreover, he thinks that if Thomas were alive today he would, unlike contemporary neo-Thomists, either condemn science or let it undermine his own religious principles – but not try to reconcile the two.13 Horkheimer acknowledges that while neo-Thomists are conscious of their selfevident principles, by constructing them from revelation, intuition, or primary evidence, they retreat into a simplistic functionalism. They hypostatize their principles and isolate them from negation, or any dialectical process, thus promoting conformism. The primary principle at fault is their theory of the transcendentals, most specifically their identification of goodness and truth. Horkheimer disapproves of how they then encourage human beings to identify with the constructed ideals of a transcendental nature. “This doubtful principle of adapting humanity to what theory recognizes as reality is one root cause of the present intellectual decay. In our day, the hectic desire that people have to adapt themselves to something that has the power to be, whether it is called a fact or an ens rationale, has led to a state of irrational rationality (Horkheimer 1974b: 90) This statement provides a good example of Horkheimer’s own materialist presuppositions. He does concede, however, that without scholastic theology human rights would never have emerged.14 Moreover, he also concedes that neo-Thomist philosophers worked, as the Marxists and critical theorists did as well, for a harmony of theory and practice in the hopes of improving humanity. As a result, Horkheimer’s assessment of neo-Thomism is, in the end, actually quite ambivalent. Horkheimer also finds the Christian notion of the self puzzling. On the one hand, the Christian individual is infinitely small and insignificant in the cosmos. On the other, however, she stands in equality with God. The fishermen and carpenters of Galilee make “Greek masterpieces mute and soulless . . . and the leading figures of antiquity roughhewn and barbaric” (Horkheimer 1974b: 136). While the Jews kept the human ego and finite nature at odds, Christianity allowed for their reconciliation. Christianity allowed the negation of the will to self-preservation on earth in favor of the preservation of the eternal soul that had infinite value. But the modern Protestant individual emerged when the social support for the collectivity of eternal life eroded. Hamlet is seen as the prototype of this modern individual – he fears death. In Horkheimer’s view, he lost his Christian faith, but retained his Christian soul. Yet the Christian soul began to resist even the Church, the very agency that had nourished it. In a secular society, the individual is left to embrace material interests guided by a free market. Horkheimer draws attention to a crucial irony of Christianity: its success was aided by the worldly wisdom and fanaticism 12 Thus

Horkheimer has a fairly positive assessment of Aquinas himself. He speaks positively of “the combination of acuteness and precision, knowledge and imagination to be found in the Summas.” See Horkheimer (1974a: 37). 13 Thomas reconciled and yet kept the basic autonomies of science and religion in a highly complex fashion. He did such a good job, that for centuries thereafter society gave the clergy the job of administering this “highly developed ideological instrument.” See Horkheimer (1974a: 67). 14 Horkheimer (1974a: 37). Charles Taylor makes a similar argument in his A Catholic Modernity? (1999: 16–17).

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it was supposed to renounce. After initially stressing the importance of the afterlife, Christians later conformed merely “to the requirements of self-preservation under existing conditions” (Horkheimer 1974a: 36). Like other critical theorists, Horkheimer does an immanent critique of contemporary Protestant theologians. He criticizes, for example, the Anglican bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God, which argued, following Tillich, that Christianity is based on myths and symbolisms and that God is the ultimate unconditioned depth of our being. Horkheimer finds the book naïve and filled with verbiage and clichés. For him, it is an example of the new theologies that “subvert the dogma whose truth alone would give their words meaning” (48). He believes that “honest theism” now serves better than atheism as an antidote to totalitarian rule. A measured optimism about this idiosyncratic form of theism, thus, prevails in the later Horkheimer. He thinks that theism can help to resist the collectivization, authoritarianism, and functionalism of culture. Christianity is, after all, inconceivable without freedom of the individual. For Horkheimer, as well as for Benjamin, no genuine morality is possible without theology. On the occasion of Tillich’s death, Horkheimer said, “I believe that there is no philosophy to which I could assent which did not contain a theological moment, for it relates indeed to the recognition of how much the world in which we live is to be interpreted as relative” (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7: 276, as quoted in Mendieta, “Introduction,” in Habermas 2002, 6–7). Horkheimer ultimately sees a person’s relationship to religion as an index of resistance and a quest for justice. In times when the powers that be are appealing to religion, the resistance takes the form of reminding us how the divine cannot be represented. In contrast, in times of non-belief, a religious theism is an act of defiance and non-conformism. He grew sceptical of Benjamin’s anamnestic power of reparation, particularly when it had to regard particularly heinous evils (Habermas 2003: 111). He instead affirms Schopenhauer’s notion of original sin – that suffering, when it ensues from sin, brings us close to the sufferings of others (Horkheimer 1970b: 66). He also strongly endorsed Schopenhauer’s dim view of the modern preoccupation with self-preservation. Horkheimer created a critical sociology of religion that requires not a commitment to religious belief but an appreciation of a mode of transcendence that resists commodification and conformity. In 1966, he declared that he could not support any philosophy that lacked a theological moment. Without theology, morality is dogmatic. The dialectical relation between the finite and the infinite, which is at the center of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, lies at the very core of Horkheimer’s sociology of religion. Like Hegel, Horkheimer realizes that religion, as longing for the Infinite, is essential for human aspirations. Both he and Hegel also reject the Schleiermachean conviction that religion is a feeling of dependence and hold instead that our very grasping of our finitude implies that we have already overcome it. Unlike Hegel, however, Horkheimer refrains from viewing this overcoming of a limitation as something uniformly positive. He can only hope that God, the Infinite, exists, though he fears that He does not. Horkheimer’s more solid hope is that a fully developed individual will emerge from a fully developed society.

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Theodor Adorno I see no other possibility than an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once originally meant. (Adorno 1998: 142) Taking literally what theology promises would be . . . barbarian. (Adorno 1973b: 399)

Adorno is probably the critical theorist most ambivalent about religion – yet profoundly interested in it. Born of a Jewish father, who converted to Christianity, and Catholic mother, Adorno was, by his own admission, raised in a “hothouse” of bourgeois culture. He was confirmed in Frankfurt’s Protestant Saint Catherine’s Church. But his experiences of the shame of the World War I, and the vast anti-Semitic backlash of the late twenties and thirties only galvanized his deep ambivalence about religion and culture. He was highly inspired by the atheistic reflections of Ernst Bloch (1885–1977).15 Though sceptical of religious aspirations, Adorno at one time even considered a conversion to Catholicism: I . . . once thought that through the Catholic ordo it was possible to reconstitute a world that is out of joint and on that occasion, ten years ago, I was on the point of converting to Catholicism. . .. I wasn’t able to go through with it – the integration of philosophia perennis seems to me hopelessly romantic and in contradiction to every aspect of our existence. (See Theodor Adorno/Ernst Krenek: Briefwechsel 1925–1935: 46 [letter of October 7, 1934], as quoted in Jäger 2004: 30).

Unlike Horkheimer, however, he did not explicitly endorse religion as an antidote to bourgeois atomization of individuals. Adorno wrote his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard for Tillich in 1931. It is concerned with the close links between theology and social theory. For the most part silent on the Christian beliefs of Kierkegaard, Adorno is more interested in the mythical features of his writings and their cryptic references to reconciliation. He does criticize Kierkegaard for having a bourgeois interior and sacrificing the intellect by means of his notion of the paradox of faith. Such a Christian spiritualism harbors a hostility to nature. Adorno thus rejects Christian sacrifice, replacing it with a “sacrificeless reconciliation” – a private world of myth and a concept of sensual happiness reconstructed through aesthetics (Jäger 2004: 70–71). In Kierkegaard he discovered a mode of the aesthetic that provides a view of nature that neither is to be suppressed by sacrifice nor negated by its own eternity but that points towards its own reconciliation through the preservation of desirous instinct (71). Methodologically, Adorno interpreted religion, as he did all cultural artifacts, by means of his dialectical critique. In Minima Morality he argues that critical theory tries to expose the “consummate negativity” of human existence, such that the “mirror image” of its opposite could become explicit (Adorno 1974: 247). Ethics itself becomes a “melancholy science.” A theory of the inhumanity of human relations is needed before human relations can be renewed. No transcendent harmony of the relation between individual and society can ever be presupposed (Adorno 15 For

a description of Bloch’s influence on Adorno, see Mendieta (2004: 12).

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1990: 41). Such a theory must be oriented negatively, so as to respect the other in her singularity. This orientation must also avoid a facile theory of transcendence: “The ideological untruth in the conception of transcendence is the separation of body and soul, a reflex of the division of labor. It leads to idolization of the res cogitans as the nature controlling principles, and to the material denials that would founder on the concept of a transcendence beyond the context of guilt” (Adorno 1973b: 401). Metaphysicians avoid the material, using instead terms like “existence” that for Adorno are simply “nonsensory egoity” (202). He aims to recover a form of subjectivity that respects the priority of the object.16 The priority of the object means, for Adorno, that a philosophy that brackets objects and analyzes them phenomenologically only to establish the grounds for their constitution is seriously flawed. A good example of Adorno’s characterization of Christianity is found in his analysis of a 1930s revivalist American radio preacher, Martin Luther Thomas. Adorno thought that Thomas’s opposition to the large institutionalized Christian sects was similar to the Nazis’ opposition to Christian worship. Adorno criticizes Thomas not simply for painting a stark opposition between the kingdom of God and the realm of the devil but also for disallowing intermediate processes or dialectics between them. Thomas’s claim that only the simple can understand Jesus is taken by Adorno to be an illusion typical of Christianity.17 Adorno accuses Thomas of having no real interest in the substance of Christianity. For Adorno, such a substance consists in three core principles: that the death of Jesus is an act of redemption (neither of violence nor of revolution); that Jesus is the bread of life (not a mere reformer); and that Christian belief is a claim to truth and not mere acceptance of our ancestors’ faith. Thus faith is a gift that cannot be mediated through socialization. According to Adorno: “He who believes because his forefathers have believed is actually not a believer at all.” (Adorno 2001: 552). From these observations, it is apparent that Adorno’s own conception of Christianity is highly demanding. Like Horkheimer, Adorno adopted a largely sociological critique of religion. Typically this critique holds that Protestantism reacted against Catholicism by fostering a “cult of inwardness” (Habermas 1993: 74). Kant was aware of this inwardness, yet distinguished the empirical subject from the transcendental subject. The realm of the transcendent lies beyond the possibility of empirical experience. Post-Kantians have continued to hold to the empirical analysis of the self, but no longer also conceive it as under the constraints of the transcendent. The inwardness is thus more potent. Horkheimer observed that the people of his day no longer organized their relationship around their religious beliefs and thus these beliefs can be maintained “only through disparate abstraction” (Adorno 1998: 136). For Adorno 16 For

a good treatment of Adorno’s position on the priority of the object and its ramifications for subjectivity, see O’Connor (2004: Ch. 2). 17 Adorno (2001: 548). When Aquinas addresses the Jews and says that they cannot be saved because they don’t believe in the Son who is the only way to the Father, Adorno responds that this claim is not anti-Semitic as such. But it becomes more so since Aquinas makes few positive references to the relation between the Old and New Testaments.

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religion now functions not to verify truth, but only to bring meaning to a disenchanted world. There are only philosophies of religion now, not religion as such. The irrationalist paths of Kierkegaard and Pascal have become socialized, so that “whoever makes this sacrifice no longer feels any burden of fear or trembling” (137). Adorno thinks that in the modern world, religion provides neither providential intervention nor knowledge of the universe, but only satisfaction for the growing need for social bonds. This is caused by the kind of spiritual homelessness imposed on people in modernity. What have emerged are forms of collectivism by which people seek these bonds in a way that does not in fact relinquish the cloister of their own egoism. The religious attitude is now quietistic. It is a “willingness to leave the world as it is, because the world could not possibly be different” (139). The victories religion gains against this “homelessness” are Pyrrhic. Adorno sees religious justification as circular. This is because the authority on the basis of which I adopt my faith demands my faith. Even if the cognitive element of faith is minimized and it is merely a practice, it still operates as a circularity. The difference is that, now, since all that is intellectual and spiritual has been neutralized, the circularity is little felt. One of the most revealing moments of Adorno’s critique of religion occurs in his assessment of Heidegger. Here Adorno attacks what amounts to Heidegger’s attempt to keep the flame of religious thinking alive in the guise of a secular but evocative vocabulary. In The Jargon of Authenticity, a text partially inspired by Marx’s The German Ideology, Adorno claims that Heidegger’s plea for “authenticity” is actually a direct product of prior theological discourse about “man.” Like many religious thinkers before him, Heidegger failed to understand social mediation. He simply put the hitherto immediacy of religious thought into a form that negated religion yet preserved it as non-intentional subjectivity. According to Adorno, Heidegger and other contemporary “Authentics,” such as theologian Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), developed a complete “jargon” of authenticity, employing such terms as “existential,” “task,” “encounter,” “concern,” and “commitment.” Though even Benjamin used similar jargon, such as the term “aura,” he acknowledged its evanescent quality. But Heidegger appeals to a form of non-propositional incantation that pronounces over and above the realm of the factual, the condition, and questionable. It is infused with positivity and bereft of any connection to the existing order of things. Rather, like fascism, it remains “addicted to authority” (Adorno 1973a: 11). Adorno believes that such theological emancipation from authority, resulting in increased secularization of religion, has been in force since Kierkegaard. Adorno acerbically claims that the “Authentics” hold that everything depends on man as the measure of all things. Such an anthropocentrism is found in Kierkegaard’s retreat into the “pathos of existence,” wherein the subject experiences itself as alienated from the world.18

18 Adorno

(1973: 29). But Adorno notes that Kierkegaard’s philosophy of inwardness actually accelerated the downfall of inwardness that was to accompany the bourgeois revolution in Germany (72).

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Such jargon, on Adorno’s account, robs us of a critical attitude towards questions about suffering, evil, and death. It deflects us from determining the proper source of suffering: the specific constitution of society. It falsely deifies the subject itself. Once the original theological image has fallen, transcendence, which in the great religions is separated from the likeness by powerful taboos – though shalt have no graven images of me – is shifted to the likeness. This image is then said to be full of wonder, since wonders no longer exist. Here all the concretion of authenticity has its mystery: the concreteness of whatever is as its own image. While there is nothing more to which wonderful man has to bow down, man who is said to be wonderful because he is nothing but man, the jargon acts as man should once have acted before the Godhead. (Adorno 1973a: 64)

In Adorno’s view, by celebrating only what is identical to the individual and whatever is in its own image, the jargon celebrates nothingness. Like traditional theology, it thus “vindicates the meaning of life through death” (Adorno 1984: 283). The jargon understands death not as that which is most unique to each person, but conversely as merely the great equalizer of all. Adorno thinks that Heidegger, though trying to use death as a means of breaking down a facile essentialism of the self, nonetheless continues “identity-thinking” by equating the self with its own preservation. Identity thinking falsely assumes that thought is able to join distinct universal predicates into a true judgment about a thing. Adorno holds instead that the radical particularity of things always renders inadequate, and indeed false, any such judgments about them. The Jargon of Authenticity is not a text to read if one is looking for any kind of bromide to counteract the existential ills that Adorno painstakingly identifies. Yet we are offered a sliver of hope: If philosophy were to take back into society the experiences which were precipitated in the jargon in the false forms of its distilled essences – society being the place where they to recuperate the genuine experiences that have assumed such distorted shape in the jargon and return them from the distilled essences and possibilities of Being to the society from which they had originated – and if the world ‘origin’ had any meaning at all, then philosophy would be able to go beyond the opposition of mobility and fixity, of groundlessness and authenticity. (Adorno 1973a: 49)

True to his philosophical conviction that ideologies are bent on destroying their own positions, Adorno considers what is positive in religious thought. He argues that we ought not to abandon reason to “mere constellations of power,” as we have done, but we ought again take it up in a way that does not promote domination. This requires “self-reflection, some of which is expressed in the need for religion today” (Adorno 1998: 138). But we must be cautious about how this reflective moment is utilized. As Habermas points out, “In opposition to the false overcoming of philosophy, Adorno – an antipositivist, like Benjamin – proposes bringing a transcendent impetus into a critique that is in a certain way self-sufficient, but does not penetrate into the positive sciences in order to become universal in the form of a self-reflection of the sciences” (Habermas 1985: 144). At the famous closing section of Minima Moralia (the title is an inversion of Aristotle’s Magna Moralia), Adorno acknowledges the standpoint of redemption

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that a philosophy could portray. It is not the simplistic utopia of rational thought, but a perspective that has “felt contact with its objects” (Adorno 1974: 247). Such a viewpoint, however, is something “impossible”. “The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters” (Adorno 1974: 247). This Messianistic thinking is closely identified with the praxis of artistic production. While Benjamin, whom Adorno greatly admired, had endorsed a divine element in human naming, Adorno too sees a kind of imitatio Dei in human activity, particularly that of aesthetics: Form is the law that transfigures empirical being; hence form represents freedom whereas empirical life represents repression. It is also a secularized version of the theological notion that God created the world in his own image. It is not creation per se but an objective behavior pattern through which man imitates creation. In a metaphorical way we may characterize form as the imprint of the human hand in an art work, wherever it passes through. Form is the mark of social labour, though different of course from empirical-practical procedures of making. (Adorno 1984: 207)

Adorno seems to be more Marxist than Benjamin ever was, since this “transfiguration” and mimesis only come at the cost of formal abstraction. Aesthetics functions for Adorno much as religion had in earlier eras. This shift is not without some justification, since both are aimed at truth. For Adorno, art is to be interrogated now not by the question, “What are you for?”, but by the question, “Are you telling the truth?” For Adorno, the reply to this has to be non-discursive, discovered through determinate negation: Truth content cannot be identified directly. It is mediated in itself and, if it is to be known, calls for mediation by philosophy. The spiritual, facticity-transcending content, while not coterminous with empirical givens, does constitute itself through them. . .. Rather than hovering above the make-up of the work like a facticity transcending other, truth is contained in its elaboration and inner consistency.. . . Redemption exposes the truth content of false consciousness in the aesthetic phenomenon. (Adorno 1984: 187–188)

Ultimately, Adorno envisages a kind of secular socialism. This takes the form of a future world of happiness without law and sacrifice. Connected to this kind of socialist eudaimonism is his strong concern for the impoverished and vulnerable whom he thinks have a close relation to religion and the aesthetic. Underlying this vision, though, is a struggle of epic proportions within thought itself. Thought is now to lay bare the world “with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the Messianic light” (Adorno 1974: 247). We are offered a negative Messianism: secularized thought recoiling from all that is comfortable and complacent.

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Jürgen Habermas In order to understand what “in the likeness of God” means, one need not believe that the God who is love creates, with Adam and Eve, free creatures who are like him. One knows that there can be no love without recognition of the self in the other, nor freedom without mutual recognition. (Habermas 2003: 114)

As a second generation critical theorist, Habermas has at his disposal a decadeslong set of critical theoretic debates among which he can choose certain elements to develop more profoundly. He is, however, no simple apologist for his predecessors. His often sharp criticisms of both Horkheimer and Adorno are widely known. Habermas has engaged with his predecessor’s views of religion, though in no exhaustive or systematic way. He comes to his remarks on religion primarily within the ambit of problems he is working out within his theory of communicative action. But he holds unequivocally to critical theorists’ materialist tendency to adopt some version of a practical atheism. Nonetheless, he has been willing to engage in constructive dialogue with a number of theologians, among them Edmund Arens, Helmut Peukert, Michael Theunissen, Johann Baptist Metz, Matthew Lamb, and Francis Schüssler-Fiorenza. The rise, fall, and aftermath of the National Socialist period in Germany was foundational for Habermas’s intellectual and moral development. He saw National Socialism not so much as an anti-religious movement, but rather as a rhetoric bent on destroying the universalizing and solidarity-forming power of reason. Nazi antirationalism undermined the very “confederation of reason” upon which modern states, with their religious toleration, are built (Habermas 1987: 325). Old Testament prophets had envisioned a confederation that was formed by the chosen people’s fidelity to the covenant. The betrayal of a covenant partner was understood as the betrayal of oneself. Mistakes, crimes, and deceptions were understood as occurring within the covenant relationship, inasmuch as they manifested the inversion of it. Habermas understands Enlightenment reason as a secularization of this earlier covenant idea. C.S. Peirce and G.H. Mead gave this religious motif of covenant a philosophical status in the form of a consensus theory of truth and a communication theory of society.19 Habermas realizes, of course, that though human beings unavoidably assume these transcendental presuppositions of communicative reason of idealized agreement, they rarely fulfill them. 19 Peirce

(1839–1914) developed a logic of inquiry based on the fact that all inquiry requires a sign, a speaker, and an interpreter. There is a necessary community of inquiry, then, which is guided by an ideal consensus that remains beyond the immediacy of the interpreters themselves. Mead (1863–1931) stressed the importance of role coordination among all social actors. He argued that one individuates oneself from a prior community of actors formed by coordinated interactions. One becomes self-conscious by taking on the perspectives to others in a performative attitude of a second person point of view. From Peirce, Habermas adopted and modified the notion of an ideal consensus; from Mead he adopted and modified the role of the second person performative perspective as that by which all social actions are guided.

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Nonetheless, all of the members of the confederation of reason are caught up in this developmental dynamic of reason. History demonstrates the reality of this dynamic. Though of Protestant descent, Habermas has nonetheless taken a keen interest in Jewish intellectual issues. He has commented, on a number of occasions, on Jewish writers, such as Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, and has championed a number of issues that have arisen in the context of the Holocaust and its aftermath.20 In an early writing from 1961, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers,” Habermas even claims that the motifs of German Idealism, shaped by Protestantism pietism, were developed productively in terms of the experience of the Jewish tradition.21 He considers Rosenzweig’s engagement with the late Schelling as an example of this affinity. He claims that, like idealism, cabalistic thought generally considers language a form of “divinized art” (Habermas 1985: 24). Habermas also posits that German idealism harmonized with the cabalistic belief that speech is closer to God than to visible images and other more empirical forms of reality (See Jay 1973: 34). He attributes the genesis of this relationship to the fact that Jews were marginalized in Germany, and thus returned to their own tradition. They needed ways to reconcile the contingency of the world with an idealist confidence in the conceptual. Idealism dealt only with creation, it did not look for the world’s need for redemption. Habermas says that idealist critical philosophy not only “secured an urbane attitude and world tolerance on the part of Christians; it also offered the philosophical tool with which the grand self-dynamism of the Jewish spirit sought to master its religious and social destiny. Jewish philosophy, in all its versions, has remained critique” (Habermas 1985: 27). Although most Jewish intellectuals are assimilated, Habermas thinks they have a unique perspective on mainstream culture: “A peculiar sharpness of vision is characteristic of one who has become assimilated. Because he lacks intimacy with the cultural realities that have been cooled down for his appropriation, they relinquish their structures to him all the more easily” (27). Habermas also surmises that Jews have had a strong penchant for critique, because it has been their means of emancipation even “from Judaism itself” (27). He goes so far as to claim that the Jewish heritage, drawn from the German spirit, has, in turn, become indispensable for the life and survival of German culture. Ironically, however, Germans since the War are now forced into the historical irony of taking up the Jewish question without the Jews. In all of his writings on religion, Habermas has held firm to a kind of philosophical atheism. He claims that “God” has become the name for a communicative structure “that forces men, on pain of a loss of their humanity, to go beyond their

20 See,

for example, his comments on Gershom Scholem’s writings on cabalism in Habermas (2001: 31–45). 21 This title is a bit of a misnomer: Habermas is really laying out a close, yet nonetheless tenuous, link between the two.

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accidental, empirical nature to encounter one another indirectly, that is, across an objective something that they themselves are not” (Habermas 1975: 121). Like all critical theorists, he adopts as canonical the historical view that understands the secularization of religion in modern cultures as a given. For Habermas, this secularization emerges from the increasingly reflective grasp we have developed of our inherent power of communication in a way that diminishes the non-linguistic power of former religious authority. Secularization is evident now in the way religions in the West have devolved into, at best, “privatized faiths” (Habermas 1985: 142). Habermas sketches a brief history of this secularization. Kant started the process by his translation of divine moral duties into the categorical imperative. This destroyed the traditional religious image of persons as dependent children of God. Marx then developed the “myth of an atheistic God” that harkened back to a tradition, stemming from German mystics such as Isaak Luria and Jakob Böhme, in which God goes into exile with Himself and becomes His own other as nature (Habermas 1973: 218–219). This model of a self-imposed exile explains how God can permit evil. Although we can now defy God, our salvation comes only through our own actions. Hegel had domesticated this myth by arguing that God did not surrender Himself entirely to history, since he is restored to Himself in the philosophical reflection of absolute spirit. The absolute must itself go through the agonizing self-limiting process of realizing itself as other. Yet, according to Habermas, “Hegel sacrifices together with sacred history the promise of a salvaging future in exchange for a world process revolving in itself. Teleology is finally bent back into a circle” (Habermas 2003: 112). Marx insisted, however, that a historical God cannot be a God any longer – we make ourselves the authors of our own history, though without realizing it. It is Benjamin who achieved, for Habermas, the crucial adaptation of Marx’s historical materialism. Benjamin remained a materialist while inverting its characteristic deflation of the divine. The human power of memory, now in the secular age unhinged from the cultic and auratic, functions as a weak Messianic power. For Benjamin, it is Messianic in that it redeems those past generations who have directed their expectations to us. Habermas claims that this view of redemption is reminiscent of both the Jewish and Protestant mysticism that assigns humans the responsibility for what formerly belonged to God who put us “on an equal footing with himself” (Habermas 1987: 14). For Habermas this “equal footing” is, however, ultimately revealed not through religion, but through communicative reason. Habermas criticizes current forms of religious thinking generally by showing how communicative action, as properly explicated, obviates most religious beliefs and practice. His theory of communicative action outlines how reason functions primarily in everyday linguistic practices as that process by which we come to agreement intersubjectively with others as to what is meaningful and what we use to coordinate our interactions with others. Communicative action is reconstructed from everyday competences of finding mutual understanding and agreement with others. It makes no reference to any kind of transcendent claims. Thus, Habermas

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has criticized both philosophers and theologians who are sceptical of the capacity of human reason to find “unconditional meaning without God.”22 He maintains that communicative reason can grasp unconditionality without appealing to any fundamentally theistic construct, whether a first cause, designer, intrinsic good, or necessary being. This means that Kierkegaard’s description of God as the “Wholly Other,” to whom we are dialectically related, needs now to be recast. The other is now the other of discourse to whom we relate linguistically (Habermas 2003: 10– 11). Although he undercuts any metaphysical basis for belief in God, Habermas’s argument allows religious believers at least a voluntaristic or fideistic belief in an other-worldly power. He maintains that only a validity-theoretic reason, independent of faith, can secure a rational society. Habermas calls such a society, as well as the moral standards determined in it, a post-conventional one. Conventional societies are determined by instrumental reason; post-conventional societies are determined by communicative reason. Communicative reason can be reconstructed from the structures of everyday speech and argumentation grasped from a “transcendence from within.”23 Such transcendence bestows on human agents the capacity to forge agreements with others on the basis of which they can live responsible and free lives. The unconditioned allows the functions of learning, action coordination, and socialization by which we reproduce our lifeworld (Habermas 1984: 2:137). Habermas understands the unconditioned, in this context, not as an apriori or selfevident claim but as that by which human beings determine otherwise indeterminate actions. He claims that human agents by practical necessity have to rely on “behavioral certainties” determined by what is “unconditionally held” to be true in order to make rational actions (Habermas 2000: 43). This initially strikes one as counterintuitive. For in contrast to knowing as true, holding as true is usually considered to be a relativistic position that neither requires nor in fact can even sustain unconditionality. But Habermas insists that “this mode of unconditionally holding-to-be-true is reflected on the discursive level in the connotations of truth claims that point beyond the given context of justification and require the supposition of ideal justificatory conditions – with a resulting decentering of the justification community” (Habermas 1998: 372). Habermas finds three further forms of unconditionality in this process of discursive consensus. First, the goal of consensus is unavoidably built into all acts of communication. The consensual agreement (Einverständnis) “is always already operatively effective in the realm of action” (372). A speaker thus always seeks a context-independent referent of identical meaning with the addressee of an utterance – otherwise the speaker’s sheer engagement in communication would be futile. Second, the strategic means to reach this agreement – the inclusion of all affected and the giving of reasons that respond to challenges to the claim – are also unavoidably anticipated in any successful speech act. One simply cannot communicate in

22 Habermas

(1993: 134). Much of my analysis here follows from my article, “Habermas’s “Unconditional Meaning Without God.” 23 For a similar notion of transcendence in a communicative paradigm, see Peukert (1976: 277ff, esp. 284).

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a completely non-universal way. All claims are implicitly held to be true for anyone in a relevant situation. Third, the justification itself is a rational need. When our behavioral certainties are in question or destabilized, discursive verification of them is the only means to restore, or discard, them in a rational, coordinated manner. These three strata of unconditionality serve as the foundation for affirming a claim as valid. Habermas claims that moral agents have at their disposal, without appeal to religious or transcendental grounds, shared idealizations on the basis of which they can discuss the validity of moral norms. One such idealization is the requirement that in such a discussion, all affected by the norm have the right to be part of the discussion. Another is that discussants appeal to their own interests as they relate to a putative norm. A third is that a consensus among all affected by the norm is assumed to be the goal of the discussion. So once all ideal-guided discussion about a norm is done, the validity of the norm is determined collectively on the basis of a “yes” or “no” response to the claim that emerges for each participant. Most discourses are carried out, however, not formally within institutional settings, but informally within a culture or society throughout time. Once verified, a norm attains to an unconditioned status: it obliges all agents simply by virtue of its own valid status. Nonetheless, the validity status of a moral norm can always be later challenged by agents – and new discourse on it instantiated. Given this account of unconditionality in Habermas’s theory of communicative reason, one is now in a better position to deal with his claims about religion. Habermas adopts the conviction, widespread in the tradition of post-Weberian German thought, that the Enlightenment inadvertently ushered in a period of disenchantment from the hitherto religious-metaphysical world view. Weber noted that rational technique (Technik), as regulated employment of means to achieve ends, dominated our thinking to such an extent that even prayer and asceticism came under its control (Habermas 1984: 1:169). Once the validity spheres of truth, goodness, and perfection were separated and developed into distinct discourses, religious convictions lost the unforced quality that only good reasons or grounds provide. Though emerging from a religious worldviews, secularism displaced truth and morality into distinct realms each with their separate accounts of the justification. The religious, mythical, unified premodern worldview simply gave rise to its own obsolescence. Habermas does not think highly of attempts to unite religious and communicative paradigms.24 He is intrigued, though, by Michael Theunissen’s optimism regarding the possibility of constructing a negative theology by means of the premises of a theory of communicative action. For Theunissen, communication manifests itself reciprocally when one’s being oneself in the other is codetermined with one’s being oneself in the other (see Theunissen 1984). This dialogical coincidence of freedom and love in intersubjectivity bespeaks the divine. Theunissen then shows how 24 Probably

the theologian who has done most to effect this interface is Edmund Arens. Arens even thinks that certain eschatological issues that Habermas fails to take up, like that of death, are implicitly embedded in his theory and can be appropriated for theological reflection. See Arens (1997: 135).

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a Kierkegaardian analysis can illuminate this phenomenon. But for Habermas this sets up a dilemma with regard to God: If we assume that God has withdrawn into the transcendent moment of the structure of linguistic understanding, and has entrusted the historical process to His creatures, who are condemned to communicative freedom, then the very myth of a self-limiting God must eventually succumb to their secularizing labours. But if God remains the only guarantee within history that the ceaseless, nature-bound cycles of history – dominated, as it is, by the past – can be broken, then the notion of an absolute which is presupposed in every successful act of mutual understanding is left without an adequate philosophical explanation. (Habermas 2001: 98)

Habermas resists any “transfer of transcendental questions into the domain of anthropological facts” (Habermas 2001: 102). Theunissen’s failure, according to Habermas, is to transpose the first and third person performative perspectives into a first and second person perspective paradigm without maintaining any role for the object, or topic, of what an intersubjective dialogue is about. Only when a topic is properly put in place can we raise validity claims about the communication in question. In this way Habermas obviates the need for any absolute objectivity, since responsible agents seek unimpeded communication by means of the transcendental power of validity claims alone. In the end, however, Habermas does concede that if a normative order becomes overlaid with domination, ideology, and suffering, theological insights can help at least to perceive the oppression. Habermas’s own thinking about religion and theology is perhaps most keen when he comments upon his fellow critical theorists’ writings. It is against the background of their Messianic claims that his own thinking about religion comes into sharpest relief. He is particularly interested in the aesthetic and mimetic elements of Benjamin’s Messianism. For Benjamin, modernity’s loss of the auratic in art serves as the point of entry for a materialist approach to religion. Religion is intertwined with the auratic ritualization of art – so when the auratic is dissolved, secular art becomes exoteric and intersubjective. This is why the mimetic theory of language replaced the prior world of incantation and myth. Now words name expressively and instinctually. Art facilitates the formation of “natural correspondences” between humans and nature (Habermas 1985: 149). The vocation of the human species, then, is to liquidate that dependence [on violence forces of nature] without sealing off the powers of mimesis and the streams of semantic energies, for that would be to lose the poetic capacity to interpret the world in light of human needs. This is the secular content of the Messianic promise. (Habermas 1985: 150)

It was the source of these powers that Benjamin discovered through the rescuing criticism of a historical, or semantic, materialism. But Habermas finds this move politically impotent. Though Benjamin astutely envisions the possibility, even reality, of a simple meliorism – the view that social conditions constantly improve over time – Habermas warns that a proper model of political action might require more than Benjamin’s “sublime anamnesis” or hermeneutics of memory (Habermas 1985: 160–161). Recently, Habermas has endorsed Horkheimer’s misgivings about Benjamin’s anamnesis and even the “coming to terms with the past” that it inspired

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after the War. Yet Habermas admits that this restorative anamnesis was “as necessary as it was hopeless” (Habermas 2003: 111). Adorno is, in Habermas’s view, even less melioristic than Benjamin. In his brilliant, albeit brief, memoir to Adorno, “The Primal History of Subjectivity,” Habermas reconstructs Adorno’s reaction against Hegel. Habermas respects Adorno’s account of what the compulsion to identify means when one is resisting identifications. Nonetheless, Habermas does to Adorno what Adorno did to Hegel – where Adorno accused Hegel of abandoning the primacy of the object, Habermas accuses Adorno of shortchanging the ways of rescuing that primacy. Habermas agrees that Christianity has tacitly condoned the devaluation of natural objects that emerges when this primacy of the object is ignored. Yet, pace Adorno, he argues that to eliminate avoidable social repression, we cannot refuse the exploitation of nature necessary for survival. For Adorno “the concept of a categorically different science and technology is as empty as the idea of a universal reconciliation is without basis” (Habermas 1985: 110). Adorno never allowed that this reconciliation with the primacy of the object could pass over into rigorous notions of responsibility and autonomy. For Habermas, a theory of validity claims would both adequately account for Adorno’s primacy of the radically particularized object and also offer a basis for a moral theory. Habermas is somewhat less sympathetic in his appraisal of Horkheimer’s analysis of religion. He notes how, late in his career, Horkheimer began to critique secularized culture’s failure to satisfy the deeper longings of human beings, particularly our desire for perfect justice. Secularized culture replaced prohibitions against injustice merely with compassion for its victims. Inspired by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Horkheimer argued that our longings for perfect justice could be satisfied only by the redemptive power of God’s will.25 He had claimed, with Adorno, that even a prohibition against murder could not be derived from reason alone (see Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 118). He wanted to put the truth found in religion at the service of the Enlightenment. To do so, he urged a return to a notion of substantive reason – objective reason – that had been rendered impotent in the West. He claimed, however, that even critical social theory could not efface “heaven’s traces,” though he also acknowledged, negatively, that the “heaven to which one can point the way is no heaven” (Horkheimer 1974c: 61). Habermas disagrees with Horkheimer’s belief that reason is unable to furnish any kind of grounding for morality. First, Habermas rejects Horkheimer’s strong distinction between justice and compassion. Horkheimer argued that justice has to be established on some kind of divine basis; compassion is merely human. Habermas,

25 Schopenhauer, in World as Will and Representation, had claimed that only a thoroughgoing neg-

ativism can salvage the spirit of the gospels. The life force suffused through the domination of one creature over another in a continuous fight for survival actually reveals, according to Horkheimer, that if one can conceive of “a will that affirms itself in everything finite, that is mirrored in a distorted fashion in multiplicity, and yet that remains at a profound level identical, then everyone has reason to view himself as one with all others.” See Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 1987: 12).

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on the other hand, sees a reciprocal interplay not between justice and compassion, but between justice and solidarity. Solidarity is based upon the mutual recognition of our actual communicative capacities. In a second step, Habermas unveils how universalistic solidarity is a natural consequence of the widespread use of communicative reason. Horkheimer never thought that reason could be uncoupled from the instrumental subjective reason he and Adorno are famous for criticizing. Habermas charges, however, that they transposed solidarity “into the identity of an underlying essence, the undifferentiated negativity of the world-will” (Habermas 1993: 143). Instead, Habermas places solidarity in linguistic intersubjectivity, communication, and individuating socialization. Although highly critical of Horkheimer’s subsequent conclusions about religion, Habermas shares with him a profound interest in any properly cultural tool that can quell the forces of alienation, reification, and totalitarianism. Habermas is also concerned with ethical questions. He investigates which ethical tasks, formerly left to religion, ought to be taken up in this post-secular age. He claims that morality is now autonomous from religion. Moreover, politics are becoming increasingly uncoupled from religious influence. Habermas is even sanguine about using a Marxist model to describe the elimination of religious influence (Düringer 1999: 69). What becomes of religious notions of salvation? In the traditional sense, salvation was found in an afterlife with God. Early critical theorists, however, influenced by Weber, translated salvation into the reconciliation of man and nature. In contrast, Habermas now understands salvation as undamaged (unversehrten) or successful (gelingende) intersubjectivity. Moreover, he claims that:

. . . the socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus. This means a freeing of communicative action from religious controls. The disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred takes place by way of a linguistification of the ritually secured, basic normative agreement; going along with this is a release of the rationality potential in communicative action. (Habermas 1984: 2:77)

The progressive “linguistification” of the sacred guarantees that modernity should, and will, continue to demystify all religious claims and practices. Habermas argues that human development has, in fact, a specific logic of development since societies change according to a discernible pattern. As rationality develops, religious forms of regulation necessarily give way to secular forms. Thus, for Habermas, the persistence of fundamentalist religious ethical codes is, by necessity, only temporary. According to his theory of social development, the secularizing potential that the force of rationality opens up in human history cannot be turned back. The sacred

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is thus reinterpreted as a pre-symbolic stage for the coming of the universalizability of human interests.26 These interests are, for Habermas, basic human needs that are defensible in light of communicative rationality. In Habermas’s scheme, God becomes effectively only a name for the communicative structure (see Düringer 1999: 84). How, then, does morality function in a secular world? According to Habermas, religious systems hold that human beings are motivated to follow ethical prescriptions because by so doing they will acquire specific goods. Moreover, religious ethicists generally hold to a close connection between the good and the right – an action is the object of a duty if and only if it is a component of our ultimate well being. Thus religions tend to posit a unity of the ethical and moral, i.e., ethical practices ought to be determined on the basis of certain unchangeable moral principles. In contemporary secular moral systems, on the contrary, knowledge and motivation, the right and good, and ethics and morality are increasingly separated. To bridge these distinctions without eliminating them, anamnesis foresees a utopianism expressed in the idiom not of an Enlightenment meliorism or a Greek metaphysics, but of the irruption of transhistorical agents into the present. It inspires not so much a philosophical mode of thought, but civic obligations. It beckons all to discern carefully the forces that break into the otherwise continuous force of history. Habermas views his own discourse paradigm as a kind of “in-breaking.” It can rupture any non-reflective pattern of human interaction – whether political, legal, social, or even psychological – that precludes the formation of solidarity and justice (Habermas 2002: 134). Habermas has, however, recently made a foray into applied moral matters that, ostensibly, represents a significant shift in his ethical framework. In The Future of Human Nature (2003), he takes up the question of whether his postmetaphysical framework can address substantive questions of the good life. Surprisingly, he gives an affirmative answer. He believes that when ethical individuals confront certain ethical questions, philosophy cannot avoid the substantive. He considers the ethics of current reproductive technologies. He argues that our interpersonal framework is strained in cases where one makes “an irreversible decision about the natural traits of another person” (Habermas 2003: 14). Some of the new eugenic technologies could change our ethical self-understanding to the point where we might no longer be able to conceive of ourselves as the authors of our own lives (42). But this acknowledgement of the validity of substantive moral questions in no way licenses an exclusive appeal to religious answers to them. So although Habermas minimizes the role that religious beliefs play in moral matters, he wants them to be neither prohibited nor even merely tolerated. In “Faith and Knowledge,” another recent article, he urges that our current “postsecular” societies must grant religious freedom, and

26 Habermas holds that an interest is an interpreted need, not simply an impulse (whether natural or unnatural). As interpreted, it is cognitive and thus able to be subjected to rational analysis as to whether it is normative or not.

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cannot block the important resources for meaning religious language provides for the public sphere. He does stipulate, on the other hand, that religions for their part must minimally affirm the legitimacy of other denominations, adapt to the authority of the sciences, and agree to a constitutional state with a secular morality. Still he remains cautious. The impulse to be skeptical of reductionistic claims in science impels one also to keep a distance from religious claims “whose normative substance we nevertheless feed on” (108). Habermas also claims that secular moral discourse has failed to come up with a language appropriate for human failings: . . . we still lack an adequate concept for the semantic difference between what is morally wrong and what is profoundly evil. There is no devil, but the fallen archangel still wreaks havoc – in the perverted good of the monstrous deed.. . . When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost. (Habermas 2003: 110)27

Moreover, for Habermas, religious beliefs can offer consolation by giving new significance to unavoidable suffering, unrecompensed injustice, loneliness, sickness, and death. Nonetheless, Habermas now claims that a profane form of reason can assist what he now calls a postsecular society in dealing with the questions of theodicy (113–114). For him, the wariness concerning the extensiveness of religious thinking, foundational for the development and maintenance of secular societies, has exhausted itself. Post-secular societies are emerging now which rightly revisit the power of religious thinking. The tool for this “nonsecular secularization” is what he calls “translation” (114). In the post 9/11 world this translation involves the interpretative understanding of the values, and particularly religious values, embedded in various cultures. In this way, not only does Habermas show an increasing openness to the resources of religious thought, but he also understands the importance of understanding the many different forms of religious thought in our contemporary multi-cultural societies. Though ostensibly less Messianistic than his critical theory forbears, Habermas clearly thinks that we cannot understand our Western past without understanding the Jewish and Christian contributions to morality and ethics, persons and individuality, and freedom and emancipation. He also thinks that Kierkegaard, in particular, was quite right to defend the Christian notion of the supreme importance of the individual existence against the universalizing assaults of the Hegelian Absolute. Individuals are vulnerable to the others they encounter. Habermas holds, however, that such encounters can be explained without using the vocabulary of a transcendent being wholly other to us. He nonetheless has respect for the religious vocabulary that philosophy can neither subsume nor dislodge. Thus he can say that “the question of the salvation of those who have suffered unjustly is perhaps the most powerful moving force behind our continuing talk of God” (Habermas 2002: 113). Yet from his viewpoint of rationality, he still holds that one must be a kind 27 This indicates, in fact, a trend in Habermas to make remarks that seem to contract his systematic

position that religion and communicative action are incompatible. See, Arens (2005: 383).

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of “methodical atheist.” Philosophy cannot be a source of the existential consolation that religion hopes for. Human beings face their vulnerability with neither hope in a consolation beyond this world nor a guarantee of its eradication in this world. Ethically speaking, religion can help them to grasp the otherness of the concrete other. It renders them aware only of the “fateful character of the events which confront us,” the “fallibility of the human mind,” and our “existential restlessness” (133). Habermas’s multifaceted immanent critique of religion is unquestionably highly original and fruitful, and offers a useful model for anyone interested in providing a rational foundation for the meaning of life in the contemporary world. He endorses unequivocally the anamnestic rationality that can foster a covenant community embodying freedom and solidarity “within the horizon of an undamaged intersubjectivity” (132). Yet only successful intersubjective communication can produce a world of solidarity and justice. God remains for Habermas, as for Kierkegaard, in an absolute difference from us – though Habermas declines to take Kierkegaard’s paradoxical leap of faith into this abyss of difference (115).

Conclusions Critical theorists’ treatment of religion has remained relatively unknown precisely because it lies outside of the traditional disciplinary boundaries within which theology, or even religious studies, normally operates (Mendieta, “Introduction” in Habermas 2002: 5). These theorists criticize strict disciplinary boundaries as products of the specialization of knowledge – a form of the division of labor – that capitalism inevitably fosters (“Introduction” in Mendieta, 2004: 6). None of them, even Habermas, has ever even attempted a philosophy of religion. So how can their analyses of religious belief and practice be assessed? Critical theorists analyze religion dialectically. They define dialectics generally as the process by which pairs of opposites or contraries can be preserved or understood without reduction of one to the other. Dialectics can thus retain as meaningful the negation of a thing, event, or state. So when critical theorists understand a faith tradition dialectically, they view it as a set of propositional beliefs about what cannot in fact be put into propositions: the ineffability of the divine. Moreover, they hold that a religious belief is dialectical if it lies at the edge of thought, where hopes, visions, success, and optimism fail. The hope and transcendence of religions must be ciphers. They must lie outside of determinate meanings, yet condition them nonetheless. One can analyze religion from one of two paradigms: either as a theoretical or a practical phenomenon. Kant utilized this distinction, and his choice of the practical over the intellectual in matters theological was as bold as it was original. The early critical theorists fell under Kant’s spell, and continued his rejection of any kind of theoretical grasp of God. Adorno took this rejection of a theoretical grasp of God as far as it would go, concluding that “the possibility represented by the divine name is maintained . . . by him who does not believe” (Adorno 1973b: 402). Habermas,

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however, wants to remove Kant’s influence completely, rejecting even a practical grasp of God and instead adopting a kind of social imperative that functions without any hidden ontological postulate of the divine at all. Critical theorists thus understand religion generally as a way of practical thinking. For them, religion involves the human response to the notion of a transcendent expectation that will eventually bring some form of salvation to humankind. Yet each critical theorist eschews a systematic analysis of religious beliefs, preferring to analyze religion as a derivative aspect of their critique of culture. Each tended not to distinguish between theoretical reflection on a faith (theology) and the worship and practices of that faith (religion). Presumably this lack of a distinction stems from their materialist conviction that theory and practice are always inexorably linked. If critical theorists share a common conviction, it is in their disdain for the exclusivity of instrumental reason in modern culture. Even Habermas has continued in this vein, claiming that instrumental, or strategic, rationality is “parasitic” on a more basic communicative rationality. To a large extent, Benjamin took this critique to its logical consequence when faced with questions of religion. He was right to see that many, if not most, religious prescriptions focus instrumentally as means toward some end. In other words, the religious person thinks “if I perform my religious practices now, I will gain heaven or some kind of better future when I die.” Benjamin eliminated future posited ends from his Messianism, rendering it able to redeem only a past that would in turn give no direct benefit to the present or future. If I am correct, his Messianism – reflected directly both in Horkheimer’s misgivings about the pragmatism latent in much Christian theology and in Habermas’s convictions about the ability for communicative reason to operate without a God – would dissolve if the critique of instrumental reason ever proved groundless. Have critical theorists overlooked any possibility of a positive, transcendent state of redemption? Have they prematurely discarded any reference to a divine other who can be present in the identical of the unredeemed present? Do they seek a mediated social-religious constraint only in a de-atomized intersubjectivity – a mediation they know is doomed to failure in advance – without considering a sociality that could be seen as an undeserved divine gift? The atheistic critical theorist is in many ways more demanding than the theist in interpreting what the redemptive should be. They cannot abide the perfection and utopia they think would be demanded by theism. They generally think that the order of causal dependence could not be what the theist could want from the divine. But what if the theist, in contrast, freely embraces theism in order to gain the self by losing it in continual and total dependence on the divine? Perhaps the critical theorists effectively take the incarnational aspect of religions, especially Christianity, all too seriously. They tend to anthropomorphize to the point that all mediations and all transcendence are located only in the human. While this is the heart of any emphasis on the community of believers – which nearly all faiths share – if this is made exclusive, the possibility of a redemption that operates over the freely chosen sins of individuals is undermined. Christian redemption, in particular, demands the reality not only of suffering but also of joy: a joy that can coexist with suffering. The Christian rejoices in the fact that the present state of the world is

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replete with both realized and unrealized manifestations of redemption, all of which are unfulfilled relative to the future to come. Critical theorists, though, generally retain a role for religion in the remembrance and acknowledgement of present and past suffering – though one wonders why simply poetry, history, literature, or even psychology, would not suffice for this. Critical theorists thus do have a significant contribution to make, in particular, to religious questions of theodicy. Adorno and Horkheimer tend to treat the Enlightenment itself as inexorably leading to catastrophic events of the twentieth century. In contrast, Habermas does not think that the Enlightenment is to blame. Rather, he blames ethical decisionism for this. Decisionism is the rejection of the use of reason in ethical and political deliberations. For Habermas, Heidegger is responsible for creating this hostility to reason, one that results in a calamitous affirmation of an “other of reason.” Habermas also strongly rebukes the historians in Germany who thought that the Nazi evils were not substantially different from those of the earlier Bolshevik period (and, in fact, that the Nazis were trying to overcome the prior evils). Habermas supports a kind of realized theodicy that locates and calls to account actual social influences on specific evils. Finally, each critical theorist remains true to Marx’s basic materialist orientation, one that ipso facto is in tension with religion.28 Like Marx, critical theorists eschew utopic transcendent visions. For Christians, the transcendence of God is understood interpersonally in a Trinitarian way, with Jesus linking heaven and earth. Critical theorists, particularly Habermas, understand that self-transcending interpersonal relations are constitutive of the human, but scrupulously demand that the divine background for human intersubjectivity – what would make it open to the utopic – is totally other to it. They assert this to such an extent that whatever transcendence from below humans do experience in intersubjectivity cannot be transposed to any other realm. Yet, since they do not hold to the inevitability of a future communist society as Marx did, critical theorists are unconstrained by the belief in a future completely bereft of religion or a state. None of them is completely dismissive of religion. Each derives somewhat idiosyncratic notions of a highly limited role for religious thinking. They feel that religions that understand themselves as beyond criticism, however, can only ply wares of superficial and cheapened contentment. What a critical theorist sharpens is a vision not of absolute knowledge but of radical, indeed Messianic, hope in a future suffused with the sufferings of the past and present. This rarified hope is, as Adorno characterized it, a revisioned “metaphysical” hope no genuine thinker can abandon (Jäger 2004: 30).

28 Horkheimer did not understand materialism in a monolithic sense. He basically divided up mate-

rialism into three epochs: in antiquity, the need to develop an interior life in the face of suffering; in the early bourgeois period, the need to develop technology to transform nature; and now in our time the need for social theory to redevelop the structure of society. See Horkheimer (1991: 24).

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. Inclusion of the other (trans: Cronin, C., and De Greiff, P.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. On the pragmatics of communication, ed. M. Cooke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. Richard Rorty’s pragmatic turn. In Rorty and his critics, 31–55. Oxford: Blackwell. Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The liberating power of symbols (trans: Dews, P.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2002. Religion and rationality, ed. and Introduction by E. Mendieta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The future of human nature. Malden, MA: Polity. Hammond, Guyton. 1993. Conscience and its recovery: From the Frankfurt school to feminism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Hewitt, Marsha. 1995. Critical theory of religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Horkheimer, M. 1987. Gespräch mit Helmut Gumnior. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 387–393, ed. A. Schmidt and G. Schmidt Noerr. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Horkheimer, M. 1970a. Sehnsucht nach dem Anderen: Gespräch mit Max Horkheimer über die Zukunft der Religion. Der Spiegel 1/2/1970. Horkheimer, M. 1970b. Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumnior. Hamburg: Furche-Verlag. Horkheimer, M. 1972. Critical theory (trans: O’Connell, M.). New York, NY: Herder. Horkheimer, M. 1974a. Critique of instrumental reason (trans: O’Connell, M. et al.). New York, NY: Seabury. Horkheimer, M. 1974b. Eclipse of reason. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Horkheimer, M. 1974c. Notizien 1950 zu 1969. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. 1985–1991. Die Aktualität Schopenhauers. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 136 ff. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. 1991. Materialism and morality. In Critical theory: The essential readings, eds. D. Ingram and J. Simon-Ingram, 176–202. New York, NY: Paragon. Jäger, Lorenz. 2004. Adorno: A political biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jay, Martin. 1973. The dialectical imagination. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of pure reason (trans: Smith, N.K.). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press [cited in text by edition numbers]. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1974. Eros and civilization. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mendieta, Eduardo, ed. 2004. The Frankfurt school on religion: Key writings by the major thinkers. New York, NY: Routledge. O’Connor, Brian. 2004. Adorno’s negative dialectic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peukert, Helmut. 1976. Wissenschaftstheorie – Handlungstheorie – Fundamentale Theologie. Düsseldorf: Patmos. Rockmore, Tom. 2005. Hegel, idealism, and analytic philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rorty, Richard. 2000. Response to Habermas. In Rorty and his critics, ed. R. Brandom, 56–64. Oxford: Blackwell. Seymour, David. 2004. Adorno and Horkheimer: Enlightenment and antisemitism. In Theodor W. Adorno: SAGE masters of social thought, vol. III, 147–65. London: Sage. Siebert, Rudolf. 1985. The critical theory of religion, the Frankfurt school. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Swindal, James. 2003. Habermas’s ‘unconditional meaning without god’: Pragmatism, phenomenology, and ultimate meaning. Ultimate Reality and Meaning 26(2): 126–149. Taylor, Charles. 1999. A Catholic modernity? ed. J. Heft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Theunissen, Michael. 1984. The other: Studies in the social ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber (trans: Macann, C.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tillich, Paul. 1951, 1957, 1963. Systematic theology, 3 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tillich, Paul. 1952. The courage to be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tillich, Paul. 1954. Love, power, and justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, Graham. 1996. Theology and contemporary critical theory, 2d ed. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1994. The Frankfurt school: Its history, theories, and political significance. (trans: Robertson, M.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wunder, Bernhard. 1997. Konstruktion und Rezeption der Theologie Walter Benjamins. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The puppet and the dwarf. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Encountering Otherness Morny Joy

Differentiation or alterity – often expressed as “the other” – are terms that have been a preoccupation for much of French philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. A number of scholars have attributed the theme of otherness – with both its positive and negative connotations – to the combined influence of G.W. Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (e.g., Schrift 2006; Baugh 2003). Different philosophers will, of course, make somewhat idiosyncratic appropriations and combinations in their particular interpretations of the mode of otherness, thus preventing any cohesive definition or consistent usage of its terminology – though indeed certain overlaps do occur. All of the philosophers who feature in this volume have engaged with variant understandings of the idea of otherness. The intention of this final chapter then is to provide an overview and analysis of the disparate versions that have appeared specifically in twentieth century Continental philosophy of the concept of otherness. It needs to be stated at the outset that this notion of otherness did not meet with universal approval, even in France itself. In his study of the impact of this aspect of French thought on American intellectual circles in French Theory, François Cusset observes that, insofar as it was associated with postmodernism, terms such as anti-humanist, anti-foundationalist, even fascist have been used to describe it (2008: 11–13). Nevertheless, despite the hostile reception in certain philosophical quarters, both in France and North America, the move towards a philosophical engagement with otherness – especially as it indicates fellow human beings – is basically indicative of a turn towards intersubjectivity and ethics. It can also be viewed as a rejection of Cartesian rationality and a change in direction from its emphasis on an ontological dualism of subject and object. As a result, instead of a rational consciousness that organizes the world according to its own principles, independent of any intrusion of otherness, the cogito is now challenged by an external entity whose own claims need to be taken into

M. Joy (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, University Drive, T2N 1N4 Calgary, Canada e-mail: [email protected] M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_10,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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consideration. Most often this extraneous entity takes a human form, but the challenge can occur at both the experiential and conceptual levels. The diverse attempts to depict this dimension of otherness can take either a positive or negative form – as is evident in the first three thinkers whom I will describe, and who either encountered, or who took into account, elements of the thought of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. In my treatment of this topic, I have chosen to describe these engagements with ideas of otherness in a roughly chronological order, so that I will begin with the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), followed by that of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 1980) and then that of Paul Ricoeur (1906–2005). Each of these three philosophers was intrigued by both the work of Hegel and the divergent expressions of phenomenology that developed in the work of Husserl and Heidegger during the 1930s. Yet each of these French philosophers “discovered” the idea of otherness independently, and they reached quite dissimilar conclusions as they incorporated discrete formulations of otherness into their own philosophical positions. What occurred as a consequence of their respective engagements can also be describes as a distinct turning away from a philosophical orientation, based on what is usually termed the problem of “the one and the many” – where the notion of “sameness” or identity prevailed as a unifying ideal that incorporated any mode of otherness. As a result, the role of otherness or difference functions as a disruption of such identity. The reverberations from this major change are still being absorbed and implemented within the philosophical domain, as the previous chapters in this book have eloquently illustrated. Most of the chapters in this volume have touched on the topic of otherness – the one exception being the chapter on the Frankfurt school. The intention in this final chapter then is not to repeat material that already appears there. Instead, what is presented is a basic introduction to the principal features of otherness in each thinker, especially in its formative stages.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) Levinas came from his native Lithuania to study with Maurice Pradines in Strasbourg in 1923. It was here, after being prompted to read Husserl by a fellow student, that his teacher encouraged him to go to Freiburg and study with Husserl, which he did in 1928. In Husserl’s phenomenology he initially discovered a way of moving from conceptual abstraction to the hidden or forgotten levels of intentional consciousness which he believed in turn, opened up a horizon of meanings (Levinas 2001: 31).1 He described his awareness at the time: “What seemed to me

1 Levinas also refers in this same interview to his first essay on Husserl, published in 1929, when he was 22, in Revue Philosophique: “On the Ideas of Edmund Husserl.” This has recently been republished in Discovering Existence with Husserl (1998 [1967]). His doctoral thesis The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, was defended in 1930 at the University of Strasbourg. It was published in English in 1973.

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rich in possibilities was this new attention to the secrets, or the forgotten facts of consciousness” (32).2 But, during his stay in Freiburg, Levinas also became captivated by Heidegger’s revisions of Husserl’s thought. Levinas describes his response after attending Heidegger’s lectures and his reading of Being and Time: The great thing that I found was the way in which the direction given by Husserl was continued and transfigured by Heidegger. It was as if, to use the language of tourists, I went to see Husserl and I found Heidegger. (32)3

But then came Heidegger’s ignominious conduct in 1933 and the “terrible years” (35) of Nazism’s rise that followed. Thus, while Levinas still acknowledges the revolutionary brilliance of Being and Time (94) it was during the disturbing years leading up to World War II that he began to take his distance from Heidegger. His discomfort is all too evident in a long essay he wrote at that time entitled De l’évasion (On Evasion [2003]). In this essay Levinas first voices his concern with the impersonality as well as the overwhelming nature of Being that is evident in Heidegger’s evocations of it. He further developed these intimations in Existence and Existents, published after the war in 1947.4 In Existence and Existents, Levinas clearly expressed his grave misgivings with certain aspects of the work of both Husserl and Heidegger, though he continued to speak of his indebtedness to both of them. Levinas had written much of this latter text during WWII, when he had been imprisoned as a French Officer in a German prisoner of war camp. He had become preoccupied with the failure of the western philosophical tradition and ethical tenets to prevent the extermination of Jews and other excluded groups in the Holocaust. His thinking began to reflect a new ethical orientation towards other human beings that would express a sense of extreme responsibility to other persons, rather than a continued emphasis on the realization of subjectivity and self-preservation. It was in this connection that Levinas first evoked the notion of the primacy of the other. Levinas also found Heidegger’s depiction of a being or Dasein’s relation with others, described as Mitsein, to be inadequate for the form of responsibility towards

2 Levinas

further elaborates elsewhere: “There is a reflection upon oneself that wants to be radical. It does not only take into consideration that which is intended by consciousness. From this moment on, the object in phenomenology is reconstituted in its world and in all the forgotten intentions of the thinking that absorbed itself into it. It is a manner of thinking concretely. There is in this manner a rigor, but also an appeal to listen acutely for what is implicit” (2001: 93–94). 3 Levinas expands on his initial reaction to Heidegger and his work: “The entire book, Being and Time, was so extraordinary, because this being abandoned to Being, this care for being, leads indeed to the way in which everything possesses meaning. In 1927 it appeared to us as if he were beginning with a kind of Darwinian struggle for existence” (2001: 136). 4 Levinas later describes this work in relation to his disagreements with Heidegger. “This theme is already formulated in Existence and Existents. It is my first book, a taking up in another form of De l’évasion. This horror of anonymous being, obsession with this anonymity, this unceasingness; a bit like the nothing that annihilates (why does it not stay calm?). And already the radical difference is outlined, that which I will later call the fundamental dissymmetry between me and the other” (2001: 46).

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the other that he envisioned. As he states: “The Heideggerian being-with-oneanother [das Miteinandersein] appears to me always like marching-together. That is not for me” (2001: 137).5 He also voices several criticisms about Husserl’s treatment of the other. In discussing Husserl’s evocation of the other by means of “appresentation” – a term Husserl uses for the process by which a subject imagines the other by means of an analogy with him or herself. Levinas observes: My philosophy would consist in constating, first, that the identity of the I and of this “I think” is not equal to the task of encompassing the “other man,” precisely because of the alterity and irreducible transcendence of the other; and second, that the reduction to powerlessness is not negative in the “appresentation” in which representation fails, but it is rather a thought that is other, in a conversion (or return) of the egological “for-oneself” into its original for the other. (2001: 252)

According to Levinas, such an evocation does not do justice to the complete and distinct alterity of the other.6 At the basis of Levinas’s intention to revise ethics in a radical fashion is an opposition to a preoccupation with the self and with sameness. As a result, the notion of identity needs to be dismantled. As he states: “I am trying to show that man’s ethical relation to the other is ultimately prior to his ontological relation to himself (egology) or to the totality of things that we call the world (cosmology)” (Levinas in Kearney 1986: 21). In such a disposition, the expression of an ethical relation to another human being “is just as primary and original (ursprünglich) as ontology – if not more so” (25). In this sense Levinas overturns the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel by giving utmost priority to the other, rather than allowing it to be incorporated or subsumed. Levinas expresses his understanding of the responsibility involved: “The other, absolutely other, is the Other [l’autre, absolument autre, c’est l’Autrui].7 The Other is not a particular case, a species of alterity, but the original exception to the order” (1998: 13). Or, as he explicates further: “My responsibility is the exceptional relationship in which the Same can be concerned with the Other without the Other being assimilated to the Same” (13). This move towards the primacy of ethics, and the primordiality of the other, was further refined and clarified by Levinas in his major postwar writings, especially the books, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974). In her 5 Another

criticism that Levinas makes of Heidegger concerns his preoccupation with one’s own being. “But what does fearing for the other mean in his theory of Befindlichkeit? To me, it is an essential moment.. . . Fearing for the other doesn’t enter into the Heideggerean analysis of Befindlichkeit because in that theory – a very admirable theory of double intentionality – all emotion, all fear, is finally emotion for oneself, fear for oneself” (2001: 177). 6 Levinas elaborates on the shortcomings of phenomenology in this connection. “Phenomenological description . . . whatever analysis of the relationship with the other, it may contribute, will not suffice. Qua phenomenology it remains within . . . the world of the solitary ego which has no relationship with the other qua other, for whom the other is another one, an alter ego known by sympathy, that is, by a return to oneself” (1978 [1947]: 85). 7 Even one of Levinas’s translators acknowledges this that Levinas himself is not entirely consistent in his use of a/autre and A/Autrui. In my usage of o/Other, I have tried to keep faithful to the context in which the term is used by either Levinas or those who quote from him.

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chapter on Levinas, Bettina Bergo provides a detailed analysis of Levinas’s later developments and certain controversies that arose in connection with his position.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) The work of Sartre on the question of the other is included in this chapter, though he does not feature in any of the essays in this volume. The reason for this inclusion is that Sartre’s adaptation of phenomenology and his variations on the theme of the other provide another important perspective on this topic in post-war French philosophy. (His position on the o/Other is also mentioned by a numbers of the thinkers discussed in this volume.) There is the famous anecdote narrated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Prime of Life, when Raymond Aron, a mutual friend, on returning from studies in Berlin in 1932, told Sartre of Husserl’s phenomenology with its emphasis on the consciousness of daily experience. As Beauvoir describes it: “Sartre turned pale with emotion at this” (Beauvoir 1962: 112). She further relates that on the same evening Sartre purchased a copy of a book by Levinas on Husserl – most probably The Theory of Intuition in the Phenomenology of Husserl (1930). Sartre himself journeyed to Berlin and Freiburg to undertake study in phenomenology from 1933 to 1935, but it does not appear that he made any significant contacts there. During this time, however, Sartre also became fascinated by Heidegger. His work, Being and Nothingness (1976 [1943]), incorporates many elements from Heidegger’s Being and Time, yet there is a long-standing debate as to whether Sartre’s interpretations played somewhat fast and loose with Heidegger’s ideas. Heidegger, in his Letter on Humanism (1977 [1947]) certainly takes Sartre to task for what he considered to be specific misunderstandings particularly on the topic of atheistic humanism and the concept of nothingness (Fell 1979: 158–159). The final influence on Sartre’s philosophical position was the work of Hegel. In the 1930s a number of diverse interpretations of Hegel had been promoted in France as part of a revitalization of interest in his work. Sartre is on record as stating that everything he knew of Hegel he had learned from Alexandre Kojève (Baugh 2003: 98). This Russian emigré was famous for his lectures on Hegel which, given in Paris from 1933 to 1939 from a Marxist-humanist viewpoint, focused principally on the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Butler 1987: 63–79; Roudinesco 1990: 134–149]).8 There is, however, no concrete evidence that Sartre ever attended these lectures (Baugh 2003: 98–99).9 There were, however, other

8 In Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave relationship in Hegel, human interaction was depicted as a battle unto death. However, on the wider social and political stage as distinct from the personal level, as Baugh describes it: “The ‘fight-to-the-death’ is merely a stage of inter-subjective relations; it is transcended in work and humanity’s technological mastery of nature. . . which ushers in the universal homogeneous stage, . . . a classless society comprising the whole of humanity.” [Kojève 1946: 354–356] (Baugh 2003: 99). 9 Baugh does admit, however: “It is certainly possible that Sartre read the important chapter on master and slave when it appeared in Mesures (January 1939)” (Baugh 2003: 98).

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interpretations of Hegel in circulation at this time, such as Jean Wahl’s emphasis on Hegel’s notion of the “unhappy consciousness” (Baugh 2003: 2–6) as well those of Alexandre Koyré and Jean Hyppolite (Baugh 2003: 21–32). Given the fact that Sartre believed no final reconciliation was ultimately possible, especially insofar as it involved any appreciation of recognition as part of positive human interactions, the work of both Wahl and Kojève appear to have been his dominant influences, though Sartre nevertheless charted his own inimitable course. Sartre’s position in regard to relations with other human beings would take an orientation that is diametrically at odds with that of Levinas. This is because, in his early work particularly, the other was regarded by Sartre more as an obstacle to one’s own fulfillment, or to achieving authenticity, rather than a being to whom one accords priority.10 Sartre remained intrigued by Hegel’s dialectic and, although he precluded the admission of recognition as an ultimate moment in the dialectic, he would employ aspects of its interaction in a strategic manner. To achieve this Sartre combined the dialectic movements with the “mood” of anxiety which he incorporated from Heidegger’s work. Yet whereas Heidegger had understood anxiety as it related to the experience of utter nothingness and thus a necessary prerequisite to achieving authenticity and freedom, Sartre will introduce a dialectical twist to its implications. The fascinating aspect is that for both philosophers, “nothingness” does not have a purely negative connotation – in that it can indicate that which has not existed previously. Nor is nothingness regarded as a complete void. For Heidegger, it indicates the potentiality, or provides the necessary grounding that emerges once all that is superfluous and all that has been previously taken for granted has been suspended or negated. Such a step then provokes anxiety, but also clears the way for a resolute decision to live and act authentically to be affirmed. For Sartre, however, things are not quite so clear-cut. Sartre appreciates that human freedom instigates a project that continuously requires an act of self-transcendence in its quest to live authentically. Thus, in one sense a human being does aspire to a form of totality. Yet Sartre is also alert to the problematics, if not aporias, involved in such a task. These involve the constant need of further negation, that inevitably results in a continuous unresolved process that is described by Hegel as “bad infinity.” This negation, as with Heidegger, certainly brings one face to face with nothingness – but it is the power to negate the present and thus transcend it that is regarded as both liberatory and creative. As Kojève expresses it: “The freedom which is realized and manifested as dialectical or negating Action is thereby essentially a creation” (Kojève 1969: 492). Sartre will provide his own understanding of this on-going dialectic. “We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not [I am not my past] and which is not what it is [I am not yet my future]” (Sartre 1966: 58). As Baugh explains this: “The present of consciousness . . . is thus defined on the basis of an irréel totality of consciousnesses which are not yet, but which would constitute a total experience of

10 There

is a less absolutist stance on Sartre’s work when he became more Marxist and also endeavored to develop an ethics that acknowledged the exploited status of many people.

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the object in all its aspects. This means that present consciousness implicitly is those future consciousnesses/ appearances that it (actually) is not” (Baugh 2003: 95). The same internal process of non-coincidence or lack of reconciliation between the different modes of consciousness in Sartre’s model also occurs in the interaction of one human being with another. Insofar as I become the object of another’s consciousness, I react from my own subjective position – basically from shame or anger, or other somewhat primal emotions. As a result, as each person or consciousness asserts their own desire to dominate as a subject rather than remain the object of another’s consciousness, conflict inevitably ensues. In Sartre’s early work there is no admission of, let alone responsibility for, the integrity of the other, though he did modify his stance in his later ethical writings.11 In an interview, Levinas himself admitted that he was “extremely interested in Sartre’s phenomenology of the ‘other’.” Nonetheless, he expressed his regret that: “The other, [for Sartre] was still considered, as in all Western ontology to be a modality of unity and fusion, that is, a reduction of the other to the categories of the same” (Levinas 1986: 17). Sartre, for all his involvement with phenomenology and existentialism, remained pre-eminently Cartesian, and it is on these or similarly restrictive grounds that most of the subsequent thinkers in this chapter choose to differ from Sartre.

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) In the pre-war years, Ricoeur had also begun to study Husserl and even went to Munich to study the German language in 1939 – whence he returned somewhat precipitously to France as war threatened. During the war, Ricoeur was also imprisoned for 5 years as an officer where he was allowed certain privileges.12 He managed to translate Husserl’s Ideen I, as well as read the work of Jaspers and Heidegger. After the war, Ricoeur’s approach to phenomenology changed, as he no longer subscribed to Husserl’s transcendental or eidetic reduction, or to the apodicity of the Cogito – understanding that one could never entirely escape from the influences of either intentionality or one’s historical context. This shift in orientation reflects the impact of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In this vein, Ricoeur’s initial exercises in hermeneutics involved textual interpretation. Even at this stage, however, Ricoeur appreciated that a text represented a form of otherness that could put the reader into question. As part of his own hermeneutic approach, Ricoeur advised

11 In his posthumously published, Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre admits that the quest for absolute freedom is an unrealistic one and that one needs to acknowledge the vulnerability of others. He states: “The other’s end can appear to me as an end only in and through the indication of my adopting that end. In choosing to help someone, I engage myself in action, but still recognize the end as not mine. To will this end in ‘good faith’ I must will the end to be realized by another.” (Sartre 1992: 277–280) 12 See Ricoeur the chapter on Ricoeur earlier in the volume for further details of his wartime detainment.

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that a dispossession of the narcissistic ego should be undertaken, in order to prevent immediately the imposition of one’s own egotistic prejudices in an interpretation of a text. This encouraged a more receptive orientation towards the meaning disclosed by a text. In his later work, especially since Oneself as Another (1992), it is another human being, rather than a text, who is encountered. This turn marked for Ricoeur an ethical effort to solve the problem of a lack of reciprocity that he detected as inherent in Husserl’s phenomenology, i.e., the lack of “an original symmetry between self and others” (2005: 260). As quoted earlier in this volume, Ricoeur conveys his own requirement for reciprocity at a personal level: “Ultimately the question at stake concerns mutual recognition – a recognition through which the other ceases to be alien and is treated as my peer according to a fundamental human fellowship” (1996a: 17).13 It is on this basis that Ricoeur finds fault with the work of not only Husserl, but also of Heidegger and Levinas, when they depict the relationship of a self to another human being. Ricoeur’s own understanding of intersubjectivity proposes that, given the bonds of friendship, each other person must be held in the same inestimable regard as that in which one holds oneself. This alone assures the irreducibility of the other person.14 Hence the title of his book: Oneself as Another. In one’s dealings with friends [the other whom I know], Ricoeur advocates reciprocal relationships where solicitude for the other’s well-being is primary. On the social and public level, [the other I do not know], the concern is that justice be meted out equally to all persons. Ricoeur states: “The corollary of reciprocity, namely equality, places friendship on the path to justice, where the life together shared by a few people gives way to the distribution of sharing in a plurality on the scale of history, politics and community” (1992: 195). These demanding requirements, stipulating the conditions of an ethical encounter built on a radical notion of reciprocity, establish the basis of Ricoeur’s appraisal of the ideas of Husserl, as well as of Heidegger and Levinas. In his analysis of Husserl he also indicates a major problem with his idea of “appresentation” (i.e., analogical apprehension) in a manner similar to Levinas’s criticism of Husserl.15 As he

13 In Oneself as Another Ricoeur depicts a multifaceted reading of otherness, which he understands

broadly as those dimensions of the world which can evade our conscious and/or voluntary control – and thus provide evidence not just of human fragility but also introduces questions regarding any façade of mastery. Under the heading of the involuntary, Ricoeur situates the body and conscience as well as relations with other human beings (1992: 317–356). I will restrict myself in this context to the relation to other persons. 14 It is in this sense with his emphasis on the uniqueness and irreducibility of the other person that I believe Ricoeur surpasses the basic maneuvers of the Hegelian dialectic in its later form. Indeed, Ricoeur often refers to Hegel’s early Jena writings where he did allow for human love between a man and woman as an illustration of the dialectic. It is to this dimension of Hegel that Ricoeur appeals rather than to Phenomemology of Spirit or his later political works (1992: 296). 15 Ricoeur voices his own appraisal of this postulate of “appresentation.” “Husserl gave the name ‘appresentation’ to this givenness in order to express, on the one hand, that unlike representations in signs or images, the givenness of the other is an authentic givenness and, on the other hand, that unlike the originary, immediate givenness of the flesh to itself, the givenness of the other never

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describes the dilemma: “The whole of the fifth Meditation [of Husserl] is dominated by the tension between these two demands: to constitute the other in me, to constitute it as other” (1981: 125).16 Ricoeur deems that his tension is not resolved, and that what results is “a unilateral dialectics,” where there is no real reciprocity, let alone an ethical encounter. In Husserl’s work, all initiative is taken by the subject who defines the other as an alter-ego resulting from his or her own analogical projections. The whole exercise remains egocentric in its direction. According to Ricoeur, the integrity of the other person in their capacity as an acting and suffering human being is not conveyed. In addition, the further founding of a community, if it were to happen on Husserl’s terms, would then be based on a virtually second-degree form of constitution, with the subject again providing the measure of projected behavior. This move to mutuality at the level of community is similarly troublesome in terms of establishing genuine relations. The whole model remains at an abstract rather a personally engaged level. Recognition, on Ricoeur’s account, does not take place. Ricoeur is just as critical of Heidegger in that he describes Heidegger’s project as “an ontology without ethics.” In Heidegger’s case, Ricoeur worries that Mitsein does not introduce a complete ethics of intersubjectivity, despite its acknowledgement of the intrinsic communal basis of humanity. This is because Dasein is mainly involved in realizing his or her “ownmost possibilities.” Thus, even though Heidegger acknowledges both care (Sorge) and solicitude (Fürsorge), this is manifested as much by actual support but by not interfering with an other’s own attempts to live authentically. From this perspective, Ricoeur does not deem that Heidegger has promoted the type of relationship he appreciates as necessary for reciprocal recognition of the other. Finally, Ricoeur acknowledges that Levinas has had a profound effect on his work, and he basically agrees with him on the necessity of an ethical response to a summons issued by another person. Ultimately, however, Ricoeur will part company with Levinas on his insistence that responsibility to the other must take absolute priority. In contrast, Ricoeur will maintain the ideal of reciprocal relations, and he worries that by denying one’s own integrity, the summoned subject, especially if the response is prereflective, is denied any process of assent, and does not act on the basic of his or her own integrity. It is not as if Ricoeur is advocating self-preoccupied behaviour, but he is recommending that both parties have the well-being of each other at heart, and each acts out of full awareness, rather than allows me to live the experience of others and, in this sense, can never be converted into originary presentation” (1992: 333). Ricoeur regards this negatively. 16 Ricoeur expands on his objections in Oneself as Another: “Like each of us, he [Husserl] understands, prior to any philosophy, the word ‘other’ as meaning other than me. Having said this, the fifth meditation [Cartesian meditations] stems from the bold stroke of the preceding meditation, a stroke by which the mediating ego reduces this common knowledge to the status of a prejudice, and so holds it to be unfounded. The mediating ego will therefore begin by suspending, hence by rendering entirely problematic, all that ordinary experience owes to others in order to discern that which, in experience reduced to the sphere of ownness, makes the positioning of others just as apodictic as the positioning of itself. Thus movement of thought is entirely comparable to Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt” (1992: 331).

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unreflexively. In this instance, once again in Ricoeur’s view, there is no reciprocal recognition. In an interview with Richard Kearney, Ricoeur describes what he hopes to achieve in the development of his own ethical ontology, with reference to the work of both Heidegger and Levinas. “Here I try to explore the possibilities of an ethical ontology beyond the Heideggerian model of ontology without ethics, and the Levinasian model of ethics without ontology” (2004: 167). At the same time, Ricoeur will admit: “not that I have ever found my ontological feet in any final or absolute sense” (167). It seems that he continued to search for this footing that is both ontological and ethical until he died. Though each of the three thinkers presented in this initial part of the chapter has directed their mature work towards an ethical position in connection with other human beings, the understanding of otherness that has informed their orientation is markedly distinct. Yet they have not exhausted the possibilities of expression regarding the dimensions of otherness, and it is to these further developments I will now turn.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) Derrida’s approach to philosophy has been basically identified with the term “deconstruction” – which has led to many misunderstandings. All too often it has been associated with a form of nihilism that revels in the arbitrariness of language. But Derrida has refuted such depictions. In response he states: I totally refuse the label of nihilism which has been ascribed to me and my American colleagues. Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other. (Derrida in Kearney 1984: 124)

The question then becomes in what sense does Derrida himself understand “the other,” if it is not nihilistic. This involves a somewhat complicated answer, as there are several registers of otherness in Derrida’s work. Each register involves a different aspect or function of otherness – first at the level of the plurivocity of a word or text; second in connection with interruptions to presumptions of self-identity; and thirdly to the impasse posed by the seemingly inexorable, yet finally ineffective attempts to encompass the wholly Other, God. It often comes as a surprise to scholars unfamiliar with Derrida’s philosophical background that he started his studies in phenomenology. He allows that: “My philosophical formation owes much to the thought of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger” (1984: 109). He then continues with both his appreciation of and his disagreements with these formative philosophical figures: Heidegger is probably the most constant influence, and particularly his project of ‘overcoming’ Greek metaphysics. Husserl, whom I studied in a more studious and painstaking fashion, taught me a certain methodical prudence and reserve, a rigorous technique of unraveling and formulating questions. But I never shared Husserl’s pathos for, and commitment to, a phenomenology of presence. In fact it was Husserl’s method that helped me to suspect the very notion of presence and the fundamental role it has played in all philosophies. (1984: 109)

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Derrida also observed that Heidegger had fallen prey to what he describes as the temptation of presence. The word “presence” in Derrida refers to the tendency in Western metaphysics to think within a framework that is believed will disclose some form of ultimate truth or meaning. In Derrida’s view, such containment, especially within a closed conceptual system – where “presence” has further connotations of transparence and mastery – can only occur because of the exclusion of other possible significations or differences. Hegel, too, (in Derrida’s eyes) was guilty of a similar infraction, in that the binary oppositions of his dialectic are always reconciled in a third term that is both teleological and totalizing in its resolution (Derrida 1981: 43–44). Derrida will employ the neologism, différance to introduce his own counter strategy which puts such (monolithic) systems and their inherent oppositional structures into question. “Différance” is adapted by Derrida from the linguistic scholar, de Saussure, who described language as a system of differential signs that constantly refer to other terms, rather than reach any constant or complete definition. Derrida’s strategy of deconstruction involves two interrelated movements. One is the introduction of other or different terms that challenge the obvious or assumed meaning. The second is the exploration of the alternative resultant meanings which introduce a chain of deferrals that disrupt the finality of any absolute or universal pronouncements. Derrida describes this strategy: At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.) – to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its “living speech”. . . become non-pertinent. (Derrida 1981: 29)

Derrida does not regard this intervention as in any way negative. He envisions it as both open-ended and affirmative – it is a creative response, utilizing a form of plenitude (as a form of otherness) in language that can subvert all philosophical attempts to foreclose it.17 Yet he remains somewhat circumspect rather than nihilistic in his claims of the effects of deconstruction. Deconstruction always presupposes affirmation.. . . Deconstruction is therefore vocation – a response to a call. The other as the other than self, the other that opposes self-identity, is not something that can be detected and disclosed within a philosophical space and with the aid of a philosophical lamp. The other precedes philosophy and necessarily invokes and

17 Derrida

describes the location of this otherness: “[T]his otherness is not necessarily something which comes to Greek philosophy from ‘outside,’ that is, from the non-Hellenic work. From the beginnings of Greek philosophy, the self-identity of the Logos is already fissured and divided. I think one can discern signs of such fissures of ‘différance’ in every great philosopher: the ‘Good beyond Being’ (epikeina tes ousias) of Plato’s Republic, for example, or the confrontation with the ‘Stranger’ in The Sophist are already traces of an alterity which refuses to be totally domesticated” (Derrida in Kearney 1984: 117).

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provokes the subject before any genuine questioning can begin. It is in this rapport with the other that affirmation begins. (Derrida in Kearney 1984: 118)18

It is in this quote that a number of the different registers in which Derrida employs the mode of otherness become apparent – at once verbal, conceptual, and even personal. At a basic level, Derrida is above all concerned with interrupting the given language and texts of philosophy. He does concede that deconstruction as an approach has primarily concerned itself with philosophical texts (1984: 108). Nevertheless, he does not consider his interrogations to be simply antiphilosophical. They are, instead, rather a needed mode of self-interrogation that investigates any foundational claims and that is situated, however, at a remove from philosophy: “My central question is: from what site or non-site can philosophy as such appear to itself as other than itself, so that it can interrogate and reflect upon itself in an original manner?” (1984: 108).19 Then, there is the mode of otherness that questions notions of self-identity. Many people consider Derrida to be hostile to the subject, even to the extent that he has completely done away with the subject, both that of author or the reader of a text. Again Derrida will oppose this view, clarifying his position. “I have never said that the subject should be dispensed with. Only that it should be deconstructed. To deconstruct a text is to disclose how it functions as desire, as a search for presence and fulfillment which is interminably deferred. One cannot read without opening oneself to the desire of language, to the search for that which remains absent or other than oneself” (1984: 125–126). Similarly to Derrida’s appreciation that his deconstruction of a text does not destroy but enhance it, Derrida understands his questioning of a subject to be similarly efficacious. “My work does not, therefore, destroy the subject; it simply tries to resituate it” (125). It is this concern with an increased self-reflexivity of a subject in relation to an enlarged perspective of both its engagement with, and intentions towards the other, that leads Derrida in his later work to an involvement with ethics and justice. This aspect of Derrida’s thought, which is carefully delineated by Ellen Armour in this volume, incorporates several positions that could be predicted from the above discussion of the different resonances of otherness found in Derrida’s early work. These include not only an openness to the other, as another human being,

18 There

are echoes of Levinas in this statement. While initially Derrida seemed to defend Husserl against Levinas’s criticisms of him, by the mid-sixties he had recognized the strength of Levinas’s position on the subject of the other, though he maintained certain reservations and did not accept it in its entirety. As Françoise Dastur states: “In his (quite critical) essay on Levinas, ‘Violence and Métaphysique,’ first published in 1964.. . . Derrida apparently wanted still to defend Husserl against Levinas.. . . But in 1967 in Speech and Phenomena, he situates himself no longer inside phenomenology and philosophy, but at the ‘margins’ of them, in proximity both to the Levinasian ‘heterology,’ and to the Heideggerian ‘de-struction’ of onto-theology” (Dastur 2006: 52). 19 Derrida then continues: “But the problem is that such a non-site cannot be defined or situated by means of philosophical language” (1984: 108). A certain distance from philosophy is needed then, so as “to interrogate it” (109).

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but also a commitment to diversity, to pluralism and to multiculturalism. Derrida’s work, from this perspective, is always ordered beyond present limitations that confine and towards an infinitely expansive horizon that inevitably challenges any close-mindedness or facile self-satisfaction. In her essay on Derrida, Armour further develops these basic themes as they unfold with greater complexity and sophistication in his later writings, particularly those on religion, the death of God (and man), negative theology as well as his turn to the gift ethics. Here God, as a mode of ultimate Otherness, proves to be at once elusive and evocative rather than definitive. As can be anticipated, Derrida’s position will never be content with fixed dogmas or appeals to tradition, insofar as they impede an open orientation towards an infinite becoming.

Michael Foucault (1926–1984) Michael Foucault acknowledges in an interview that as a student he read the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but once he encountered Nietzsche, he completely changed course from his initial phenomenological orientation (Foucault in Rex 1988: 12–13). His early genealogical studies, influenced by Nietzsche, have been dismissed by some critics as promoting a mode of nihilism, especially in connection with his alleged “death of the subject” (1980: 102). But such a reading is far too simplistic, as what Foucault is questioning is the unreflective assumption of agency and identity that the modern individual subject regards as an entitlement. This form of self-righteousness, in Foucault’s estimation, does not take into account the matrices of power that allow such an arrogation to occur. Foucault asserts that there can be no easy assertion of a right to such power without an awareness of the various exclusions that have been created by such a manoeuvre. Foucault’s investigations are undertaken so as to detect the people or voices of others that have been denied in order for a single prepossessing subject to emerge. As Karlis Racevskis observes: “For Foucault, there are no strategists to be identified behind the strategies – no one occupies the place of the Other. Nevertheless it is in the name of the Other that identities are formed; by questioning the provenance of the forces that control an individual’s life, Foucault calls into question the accepted patterns of individualization” (1991: 31). Foucault never denies that there is subjectivity but he wants to demonstrate the abuses that can occur when it is presumed as a given that a subject has automatic access to attributes of permanence and control. His intention is encourage more self-reflexivity regarding the manner by which identity is constituted in a context of multiple influences, which inevitably are determined by specific interests. Foucault makes his discomfort with modern subjectivity and its influences extremely palpable. “What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom. I think that there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism as it is domatically represented on every side of the political rainbow: the Left, the Center, the Right” (15).

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Focault’s first genealogical study concerns the way that madness came to be regarded as the Other of reason. In his study of the emergence of psychiatry Foucault endeavored to give voice to all those others who had been silenced by the normative impositions of reason: “The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue . . . and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax, in which the exchange between madness and reason was made” (1973: x). It was because of this division and its inevitable exclusions that, in a later study, Foucault explained his dismay at the consequences: The history of madness would be the history of the Other – of that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize the interior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness); whereas the history of the order imposed on things would be the history of the Same – of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities. (1989: xxiv)

Foucault’s intention in his later genealogical studies, such as those of the prison, and other aspects of medicine, was to illustrate the way that various discriminatory disciplines, as codified by subjects who presumed their absolute authority, were actually the result of contingent historical circumstances, rather than scientific findings. Foucault carefully investigated the power play(s) he discerned as endemic to such disciplinary divisions that rejected certain people based solely on preferential bias. He strove to combat the restrictions thus imposed. Elisabeth Roudinesco explains: “Hence the combat in which he engaged, with and against his historians to give voice to the transgressive archive – meaning to the raw and hallucinatory document, the infamous text, the truce not of the expert, judge, or censor, but of the madman, the criminal, the assassin” (Roudinesco 2008: 69–70). In time, however, Foucault came to appreciate that he had been too preoccupied with the negative aspects of subject formation. In an interview towards the end of his life he acknowledged that his own attitude had changed. “Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self” (Foucault 1988: 19). Such a statement marks both Foucault’s turn to ethics and his move to a hermeneutics of the self, specifically of care of the self. Such a change has been described as a betrayal of his genealogical explorations. Yet Foucault himself obviously understands a definite connection. In an article, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” Foucault allows that “the genealogy of the modern self . . . is one of the possible ways to get rid of a traditional philosophy of the subject” (1999: 169). Foucault’s ethics emphasized a personal discipline rather than obedience to a set of preordained rules. His program, delineating “the care of the self,” appealed to classical and pre-Christian practices, of both Greek and Roman provenance: “from the first Platonic dialogue up to the major texts of later Stoics – Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius” (1991: 4). It was also devoted to self-knowledge.

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Foucault depicts his own understanding of this association. “In order to behave properly, in order to practice freedom properly, it was necessary to care for self, both in order to know one’s self – and there is the familiar gnothi seauton – and to improve one’s self and to master the appetites that risk engulfing you” (1991: 5). In this context, taking care of oneself was akin to a form of self-formation whereby one cultivated certain ascetic and aesthetic attitudes and qualities by means of introspection, reading and practical exercises that led to self-control rather than domination of others. Foucault expands on this discipline of knowledge – both of self and of other related domains: “One cannot care for self without knowledge. The care for self is of course knowledge of self . . . but it is also the knowledge of a certain number of rules of conduct or of principles which are at the same time truth and regulations. To care for self is to fit one’s self out with these truths. This is where ethics is linked to the game of truth” (1991: 5). In this understanding of ethics, truth is understood as a game, insofar as it is accepted, but the fact that it is a game does not mean it is not serious. It is a wager, however, with oneself alone that depends on no higher approval or supervision. A number of critics have taken Foucault to task for this emphasis on care of the self, regarding it as too preoccupied with personal issues and therefore narcissistic. An example of such criticism is found in an essay of Christopher Cordner who, with Levinas’s philosophy in mind, charges: “The ethical subject described in Foucault’s later writings is too self-concerned. Foucault’s ethics does not sufficiently acknowledge the authority of ‘the other’ in our ethical interaction” (2008: 593). It is fascinating to note that Foucault anticipates this criticism. It seems that in our societies, beginning at a certain moment in time – and it is difficult to say when it happened – the care for self became something somewhat suspect. Caring for self was . . . gladly denounced as being a kind of self-love, a kind of egoism or individual interest in contradiction to the care one must show others or the necessary sacrifice of the self. All that happened in the Christian era but I would not say that it is exclusively due to Christianity. (1991: 5)20

Foucault begs to differ from his critics: “No, because the risk of dominating others and exercising over them a tyrannical power only comes from the fact that one did not take care for one’s self and one has become a slave to his desires. But if you care for yourself correctly, i.e., if you know ontologically what you are, if you also know of what you are capable. . . well, then you cannot abuse your power over others” (1991: 8). Inherent in Foucault’s position is the idea that by proper care of the self one learns to resist external domination of any variety. The knowledge thus acquired helps to prevent the imposition on others of any similar demands. In a manner that

20 Foucault

further notes that: “Christianity, in introducing salvation as salvation beyond this life, will somehow unbalance or at least upset the whole theme of care for self” (1991: 9). It is from this point onwards that care of the self began to be regarded as selfish.

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recalls the work of Pierre Hadot,21 whose work on ancient forms of self-discipline had inspired him, Foucault expresses his own understanding that philosophy today should be consonant with such classical practices in that exercise involves the whole person and not simply the intellect. It is from this position that Foucault adapts Hadot’s ideas to the contemporary world so that to pursue philosophy will again be a “way of life,” though with different implications for philosophy from those espoused by Hadot. For Foucault: “Philosophy is precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination at whatever level of under whatever form they present themselves – political, economic, sexual, institutional and so on” (1991: 20). In an essay, “Foucault’s Alimentary Philosophy: Care of the Self and Responsibility for the Other,” David Boothroyd appreciates Foucault’s later philosophy as involved in a form of personal “self-styling” that, in effect, “may also be considered an ‘ethical subject’ to the extent to which its primary self-referentiality is the condition for a non-repressive relation to the Other” (1996: 372). As a result, it could be observed that Foucault’s philosophy trajectory is one that moves from an early concern with the way any system or ideology designates “others” as those who do not meet the criteria of the norm or ideal, while his later work is an attempt, from a personal perspective, to eradicate or at least neutralize those forces, both internal and external, that facilitate such “othering.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) Gilles Deleuze will move in a more radical direction than Foucault in his endeavour to articulate an ontology of difference where “to be” implies “to be different.” In so doing, Deleuze rejects notions of identity or essence, and proposes a manner of thinking difference as operating “in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same” (1994: xix). In addition, Deleuze has no time for the Hegelian dialectic and its totalizing synthesis, where the emphasis is on a negative understanding of difference. As Bruce Baugh observes: “The dialectic is based on negation, and negation expresses only comparative difference mediated through a third term or genus common to both, and not the incomparable difference between one singularity and another” (Baugh 2003: 155). His own positive interpretation, based on affirmation, Deleuze appreciates difference as instigating a continuous creative process of differentiation that thereby honours multiplicity and heterogeneity. In this, he is influenced by Nietzsche whom he describes as introducing a theory of drives or positive forces whereby each “affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference” (Deleuze 1983: 9). From this perspective, “difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction” (Deleuze 1994a: xix). As a result, such an affirmation of difference,

21 Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) examines the various philosophically inspired

forms of self discipline that Greek and Roman thinkers adopted in a pre-Christian era. He did not necessarily agree with Foucault’s adaptation of his ideas, especially those of a contestatory nature.

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as both multiple and open-ended, allows for qualitative differences to be discerned both within a single term (singularity) as well as among various terms (multiplicity). This “empirical pluralism” is basically concerned then with the richness and complexity of the sensible and, as such, intended to refute Hegel’s dismissal of empiricism as being the weakest and most unproductive form of knowledge. There is also no linear or predictable pattern of development in this philosophy of becoming (other). As Baugh describes this process: “For Deleuze, then, coming into existence or “becoming-actual” is not a transition from the possible (the concept) to the real (its instantiation), but the production of something new by already existing forces entering new relations through chance encounters, encounters which are nevertheless the extrinsically determined effects of previous encounters” (Baugh 2003: 154). Such creative and contingent encounters of singularities could certainly generate new ways of understanding “otherness” – a term that Deleuze never directly addresses. In a simplistic account of the ethical implications involved, if difference is always conceived of as having a positive perspective, “otherness,” deprived of its negative impositions, would cease to be associated with the pernicious effects of exclusion and/ or denigration. For obvious reasons, however, Deleuze does not pursue this course. Instead, for his own ethics he principally turns to Spinoza and Nietzsche. This obviously introduces an immanent ethics where transcendent or absolute values are no longer applicable. There is no longer an “Other.” Deleuze himself explains: There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared, selected, and judged relative to one another. There are only immanent criteria.. . . A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good or Evil or any transcendent value: there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life. (1994b: 74)

There are also obvious echoes of Nietzsche here both with the affirmation of life in this world and a transvaluation that no longer apportions good and evil according to moralistic criteria. In Deleuze’s world of becoming, of continuous creative differentiation, it would seem that ethics indicates the exercising of a creative and transformative capacity on the plane of existence. As such, becoming other, or different would become an ethical ideal. Such an ideal would foster new forms of relating and also encourage new insights and opportunities for reconfiguring existing binary systems that alienate and/ or reify otherness rather than promote its life-enhancing capacities.

Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) As Robyn Horner has observed, Marion’s work is an exploration of various innovative strategies by which to think about and describe alterity (2005: 60). This alterity, however, has a number of different references. These indicate both Marion’s attempt to surpass traditional metaphysics, in his investigations of what is “beyond Being,” and also to indicate a dimension of human existence whereby conventional

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notions of a controlling rational subjectivity are superceded. It could also be said that Marion’s aim is to revise phenomenology in both its Husserlian and Heideggerian modes of expression – with their respective in-built expectations of the discovery of essences, or of disclosures of Being. Firstly, Marion rejects the basic tenets of subjectivity and certainty regarding knowledge as they have appeared since the Enlightenment. As John Caputo expresses it: “For Marion, modernity means the tradition of the ‘subject,’ stretching from Descartes through Kant and Husserl and even extending as far as the Heidegger of Being and Time, which places prior constraints upon the self-giving of phenomena. The transcendental subject holds court over the phenomenal field and sets out conditions in advance for the emergence of phenomena” (1999: 5). By advocating a phenomenological approach that has no such preconditions, Marion wants to allow for a different disposition of receptivity to the other as a phenomenon that is given – be it another person, or “the God beyond Being.” Central to Marion’s orientation is his positing of self-giving or “saturated” phenomena that exceed expectations, as well as the usual philosophical formats, whether metaphysical or phenomenological – employed to describe them. All of these reflections centre around ideas of unconditional love which is described as self-giving to the point of excess. Such an aspect of love is regarded by Marion as intrinsic to one’s relationships to an ultimately unknowable Other, i.e., God or more precisely, “God beyond Being.”22 “God can only be known only as not being known.. . . Incomprehensibility therefore belongs to the formal definition of God, since comprehension would be God on the same finite level as a finite mind (ours)” ([2001] 2002: 154). Such unconditional love is also applicable to other human beings, although Marion focuses specifically on the relation of the lover to his (or her) beloved in his book, The Erotic Phenomenon ([2003] 2007). “This unique phenomenon unfolds in common for the two lovers.. . . The lover only becomes himself because the other, the other lover, assures the first lover his own signification through hers” ([2003] 2007: 184). From such a perspective, Marion depicts this erotic phenomenon – which is definitely a saturated one – as one that is dependent upon finding oneself, as Horner expresses it, “always and already loved” (2005: 141). It is thus by a gift of love, rather than by applying reason, that one can learn to be open to the infinite, rather than constricting its unlimited possibilities to formulaic expectations. But then in the conclusion of The Erotic Phenomenon Marion makes a further dramatic claim. This is that “God loves in the same way as we do” (2007: 222). There is, however, “an infinite difference” (222). This is that “God precedes and transcends us, but first and above all in the fact that he loves us infinitely better than we love, than we love him. God surpasses us as the best lover” (222). The conclusion to be drawn from this work appears to be that God’s initiatory gift of love makes all other loves possible. 22 Marion’s

theology has been basically described as neo-Platonic in that it basically posits a God that is unknowable. In his work God Without Being ([1982] 1991), Marion posits that it is love alone that will foster a relationship and insight into this dimension that far surpass the claims of reason. It would also seem that there is a Kierkegaardian influence at work here as well.

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Christina Gschwandtner has discussed these controversial developments of Marion’s thought in her chapter on his work, demonstrating how they have provoked criticism from both secular thinkers as well as theologians. Dominque Janicaud charges that the transcendent has thus been introduced into phenomenological thought, and that Marion’s work is basically a mode of apologetics. Yet even other Christian thinkers of a postmodern disposition also find fault in Marion’s postulate of a seemingly “totally other” God who, though excessive in his self-giving love, nonetheless appears to be accompanied by not only the requirement of faith, but the trappings of a conservative Catholicism.

Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva In the chapter devoted to these two important women scholars, there were many references to ideas of otherness that figured in their discussions of women’s exclusion from Western cultural and religious institutions (the symbolic). In one sense, both women are responding critically to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic positing of the phallus as Other. Yet another crucial theme informing their their work is the notion of woman as the other – or “man’s Other,” to echo the description of Simone de Beauvoir.23 Both Irigaray and Kristeva will expand on Beauvoir’s statement, taking the understanding of this otherness of women in diverse directions. As Irigaray has stated: “I was the other of/for man, [but] attempted to define the objective alterity of myself for myself as belonging to the female gender (Irigaray 1996: 63). Kristeva, for her part, acknowledges women as a necessarily repressed unconscious element or other of male consciousness. While she attempts to introduce semiotic or “feminine” elements into symbolic structures and expressions as a remedial measure, she nevertheless does not find it necessary to promote women’s interests in as explicit a manner as does Irigaray. At the same time, both Irigaray and Kristeva acknowledge that God has presided over Western institutions and religions as the ultimate Other. Irigaray’s efforts are devoted to dismantling this God as Other, whom she portrays as made in man’s image to the detriment of women. The (male) ideal other has been imposed upon women by men. Man is supposedly woman’s more perfect other, her model, her essence. The most human and most divine goal woman can conceive is to become man. If she is to become woman, if she is to accomplish her female subjectivity, woman needs a god who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity. (1993: 64)

Irigaray wants women to come to an appreciation of their own divine likeness, their own mode of ideal existence. She envisages the necessity of attaining “the wholeness of what we are capable of being” (1993: 61). But this realization need not necessarily be represented by a God or Goddess figure. Irigaray first defines what

23 De Beauvoir’s own understanding of otherness in relation to Sartre’s thought including the modes

of transcendence do present certain problems of interpretation. See de Beauvoir (1977: 16).

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she perceives as lacking in women’s situation. “We women, sexed according to our gender, lack a God to share, a word to share and become. Defined as the often dark, even occult mother-substance of the world of men, we are in need of our subject, our substantive, our word, our predicates” (1993: 71). Yet she is hesitant to simply repeat the psychological gestures of projection and reclamation that have featured as part of man’s relationship to the Other/ God. “How is our God to be imagined. Or is it our god?” (67) Rejecting any facile identification, Irigaray instead focuses on attributes and ideals that she describes as necessary to “becoming divine.” She declaims what is required to attain this is: “The feeling or experience of a positive, objective, glorious existence, the feeling of subjectivity, is essential for us.” (67) As a result, the Absolute Otherness of a transcendent God-figure is surpassed by an understanding of a divine orientation that dwells within creation and human existence, and, ultimately, in human expressions of love. If we are not to obey the other, we have to set a goal of our own, make our own law or laws. . . So far it requires no faith other than the faith in the possibility of our autonomy, our salvation, of a love that would not just redeem but glorify us in full self-awareness. (68)

It would be easy to conclude from these assertions that what Irigaray is recommending amounts to a narcissistic disposition. But this is not her ultimate intent. What is at stake for Irigaray is that unless a woman has realized her own autonomy or integrity, she is unable to love at all – that what has previously passed for love has been dependency (72). Irigaray’s vision of God as divine in-dwelling will be an incarnate one –achieved in a love relationship between a man and a woman. This can only occur, however, if women have come into their own. It is only then that both women and men can cease to project onto others those ideals or deformations that render love impossible. This is no easy task and requires discipline of both mind and body. It also demands self-reflexive meditative and physical exercises, on the part of men and women, that assist them to move beyond imposed cultural stereotypes of “male” and “female” roles. For Irigaray this work can become a spiritual task. Her personal understanding of spirituality is a process whereby the mind/ body dichotomy is healed not only by psychological insight into artificially imposed cultural requirements, but also by a growing awareness of the Western philosophical and religious/ theological propensity to dichotomize. This pertains especially to the tendency to estrange or “other” people and thereby reject or belittle what does not conform to their norm or ideals. Irigaray’s path of spirituality also includes psychoanalytically informed analyses of the drives and desires that can dictate human behaviour. The growing integration of such energies with conscious choices is, for Irigaray, inherently spiritual. One is no longer driven by instinctual urges. Irigaray describes her apprehension of this process: “Above and beyond all dichotomies thought must transform the pathos of human energy into respect for the life of the self, of the other, of others, in the context of spiritualizing and divinizing gender and the genders” (1993: 145). While there are definite problems with some of Irigaray’s moves and conclusions in her constructive response to the “othering” of women – that I have dealt with at greater length in my book, Divine Love (2006), the importance of Irigaray’s charges

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should not be ignored. This is because they provoke both indignation and recognition at the treatment – both intellectual and physical – of women in the Western tradition and so raise questions as to what can be done to repair this. The work of Kristeva takes a different tack. She certainly engages with the negativity whereby women and the “feminine” have been portrayed as other – specifically in her attempts to interpose the semiotic within the symbolic. But she refuses to constitute women as constituting a “feminine” morphological entity that is completely distinct from men in the way Irigaray does. In fact, Kristeva may well have Irigaray in mind when she elaborates on her position. I want to propose a differentialist conception of the speaking subject that includes female subjects, but that considers the universal constraint as well as concrete ways to mark it with the exceptional nature of each subject. In this conception, women’s difference is manifested inside this constraint as a difference from a group that is the other sex, but it resists the selfenclosed category of the “feminine” because I am particularly aware of what characterizes each woman. Yet this difference is also inscribed inside the universal symbolic bond, from which it would be absurd to try to exclude women. (Kristeva 1996: 267)24

Kristeva’s own hope is that the two human species, with their desires which do not always coincide, may learn to understand one another. There is no idealization of a renegotiated love relationship between the two as a means of healing the disparities between them – though she does not rule out the possibility of love, once a measure of psychological awareness into the obstacles that impede its expression has be gained. Kristeva is more concerned with the figure of the other as a stranger or a foreigner than as woman. Her understanding of the other is an adaptation of Freud’s postulate of the “uncanny’ – that unconscious dimension that “shows itself to be a strange land of borders and otherness ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed” (Kristeva 1991: 191). The title of Kristeva’s work, Strangers to Ourselves, alludes to this unconscious urge to reject the other, the foreigner or stranger. It results from a displacement of unnegotiated infantile fears and desires of the other – “the other of death, the other of woman, the other of uncontrollable drive” (191). Kristeva views psychotherapy as a vehicle to aid in facing down such fears so that the “other” does not bear the brunt of deflected hostility. In this way, others or strangers can be welcomed or integrated into both one’s own psychic make-up and communities. As she states: “The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, then there are no foreigners” (192). From this perspective, psychoanalysis could be the agency of a new cosmopolitanism (192).

24 Kristeva clarifies this remark also with reference to her reception in the United States. “I believe

that much of what has been written in the United States about my conception has been inaccurate. People have either defined and glorified the “semiotic” as if it were a female essence or else claimed that I do not grant enough autonomy to this ‘essence’” (269). For more details on the “semiotic,” see the chapter on Kristeva.

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It is instructive, nonetheless, that Kristeva will also situate women as other. “I am very attached to the idea of the woman as irrecuperable foreigner” (1996: 45).25 At first glance, this statement just could appear as a sophisticated repackaging of that French banality: “Vive la différence.” The implication of this remark, however, that Kristeva wants to designate women as one of the repressed representatives of the “semiotic.” Such a placement would allow women access to the transformative activity of revolt that she has assigned to the semiotic. For Kristeva, revolt functions as a creative agent of disruption of the symbolic. She describes her own understanding of this term: “I like the term ‘revolt’ because of its association with return, patience, distance, repetition, elaboration. Revolt is not simply about rejection and distrust; it is also about starting over. Unlike violence, revolt foregrounds and element of retrieval and regeneration” (2002: 23). Such an account introduces an intriguing possibility regarding the disruption of the symbolic Other that Kristeva herself most probably would not approve. Nonetheless, I will explore the implications of this particular train of thought. Kristeva has described religion as: “[T]his phantasmic necessity on the part of speaking beings to provide themselves with a representation (animal, female, male, parental, etc.) in place of what constitutes them as such, in other words, symbolization” (1986: 208). The most potent symbolization of all has been the ultimate Other, God, and the accompanying Law of the Father. Indeed, Kristeva has elsewhere identified faith as a compensatory form of primary identification with such an Other (1987: 24). In describing the necessary rupture of a child from his symbiotic relationship with his mother, Kristeva further enlarges on its consequences. “Overcoming the notion of irremediable separation, Western man, using ‘semiotic’ rather than ‘symbolic’ means re-establishes a continuity or fusion with an Other that is no longer substantial and maternal but symbolic and paternal” (24). As a result, this paternal God, or Other, helps to heal narcissistic wounds inflicted by the posited necessary separation from the mother. Another consequence, however, of this Oedipal drama on a divine scale, is that the maternal/female is banished to the domain of the semiotic. In this respect she becomes other. Here she bides her time and plots her return. Yet surely it is in this semiotic guise – following Kristeva’s logic – that women, and/or her “feminine” connections as other, can revolt and interrupt the seeming divine implacability of the absolute male Other. As a result of such a manoeuvre, women can be regarded as an agent of renewal, of creativity – never allowing the reifications of God as Other to dictate the terms of their existence. It is in this sense also that women can question not only the out-dated concepts of philosophy and religion regarding their determinate nature, but also can provide innovative alternative proposals.

25 Kristeva,

interestingly, qualifies this remark with the observation: “But I know that certain American feminists do not think well of such an idea, because they want a positivist notion of woman. But one can be positive starting with this permanent marginality, which is the motor of change” (45).

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Irigaray and Kristeva both envision alternative possibilities for an absent paternal authority (Other). Irigaray proposes two distinct ways that the divine can be realized. Firstly, she encourages women to claim their own integrity by a self-reflexive discipline that awakens their latent spiritual potential. Secondly, she allows that women who have realized their own self-worth, both emotionally and psychologically, can now also experience a form of divinity with others in a heterosexual relationship. In contrast, Kristeva proposes that the unrequited demands for an all-providing and loving Other, projected onto other human beings, can be realigned by a wise and caring psychoanalyst. Such a counsellor can help a client to reclaim such misplaced desires and channel them into more creative and temperate human endeavors, including love. All of the authors discussed in this book, writing in the wake of Heidegger, regard the God of metaphysics as no longer viable, whether sustained by proofs and truths, or by blind adherence to dogma and decrees. The One, the Same, that underwrote the onto-theological association of God with Being has been undermined by various interlopers. Under the cover of otherness they have put into question the absolutist definitions of such a Presence. Certain of these thinkers, however, have not necessarily abandoned God – only this specific designation of a divinity. Marion, for instance, remains resolute in faith and seeks to experience that which is beyond human ken. Irigaray, however, prefers to seek more immanent and enfleshed forms of partaking in divinity. Then Derrida, in his undecidable style, has messianic aspirations which may never be fulfilled. For Kristeva, however, any such longings will not come to fruition and so a redirection of such desires to more moderate pursuits is highly recommended. Finally Foucault and Deleuze, in their appeals to radical difference, take it for granted that god no longer dictates the terms of engagement. Their basic intention is to overturn difference as having any negative connotation. (It needs to be recognized, however, that such a negative meaning is more of a human, if not Hegelian intervention, rather than attributable to any divine design.) The nondialectical mode of difference they introduced started a resistance, or, in Kristeva’s words, a revolt, against both individuals and institutions that defined themselves by measuring their worth against others. They regarded both this arrogation of powers to discipline and segregate others, as well as a certain subjective self-righteousness, as no longer tenable. The ethical impulse that informed their later work, in particular, attempted to be more inclusive, if not transformative. And perhaps this is what all of the supporters of “difference” in a positive key are intending, although their strategies are indeed distinctly dissimilar. It is such attempts, imperfect as they may be in their critics’ estimation, that lead in the direction of a renegotiated and generous openness to other human beings. It needs to be admitted that their various movements towards the other, to the strange, to what is foreign or repressed, raise contentious issues as to the conduct of many academic disciplines, in addition to the institutions that house them. Western philosophy of religion with its singular insistence on a Christian revelation and heritage, has operated mainly in accordance with inclusive tendencies that have ostracized others. Perhaps it is now time to open the discussion to other people, other regions, other religions, and not to judge their respective orientations by appealing only to one exclusive system.

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Irigaray, Luce. 1996 [1992]. I love to you (trans: Martin, A.). New York, NY: Routledge. Joy, Morny. 2006. Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, women, gender and religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kearney, Richard. 1984. Jacques Derrida. In Dialogues with contemporary continental thinkers, The phenomenological heritage, 105–133. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kearney, Richard. 1986. Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. In Face to face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen, 13–33. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Kearney, Richard. 2004. On life stories. In Paul Ricoeur: The owl of Minerva, 157–169. London: Ashgate. Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. The Kristeva reader, ed. Toril Moi. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1987. In the beginning was love: Psychoanalysis and faith (trans: Goldhammer, Arthur). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to ourselves (trans: Roudiez, Leon S.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1996. Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate revolt (trans: Herman, J.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2009. This incredible need to believe (trans: Brahic, Beverley B.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An essay on exteriority (trans: Lingis, A.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1973 [1930]. The theory of intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology (trans: Orianne, A.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978 [1947]. Existence and existents. (trans: Lingis, A.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise than being; or, beyond essence (trans: Lingis, A.). Boston, MA and Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998 [1986]. Of god who comes to mind (trans: Bergo, Bettina) 3–14. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2001 [1998]. Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2003 [1935–1936]. On evasion: De l’évasion (trans: Bergo, B.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991 [1982]. God without being (trans: Carlson, Thomas A.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002 [2001]. In excess: Studies of saturated phenomena. (trans: Horner, Robyn, and Berraud, Vincent). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2007 [2003]. The erotic phenomenon (trans: Lewis, Stephen E.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Martin, Rux. 1988. Truth, power, self: An interview with Michel Foucault. In Technologies of the self, ed. Luther Martin et al., 9–15. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press. Racevskis, Karlis. 1991. Michel Foucault, Rameau’s nephew, and the question of identity. In The final Foucault, ed. J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen, 21–33. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. Husserl: An analysis of his phenomenology (trans: Ballard, E.G., and Embree, L.E.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992 [1990]. Oneself as another (trans: Pellauer, D.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 1990 [1986]. Jacques Lacan & Co (trans: Mehlmann, Jeffrey). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 2008 [2005]. Philosophy in turbulent times (trans: McCuaig, William). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1992 [1943]. Being and nothingness (trans: Barnes, H.). New York, NY: Washington Square Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1992 [1983]. Notebooks for an ethics (trans: Pellauer, David). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schrift, Alan D. 2006. Twentieth-century French philosophy: Key themes and thinkers. Oxford, MA: Blackwell. Schroeder, William R. 1984. Sartre and his predecessors: The self – the other. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Notes on Contributors

Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology and Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Divinity School and the Graduate Scholl of Religious Studies. She is the author of Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2006), as well as a number of articles and book chapters. Bettina G. Bergo is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. She is the author of Levinas between Ethics and Politics and co-editor of several collections, notably Levinas and Nietzsche: After the Death of a Certain God (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Levinas’s Contribution to Contemporary Thought (double issue of the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 1999). She has also translated three works of Emmanuel Levinas. Bettina is the author of numerous articles on ethics, the history of psychoanalysis, and feminist questions. Jeremy Carrette is Professor and Head of Religious Studies in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent. He is the author of Foucault and Religion (Routledge, 2000). He is also editor of Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault (Manchester/Routledge, 1999) and joint editor, with James Bernauer, of Michel Foucault and Theology (Ashgate, 2004). His other works are in the area of social and cultural theory of religion, including works on William James, critical psychology, and religion and consumerism. Philip Goodchild is Professor of Religion and Philosophy in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Sage, 1996), Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002), and Theology of Money (SCM, 2007; Duke University Press, 2009). He is also coeditor of the New Slant Book Series on Religion, Politics, and Ontology with Duke University Press.

M. Joy (ed.), Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion 4, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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Christina M. Gschwandtner is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Scranton. She is author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Indiana University Press, 2007) and several articles on contemporary French religious phenomenology. She has translated Jean-Luc Marion’s On the Ego and on God and The Visible and the Revealed, as well as several other articles. Morny Joy is University Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. She has published in the area of philosophy and religion, women and religion, postcolonialism and intercultural studies in South and SouthEast Asia. Her book, Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion was published by Manchester University Press (2006). She has co-edited with Jeremy Carrette two posthumous volumes of the work of Grace Jantzen (Routledge, 2008, 2009). A forthcoming volume is entitled After Appropriation: Intercultural Explorations in Philosophy and Religion (University of Calgary Press). James Swindal is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. He specializes in critical theory, German Idealism, ethics, and Catholic philosophy. He is the author of Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth (Fordham, 1999) and co-editor of The Sheed and Ward Anthology of Catholic Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). A recent article, “Second Generation Critical Theory,” is included in History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 8, ed. A. Schrift (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Index

9/11, 58, 214 A “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” (Foucault), 234 Absolute knowledge, 7, 9, 25 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 4, 14, 85, 190–191, 195–196, 205, 212, 216–217 concern for the impoverished and vulnerable, 204 critical theory, 187, 200–204 Habilitationsschrift, 200 The Jargon of Authenticity, 202–203 Marxism, 204 Minima Morality, 200, 203 philosophical atheism, 189 reaction against Hegel, 211 rejection of theoretical grasp of God, 215 sociological critique of religion, 201 Aesthetic of existence, 132, 134 Aesthetics, 191, 200, 204, 210 Afterlife, 195, 199, 212 Agnosticism, 72 Alienation, 99, 212 Al Qaeda, 54 Alterity, 47, 71, 172–173, 221, 224, 237 See also Difference; Otherness American Christian movement, see Christian right Analytic philosophy, 1–2, 26, 39 women and, 90 Anamnesis, 190–191, 199, 210–211, 213, 215 See also Memory Ancient world, see Greco-Roman thinkers Anderson, Pamela Sue, 5 Feminist Philosophy of Religion, 110 New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, 110 Angelus Novus (Klee), 193

Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 148 Antigone, 105 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze), 139 Anti-Semitism, 67, 196, 200 Anxiety (Angst), 65, 77, 84 Aphrodite, 105 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 191, 193 Archaeological method, 120–121 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 120, 126–128 Arendt, Hannah, 33–34 Arens, Edmund, 205 Aristotelian ethics of the ‘good life’, 35 Aristotelian teleological ethics, 33 Aristotle, 9, 42, 90 Aristotle’s unmoved mover, 189 Armour, Ellen, 10–11, 110, 232–233 “Art of living”, 132, 134 Asceticism, 132 Atheism, 1, 72, 90, 139–140, 143, 190, 199–200, 206 methodical atheism, 214 “myth of an atheistic God”, 207 philosophical, 189, 206 Atheistic humanism, 225 Atheistic metaphysics, 139–140, 145 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 21, 132, 195 Augustinian creationism, 154 Austin, J.L., 83 “Authentics”, 202 Avant-garde, 92, 117, 119 B Bachlehard, Gaston, 118 Baeck, Leo, 68 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 165 Bataille, George, 119–120 Baugh, Bruce, 236–237

249

250 Beardsworth, Sara, 93–94 Beatitude, 140, 154–155, 157, 159, 163 Beauvoir, Simone de, 239 The Prime of Life, 225 Being, 12, 49–50, 55, 64–65, 67, 69, 72–75, 80–81, 84–85, 102, 109, 113–114, 134, 146–148, 152–154, 157, 162, 167–168, 172–173, 175–177, 181, 203, 223, 238 being-toward-death, 33, 65, 67 being-in-the-world, 27–28 for descartes, 167 of God, 3, 9, 35, 42, 45, 47, 103–104, 166, 174–176, 243 God beyond Being, 14 of human existence, 9, 21 Levinas’s, 78–79 in Thomist metaphysics, 148 with transcendence, 42 understood as our existence, 75 See also Dasein; Existence of God Being Given (Marion), 166 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 225 Being and Time (Heidegger), 65, 109, 223, 225 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 4, 14, 85, 187, 197, 202–204, 207 anamnestic power of reparation, 199, 210 Arcades Project, 191, 193 critical theory, 190 Messianism, 190–192, 210, 216 theory of language, 192–193 “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 84 Béon, Yves, Planet Dora, 66 Bergo, Bettina, 12, 225 Bergson, Henri, 13, 35, 139, 151, 159 critique of spatialization, 155 Deleuze’s studies on, 145–150 method of intuition, 145–149 ontological monism, 149 The Two Sources of Morality and of Religion, 51, 58 vitalism, 61, 64 Between East and West (Irigaray), 102 Bible, 24, 35, 71 Biblical hermeneutics, 23 Binswanger, Ludwig, Dream and Existence, 12, 118 “Bio-power”, 123, 130 The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault), 126 Blanchot, Maurice, 119–120 Bloch, Ernst, 200 Blondel, Maurice, 63

Index Body, 12, 91, 125, 130 Augustinian concern with control of the flesh, 132 in Foucault’s thinking, 119 marginalization within a dualist ontology, 13 separation of body and soul, 201 as site of the incarnation of the divine, 106, see also Divinity state and institutional governance of the, 123, 130 See also Love Böhme, Jakob, 207 Boothroyd, David “Foucault’s Alimentary Philosophy”, 236 Buddhism, 41, 44, 46, 51, 106, 108 Butler, Judith, 129 C Canguilhem, Georges, 118 Capps, Walter, 6 “The Future of Religious Studies”, 4 Religious Studies, 4 Caputo, John, 41, 57, 182 Care of the self, 113–114, 121, 234–235 The Care of the Self (Foucault), 131 Carette, Jeremy, 12–13 Carlson, Thomas, 182 Cartesian Questions (Marion), 166 Cassirer, Ernst, 193 Categorical imperative, 160, 195 Categories and categorizing, see Disciplines Catholic Church, 195 Catholicism, 197, 201 Catholic neo-Thomists, 197 Causality, 142–143, 154, 156, 160, 189 Celan, Paul, 72, 74, 85 “Conversation in the Mountains”, 73 “Der Meridian”, 73 Charity, 176 Christian God, 9–10 Christianity, 11, 24, 44, 46, 51, 198–199, 216 Adorno’s characterization of, 201 dominance of western culture, 56 exclusive focus of traditional philosophy of religion, 7, 41 Horkheimer’s understanding of, 194 incorporation of Greek philosophy, 42, 50 longings for an all-encompassing love, 96 marginalization of the body, 13 mythic doctrines that legitimize power, 196 natural object devalued by, 211 as only true religion, 53

Index roots in “Jerusalem”, 42, 50 treatment of women, 196 Christian monasticism, 125, 132 Christian right, 43, 54–55, 57 Christian sexual ethics, 131 Christian sexuality, 132 Clack, Beverley, 110 Cognitive psychology, 83 Cohen, Hermann, 68 Collins, James, The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion, 4 Communication theory of society, 205 Communicative action, theory of, 207 Communicative reason, 207–208, 212–213, 216 Comparative religion, 39 Compassion, 100, 151, 211 Conatus, 35, 78–79 Connaissance, 118 Conscience, 10, 71, 83, 85, 122, 142 Ricoeur’s understanding of, 29 Consciousness, 2, 18–19, 67, 70, 92, 157–158, 171–172, 174, 178–179, 223, 227 presuppositions of, 8 Consensus, 208–209 Consensus theory of truth, 205 Continental philosophy, 1, 90 American academic interest in, 39 concept of otherness, 221 Continental philosophy of religion, 13, 39, 41 “Conversation in the Mountains” (Celan), 73 Cordner, Christopher, 235 Counter-intentionality, 174 Covenant, 205, 215 Coward, Harold, 46–47 Derrida and Negative Theology, 44 Creation accounts in Genesis, 192 Creation, acts of, 162 Creationist theology, 154 Creative emotion, 149–150 Creative power of language, 192 Critical social theory, 211 Critical theory, 14, 187–217 Jewishness and, 188 Marxian materialism, 189 religion as important cultural phenomenon, 188 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 143, 189 Crossing of the Visible (Marion), 166 Cultic religion, 52 Cultural studies, 123, 125 Cult of the Virgin Mary, 93–94 Cusset, François, French Theory, 221

251 D Dasein, 12, 29, 32, 64, 109, 172, 175–176, 223 Death of God, 2, 11, 13, 40–41, 44, 53, 97, 119, 127, 177 Marion’s thoughts on, 165, 171, 174 See also God Deconstruction, 3, 10–11, 43, 102–103, 172, 230–232 in American academy, 39–40 death of God and, 41 and negative theology, 47 Deconstruction and Theology (Raschke), 10, 40–42 De la grammatologie (Derrida), 39 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 13, 139–163 Anti-Oedipus, 139 on David Hume, 141–143 Difference and Repetition, 139 Empiricism and Subjectivity, 141 ethics of thinking, 158 “Immanence”, 156 indifference, 140–141 The Logic of Sense, 139 Nietzsche’s influence on, 159 otherness, 236–237 philosophy of religion, 154, 156, 159, 162 radical difference, 243 radical empiricism, 4 on Spinoza, 150–155 study of Henri Bergson, 145–150 study of Kant, 143–145 A Thousand Plateaus, 139 What is Philosophy?, 139 De l’évasion, see On Escape (Levinas) De Man, Paul, 40, 40n4 Democracy, 54, 56–57 Denken, 22–23, 26 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 3, 9, 11, 39–58, 74, 80, 182, 243 Deconstruction and Theology, 40–42 deconstructive strategy, 10, 39, 42, 46 See also Deconstruction De la grammatologie, 39 différance, 10, 46–47, 182, 231 Dissemination, 49 “The Ends of Man”, 45 “Faith and Knowledge”, 51 Of Grammatology and Dissemination, 42 “How to avoid speaking”, 47 “Khora”, 49 La voix et les phénomène, 39–40 L’écriture et la différance, 40

252 Derrida (cont.) otherness, 230–233 “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 44 postmodernism, 44 “Sauf le nom”, 47–49 triad of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, 44 Derrida and Negative Theology (Coward), 44, 47, 51 Der Spiegel, 10 De Saussure, 11, 231 theory of the sign, 74 Descartes, René, 22, 113, 141, 168–169, 175 Marion’s work on, 166–170 Meditations, 181 proofs for God’s existence, 170 Diachrony, 83–85 The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer), 196 Dialogues on Natural Religion (Hume), 143 Différance, 10, 46–47, 182, 231 Difference, 13, 109, 160–161, 236, 243 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 139 Differentiation, 145, 147, 163, 221 Dionysius the Areopagite, 170, 180 Disciplinary regimes of power, 123 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 129–130 Disciplines, 116, 128–129, 234 Discourse, 12, 115, 120, 125–128, 130 Dissemination (Derrida), 49 Dits et ècrits (Foucault), 123 Diversity, see Pluralism Divine energy, 156 Divine knowledge, 169 Divine Love (Joy), 240 Divine names, 170 Divine power within thought itself, 159 “Divine Women” (Irigaray), 104 Divinity, 11, 102, 163, 242 “becoming divine”, 90–91, 102 body as site of, 106 through act of human love, 108, 240, 243 women’s relation to, 104 Domination and power, 2, 122, 128–129, 210 See also Power “Dramatique des phénomènes”, 67 Dream and Existence (Binswanger), 12, 118 Dreyfus Affair, 61, 63 Dreyfus, Hubert, 118, 120 Dufrenne, Michel, 18 Dumézil, Georges, 120–121 Duns Scotus, John, 153

Index E Eastern religions, 106, 140 See also names of specific religions Eckhardt, Meister, 34 Ego, 82–84, 167, 170, 197, 202 On the Ego and on God (Marion), 166 Elden, Stuart, 118 The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion (Collins), 4 Emotion, 62–64, 81, 83, 158 Empathy, 9, 82 Empiricism, 4, 127, 141–143, 232 Empiricism and Subjectivity (Deleuze), 141 “The Ends of Man” (Derrida), 45 Engels, Friedrich, 187 Enlightenment, 117, 119, 125, 194–196, 209, 211, 217 secularization of covenant ideas, 205 Enlightenment meliorism, 213 Episteme, 120, 126 Epistemology, 6–7, 61 Erkennen, 22–23 Eros, 75, 180 The Erotic Phenomenon (Marion), 166, 176, 180, 238 On Escape (Levinas), 62, 64–65 Ethics, 1–2, 6, 12–13, 15, 26, 30–31, 35, 57, 71, 75, 155, 157–158, 232 ethical prioritization of Emmanuel Levinas, 3 Foucault’s reading of, 132 Irigaray and Kristeva, 91 melancholy science, 200 primordiality of, 12 turn towards, 221 Ethics of current reproductive technologies, 213 Ethics of intersubjectivity, 32, 99 Ethics of love, 11, 89, 99–100 Ethics of pleasure in Greek writings, 131 Ethics of sexual difference, 91 An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Irigaray), 102 European phenomenological thinking, 118 1968 Events of, 46 Evil, 1, 7, 14, 20–21, 29, 32, 190, 207 origins of, 22, 30 paradox of the quasi-nature of, 29 philosophy not able to answer, 30 Ricoeur’s approach to, 28 In Excess (Marion), 166 Existence and Existents (Levinas), 62, 66, 223 Existence of God, 1–2, 10, 14, 24 See also Proofs of the existence of God

Index Existentialism, 64–65, 69 Existential judgments, 148 Existential phenomenology, 11 Existential restlessness, 214 F Face, 173 Face-to-face encounter, 12, 62, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77–81 See also Otherness Faith, 5, 24, 39, 42, 45, 52, 54–55, 72, 160, 197, 201–202 in immanence, 161 “privatized faiths”, 207 “Faith and Knowledge” (Derrida), 51 “Faith and Knowledge” (Habermas), 213 Falque, Emmanuel, 183 False problems, 146–147, 149 Father God, see God the Father ‘Father of individual prehistory’, 95 Female mysticism, 102–103 “Feminine the”, 94 “Feminine divine”, 102 “Feminine” imaginary, 90 Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Anderson), 110 Feminists and feminism, 5, 11, 89, 124–125, 130 See also Women Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 140, 143 Final Solution (Endlösung), 66, 73 Finitude, 9, 65 Finitude and Guilt, Fallible Man (Ricoeur), 19 Fink, Eugene, 8 The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (Irigaray), 109 Foshay, Toby, 44, 46–47 Foucault, Michel, 1, 3, 12–13, 139 “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self”, 234 archaeological method, 120–121, 125–126 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 120, 126–128 The Birth of the Clinic, 126 The Care of the Self, 131 challenge to “think differently”, 12, 114, 134 Collège de France lectures, 113, 120–121, 124, 128, 131 Discipline and Punish, 129–130 Dits et écrits, 123 and the Enlightenment philosophical traditions, 117, 119, 125

253 ethical subject, 131–132 ethico-politico spirituality, 133 experimental attitude, 121–123 feminist theory and, 124 genealogical investigations, 2, 121, 124, 128, 130, 233–234 governmentality, 122–123 Hermeneutics of the Subject (lecture course), 113 Historie de folie à l’âge classique, 118 historical critical analysis, 118 History of Madness, 126 History of Sexuality, 125, 129 intellectual roots, 117–121 Introduction à l’anthropologie de Kant, 118 La Volonté de savoir, 129 Maladie mentale et personalité, 12 The Order of Things, 119–120, 126–127 Oriental sub-text, 134 otherness, 233–236 philosophical location, 115–117 post-structuralism, 120 power, theme of, see Domination and power radical difference (appeal to), 243 re-uniting of philosophy and spirituality, 114 scholarship on (or reception), 123–125 social justice (struggles for), 116–117, 123 theory of discourse, 120 See also Discourse turn to ethics, 234 The Use of Pleasure, 131 “Foucault’s Alimentary Philosophy” (Boothroyd), 236 Frankenberry, Nancy, 5–6 Frankfurt school, 1–2, 4, 14 Freedom and Nature (Ricoeur), 18 French intellectual tradition, 1, 12, 117 French Theory (Cusset), 221 Freud (Ricoeur), 21 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 11, 21–22, 34, 43, 67, 83–84, 92, 94–96, 99–101, 140, 143, 188 Fromm, Erich, 187 The Future of Human Nature (Habermas), 213 “The Future of Religious Studies” (Capp), 4 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 4 Galileo Galilei, 168–169 Gay Science (Nietzsche), 171

254 Gender, 107 heteronormative binary sex/gender system, 44 See also Feminists and feminism; God the Father; Women Gender analyses (Irigaray and Kristeva), 3 See also Phallogocentrism; Psychoanalysis Gender essentialism, 90 Genealogical investigations, 2, 121, 124, 130, 233–234 Genealogy, 119, 128 “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers” (Habermas), 206 The German Ideology (Marx), 202 Global capitalism, 7 Globalization, 53 God, 9–10, 42, 48, 84, 86, 89, 158, 161, 165, 167–169 as causa sui, 170 concept of, 151 gender of, see God the Father genetic definition of the idea, 152–153 Habermas on, 206, 210, 213 Kantian idea of, 147 not source of conscience for Ricoeur, 29 as process of becoming divine, 104 theoretical grasp of, 215 and transcendence, 15, 160, 169 See also Transcendence See also Death of God God of Being, 35 God beyond Being, 3, 14, 238 God the Father, 11, 45, 50, 89, 91 centrality to text of metaphysics, 43–44, 243 God, the Infinite, 169, 199 God is love, 176, 180 God as Other, 95, 208, 233, 239 God-talk, 35 God “without Being”, 166, 174–177 God without Being (Marion), 165–166, 174–176 Good, 63, 79 Goodchild, Philip, 13 ‘Good life’, 35 Goodness of human beings, 29n17, 32 Grace, 29, 96, 160, 183 Of Grammatology and Dissemination (Derrida), 42 Gramsci, Antonio, 187 Greco-Roman thinkers, 113–114, 119, 133, 213 Greek metaphysics, 213

Index Gschwandtner, Christina, 13–14, 239 Guattari, Félix, 139, 144 Guilt, 19, 22 Gynocracies, 105 H Habermas, Jürgen, 1–2, 4, 14, 117, 187, 192, 203, 205–217 “Faith and Knowledge”, 213 The Future of Human Nature, 213 “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers”, 206 immanent critique of religion, 215 Knowledge and Human Interests, 122 non-causal theory of action, 190 philosophical atheism, 189, 206, 214–215 “The Primal History of Subjectivity”, 211 second generation critical theorist, 205 theory of communicative action, 205, 207 “Habermas’s Unconditional Meaning Without God” (Swindal), 208 Habilitationsschrift (Adorno), 200 Hadot, Pierre, 121, 131–132, 236 Hart, Kevin, 41 Hegel, G.W.F., 1, 11, 26, 62, 71, 90, 189, 196, 207, 211, 221–222, 224, 230–231 dismissal of empiricism, 237 notion of the other, 91 notion of the “unhappy consciousness”, 226 Phenomenology of Spirit, 70, 225 philosophy of religion, 199 on women, 107 Hegelian Absolute, 214 Hegelian dialectic, 26, 31, 236 Heideggerian ontology without ethics, 230 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 4, 8–12, 17–18, 21, 32, 34, 40, 42, 46, 61–62, 66–68, 74–75, 77, 85, 117–118, 148, 165–167, 171–172, 174, 178, 202, 217, 221–223, 226, 228–229, 231 Being, 65, 80, 224 See also Dasein Being and Time, 65, 109, 223, 225 criticism of metaphysics, 176 destruktion, 10 existentialism, 64–65, 69 hermeneutic phenomenology, 21, 227 identity thinking, 203 invocation of conscience, 29 Irigaray’s work on, 102, 109 Letter on Humanism, 225 Marion’s criticism of, 175–176

Index Nazism, 223 “Only a God Can Save Us”, 10, 109 “onto-theology”, 2 On the Way to Language, 108 Heinämaa, Sara, 102 Hermeneutic phenomenology, 10, 21–22, 67, 227 Hermeneutics, 8–9, 19, 28, 61, 69, 183 See also Ricoeur, Paul Hermeneutics of the Subject (lecture course), 113 Heterogeneity, 7, 83 See also Pluralism Heteronormative binary sex/gender system, 44 Hinduism, 44, 46, 51, 108 Historie de folie à l’âge classique (Foucault), 118 History of Madness (Foucault), 126 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 125, 129 Holiness, 78 Holocaust, 2, 7n2, 206, 223 See also Final Solution (Endlösung) Honest to God (Robinson), 199 Hope, 25–26, 28–29, 33, 72, 85 “Hope and Structure of Philosophical Systems” (Ricoeur), 25 Horkheimer, Max, 14, 187, 190–191, 194–199, 201, 205, 212, 216 analysis of religion, 211 critical sociology of religion, 199 critical theory, 4 The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 196 “Materialism and Morality”, 195 materialist presuppositions, 198 misgivings about Benjamin’s anamnesis, 210 philosophical atheism, 189 respect for role of religion in human life, 194 “Thoughts on Religion”, 194 “Threats to Freedom”, 196 Horner, Robyn, 182, 237 “How to avoid speaking” (Derrida), 47 Human rights, 31–32, 198 Hume, David, 13, 139, 157 Deleuze on, 141–143 Dialogues on Natural Religion, 143 precursor for the genetic explanation of the origin of religion in human nature, 143 Treatise, 142

255 Husserl, Edmund, 1–2, 4, 8–12, 17, 22, 26, 61–62, 66–67, 71, 74, 165, 171–172, 178, 221–222, 228–230 approach to embodiment, 63 Heidegger’s revisions, 223 Ideen I, 10, 18, 227 “life-world” or Lebenswelt, 30 phenomenology, 18, 225 transcendental approach, 10 treatment of the other, 224 Hyppolite, Jean, 226 I The Idea of the Holy (Otto), 8 Idealist critical philosophy, 206 Ideas, 154, 156, 161–162 Ideen I (Husserl), 10, 18, 227 Ideology, 121, 129, 188, 203, 210 Idol and Distance (Marion), 166, 176 Idol and icon, 177 Illusions, 98–99 I Love to You (Irigaray), 102, 106 Imaginary, the, 103 Imitatio Dei in human activity, 204 Immanence, 154, 156–159, 161 “Immanence” (Deleuze), 156 Immanent causality, 154, 156, 160 Immanent critique, 199 methodology of, 187–188 Immanent philosophy of religion, 13, 163 Immanent religiosity, 140 Incantation, 210 Indifference, 139–141, 149, 158 Indifferentism, 190 Individuality, 197–199, 214 Inhumanity, see Violence Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 14, 187–188 Intelligence, 149 Intention, 143, 172 Intentional consciousness, 77–79, 178 Intentionality, 8, 174, 179 Intersubjective responsibility, 69, 85 Intersubjective ties, 83 Intersubjectivity, 7, 9–10, 12, 35, 66, 69–71, 73, 109, 209–210, 217 ethics of, 32 turn towards, 221 Introduction à l’anthropologie de Kant (Foucault), 118

256 Intuition, 172, 178–179 Bergson on, 145–148 ethical, 67–68 Husserl on, 8, 11, 64 mystical, 150 Irigaray, Luce, 1, 3, 11, 89, 101–110, 239–240, 242 attempts to subvert transcendent male God, 102 attention to the present, 109 on “becoming divine”, 90–91, 102, 108–109, 243 See also Love Between East and West, 102 “Divine Women”, 104 An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 102 The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 109 gender essentialism, 90 I Love to You, 102, 106 Je, Tu, Nous, 104 “La Mystérique”, 102 on reclamation of the repressed maternal body, 104–105 rejection of traditional forms of God, 110 Sexes and Genealogies, 102, 104 sexual difference, 91, 107 Speculum of the Other Woman, 102, 104 spiritual discipline, 106 This Sex which is Not One, 102 The Way of Love, 102, 108–109 Islam, 41, 52, 55 J Jakobson, Roman, 27, 83 Janicaud, Dominique, 14, 183, 239 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 70 Jantzen, Grace, 5, 94, 110 The Jargon of Authenticity (Adorno), 202–203 Jaspers, Karl, 17, 20, 30–31, 202 The Philosophy of Knowledge, 18 Je, Tu, Nous (Irigaray), 104 Jewish culture, 194 Jewish-inspired Messianism, 191 Jewish intellectual issues, 12, 14, 61, 85, 206 See also Judaism Jewish mysticism, 207 Jewishness, 34, 41 critical theory and, 14, 188 “Jewish Question”, 196 Jouissance, 102 Joy, 155, 157–159, 162, 216

Index Joy, Morny, 110 Divine Love, 240 Judaism, 41, 68, 70, 73, 196–197, 214 Justice, 31, 56–57, 78–79, 196, 199, 211–212, 232 Justice yet-to-come, 48 Just societies, 36 K Kantian Denken, 26 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 11, 13, 29, 81, 90, 117–119, 139–141, 148, 163, 201, 215 account of religion, 52 categorical imperative, 160, 195 Critique of Pure Reason, 143, 189 Deleuze on, 143–145 Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone, 51, 53, 58 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 22, 28 started secularization, 207 Karl Jaspers and the Philosophy of Existence (Ricoeur), 18 Kearney, Richard, 34–35, 41, 181, 230 Kepler, Johannes, 168–169 Khora, 48, 57 “Khora” (Derrida), 49 Kierkegaard, Søren, 1, 55, 159–161, 177, 200, 202, 210, 214 God as the “Wholly Other”, 208 Klee, Paul, 85, 193 Klossowski, Pierre, 145 Knowledge, 126, 133 absolute, 7, 9, 25 integrated mode of knowing, 7 philosophical, 129 specialization of, 215 of the third kind, 162 Knowledge (connaissance), 118 Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas), 122 Knowledge (savoir), 114, 118, 129 Kojève, Alexandre, 70–71, 225–226 Korsch, Karl, 187 Koyré, Alexandre, 226 Kristeva, Julia, 1, 3, 11, 83, 89, 91–101, 239, 241–243 “abjection” of the mother, 93 See also Mother ambivalence, 100 ethics of intersubjectivity, 99 feminist response to, 94

Index gender essentialism, 90 imaginary father, 95–96, 98, 100 of the male oedipal conflict and its resolution, 96 See also Psychoanalysis model of interactive dynamic between the semiotic and symbolic, 94 “New Maladies of the Soul”, 97 patriarchal orientation, 96 Revolt, She Said, 101 “Stabat Mater”, 93–94 Strangers to Ourselves, 241 Tales of Love, 91 L Labor of love, 91, 108 Lacanian psycho-analytic theory, 45 Lacanian psycho-social linguistics, 43 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 94, 102–103, 239 Kristeva’s amendments, 92–93 linguistic turn upon Freudian theory, 43 unconscious “imaginary”, 93 Lamb, Matthew, 205 “La Mystérique” (Irigaray), 102 Language, 3, 15, 40, 43–44, 83, 119, 127 Benjamin’s theory of, 192 expression of God, 151 mimetic theory of, 210 multivalency of, 27 naming (biblical understanding), 192 pluri-vocal view of, 28 religious, 27, 41 significance to philosophy, 40 Language appropriate for God, 170–171, 180 Language appropriate for human failings, 214 Language appropriate to speak of the divine, 14, 180 Language games, 27, 47 Language of love, 176–177, 182 La volonté de savoir (Foucault), 129 Law of the Father, 93, 101–102, 242 L’ écriture et la différence (Derrida), 40 Leibniz, Gottfried, 35, 139 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger), 225 Levinas, Emmanuel, 2–3, 7, 11–12, 32, 40, 61–86, 165, 171, 173, 177–179, 227–228 On Escape, 62, 64–65, 223 ethical encounter, 81 See also Face-to-face encounter ethical intuition, 67–68 ethical prioritization, 3 Existence and Existents, 62, 66, 223

257 infinite time, 84 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 62, 73–74, 81–82, 84–85, 224 phenomenology, 172 primacy of the other, 223–224 responsibility to the other, 229 “Substitution”, 82 The Theory of Intuition in Phenomenology of Husserl, 225 Time and the Other, 62, 66 Totality and Infinity, 62, 72, 74–75, 80, 84–85, 224 “The Work of Edmund Husserl”, 66 Levinasian model of ethics without ontology, 230 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 11, 119–120 L’ héréthique, 91 Lived embodiment, 63–64, 125 Lived experience, 2, 8, 11, 67, 69–70, 79–80, 157, 162, 172 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze), 139 Long, Eugene, Twentieth-Century Western Philosophy of Religion 1900–2000, 4 Love, 14, 34, 91, 96, 209, 238 act of human love is divine, 108–109, 240 crisis of, 98 ethics of, 11, 89, 99–100 God as, 176, 180 impossible in state of servitude, 107 labor of, 91, 108 language of, 176–177, 182 Marion’s emphasis on, 166 of a mother for her child, 91, 97 only thing that can save us, 98 phenomena of, 14 redemption of the flesh, 108 threatened by symbolization, 197 “Love and Justice” (Ricoeur), 34 Lubac, Henri de, 165 Lukaks, Georg, 187 Luria, Isaak, 207 Luther’s reformation, 196 M Madness, 118, 122–123, 126 Maine de Biran, Pierre, 63 Maladie mentale et personalité (Foucault), 12 Marcel, Gabriel, 17, 30–31, 70 Marcuse, Herbert, 187 Marion, Jean-Luc, 3–4, 8, 14, 165–184 Being Given, 166 Cartesian Questions, 166

258 Marion, Jean-Luc (cont.) criticism of, 181–183 Crossing of the Visible, 166 On the Ego and on God, 166 emphasis on love, 166 The Erotic Phenomenon, 166, 176, 180, 238 In Excess, 166 faith in God, 243 God’s absolute transcendence, 169 God without Being, 165–166, 174–176 Idol and Distance, 166, 176 language for God, 165, 170–171, 175, 180 The Metaphysical Prism of Descartes, 166 Ontologie grise, 166 otherness, 237–239 on phenomenology, 171–174 between philosophy and theology, 165 Prolegomena to Charity, 166, 176 Reduction and Givenness, 166 saturated phenomenon, 13, 166, 182–183 Théologie blanche, 166 work in Descartes, 166–170 Marxism, 14, 48, 92, 129, 198, 212 Marx, Karl, 2, 14, 26, 143, 187, 189 The German Ideology, 202 “myth of an atheistic God”, 207 on religion, 188 Mass culture, 195, 197 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 57 Materialism (Marxian materialism), 189, 195 “Materialism and Morality” (Horkheimer), 195 Maternal love, 91, 97 Mathematical truths, 168 McCance, Dawne, 94 Mead, G.H., 205 Meaning, 79, 192 Husserl’s approach to, 69 Medicine, 123, 126 Meditations (Descartes), 181 Meliorism, 210–211 Memory, 71, 83 hermeneutics of, 210 human power of, 207 Mendelssohn, Moses, 68 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 70–71, 74, 81, 102, 118 Mersenne, Marin de, 168–169 Messianism, 15, 48–49, 72, 84–86, 188–193, 204, 207, 210, 216–217 The Metaphysical Prism of Descartes (Marion), 166 Metaphysicians, 201

Index Metaphysics, 9, 13, 22, 43, 155 conversion into ethics, 163 Descartes’ metaphysics, 167 end of, 127 as idolatrous, 175 limitation of God, 166 metaphysical humanism, 46 onto-theo-logic, 42, 167 See also Ontotheology post-Kantian, 155 Thomist metaphysics, 148 Metz, Johann Baptist, 205 Milbank, John, 181–183 Mimesis, 193 Mimetic theory of language, 210 Minima Morality (Adorno), 200, 203 Mitsein, 223, 229 See also Intersubjectivity Modernity, 55, 212 contained religion to a particular sphere, 51 loss of the auratic in art, 210 passage of, 56 spiritual homelessness of, 202 Mondialatinisation, 53–54, 57 “Moral God”, 177 Morality and ethics, 1, 15, 33, 199 Jewish and Christian contributions to, 214 moral agents, 209 “moral” conscience, 83 moral norms, 209 moral obligation, 132 moral religion, 52 See also Ethics Morality in a secular world, 213 Moral judgement, 33 See also Practical wisdom Mortality, 33, 64, 66 Mother, 93–94 abjection of the, 93 attempts to reclaim influence of, 93 “lost territory of the mother”, 92 originary abandonment/loss of the mother, 97 repression of the mother, 89, 104 See also Women Mother-daughter couple, 105 Mother-father composite, 96 See also Kristeva, Julia, imaginary father Mounier, Emmanuel, 17 Mourning, 34 Mysticism, 11, 41, 47, 124, 150, 207 female mysticism, 102–103

Index N “Naming God” (Ricoeur), 23 National Socialist period in Germany, 205 Natural correspondences between humans and nature, 210 Naturalism, 8 Natural theology, 1 Nazism, 46, 75, 201, 205, 217, 223 Negation, 215, 226 Negative theology, 14, 47–51, 84, 190, 209 Negativity, 91, 200 Neo-Kantianism, 61 Neo-Nietzschean voluntarism, 71 Neoplatonic emanation, 154 Neo-romantic philosophy, 63 Neo-Thomists, 197–198 “New Maladies of the Soul” (Kristeva), 97 New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Anderson), 110 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 39 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–2, 11, 13, 40, 63–64, 85, 117–119, 127–128, 130, 139–140, 145, 158–160, 163, 233, 236–237 death of God, 171, 174 Gay Science, 171 influence on development of critical theory, 190 Nietzsche’s forces, 67 Nothingness, 225–226 O Objectivism, 117 Objectivity, 110, 210 Oedipal drama, 96, 242 O’Farrell, Clare, 116 O’Grady, Kathy, 92 Oliver, Kelly, 95–96 Olkowski, Dorothea, 102 Oneself as Another (Ricoeur), 31–32, 228 “Only a God Can Save Us” (Heidegger), 10 Ontological argument for the existence of God, 139, 147–148 Ontologie grise (Marion), 166 Ontotheological constitution of metaphysics, 42, 167 Ontotheology, 2–3, 9–10, 41–46, 50 o/Other, 6, 10, 15, 23, 76, 78, 80, 83–84, 91, 110, 127, 166, 172, 179, 201, 214 humanism of the, 71 Husserl’s treatment of, 224 in Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, 225–227

259 non-repressive relation to the Other, 236 “other of reason”, 217, 234 See also Madness “other-in-the same”, 85 as the other than self, 231–232 in Paul Ricoeur’s work, 227–230 phallus as, 239 to philosophy, 40 respect for the other person, 89 as stranger or foreigner, 241 that haunts selfhood, 29 wholly Other, God, 230 The Order of Things (Foucault), 119–120, 126–127 Othering (blaming other people), 99 Otherness, 9–10, 30–31, 173, 214, 221–243 Absolute Otherness of a transcendent God-figure, 230, 240, 242 associated with postmodernism, 221 in Deleuze’s work, 236–237 in Emmanuel Levinas’s work, 222–224 in Foucault’s work, 233–236 interpersonal “otherness”, 31 in Jacques Derrida’s work, 10, 230–233 in language, 231 in Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, 239–243 The Other (Theunissen), 6, 9 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas), 62, 73–74, 81–82, 84–85, 224 Otto, Rudolf, 39 The Idea of the Holy, 8 P Pantheism, 153 Parisian Collège de Philosophie, 70 Paris student uprising (1968), 46 Parmenides, 151, 159 Parrhésia (truth-telling), 121, 132–133 Pascal, Blaise, 161, 169–170, 177, 202 ontology of disproportion, 20 Passive synthesis, 62 Passivity, 67, 70–71 Patriarchy, 43, 90, 94–96, 104–105 Peirce, C.S., 205 Penis, see Phallus Peukert, Helmut, 205 Phallogocentrism, 43–45, 50 Phallus, 43 as Other, 239 as standard of truth in our culture, 45 Phantasy, 71

260 Phenomenological ethics of capacity and intersubjectivity, 35 Phenomenological reduction, 172, 178 Phenomenology, 2, 6–9, 12–14, 18, 26, 61, 68, 80, 86, 102, 117, 222, 225 genetic, 63 hermeneutic, 10, 21–22, 26, 67, 227 Marion’s work on, 4, 171–174 Phenomenology of eros, 180 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 70, 225 Philosophical atheism, 189, 206 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 27 “Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics” (Ricoeur), 23 Philosophy onto-theo-logical foundation of, 42 philosophy-as-life, 115 relation to religion, 36 task of, 141 Philosophy in the feminine, 108 Philosophy of immanence, 158–159 The Philosophy of Knowledge (Jasper), 18 Philosophy of religion, 50, 149, 199 continental philosophy’s impact on, 39 Deleuze’s influence on, 139, 154, 163 Derrida’s impact on, 39, 41–42, 44, 47, 56 “Eurocentric and Anglo-American in orientation”, 6 focus on Christianity, 11, 41, 56 Foucault’s influence, 124–125, 134 Irigaray’s ideas of a new god and, 110 Levinas’s influence on, 86 Marion’s contribution to, 165, 178 pluralism and/or heterogeneity, 7 power and gender in, 5, 95, 124 respons-able, 57–58 Ricoeur’s influence on, 35 Spinoza’s revisioning, 150 task of, 92 “Philosophy and Religious Language” (Ricoeur), 26 Philosophy and spirituality, 113–114, 121, 123 Philosophy and theology, 179, 183–184 Phronesis, 33 Plane of immanence, 156–163 Planet Dora (Béon), 66 Plato, 9, 11, 42, 90, 141 Timaeus, 48–50 “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida), 44 Plessner, Helmut, 187 Pluralism, 6–7, 237 Pluri-vocal view of language, 28 Plurivocity, 230

Index Plutarch, 131 Poetic language, 83 Poetics, 24, 108 Political change, 114, 123 Political engagement, 133 (Political) existence (Being), 75 Political force of religious discourse, 12 Political sphere, 75 Politics, 57, 116 Post 9/11, 214 Post-Marxism, 123 Postmodernism, 11, 44, 51, 221 Postsecular societies, 213–214 Post-structuralism, 3, 120 Power, 12, 125, 129–130 abuse of, 2 will to power (Wille zur Macht), 64 See also Domination and power Practical atheism, 205 Practical reason, 52 Practical wisdom, 33 Pradines, Maurice, 11, 61, 63–64, 222 “The Primal History of Subjectivity” (Habermas), 211 The Prime of Life (Beauvoir), 225 Problematization (problematiques), 122 Prolegomena to Charity (Marion), 166, 176 Proofs of the existence of God, 75, 141, 189 Marion’s rejection of, 174–175 ontological, 139, 147–148 Pascal on, 169–170 Protestantism, 189, 196, 201, 206 Psychiatry, 118, 123, 126 See also Madness Psychoanalysis, 39, 71, 77, 83, 91–92, 98, 100, 240 as agency of a new cosmopolitanism, 241 analyst represents the imaginary father and stands in for the Other, God, 98, 243 foundational psychoanalytic narrative, 101 Freudian psychoanalytic movement, 102 Lacanian psycho-analytic theory, 45 Levinas’s hostility to, 63 as substitute for religion, 98, 100 task of, 99 Psychological analysis of religion, 188 Psychology, 71, 77 anti-psychoanalytic, 63 cognitive, 83 existential, 12

Index Q Queer theory, 123, 125, 130 R Rabinow, Paul, 118, 120 Racevskis, Karlis, 233 Racism, 45–46, 57 Radical empiricism, 4, 155, 236–237 Raschke, Carl, Deconstruction and Theology, 10 Rationalism, 8–9, 50, 125 anti-rationalism, 205 Rationality, 2, 11, 89, 118, 177, 212, 214 Rationalization, repressive power of, 83 Rational knowing (Erkennen), 22 Rational technique (Technik), 209 Reagan, Charles, 30, 34 Reason, 194, 205–206 alternative formations of, 177 death of, 44 instrumental, 216 limits of, 142 Recognition, 33, 229 Redemption, 204, 207, 211–212, 215–216 Reduction and Givenness (Marion), 166 Regeneration, 29 Reification, 212 Relativism, 117 Religion, 47, 57, 211 Adorno’s critique of, 201–202 breakdown of religious authority, 195 critical theorists’ treatment of, 215 during the Enlightenment, 195 Greco-Latinate-Christian origins, 52 Habermas on, 209, 214 in Kristeva’s work, 91–92 Levinas’s use of the term, 76 as longing for the Infinite, 199 loss of, 195–196 love engendered by, 197 psychological analysis of, 188 religious foundation to western civilization, 56 return of, 51–52, 55–56, 58 role in socio-cultural life, 14, 188, 194 third kind of, 155–156 unity of the ethical and the moral, 213 as way of practical thinking, 215 Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone (Kant), 51, 53, 58 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant), 22, 28 Religiosity, 11, 56

261 Religious differences, 7 Religious experience, 14 Religious freedom, 213 Religious indifferentism, 190 Religious-metaphysical world view, 209 Religious pluralism, 56 Religious and secular (line between), 51 Religious Studies (Capps), 4 Religious symbolization, 197 Religious utopianism, 190 Religious wars, 53–54 Repetition, 13, 159–160, 162 on the basis of faith, 161 categorical principle for Deleuze, 161 Representation, 141, 149 Respons-able philosophy of religion, 57–58 Responsibility, 62, 70, 73, 76, 84 ethical, 78, 86 sensuous-affective primacy of, 80 Revelation, 151, 179–180 phenomenon of, 166 Revolt, 101, 242–243 Revolt, She Said (Kristeva), 101 Richlin, Amy, 132 Ricoeur, Paul, 3, 7, 9, 17–36, 70, 181 concern with otherness, 10 criticism of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, 228–229 distinction between philosophy and theology, 24–26, 35–36 ethical ontology, 230 Finitude and Guilt, Fallible Man, 19 Freedom and Nature, 18 Freud, 21 hermeneutics, 2–3, 10, 19, 21–22, 24, 28 “Hope and Structure of Philosophical Systems”, 25 Karl Jaspers and the Philosophy of Existence, 18 “Love and Justice”, 34 methodological agnosticism, 10, 36 “Naming God”, 23 Oneself as Another, 31–32, 228 “Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics”, 23 “Philosophy and Religious Language”, 26 reciprocity idea, 31–32, 228 religious conviction, 30 The Symbolism of Evil, 19–20 text as other, 227 violence (concern with), 30, 2030 Robinson, John, Honest to God, 199 Rorty, Richard, 40n5

262 Rosenzweig, Franz, 74, 206 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 234 Ruwet, N., 83 S Sachs, Nelly, 72 Sacraments, 14 Sacred, 11, 51, 212 Sade, marquis de, 119 Salvation, see Redemption Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17 Being and Nothingness, 225 Hegel’s influence on, 225 position on the o/Other, 225–227 Saturated phenomenon, 166, 178–183, 238 “Sauf le nom” (Derrida), 48–49 “Save the name”, 51 Schmitt, Carl, 74–75 Scholastics, 114 Scholastic theology, 198 Scholem, Gershom, 85, 206 Schüssler-Fiorenza, Francis, 205 Sciences, 114, 197 authority of the, 213 Searle, John, 40n5 Secularism, 7, 10, 41, 43, 55, 188, 191, 209 Secularization of religion, 14, 202, 207 Secularized classless society, 194 Secularized Jewish philosophy, 85 Secular moral systems, 213–214 Secular order, 196 Secular socialism, 204 Secular society, 97–98, 198, 213 Self, 81, 125, 165–166 Christian notion of, 198 empirical analysis of, 201 hermeneutics of the, 234 technologies of the self, 122, 131, 234 See also Care of the self Self-awareness, 106 Self-formation, 122 Self-interest, 195 Self-preservation, 199 Self-reflection, 89, 106, 203 Self-reflexivity, 2, 21, 52–53, 203, 232–233, 240, 243 Self-transcending interpersonal relations, 217 Semiotic, 92–95, 100 Semiotic-like impulses of revolt, 101 Sensation, 62–64 Sensibility, 62, 64, 81–83 Sensibility-affectivity complex, 79–80, 83

Index Sensual happiness, 200 Sensuality, 64 Sexes and Genealogies (Irigaray), 102, 104 Sexism/heterosexism, 57 Sexual difference, 91, 104, 107 Sexual ethics, 131 Sexuality, 119, 130 Shame, 65 Shushani, 68, 74, 85 Sign, Saussure’s theory of, 74 Sin, 19–20 Social construction of ideas, 123 Social contract, 98 Social imperative, 215 Socialist eudaimonism, 204 Social and political change, 123 Social theory, 12, 200 Sociology, 187 Socratic parrhésia (truth-telling), 121 Solidarity, 212, 215 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray), 102, 104 Spinoza, Baruch, 13, 35, 139–140, 148, 158–159, 163, 237 aim to convert philosophy into an expression of God, 150 “Christ of the philosophers”, 155 Deleuze’s treatment of, 150–155 distinction between revelation and expression, 151 genetic definition of the idea of God, 152–153 metaphysics, 155 notion of conatus, 35, 78–79 ontolological proof for the existence of God, 139 plane of immanence, 154 religion of understanding, 155 revisioning philosophy of religion, 150 third kind of knowledge, 155 “Spirit”, 70 Spiritual homelessness of modernity, 202 Spiritualism, 200 Spirituality, 113–115, 121, 133, 240 “Stabat Mater” (Kristeva) treatment of the Virgin Mary in, 93–94 State and institutional governance of the body, 123, 130 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 241 Structuralism, 43, 92, 117, 120 influence on Foucault, 119–120 Structural linguistics, 83 Subject, 125, 129, 131–132, 142, 166

Index authority of, 196 death of, 44 Subjective reason, 195 Subjectivism, 145–146 Subjectivity, 9, 97, 201–202 Sublime, 66 Substantive reason, 211 Substitution, 73–74, 82–83, 85–86 “Substitution” (Levinas), 73, 82 Suffering, 15, 22, 82, 85, 190, 193, 196–197, 199, 203, 210, 216 Surrealism, 119 Swindal, James, 14 “Habermas’s Unconditional Meaning Without God”, 208 Symbolic, 93–94, 193 Symbolic logic, 1, 27 The Symbolism of Evil (Ricoeur), 19–20 T Tales of Love (Kristeva), 91 Taliban, 54 Talmud, 67, 71, 73 Tantric symbol of male and female figures, 108 Technologies of the self, 122, 131, 234 Teleology, 207 Tel Quel, 119 Text, 46 Text of metaphysics centrality of God the Father, 44 limits of what can and cannot be thought, 42 phallo(go)centric, 43 Text of western metaphysics, 44–45 Theism, 1, 11, 41, 43, 199 Theodicy, 68, 146, 214, 216 Theological hermeneutics, 24 Theological illusion, 158 Theological truth, 193 Théologie blanche (Marion), 166 Theology, 3, 11, 14, 114, 150, 154, 165, 167, 175, 180, 183–184, 199 adoption of the God of the philosophers, 42 apophatic, 47, 49 Platonic and Christian traditions, 48 “scientific mainstay” of, 193 Theology and social theory, 200 The Theory of Intuition in Phenomenology of Husserl (Levinas), 225 Therapeutics of desire, 90 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 84 Theunissen, Michael, 205, 209–210

263 The Other, 6, 9 This Sex which is Not One (Irigaray), 102 Thomas the Apostle, Saint, 181, 197–198 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 90, 114 cosmological argument for God’s existence, 189 Thomas, Martin Luther, 201 Thomist metaphysics, 148 “Thoughts on Religion” (Horkheimer), 194 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze), 139 “Threats to Freedom” (Horkheimer), 196 Tillich, Paul, 39, 197, 199–200 Timaeus (Plato), 48–50 Time and the Other (Levinas), 62, 66 Totalitarianism, 212 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 62, 72, 74–75, 80, 84–85, 224 Tracy, David, 5, 25, 183 Transcendence, 43, 48, 50, 65–66, 69–70, 75, 154, 199, 201 from within, 208 dismissed as ideological, 189 human power of, 190 as response to another person, 76 Transcendental ego, 8 Transcendental empiricism, 141 Transcendental field, 156 Transcendental idealism, 9, 154, 162 Transformation, 113–115, 122, 132 Treatise (Hume), 142 Truth, 12, 177, 204 for Foucault, 127 phallus as standard of, 45 in relation to the self, 131 Twentieth-Century Western Philosophy of Religion 1900–2000 (Long), 4 The Two Sources of Morality and of Religion (Bergson), 51, 58 U Unconditionality in Habermas’s theory of communication, 208–209 Unconscious, 22, 92 Understanding, 8, 10 Unity of the divine and human, 196 Universal anti-universalist theory, 196 Irigaray’s redefinition of, 107–108 Universalistic solidarity, 212 Universalizability, 160, 212, 214 Univocal Being, 153, 157 Univocal language about the divine, 174 Univocity, 153–154, 162, 168

264 Unknowable God, 50 The Use of Pleasure (Foucault), 131 Utopianism, 190, 213 V Van der Leeuw, Geradus, 8 Vattimo, Gianni, 51 Via negativa, 49–50 Vienna Circle, 26–27 Vietnam War, 46 Violence, 7, 55 as manifestation of evil, 20, 30 Virgin Mary, cult of, 93–94 Vitalism, 63–64, 163 W Wahl, Jean, 70, 226 War on terror, 58 On the Way to Language (Heidegger), 108 The Way of Love (Irigaray), 102, 108–109 Weber, Max, 187, 209, 212 Western Christian values, 2 Western dominance, 53 Western metaphysics, 8 Westphal, Merold, 41

Index “What is”, 106 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze), 139 “What-nots”, 162 Wiesel, Elie, 68 Will (human will), 18–19, 29, 67 free yet bound nature of the will, 18, 20, 28 Will to live, 79 Will to power, 64, 190 Wisdom, 30, 33 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 27 Women, 239 exclusion of, 89, 101, 103, 107 gynocracies, 105 prevented from symbolic status, 103 repression in western culture, 89 See also Mother Women as agent of renewal or creativity, 242 Women as other, 239, 241–242 Women’s divine, 104 Women’s heterodoxy, 103 Women’s rights, 54n22 Women’s sexuality, 103 “The Work of Edmund Husserl” (Levinas), 66